OCR A-Level Film Studies silent and experimental film overview quiz quiz

As one single individual film studied in isolation from any wider movement or context

For its industrial history alone, focusing on studios, finance and distribution patterns

As a body of documentary footage recording real events from the early twentieth century

As a film movement, with shared aesthetics, context and stylistic development

Through cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, stylised performance, intertitles and music

It cannot make any meaning at all without recorded spoken dialogue to drive the story

Only through translated subtitles burned permanently onto the bottom of the screen for the audience

Only through a single narrator who speaks over every scene to explain what is happening

Naturalistic location shooting that captures real streets and everyday daylight settings

Distorted, stylised sets, chiaroscuro shadow and exaggerated performance

Rapid montage of actuality footage edited together to build an ideological argument

Visual gags, physical comedy and slapstick routines built around an everyman figure

Meaning comes from a single unbroken long take that avoids cutting

Meaning comes only from the spoken dialogue between the characters

Meaning is generated by the collision of shots in editing

Editing should be invisible so the cuts never draw attention

A large production budget spent on expensive sets and special effects

Using famous star actors who draw a wide mainstream cinema audience

Following the rules of continuity editing strictly and without deviation

Deliberately challenging mainstream conventions of narrative and form

1960 to 2000

1900 to 1930

1930 to 1960

2000 to the present

Spectatorship and ideology

Auteur and narrative

Realism and digital

Genre and industry

They do not relate, since auteur theory and narrative analysis are entirely separate

Narrative analysis completely replaces the auteur, making the director's style irrelevant

The experiment is both the director's signature and a reworking of narrative

Auteur simply means the size of the budget the director was given for the film

As technical faults or random noise

As careless mistakes by the editor

As purely accidental and unplanned

As deliberate, meaningful choices

By levels of response, rewarding an integrated, argument-led essay

By a points checklist that simply ticks off each named feature mentioned

By word count alone, with longer essays automatically scoring higher marks

By a series of short multiple-choice questions on the film movement studied