A Brief History of Cinema

 After reading chapter 1: A Brief History of Cinema I remember seeing some of the clips that were shown in the chapter, the one I can vividly remember is the moon clip. Which speaking on that clip you can tell that cinema has come along way since then and maybe adopted a more calm approach compared to those earlier times. The two clips that I will be going over are "A Trip to the Moon" by George Méliès and "Battleship Potemkin" by Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein.

Starting off with "A Trip to the Moon" I would say that this clip alone is a pivotal point in the cinematic world because it was ahead of its time in the film industry, yes some of the choices would seem quite mind boggling in a film today and may seem grotesque when the moon was landed on. There were many effects and choices that were added to add moving parts so that every point of the screen was filled so no matter where you looked you could find something new that was moving in the frame. It was as if the film had no dry parts and the creator wanted to have something going on at all times. It was also very easy to tell as to what was happening with the story even without sound. The effects were much better than I was expecting outside of the hard cut from a perfectly fine moon to the rocket landing, the film had some great effects. This is a good clip/short film because it shows you what cinema was like in the past with clips this short but had an entire story behind it.

Next "Battleship Potemkin" was interesting and the use of sound was done very well overall. In the beginning of the clip with hopeful and happy feeling music for the viewer to get those feelings setting the mood. Then once it cuts to the "suddenly..." line it then switches moods and soundtracks to show this as the cast runs frantically around slowly revealing what has happened as something horrific. Overall here you can tell that film has started moving in the direction of using sound in films to aid with what is happening on screen. This clip really stood out since it used sound in a way that most didn't for transitions between scenes. Using sound for character emotions. It had kept me interested since it was less crammed than the moon clip mentioned previously. From that you could tell that the film industry was trying to find a happy medium of too much and too little to improve the viewing experience in my opinion. 

To conclude I wasn't completely expecting to see this much drastic change overtime and through the different clips. I only recognized "A Trip to the Moon" initially but I enjoyed going through the different clips as th
ey were explained, seeing the change was interesting to see overtime.