Qualities of the film image All U Need Is Love 2021

7 min readApr 22, 2021

All U Need Is Love 2021,There is always love in isolation

There is always love in isolation

“ Always Love in Quarantine “ is a Hong Kong film with the theme of fighting the COVID-19 epidemic in 2021. It was initiated by the Hong Kong Performing Artists Association and the Hong Kong Film Workers Association . Ten film companies in Hong Kong ( China Star , Anle Films , Emperor Films , Oriental Pictures , Media Asia Films , Meiya Films , World Films , Shaw Brothers , Sun Entertainment Culture , Universal Films ) and the Hong Kong Film Development Council’s “Film Production Financing Project” jointly produced [2] . Gu Dezhao served as the chief director, shooting in May 2020, with the Hong Kong Ocean Park Marriott Hotel as the main filming location [3] , the whole film was divided into three crews simultaneously, and the film was shot around the clock and behind the scenes. The proceeds from the film will be donated to Hong Kong Grassroots staff in the film industry who have been affected by the epidemic in difficult lives. The “quarantine” in the title refers to the quarantine and epidemic prevention measures during the epidemic. In Cantonese , “ quarantine “ also means “nearby”.

Film, also called motion picture or movie, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement.

Film is a remarkably effective medium in conveying drama and especially in the evocation of emotion. The art of motion pictures is exceedingly complex, requiring contributions from nearly all the other arts as well as countless technical skills (for example, in sound recording, photography, and optics). Emerging at the end of the 19th century, this new art form became one of the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond.

As a commercial venture, offering fictional narratives to large audiences in theatres, film was quickly recognized as perhaps the first truly mass form of entertainment. Without losing its broad appeal, the medium also developed as a means of artistic expression in such areas as acting, directing, screenwriting, cinematography, costume and set design, and music.

Essential Characteristics Of Film
In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in styles that differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the documentary created by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic involving hundreds of performers and technicians.

A number of factors immediately come to mind in connection with the film experience. For one thing, there is something mildly hypnotic about the illusion of movement that holds the attention and may even lower critical resistance. The accuracy of the film image is compelling because it is made by a nonhuman, scientific process. In addition, the motion picture gives what has been called a strong sense of being present; the film image always appears to be in the present tense. There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and things.

No less important than any of the above are the conditions under which the motion picture ideally is seen, where everything helps to dominate the spectators. They are taken from their everyday environment, partially isolated from others, and comfortably seated in a dark auditorium. The darkness concentrates their attention and prevents comparison of the image on the screen with surrounding objects or people. For a while, spectators live in the world the motion picture unfolds before them.

Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience react as if the events on the screen are real — for instance, by ducking before an onrushing locomotive in a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a relatively low form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be truer to certain unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes expect exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from the real world and make them exercise their imagination, a demand made by great works of art in all forms.

The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are implicitly accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish lighting, filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life in the early 20th century (as in The Godfather [1972] and Days of Heaven [1978]). The brownish tinge that is associated with such films is a visual code intended to evoke a viewer’s perceptions of an earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are even more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality. Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), for example, begins in a torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts. In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore, the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a walled-up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film’s grainy photography plays on the spectator’s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images with newsreels.

Fidelity in the reproduction of details is much less important than the appeal made by the story to an emotional response, an appeal based on innate characteristics of the motion-picture medium. These essential characteristics can be divided into those that pertain primarily to the motion-picture image, those that pertain to motion pictures as a unique medium for works of art, and those that derive from the experience of viewing motion pictures.

Qualities of the film image All U Need Is Love 2021
The primary unit of expression in film is the image, or the single shot. The attribution of magical properties to images has a long history. This association is well documented among many primitive peoples, and it is even reflected in the term magic lantern as a synonym for the film projector. Any image taken out of the everyday world and projected onto a screen to some extent appears to become magically transmuted. This magical quality helps to explain the enthusiastic reception accorded such early films as La Sortie des usines Lumière (1895; “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), which were merely photographic records of commonplace scenes in France in the 1890s by the French film pioneers the Lumière brothers.

Intensity, intimacy, ubiquity
The qualities of intensity, intimacy, and ubiquity have been singled out as the salient characteristics of the motion-picture image. Its intensity derives from its power to hold the complete attention of the spectator on whatever bit of reality is being shown. Outside the theatre, a person’s attention is usually dispersed in the endless surrounding reality, except for sporadic moments of concentration on what is selected for closer scrutiny. In the cinema one is compelled to look at something that not the viewer but the filmmaker has selected, for reasons that are not always immediately apparent. This quality of intensity becomes most noticeable when the camera remains fixed on something for a longer time than seems warranted, and spectators gradually become acutely conscious of their loss of volition over their own attention. This technique is not often used but is very effective when used well.

The intimacy of the film image is related to the camera’s ability to see things in greater detail than the eye can. This ability is demonstrated in long-distance shots through a telephoto lens as well as in close-ups. At the beginning of the Japanese film Suna no onna (1964; Woman in the Dunes), for example, a pervading theme of the film is indicated by shots of grains of sand many times enlarged.

The impression of ubiquity — being everywhere at once — is achieved in part by the camera’s apparent freedom to move from place to place or to approach or withdraw instantaneously. No less important to this illusion of ubiquity is the effect achieved by editing, which allows countless images representing a long, elaborate action to be presented in a comparatively short film or sequence, such as that exemplified by the opening of The Battle of Algiers. The geographic and temporal authority of the image even permits credibility to be given to sequences representing the past, the future, and dreams.

Particularity
Other equally important characteristics of the film image may be singled out. One of these is its particularity. The language of words lends itself to generalization and abstraction. In themselves, words such as man or house do not suggest a particular man or a particular house but men and houses in general, and more abstract terms such as love or dishonesty have even less-precise associations with specific things. Motion pictures, on the other hand, show only particular things — a particular man or a particular house. In this way a film image may be less ambiguous than the language of words but also less evocative, less likely to be enriched by imagination, association, or recollection. Despite its particularity, however, the motion-picture image may also be ambiguous in that it shows but does not explain. It does not in itself tell what it means, and people instinctively search for meanings in images. This is why commentary is thought to be essential in tying down precise meaning in educational films. On the other hand, many evocative documentaries, from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) to Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), abjure commentary, thus forcing the spectator to take in the remarkable and untranslatable specific sights and sounds they collect. The particular insistence of given photographed objects also explains why the juxtapositions of montage are so effective — the spectator compulsively searches for the reason behind a particular sequence of images.

Qualities of the film image All U Need Is Love 2021

Written by Lewis Jacobs

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