Kabuki Film Studies

Kabuki is a traditional Japanese popular drama which includes singing and dancing with good Mixture of music, dances, it has been a major theatrical form in Japan from centuries. The word is written with three characters: ka, which signify “song”; bu, which signify “dance”; and ki, which signify “skill.” These actors have carried the traditions of Kabuki from one generation to the other.  Kabuki came in 17 century. When female dancer named OKUNI which means they perform at majestic place of worship. They dance in a group. it was the first dramatic entertainment common folks in Japan.

Kabuki was present in order to show featuring courtesans, ghosts, and other forms of stories related to the historical books and believes. One of the most influential Kabuki story is of the way of the warrior”
As an art form its one of the best form to express all the feelings without making any kind of physical touches. The entire artist in the play has their own place in every story line. This art form includes all the expression through the jesters and the hand expression. In all the art form Kabuki is one the hardest and the difficult form of art. The strongest element of this art form is the makeup part the makeup speaks a lot than that of the action in the play.

If we look closer there are so many Indian art for which reflects the same style of Kabuki. The best example is the art form called kathakali which a traditional art form of Kerala. Stylized gestures, symbolic and expressive exaggerated movements of body parts, colourful and dazzling costumes, elegantly designed wigs and make-ups and refined body movements are some of the common heritage of these classical art forms of Kerala and Japan. Both the art forms deal with the Rasa elements all through their act and both the art culture are scripted in the ancient stories of the culture.

Spectatorship

Spectatorship mainly deals with a very strong emotional response. Why do we laugh, cry, and scream. Spectator’s involvement is important in a film. Spectatorship is not only an art but it is also very important element takes pleasure in the experience while watching movies. Spectatorship refers on how a film-going and the consumption of movies and their myths are symbolic activities, culturally significant of a particular part in the scene.

When it comes to Spectatorship music plays a very significant role to reach the minds of the people. The entire element in the film language works so effectively to make the viewer feel every movement in the film. The main element is how are we linked to screen, narrative, and character? Who exactly is the subject seated before the screen, involved in an activity which has been described as everything from passive absorption to active production of the text?

If we look close to the basic elements of the Spectatorship theory deals with creating a particular scenario and the way of expressing the story. In simple way they use the way to express the rasa theory with the mode of generating the types of any situation.
 
The best examples of implementation of Spectatorship theory in films are:
The Birds (1963)
Rear Window (1954)
Vertigo (1958)
In this movie the directors were successful in explaining every situation to the audience with the fantastic direction, background sound and the well wised expressions.

Russian Formalism

Russian formalism was a Powerful school of criticism in Russia. It mainly includes the number of work highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars who revolutionized criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers and on structuralism as a whole.

Russian formalism was a diverse movement; In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".

Formalism was the particular word first used by the adversaries of that particular era, the meaning states the Formalists themselves. One of the main reasons which this theory focuses on is the study related to the Society in relation to the poems.

Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. It mainly deals with "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavor consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose, recognizable by their "artfulness" and consequently analyzing them as such.

Phi Phenomenon by Max Wertheimer

The phi phenomenon is an illusion of perceiving continuous motion between separate objects which viewed rapidly in success. The term was defined by Max Wertheimer in the Gestalt psychology in 1912 and formed a part of the base of the theory of cinema, applied by Hugo Münsterberg in 1916.

The phi phenomenon is the visible motion caused by a changing fixed image, as in a motion picture. In phi, there are different images or lights in a one place, to produce the effect. The images or lights are turned on and off rapidly. in Cinema and animation, it is been mostly used. The classic phi phenomenon experiment involves audience watching a screen, upon which the experimenter projects two images in succession i.e. the first image portray a line on the left side of the frame.

The second images portray a line on the right side of the frame. The images are shown quickly that each frame may be given several seconds of viewing time. Once both images have been projected together, then they ask the audience to describe what they saw.

At certain combinations of spacing and timing of the two pictures, a viewer will report a direction in the space between and around the two lines. In these case, the line that seems to move is actually an image that first appeared in the right of the screen and then in the left of the screen.

Dhvani

The actual meaning of dhvani is suggestion. This is a graceful concept which occupies an important place in poetic theory i.e. in Sanskrit Theaters. Anandvardhana was the first supporter of the dhvani further it was elaborated by Abhinavagupta .

According to this theory the content of a good poem is mainly divided into two parts. One is direct express through the powerful meaning of words and the other is to be the soul of poetry. Sometimes Dhvani is linked with the denotative i.e. denoting and connotative i.e. suggesting meaning of the words.

 According to the traditions there are three types of Dhvani. When the expressive words offer their direct meaning vastu (Idea) it is called Vastudhvani. The sun has set may mean to be a peasant that it is a right time to stop tilling the field whereas for the housewife it is the time to cook the food. When in addition to express the meaning some striking and power meaning is placed in the poetry which is called as Alamkara which means ornamental dhvani which understand the different form to express the figure of speech. And when a poet should have an idea that where to place these powerful words and should carefully choose his words by particular situation and make them convey far more than their bare meaning and so includes the whole series of emotions it creates Rasadhvani.

Foregrounding Theory

 Foregrounding theory was developed to understand responses to both literature and to film, empirical i.e. first hand research focuses on reader response. It examines whether `literariness' in film causes the same effects as those established for literature. In two experiments participants were shown one scene from Shakespeare film adaptations, either low or high in foregrounded elements.

This theory plays a vital significant role in every cinema. If we look closer then we can clearly see that Foregrounding theory is parallel to Russian formalism theory. This theory mainly deals with development of a situation in that particular movie. The motive behind including this theory in the film is to make the audience remember that particular seen in their whole life if it comes to any kind of discussion point. For examples there are so many Bollywood movies whose names comes in our mind with a particular situation in that movie.

Example: Hera Pheri, Schindler's List, Mostly all the Priyadarshan movies and in latest the Marathi movie Time - Pass

It was expected that showing these materials twice would reveal differences in levels of foregrounding effects. It was found that seeing high-foregrounding scenes twice was more enjoyable and made spectators perceive more significant aspects than the low-foregrounding versions of the same scenes did. A third experiment examined the extent to which a foregrounding effect requires spectators' awareness of a `background'. Participants in the experimental group were shown a conventional dinner scene (background) before they saw an unconventional one.

In this we define foregrounding as an effect. It is something that readers and spectators experience (or not). The cause of this effect is found in deviation, deviation from ‘normal’ ways of presenting things.

Andre Bazin’s Myth of Total Cinema

In 1946 the co-founder of cahiers du cinema, and well respected movie critic André Bazin wrote an article entitled The Myth of Total Cinema in which he outlined a theory about the change in life and future of the cinema.

This theory deals with how film originally came to be, and the visions of the creators of the medium. Bazin works to prove that some inventors were in the business of making film equipment just for the purpose of earning money, while others, the small number of "savants" as he calls them, he had a clear vision, a drive to succeed to push the envelope and to make films that were beyond real.

His theory also worked and explains about the new technology which is always evolving, the large amount of reality that can be achieved in the cinema is in a large number and therefore according to him cinema has not yet been invented. Although this theory is impossible to explain. The film My Dinner with Andre provides the best examples of Bazin's theory.

My Dinner With Andre was directed by Louis Malle a French movie maker renowned for making films that deals with extremely not to be touched subjects from sexual activity between family members, to extramarital sex. While many of his movies deal with real life situations and emotions, The Real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations of a small number of males of the nineteenth Century and are in complete copying of nature.

Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins of the cinema on the capitalists, who were more concerned with profit than they were with the progress of cinema as an art form.