Film and Visual Communication Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The director of Baahubali is S.S. Rajamouli.

S. S. Rajamouli directed Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017), the Telugu epic films starring Prabhas that became some of the highest-grossing Indian films. His other films include Magadheera, Eega and RRR.

Srikanth Addala and Anish Kuruvilla are other Telugu film directors, and Kovelamudi Bapayya was a director of an earlier generation. None of them directed Baahubali.

Answer: B

Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar for The Revenant.

At the 88th Academy Awards in February 2016, DiCaprio won Best Actor for playing the frontiersman Hugh Glass in Alejandro G. Inarritu's The Revenant (2015). It was his first Oscar after several earlier nominations.

Titanic (1997) brought him no nomination, and Inception (2010) none for acting. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) earned him a nomination, but he lost that year (2014) to Matthew McConaughey.

Answer: B

The award was for Tanu Weds Manu Returns.

At the 63rd National Film Awards, announced in 2016, Kangana Ranaut won Best Actress for her double role as Tanuja and Kusum in Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015). It was her second Best Actress award in a row, after Queen.

Queen won her the Best Actress award at the 62nd awards, announced in 2015. Fashion (2008) won her the Best Supporting Actress award, and Krrish 3 (2013) brought her no National Award.

Answer: C

The technique is montage.

A montage sequence joins a series of short shots to compress space, time and information, for example showing months of training or a long journey in a minute of screen time. The term also covers the Soviet theory of editing, in which meaning comes from the collision of shots.

The Kuleshov effect is the finding that viewers read different emotions into the same face depending on the shot placed next to it. Parallel editing (cross-cutting) alternates between actions happening in different places at once. A McGuffin, Hitchcock's term, is a plot device that drives the story; it is not an editing technique.

Answer: A

Priyanka Chopra's American TV debut was Quantico.

In 2015 she took the lead role of Alex Parrish, an FBI recruit, in the ABC thriller series Quantico, becoming the first South Asian to headline an American network drama. She won a People's Choice Award for the role.

Castle, Friends and The Big Bang Theory are American series too, but she did not star in any of them.

Answer: D

The movement is Expressionism.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) are landmarks of German Expressionist cinema, with distorted sets, stark contrasts of light and shadow and stylised acting that express inner states of fear and madness. Hitchcock worked in German studios in the 1920s, and the shadows, looming staircases and psychological horror of Psycho (1960) show that influence.

Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves) used real locations and non-actors, the opposite of studio stylisation. Surrealism (Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou) worked with dream logic rather than this look, and social realism is a documentary-like portrayal of working-class life.

Answer: B

The film is Umbartha (1982).

Jabbar Patel directed this Marathi film, made in Hindi as Subah, with Smita Patil as a woman who leaves home to run a women's reformatory. Among the institution's problems it shows a relationship between two inmates, one of the earliest portrayals of lesbianism in Indian cinema, alongside its main themes of a woman's career and her family's resistance.

Uttarayan (2005) is a Marathi film directed by Bipin Nadkarni about love late in life, not a Jabbar Patel film. Vidushak and Maza Ghar are not the Jabbar Patel film on this theme; his best-known films besides Umbartha are Samna, Jait Re Jait and Sinhasan.

Answer: D

The first Dadasaheb Phalke Award went to Devika Rani.

The award, India's highest honour in cinema, was instituted by the Government of India in 1969, the birth centenary year of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra (1913). Devika Rani, star of Bombay Talkies films such as Achhut Kanya (1936) and often called the first lady of Indian cinema, was the first recipient.

The other three received it later. The composer and singer Pankaj Mullick was honoured in 1972, the silent-era actress Sulochana (Ruby Myers) in 1973, and the music director Naushad in 1981.

Answer: D

The film that is not about news media is Silence.

Martin Scorsese's Silence (2016) follows two Jesuit priests searching for their mentor in seventeenth-century Japan, during the persecution of Christians. It is about faith and doubt, not journalism.

The other three are classic newspaper films. Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) follows a cynical reporter who prolongs a man's entrapment in a cave to keep his story running. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) is the life of a newspaper magnate modelled partly on William Randolph Hearst. All the President's Men (1976) dramatises the Washington Post's Watergate investigation by Woodward and Bernstein.

Answer: D

The characteristic that does not fit is highly subtle and restrained treatment of narrative.

Film theorists describe popular Indian cinema as melodramatic and excessive rather than restrained: emotions are stated openly, conflicts are heightened and the treatment is anything but subtle. Restraint is associated instead with parallel or art cinema.

The other three are standard descriptions. The narrative is repeatedly interrupted by songs, dances, comic tracks and the interval, which Lalitha Gopalan calls a cinema of interruptions (the paper prints 'Intrumption oriented'). Dialogue carries much of the meaning, often in declamatory set pieces. Stories are commonly underpinned by traditional and patriarchal values about family, honour and women's roles.