Vocabulary Focus
An Online Movie Club (Adapted from World Pass)
Ex 1. Match the expressions on the left with their definitions on the right.
1. blockbuster
2. tearjerker
3. strike a compromise
4. wholesome
5. B-movies
6. give away
7. mainstream
8. shot on location
9. drawback
10. distracting
11. nerve-wracking
12. guilty pleasure
a. disadvantage
b. reach an agreement
c. making you feel tense
d. a-very successful-book -or-movie
e. not filmed in a studio
f. reveal
g. making it difficult to focus on something
h. popular, appealing to most people
i. a sentimental movie or story that can make people cry
j. considered to have no bad influence
k. something you feel embarrassed about enjoying
1. low-budget films with poor scripts and little-known actors
LISTENING
A low-budget indie film
Pair work. When you listen and take notes, it's helpful to use abbreviations and symbols. With a partner, look at the ones. What do you think they mean?
L.A. P.A info 1st w/o hmtwn cmdy
Listen. You will hear an interview with Jesse, a film director. Listen and complete the notes below. Try to use the symbols and abbreviations in A to make your note-taking faster. (CD Tracks 02& 03)
Jesse |
His movie |
Age: |
Title: |
Where from: |
Shot where: |
1st job in filmmaking: |
Cost: |
|
The movie has made: |
Kind of film: |
Listen again. How did Jesse make his film? Circle your answers. There may be more than one answer for some items. (CD Track 03)
1. Money was raised for the film when people read about it / met Jesse / saw Jesse’s short film.
2. Jesse’s cast and crew stayed in people’s homes / hotels / his hometown hotel.
3. Jesse didn’t pay the actors / the cameraman / to shoot on location.
4. Jesse used celebrities / friends / his father in the movie.
5. Jesse based his movie on a book / his life / a dream he had
Use your notes to retell what you know about Jesse.
Imagine that you are making a low-budget movie. What is the movie about? Where would you shoot it? How much would pay the actors. Who would you use in your movie?
Reading Passage 2
The early days of film-making
The history of the cinema can be followed back as far as the 1700s, when the "magic lantern" was popular. This was the first projector, which could show pictures painted on glass on the wall.
The next step happened in 1816, when a French scientist, N.Niepce, invented photography, and soon photographs were used instead of the much more expensive glass slides. But the pictures didn't move.
In 1878, an Englishman in California, E. Muybridge, produced the first photographs of moving things. He used 24 cameras next to each other in a line, to take pictures of horses running. By showing these pictures on a projector, one after the other, it was possible to show the movement of the horses. Soon other people tried to find a way of doing this with only one camera.
At the end of 1890, the famous American, Thomas Edison, and his English assistant William Dickson, developed a new machine called Kinetoscope. This contained a long piece of film, which ran through the machine over an electric light, and under a glass lens. By looking through "peepholes" people could see moving pictures. Although only one person could watch the film at one time, the machines became very popular, and were soon working all over the world.
It was the Lumière brothers, in France, who invented a camera and projector in one - the Cinématographe. Now large audiences could watch projected pictures on a screen. The Lumière brothers gave the first performance of their Cinématographe in Paris in 1895, in a room under Grand Cafe, 14 Boulevard des Capucines. It was the world's first "film show". Similar machines were soon made by Edison (the Vitascope) and others in England.
Within a year, there were real cinemas in every big city, including London, Moscow, Bombay and Tokyo. In the next few years, shops and halls in every country were turned into cinemas, and new buildings to hold bigger audiences were built everywhere. These early films were very simple: they were usually photographed from only one position, as the cameras could not move around. The first film to use a moving camera, which could show much more interesting action, was made in 1905. It was called "Rescued by Rover " and showed a dog running and swimming in a river.
From now on, new ideas came quickly as more and more people started making films and developing new machines. New types of film were made: stories which used actors, although the actors were not named. Serials, which were stories that continued each week with a new film. The news film, the newsreel, was developed to show the news of the week or the month on the screen. One of the first pieces of news to be shown in this way was the death of Queen Victoria. At this time films were still short, because the reels of film could only hold 15 minutes of film.
