cinema scenes version two
Overview
cinema scenes version two 2021
cinema scenes version two
version two of cinema scenes. changing of some chapters. some material curtailed. some added
Cinema scenes By
Judith Broadbent Patsy Daniels Graham Harkness Laura Sherill Stuart Lenig
Table of contents
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Cinema One
Early Film and the Business Beginnings
The movie is a new art, neither a novel nor a stage play. It is analogous to the novel only in the fact that it presents a narrative story, and early on the movie was treated as if it were a photographic record of a stage play. But the movie was discovered to be neither a novel nor a stage play.
The movie camera had the best seat in the house, but it did not move; instead, it presented one viewpoint only, like neither the novel nor the play. The three basic principles of the stage, unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action, would not work for a movie. In film there is no unity of time or unity of place; these basic principles of the stage do not apply. But the unity of action, another stage term, does apply: the images appear in succession and produce meaning and continuity. The movie then is like a novel in presenting a narrative story and like a stage play in its continuity of action.
When sound recording was invented about thirty years after the motion picture, its analogy to the stage was also found to be false. Sound could be synchronized with images, but need not come from the images, or from the actor’s mouth.
Other than the stage and novels, movies had no roots. It was a new idea founded on recent discoveries, dependent on technology for its very existence. Innovators, inventors, and scientists influenced each other immediately in their attempts at making moving pictures, each looking over the shoulder of the other, each showing off his latest gadget. This new idea of the motion picture would not exist without the technology that was invented, step by step.
But the technology came in fits and spurts, so dates become important; the date of release of a movie is especially important. For example, it is difficult to compare a movie made in the 21st century with one made in 1939; technology has advanced tremendously since 1939, so movies are not made the same way that they were in the early days of cinema. It is also important to get the names right: the title of the movie (always italicized when writing about it) and the names of the professionals who have created it.
Even though there are numerous professionals who have worked on a film, from the screenwriter to the editor and everyone in between, the film is considered to be the work of the director. The director is the person who keeps it all together during the production of the film and works closely with writers, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and many other professionals. The director is considered the auteur, (French for “author”), the creator of the film, the person to whom the film is credited.
Next Steps
As tinkerers and inventors attempted to make pictures move, scientists had been studying the human eye and the human brain and how they work together. What they
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called “persistence of vision” had to be understood in order to make people see moving pictures, or pictures moving. Persistence of vision is the tendency of the eye to hold an image for a moment after the image is no longer visible. This tendency became very important in the quest for moving pictures.
In addition, still photography had to be invented, and there was a long route to figuring out how to make a picture with light. The idea of making a picture with light is usually attributed to Leonardo daVinci, the Italian Renaissance inventor and artist. He is generally acknowledged as the originator of the camera obscura during the fifteenth century. The principle of the camera obscura, or “dark room,” is that light comes into the dark room through a pinhole and projects the image of something outside of the camera obscura. The image always appears upside down, just the way the human eye captures an image, but people were able to use it for tracing an image on paper.
In the early eighteen hundreds, innovators discovered that they could make an image seem to move in various ways. In 1825, Dr. John Ayerton Paris invented the Thaumatrope, a device that made images seem to move when they were spun in a circle. It was a delight in the parlor. Then, seven years later, Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau invented what he called a phenakistiscope, which was later refined into a Zoötrope by William George Horner. This device showed a series of pictures, stages of a movement perhaps, that made the images seem to move, kind of like an early form of animation. It was fun to play with, and forty years later, the device was marketed as a toy.
These toys led to similar experiments with moving images, but inventors had to create the technology to make it happen. In 1816, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce first captured an image on a metal plate. But it was twenty-three years later, in 1839, that Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was able to capture an image on silvered copperplate. This development led to the manufacture and sale of daguerreotypes, an image of a person on copperplate, a portrait. These portraits became very popular.
Now that the image had been stabilized, inventors needed to make it move. William Henry Fox Talbot invented paper printing in the 1830s, and as more sensitive photographic stocks became available and the shutter was invented, by the 1860s exposure time was reduced from thirty minutes to a fraction of a second.
Because of these developments, Englishman Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer and inventor, was able to perfect serial photography. Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford, the governor of California, to set up a series of cameras to help Stanford win a bet: he had bet a friend that, as a horse runs, at some point all four hooves are in the air at the same time. Muybridge set up 24 cameras with trip wires so that when the horse would run by, the camera would take a picture. He and Governor Stanford showed that, indeed, at some point a horse can float through the air. The series of photographs, when bound into a booklet, became the flip book, a series of photos that, when the pages are turned rapidly, seem to move. Thanks to persistence of vision.
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During the next fifteen years, many inventions came into being, and the inventors sometimes shared their work with other tinkerers, but sometimes they competed with each other. Thomas Edison came up with the phonograph in 1877 and the incandescent light in 1879. In 1882 Étienne-Jules Marey invented the Photochronograph, a camera shaped like a long gun, which could be pointed exactly and held fairly steady. This camera captured images on a glass plate instead of a metal plate, and could take as many as twelve shots on one revolving plate.
In 1887, celluloid film was created by Reverend Hannibal Goodwin, but in 1888,
celluloid film was invented by George Eastman. How could this have been? Not until 1913, or twenty-five years later, did the courts rule that Eastman had infringed on Goodwin’s patents on celluloid film (Mast and Kawin 22).
Again in 1888, Étienne-Jules Marey created a camera that used coated paper film, which was much more inexpensive to use than metal plates. In the same year, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince invented the paper-film movie camera, which used the same paper film; in that year, too, Le Prince integrated the camera and the projector.
A movie camera which used the disputed celluloid film was invented in 1890 by Étienne-Jules Marey, who showed his work to Thomas Edison. Two years later, Marey invented a camera and projector which used celluloid film.
As time passed, the technical challenges found in photography were overcome: long exposure times were shortened by inventing a faster film stock; photographers were able to transmit an image to a medium when still photography came into being; paper stock and celluloid film allowed a more flexible medium, and eventually a heat resistant stock was created. One invention led to another; one idea generated more ideas.
Keep in mind that, though we speak of pictures moving, they do not. Every motion picture is made of many still pictures shown in rapid succession. Because the human eye retains an image on the retina for a moment before letting it go and focusing on another image, humans do not see the blank space between the still photographs. This phenomenon is called persistence of vision. Just like in Muybridge’s flip book, thanks to persistence of vision, humans see apparent movement of the images. Keep in mind that movies present apparent movement. Filmmakers create the illusion of real movement on the screen, but real movement is movement that has not been created from still images.
Early Filmmakers
The tinkerers and inventors developed the technology for moving pictures one step at a time. It was a while before some became actual filmmakers. Early innovators were the Étienne-Jules Marey, Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Émile Cohl, E. S. Porter, Georges Méliès, and Thomas Edison.
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Étienne-Jules Marey had also been experimenting with serial photography, and in 1881 he and Muybridge met in Paris and exchanged ideas. Marey’s Photochronograph could use coated paper film, and it became easier to manipulate when Émile Raynaud invented the perforations that would allow moving the roll of film at a steady pace.
What They Had to Invent WHAT: TOYS
Thaumatrope
Phenakistiscope
Stroboscope
Zoötrope (refined Phenakistiscope) William George Horner
Praxinoscope Projection Praxinoscope Théatre Optique
Émile Raynaud Émile Raynaud
Émile Raynaud
What They Had to Invent WHAT: MACHINES
Camera obscura
Metal plate to capture image Silvered copperplate
Paper printing
Shutter, faster plates
WHO Leonardo da Vinci
J
WHEN
15th century
1816
1860s
Zoöpraxiscope, serial photography
Eadweard Muybridge
1877 Phonograph
Incandescent light Photochronograph (gun) Celluloid film
Celluloid film
1892
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison Étienne-Jules Marey Reverend Hannibal Goodwin George Eastman Étienne-Jules Marey
Coated paper film
Paper-film movie camera
Integrated camera, projector
Movie camera for celluloid
Camera and projector for celluloid Étienne-Jules Marey
WHO WHEN
Dr. John Ayerton Paris 1825 Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau 1832
Simon Ritter von Stampfer
1832
1834
1877 1880
1888
Reynaud should be considered the maker of the first animated movies (Mast and Kawin 18).
By the end of the nineteenth century, there were hundreds of these toys and variations, all of which exploited the persistence of vision (18).
oseph Nicéphore Niépce
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre William Henry Fox Talbot
(Mast and Kawin 19)
1839 1830s
1877 1879
1882
1887 1888
1888 1888
1888 1890
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince
Étienne-Jules Marey
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Marey shows his work to Edison. Edison may have seen Reynaud’s work as well (21). 1889
Courts rule that Eastman has infringed on Goodwin’s patents on celluloid film (22). 1913
Cinema one tech Technology
The technology to create film was complex. There were many associated scientific issues associated with creating a workable film platform. Photography, optics, the science of sight, the way the human eye interpreted images, the speed of recognition of an image via the optic nerve, and the science of rhe brain and how the brainoperated were involved. Film was not an overnight achievement and in fact, one hundred and thirty years since the birth of film rhere are still technological innovations and improvements being made to film technology.
Daguerre and photography
The dream of photography had been around for millennia. Early people made copies of people via sculpture and portraits but aside from good drawing skills no one had found a secret way to keep the actual appearance of a person intact in some visual media. Paintings and sculptures captured a resemblance, but scientists and artists wanted a batter way to maintain a picture from the light and image of a person. Artists wanted some form of the real person.
In the renaissance and afterwards scienctists had developed lens that could focus light and through pinhole cameras in a room like could be focused (mostly uspdie down) so that artists could raw what they saw from thew outside. Still, despite the capture of light on a surface there was still no way to permanently capture light and record the appearance of a scene or a person. Artists set up rooms with lenses so they could better see and capture a subject. The most fampus of these early artists experiemtning
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with photography was Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch artist who possessed a technological device that was expensive but widely available to people in the art community called a camera obscura. The camera obscura used lens and reflected light from a window or outside to make an image that could be projected on a wall, paper or canvas and thus Vermeer could draw a close copy of the image projected. In essence this amounted to tracing an image and making it one’s own. In the film, the Girl with the Pearl Earring about the life of Vermeer, Vermeer shows a servant girl in his house his camera obscura, and she is so amazed, she blurts out, ‘does it tell you how to paint?’ and the bemused painter replies that, “it helps.” It was fashionable for wealthy people in 17th, 18th and 19th century to have lens and rooms dedicated to camera obscura light studies of subjects and people tracing images was a simple way for people to learn about art and drawing. But the dream for the photographic community was not only to capture light and project it on a wall, but also to capture the image on a medium. This race to capture light and images o =n some portable medium continued into the 19th century.
On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of a new invention that wouldforever change the way people visually represted the world. This new art was called photography and it was the work of many scientists artists and technicians who worked tirelessly through the years creating a new way of making images that could be sustained and kept through technology. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787– 1851), who had forged a career as a romantic painter, and printmaker and he became somewhat famous as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper. Deguerre developed a process of developing images using chemicals that treated a piece of metal that had been exposed to an image or light source for a limited time of exposure. Daguerre’s invention in 1839 came after years of hard work by various artists, inventors and scientists. In fact, Daguerre had been searching since the mid-1820s for a means to capture the fleeting images he saw in his camera obscura, a draftsman’s aid consisting of a wood box with a lens at one end that threw an image onto a frosted glass sheet at the other. In 1829, he had formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry—and who had achieved primitive but real results as early as 1826. By the time Niépce died in 1833, the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process.Not until 1838 had Daguerre’s continued experiments progressed to the point where he felt comfortable showing examples of the new medium to selected artists and scientists in the hope of lining up investors. François Arago, a noted astronomer and member of the French legislature, was among the new art’s most enthusiastic admirers. He became Daguerre’s champion in both the Académie des Sciences and the Chambre des Députés, securing the inventor a lifetime pension in exchange for the rights to his process. Only on August 19, 1839, was the revolutionary process explained, step by step, before a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with an eager crowd of spectators spilling over into the courtyard outside. Deguerre was fortunate to have advocates that gave him a pension because thousands of photographic enthusiasts were waiting for a
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sensible and capable way to take photographic pictures and to keep them in some stable fashion. Deguerre’s deguerrotypes were the big breakthrough everyone was waiting for.
The process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each daguerreotype was a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image on a highly polished, silver- plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized (or fixed) with salt water or “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate). Although Daguerre was required to reveal, demonstrate, and publish detailed instructions for the process, he wisely retained the patent on the equipment necessary to practice the new art.From the moment of its birth, photography had a dual character—as a medium of artistic expression and as a powerful scientific tool—and Daguerre promoted his invention on both fronts. Several of his earliest plates were still- life compositions of plaster casts after antique sculpture—an ideal subject since the white casts reflected light well, were immobile during long exposures, and lent, by association, the aura of “art” to pictures made by mechanical means. But he also photographed an arrangement of shells and fossils with the same deliberation, and used the medium for other scientific purposes as well. The journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud, in a scoop that appeared the day before daguerreotypes were first shown to the Académie des Sciences, wrote of having been shown the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: “You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine.” Even Arago, director of the Observatoire de Paris, was reportedly surprised by a daguerreian image of the moon.Neither Daguerre’s microscopic nor his telescopic daguerreotypes survive, for on March 8, 1839, the Diorama—and with it Daguerre’s laboratory—burned to the ground, destroying the inventor’s written records and the bulk of his early experimental works. In fact, fewer than twenty-five securely attributed photographs by Daguerre survive—a mere handful of still lifes, Parisian views, and portraits from the dawn of photography. From Metal to paper
Once people could resolve and stabilize an image on a meta; [plate the race was on to encourage and preserve an image on a paper medium. Scientists studied the chemicals, an iodine mixture, silver nitrate vaper and other chemicals that might resolve an image on metal to see how these procedures could be adapted to create an image on paper surface. This would make photography more portable and easier to cart around than big heavy metal plates.
The early 1840s and 1850 began to see European and American photographer printing their images onto glass negatives. These prints were wet and soon scientists developed a photosensitive paper that could print directly onto paper and thus create paper prints. By the late 1850s, deguerrotypes had been replaced by glass negative paper prints and during the civil war, Matthew Brady became a dominant figure in this new process. The exposure time shrank as well. Photogaphic exposures shrunk from 15 minutes or more to make a visual exposure on metal to under one minute to expose a negative on glass. Brady’s crystal clear prints of Lincoln and other notable figures and his war photos in the newspapers assured the success of the photographic process.
Of course people wanted to make pictures move and it was in the 1870s that Muybridge performed the multiple camera experiment for Leland Stanford that
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guaranteed the arrival of moving pictures. When Muybridge set up 25 cameras on a race track the idea of a multiple camera image of multiple successive serial images laid the groundwork for cinematography.
The eye the brain and cinema.
There were technical issues in running a stream of images past the human eye and getting people to think they were seeing moving images. First the eye and the brain had to recognize what they had seen. Then the rate of image had to be tailored to what the brain could interpret as a clear and discernable image aseries of seconds or mi/cro portions of a second. Many fillmakers have had fun playing with the eyes visual perceptions of things. In Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene, Hitchcock has the murderer, norman bates stabing down at the woman’s body but there is rarely a real penetration of skin by the knife. The eye interprets the stabbing from the lounge of the knife.
Several aspects of eye and brain structure create the effect of movement and vision. One aspect of how we see is known as persistence of vision. That is when a vision is projected onto the retina and absorbed by the optic nerve that image is retained on the eye for a few miliseconds after being seen, thus the image persists on the eye after it is shown to the eye.
