Citadel in Images

French inventor Henri Chrétien developed and patented a new film process that he called Anamorphoscope in 1926. It was this process that would later form the basis for CinemaScope. Chrétien's process was based on lenses that employed an optical trick which produced an image twice as wide as those that were being produced with conventional lenses; this was done using an optical system called Hypergonar, which was the process of compressing (at shoot time) and dilating (at projection time) the image laterally. He attempted to interest the motion picture industry in his invention, but at that time the industry was not sufficiently impressed.

By 1950, however, cinema attendance seriously declined with the advent of a new competitive rival: television.

Basilica in Vezelay

In filmmaking and video production, a shot is a series of frames that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Film shots are an essential aspect of a movie where angles, transitions and cuts are used to further express emotion, ideas and movement. The term "shot" can refer to two different parts of the filmmaking process:

In production, a shot is the moment that the camera starts rolling until the moment it stops.
In film editing, a shot is the continuous footage or sequence between two edits or cuts.

"Coronation street" (riots)

The Amsterdam coronation riots (Dutch: Kroningsoproer) refers to major violence and rioting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on the day of the coronation of Queen Beatrix, 30 April 1980. It was the biggest episode of such disturbances in the country since the end of World War II and the most significant event of the Dutch squatters' movement (Krakersrellen).

Beatrix's coronation as Queen was on 30 April 1980, and was when squatters started to riot. The protesters were rallying under the slogan Geen woning, geen kroning, which translates to 'No house, no coronation'. Despite the presence of 10,000 police officers, gendarmes and some military officers, the event turned into a major clash. The riots were centred around the Dam Square, where the new Queen's inauguration took place. Clashes also happened in and around Blauwbrug, Rokin and Vondelstraat.

It marked a milestone in the post-war peaceful history of the Netherlands. 600 people were wounded.[

 

Train to the citadel

Traditionally, films were recorded onto celluloid film through a photochemical process and then shown through a movie projector onto a large screen. Contemporary films are often fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack (a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that accompany the images which runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and is not projected).

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures. They reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, and a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens. The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication.

Another day in Grenoble

The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay, and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, and cinema; the last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen.

Jan Bont en Ed van der Elsken

De Bont was born in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

His earliest work after studying at the Amsterdam Film Academy was with the Dutch avant garde director Adriaan Ditvoorst. He first came known in the Netherlands as the cinematographer for the infamous 1971 film Blue Movie followed by the 1973 film Turkish Delight, directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Rutger Hauer and Monique van de Ven. Since the early 1980s, he worked frequently in Hollywood, often collaborating with directors including Verhoeven and John McTiernan.
De Bont made his directorial debut with the action thriller Speed in 1994, which was a surprise hit
 
More video on Ed van der Elsken on this very website .

Grenoble

Although usually more expensive than film projectors, high-resolution digital projectors offer many advantages over traditional film units. For example, digital projectors contain no moving parts except fans, can be operated remotely, are relatively compact and have no film to break, scratch or change reels of. They also allow for much easier, less expensive, and more reliable storage and distribution of content. All-electronic distribution eliminates all physical media shipments. There is also the ability to display live broadcasts in theaters so equipped.

Images from le Puy en Velay

Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph or screen display, or three-dimensional, such as a statue or hologram. They may be captured by optical devices – such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water.

The word 'image' is also used in the broader sense of any two-dimensional figure such as a map, a graph, a pie chart, a painting or a banner. In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing, the art of painting, carving, rendered automatically by printing or computer graphics technology, or developed by a combination of methods, especially in a pseudo-photograph.

Haute Loire

The focus pull is useful for directing the viewer's attention. For example, if there are two people in shot but only one is in focus, that person is the subject of attention. If the focus changes to the other person, they become the subject. This is often used in drama dialogues — the focus shifts backwards and forwards between the people speaking. A slightly more subtle trick is to focus on a person speaking then pull focus to another person's silent reaction.

