![]() ![]() While I waited for her to respond, I brought the glass to my lips and took a sip. Me: First class and first glass… poppin’ champagne and everything. Katie’s text might have been a mistake, but she knew me well. Like Fosse's previous film, Cabaret (1972), Lenny juxtaposes cinematic and photographic realism with the heightened reality of the stage, where Bruce speaks to us, bursting the chronology of his own biography, and commenting on his own life story.I laughed at my best friend’s typo and snapped a picture of the mimosa I’d already requested from the flight attendant. It tells a story (rather than the story, as biopics conventionally insist) of Lenny Bruce, an irreverent, iconoclastic standup comedian who ran afoul of American obscenity laws in the last years before the cultural revolution of the late sixties, even as he helped to change them. It contrasts modes of black-and-white cine-matography, making them forms into themselves. Lenny is an interme-dial biographical collage that straddles divergent narrative strands, subjectivi-ties, mid-twentieth-century periods. He developed a film style that eschewed conventional chronology, aiming for an atempo-ral juxtapositional montage closer to poetry and the live performing arts than the narrative causality and temporality of Hollywood cinema. As an intermedial artist, with equal facility for the stage and movies, Fosse approached film editing with the rhythmic intricacy of his dance style. With this thesis I hope to shed light on the choices which directors make at every scene junction.īob Fosse directed Lenny (1974), about the profane American comedian Lenny Bruce at a time when he had won complete artistic control over his films. I will also define the role of transport scenes in the geographic movement of character, the expression of scenery and music, as well as the collage with a look at Darren Aronofsky’s Hip-Hop-Montage. I will examine scene transitions through the lenses of montage and narrative theorists with a focus on collision, linkage, rhythm, plot intensity, contextual flow, and time manipulation. It will also reach further into the territory on either side of the junction, as well as the overarching contextual influences within a given work. It is my hope in this thesis to uncover the complexities of this hidden art by examining the region where the scenes join within a film, with an emphasis on the stylistic choices made by filmmakers at the moment of scene transition. While a great deal of the emotional content of the story is expressed through the scene transitions, little is known about this craft. Keeping a balance between sustaining momentum and providing relief from sensory fatigue requires creativity on the part of the filmmaker. ![]() Is there a hidden cinematic art which we are only beginning to uncover? Modern epic films in excess of three hours do not include intermission yet the viewer is expected to remain captivated through the duration. If these filmmakers are to be believed, scene transitions represent something wholly essential but not fully understood. Even while filmmakers Stephen Gaghan, Ron Howard, and Walter Murch, have recently championed their artistic importance, established discourse on scene transitions seems only precursory. Modern feature films contain on average 30 to 50 scene transitions. ![]()
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