2. Predicting Your Future
What technology will
the future bring?
“Computers in the
future will weigh no
less than 1.5 tons.”
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

3. Can you locate the face?

5. How people study art…
• Professional/Criticism: what works, from an
aesthetic or persuasive point, in visual
communication, what doesn’t?
• Audience-Oriented: what does the audience
see/believe when they see a particular image?
• Semiotic: what metaphors are used and to what
effect?
• Cultural Studies: What do the images tell us
about ourselves and our worldview?

6. • Realism and formalism are 2 main styles a
movie falls under in filming technique.
• Realism strives for an objective view and makes
use of actual locations, authentic costumes, and
handheld documentary style shots to add a
sense of reality to film.
• Formalism uses techniques that express the
filmmaker’s artistic view (even distorting images)
and aim for the emotional symbolism in style.

7. Formalism vs. Realism
• Open Form: window on the
world; random composition in
the frame; candid effect;
suggests freedom of choice in
the filmic world
• Closed Form: planned and
elaborate composition;
formalistic and expressive;
suggests entrapment in the
filmic world

8. • The camps are opposed aesthetically: a
formalist might argue that realism is too plain
to be great art, where a realist might argue
that artistic value lies in the story itself, and
formalism damages that by drawing too much
attention to the way the story is told.

9. Romanticism/
Formalism/
Closed Comp
Julia Ma
osition
rgaret Camer
on
• 1815-1879
• English photographer known for
her portraits of eminent people
of the day, and for her romantic
pictures which, despite their
technical imperfections,
stand the test of time

10. • Not a great technician.
• Some negatives show uneven
coating of collodion, and dust particles that lend a
dream quality.
• Many prints are faded.
• But Cameron had tremendous capacity to visualize a
mythic drama--her portraits show vitality that the
work of her peers did not.
• Exposures lasting between one & seven minutes.

18. Realism
Walker Evans
American photographer of the Great
Depression era. A sensibility that is
characterized by isolation, melancholy,
and loneliness.

19. • Open Form Framing

20. • Scenes with sparse qualities—city streets,
half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad
tracks, rooming houses.

21. • Chilling, alienating, and often vacuous places. People
may appear terribly alone.

28. • According to Irving Singer, there are two kinds of film
theorists as well as makers - formalists and realists - and
since the formative years of film theory their differences
have been at the core of controversies in film criticism.
• Basically, formalists adhere to the idea that film is art
and not a recording of reality
• Realists believe that film is meant to be a more or less
direct reproduction of reality.

29. “Every act of
seeing is also an
act of NOT seeing”
(~Shirato and Webb/Roland Barthes)

30. Types of Visual Messages
Direct/Pure—what we see in the world
Mediated/Interpreted —what we see on
photography, TV, in film, magazines, on
signs and billboards, on the Internet…