Another trick in our vision is the phi phenomenon. If you see a series of electric lights light up in succession, your brain may think the lights are actually moving and are not actually lighting up individually but re moving in a sequence across a field. The phi phenomena gives the impression of movement where there is none.
The way the eye sees images is rather more complicated then we imagine. When light hits the retina which is sentive to light and reacts to it. special cells called photoreceptors turn the light into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the brain. Then the brain turns the signals into the images you see.
Actually apparently when the eye sees things it is actually sees things upside down and the brain has to reinterpret the image and turn the image right side up so we can see things in the normal way we see things in space.
Projectors.
The technical achievement of watching film that was projected was even more complex. Film projectors had to pick a frame of film out of a roll of film, push it infront of a very bright light and hold the film for a millisecond so the eye can register the image and then allow the image to move before the film became too hot and burned up the frame. Then the next image would be dragged in to be vied for a millisecond. The projector needed a motor that allowed the film to move at one continuous speed. This required a moving engine or motor with variable speed and gears and rotors that would allow the motor to crank the film at one continuously speed, no less or no more. Faster film would not register with the eye and would be meaningless, a simple blur of images going by like items flying by you as a plane takes off or flashing by in a speeding car. A slow motor would make it seem like images were hanging in space and not moving.
Projectors had a special device called the latham loop, developed by a group of famr engineers and laborers in New York. The lathams developed a loop that would keep film suspended in space for a second before being pulled by sprockets into the light to be exposed to the public.
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Another problem with projectors was the noise the big loud 35 millimeter projectors made. When they were roaring and at full speed theyir motors made loud noise so often the projection room had to be separated from audiences as in today’s theatres. Today’s projections are digital but still the computers that run digital projectors generated many lumens of light electrical power and become very hot. The fans needed to cool such projectors can also be loud and forcing air into our out of the room. Thus projecting can still be noisy.
Further in the early 20th century motors could run hot and cause another technological danger: fire. Fires famously broke out in early theatres sometimes killing whole audiences. Remember people are in a dark room. They often do not know where exits are. They are disoriented. When smoke fills the room it can incapacitate people and render them unable to respond. Fire was a constant danger and earlier theatres sometimes had a fire marshall by the door to assure people that the theatre was safe.
Sound was always a part of film even during the silent period. In silent films people might narrate the film or a pianist or organist might provide accompanying music. Often even in early films people would try to provide an improvised soundtrack and or a record playih the dialogue. It asn’t that sound wasn’t availabl,e but it was often that sound did not work very well. There were two problems. For one thing sound was not well amplified in the arly twentieth century. People did not have amplifiers because there were no volume increasing tubes that would increase the volume of photograph record signal. All you could hear waa scratchy record through a minimally amplified old horn speaker. Sound quality was very poor. The man who solved that problem as an electrical engineer named lee de forest. De forest created the earliest vacuum rtubes and with amplification tubes the sound of the movie or record player could be pumped through large paper cone speakers that would give off more sound. But such devices were widely available in radio sets until the early 1920s. DeForest solved the amplification problem and people could hear better through amplified speakers. The second problem was synchronization. Sound could play during a film but if you played a record with a film and it skipped the entire sound of the soundtrack might be thrown off and a person might be speaking when he is silent and music might play at the wrong time. To synchronize sound you had to have a tape that played at the same time as the film or atape embedded wit hthe film or a synchronized record player that began at the same instant as the film. Today even wit hdigital film and digital audio you can have breaks in the sound and soundsignals that run digitally ahead of the sound track and people might still wind up talking out of sync with the film. Sound synchronization wit hediting of sound and image is still a problem for editors. Often the soundtrack of music is the last thing added to the film and that’s why some soundtracks are so powerful, they are creating as a unit as a part of the film distinct from the filming and speaking of the film itself.
Terms
Pure cinema: The notion of pure cinema is the combination of image, music and idea that Hitchcock carefully wove together in films to gain the focus of a scene. The shower scene of psycho or the opening scene from strangers on a train or the climactic scene in Rear Window where Stewart watches Grace Kelly in the house in his view all qualify as moments of pure cinema.
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McGuffin: A device Hitchcock used. A device in films that kept the audience interest. Usually the object the criminal or the hero is after in a film (a formula, a person, a valuable object, money, a hostage)
Films:
Hitchcock, Alfred: Strangers on a Train (1951) Hitchcock, Alfred: Dial M For Murder (1954) Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho(1960)
Readings:
Ursell, Joe. “The Phenomenal influence of Alfred Hitchcock.”
https://www.intofilm.org/news-and-views/articles/hitchcock-feature
Wilson, Bee. “Alfred Hitchcock,from silent film director to inventor of modern horror.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/15/alfred-hitchcock-inventor-modern-horror
Cinema one
The birth of cinema Early man and cinema
Obviously, cinema did not occur until the nineteenth century in anything approaching the form we know today, but it is possible that early people were active thespians and perhaps enacted events from everyday life to be entertaining. So imagine a tribe or collective people who lived and dwelled together for protection from the elements and predators established a camp where the weather was desirable, the natural food was plentiful, there was game for hunting and potable water and the basic elements of life were desirable.
This particular tribe of people harnessed the wheel, general mathematic calculations to make things and achieved a degree of engineering, and had clothing made from cotton and wool and designated labor tasks to various members of their collective.
Then there was the need for entertainment and storytelling. After dinner or the evening meal, people gathered around the campfire or fire pit and achieved relative comfort in soft furnishings and conversed in an ancient language unknown to us. They had language, they were sentient, and they had memory and experiences. They begin to act out events of their day and explored issues and current events of common interest. They entertained their clan via a practice of storytelling.
Storytelling
Presumably early people gathered all people in a communal forum and one by one the members of community begin to explore their stories. Some were better storytellers, used language in a more captivating way, had expressive gestures and
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bodies and plotted their fables in a manner that brought enjoyment to the crowd. Some even remembered the tales and repeated them and perhaps transcribed them.
Another method of telling stories might have been a primitive form of animation. Early people were fairly sophisticated artists, and they likely could draw or paint on a variety of media. Some might have found flexible leaves or leaf material that could be dried and turned into a primitive form of paper. It would then be a small step from making individual pictures to linking them together as a primitive form of animation. One could flip a series of images in relation to the other pictures and make a primitive flip book of animated pictures. Recent discoveries hint that early people were more creative and technological than we knew. The idea of cinema probably was around long before there was advanced technology. The hunt to create real moving pictures probably took centuries of civilization to develop. The concept of a series of continuous images linked together as something to see and something acted out was probably in the minds of ancient people for many centuries before our common notion of civilization. Cartooning
Cartooning was a prelude to moving images and the Egyptians, the Greeks, and especially the Romans were very adept at various forms of cartoons. The Romans were quite skillful at early forms of pornography. Just like the internet today, Roman cities had gobs of pornographic graffiti. This sort of illustration was not very educational or edifying but it did show that public interest in graphic arts was a popular pastime. Beginnings
Animation probably arrived in steps. If one could draw a figure using successive movements that represented movement, walking or running using one image page at a time, the illusion of a person running could be achieved by flipping through pages from the beginning of a movement to the end of a movement.
The earliest recording of movement was using a device that you spun in your hand or thumbs that was called a thaumatrope. You had two images on the opposite side of a plate-like drawing surface. You might have a person taking a step on one side and completing that step on side two. By flipping the device like a coin back and forth using a string to pop the image back and forth between the two images the partial step and the completed step would merge into a complete animated moment of a person stepping forward and taking a full step. People played with this toy and the producers would create simple animations of a person stepping or dancing, a horse galloping or a bird spreading its wings and flying.
Another spinning cartoon device was called the Phenakistiscope. The device was a novelty that worked like a flipbook, but in a spiral motion. The technology was discovered by Joseph Plateau who was a mathematician and physicist in Belgium. Panorama
Panorama’s were early forms of moving pictures that people visited in darkened rooms. Painters made scrolled paintings of country scenes. They would place a roll bar at the end of the big scroll painting and technicians would unroll the scroll at one end and collect the large wide painting at the other end. The effect of the scroll painting panorama was like riding by a beautiful scene on an afternoon drive in the horse drawn carriage. The painting might be populated with people in the landscape and though nothing moved but the painting, the audience sometimes thought they could catch movement in the cartoon characters painted into the scrolled scene.
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Edward Muybridge
The first actual film was an attempt made by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, to put photographs of an animal running in successive order. What Muybridge did was a form of serial photography where a series of cameras were lined up to track every moment of movement of an animal. Muybridge was a 19th century British photographer best known for his photos of a horse. There is a famous story of Leland Stanford, a California racehorse breeder, who was an entrepreneur and later became governor and eventually endowed Stanford University. Stanford had money bred horses and liked betting on horse races. One of his friends argued with him that horses were bound to the ground. Stanford said that horses at full gallop were able to leave the ground and momentarily could become air born creatures. Stanford’s friend did not believe him and bet him $25,000, a fortune in nineteenth century money that a horse was never air born and the appearance of a horse leaving the ground was an optical illusion. Stanford took the bet and promised he could prove his point. He felt that a better understanding of how horses run would serve trainers, and the animals. Stanford commissioned Muybridge to take rapid, successive photos of his racer a horse named, Sally. Muybridge warned Stanford that creating cameras that could track every millisecond of a horse’s trajectory would be costly. Stanford agreed to any price to win the bet. Muybridge set about finding engineers that would make him cameras with precision shutters that could click open and close and expose film for the briefest of times. Thus Muybridge could track every small movement of the horse. A second challenge was finding a chemical mixture that would expose the film quickly with a small amount of light at high speed. At that time, some people sat still for 30 seconds or longer to produce a film exposure. The chemical process involved a chemical mixture of silver nitrate which was painted on a special photo-sensitive paper to obtain an exposure of light to the paper to produce a photographic record of an event. Muybridge’s second challenge was finding a chemist that could create a new chemical emulsion that could make the film develop a picture with only a millisecond of light exposure. That required a very specific chemical mixture that would allow the paper to resolve an image in a short period of time. Eventually, Muybridge the intrepid experimenter built 25 cameras with a sensitive quick shutter and used a new type of film that developed with small light exposure. When horses ran before the cameras and pulled very light trip wires, the cameras, all twenty five fired off in quick succession creating a series of photos this showed every movement the horses made including horses leaving the ground. Muybrdge did conclusively prove that horse’s hooves indeed fly when they were running and that at full gallop horses did in fact fly. Stanford was right. Horses do fly. Although Stanford won the $25,000 dollar bet, the cost of Muybridge’s research set Stanford back an incredible $50,000. Muybridge did prove that the horse's hooves were completely off the ground in mid-gallop. The experiment used photos that proved horses do in fact leave the ground at high speeds. Staring at all of these photographs, Muybridge soon realized that he could put them together to display the horse and the rider in motion. Muybridge transformed his scientific skill to become an early creator of medical images of patients in motion.
Muybridge had an interesting and exciting life. He was born in England in 1830 and died in the US in 1904. He had started as a nature photographer in the west, and became fascinated with recording the movement of animals. He was involved in a near
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fatal stagecoach accident that caused brain injuries and made Muybridge sullen and less communicative. People thought the injuries drove him mad. They did not, but recovery was long and arduous. He lived in the west was married and was gone photographing the wilds of Western America. Once when he returned, he found his wife in bed with another man. He promptly shot and killed the man and was found not guilty in a court. The court decided he had just cause.
Muybridge was involved in a deadly stagecoach accident and almost lost his life. He had serious traumatic injuries. He recovered from that unfortunate incident and busied himself with learning about the motion of people and animals. He photographed the minute movement of animals in every stage of movement. He photographed people in motion. He received commissions from osteopathic surgeons who wanted minute studies of how people moved so they could reconstruct people’s bone’s and movement after a traumatic accident. Muybridge, himself, a beneficiary of good trauma surgeons appreciated their value. People saw Muybridge’s nude portraits of people walking as pornographic, but they were not used for that purpose, only to instruct doctors in the way normal bones and limbs moved in natural motion. He photographed the movement of men, women, monkeys, horses, dogs, cats, and many other animals and created the first record of medical movement charts used by osteopathic surgeons in the US. He also toured extensively showing his images of movement and images of the body in motion to thousands across the country. He worked with scientists and technicians to increase the speed of shutters in camera so they could take faster pictures of events at the moment the event happened. He also increased the experimentation into chemicals that would resolve images on paper faster. Thus, he was able to transform the time portrayed in photography from lengthy shots to short and speedy snaps. Modern gif images popular on the web today often reveal the dramatic achievements of Muybridge’s work 100 years after the fact. A common student can construct a clever gif image of Muybridge’s images into a complex study of animal motion. Muybridge between 1870 and 1900 perhaps did more to advance the work of photography both as an art and a science than any other artist and photographer of the age. Muybridge was the father of modern cinematography and was responsible for reanimating still images, but his work was largely forgotten during his lifetime, and he achieved little credit after his death. Only in the last fifty years has Muybridge’s work been revisited. Sadly near the end of his life, Muybridge thought his work might be forgotten but today he is revered as one of the pioneers of pre-cinema technology. Without Muybridge, there might have been no film production.
A specialty of Muybridge’s work was his fascination with animals. He was fascinated by the motion of animals. This fascination came from his previous photographing at Yellowstone. Muybridge pioneered chrono photography, the filming of events over time. Muybridge's work in the famous Yosemite valley had an afterlife of its own in the new medium of cinema. He photographed horses, donkeys, raccoons, dogs, and even cats. He created the first cat film in 1887, and the first film of a dog in 1881. All the YouTubers and other video artists creating cute viral cat and dog videos
have Eadweard Muybridge to thank. Besides animals he also captured the movement of athletes.
Alice Guy Blanche
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Alice Guy was one of the first women filmmakers and her career extended from 1896 to 1920. She lived into the 1960s and had a chance to give interviews near the end of her life that re-established her long forgotten work in film. Alice Guy was a French woman and her family who were poor struggled to obtain a job for her in secretarial work. She luckily found a job in an early film company in Paris working for Louis Gaumont, the chair of a division of the company that was actively producing films. In these early days of film there was little belief that film would last or be a craze or sensation for society. Films were short, thirty seconds to one minute and there were few theatres available for showing films. In fact, the first films had only debuted in public theatres in November of 1895 when the Lumiere brothers showed a film to 30 plus people in a public room in Paris. The Lumiere’s had built a camera that was not only a camera but could be used to develop film by pouring developing fluid in the camera box and could be used to project film by placing a light behind the lens and showing the projected image on the wall. It was a remarkably versatile device and it was expensive.
Gaumont bought one of the Lumiere camera boxes and set to work on improving on the Lumiere technique. He hired production crews to go out and make films. Some were fiction films and some were documentary films. People came to see these Gaumont productions and soon Gaumont needed more directors and producers. He deputized Alice Guy, his secretary to supervise filming. Guy was a keen film fan, and she started producing and directing her own productions possibly creating the first narrative film in her fantastic, The Cabbage Patch Fairy in 1896. This film featured an attractive older woman plucking beautiful bouncing babies from a field of cabbages. The babies cooed and giggled and the happy woman placed them in little pod cradles and extracted more babies from the scene creating a rousing little fairy tale about the birth of babies.