Vezelay

White balance basically means colour balance. It is a function which gives the camera a reference to "true white" — it tells the camera what the colour white looks like, so the camera will record it correctly. Since white light is the sum of all other colours, the camera will then display all colours correctly.

Incorrect white balance shows up as pictures with orange or blue tints, as demonstrated by the following examples:

Most consumer-level camcorders have an "auto-white balance" feature, and this is how most amateurs operate. The camera performs it's own white balance without any input from the operator. In fact, very few home-video users are aware of it's existence. Unfortunately, the auto-white balance is not particularly reliable and it is usually preferable to perform this function manually.

Line 2 in Göteborg

Kodak ceased sales of standard 8 mm film under its own brand in the early 1990s, but continued to manufacture the film, which was sold via independent film stores. Black-and-white 8 mm film is still manufactured in the Czech Republic, and several companies buy bulk quantities of 16 mm film to make regular 8 mm by re-perforating the stock, cutting it into 25 foot (7.6 m) lengths, and collecting it into special standard 8 mm spools, which they then sell. Re-perforation requires special equipment. Some specialists also produce Super 8 mm film from existing 16 mm, or even 35 mm film stock.

 

Burgundy: Morvan

An open content film is much like an independent film, but it is produced through open collaborations; its source material is available under a license which is permissive enough to allow other parties to create fan fiction or derivative works, than a traditional copyright. Like independent filmmaking, open source filmmaking takes place outside Hollywood, or other major studio systems.

Grenoble from Above

The increasingly rare industry term "short subject" carries more of an assumption that the film is shown as part of a presentation along with a feature film. Short films are often screened at local, national, or international film festivals and made by independent filmmakers with either a low budget or no budget at all. They are usually funded by film grants, nonprofit organizations, sponsor, or personal funds. Short films are generally used for industry experience and as a platform to showcase talent to secure funding for future projects from private investors, a production company, or film studios.

 

Ardeche Mountains

White balance
On digital cameras, electronic compensation for the color temperature associated with a given set of lighting conditions, ensuring that white light is registered as such on the imaging chip and therefore that the colors in the frame will appear natural. On mechanical, film-based cameras, this function is served by the operator's choice of film stock or with color correction filters. In addition to using white balance to register natural coloration of the image, photographers may employ white balance to aesthetic end, for example, white balancing to a blue object in order to obtain a warm color temperature.

Openair cinema

Projectors can be roughly divided into three categories, based on the type of input. Some of the listed projectors were capable of projecting different types of input. For instance: video projectors were basically developed for the projection of prerecorded moving images, but are regularly used for still images in PowerPoint presentations and can easily be connected to a video camera for real-time input. The magic lantern is best known for the projection of still images, but was capable of projecting moving images from mechanical slides since its invention and was probably at its peak of popularity when used in phantasmagoria shows to project moving images of ghosts.

Green Loop of Doubs

Loops are short sections of tracks (probably between one and four bars in length), which you believe might work being repeated." A loop is not "any sample, but...specifically a small section of sound that's repeated continuously."
A loop is a sample of a performance that has been edited to repeat seamlessly when the audio file is played end to end

Avallon in Burgundy

The city of Avallon, "ABALLO" in the Celtic world, is located in the heart of Burgundy. Perched on its granite spur, it dominates the Cousin valley from its terraced gardens. The Clock Tower (XVth century) opens the doors to the historic district of the city, with its old houses, towers, bastions, watchtowers... and the collegiate church of Saint-Lazare, a witness to the architecture of the twelfth century, its two Romanesque doorways and wavy and fluted spiral columns.

Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage (special effects) and generated imagery (digital effects and/or optical effects) to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, expensive, impractical, time consuming or impossible to capture on film. Visual effects using computer-generated imagery (CGI) have recently become accessible to the independent filmmaker with the introduction of affordable and easy-to-use animation and compositing software.

