Film Terminology for Talking about Buffy

Generally, I hand out a refresher on basic film terminology, as it can be helpful for class discussions. My terminology is deliberately stripped down and perhaps a bit old-fashioned; most production professors will make it much more complex. In this kind of studies class for my Buffy seminar, however, accurate and efficient communication is what's best. What follows is the terminology that I think leads to better writing and reminds us to talk about how images are presented beyond what can be found in the script. As a grad school professor once observed to me, "If it's all in the script, why film it?"

Film Technical Terms:

Diegetic: the conditions and events within any part of a recounted film world that is accessible to the characters within that fictional world.

Extra-diegetic or non-diegetic: those elements that are not accessible to the characters, e.g. score or voice-over narration, which is still part of the film’s discourse. Can you think of an example of both diegetic and non-diegetic moments in Buffy?

Framing: Extreme close-up (a detail of a detail), close-up (a detail, a shot of somebody's face in shallow focus typically), medium close shot (the equivalent of a bust in sculpture, a head and shoulders shot of a person), medium shot (1/4 to 3/4 of the subject, balances the subject and her environment), full shot (fully captures the subject, often used as the first shot of a sequence to establish the geographic location in an establishing shot), medium long shot (fully captures the subject and leaves room above, below and to the sides; often describes as a wide or loose framing), long shot (the environment is the subject more than the figures within it), extreme long shot (the figures within the shot are hard to identify). 

All directors use all framings, but what framings directors prefer at moments of great narrative or stylistic importance can suggest their overall philosophy. John Ford is famous for his long shot framings of Arizona, amongst other locales. He made the environment, the frontier, the west an unusually important part of his narratives. If you want to know a character in a John Ford film, knowing how he responds to the dominating presence of his environment can be important. Alfred Hitchcock, however, is best known for his use of close-ups in rapid montage. Despite notable long shots of the UN and Mount Rushmore, his sequences have a consistent general pattern of starting with looser framing (MLS or FS) and then gradually homing in on his subject to tight framings of CUs and closer. (Take a look at Psycho with this pattern in mind.) For Hitchcock, knowing a character's environment is much less informative than isolating that character and getting to know their consciousness: their desires, fears, sexual impulses, sins, etc. Howard Hawks, however, centers his framings in the middle of the spectrum, at the medium shot. He made important and popular films in virtually every notable genre, from noir to musical to screwball to western. Yet, despite the varying genres, his films focus more often than not on man's relationship to men. Conversation around campfires, newsroom desks, or bar tables is the center of his films. To really know someone in a Hawks movie, you have to know their place in their society. Framing gives clues for the philosophy of each director: humans are defined by how they eke out a place in a dominating environment (be it town, foreign land, or frontier); humanity's most telling trait is their consciousness; and the social is the best means to understanding what it means to be a man. Where on this continuum do you feel that Whedon and Gershmann fall as directors?

Editing: cuts (instantaneous juxtaposition of two pieces of film), fades (in to black or out from black), dissolves (two shots coexist on frame momentarily as one fades out and another fades in simultaneously), and wipes (often seen in 70s films, the frame pushes one shot off screen to be replaced by black or the next scene). 

Match cuts are when you smooth the disruption caused by the abrupt spatial shift of a cut by either cutting on action (showing the start and then the end of a movement common to both shots), by composition (in 2001, Kubrick cuts between a space station and a femur thrown into the air, but both have the same general shape; it's also a conceptual cut, suggesting a commonality between these two tools) or on eyeline (shooting a conversation such that one character speaks, looking off screen right at a certain level and then following with a shot of another character reacting to the dialogue and looking off screen in the opposite direction screen left but at the same level, creating the sense that the characters are "looking at each other," when, in reality, the actor from the first shot was in his trailer drinking bourbon while the second actor was being shot.)

Montage: from the French word, meaning “mounting,” used to describe the assembly of a film through editing.

Accelerated or rhythmic montage

• gives impression of increased speed of action by decreasing the length of shots
• imposes an external pace on the rhythm of the film
• examples: nearly any car chase, D.W. Griffith in many of his melodramas;
• Can you think of one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
• One can, of course, reverse the principle to stretch out an event, think of Sergio Leone duels or how Kurosawa will insert slow motion reaction shots into an action sequence to get a "stutter step" effect.

