Aspect ratio: The relationship of screen width to height. There are four ratios. “Standard” ratio existed from the early 1930s through the early 1950s and is 1:1.3. Two wise-screen ratios are 1:1.6 and 1:1.85. 

Auteur: French term for the film director who places a personal style on his or her films.

Avant-garde: Often used to explain works of artists that are personal, experimental, and not aimed at a wide audience.

Backlighting: Lights from behind the characters that set them off from the background.

Chiaroscuro: A term from art history that refers to the use of deep shadow in the mise-en-scene.

Cinema verite:  A version of documentary developed by the French in the late fifties and sixties that attempted to capture the ongoingness of everyday life without narration.

Cinematographer (director of photography):  Working with a film’s director, the cinematographer lights the scene, chooses the appropriate lenses and film stock, and therefore carries a large responsibility for determining the look of a film.

Classical Hollywood style: The classical Hollywood style refers to a complex collection of formal and thematic elements that became basic to Hollywood filmmaking by the early teens. Continuity cutting – including shot/reverse shot and over-the-shoulder cutting – the 180-degree rule, happy endings, psychologically motivated characters, villains getting punished, women becoming wives and mothers are all associated with the classical Hollywood style. The continuity style is a subset of the classical Hollywood style.

Close-up: The actor’s face fills the screen. Also, medium close-up, where the actor is seen from the upper torso.

Composition: The arrangement of characters and surroundings within the boundaries of the screen frame.

Continuity style/Continuity Editing:  Smooth, seamless editing that links shots so that the cuts appear invisible to the viewer.

Cultural studies:   A wise-ranging critical approach to works of imagination that examines them in light of the cultures they are part of and that create them.

Culture: The sum total of the intricate ways we relate to ourselves, our peers, our community, our country, world and universe.

Deep focus: In deep-focus cinematography, all objects from front to rear of the composition are in sharp focus.

Documentary: A film that records actual events, often creating dramatic impact through editing.

Editing: The process of cutting film footage and assembling the pieces into an expressive, narrative structure.

Editor: The person who assembles the shots of a film into its final shape.

Establishing shot:  Before a cutting pattern can begin, there must be a shot that establishes the whole space. Examples of establishing shots are the initial two-shot of characters in a dialogue sequence, or the image of an entire roomful of people, or of the city in which the film takes place.

Expressionist: This term originally referred to the style of film and theater in post-World War I Germany, where the mise-en-scene expressed the exaggerated, neurotic psychological state of the characters. Now it is used to refer to a mise-en-scene that is dark, distorted, and menacing.

Fill lighting:  Lights that fill in the scene, creating accents, removing or adding shadow.

Film noir:  A genre of film developed in the 1940s. Noir has a literary heritage in the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and the novels of James M. Cain. Its cinematic lineage is German Expressionism and Welles’ Citizen Kane. It is marked by a mise-en-scene of heavy shadow and narratives of weak men destroyed by predatory women.

Flow:  A notion developed by the British cultural scholar Raymond Williams to define the ways that disparate and incoherent elements, commercials, promotions, and the shows themselves move together seamlessly on television.

Frankfurt school: Short for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in Germany in 1924, much of it devoted to the study of popular culture and its productions.

Genre: A “kind” of story or narrative, made up of character types, plot lines, and settings common to all its members. Science fiction films and Westerns are genres, for example.

High-keyed lighting: Creates a bright, evenly lit scene.

Intertextuality: The way texts are interwoven or refer to each other in film, music, and the other arts. “Sampling” in rap is a kind of intertextuality.

Italian neorealism: Developed by the Italians at the end of World War II, a genre that defied studio conventions by filming on the streets, using nonprofessional or semi-professional actors to define a working class ruined by the war.

Jump cut: The result of editing out unnecessary transitions so that continuity is replaced by rapid changes in space.

Key light: The main overhead light that lights the faces and is reflected in the eyes.

Long shot (long takes): Characters and surroundings are shown at the considerable distance from the camera.

Medium close-up: Character is shown from the shoulders up.

Medium shot: Character is shown from the waist up.

Melodrama: With comedy, the major genre of film, providing large arcs of emotion, often spilling into the music and mise-en-scene, and ending with the death of a beloved character or a closure in heterosexual marriage.

Mise-en-scene:The use of space within the frame: the placement of actors and props, the relationship of the camera to the space in front of it, camera movement, the use of color or black and white, lighting, the size of the screen frame itself. 

Montage: A style of editing that juxtaposes shots to build dramatic tension. Sergei Eisenstein used montage as the basic structure of his films.

Over-the-shoulder cutting pattern:  A major component of the classical Hollywood style. A dialogue sequence (two people talking to each other) begins with a two-shot of the participants and then proceeds to cut from over-the-shoulder of one speaker to over-the-shoulder of another. Occasionally a shot of one of the participants talking or listening with be cut into the pattern.

Pan:   The camera pivots on its tripod or dolly. A pan an be lateral (side to side) or up and down.

Panning and scanning:  The only way to show the entire width of a wise-screen film on television is to matte the top and bottom of the screen with black bars (the process is called letter-box format). Because many people believe they are seeing less of the film in this format (they are actually seeing more), television broadcasters and videotape distributors blow up the image to a square and move the focus around in that image to find what they think are the important elements.

Point of view: Simply, the representation of what a character sees. But it also refers to the dominant “voice” of the film, the teller of the film, similar to third-person point of view in fiction.

Post-studio period: Since the late fifties, when the studios no longer controlled every aspect of a film’s production.

Producer: The individual who administers the making of an entire film, and often puts together its financing.

Production designer: Conceives and elaborates the setting’s rooms and exteriors that help give a film its visual texture.

Reverse shot: Cutting to the opposite side of the previous shot. In a dialogue scene, a reverse shot occurs when a cut is made from over the shoulder of one character to over the shoulder of the other character. If a character is seen looking at something and a cut is made to what she is looking at, that is a reverse shot.

Screwball comedy:  Films of the 1930s in whih both members of a romantic – often married – couple carried equal weight with dialogue of wit, strength, and self-possession.

Shot:  An unedited, or uncut, length of film.

Shot/reverse shot : Any pair of shots in which the second shot reveals what is on the other side of the previous shot. If, for example, the first shot is a hat and the second shot is a character looking at something, the character constitutes the reverse shot and we assume that character is looking at the hat.

Silent era: From the beginning of film to the late 1920s, there was no recorded sould accompanying the image. Nonetheless, films were never shown without sound. A piano or, in a big movie palace, an entire symphony orchestra played a score that was often created especially for a particular film.

Studio system: Beginning in the early 1920s , the film studios developed a production process -–with the producer at the head on any given film – and a style of shooting and edition that, despite many variations, remains to this day.

Take: A shot made during the production of a film. A scene in a film is the result of editorial choices made from many differing takes.

Technicolor: A proprietary color process that used three strips of black and white film, each one exposed to either red, blue, or yellow light. These strips were then used to transfer color dye to impart a rich color to film that did not fade with age.

The New Wave: A group of French filmmakers – Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacque Rivette – who started as film critics, became filmmakers in the late fifties, and briefly revolutionized the look of cinema.

Two-shot: A shot composed of two people.