Performing Arts - CLEP Humanities

The Lumière brothers were Frenchmen who ran a family photographic business in Lyon, France at the end of the nineteenth century. They were some of the first people to figure out how to connect individual images to create moving pictures, and they essentially invented the modern process of filmmaking. Their first film, from 1895, was a forty-five-second reel depicting workers leaving their factory.

Walt Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was considered a folly while Disney was making it, as no one had made a full length animated feature before. Financed entirely on his own, and with considerable debt accrued, Disney's film was released under great suspicion. The film ended up being a success, with the Academy Awards giving seven small special Oscars to Disney for his film.

The Japanes director Akira Kurosawa became internationally famous for his samurai films, which were sweeping epics that reflected a wide range of philosophical issues. Many of his films were remade around the world in different genres. Most notable among these was the 1960 Western film The Magnificent Seven, by John Sturges, which followed a similar story to that of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

Alfred Hitchcock was a British director who began directing films in America in the late 1930s and became one of the most well known and popular filmakers in Hollywood for the next two decades. Among his works were Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and Vertigo. Raging Bull was a 1980 film directed by Martin Scorsese.

Alfred Hitchcock frequently featured characters pursuing a simple goal or object relentlessly in his films. However, what they were after was usually not important in the film's larger story by the time the film reached its conclusion. Hitchcock called such a device the "MacGuffin," a term he invented as well as helped to popularize.

Alignment describes harmonious, unbroken lines with arms and legs. Arabesque refers to standing on one leg and extending the other leg and both arms away from the body. A pas de deux involves dance sequences with two dancers. Spiral refers to a twisting movement, but does not mean that is it done on one leg; it is also not a French term.

Johann Sebastian Bach was the most significant and well-known composer of the Baroque Era, which stretched from 1600 to 1750. Bach's signature elements—strong counterpoint, involved harmonies, and complex melodies—were extremely typical of Baroque music in general.

In musical notation, the note "piano" above a clef indicates that the music should be played softly. Often such a mark, sometimes abbreviated with just a "p," will come in the middle of a piece to indicate a change of volume. The opposite notation is "forte," which indicates that the music should be played loudly.

Philip Glass was part of a group of composers who used simple motifs that were repeated over steady beats. This music was dubbed "minimalism" by crtics, but also embraced by the figures who founded it, as it expressed their desire to reduce music to its essentials.

The eighty-eight notes on a keyboard are produced by pressing white and black keys. The black keys are positioned slightly higher and farther back, as they hold all of the sharp and flat notes on the twelve-tone chromatic scale. This arrangement allows the natural notes to be played more easily, and make the non-natural notes more obvious.

William Shakespeare's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, typically are divided into five separate acts. This was based off of Roman structures, and was the popular format in Renaissance drama. This structure was formally described and analyzed by the German author Gustav Freytag in his 1863 Die Technik des Dramas.

Casablanca, made in 1942, features a plot based around the intersection of various people who have found themselves in the eponymous Moroccan city thanks to the upheavals of World War II. Primarily focused on a romance between Humphrey Bogart's Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa, the story includes many other storylines that touch the main plot. Casablanca is often listed as among the greatest films in polls of both critics and audiences.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane pioneered a variety of filmmaking approaches and techniques, marking it out as a landmark of cinema. In particular, Welles used overlapping dialogue, with characters talking over each other; a soundtrack of incidental and background noises; deep focus shots that placed entire shots of different depths completely into focus; and a story that unfolded in a nonlinear fashion, by using flashbacks, unreliable narrators, and contradictory facts.

Silent films, by their very nature, were unable to use dialogue or sound to convey information to the audience. While many actors were able to provide lots of content through pantomime and action, crucial elements would still be missed. Therefore, intertitles, screen shots of writing that gave dialogue or information, were used to flesh out the stories of silent films.

In 1927, Al Jolson, a notable vaudeville star, starred in a semi-autobiographical film called The Jazz Singer, which was most notable for Jolson turning to the camera and telling the audience, "You ain't heard nothing yet!" This was the first recorded sound to feature prominently in a movie. The Jazz Singer ushered in the era of talkies, and largely spelled the doom of silent films.

Sergio Leone was an Italian filmmaker who made his name by directing Westerns, which were originally called "Spaghetti Westerns" due to being made, performed, and produced by Italians. Leone eventually made Westerns in America, notable working with Clint Eastwood on the films A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More,and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Leone helped revitalize the Western as a genre and move it into the realm of modern cinema.

The film Birth of a Nation was a massive success, becoming the first film ever shown at the White House. However, its heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan and virulent depiction of African-Americans caused criticism to be launched at its director, D.W. Griffith. In response, Griffith's next film, Intolerance, told the story of five civilizations who were ruined by their various forms of intolerance.

The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini was one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, and his work proved highly influential around the world. Beginning in the Italian Neo-realist genre, Fellini began moving into a more surrealist and fantastical mode with his 1954 film La Strada. With 1960's La Dolce Vita, Fellini explored non-linear narrative, and with 1964's 8 1/2, Fellini began exploring dreams and fantasies in his work more explicitly.

The French New Wave was a label applied to a group of French filmmakers in the 1960s who all sought to create narrative ambiguity, a realistic shooting style, and modern stories. Among the New Wave directors were figures such as Éric Rohmer, André Bazin, François Truffaut, and Jean Luc Godard. One of their chief influences was the earlier filmmaker Jean Renoir.

The Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo, began their career in the vaudeville era, and translated their success there into Broadway success as zany comedians. As soon as sound entered pictures, the Marx Brothers started making films, which were among the first commercially successful comedies, including 1930's Animal Crackers, 1932's Horse Feathers, and 1933's Duck Soup.