Performing arts: film, dance, etc.
The film and dance questions split into film technique (shot, editing, sound, movement) and dance history, where you must match a choreographer or work to a style.
Film: shot and camera
Shot scales run extreme long, long or establishing, medium, close-up, extreme close-up. Angles: high (diminishes the subject), low (empowers), Dutch (tilted, destabilizing). Movement: pan, tilt, tracking or dolly, crane, handheld. A zoom changes the lens's focal length and is not camera movement; a dolly moves the camera. Mise-en-scène is everything placed before the camera.
Editing and sound
Continuity editing obeys the 180-degree rule and uses shot/reverse shot. Cross-cutting or parallel editing alternates two lines of action. Montage in Eisenstein's sense collides shots to generate a new idea (Battleship Potemkin's Odessa Steps sequence), whereas a Hollywood montage merely compresses time. Diegetic sound belongs to the story world; nondiegetic sound, such as a score or narrating voice-over, does not.
Film movements
German Expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Soviet montage, Italian Neorealism (Bicycle Thieves), the French New Wave (Godard's Breathless, Truffaut, jump cuts, auteur theory), film noir, and documentary (Flaherty's Nanook of the North).
Dance
Ballet vocabulary such as plié, tendu, arabesque, and pirouette was codified under Louis XIV's Académie Royale de Danse in 1661. Romantic ballet brought pointe work and the tutu (La Sylphide, Giselle); Petipa and Tchaikovsky produced Swan Lake and The Nutcracker; Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered Nijinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913. Balanchine made plotless neoclassical ballet. In modern dance, Isadora Duncan rejected ballet for barefoot, natural movement; Martha Graham built a technique of contraction and release (Appalachian Spring, music by Copland); Merce Cunningham used chance procedures.
Worked example
A described sequence alternates shots of a man boarding a train and a woman waiting on a platform, each unaware of the other, tightening suspense. Candidates often answer montage. But the shots do not collide to create a concept; they alternate two simultaneous lines of action, which is parallel editing, and the effect is suspense rather than intellectual synthesis.
Traps
- Calling a zoom a dolly or tracking shot.
- Using montage for any rapid sequence.
- Confusing Graham's contraction and release with Duncan's free movement.
- Mislabeling a narrating voice-over as diegetic sound.