Royal French Saltworks

The Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans, near Besançon, was built by Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Its construction, begun in 1775 during the reign of Louis XVI, was the first major achievement of industrial architecture, reflecting the ideal of progress of the Enlightenment. The vast, semicircular complex was designed to permit a rational and hierarchical organization of work and was to have been followed by the building of an ideal city.

Besancon

CUTAWAYS
In a cutaway, you simply leave the main action for a brief scene to film something else that's related to your movie. In the preceding example, we mentioned a close-up of the dog falling asleep. This is a good cutaway. The camera left the fishing itself and concentrated on the sleeping dog as Dad waited for a bite. Cutaways like this, or of excited crowd reaction and other sidelights at a sporting event, add interest and variety to the main action.

on the Way

White balance basically means colour balance. It is a function which gives the camera a reference to "true white" — it tells the camera what the colour white looks like, so the camera will record it correctly. Since white light is the sum of all other colours, the camera will then display all colours correctly.
Most consumer-level camcorders have an "auto-white balance" feature, and this is how most amateurs operate. The camera performs it's own white balance without any input from the operator. In fact, very few home-video users are aware of it's existence. Unfortunately, the auto-white balance is not particularly reliable and it is usually preferable to perform this function manually.

Cascade du Herisson (remake)

The term "remake" is generally used in reference to a movie which uses an earlier movie as the main source material, rather than in reference to a second, later movie based on the same source.

While you don't need the best camera, you do need acceptable sound. A microphone for man-on-the-street interviews is very helpful and is a real improvement over the camera's on-board mic. The following are specifications for a hand-held stick microphone.
uni-directional (cardioid) pick-up pattern lo-impedence (ohm symbol) 600 ohms or lower
frequency response range: 50-100 hertz to 10,000-15,000 hertz
1/8 mini-plug or a phone plug with a 1/8 adapter
10-20 foot cord (you might find it a pain to wrap up and store such a long cord, but it's indispensable when you really need it; a detachable cable is OK)
No battery required

Eye Filmmuseum: Filmrestauratie

Digitization, less commonly digitalization, is the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format, in which the information is organized into bits. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or signal (usually an analog signal) by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitate computer processing and other operations, but, strictly speaking, digitizing simply means the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format; the decimal or any other number system that can be used instead.

Juf .ch

30-degree rule
A basic film editing guideline that states the camera should move at least 30 degrees relative to the subject between successive shots of the same subject. If the camera moves less than 30 degrees, the transition between shots may look like a jump cut, which could jar the audience and take them out of the story by causing them to focus on the film technique rather than the narrative itself.

Dune artificial landscape

DUNE by Studio Roosegaarde is a public interactive landscape that interacts with human behavior.

This hybrid of nature and technology is composed of large amounts of fibers that brighten according to the sounds and motion of passing visitors. This video shows an early prototype (Dune 4.0), developed as an artist in residence project at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in 2006.

His sculptures, such as Dune and Intimacy, are tactile high-tech environments in which viewer and space become one. This connection, established between ideology and technology, results in what Roosegaarde calls “techno-poetry”.

Dutch nostalgia: herring fishing

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you've really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first. Then learn just the techniques of making a movie because that stuff you can pick up pretty quickly. But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences -- are very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

The Illusion of Movement

For the Eye Museum in Amsterdam, we were asked to make a teaser that displays the many things the Eye has in its collection. We chose to do the pre-cinema objects: Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope and the Praxinoscope.

The phénakisticope (better known as phenakistiscope or the later misspelling phenakistoscope) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluid illusion of motion. The phenakistiscope is regarded as one of the first forms of moving media entertainment that paved the way for the future motion picture and film industry. Like a GIF animation, it can only show a short continuous loop.

Passage of Toledo

A tracking shot is any shot where the camera follows backward, forward or moves alongside the subject being recorded. In cinematography, the term refers to a shot in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly that is then placed on rails – like a railroad track. A handheld steadycam or gimbal may also be used for smaller scale productions. The camera is then pushed along the track while the scene is being filmed or moved manually when using a handheld rig.