Alice Guy Married Max Blanche and moved to the US in 1900 first to work for Gaumont’s overseas division and then she opened her own film company that made films for ten years. She was the first independent female filmmaker in the US and the only woman in the field that ran her own company, Solax. After her marriage to Blanche failed she continued her operations eventually closing in the 1920s. Eventually she returned to France, but found no work in the industry. She returned in the US in the fifties and lived in obscurity until critics began to realize the quiet old lady down the block in New Jersey had been one of the country’s first female filmmakers. She was questioned and interviewed in the 1960s, and she told the story of her early adventures making films. In the end, Alice Guy Blanche was recognized as one of the first narrative filmmakers in the world and one of the only women filmmakers in the early field of filmmaking.
Thomas Edison and his Kinetoscope
Thomas Edison was a great inventor of the nineteenth century and he did not work alone. He hired a studio of engineers and technicians to help him invent and patent devices and new products. As a child Edison had partial hearing loss from an explosion that damaged his ear drum, and he was often considered lax and not intelligent in school. Edison remembered these early slights and when he became rich and famous he grimly defended his inventions including the movie camera and sued competing filmmakers out of business. He would not appear stupid in business and many people and businesses grew to fear Edison. On the plus side, Edison hired a
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group of talented engineers and creators, and they designed not only electric lights, record players, recorders and movie cameras and projectors but also a host of other attached items that people. Edison created the incandescent electric light in 1879 which immediately revolutionized lighting. The only powered lighting that had been available for centuries was fire which was dangerous and easily went of control. Lime light was an earlier form of light created by heating a mound of lime. It was hot, dangerous, and impractical. Edison created a phonograph recorder and an early form of microphone recordings. He made better telegraphs and improved the reception and transmission of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. One of Edison’s best talents was improving on inventions made by others.
Edison noticed that Europeans like the Lumieres were working on making films, and Edison saw the novelty of film as profitable. Edison witnessed early films in the labs of scientist Étienne-Jules Marey. Marey was racing to creating a device that could record visual movement. After seeing Marey’s experiments he began to work on experiments in his own lab. William K. Dickson was a photographer, who worked for Edison, and pioneered some of the first films that this laboratory produced. Two of
the most notable films produced in the lab, were Dickson's greeting in 1891, and Dickson's Experimental Sound Recording in 1894. Dickson's Greeting was merely him moving his hat in his hand. Dickson’s Experimental Sound Recording was a violinist playing into one of Edison's recording devices while simultaneously being filmed with two people dancing. Edison, himself, designed and did work on the camera. He created a mechanism that would momentarily pause the film in an attempt to keep the photos from blurring. This device was derived from Latham loop that was originally developed by the Latham family in New York, halted a film long enough to be seen and then the loop would pull the film through the camera.
Some of Edison’s films in the 1890s included Fred Ott’s sneeze. Fred Ott was a man who worked for Edison who could sneeze on cue. Edison recorded him sneezing. Edison also recorded the first controversial film, the Rice-Irwin kiss. Rice and Irwin were two middle aged actors in a New York stage play. In it, they kissed on stage. Edison saw the play and invited them to come to his studio to kiss on film. Although the scene they performed is like watching two grand parents kiss, two older people in a warm and tender embrace smooching, it caused public outrage and the event was considered by some as pornographic. Edison pursued all sorts of recordings at his custom-built Menlo Park, New Jersey lab. There he built a custom building with black walls and a moveable roof that could be opened to allow light in to provide more or less exposure as Edison demanded to expose his film. In his lab, he recorded strong men flexing, women dancing in colored robes (these were colored by hand a single frame at a time) and boxers were recorded boxing. Edison found a wide and endless appetite amongst viewers for all style of films about every day life.
Thomas Edison introduced the Edison Home Kinetoscope, using 22mm safety film provided by Eastman Kodak. Edison devised a plan to set up kinetoscope parlors across the country for people to view new short films. The Kinetoscope parlors were an instant hit with the public, especially because they were inexpensive to use. The films were a cheap amusement that Edison targeted to the working classes. The concept of cheap short movies became popular, but projecting film on a screen took powerful
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lights, generated a lot of heat, and threatened to burn the film. Edison’s individual style of viewers watching one film at a time gave rise to the concept of the nickelodeon. The Lumiere Brothers, Cinématographe, and the first projected movies
Louis and Auguste Lumière were brothers and owners of a company that made photographic film, but they also realized that feature filmmaking might be new form of entertainment and revenue. It was something for people to watch. It was a new amusement for people’s leisure time and in the early twentieth century people had more leisure. They were good engineers and the brothers built an early movie camera that could shoot pictures in sequence, develop film by pouring in developer to the camera box and could be used as a projector to show the pictures after they had been developed. All you had to do was attach a light to one end of the camera box and crank the film past the projected light. The Lumiere Brothers saw the popularity of Edison's Kinetoscope Parlor, and they wanted their own form of cinema. Edison's machines were only good for one person at a time, and the Lumieres dreamed of many people being able to see the pictures at the same moment. Auguste and Louis used their same camera as a projector that had the capacity to project a motion picture on a wall. The men had made a device and viewing place they called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere’s showed the first projected cinema shows in a small darkened room in November of 1895, the first example of projected films. Louis Lumiere had developed a dry film emulsion process for developing photographs and the same chemicals were used for processing cinematic film. They created the process to develop the film and to show the pictures. Louis Lumiere had the foresight to make a versatile recording and projecting device. The Lumieres regarded cinema as one invention among many and in his later In later life he observed that he and his brother had shown the seeds of the film industry for others to harvest. Forbes magazine announced in 2019 that the movie industry could gross 11.5 billion dollars in 2019. Film culture and business sadly has had a short memory, and sadly, no one has ever thanked the Lumiere for their contribution.
Georges Melies, and the invention of film editing
Georges Melies was a well-known stage magician, who owned his stage and theater where he performed magic shows. George was a master at elaborate stage illusions, and used projectors as part of his stage act. Many of the magic sketches Melies produced used stage illusion to produce startling, and violent, comedic effects. Melies loved the work of the Lumiere Brothers and their Cinématographe Machine. He wanted to use this tech in the magic shows. Melies designed a different film camera and projecting system, and he realized the projector could stop and start during the recording. He developd the jump cut, an image jumping from one screen position to another and realized this could be used for magic effects. Melies created another technique used in magic, the double exposure. He could expose the film twice and put two separate images in one frame. He considered film to be one of the most spectacular mediums of magic. He wished to astound audiences, and his films seemed magical with their special effects. His 1902 film A Trip to the Moon was widely bootlegged in the US and Melies fought hard to obtain payment for pirated copies of his films. This ‘Trip to the moon’ was even bootlegged by Thomas Edison to be shown in his own new theaters, Melies wasn't done impressing people with his visual sorcery, he also employed a lot of people to color tint each individual frame to make the earliest colorized films.
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New Entertainment and Hollywood
Edison was a major reason that Hollywood arrived. Edison saw the popularity of projected films, so he switched from the Kinetiscope to the new medium to keep relevant. After he patented the new film projector, he actively sued his competitors, many of whom did not have patents and so were unprotected. He also sued W K. Dickson, his former employee, for trying to start his own company. Eventually, he tired of suing competitors and formed a trust with Dickson and some of his other competitors. This eventually started squeezing out smaller film producers, who ended up leaving the East Coast and moving their own production houses to Hollywood. The West Coast location had access to all types of topography and terrains which was necessary to make realistic, different types of sets. Hollywood began to get a great variety of moving picture companies. Hollywood, itself, pushed out much of the smaller competition with the variety and abundance of films being produced. Major production companies started engaging in integration of the film industry through film production, distribution, and theaters. Universal developed a form of vertical integration by producing its own films, distributing them to domestic and international markets, and then exhibiting those films in Universal-owned theaters. The Hollywood monopoly became so great that it edged Edison out and dominated the world movie market. The film industry was motived by money and ending outside competition.This allowed Hollywood dominance over world cinema for generations. Today Disney alone produces over 70% of all American films. In recent years calls have been made to regulate Hollywood and make it more fair and equitable for other companies to compete against the Hollywood system. We hopefully want more films than the simply the princesses and Marvel movies of Disney.
Terms
storytelling: early form of drama
Animation: a form of moving pictures using drawings strung together to give the appearance of real life movement.
Thaumatrope: Early simple animation device flipping pictures back and forth with a small disc or plate.
Panorama: a painted scene that could be moved on a scrollbar revealing more scenery and showing a primitive form of animation or movement through space.
Storytelling: the art of telling stories preceded the production of all cinema. Phenakistiscope: Another early animation device only unlike a thaumatrope the Phenakistiscope moved objects in a circle to create the sense of motion.
Electric light: the essential invention for filmmaking, created by Thomas Edison’s lab in 1879. It changed the world.
Films:
E. S. Poster: The Great Train Robbery (1903)
James Williamson: The Big Swallow (1900)
T. A. Edison: The Rice Irwin Kiss (1896)
Lumiere: Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895)
Readings:
Gunning, Tom. “Cinema of Attractions.” http://www.columbia.edu/itc/film/gaines/historiography/Gunning.pdf
Kubincanek, Emily. “How Hollywood Made People Believe it Was the Dream Factory.”
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https://filmschoolrejects.com/old-hollywood-made-america-believe-american-dream- factory/
Cinema two
Early Cameras
The earliest American invention of a cinematic device was edison's kinetoscope created by one of his technicians WKL Dickson around 1890 Edison built a studio in New Jersey called the black Mariah it looked like a great big black building. Some of the earliest films that Edison produced were Fred ott's knees that arrived in 1894 and the Serpentine dances of 1894. Edison scored one of the first controversial films in 1894 with the rice Erwin kiss that actually showed two people kissing on film and upset people who believed the film contained pornographic content. What Edison had done was photographed 2 actors who were portraying lovers on stage in a New York production. Edison asked the actors to perform a scene from the play on film for him and the actors for a fee obligingly appeared and performed the scene and Edison filmed it . However Edison became aware of how controversial film could be immediately when he realized that the content of the film could make people upset. The black Mariah studio was an interesting invention in and of itself the walls of the building were black so that all the backgrounds of the images that Edison photographed with his assistance WKL Dickson and others would be foreground images against a black background light came from skylights in the building so that Edison could control the lights in the room by raising or lowering curtains over the skylights and he could control the light on the objects in the room so that the objects that would be central would be in a lighter color and the background behind objects would be black. in essence edison created the very 1st cinematic studio or studio space for For filming a film. Edison referred to his camera as the kinetoscope or a box that would contain film and could be cranked by hand to record images moving in front of it using celluloid. Celluloid film did not come out exposed and ready for viewing. Like the photographic process the film once exposed
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had to be treated with chemicals to resolve or bring out an image this could take hours to make an image clearer so that the film could be seen and the image could be interpreted.
Edison made a series of comedic films and films of boxers and films of people dancing . However Edison did not solve the problem of how to project films by 1896 many competitors with Edison in the United states were trying to achieve their own films and we're trying to project films in a live environment the projecting of films had many difficulties and challenges for film makers while individual viewers of film could watch a film in a small viewer actually projecting a film on a wall with enough light and clear lenses so that the film could be seen by others and would project at the right rate of speed so that it could be discernible as moving images proved to be very challenging for film makers.
Lumiere
The race to be the first people to produce a movie projector and a place to entertain audiences would be the Lumiere brothers auguste and Pierre lewmar 2 French inventors who created the cinematograph. The cinematograph was a superior invention 2 edison's kinetoscope the cinematograph developed by the Lumiere brothers was a camera a developing device and projector all in a single box in November of 1895 the Lumiere brothers created the first cinema show allowing audiences to sit in seats while the Lumiere brothers projected their images on a wall this entertainment was very popular for european audiences and it took a while for american inventors to up up with something similar where projection The Lumiere films were bright and intelligent featuring elements of life that had not been seen before including images of the loomers themselves feeding their baby and featuring elements like a train arriving at a train station . Some of the images The Lumineers chose to shoot were so astounding they frightened audiences. For example when the loomers shot the very first train arriving at the train station people in the audience thought the train was coming directly at them and they literally ducked out of their chairs for fear of being struck by the train . The image was so riveting people really thought it was a real train coming at them. The I fold the brain into a fear reaction to the early cinema. In fact many times when we have a jump reaction in a horror movie it's still our body responding to a stimulus that the body feels is real even though in our minds we know that what is on the screen is in no way near us and cannot really affect us or actually harm us in reality . Thus jumpscares are a way in which our body still responds to cinema as if we're in the room with the cinema event and we can be affected by things in the cinema. The truth is what is happening is the body is reacting to a physical stimulus it still perceives as a threat that is a jump scare where the brain eventually realizes that everything is on film and is not really a danger to the physical body.
The Lumiere films piloted several innovations in the creation of films first loomers probably created the very first narrative comedy called the Gardner. In the Gardner there is a gardener who is watering plants and a boy walks along and steps on the garden hose stopping the water the gardener looks at the hose to see if something is obstructing the water the boy takes his foot off the hose and the gardener is splashed in the face with water popping out the comedic aspect of the film immediately was enjoyed by audiences who along with the boy understood the joke of the water trick. The loomers also captured real life when they actually showed their first film workers leaving
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the mayor factory. August and Pierre lewmar had a film factory where they actually made photographic film and one of the first films they recorded was workers leaving their factory at the end of a work day and it's simply an image of workers walking out the doors of the factory at the end of the work day and lasts about 30 seconds thirdly and finally most powerfully the workers showed a train pulling into a station and arriving. People thought this was an astounding event because the train appeared to be coming directly at the audience and people in the audience actually ducked fearing that the train would actually strike them.
Two theories discuss the way early cinema was seen by audiences the first theory is the actualities or cinema as realism in the early days of film film was seen as real or what actually occurred the term for this was that cinema is seen as an actuality or a reality of life and audiences took it that way there are many apocryphal stories about the first cinema showing of the train arriving at the station in France in in the first showing of of that shot in 1896 the story is that audiences actually ducked because they're afraid they would be struck by the train but they did realize they were watching a film that was projected and they realized that the film that was projected was not real life but they took the events they saw on screen as real that is they did not assume that somebody had staged the event or that actors were performing in action and not really living it so it took a while for the idea of performance in film just like performance on stage to be accepted as being fiction. The second theoretical concept about early film is the idea that cinema was treated like a form of amusement like an amusement park or carnival or circus. That film was seen as a cinema of attractions that people went to the cinema like they would go to a fair or a ride at Disney World the idea for many people attending cinema was they were going to experience an experience they had never experienced before. This cinema of attractions theory suggests that people went to film for the sensation of seeing something they had never seen before they did not go to the cinema because they wanted to see a story that experience came a little bit later.
As the length of films became longer audiences moved from wanting to see actualities and a cinema of attractions to actually wanting to see films that told a story. This created more competition to make movies and it created the birth of more studios . As films became longer people wanted to see more diverse stories that told the stories of different people and people had an appetite for fantasy and reality. Narrative became the format for film over simply an actual event or a cinema of attractions where people could see something new the whole idea of a narrative film changed the basis for filmmaking in the 1890s into the 20th century
Actualities: Early non-fiction short films that were often composed as static one-shots. The first films in cinema history were actualities.
Cinema of attractions: Concept developed by theorist Tom Gunning to describe how early moviegoers were attracted to cinema primarily as a shocking and exciting new technology.
Georges Méliès: Cinema and the magic tradition
George molaise is considered one of the earliest great film makers of the early cinema era he was a magician he was an early on tour he built his own studio and he pioneered a wide range of cinematic effects . He is considered the father of fantasy and science fiction cinema. He controlled all aspects of filmmaking including production screen
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writing directing acting producing and distribution so therefore he is now considered by many people to be one of the earliest auteurs of cinema.
