The Art of the Filmmaker

Abstract This book reveals the filmmaker’s art, principles, methods, and approaches for a range of readers: the student filmmaker; practicing filmmaker; student or scholar of film studies, theory, or history; and the student of media studies or scholar of arts programs, together with the informed cinephile. It conveys pragmatic information on the decision-making processes of film (and by inference all media) creators historically and in present practice, offering the reader highly informed textual analyses of specific films in order to explain the how and why of cinematic decision-making. The importance of practical aesthetics is proven in the clearly identified, detailed, and examined discussion of the decision-making that is involved in the creation of films, with carefully constructed and specific examples provided, the choice of recent films for analysis being a key element. Additional reference to classic films supports the book’s assertion that filmic planning and decision-making is a process that reflects an understanding and embracing of decades of cinematic practice along with the employment of continually evolving strategies reflecting technological change. Incorporating the author’s experience as a filmmaker, filmmaking educator, and film viewer, and considering cinematic language in the broad context of language, the book shows how the filmmaker’s art involves the conjuring and capture of the film’s fiction (story, characters, world), its representation on the screen, and the address to the audience through the practical aesthetics this constitutes—information, emotion (most importantly), and physical sensation are the constituent aspects of its engagement.