The technique is often used to follow a subject that would otherwise leave the frame (ergo, it is often called a following shot), such as an actor or vehicle in motion In this spirit, any conveyance, such as a motorized vehicle like a car, may also be used to create a tracking shot. A handheld or Steadicam mounted camera following a similar trajectory is called a tracking shot as well. While the core idea is that the camera moves parallel to its subject, a tracking shot may move in a semi-circular fashion, rotating around its subject while remaining equidistant.

Old fashioned Dutch Candy

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb "to stream" refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner;[clarification needed] the term refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself, and is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it.

Heimbach im Eifel

Montage theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film's ideological and intellectual power. 
In other words, the editing of shots rather than the content of the shot alone constitutes the force of a film. Many directors still believe that montage is what defines cinema against other specific media.

Beautiful Old Amsterdam

The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a story with film. Until sound film became commercially practical in the late 1920s, motion pictures were a purely visual art, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Rather than leave audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist or, in large urban theaters, a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose, and complete film scores were composed for major productions.

Eye Filmmuseum: Jean Desmet

Jean Desmet was one of the largest film entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and he documented and saved almost everything that had to do with his company: not only accounting and films, but also posters, advertising printed matter and cat's bubbles.; In this way an extraordinary archive was created. This received worldwide recognition in 2011 when UNESCO included it in its Memory of the World Register. With its collection, Eye manages more than 40,000 films from all genres: a fine sample of film history, from classics and blockbusters to cult films.
The Eye collection took shape in 1946 when the first predecessor of Eye was established: the Dutch Historical Film Archive. In 1952 the Nederlands Filmmuseum was born from the Dutch Historical Archive; since 2010 we are Eye.

Manipulation of images

On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique and practice of assembling shots into a coherent sequence. The job of an editor is not simply to mechanically put pieces of a film together, cut off film slates or edit dialogue scenes. A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to effectively "re-imagine" and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole. Editors usually play a dynamic role in the making of a film.

10 KM New Netherlands

The Netherlands. The first island was inaugurated on 24 September 2016.

Work on the first phase, which is mainly focused on the construction of the first island, started in April 2016.

The main aims of the project are to create breeding grounds, islands, and coast line as well as to improve the water ecology of the Markermeer. The project creates a wetland comparable with the Wadden Sea—hence the name of the project—yet without tides. This is because the Markermeer is not connected to the sea and is in a fresh water environment. The new nature reserve will be accessible to tourists.

On 11 May 2016, the first new land was created, which Natuurmonumenten called a "milestone". In March 2017, it was announced that four other islands should be completed before 2020.

Roel Reine

Roel Reine was born in The Netherlands, and with his first theatrical feature 'The Delivery' he won The Golden Calf for Best Director (the Dutch equivalent to an Academy Award). In 2005 Roel Reine has moved to Los Angeles and has directed now an impressive slate of 16 feature films for studios like Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony and Lionsgate, as well with independent international producers. Roel is also the Director of Photography (Cinematographer) on all his movies and operates A-Camera.

Roel Reine is known by fans, critics and Hollywood studios as one of the best modern action Directors around today. Some of his last movies where: 'Seal Team Eight' (with Tom Sizemore), 'Dead in Tombstone' (with Mickey Rourke), 'Scorpion King: Battle for Redemption' (with Ron Perlman and Billy Zane) and two very popular 'Death Race - prequels' (with Sean Bean and Ving Rhames).

In 2014 Roel Reine is finishing a sequel to the movie 'Man with the Iron Fists', with rapper RZA and produced by Marc Abraham while prepping a Dutch language historical epic movie called 'The Admiral'. This last movie is the second most expensive movie ever produced in The Netherlands and tells the story of a 17th Century Admiral of the Ocean, Michiel De Ruyter, who protects the Dutch population from a civil war between two political factions while defeating English armada's in massive sea-battles.

Le Puy festivities

Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspect of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction. It is also commonly used to refer to single scenes within the film to represent the film. Mise-en-scène has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term".

