Yuri Tsivian on Cinemetrics

The Advanced Research Team on the History and Epistemology of Moving Image Studies is pleased to present a lecture with

Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago)

Friday March 18th 2011 16h00
MB 2,430 (Molson building)
(1450 Guy, Montreal)
Concordia University

What Makes them Run, What Slows them Down : Variations in Cutting Rates across Films, their History and Culture.

The paper attempts to interpret digital data related to film editing that have been submitted to the online application called Cinemetrics (see http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php) by a large group of scholars and students in the time period 2005-2011. The interpretation proceeds from 2 premises, asks one question and proposes three hypotheses.
PREMISE 1. It is an established fact that, at certain points, each given film is cut faster or slower than its average shot length (ASL) figure indicates.
PREMISE 2. There is little doubt that these are not random fluctuations. That the film’s cutting becomes faster at one point or slower at another must be caused by certain factors.
QUESTION: What are these factors?
HYPOTHESES: there are 3 kinds of factors at work: 1) Event-driven (ED) factors. 2) Story-flow (SF) related factors. 3) Conventional editing (CE) related factors.

Ph.D. in film studies from Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema, Leningrad, 1984 - William Colvin Professor in the Humanities. Kandidat Iskusstvovedenia, Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema Fields : early cinema, Russian cinema, film poetics, Yuri Tsivian is the author of numerous publications on Russo-Soviet and world cinema. In addition to his many journal articles, he has created electronic media materials and has published several books, including Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919 (1989), Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (1994), and Ivan the Terrible (2002). Professor Tsivian speaks Polish, French, and German in addition to English and his native Russian and Latvian, and teaches in the departments of Slavic Languages &Literature, Comparative Literature, and the departments of Art History as well as the Committee on Cinema & Media studies.