George Melies created his cinema using a camera he purchased in England from an English inventor. His films became famous for the use of special effects or magic tricks that popular popularized using multiple exposures dissolves stop motion and split screen photography effects amongst other techniques malaise was one of the first people to utilize many effects in his films and therefore is by many people is considered to be the father of science fiction special effects and fantasy cinema. One of his popular early films on whom date it or the four troublesome heads from 1898 actually has Malays in the frame and he actually removes his head and places it on a table in the end he places four different versions of his head on the table and each one of them is a different version of malaise head . How he creates the this effect is by using multiple exposures of the same film. Malaise in many of his films uses the technique of the dissolve or stop motion photography to create many of his special effects.
Another technique molaise uses is direct address to the audience where he actually is speaking directly to the audience as as they are watching the film . Perhaps the most famous of malaise early films is a trip to the moon from 1902 and the impossible voyage from 1904 in both films molaise is telling a story of people taking a trip and he uses the technique of linear editing to actually portray the story in a specific sequence . He is one of the first film makers to utilize linear editing successfully to show the progression of the story moving forward in a narrative format. Malaise work is also important for his building of his own studio and his creation of a set design where he can control the elements of the design and the background and the special effects in his own studio he also utilized objects that would jump from one scene to another or literally jump cuts . Other film makers of the era including James Williamson began to utilize special effects in their films in 1900 James Williamson created the big swallow a film in which he is describing a man who is angry about the fact that he is being photographed so he walks up to a camera and decides to swallow the camera and the filmmaker all we see is a guy approaching the camera and opening in his mouth but the assumption is that he is actually swallowing and devouring the camera because he's tired of being photographed.
The birth of classical Hollywood storytelling. James Williamson was an important filmmaker from England and in 1901 he created a 5 minute film entitled fire in which he put scenes together in a narrative format so that audiences would see one event coming after another describing the outbreak of a fire and attempts by fireman's is to end the fire and save the building.
The big breakthrough in Hollywood classical editing and film story structure arrived in 1903 Edwin S Porter had been a worker for Edison and had been a projectionist and had access to a lot of films. He had seen Jane woods williamson's five minute 1901 film fire he had been witness to George molaise a trip to the moon in 1902 . Because he had been a projectionist he had a chance to see each of these films several times he created two of the most important films to the idea of film narrative and those films were the life of an American fireman in 1903 and the Great Train Robbery in 1903 both are important breakthrough films. The life of an American fireman is literally taken from James Williamson fire in 1901 it tells the story of firemen and fighting fires in nine scenes that are strung together in a narrative format that tells the story of the
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firemen being called out to stop a fire. In nine scenes Evan S Porter actually creates the idea of cinema that is edited together in nine separate specific scenes. In 1903 he embarks on the Great Train Robbery about the robbery of the train which is even more complex and has more scenes and uses rear projection in the film there is a train station being seen with rear projection scenes of trains going by through the window a group of robbers come into the train station to hold it up they knock the train station attendant unconscious and they tie him up and they go out to the train tracks to wait for the train when it stops to refuel for water and coal when the train stops the robbers climb on board the train and subdue the crew and break into the train car containing money that is moved from one location to another the valiant train official tries to protect the money but is shot and thrown off the train by the robbers they take the money they separate the engine car from the rest of the train they robbed the passengers on the train and then they mount the engine car and drive away in the meantime we see a scene of the sheriff and his men at a dance and people are dancing in a room at a hoedown uh a dance party . The robbers separate from the engine car abandon it and go into the woods and pick up horses to make their getaway. The sheriff in the middle of the dance is told that the train has been robbed and he must mount a posse to stop the robbers . The sheriff and his men depart the dance . The next scene shows the robbers on horseback being chased by the sheriff and his men and shooting ensues the robbers get some distance away and decide to stop get off their horses and split the loot. They are surrounded by the sheriff and his men and one by one they are shot dead . The last scene of the film shows a sheriff pointing a gun in the audience and firing. The film is 8 to 10 minutes long and really does show the complex process of the robbery and the aftermath of the robbery. The value of Edwin S Porter's technique is that he places the scenes together in sequence so that we have the sense of an action being continued mentally by the audience as they watch one event followed by another event. The satisfaction for the audience is that they get to see the beginnings of the robbery the effects on the station agent who is knocked unconscious they also watch a girl who come pops into the station and rescues the agents and alerts her and the sheriff to the fact there's been a robbery and they showed the resolution of the robbery the chase by the sheriff and the capture and eventual execution of the robbers by the sheriff and his men. Both the life of an American fireman in 1903 and the Great Train Robbery in 1903 have in massive impact on American film for one thing they illustrate that American film is based on the idea of action of big complicated dramatic and oftentimes violent actions become the central thing in American film they also show that the audience is like chases the audiences like westerns the audience is like violence the audience is like killing the audience is like drama the audience is like suspense the audience is like to know what happens the audience is like to know sequence and the audience is like to know outcomes so for many many reasons the Great Train Robbery deeply impacts the way later American films are made. After the Great Train Robbery many films feature action many films feature drama many films feature violent action many films feature chases many films resolve themselves in violent conclusions of that action. One of the interesting scenes in the Great Train Robbery is where the robbers are slowly taking all of the possessions of the passengers on board the train and while they are robbing the passengers 1 passenger attempts to make a break for for it and run from the robbers and his shot in the back that sequence creates real interest for the audience because
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they are concerned about what happens to this man and as the robbers depart the scene all of the characters who have been robbed run to the man who has been shot to see if one he's still alive and two if they can render made so there is a social and curiosity dimension to these early American films but they do set in motion the style of of filming that will be sent become significant for the next 100 years in American filmmaking
The Great Train Robbery prevails as one of the Great American films from 1903 for another 10 years audiences returned to watching it again and again at 10 minutes in length audiences can watch the film six times an hour and do people literally memorize it line for line and action for action period from 1905 to 1911 there was a massive boom in what's known as the Nickelodeon a private viewing parlor where people could watch a short film for five cents these examples of short nickel films really created an audience for films.
American film progresses forward in 1915 with DW griffith's breakthrough film birth of a nation birth of a nation uses many techniques that become standard in American film and provides a variety of technical innovations the three hour and 15 minute film is a major epic and an extremely sensational film and it is also deeply racist in its tone. Birth of a nation possibly singlehandedly helped to revive the klu Klux Klan in American culture DW Griffith knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the novel the klansman to make into a film . First Griffith knew the the book and the subject matter would be deeply controversial second Griffith linked these sensational topic of racism and the birth of the glucose clan to his cinema innovations third Griffith had enormous vision to envision the era of the pre civil war the civil war the death of Lincoln the Reconstruction Era and the birth of the Klan all in a single film . He utilizes a variety of techniques in the film to create empathy with characters . He uses a variety of shots cross cutting from close up to medium shot to longshot to dramatize events and take the audience with him he uses naturalistic acting from some of the best actors he could find in that era who really epitomized the characters and make the audience sympathetic to even some of the most horrific ideas such as lynching throughout the film the klu Klux Klan is seen as the epitome of order in the South the attempts to restore order to a lawless southern territory of the United states. While the film had enormous racist content the film prompted controversy and prompted public outcry about racism about lynching and about the origins and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan if nothing else despite Griffith sensationalistic motivations the birth of a nation caused the the nation to have the very first debate about issues of racism and the idea of democracy of a variety of people in the 20th century and that debate continues today. The film shows that a film can have a sociological impact on a culture in a country and how people see the world and how people even see their neighbors.
While the story of women film makers was not widely told there were many women who became involved in the filmmaking business as producers and directors . In 1896 in Paris the secretary to Luis GAIL mall of the gammill studios was Alice guy blanche. Alice guy blanche was hired by gammill to create films and she ran her own film unit in the early 20th century Alice guy blanche left the gomoll organization to create her own film making business and pioneered filmmaking in the United states making films into the 1920s. In the United states one of the first female film makers to make a full length feature film was Lois Weber who in 1914 made a version of Shakespeare's merchant of
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Venice. Lois Webber was one of the first women to achieve fame and acclaim as a director and she used her platform to talk about issues of child care abortion and women's rights . All of these ideas would remain fairly taboo until recent years many women innovated in the format of film.
World War One had a massive impact in the creation of film around the world and of course influenced where and how films could be made. With Europe plunged into war The United states took the lead in film production. The United states entered World War One very late and had very few casualties from the war period therefore their film industry was intact at the end of the war and by 1919 American film had taken the lead. However art movements had enormous influence over film particularly in France where art had enormous influence over everyday life. The movement that began with ridicule but became popular by the turn of the century was the notion of French impressionism. French impressionism literally used the science of how the ises to create pointillistic images that were reconstructed by the retina into a meaningful image. In Francis impressionistic music sketches and pieces of a melody would be reconstructed in the mind of the audience into whole melodies where audiences would do some of the work of reconstructing the music into a whole and beautiful experience. Similarly expressionism in film allowed audiences to interact with the film . In impressionistic film a series of images or ideas would be presented partially and the audience would be invited to become involved in the film process by trying to connect the dots literally of the story of the character of the movement of the scenes to reconstruct a whole from the idea of the French impressionist view of the world where various discrete parts would be laid before the audience in isolation and the audiences would have to reconstruct the parts into a hole to make sense of the impressionistic elements.
One of the major innovators in the French impressionistic film movement was a man named Abel gantz who literally utilized a variety of storytelling lighting and technology techniques within a frame and using frame mobility to recreate the experience in the eyes and the experience of the characters . Oftentimes gantz would use montage to put together a series of ideas or scenes to connect an audience to an image and make sense of the image. Very famously in his film Napoleon one of the last classic silent films constructed in 1927 gan's used the technique of impressionism to put together a series of images telling the story of the life of Napoleon. One of the concepts of cinema impressionism is the concept of the photo genie that is the way of making an object more profound and deeper by enhancing it with a close up that gets you inside the mind of the character. There are several scenes enable gansus Napoleon in which he uses the technique of the photo Jenny in which we see Napoleon in close-up and then we see cuts or cutaways to different things inside napoleon's mind that allows us to project from the image of Napoleon the thought process of Napoleon as he's looking at things in the world the concept of the photo Jenny is very important to the impressionist concept of building a character.
A new style of cinema emerges in France under the concept of Dada filmmaking and surrealistic filmmaking. Dada film making portrays oftentimes the nonsense of life and can collide through editing images that can produce a smile or silliness or terror pure. Surrealism is a movement more wedded to psychoanalysis and surrealists believed that there were unconscious images floating in the back of our mind that if those images could be brought to life might give us deeper understanding of our
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unconsciousness. Surrealistic filmmaking toyed with Freud's ideas of dream analysis. Probably one of the most important in the surrealist films of the 1920s was Salvador Dali and Luis banal 2 French Spanish surrealist painters made a film titled and delusion dog andalusian dog was a film that was a series of dreamlike sequences tide together with a broken narration that appeared to be like fragments of a dream. A man stares at the moon at night sharpens his razor blade and then cuts open a woman I all of these are weird strange nightmarish dream images at the beginning of the film then there is a sequence of a man wearing what looks like a nun's habit riding a bicycle down a street in Paris he goes unconscious the bicycle falls over a woman in upper upper floor of an apartment complex looks out her window and sees him lying on the ground goes running downstairs to his aid and then she is back in the apartment mysteriously and she assembles pieces of his clothing on the bed and looks at the bed and wheels the man on the on the street who has fallen over to appear in her bed the man is reconstructed in the bed and then while she's looking at the bed she notices the man has teleported to the room and he's staring at his hand in the room and she goes over to him and sees it coming out of his hand as a series of ants so the film does not make traditional sense it just gives a catalog of a series of different disconnected dream images that might appear in somebody's fitful nightmare but surrealistic film definitely had an influence on the faint way film was constructed because even though some surrealistic feelings or images might seem unreal some aspects of life might seem like a dream or deeply unreal and not realistic all of these are important ideas about films and filmmaking and all of them shaped the way modern European film arrived. When we look at French and European film we see that Dada and surrealism and impressionism probably didn't have a lot of impact in early 20th century film although all of those ideas might have had impact later in this country but we clearly see that Dada surrealism and impressionism all have a strong impact in the way French film is created again around ideas that are very different than the ideas that created American film.
Finally we arrive at another style that's very important to the creation of European film and that's the style of German expressionism German expressionism was an art style that grew out of the horrors of World War One . The Germans had become involved in war in World War One thinking that they would be great militarists and leaders and winners at the war . What they didn't understand was other cultures could also martial forces against them and stop them the Germans were stunned to find themselves the losers at the end of World War One. They felt that they should be the winners of the war and when the Treaty of Versailles was signed the Germans ended up paying massive reparations to the allies in the war. The concept of German expressionism was a concept that was already available and existing in art. German expressionism depended on bright unmixed colors German expressionism also conveyed abstract images that did not look like real life locations. German expressionism also portrayed extreme violent emotions hysteria fear anxiety horror death all of those things are experienced in German expressionist expressionistic work. When Germans began to employ expressionistic techniques after World War One it came from a period of anxiety. The German psyche did not expect to lose the war period the Germans did not expect their country to be bankrupt by war reparations. The Germans did not expect to have massive inflation and instability in their culture. Therefore the films made from German expressionism are darkly psychologically
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complicated and disturbing. The Germans become highly interested in horror fantasy science fiction and aberrational states of mind. One of the earliest films of the German expressionist. Is a film by Robert wiene entitled the cabinet of doctor caligari and in summarizes many of the anxieties in the German mind at the time . The character at the center of the film is being treated by a psychiatrist whom the character realizes has a hidden side to him he isn't just a psychiatrist but at night he is experimenting with creating dark life and he has created a homunculus a proto human creature that goes out at night and terrorizes people kills people and steals women our protagonist is terrified of the doctor because he has this hidden side to him and what he discovers overtime is that this character is dangerous and destructive. So he fears the character and believes that he's in the clutches of a madman. Finally at the very end of the film after the monstrous Dr caligari has killed people and stolen women the protagonist of the film wakes up . He realizes he's been in a dream and the dream has been a paranoid psychotic fantasy. When he awakens he realized that doctor caligari is not an evil scientist has now created a proto human has not been killing people has not been stealing women but has been treating him for psychosis and paranoia. When he awakens from his dream he realizes that everything he is seen throughout the film has been a horrible delusion and that the doctor is really a good person who has cured him from his hysteria paranoia and paranoid state. So many of the films that arrive from German expressionism have these dream states in their mind. Another film from the era is FW murnau's Nosferatu which deals with the idea of a vampire that is literally sucking people dry and is very clearly taking over the evening hours and destroying the lives of people and particularly praying on young women. German expressionism expresses the terror the Germans have about their society following the aftermath of World War One and the sense of hopelessness and bleakness that characterizes their society in such times.
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Cinema two: Hollywood women
Women of Hollywood
Alice Guy Blanche, Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arzner, Sofia Coppola, Alma Reville
Alice Guy Blanche
Alice Guy Blanche with a secretary to Louis Gaumont in the early days cinema. In the late 19 century in 1896 Gaumont wanted to increase the productions of his film company, and he assigned a unit to his secretary who became an able filmmaker. In 1900, she made one of the earliest short films entitled The Cabbage Patch Fairy. In the short film a middle-aged woman grabs babies from a cabbage patch and present them to the audience with adoring giggles and goo-goos all the way. Alice Guy was a talented woman and she was assigned a role to open production facilities for Gaumont in in the US. When she arrived in the country, she saw opportunities for starting her own business and began her own filmmaking business, Solex that lasted until 1920. Finding little work in the film industry for women in the US, she returned to Paris and worked there for a number of years. In the late 1950s she returned United States to be with her children. Word circulated that Guy Blanche had been a filmmaker in the early days of film and in the 1950s and 60s film critics began to interview her to learn about her role in the history of film. Finally, by the end of her life she was claimed as one of the original female pioneers in the film business.
