The Film Book: The Ultimate Guide to the World of Cinema by Ronald Bergan is widely regarded as a definitive handbook and an essential introductory guide to world cinema. The latest edition, published in 2021, serves as a valuable reference for students, enthusiasts, and admirers of film. Notably, the book’s glossary offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of important filmmaking and editing techniques, key technical terms, and brief descriptions of major cinematic theories. This makes it an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to decode the nuances of cinema, be it reviewers, researchers, or students.
Glossary:
Abstract film: A type of non-narrative film that is organized around visual elements such as colour, shape, rhythm, and size. Shots are related to each other by repetition and variation.
Action: The movement that takes place in front of the camera, or the series of events that occurs in the film’s narrative.
American underground: The world of films and film-makers that vary in production styles and exhibition venues from mainstream Hollywood film-making. Active in varying ways since the 1940s, the American underground has become noted for its inventive, usually low-cost methods of film-making and distributing, such as video film-making and online promotion.
Auteur: The “author” of a film, usually referring to the director. The concept is the basis of the auteur theory, which originated with François Truffaut’s theory of the politique des auteurs in Cahiers du Cinema and was popularized in the US by critic Andrew Sarris.
Avant-garde: An inclusive term for many varieties of experimental art forms. Avant-garde films flourished in France, Germany, and the Soviet Union during the 1920s and part of the 1930s, each taking various paths.
Cinema du Look: A group of late 20th- and early 21st-century French directors who eschewed mainstream film-making and were informed by the image-centred art of Music Television (MTV).
Cinéma vérit: A type of film-making (its name means cinema truth) that aims to present the truth by recording real-life events in an objective, unadorned manner. It originated with the ideas of Russian theoretician Dziga Vertov and was practised in the documentary work of US film-maker Robert J. Flaherty.
CinemaScope: A trademarked name for a wide-screen projection process developed in 1953 consisting of an anamorphic lens system drawn from an invention by Henri Chretien.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI): Images created on a computer, often animated and combined with live action.
Deep focus: The effect of having objects close to and away from the camera in focus. This increase in the depth of field is brought about by the deep-focus lens.
Digital effects: Special screen effects made by reconfiguring movie frames or art stored inside a computer. Their uses include creating scenes, enhancing them, or representing change (or morphing). The images used to make these effects exist in binary digital form.
Direct Cinema: The term in the US since the late 1950s for cinéma vérité. Known through the work of Steven Leacock and Robert Drew as Living Cinema, it became Direct Cinema in the 1960s through the work of Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker.
Direct film: A film distribution system that bypasses traditional sales outlets such as television and periodicals to reach audiences via blogs and other online communications.
Dolly (or dollie): A platform on wheels mounted with a movie camera, that makes tracking shots possible. Most move by hydraulics, sometimes on tracks. To dolly in means to move the camera towards the subject; to dolly out means to move it away.
Dynamic montage: The arrangement of intrinsically uncontroversial film images to offer polemical expression. This film-editing practice is often used for propaganda works.
Iconography: The elements of a film that allow its identification with a certain genre or type. These elements may encompass plot formulas, subject matter, locations, and style: together, these elements distinguish a Western from film noir or science fiction, and for most viewers, simplify movie decoding.
Intellectual montage: A type of film editing that eschews now-traditional Hollywood spatial and time continuity and instead employs unexpected, quick images out of standard time to make a point or have a certain emotional effect. Practised by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, these images often shock viewers.
Medium long shot: A film shot that places the main object of interest in the centre of the composition, neither in the foreground or the background. Its angle is wider than a medium shot but not as wide as a long shot.
Mise-en-scène: Literally the “setting in scene”, this term refers to the existence and placement of actors and objects within the frame. Drawn from the French theatre, mise-en-scène may for some critics also refer to the tone and mood created by the film-maker.
Modernism: An artistic movement of the late 19th and 20th centuries, marked by its concentration on the presentation of the story rather than standard story components. Often, the term is applied casually in recent films, which are are considered modern as they explore feelings rather than follow plots.