American (or Hollywood) montage

• A series of short, quick shots that suggests in a brief period the essence of events occurring over a longer period of time
• Often uses dissolves to soften the effect
• Example: Rocky training montages; swirling newspaper headlines in war docs
• Can you think of one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Relational montage

• A form of narrative montage wherein two or more shots create meaning by their relationship to one another 
• Kuleshov effect: Acting via editing
• Antonin Kuleshov constructed a filmstrip consisting of a single take of a stage actor’s expressionless face intercut in the following manner:
• Empty soup bowl
• Actor
• Dead woman in a coffin
• Actor
• Child playing with a toy
• When shown to audiences, they highly praised the actor’s ability to express a wide range of emotion. He was hungry, sad and joyously happy in such a short time! The actor, in this style, is a blank canvas upon which meanings are painted.
• shots are like links or bricks: building meanings but retaining their integrity
• think of it as A + B = AB
• Can you think of one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Conceptual montage
• meanings created only by the arrangement of various shots
• Used for emotional/intellectual impact as well as for narrative flow
• More a clash between the shots
• Example: Strike shot of a slaughtered cow and then a shot of massacred strikers, when no cow has been in the movie or will be in the movie. (The remake of Psycho does the exact same insert for the shower sequence, incidentally.)
• Meanings not as smoothly assimilated into narrative as in relational montage
• think of it as A + B = C
• Can you think of one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Shot composition: the organization of 2 dimensional space
• Everything in a shot becomes elements of the composition. People, objects, and light itself become lines and fields, vacuums and volumes.
• Divide up the frame into thirds FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE AS A VIEWER: screen left, center screen, screen right, down screen, and up screen. Thus, you could have a figure down screen right.
• Balanced composition: evenly weighted
• Geometrical composition: shots whose composition fall into a particular pattern: circular, triangular, rectangular.
• Example: triangles w/ base at bottom gives impression of extreme stability, apex of the triangle is site of greatest visual interest. On the stage, actors who stand at the apex of a triangle often face the audience frontally, while her conversation partners face 1/4 or 3/4 away from the audience, limiting the expressive techniques that they can use.
• Inverted triangle gives opposite effect, as composition wobbles on the triangle’s apex
• Lines: horizontal (stable), vertical (more dynamic, less stable), diagonal (most dynamic
• According to many filmmakers and art historians, point of greatest interest in a frame lies along line running from bottom screen left to top screen right.
• Composition in depth: the use of background, middle ground, and foreground to vary the placement of significant information. Thus, one can then talk about how a small object up screen right in the foreground balances a more graphically massive object down screen left in the background
• Lines of sight can also direct audience interest
• Color (reds) and light (brights) and movement (fast) and focus (deep or shallow) can draw the viewer's eye to certain places in the frame and not others.
• Composition is important because it conveys layers of meaning visually and literally directs the viewer's gaze.
Camera angle: eye-level (or simply level if the camera is at a low placement), high angle (looking down on the subject), low angle (looking up at the subject), bird’s eye view (shot from directly above the subject), oblique angle (if the camera is my head, I have cocked it quizzically at a 45 degree angle).
Sound:
• Score: music played which is not heard within the diegesis
• ambient sound: environmental sounds, noise, and music which occur within the diegesis, but whose source is not seen
• source sound: sound that originates from something that is seen on screen
• contrapuntal sound: the art of deliberately mismatching picture and sound, allowing the two tracks to play off each other to create new meanings (for example, Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck strums a guitar and a machine gun sound results).
Lighting: I'm simplifying this terminology most here. For our purposes, all you need to know are these terms to provide an overall picture of the lighting design before discussing particular effects.
• contrast ratio: ratio of key and fill lights to fill lights
• low key lighting scheme:
• contrast ratio is high
• set is dimly lit with rich shadows and occasional highlights
• examples: film noir, horror movies, and gangster films
• high key lighting scheme:
• low level of contrast
• brightly lit
• example: most musicals
Camera movement:
• pan (camera swivels left or right), tilt (camera swivels up or down), track (camera moves in or out), dolly (camera swoops in or out), hand-held.