Ida lupino
Ida Lupino was an attractive young woman from England who had a talent for acting. In the 1930s she arrived in Hollywood and began to take roles in featured Hollywood films including parts in Gone with the Wind and roles that cast her as a beautiful engenue. But by the end of world war two she was getting steady work in mysteries and bad girls and femme fatales. By the 40s she had become in an influential and beautiful actress popular in the movies. While starring in a film noir, Not Wanted in the 1940s the Director of the production Elmer Clinton became violently ill with a heart attack. The production was threatened with closure. Lupino stepped forward and said I can direct the film and the producers not wishing to end the production accepted her offer of help. Within several weeks she completed the film and made friends of the cast and crew. Lupino went on to become a popular actress and Director of a series of film noir’s in the late 40s and early 50s. As women’s roles were further circumscribed in Hollywood in the 1950s despite her success as a director Lupino found fewer and fewer opportunities to work. She moved her talents to television where she found continued work as an actress and as a Director. Lupino never flinched at the fact that her gender held her back from receiving accolades as a Director but the cast and crew and production teams that worked with her awarded her great accolades as a devoted, attractive actress and a consummate professional. Friends called her Lupi but her name on the set was ‘mother’ and they even placed mother on the back of her director’s chair. Lupino’s long career in Hollywood illustrated the difficulties women directors had but also showed that a plucky woman with talent, skill, and diplomacy could work her way into the production side of Hollywood and could work both as an actor and as a Director. Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner was a Hollywood original. She was an open lesbian who lived with a woman her entire life. She directed a variety of films that featured strong female
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characters and discussed the problematics of heterosexual society. In Craig’s wife, based on a Pulitzer Prize play she tells the story of a woman (Rosalind Russell) who is ridiculed because she is seen as strong and her husband is regarded as weak. Such role reversals threatened their marriage. Men that were weak and women that were strong were taboo topics. She produced films about marriages plagued by unfaithfulness. She crafted 16 films as a director including many about taboo subjects. She worked with female stars like Katherine Hepburn and Rosalynn Russell and gave them intelligent complex rules.
In many of her most provocative films she attacked the concept of the male gaze Maureen O’Hara had a creepy line in the 1940 film Dance Girl Dance where she responds to leering men by saying, “I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can have your look and $.50 worth, $.50 for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wife won’t let you. “ Azner was a powerful director and who made 16 films between 1927 and 1943. Before she quit directing, she was the first woman to join the directors guild of America in 1936 . She lived with her partner Mary Morgan for four decades many of her films revolve around the theme of courage and bravery to make difficult choices and sacrifices for a moral code of strength to be one’s own person. she was uncompromising in public and in private and lived her code of honesty and self-reliance. Jane Campion
Jane Campion is an important contemporary female Director who has been directing films for over 30 years. She began directing in her native Australia and moved to other countries to produce a series of films that deal with women’s struggle and people’s struggle to be individuals and to live a life unshackled by controls and allowing people to experience the freedom that society rarely allows people. As a female directors she is deeply involved in women’s issues and her major breakthrough was 1993’s The Piano in which Holly Hunter is a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to Sam Neill. She meets a land owner nearby who shares much of her passion and love for books, art, and learning played by Harvey Keitel. They fall in love, and they learn that they can can be free.
She directed a powerful TV series in 2013 and a sequel to it in 2017 entitled top of the lake starring the magnetic Elizabeth Moss as a police detective trying to solve a crime involving young women who were taken to a dangerous location are enslaved and murdered. The film deals with issues of dark men with a code of violence that undermines their lives.
In her 2021 film The Power of the Dog she deals with alternative lifestyles. The character of a brother, George, played by Jesse Plemons and his wife Rose played by Kristen Dunst come into conflict with his brother Phil who is a hard and masculine advocate who doesn’t support his brother’s wife and her inclination towards learning. The wife Rose has a son from a previous marriage who is thin and wiry and feminine and attending college and training to become a doctor. Cumberbatch plays the hardened masculine Phil with a hatred for anything feminine. He makes fun of Rose he ridicules her and drives her further into alcoholism. He makes fun of her son, Peter for his size and his lack of physical strength. However, over time he builds a bond with this feminized scholarly boy. But the boy sees him as rooted in toxic masculinity and mean to his mother in a danger to his family so eventually the boy uses his medical skills to acquire some anthrax and uses it to poison the pernicious Phil ending him. Campions
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film leaves behind the theme of female empowerment and instead takes on the subject of toxic masculinity that can turn against men when actually a man’s feminine side might be his salvation. the Power of the Dog is a powerful repudiation of such toxic masculinity.
Alma Reville
Alma Reville was Alfred Hitchcock’s wife for 50 years and often the cowriter of many of his films. Because her husband was enormously famous and popular Reville’s contribution to the success of Hitchcock’s career was often overshadowed by her husband’s larger than life persona and his stage presence as a Director. However in times of stress it was Hitchcock who always looked at Reville to rewrite and save productions of films that had script trouble. Reville was instrumental in rewriting many of Hitchcock’s most potent films including working on the script for Psycho and helping to rewrite that structure of the story. Her contributions to the films are often obscured by the fact that Hitchcock and Reville worked in private and contributed to the work together seamlessly as a team. However, since there were no records of actually what Reville had written and what the original writer of the script had written much of her contribution to Hictchcock’s work is obscured. . It is undoubtedly Reville’s work that led to the consistency of Hitchcock’s work for the 50 years of his career, and it is undoubtedly without Reville’s help Hitchcock’s career could not have taken place.
Sofia Coppola.
True that Sofia Coppola had the advantage of having a famous father and Director for a guiding light and an entrée into the movie business but Sofia Coppola’s work all by itself is distinctive and original. She has her own voice and she has developed a variety of films that are insightful inquisitions into the mind and thinking of women.
Coppola’s career was off to a shaky start when she appeared in her father’s godfather three as the granddaughter of Michael Colionne. However after that experience, she read the novel the Virgin suicides about young women that are deeply unhappy with their lives and some of them as virgin’s commit suicide because they are unhappy in their lives, and they can’t find any way to achieve happiness. She burst onto the scene directing this important film and a generation of young women immediately gravitated to her vision of hopeless young girls not finding a way forward in their lives. After 1999’s Virgin Suicides Coppola became involved with the 2003 film lost in translation which deals with a movie actor Bob Harris who is in between films and spending time in Japan.As a celebrity, he has a compromised sense of privacy, but he is in a foreign country and he is disoriented and lonely. Coppola catches the idea of and his estranged life. In the film lost in translation is a rye comedy about being out of place, being out of time, and not having a sense of your own direction home.
Her next film was 2010’s somewhere and it deals with celebrity culture in the young star is basically thrust into situations with people where he has no interest in the things he’s doing with his life and he becomes involved in a series of vices that don’t provide any pleasure. Sometimes he spends time with his young daughter but that provides him with no pleasure as well too. It is another study of toxic celebrity and how toxic celebrity renders most of life dull and meaning meaningless. In her 2017, film the Beguiled she does a remake of a 1970s Clint Eastwood movie in which a soldier is left damaged and at the mercy of a group of girls in the girls’ school. While the girls try to
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help him, his natural inclination toward seducing the women makes the women envious of each other and eventually they determined that the soldier’s masculinity is a toxic force in their lives, and they might just as well be rid of him and his damaging ways. Terms
Toxic masculinity: a term that describes how masculine features can be destructive to men.
The gaze: A term articulated by feminists that suggest that men use looking at women as a way to possess them.
empowerment: In Hollywood and many places in the western cultures women have been routinely deprived of empowerment through a lack of jobs, education and creative outlets.
Films:
Dorothy Arzner: Craig’s Wife (1936)
Dorothy Arzner. “Dance Girl Dance.” (1940)
Ida Lupino. “Never Fear.” (1949)
Alfred Hitchcock. “Psycho” (1960) script support by Alma Reville
Sofia Coppola. “The Virgin Suicides.” (1999)
Alice Guy Blanche. “The Cabbage Patch Fairy.” (1900)
Readings:
Liu, Rebecca. “Jane Campion’s the Power of the Dog.”
https://www.anothergaze.com/
Geller, Theresa. “Dorothy Arzner.” Senses of Cinema. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/arzner/
Cinema 3 Griffith
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David Warwick Griffith is one of the most important filmmakers of the early twentieth century. His films were epic Biblical novels and dealt with classical literature. He pioneered many techniques that we now take for granted in cinema. He used natural acting, he rehearsed scenes, he was early in mixing a variety of camera shots, close up, medium shot and distance shot. he used to close up the point of view shot. He type cast specific roles by physical type. He created drama by moments of extreme emotion. He edited for continuity and emphasis and quicken the pace for editing in action scenes. While he may not have created all of these techniques he practiced all of them and improved them so that what Griffith did became the grammar of vocabulary of American film for the next hundred years. He made shots, he edited, he rehearsed actors, he used naturalistic acting, he created strong storylines, he was interested in epic formats, he could shoot long films with complex editing, he was interested in history, and he was interested in the development of narrative. No early filmmaker made a more comprehensive and diverse body of work and no early filmmaker was as universally interested in every aspect of the craft of filmmaking than Griffith. He was the most adventurous pioneer and explorer of the craft of filmmaking of the silent period, and without him, there would be no modern film technique.
Early in his career, the format for feature films was being created. From 1900 to 1908, the length and complexity of films had grown from a few minutes to almost 60 minutes in length. Also there was a development of motion picture projection to a brand new style of motion pictures that could be shown indoors on. Big screens making the film format more impressive. These new movie palaces created very beautiful structures where people could watch films in comfort even though their homes might be small and squalid. Seeing that these early films were very successful, Griffith with an eye to an acting career determined to enter the field of film acting. He decided that he would be an actor Griffith. He was from a family of aristocratic Kentuckians, and his great grandfather had actually served in the Civil War for the South, and many people believed that DW Griffith had loyalties to the south. But throughout his film career DW Griffith is showed an evenhanded view of world history, and created a variety of films that provided different perspectives on the society that nurtured him. Griffith had a different understanding of the world and saw differing groups with a mature eye for world cultures.
Due to the massive influence of The birth of a Nation, people have tried to type DW Griffith as principally a racist filmmaker. While there is certainly racist content in the novel The Klansman from which The Birth of a Nation was taken, and while there is certainly very many disturbing scenes that are very insensitive, it would be hard to describe most of Griffith’s filmmaking as racist in intent or prejudiced. Griffith’s films were governed by the subject matter of the script, and Griffith filmed the material as he supposed the author intended their work to be seen and understood. If the content was racist, the film would reflect that, but if the film was about diverse people and views Griffith also reflected progressive content just as strongly. While Birth of a Nation’s content is seen as racist today, at the time the film was made the United States was a more racist country and probably many of the racist views in the film were shared by the majority of viewers watching it. DW Griffith had a great influence on film and was an important filmmaker of the early decades of the twentieth century.
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Griffith began his career at the Edison studios in 1908, and he worked with the American Mutoscope and Biograph companies from 1908 to 1913. During this time, in the five years that he worked for these studios he made possibly as many as 450 films. Some of them were one reel, 10-12 minutes long, some of them were two reels of film or 15 to 20 minutes long and some were three reels, approximately 30 to 35 minutes and some four reels approaching an hour in length. Griffith started off his career as an actor, and then when the studios needed an extra director around 1908, he was chosen to be a new director. He didn’t trust directing film, and he was afraid that his career as an actor would be ruined, so he asked for the ability to return to acting if his career as a director didn’t work out well. Of course, he had nothing to worry about, and Griffith was a monumental Director with many great ideas. His films were enormously popular for a decade.
As to his techniques and innovations in filmmaking, he spoke of his breakthrough ideas. In later life he said, he invented the close-up. He used the set of a film as a miniaturized stage to create a variety of scenes. He claimed to have borrowed the cut back or the flashback scene from having read Dickens who had inserted flashback scenes in his novels. A narrative trick that Griffith pioneered was a character seeing or visualizing a moment within the mind. Griffith found ways to help the audience imagine what was in the mind of a character by cutting back and forth from the actor to the concept in a character’s mind. From the French filmmakers, he was known for framing what was seen using tracking shots, and he was known for the origination of modern editing. he used what he referred to as an inner frame narrative in which the master shots of the scene would provide the structure for the rest of the scene. He might preview a scene with a distant master shot to explain what was going on in the overall scene, and then introduce shorter smaller scenes interpolated into the master scene to provide details of the action within a scene.
Griffith’s philosophy of a scene was complex. Within a scene, he believed in the idea of parallel action where he could use cross cutting, a cut from one thing to another scene, so you could see two stories moving forward at the same time. All of these were massive event/filming innovations that had not been done before by any director anywhere. In many ways he was the titanic new theorist in film increasing new ideas in the creation of an interframe narrative. Griffith was able to break scenes down into several shots. First, there would be a master shot to establish the scene, and then he would have inserts or close-ups of individual actors within the scene. He would match the cuts from the perspective of the audience. He would show the same line of direction. he would have an online scene match another scene. Thus, he would see characters at the same level, and he would use faces to track continuity. He would use point of view or reaction shots in scenes where actors might talk to each other. He would match scenes line-by-line or at the height of the human eye, so that the two characters would match up in terms of their own lines in their vision of where they stood in the frame. He would have Point of view reaction shots where one actor would be standing on one side of the stage and talking, and then he might insert a close up. Then he would move the action to the other side of the stage, and he would have the actor talking in close up at the side of the stage, so you would have a reaction from one active shot to another. He accelerated the art of montage using a cut to move the action from one scene to another. He focused on actors that look like the characters they played. If
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a scene required a beautiful young girl, he cast a beautiful young girl to play her. If it was an old man required for a scene, he cast an old man to play an old man. He tried to type cast people to look like the characters they were supposed to play in the film.
Perhaps his first great early film was birth of a nation from 1915. It was a film that was universally loved by many Americans despite the fact that it had racist content. Many of the characters were people of color but were played by white actors in black face due to the strongly racist content. The film deals with two families going through the pre-Civil War period, the Civil War, the death of Lincoln, and the reconstruction. It’s a titanic film lasting three hours and fifteen minutes. The film birth of a nation was based on a very racist-oriented novel entitled The Klansman that was popular in Griffith’s time. Many have criticized Griffith’s choice, because they felt the content of the novel and film was racist, but Griffith believed that picking a novel that was extremely controversial would attract audiences to the film, and indeed that was the case. Many people have considered whether Griffith himself was a racist person. It is a difficult idea to answer because there is certainly elements of Birth of a Nation that appear on the outside to be very racist but again they reflect elements of the novel which itself had racist content. Do you make a novel with racist ideas to support them or expose them to the light of day? There have been many American movies they deal with Nazism, and many have complained that the way Nazis are portrayed they make Nazism look attractive. The question of Griffith’s racism is complex because many of the films that he made later deny many elements of Birth of a Nation. In a way poor Griffith’s early experience making a controversial film makes him an early victim of cancel culture. People cannot see the man’s art because they today find that subject matter disturbing. Sadly, sometimes in many American films we have to learn to see the subject matter separately from the filmmaking art.