New methods of making films were developed by Georges Melies, who first designed scenes and stories for actors. The famous American film-maker, D.W. Griffith, first used the idea of close-up shots of an actor in his films, and so helped to create the film star. Another American. Edw in Porter, took a big step forward in 1902 when he found that it was possible to build a film story, as in a book. He made one of the most popular films of the early cinema, "The Great Train Robbery", in 1903.
It was already becoming clear that different film-makers had different styles, and could create different feelings for the audience. The art of the film was beginning to be established, and the films began to be more serious. The first famous director of the time, whose films arc still shown today, must be D.W. Griffith, whose films "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Intolerance" (1916) have become classics, as they used for the first time film-making methods which are now the normal methods of the art: close-ups of the actors' faces, mixing close-ups and long shots of a scene, and showing the same scene from different places.
From the beginning, film-makers wanted to find a way to use colour and sound in their films, but both were very difficult to produce successfully. Some people painted colour on to their films, and several methods of colour photography were used. But not until 1932 was the first three-colour film made, by Walt Disney and the Technicolor company, whose system was the most successful until the 1950s.
The early films were silent, because no method of recording the sound could be found. At first there was music with the films, played on the piano by someone in the cinema. The music was not written - the player had to use his or her own ideas to create the right atmosphere. The first films with sound were shown in England in 1925 by Lee de Forest, and they were very popular with the audiences. Many film stars found it difficult to work with sound - they found that their voices were not strong enough. Some of them had not had any training in using their voices, and soon they found that they were not as popular as before - many gave up films completely.
But by 1933 new methods had been developed, and now it was possible to record several different types of sound and mix them together on to a soundtrack of the film. Now the "talkies" took over the world's cinemas.
How did Hollywood begin? A Kansas couple, Harvey and Daidia Wilcox, came to Los Angeles in 1883, when there were just orange and lemon farms in the area. Three years later, they owned fifty hectares of land which they called Hollywood. The Wilcoxes sold the land, bit by bit, and the first Hollywood studio was built in 1911 by the Nestor Company. The American film-makers came to California because the weather was good, and because the Californian workers were cheap to employ. In 1913, C.B.DeMille came to Hollywood and started what became known as Paramount Studios.
Until 1910, the audiences did not know the names of their favourite actors and actresses. Carl Laemmle was the first to name a star, when he employed Florence Lawrence. By 1913, every studio was naming its actors and actresses. Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton were busy making audiences laugh. Rudolph Valentino, an Italian actor, became the "great lover" of the silent screen. Douglas Fairbanks was the star of the best adventure films. Audiences loved the beautiful Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. By 1916, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were earning $10,000 a year. By 1918, both had contracts for more than $1 million a year. Thus the "star system" developed.
(from The Cinema)
GET IT RIGHT!
Note: make + infinitive without to (in the meaning to force)
E.g. You can't make Emma understand it. (not: You can't make Emma to understand it.)
Complete the sentences with the information from the text.
The first "magic lanterns" showed ...
Kinetoscope was a new machine to ...
It was ... who invented a camera and projector in one - the Cinematographe and organised the first film shows.
D.W. Griffith used for the first time film-making methods which are now the normal methods of the art: ....
Some stars of the silent screen could not make the change to……, because ...
The American film-makers came to California because ...
Such outstanding actors of the early cinema as ... considerably contributed to the world movie history.
Put these statements of the text outline in the right order. Then retell the text according to the outline.
The first use of colour and sound.
First photographic motion pictures and the invention of Kinetoscope.
First cinema programmes, cinemas, and types of films shown in them.
The history of Hollywood.
The development of new methods and techniques in film-making.
The first magic lantern and the invention of film.
The development of "star system".
Reading Passage 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
A The Lumiere Brothers opened their Cinematographe, at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, to 100 paying customers over 100 years ago, on December 8, 1895. Before the eyes of the stunned, thrilled audience, photographs came to life and moved across a flat screen.
В So ordinary and routine has this become to us that it takes a determined leap of the imagination to grasp the impact of those first moving images. But it is worth trying, for to understand the initial shock of those images is to understand the extraordinary power and magic of cinema, the unique, hypnotic quality that has made film the most dynamic, effective art form of the 20th century.
