Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Italian Cinema

Primary attributes of Italian cinema include the consideration of three things:

Audiences, Historical / Social Context, Economics

Prima Visione, Second Visione, Terza Visione. The idea was the audience could go to the cinema ever night, and the film industry needed to keep up with the demand for new films. Terza Visione was like a television audience. They would eat and drink and even talk and discuss things during the film, as it was recognized as a social space.

They featured exploitational / gross out movies, and were in many ways similar to the American drive-in cinema.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Clint Eastwood



Sound, music, score are important factors of Italian Cinema. The soundtrack for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly includes arguably one of the most well known movie themes of all time - so well known that it is frequently mimicked in pop culture and in modern times to this date when anything remotely western happens in many forms of media, and there are doubtless many who have heard the song without having heard of the film.


Eye line and Cutting, difference in scale, use of camera to tell story, fragmentation of the body and catholic references are other attributes of Italian cinema. The eye line is an invisible but distinguishable location where the eye is on camera that best capture's the character's facial expression. Camera told the story by reacting to the scene and the narrative. Fragmentation of the body broke the body into pieces that would be displayed in specific areas of the camera and rarely in other places.

Another recognizable origination from Italian cinema was the imagery of a black gloved killer, so we could see the criminal's hands but never his face or head, and would allow us to get a perspective in the film that we never had before.


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