A modern case of racism might be Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The antagonists in the film are all Asian. There are gruesome scenes of Asian cult members removing a man’s heart , holding a bleeding beating human heart in their hands, and having the man watch as he dies. This film has many racist elements, but because it is Spielberg, Indiana Jones and a popular film watched by millions of kids, it does not obtain the same negative reaction as Birth of a Nation because it is fantasy. George Lucas’s Phantom Menace from 1998 also has racist content including the silly Jar Jar Binks character, that talks in a funny accent, and the film is filled with evil characters who speak with Asian accents. So many American films have difficult subject matter, elements that could be construed as racist, but because they are made by top grossing filmmakers and the subject is fantastic they do not receive the censure that Griffith received. What we discover is some views of racism are relative to the times, the audience, and the critics.
In later films like Intolerance, Griffith savagely denounces the actions of racists. In later films like Way Down East or Broken Blossoms he strongly denounces racism and violence of any kind. One might say that Griffith learns about racist ideas from making films that test changing American attitudes about racism. If anything, Griffith’s films began a discussion about racism in American society. Remember desegregation of schools in the United States did not occur until 40 years after Birth of a Nation, so maybe the film helped the debate about the United State’s racist past.
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In BOAN we see a variety of events including the pre-Civil War families, and movement towards war, the Civil War itself, and the events following the war in the reconstruction. Two families are presented in the film, the Stoneman family and the Camerons. Ben Cameron is a principal character who is a handsome southern confederate officer who leads his men into a desperate charge against union forces but it ends tragically with the union forces wiping out most confederate troops. Cameron stops the charge to give water to a fallen union soldier and is cheered for his bravery by both union and confederate troops. In a last pyrrhic charge Cameron shoves a confederate flag down a union canon before collapsing. The union soldiers are so smitten by his bravery that instead of shooting him, they pick him up and nurture him. Later Lincoln commutes Cameron’s death sentence as a traitor. The film sends complicated messages about the post war era. One of the African American union soldiers named Gus (played by a white Actor wearing black face makeup) decides that he can now live freely in the south. he settles in Ben Cameron’s town and builds an affection for Cameron’s sister. The young woman is a simple minded nature lover. Gus proposes to her and in terror and horror she considers the offer a dangerous prelude to rape and she runs to a mountain top. Gus follows realizing that if he causes harm to white woman his life will be forfeit. Cameron searches for his sister and follows her trail into the woods. Gus attempts to talk the terrified hysterical woman off a cliff but she jumps off the cliff, mortally wounded by the fall. Cameron arrives in tme t osee her die but she proclaims she kept her honor with her last breathe. Cameron’s face changes to an image of hate and anger and afterwards he becomes determined to start a vigilante group to protect the south from radical whites, blacks and a society that wishes to punish the south. The scene of death is built on colossal misunderstandings by all, and a failure of kindness and reason for all parties. Cameron creates the Klan. The Klan executes Gus by lynching and the roots of modern extremism are laid. More worrisome is the film’s insistence that slaves were better off in the old South under slavery and the notion that someone enslavement of anyone could be justified. Griffith was tone deaf to the film’s bizarre rhetoric..
Griffith was deeply stung by the negative criticism of birth of a nation even though the film made him millions. In 1916 he made a four hour epic about prejudice and racism, in a film entitled Intolerance. That film featured four stories in a color-coded film. Griffith spent all the money he had made in BOAN and more to make Intolerance, and he thought the film would show his intention to discuss the dangers of prejudice and intolerance. In intolerance there is a story of a mother trying to support her child, a tale of Jesus and his persecution, a fight between French Catholics and French protestants ( the Huguenots), and a battle between factions in ancient Babylon. Baffled audiences didn’t understand the color coding system; they didn’t understand the four different stories throughout history, and they didn’t really understand Intolerance or Griffith’s intentions. Griffith lost virtually all the money he made in BOAN. While never having great financing again, Griffith made great movies into the 1920s. He worked with very important actors such as Lillian Gish.
In Way Down East a woman is fooled into thinking she has been married to a man who leaves her with a baby. The town turns against her and there isa harrowing escape through a snow storm over a water way as the ice on the water is breaking up. Finally the town’s people realize she has been victimized by an evil man and she is
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eventually saved by a kind man who wishes to marry her. It’s a wonderful film and many people have suggested that way down east (1919) is one of Griffiths greater later films. Broken blossoms (1921) is a love story between a white woman and a
Chinese immigrant. Lilian Gish, plays the child of the alcoholic boxerfather who when drunk beats his daughter, Lucy, nearly to death. In one of his drinking frenzies, the girl is badly beaten and traumatized. She hides in the doorway of a small shop owned by a Chinese merchant, Cheung. Cheung enters his shop and sees the wounded girl on the ground, takes her to his bed, dresses her wounds and nurses her back to health. A love relationship arises built on kindness and mutual trust and admiration. However Lucy returns to her father who in another drunken frenzy beats her to death. Cheung confronts the father, shoots him, carries Lucy’s body back to his shop and commits suicide. Broken Blossoms is a marvelous film defying racism and dark ideas with notions of a perfect love and a kinder world. It’s a deeply emotional film that illustrates that in many ways Griffith did not agree with anything racist and had himself spoken strongly against racism. Ironically one of the last films Griffith made in 1930 was a sound film about the life of Abraham Lincoln. Griffith battle alcoholism and by 1940 the last work he had was in a science-fiction film, 1 million BC in which actors were playing cavemen and Griffith was brought in to direct silent scenes. Griffith was a great innovator in American film and created longshots, tracking shots, moving shots, articulate camera movements, head angle shots and a great variety of different kinds of techniques that could be intermingled in a scene. Griffith was very attracted to making films about the American experience and made some great films like the Adventures of Dolly in 1908 that dealt once again with themes of immigrants and fear of foreigners.
In his early Adventures of Dolly from 1908 he actually has a mother walking her child in a baby stroller. When the mother stops to talk , and evil gypsy sneaks in and steals her baby. Eventually the baby is put in a barrel and sent down the river, but along the river a young boy fishing sees the barrel and pulls it from the water saving the baby and reuniting the family.
Director Griffith was one of the first directors to work and rehearse actors before a film is produced. Griffith was one of the first directors to use naturalistic acting with less hand gestures and more simple movements that look more like real life. Griffith was one of the first directors to use a variety of different shots in a scene. Griffith was one of the first directors to use complex narrative tracking shots where we are literally inside the mind of the character, and Griffith was one of the most psychological of the early cinema film directors. He so completely understand the psychology of the characters in a scene we believed the actors were these people. Griffith remains one of the great undisputed masters of cinema provoking challenging ideas about American history, racism and the United States as a complex world culture.
Terms
Grammar of film: Griffith’s inventiveness created the vocabulary and grammar of film techniques we use today.
Naturalism in acting: Griffith’s actors used a new style of acting that was less like stage actors and more natural and simple.
Rehearsal:Griffith had actor’s rehearse prior to shooting a scene.
Choreography: Griffith choreographed and mapped out large complex group scenes and battle scenes.
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Type casting: Griffith cast actors according to their physical type. A pretty young girl was played y a pretty young girl.
Films:
Griffith: Adventures of Dollie (1908)
Griffith: Birth of a Nation (The Clansman) (1915) Griffith: Intolerance (1916)
Griffith: Way Down East (1919)
Griffith: Broken Blossoms (1921)
Readings:
Corliss, Richard. “D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation 100 Years Later: Still Great, Still Shameful.” https://time.com/3729807/d-w-griffiths-the-birth-of-a-nation-10/
Lussier, Tim. “What Was The Great Man Like?” http://www.silentsaregolden.com/articles/griffitharticle.html
Cinema four: Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin was one of the most remarkable talents in the history of cinema. Charlie Chaplin who is born in 1889 in South London to Hannah and Charles Chaplin Senior. Both were musical entertainers. His faher left, but his mother remained, but she was mentally unstable for the majority of his life, and he joined a group of dancers at the age of ten. He clog danced and clowned for a living as a child. Due to his father’s connections he landed a gig in a theatrical company and toured around England at the age of 15. He worked on various productions including a production of Sherlock Holmes and by 1910 when he was barely 20 years of age he began performing with a touring comedy group in England that later had the opportunity to tour in the United States.
His brother Sydney Chaplin who was already connected to the theatrical community in England landed Charlie a job with the Fred Carno agency in England and from 1910 to 1913 toured the United States. Chaplin was making a good wage for a stage performer ($75 a week) with the Carno company and getting good billing, but he eventually arrived in New York and the agents thee liked him so much they offered him a job in film. Chaplin wasn’t really sure that film was going to last so he reluctantly signed on to make films for double his salary at $150 per week. He joins Keystone pictures managed and directed by the brilliant Max Sennett, a talented Canadian director who makes fitful comedies with lots of action. Sennett sees the talent in Chaplin and stars him in several short comedies. Audiences love the little funny man. One day Sennett sends Chaplin Into a costume booth to dress for a scene. He tells him to pick what he likes. Chaplin finds a small bowler hat, a fake moustache, a white shirt and tight
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tailed jacket, baggy pants, and floppy over-sized shoes. To top off the outfit he finds an old walking cane. This tramp costume would be Chaplin’s standard outfit for the next 40 years. Chaplin was immediately successful in films for the Keystone company and he stars as the tramp character in over 35 films during his year with Max Sennett.
After a year with Sennett and the Keystone company Chaplin is given an offer to work for the S and A company (Esseny films) which is a larger company, and they offer him $1000 signing bonus and $1000 a week. He is one of the most popular actors in comedy in the United States by 1915. Chaplin’s career skyrockets and by 1916 he is offered more money by the Mutual Film Company. he is given a signing bonus and a starting salary of $670,000 making him the highest paid actor in America, and his Trump character is given far more dimension and goes further than it had been before. Finally, in 1917 he signed with the First National Company for one million dollars and is able to purchase his own studio and his own land track in California with the money. Some critics argue that his finest films were made in this era.
Chaplin was still under thirty and has become a millionaire in five years. He married his first wife in 1918, Mildred Harris who was 16-years-old. In 1919, with DW Griffith Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford Chaplin established the distribution company United Artists. It was a company that was fully owned by artists in the United States film industry. From this point, Chaplin was solely responsible for his own output from this point. In 1924, he married his second wife Rita Gray who was also 16 years of age, but the marriage only lasted two years, and Chaplin now had two sons.
Chaplin was incredibly gifted at doing improvisational comedy, and made mini gags at the time he was on the set, including the clever potato roll dance he played with a couple of forks and a few potatoes while he’s making the film The Gold Rush in 1925 Chaplin was probably the most recognized person in the world in the 1920s. Chaplin even competed in Chaplin-look-a-like contest in the twenties and only placed third. In 1925 he made The Gold Rush, one of his funniest films about a couple of guys that prospected for gold in the Alaskan wilderness. He suffered the indignities of the bad environment, cold-weather, starvation, deprivation, and the film was a massive success. In 1927 he had another massive success for The Circus. In 1929 during the first Academy Awards he was giving a special award for his work on The Circus. Hollywood loved Chaplin and he was one of the people that created the celebrity-based star system of movie making.
In 1931, in a period we’re almost all the films were already sound films, Chaplin released the completely silent film City Lights which became a massive hit. The film had sound effects and a score written by Chaplin and Chaplin provided brilliant moments of comedy, empathetic romantic comedy, silly pratfalls, and a variety of physical comedy. Chaplin remained the master of silent comedy deeply into the sound era. In 1936 Chaplin made Modern Times commenting on modern industrial society, again playing his tramp character, again composing the music, and making a fun commentary on the machine age and industrialization. Finally,in 1936 he married a third time to Paulette Goddard, a popular actress at the time.
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Chaplin was so popular in the United States that women around the world wished they were Chaplin’s girlfriend, and in fact, when women were unwed mothers across the globe during the twenties, more often than not when they were asked the paternity of their child, they claimed Charlie Chaplin as the father. It was a joke of course, but Chaplin’s popularity particularly with women extended across the globe.
In 1940 Chaplin released one of his most powerful films The Great Dictator, a massive film parody of the life and deadly ambitions of Adolph Hitler. Actually, even Hitler adored Chaplin and was angry when during the war with the allies he found he could no longer see Chaplin films. The Great Dictator sends up Hitler’s madness. Chaplin does an entire ballet in the dictator’s throne room bouncing a balloon version of the wordld on his feet, his butt and his head. He makes Hitler’s idea of world conquest look silly. Further the film ridicules Hitler’s anti-semitism as the plot revolves around a Jewish butler disguised at the dictator. The film ends with a powerful speech denouncing meanness and cruelty and espousing the virtues of civility and kindness, something that Chaplin wished could be accomplished by humor.
Chaplin was overtly socialist in his ideas. He was a very wealthy man, but he believed in the little guy and he always played the character of the tramp. The great dictator was nominated for best picture and Chaplin for best actor. In 1943, Chaplin married his fourth wife, an 18-year-old protégé Oona O’Neill the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill and he remained married to her for the rest of his life.
But Chaplin’s liberal politics ambush him. While traveling to London in 1952 to debut a new film about a retiring comic called, Limelight, he is warned by the US State department not to return to the United States. The House Unamerican Activities Committee wanted to question him for communist ties. Chaplin was angry and felt slighted. He deciced to relocate his enterprizes to Switzerland and spent the rest of his life as a Swiss resident, a national treasure, and an international hero. He never forgave the US after 40 years of entertainment to turn him out. Finally in 1972, after 20 years of exile from United States Chaplin was given a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars and when he arrived on stage he was given a 12-minute standing ovation. He died quietly in 1977 at his home in Switzerland.
Chaplin’s influence is legendary. He was the greatest comedian of the silent era, Chaplain and perhaps the greatest comedian in American history. His career from 1913 when he first began until 1967 when he directed his last film A Contessa From Hong Kong. Th film was a romance starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, two of the mot popular actors of the era. Sadly the film was not successful and Chaplin did not work in the last years of his life. Chaplin’s work as often brilliant as in films like one AM where he plays a drunk out after a night of drinking. Chaplin literally created a one-man performance of a drunk at 1 AM getting out of his cab, going into his house, fighting with the door, losing his key, breaking a window, finding the key inside and popping back out through a
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window to reopen the previously locked door. He fights with the staircase, he fights with the table, he fights with a with a couple of animal rugs, he struggles to navigate stairs, he tries to open his Murphy bed (a fold up bed), he struggles to have a drink, he tries to smoke, he wrestles with every object, and devises comedy pratfalls throughout the film. While he creates complete pandemonium working through the space one realizes that Chaplin has had a 20 minute romp through the property and the audience is left laughing along with the tramp all the way through the chaos. Perhaps that was the wonder of Chaplin’s art, the sheer joy and humor found in acts of chaos.
Terms
The Tramp: Chaplin’s indelible character wearing a bowler hat, small moustache, tight coat, cane, baggy pants, and floppy shoes. It was a costume he wore for 40 years. Score: Chaplin was a talented musician and songwriter and could compose scores and pop tunes that were successful.
In camera: Chaplin’s skill involved camera shots focused on mostly Chaplin and his antics.