Dreams of Dali: 360º Video

 

 

Click on the arrows to get the full 360 degree experience.

I felt as impressed as everyone else did when I saw my first 360-degree video, the technology that allows viewers to "look" in any direction they wish. But most of the 360-degree videos that became popular early simply demonstrated the concept, and as much astonishment as the experience of the concept alone can generate, even more excitement came from thinking about the technology's potential. It hasn't taken long for 360-degree videos to look beyond virtual reality — indeed, to look all the way to virtual surreality, as envisioned by perhaps the best-known surrealist of them all, Salvador Dalí.

 

Adventures in Perception

Maurits Cornelis Escher 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for long somewhat neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the twenty-first century, he became more widely appreciated, with exhibitions across the world.

His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations.

Cologne Dom

Dubbing, mixing, or re-recording is a post-production process used in filmmaking and video production in which additional or supplementary recordings are "mixed" with original production sound to create the finished soundtrack.

The process usually takes place on a dub stage. After sound editors edit and prepare all the necessary tracks – dialogue, automated dialogue replacement (ADR), effects, Foley, music – the dubbing mixers proceed to balance all of the elements and record the finished soundtrack.
Outside the film industry, the term "dubbing" commonly refers to the replacement of the actor's voices with those of different performers speaking another language, which is called "revoicing" in the film industry.

Tokyo Story

A Film by Yasujiro Ozu. The finest film ever made. Listed at #1 in Halliwell's Top 1000 countdown of the world's best cinema, and voted among the five best films ever made in Sight and Sound magazine's ten yearly poll of critics worldwide, Tokyo Story is prehaps the most powerful reflection on the human condition ever committed to celluloid. When an elderly couple travel to a rapidly-rebuilding Tokyo to visit their children, they are met with unexpected indifference, ingratitude and selfishness. As the vastly different priorities of pre- and post-war Japan collide, Yasujiro Ozu's materpiece deepens into a sublime meditation on family, ambition and mortality. Considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, Tokyo Story is a subtle yet overwhelmingly emotional drama from one of Japan's finest directors whose masterful eye and scrupulous attention to character has influenced countless filmmakers around the world.

Nantes - L'Eléphant

 

 

In the warehouses of the former shipyards in Nantes, the Machines of the Isle is created by two artists, François Delarozière (La Machine) and Pierre Orefice (Manaus association), visualising a travel-through-time world at the crossroads of the “imaginary worlds” of Jules Verne and the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci…

The mechanical elephant is 12 meters high and 8 meters wide, made from 45 tons of wood and steel. It can take up to 49 passengers for a 45-minute walk. It is a non-exact replica of The Sultan’s Elephant from Royal de Luxe, which toured the world from 2005 to 2007 (the main difference being that this elephant was designed to carry spectators).

Dubrovnik

It takes a lot of energy to shoot a travel documentary. There are many things to worry about.The production process of travel documentaries is very complicated. First, the director needs to place a large number of staff and allocate all the equipment. In addition, they have to be responsible for formulating travel plans. They also need to book hotels and foods in advance. And they may have to prepare for many unexpected situations.

The documentary filming method is different from many other films. In the process of documentary filming, it is often necessary to interview other people. So the quality of the interview is very important for the documentary.In addition, the details of the documentary are also very important.Take tourism documentaries as an example. Only by making every appealing place in the tourist destination clear, can we attract more people to travel there. There are also some questions about the shooting angle. Because documentaries have a higher requirement for authenticity, they must have the most reasonable shooting angle.

Experience of the sheep

Watching, co-suffering, is a choice. You can also look away believe me: you are looking at it completely powerless. A train passes behind the sheep. It doesn't stop either. "Some people got really angry with that film," says Eisinga, the filmmaker “Looking, co-suffering, is a choice. You can also look away.

