Todd Solondz

Welcome to the Dollhouse, 1996

Working with Kids

• Shorter hours • Tutors

Method of Working

• Many auditions• Contingency plans• Decisive and precise• Made his production crew crazy • Asked for test audiences even when other

directors are afraid of them• For Happiness fights almost broke out in the

test screenings

• Solondz’s work is very controversial (especially Happiness)

• While other directors are making films for less and less money—he continues to ask for larger budgets

• Ted Hope suggests that producers need to come up with new ways to support work by ambitious directors like Solondz

Welcome to the Dollhouse

• Low-Budget, independently produced film• Critical Praise• Best dramatic feature at the Sundance Film

Festival

Style of Film

• unrelenting attention to detail • key to satire (the use of irony, sarcasm,

ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.)

• It isn't the big picture that matters to a girl like Dawn, but the details: how she looks today in the mirror, and how this dress looks, and what small hopeful signs might have been sighted, or imagined, on the far emotional horizon.

180 Degree Rule

• Spatial Continuity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdyyuqmCW14

30 Degree Rule

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YSPQGZmnIw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHaXM7YeQsQ

Eyeline Match

• https://vimeo.com/61230883

Intensified Continuity

• More Editing• More and tighter close-ups• More shots overall, especially of reactions• Use of longer lenses, producing tight long

shots• Fewer medium shots

Transitions

• Dissolves: A smooth transition from one to another

• Fades: A transition from one shot to another with a fade to black

• Wipes: A line wipes one shot from the screen which is replaced by another shot

• Freeze Frame: the frame may freeze before a transition or can stop time for emphasis

Discontinuity outside the mainstream

• Avant-garde • Narrative is not the main concern of the film-

maker • Refer to character psychology, graphic and

rhythmic relationships, or comment on the ideological form of the medium

• These films subvert narrative flow

Kulesohov Experiment

• Took a shot of an impassive actor’s face and cut it together with shots of emotive material

• Viewers thought the actor was expressing an emotion even though he had no expression on his face

Montage

• Montage used to compress time—condenses narrative information into a short sequence of linked shots, often set to music

Sergei Eisenstein

• Believed the business of film was conflict of all kinds: of lines, angles, colors and ideas

• Dialectical or intellectual: two unrelated ideas and cuts them together to make a thematic or intellectual point

• (Cattle being slaughtered juxtaposed with workers being massacred by government forces)

Thesis+Antithesis=Synthesis

• Intellectual concept was created during synthesis

• Not a subtle method of communication

Forms of Montage

• Metric: length of shots not determined by factors in the image (musical time signatures)

• Rhythmic: Rhythmic, the rhythm of the shots is determined by what is happening visually

• Tonal: Determined by the dominant emotional tone of the sequence

• Overtonal: the conflict between different types of the above montage effects

• (Overtone: a secondary effect, quality, or meaning) Requiem for a Dream