Films:
Sennett: Tillies Punctured Romance. (1913)
Chaplin: One A. M. (1916)
Chaplin: the Gold Rush (1925)
Chaplin: The Circus (1927)
Chaplin: City Lights (1931)
Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)
Readings:
Birdwell, Richard. “Chaplin’s Modern Times and the minstrel tradition.” https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/birdwell-chaplin-modern-times-and-minstrel- tradition
Brody, Richard. “ Chaplin’s Scandalous Life and Boundless Artistry.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/charlie-chaplins-scandalous-life-and- boundless-artistry
Cinema five
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George Melies
One of the early auteurs of cinema was George Melies, a Frenchman who was born into a wealthy family and became a magician. Over the years Melies created a variety of magic acts, and then in the 1890s when the cinematograph became popular Melies decided to invest in a camera and began making movies focusing on his magic act.
Melies was interested in fantasy films and in 1902 created his a trip to the moon which featured many special effects and humorous passages in which a group of scientists decide they will journey to the moon. In the film there is a clever shot of the rocket hitting the moon and kind of fracturing the moon and stabbing the moon in the eye. Melies work has been lauded in recent years as the father of science fiction and special effect movies. Melies work is seen as a juncture between the spirit of films that focuses on photographic effects nad stunts and films that wanted to tell a story. Melies wanted to do both. He wanted to tell a story and he wanted to tell stories and he liked using powerful cinematic effects in the service of his stories.
He was responsible for some of the earliest special effects films created in the medium of film. He originally wanted to buy a Lumiere camera and they refused ot sell him one. They wanted to protect the copyright of the camera and they wanted to dissuade other people from making films. Eventually he bought a camera from R Paul, a British inventor. One of his most popular effects was the stop motion effect in which a subject was photographed in a specific area, and then the camera would be stopped and the subject would be removed and the filming would be continued. This gave the effect that the subject had disappeared or in the reverse, could suggest that something had magically appeared. Of course for a magician it was a great because it seemed like there was real magic afoot.
Philosophically, Melies was important because he illustrated that magic and fantasy films were very popular with audiences, and that if done properly, audiences would go to see films because of the special effects and the clever technology used to create the effect. He proved that such films were popular and that audiences liked to be thrilled by photographic effects as well stories.
He was born in 1861 and died in 1938. He was an inventor, actor, producer, film maker, writer and was educated in Paris. Within 9 months of buying a camera he mastered most elements of cinematography and began making a series of inventive films. Between 1898 and 1904 he made over 400 films. Only a fraction of them still exist. The Trip to the Moon in 1902 was popular worldwide and was widely copied illegally in the U.S. and Melies received little overseas revenue from the work.
He used his ideas. Of magic to make films that focused on trick photography. One of his popular tricks was the use of stop motion photography where an object could be inserted or removed from a scene giving the idea that something magic occurred. A second trick he employed was super imposition of images. Melies double triple and multiple-exposed films. In one called the four troublesome heads, he inserted himself into the scene four times recording himself over and over and making his head into four separate characters.
Melies went further with double exposures and concocts a scenario where his head is blown up and exploded by being overinflated. In another film he refilms himself
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several times as various members of a band and then conducts himself and his peers altogether.
Melies tried to popularize fantasy work and wanted mass audience appeal. However, after 1905 or 1906 people were less interested in those films, and wanted more narrative and Melies films had waning public demand. Sadly he ended his career bankrupt and many of his early originals were sold for industrial celluloid used in making soldiers boots. He vanished from the world scene only to be discovered by a kiosk selling candles for a living in the 1930s by French film makers. He fortunately was rediscovered and that resulted in a retirement home support for him and rehabilitation of his memory in his adventurous and important early works. Today his works are revered by cinema lovers across the globe. He was lionized in Martin Scorsese’s charming homage film Hugo from 2011. His early films a trip to the moon in 1902, the melomaniac in 1903, the damnation of files from 1904, the enchanted well in 1905, jupiter's thunderbolts in 1905, and a variety of special effects films playing with time and space made Melies one of the most adventurous and effect oriented filmmakers of his time. Sadly, most audiences never obtained the full effect of his genius.
Terms
Stop motion: a technique of filmmaking where motion is stopped and characters are moved about.
Animation: Melies animated inanimate objects using stop motion and multiple exposure techniques.
Films:
Melies, George: A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Melies, George: The Impossible Voyage. (1904)
Readings:
Ganguly, Subarna. “Early Cinema: the Magical World of Georges Melies.” https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/paris/articles/early-cinema-the-magical-world- of-georges-melies/
Cinema 6
world cinema in the early 20th century
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Cinema was a world affair. Early cameras were developed in England (Paul), France (Le Prince and the Lumieres), America (Dickson), several filmmakers developed editing (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Porter), and several countries created narrative cinema (Lumieres in France, Porter in the United States, Melies in France, Alice Guy in France). Many nations contributed to the growth of cinema form. Each nation created a national form that reflected the ideas and consciousness of their people.
Cinema history is complex. In the first 20 years of film production, producers hammered out basic formats. Large companies capitalized on cinema and created large conglomerates that controlled the industry and still do. Filmmaking was and is a capital intensive business, and large corporations were helpful to creating early cinema. Storytelling had been evolving for centuries prior to cinema. Cinema added a long awaited technology to the art of storytelling. Cinema was a way of creating storytelling that could be retained and marketed and sold in a visual format . This engendered many technical problems in the creation of the medium.
One of the first problems in creating cinema was creating a medium by which stories could be told and retained. For example storytelling through the novel was created by putting words on paper. To put visual stories in a format where people could see them and recreate them required a medium that was flexible and could be shown to mass audiences. Many substances were used to create film initially . Paper and other formats proved unworkable. Celluloid had certain advantages over other materials for making film. Celluloid was a substance that was flexible that allowed for the printing of a picture on a surface and could be spooled onto reels so that it could be projected to people in a room. Further, celluloid was heat resistant making it resistant to the powerful light used for projection.
Phi Phenomenon and Persistence of vision
Early film makers did not totally understand the concept of how the human eye worked when we see images we think that we see continuous images that are moving through space but in film the concept of moving images is actually incorrect what is happening in a film is that we are seeing a fast succession of still images that our mind puts together as moving images two phenomenon make this possible the first is a aspect of our visual cortex known as persistence of vision. To make our mind make sense of images that are speeding by us our brain interprets each individual image as retained in the visual cortex on the retina of the eye for a millisecond after we have seen that image this phenomenon or mistake in our visual cortex we refer to as persistence of vision images stay rooted in our I and our translated to our visual cortex through the retina too visual ganglia in the brain for a millisecond after the image has been seen . So when a succession of 24 frames per second fly by the eye the eye retains each one of those small discreet individual still images for a millisecond in the eye. The brain then interprets those images altogether as not single still images but as moving images . The way the brain does this is through a second phenomenon known as the Phi phenomenon in which the brain attempts to suture or tie together each successive image image in a way that makes sense to the brain so that if a person raises their hand to their mouth to say eat something or smoke a cigarette we interpret all the different phases of the movement of the hand as being parts of the same movement. Without persistence of vision or the fi phenomenon we would not have cinema as we know it today.
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Pre-cinematic technologies (6th c – 1980) The Magic Lantern and Camera Obscura
Europe had a technological awakening during the renaissance when scholars began to rediscover the technologies of the Romans and the Greeks. But even during the middle ages technologists were involved in developing story telling technologies. Several proto-cinematic phenomenon we're precursors to the idea of film. For example in the 6th century, we know there may have been examples of early camera obscura. The camera obscura was a light box that allowed light to enter a box on one side and had a primitive lens on the other side. This allowed the light to be contained, and permitted projection on the inside of a box or an opposing wall. Camera obscuras allowed artists to trace objects projected with a pencil or a crayon or other drawing device.
Magic lantern
Europe developed many devices to capitalize on the invention of optical glass lens. The magic Lantern was an early form of slide projector in which a concave mirror with a light behind it projected an image on a wall with a lens. The slide medium might be a glass slide or a paper slide containing a drawn or painted image. Between magic lanterns and camera obscuras there was already a basis for primitive projected entertainment. What was lacking was true motion. Further there was no apparatus for maintaining images. The magic Lantern was a permanent projection of an actual slide but only drawings or paintings, not the real world. Both aided artists in drawing objects. Phantasmagoria
Perhaps the first theatrical innovation utilizing magic lanterns and a camera obscura was the 18th century device known as the phantasmagoria. This device added limited movement to entertainment, The phantasmagoria mixed slides and projections using transparent curtains and horrific demon images to frighten audience. Phantasmagoria projectors could be moved around in portable boxes so that people presumed that demons were actually moving around the room. The mechanism was an operator with a lens projecting a slide and moving the light box around the room. These horror shows were popular with audiences and had the potential to induce fear. The phantasmagoria were the first examples of entertaining projections and were early precursors to cinema. Marionettes and Puppets
The puppet show had existed since the classical era, but marionette shows became major attractions in the medieval era. Talented craftsmen could craft realistic wooden puppets that could be manipulated with joints and complex facial features; Traveling players journeyed across the continent retelling bible stories, folk tales, moral fables and pantomimes for children. With a trestle stage, effective costuming, jointed puppets and skilled actors and narrators puppet shows could compete with live actors and offer cinematic special effects.
Photography
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Another innovation from Europe was the concept of photography. Photography arrived in the 1820s. People were experimenting with ways to resolve an image maintaining that image on a medium. Once accomplished different devices worked at creating a moving picture show. One such was the zoetrope in 1834. This device basically stacked a variety of still images on a circular slide device playing them in succession and creating the concept of moving images. In the 1870s Edward Moybridge, a celebrated nature photographer began to concoct serial images of people and animals that he assembled in slideshows. A second innovator was Frenchman French physiologist Etionne Jules Marey. Both were born in 1830 and both died in 1904. Muybridge’s work involved setting up multiple cameras to record serial images of movement of objects . When linked together all of the moving objects created a sequence that resembled the frames in later motion pictures. Muybridge created a device in 1879 known as the zoopraxtescope. It showed images in rapid succession similar to s film for the first time. Muybridge is credited with making early moving images.
His rival in creating new technology was Marey who created a new format called chrono photography. Marey used a camera gun or photographic gun that allowed the user to take individual shots that combined these multiple exposures in a single image. This allowed photographers to record sequential movements in a single image. Muybridge with his multiple cameras, and Marey with his chrono photography pushed the art of photography towards actual filmmaking.
The Mystery of Le Prince
A sidelight to the invention of cinematography was the story of Louis le Prince Louis le Prince was an inventor who supposedly was making early films in 1888 to 1890. At the time that his first public demonstration was to be made in 1890 he mysteriously disappeared with all of the applications for his early cinema device the the disappearance of les Prince and his demonstrations of cinema in those early pivotal years has always been a mystery that has never been solved.
Terms
Persistence of vision: The effect of an afterimage on the retina persisting after an image has been shown. This allows for sequential images, as in optical toys or in film, to blend together to appear to be in motion.
Photography: The creation of permanent images with light on a light-sensitive material, often an emulsion on paper or celluloid.
Chronophotography: Photography that captures a quick succession of movements in several images. Originally used for scientific study of body movement. Zooepraxescope:Muybridge’s device for showing sequential slides.
Celluloid: A malleable thermoplastic. Used in cinema as photographic film stock. Persistence of vision: The effect of an afterimage on the retina persisting after an image has been shown. This allows for sequential images, as in optical toys or in film, to blend together to appear to be in motion.
Photography: The creation of permanent images with light on a light-sensitive material, often an emulsion on paper or celluloid.
Chronophotography: Photography that captures a quick succession of movements in several images. Originally used for scientific study of body movement.
Celluloid: A malleable thermoplastic. Used in cinema as photographic film stock.
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Films:
Hitchcock, Alfred: Strangers on a Train (1951) Hitchcock, Alfred: Dial M For Murder (1954) Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho(1960)
Readings:
Ursell, Joe. “The Phenomenal influence of Alfred Hitchcock.”
https://www.intofilm.org/news-and-views/articles/hitchcock-feature
Wilson, Bee. “Alfred Hitchcock,from silent film director to inventor of modern horror.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/15/alfred-hitchcock-inventor-modern-horror
7 cinema
French film 1920-1940
French cinema between World War I and World War II was one of the most productive styles of cinema. Cinema in this era was influenced of art. Two forms of art influenced films in the 1920s. First, was the theory of impressionism and secondly the theory of surrealism. Both were prominent art movements in France. Impressionism became popular in the art world in the 1870s and arrived with a relationship to photography. French impressionist painters were interested in the way the eye saw the world and light. Photography took light and registered it on a medium (paper) to make photographs. French artists of the 1870s were fascinated by the idea of light striking the eye and creating photography. They created a form of art doing the same thing that was jokingly referred to in the press as impressionism. Impressionism was an insult to the artists. It’s suggested that the artist were unable to make a good impression or a good likeness of a scene or a person. The impression assumed that the artists were incompetent to draw or paint better so their work was labeled impressionism to suggest that they were giving a fleeting impression of a scene rather than an accurate description of a scene. What the critics got wrong was that impressionism did not care about making an accurate portrayal of a scene. It wanted to photograph the scene the way a camera would look at a scene with light striking the lens. The influence of the impressionist image was that it reflected how the lens picked up light. It did not try to be photo realistic. Impressionist film of the 1920s was deeply influenced by the impressionist idea of creating a film that shows the way light strikes the human eye. This gave the scenes a wispy quality where extensive dialogue and complicated realistic shooting was replaced with scenes in which a few words and a few fleeting
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glimpses of characters would fill in details. The audience would have to make summations and ideas about the scene. The filmmaker was not required to paint everything in photo realistic format. The filmmaker tried to make scenes that would allow for the audience to involve themselves in the scene.
For example one of the popular French films in the 1920s was Theodore Dreyers the passion of Joan of arc. This 1928 film described the trial and a few days in the life of the famous French Saint who had led French troops against the British and was betrayed and brought up for trial by a court of both countries. In Joan of arc we see intense close-ups of Joan’s face during the trial, and we see her anguish at being asked questions about her religion and her View of God. Joan is unable to answer these deeper questions because she simply considers herself a poor girl who is a vehicle for God’s will. The British and French clergy seem relieved to get rid of Joan because her religious nature and her devotion make her a danger to reasonable politics including the war between the two nations. Joan is something of a zealot but her suffering is conveyed in intense close-ups by Dreyer so that we have a deeper understanding of the character of Joan. However dialogue and specifics about Joan are not that important to the film. The impressionist style simply gives us impressions of Joan and what she feels by long intense close-ups that linger on Joan and her face. This film is not a standard biography but a passion play portrayed in tragic human faces.
