湖北2021年英语专业四级八级考试准考证这样打印

Practically speaking, the artistic maturing of the cinema was the single-handed achievement of David W. Griffith (1875-1948). Before Griffith, photography in dramatic films consisted of little more than placing the actors before a stationary camera and showing them in full length as they would have appeared on stage. From the beginning of his career as a director, however, Griffith, because of his love of Victorian painting, employed composition. He conceived of the camera image as having a foreground and rear ground, as well as the middle distance preferred by most directors. By 1910 he was using close-ups to reveal significant details of the scene or of the actors. The exploitation of the camera's possibilities produced novel dramatic effects. By splitting an event into fragments and recording each from the most suitable camera position, he could significantly vary the emphasis from camera shot to camera shot.

Griffith also achieved dramatic effects by means of creative editing. By juxtaposing images and varying the speed and rhythm of their presentation, he could control the dramatic intensity of the events as the story progressed. Despite the reluctance of his producers, who feared that the public would not be able to follow a plot that was made up of such juxtaposed images, Griffith persisted, and experimented as well with other elements of cinematic syntax that have become standard ever since. Those included the flashback, permitting broad psychological and emotional exploration as well as narrative that was not chronological, and the crosscut between two parallel actions to heighten suspense and excitement. In thus exploiting fully the possibilities of editing, Griffith transposed devices of the Victorian novel to film and gave film mastery of time as well as space.

Besides developing the cinema's language, Griffith immensely broadened its range and treatment of subjects. His early output was remarkably eclectic, it included not only the standard comedies, melodramas, westerns, and thrillers, but also such novelties as adaptations from Browning and Tennyson, and treatments of social issues. As his successes mounted, his ambitions grew, and with them the whole of American cinema. When he remade Enoch Arden in 1911, he insisted that a subject of such importance could not be treated in the then conventional length of one reel. Griffith's introduction of the American-made multireel picture began an elaborate historical and philosophical spectacle. It reached the unprecedented length of four reels, or one hour's running time. From our contemporary viewpoint, the pretensions of this film may seem a trifle ludicrous, but at the time it provoked endless debate and discussion and gave a new intellectual respectability to the cinema.

The author of this passage seems to imply that Victorian novels ______.

A．are like films

B．may not narrate events chronologically

C．exploit cinema's language

D．feature juxtaposed images

【M9】

Charles thinks that nowadays running a small shop becomes increasingly difficult ______.

A．so his shop will surely go bankrupt

B．but his shop will surely make good money

C．and the only way to save his shop is to change the government

D．because it's hard to keep up with the rising cost

During the first half of the seventeenth century, when the nations of Europe were quarreling over who owned the New World, the Dutch and the Swedes founded competing villages ten miles apart on the Delaware River. Not long afterward, the English took over both places and gave them new names, New Castle and Wilmington.

For a century and a half the two villages grew rapidly, but gradually Wilmington gained all the advantages. It was a little closer to Philadelphia, so when new textile mills opened, they opened in Wilmington, not in New Castle. There was plenty of water power from rivers and creeks at Wilmington, so when young Irenee DuPont chose a place for his gunpowder mill, it was Wilmington he chose, not New Castle. Wilmington became a town and then a city —a rather important city, much the largest in Delaware. And New Castle, bypassed by the highways and waterways that made Wilmington prosperous, slept ten miles south on the Delaware River. No two villages with such similar pasts could have gone such separate ways. Today no two pieces could be more different.

Wilmington, with its expressways and parking lots and all its other concrete ribbons and badges, is a tired old veteran of the industrial wars and wears a vacant stare. Block after city block where people used to live and shop is broken and empty.

New Castle never had to make way for progress and therefore never had any reason to tear down its seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses. So they are still here, standing in tasteful rows under ancient elms around the original town green. New Castle is still an agreeable place to live. The pretty buildings of its quiet past make a serene setting for the lives of 4,800 people. New Castle may be America's loveliest town, but it is not an important town at all. Progress passed it by.

Poor New Castle.

Lucky Wilmington.

Which is the major factor that made the difference between Wilmington and New Castle?

A．Convenience for traffic.

B．The Delaware River.

C．The investment of Irenee DuPont.

D．The textiles mills.