Montage: The term referring to the juxtaposing of two opposing cinematic images to create a different meaning for the viewer. Deriving from the French word for assembling and mounting, montage was practised most famously by Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. Particularly in the 1930s, montage of calendar dates and photo images was used in US films to indicate the passage of time.
Negative image: A reverse light capture of an image in photography and film-making, or the unsympathetic presentation of a character or issue.
Painted cells (or cels): The individual components of traditional animation, each of which has been painted on paper and later on acetate (originally celluloid) by an animation artist. Each cell represents a discrete movement of the character or characters; thousands are used for an animated film.
Pan: A compression of the words “panorama” and “panoramic”, a pan is a movement of the camera on a fixed plane from one part of a scene to another.
Postmodernism: An artistic movement arising in the late 20th century, concerned with the non-linear, non-traditional, and self-reflexive aspects of the arts. Postmodernist films often reflect an intimacy with non-cinematic forms, including computer art and literature.
Production Code: The studio-generated self-governing system developed in 1930 to ensure acceptable levels of moral behaviour and good taste in films. The Code was revised in 1966 and a movie ratings system was begun in 1968.
Rapid cutting: The editing together of many very short film shots, often to create a heightened sense of excitement or danger. An example is the series of short cuts used in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which present a murder.
Reverse slow motion: A trick film effect in which a film is run backward in the camera at an accelerated rate. When projected, the action filmed appears to occur in reverse sequence and at a slow pace.
Reverse tracking shots: A trick effect made by running the film backwards in a dolly-mounted camera, which is itself moving backwards, forwards, in, and out of a scene.
Sensurround: The trademark for a special-effects process developed by Universal in 1974 to increase the feeling of tremors during watching a film.
Shock cuts: A juxtaposition of widely varying images in a film to create a sensation of surprise or horror. Films employing the technique include Un Chien Andalou (1929) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Shot: A single continuous action that is filmed or appears to be filmed in one take. from one camera setup. Many shots filmed are never seen by the audience; a single scene may be photographed from several different angles, with the director and editor selecting the ones that work best.
Slow motion: A film effect of making an action appear to occur more slowly than it would in reality. The effect is created by putting the film through the camera at an accelerated rate. When the film is projected at a normal speed, events run more slowly than usual.
Special effects (SFX): Visual and mechanical effects used to create illusions on film.
Stop motion: A technique in which inanimate objects appear to have lifelike action. The effect is created by repositioning the inanimate figures for each frame. The sequence of manipulated images is projected, with the effect of character movement.
Storyboard: A progression of sketches or photographs that outline the sequencing of a film. They are used by directors for planning scenes.
Structuralism: A theory of film analysis in which meaning is acquired through the study of dual opposing images. For example, desire may be portrayed by a seemingly unconnected image of a person followed by an image of another person or a costly item.
Superimposition: The practice of photographing or placing an image or set of words over an existing image. The superimposed images are viewed as one. Superimposition is often used to supply subtitles; when several images are projected in rapid succession, they convey a colloquial Hollywood form of montage, usually for time passage or romantic dissolves.
Surrealism: A 20th-century theory of art that pursues the expression of the irrational inner workings of the unconscious. Surrealist filmmaking draws upon fantasy and is often made of a series of seemingly unrelated images.
Take: An uninterrupted shot taken by a camera. Directors may film many takes of the same action.
Technicolor: A film colour process developed by Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Camstock during World War I and patented in 1922.Originally a two-colour process, it became a three-colour process in 1932; represented in movies including Gone with the Wind (1939).
Three-strip Technicolor: Developed in 1932, this process is an advancement on the original two-colour Technicolor that uses a custom-built camera and three strips of film in red, blue, and green to render more realistic colour on screen.
Tracking shot: A shot created by a camera mounted on a dolly or track that follows the movement of an actor or action. The shot may move in any direction to follow action.
Triple Screen: A multiple-screen video display monitor for use in computer video editing.
VistaVision: A wide-screen projection system developed by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s that creates its image through the technique of optical reduction from a large negative image to the standard release print image.
Visual formality: The orderly arrangement of surroundings and players in the movie frame to convey a serious or settled tone to the film. Often the arrangement is meant to contrast with the world or characters in the film, as in the formality masking the disorder in Ran (1985).
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