smacks of pretentious social climbing: Archive

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”Any idiot could write voice-over to explain the...

[Originally posted on this film dialogue blog] So says screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the reflexive Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002). In many ways he’s right; by granting the audience direct access to a character’s thoughts, voice-over avoids the need to carefully craft dialogue and performances to convey the same information discreetly. As Mary Ann Doane (1980) notes, it gives...

Jun 11th

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Nonsense and Jargon in the Science-Fiction Film

[Originally posted on this blog on film dialogue] Siegfried Kracauer (1960) requested that the content of film dialogue be secondary to its aural qualities. ‘[S]tripped of all the connotations and meanings [words] appear to us for the first time in a relatively pure state. Words presented this way lie in the same dimension as the visible phenomena which the motion picture camera captures.’ In...

Jun 10th

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