С One of the Lumiere Brothers' earliest films was a 30-second piece which showed a section of a railway platform flooded with sunshine. A train appears and heads straight for the camera. And that is all that happens. Yet the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the greatest of all film artists, described the film as a 'work of genius'. ‘As the train approached,' wrote Tarkovsky, panic started in the theatre: people jumped and ran away. That was the moment when cinema was born. The frightened audience could not accept that they were watching a mere picture. Pictures were still, only reality moved; this must, therefore, be reality. In their confusion, they feared that a real train was about to crush them.”
D Early cinema audiences often experienced the same confusion. In time, the idea of film became familiar, the magic was accepted -but it never stopped being magic. Film has never lost its unique power to embrace its audiences and transport them to a different world. For Tarkovsky, the key to that magic was the way in which cinema created a dynamic image of the real flow of events. A still picture could only imply the existence of time, while time in a novel passed at the whim of the reader. But in cinema, the real, objective flow of time was captured.
E One effect of this realism was to educate the world about itself. For cinema makes the world smaller. Long before people travelled to America or anywhere else, they knew what other places looked like; they know how other people worked and lived. Overwhelmingly, the lives recorded - at least in film fiction - have been American. From the earliest days of the industry, Hollywood has dominated the world film market. American imagery - the cars, the cities, the cowboys - become the primary imagery of film. Film carried American life and values around the globe.
F And, thanks to film, future generations will know the 20th century more intimately than any other period. We can only imagine what life was like in the 14th century or in classical Greece. But the life of the modem world has been recorded on film in massive, encyclopaedic detail. We shall be known better than any preceding generations.
G The 'star' was another natural consequence of cinema. The cinema star was effectively born in 1910. Film personalities have such an immediate presence that inevitably, they become super-real. Because we watch them so closely and because everybody in the world seems to know who they are, they appear more real to us than we do ourselves. The star as magnified human self is one of cinema's most strange and enduring legacies.
H Cinema has also given a new lease of life to the idea of the story. When the Lumiere Brothers and other pioneers began showing off this new invention, it was by no means obvious how it would be used. All that mattered at first was the wonder of movement. Indeed, some said that, once this novelty had worn off, cinema would fade away. It was no more than a passing gimmick, a fairground attraction.
I Cinema might, for example, have become primarily a documentary form. Or it might have developed like television - as a strange noisy transfer of music, information and narrative. But what happened was that it became, overwhelmingly, a medium for telling stories. Originally these were conceived as short stories - early producers doubted the ability of audiences to concentrate for more than the length of a reel. Then, in 1912, an Italian 2-hour film was hugely successful, and Hollywood settled upon the novel-length narrative that remains the dominant cinematic convention of today
J And it has all happened so quickly. Almost unbelievably, it is a mere 100 years since that train arrived and the audience screamed and fled, convinced by the dangerous reality of what they saw, and, perhaps, suddenly aware that the world could never be the same again - that, maybe, it could be better, brighter, more astonishing, more real than reality,
Reading Passage 3 has ten paragraphs, A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-J next to points 1-5.
1 the location of the first cinema
2 how cinema came to focus on stories
3 the speed with which cinema has changed
4 how cinema teaches us about other cultures
5 the attraction of actors in films
Questions 6-9
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer if the
NO statement contradicts the views of the writer if it is
NOT GIVEN impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
6 It is important to understand how the first audiences reacted to the cinema.
7 The Lumiere Brother s' film about the train was one of the greatest films ever made.
8 Cinema presents a biased view of other countries.
9 Storylines were important in very early cinema.
Choose the correct letter А, В, С or D,
10 The writer refers to the film of the tram in order to demonstrate
A the simplicity of early films.
В the impact of early films.
С how short early films were.
D how imaginative early films were.
11 In Tarkovsky's opinion, the attraction of the cinema is that it
A aims to impress its audience.
В tells stories better than books.
С illustrates the passing of time.
D describes familiar events.
12 When cinema first began, people thought that
A it would always tell stories.
В it should be used in fairgrounds.
С Its audiences were unappreciative.
D its future was uncertain.
13 What is the best title for this passage?
A The rise of the cinema star В Cinema and novels compared С The domination of Hollywood D The power of the big screen