"Countless film festivalsWith its transverse arrangement, Eisinga is difficult to place. He does not make documentaries and also opposes the video art label. He makes analogue films in 16mm and 35mm formats and mirrors pioneering film makers such as Tarkovsky
His considerable resume mentions participation in numerous film festivals, but he is still in the margins in that world. He sets the "still image" in motion and that is why the circuit of contemporary art (with his generous opinion about the use of media) fits him better.

One-point perspective

One-point perspective

A drawing has one-point perspective when it contains only one vanishing point on the horizon line. This type of perspective is typically used for images of roads, railway tracks, hallways, or buildings viewed so that the front is directly facing the viewer. Any objects that are made up of lines either directly parallel with the viewer's line of sight or directly perpendicular (the railroad slats) can be represented with one-point perspective. These parallel lines converge at the vanishing point. 

Charlie Chaplin - The Lion Cage

Charlie Chaplin was an actor and filmmaker committed to his craft--a perfectionist, in short. When directing City Lights (1931), Chaplin demanded as many as 342 takes of a fairly straightforward three-minute scene. That's what it took to get it right.

Above, we find an earlier example of the filmmaker's attention to detail ... and his appetite for risk. In the 1928 film, The Circus, Chaplin took more than 200 takes to complete the Lion's Cage scene shown above. Many of those takes, the official Charlie Chaplin website reminds us, took place inside the lion's cage itself. As the scene unfolds, the tension builds and Chaplin puts in a performance that helped him secure his first Academy Award.

An introduction to the Desmet Collection

Jean Desmet was a pioneering film distributor and theatre owner in the Netherlands.
The Desmet Collection consists of films, posters, stills and company documents, mainly from the period 1907-1916.
The film collection contains over 900 films of all genres; from France, Italy, USA, Germany and more...
Since 2011, Desmet Collection held at the EYE Filmmuseum has been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

The sound of politicians

An interview is a conversation where questions are asked and answers are given.[1] In common parlance, the word "interview" refers to a one-on-one conversation between an interviewer and an interviewee. The interviewer asks questions to which the interviewee responds, usually so information may be transferred from interviewee to interviewer (and any other audience of the interview). Sometimes, information can be transferred in both directions. It is a communication, unlike a speech, which produces a one-way flow of information.

the real meaning is that for sure what you say may be important, but the way you say it can really make a difference.

Funfair in Volendam

In combination with other aspects, theatrical costumes can help actors portray characters' age, gender role, profession, social class, personality, and even information about the historical period/era, geographic location and time of day, as well as the season or weather of the theatrical performance. Often, stylized theatrical costumes can exaggerate some aspect of a character; for example Harlequin and Pantaloon in the traditional commedia dell'arte.

Usually, in costume, historical accuracy is combined with a certain vision. The character that the costumer is dressing is also an important aspect, and a lot of the time the attitudes of the character is not exactly in line with the time period. For example, they may be more bright and colorful, or they may be more dull. A movie or stage production which emphasize the use of correct clothes and settings for a specific time period is called a costume drama.

Stage clothes often follow the evolving fashion but in a more extravagant way.[clarification needed] Clothes worn by popular performers can often spark new fashions by themselves, as fans of performers want to look like their idols.

 

New Wave

To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted line might have come from the mouth of any tough-talking, American movie director from Hollywood’s classic era. The fact that it was spoken by a 29-year-old Franco-Swiss intellectual from Paris says much about the cross-cultural pollination that was so crucial to birth of the New Wave and to what is often considered its flagship film: À bout de souffle. Indeed the film’s simple story resembles a classic American film noir, such as those made by Monogram Studios, to whom the film is dedicated. But Godard approached the story in ways that departed radically from past genre archetypes. His years as a critic, his immersion in both high and low culture, his philosophical explorations, all impacted on his debut feature film. As he said in an interview, the film was the result of “a decade’s worth of making movies in my head.” The fact that he was relatively inexperienced and had little knowledge of the practical aspects of filmmaking proved unimportant. What he did have were an accumulation of original ideas, which he applied fearlessly to the aesthetic and technical elements of the film. The results were nothing less than a cinematic revolution.