Another classic example of the impressionist style in French film is the 1927 epic by Abell Gance entitled Napoleon. 1927’s Napoleon is an epic three-hour journey through the mind and thinking of the great French leader. Gance is like Theodore dreyer in the passion of Joan of arc. He does not dewell in intense close-ups on his subject of Napoleon although there are great close shots in the film. Instead Abel Gance combines a group of images quickly in a fast furry of montage scenes in which we see napoleon’s life acted out through images from his mind and in his imagination. We are looking inside the mind of Napoleon in light of the film. We are given these fleeting insights into the mind of a great genius and a great leader. In one scene there is one brilliant montage the Gance creates in which Napoleom and fellow youthful children are fighting a snowball fight and Gance becomes enormously intoxicated by shooting back- and-forth from one child to another as each of the kids is throwing volleys of snowballs at each other. In time, the scene becomes a chaotic blur of white snowballs flying through the air and nobody can quite figure out the action of where the balls are going, who is being hit, and who is throwing at each other. Film montage creates the sense of chaos. Napoleon dreams of ending the French revolution to bring order and justice to society. Napoleon decides the only way to end the carnage is for Napoleon himself to take over the country and to remove the people from self-slaughter towards a war against the rest of the Europe to unify Europe under French rule. Napoleon’s dream is portrayed in a series of montage scenes showing the destruction of the French revolution and Napoleon’s image of how the society would look in the future under his leadership. The film uses montage to build these impressionistic views of napoleon’s life his career his battles and his view of the world. By the end of three hours we seem to have a great understanding of the leader and a great understanding of how Gance as a filmmaker has compiled a series of images to bring us to a deeper understanding of how the leader’s mind works. Gance’s Napoleon is an epic film with spectacular production ideas in which three scenes are often showing simultaneously on the same
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screen to keep the audience completely engaged and to constantly be surveying the screen for new information. Gance even photographed a segment of the film in 3-D back in 1927 to show that 3-D might be a way of showing the story of Napoleon more powerfully. Ironically Gance never used the 3-D ending sequence of Napoleon because he felt it was unnecessary. Gance was famous for using longshots medium shots close- ups, massive and incredibly complex montages, interesting introspective shots of each character involved in Napoleon’s rise, and a pivotal performance of Napoleon at center. The master general is portrayed as a complex thoughtful and idealistic figure who only wants to unite Europe to end the chaos of self-slaughter and the French revolution.
The other format that gained adherence in 1920s France was the format of surrealistic film. Again the French were probably more influenced by art movement than Americans who had a more prosaic naturalistic realistic tone in their films. However, in French films the influence of art was apparent and changed the way French films were made, making the French style film deeply different than American films. In 1929’s Andalusian dog or Un Chien Andalou the concept was constructed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali two artists from Spain living in Paris at the time. The concept of surrealism was based on ideas and notions of Freudian psychology, dream states, the unconscious, and the way people believed the mind works. Surrealism unlike impressionism. Impressionism was a movement concerned with science and how the eye sees light. Surrealism was also scientific but a different style of science engaged with psychology. Surrealists were deeply involved in psychology and what we think and what is inside our minds. Andre Breton, one of the fathers of the surrealistic movement believed that much of surrealism had to do with concepts within the mind. Freud had written in 1900 his famous book The interpretation of dreams and a lot of the ideas of surrealism dealt with the idea of dream states. Surrealists believed that dream states were ideas repressed or controlled by waking consciousness. When a person went to sleep many of the unconscious thoughts that were assumed to be a part of our consciousness during the day would be released, and people will begin to act out those unconscious thoughts in a dream state. The dream state allowed people to do all sorts of fantastic things that they couldn’t imagine in the daytime. Other varities of dreamworlds, dream actions, carnal thoughts, violent thoughts, all sorts of images that wouldn’t be acceptable in waking life flourished and could be entertained in the dream state. Our dream state was a way of liberating the mind. The surrealists believed that in the dream state we could harness those energies by projects like automatic writing. Individual dream states could show surrealistic consciousness in surreal artworks such as Salvador Dali’s the persistence of memory in which we see a scene of a weird infinite horizon, merged with melting clocks and in strange dormant creatures in the foreground. But Dali and Bunuel in writing an Andalusian Dog went further and decided that they could put dream states on on film. An Andalusian dog has little overt meaning and doesn’t make sense in a conventional plot way. It is a series of surreal events that takes place one after another. First we start by seeing a barber looking out at the moon as clouds roll by. It is a full moon he pulls out a razor blade and slices open a woman’s eye. it’s a very disturbing horrible violent scary scene. The next scene is a woman sitting in her room in an apartment alone she is staring strongly at a wall and looking like she is concentrating on something. In the street below a man dressed in a nun or a nurse’s uniform is riding a bicycle down the street towards her
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building. At some point he simply collapses and falls off the bike. She recognizes something is wrong and goes to the window looks down to the street below and sees the man on the bike. She decides to go down to the man and offer him aid. People are standing around. He is lying on the ground next to his bike. On the back of his bike was a box and something has fallen out of the box. People are staring at the object and moving it around with a cane. It turns out that object that’s in the box in the back of the bike is a human hand that has been severed. The scene changes to the woman’s apartment. she takes the nurse’s outfit the man was wearing and adorns the bed with the parts of his nurse’s female outfit, and then she sits in a chair next to the bed and stares at the bed. Slowly his body begins to materialize in the clothing she placed on the bed. While she is looking at the bed, she notices that the man has materialized on the other side of the room. He is looking distractedly at his hand when the woman comes over to visit with him. She can’t get his attention because he is obsessed with the image in his hand. Inside his palm there are a group of ants that are emerging from a hole in his hand, and he and the woman are both fascinated and horrified by the sight. What these few fragmentary scenes tell us about Andalusian dog is that it is a fantasy art film, like a day dream state. Nothing seems to make sense and that appears to be Dali and Bunuel’s idea. Things do not make sense in a dream state, and we need to accept dream states as a part of our waking consciousness. This was a theory and idea of the surrealists that real events or non-realistic events could happen to us at any time and we need to become aware of them and accept them and incorporate them into our artistic life. Surrealists believed that dream states were the key to a deeper understanding of reality. Others thought they were merely extravagant fantasies.
French film of the 1920s is obsessed with artistry and not with wealth and power. French films are made to be watched to edify the public not so much to make money although the best of the films are some of the best films ever made in the world. Before he made Napoleon in 1927 Abel Gance made another epic in 1923 La roue or the wheel. This is a film that deals with an entire life of a family. Sisif is a railroad engineer and after a horrible accident he rescues a little girl from the wreckage and raises her as his daughter along with his son Elie. Overtime safe Sifif falls in love with his adopted daughter, named Norma. His son thinks that Norma is his sister from natural childbirth. Since his wife had perished not long after Elie’s birth. Sifif admits to Hersan that he has fallen in love with his own daughter. Hersan threatens Sifif and tells him if he cannot marry the daughter, he will reveal to her that sifif has romantic feelings for her. Sifif allows the marriage to take place, although he knows it will not make Norma happy. After some months Norma writes to Sifif to tell him she is unhappy. Elie discovers that Norma is not his natural sister and that he himself might have married her but now she is in the hands of Hersan. He fights a jealous dual with Hersan, shooting Hersan but falling from a high precipice and dying. In the end Sifif who is suffering from blindness is cared for by Norma who returns home. Together they build a fatherly/daughter relationship again. One day there is a festival and Norma is sent out by Sifif to dance. In the end of the festival Norma is happy and sifif quietly dies at home alone. The film describes cycles of life.
In the 1930s French films become even more passionate. In 1937 John Renoir produces one of his greatest films the grand illusion. It tells the story of two officers during the first world war.One is French and one is German in a failed campaign a
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French officer is captured by the German officer and they build a close camaraderie. Though the German officer sees the two as we officially enemies, in real life the two are very much alike, members of the upper class, possessing aristocratic and heroic and noble tendencies and a strong sense of duty. Both men are similar. He tells his French counterpart, we are both men of the aristocracy and after the war, our time will pass. Towards the end of the film the French officer tries to escape and the German officer tells him to stop or he will shoot. He warns him, that though I like you and I don’t want to shoot, I must because it is my duty. The French officer continues his escape and is shot and killed. Finally, at the end of the film two lower class Frenchmen escape from the prison camp and are aided by a country woman and cross the alps into French territory. Many people have seen Le grand illusion as perhaps the greatest film about war ever made.
Rules of the game is a study of French cultural behavior. There are a series of romantic liaisons in a household in the country amongst the upper class wealthy people who are disregarding the impending war and the fear that envelops the whole country. Instead they spend their time in the romantic dalliances, but towards the end of the film the character of Octave sends his friend Andre out to meet his girlfriend Christine at the greenhouse. Th greenhouse is one of the many locations on the property where people send their time making love. But unknown to Andre or Octave, Andre is mistaken for another man and shot by one of the angered lovers in the residence. All he was attempting to do was to have a love affair, and ironically it brought his death. The film is filled with ironies. In a French life the thoughts of the fragility of life, the fragility of love, and how French society values some issues highly and disregards other important issues. Films like rules of the Game comment of puzzling aspects of French culture. French films are extremely social and deal with relationships between people who are living in small towns and villages.
The films of the French film makers from 1920 to 1940 progress from impressionistic films that deal with wispy images of life filled with sounds and music to surrealistic images that are far more concrete, but very dream like to an emerging style of social realist films that analyze odd French social codes. French film which emerges in the 1930s is involved with social issues and relationships amongst different people of different classes in French and world society. People are often puzzled by how French society see’s the world, but watching the French films of the early twentieth century might dispel some puzzlement over an evolving French society.
Terms
Montage: the connecting of scenes in different ways by editing.
Impressionism: A style of art popular particularly in rance from 1870-1900. French art influenced the process of filmmaking and many French films were influenced by this concept of art that was based on the science of how the eye and the retina picked up light and images.
Films:
Renoir, Jean. Rules of the Game. (1939) Renoir, Jean. The Grand Illusion (1937)
Melies, George: The Impossible Voyage. (1904) Dreyer, Theodore. The Passion of Joan Du Arc
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Gance, Abel: La Roue (The Wheel) (1923)
Gance, Abel. Napoleon (1927)
Dali, Salvadore and Bunuel, Luis. Andalusian Dog (1929)
Readings:
Frenchfilms.org. “The Essential Guide to French Cinema.” http://www.frenchfilms.org/ A Woman’s Paris. “Portraying France Through Cinema.” https://awomansparis.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/portraying-france-through-cinema- myth-vs-reality/
Cinema 8
Early german cinema
What country gave us early vampires, science fiction worlds and dark psychological drama? Germany! Early German cinema was prompted by a variety of traumas that affected the German people in the early 20th century. First there was the rise of militarism in Germany under Bismarck and the belief that the German people could be a great military power. Bismarck promised the people that they would be military leaders of Europe, and he led them into battle in World War I. Germany was soundly defeated and the price for militarism and aggression were high reparation costs. The German people were punished with high repayment costs after the war. They were blamed for causing the war. The people were horrified that they lost the war, were more horrified of the huge cost of war they would have to pay back. The costs bankrupted the society and ruined the German economy. Their economy was in chaos for most of the next 10 years. There was massive fighting between fascists and communists. The military industrial complex collapsed. The new government, the Weimar Republic government was riddled with corruption. Germany couldn’t accomplish very much. People lived in abject poverty for 10 years between the end of World War I and the 1930s, and then they had to cope with a worldwide depression in the 1930s. However, fascism and the rise of Hitler brough new perils. The German people became involved in the second world war due to the influence of the dangerous dictator Adolf Hitler. Life for the first half of the twentieth century was chaotic and uncertain for most Germans.
This instability created an odd artistic climate for making films. First there was little money for film production. A style that emerged and flourished in the 1920s was a style known as Expressionism. Expressionism was a a style of film that erupted out of the art movement of expressionism and was noted for heightened color, extreme exaggeration, distortion of figures, abstracting of space, so that nothing appeared realistic. The worlds created by expressionism were manufactured worlds in which
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abstract, extreme, unusual vistas became the norm. Unusual angles and exotic landscapes peppered this extreme style. Many of the images of of expressionism in cinema appear abstract, ghostly, and haunting.
Prior to World War I German cinema was on the road to great success. There were over 1500 theaters by 1914, but the European cinema went into a slump because of the massive production of American cinema that out produced Europe and catered to popular tastes. The American film business was more concerned with volume and profits then art and style. Further American cinema developed star system actors and this attracted more people to movies. German cinemas an art and business suffered greatly due to the war and the costs of World War one. There were huge economic shortages. Still people in Germany thoroughly enjoyed the field of cinema and attended the movie theatres regularly. Weimar cinema existed in a completely different place than cinema in the rest of Europe. Expressionism as an art movement influenced film as well as art. Abject poverty, political chaos, and instability created a tentative art.
Unable to afford huge sets, big costumes, extensive sets, big props, and the massive production facilities of the US, German filmmakers had to find new ways to provide a mood, create a feeling, and grab emotions in a film. They explored much darker themes then Hollywood films. They showed more sexuality, crime, immorality, social decadence, government destruction, financial decline, a mistrust of concepts of progress, and a fear of technology. Therefore films in Germany became darker, claimed a darker subject matter and maintained an obsession with gothic, dark, and mysterious. Germany embraced the Gothic horror film, the graphic crime film noir style, and deeply pessimistic views of the human condition. After Hitler came to power, most of the major filmmakers immigrated to the United States to avoid the horrors of Hitler. They brought with them extensive skills. Many German artists created horror films for universal studios and nurtured the dark form of crime movies, film noir, that peppered American theaters in the 1940s and 50s. German filmmakers were not only important in Germany, but they were also important in world cinema particularly in the United States producing the American films of the thirties, forties and fifties and transforming American scenography with their expressionist visual sense.
Many of the German films in the 1920s had a massive effect on American films that came later. Amongst them were 1920 Robert Weine production of The cabinet of Dr. Caligari.In Caligari a man who is being treated for a massive paranoia and psychosis believes that his doctor, Dr. Caligari actually has a secret life as a mad scientist sending out a monster at night that is killing women and holding people hostage. He believes that the doctor is evil and means to do harm to him. He sneaks out of his room at night and watches the doctor release his robotic man, a half human monster that menaces and murders women. At Caligari’s command the monster plagues the city by kidnapping women and killing people. By the film’s end, he realizes he is the doctor’s next intended victim. The twist ending hs him awaken from a fever dream to understand that the good doctor has been treating him all along, and that the entire film has been his own paranoid psychotic dream. The doctor is not a horrible monster, but a very nice person who has been treating him through his psychotic episode. In the end he discovers there is no evil doctor, no conspiracy, no kidnapped women, no murders. it has all been his paranoid delusion. It’s a film about literally the appearances versus reality of everyday situations.
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The American studios were watching this new brand of film emerging from Germany. The next big feature was F. W. Murnau 1922 epic, Nosferatu, a symphony of horror. It was one of the earliest horror films based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the 1890s. Nosferatu literally means vampire and Murnau referred to it as a symphony to tie it to its romantic novel origins. It is a symphonic and operatic work where characters glide in and out of the scene. Though Murnau has a miniscule budget, he uses light and shadow, time and movement to build suspense and show the vampire. Using these marginal means to portray the horror rather than complex sets or special effects, he captivates and chills the viewer. Here the vampire is Count Orlack because Murnau could not obtain permission to use Bram Stoker’s novel as the basis for his film. Stoker’s widow refused to sell rights to the novel to a German company. Many of the best scenes are simply shadowy sequences where Orlack lurks and menaces the cast. His silhouette descending a staircase became one of the film’s iconic moments and one of the most iconic moments in cinema history. The film comes to a crescendo when Nosferatu smitten for lust for a young woman over stays his feast on her blood. As the sun rises he realizes he is in jeopardy and thought he tries to escape, he is caught and incinerated by sunlight.
Another important film from 1922 is Murnau’s lesser known film Phantom in which a man is haunted by the image of a woman that he has seen and then he spends money trying to track this woman down. Underneath is a metaphor for financial obsessions. He obsesses over spending and not over living a good life.
Another important film from the same era in 1924 is Murnau’s The Last Laugh, another financial parable about a country facing debt, spiraling inflation and decreased buying power of the German currency, the marc. Laugh is the story of a doorman who works for a fancy hotel. When times turn financially unstable, the hotel closes and he loses his job. The man is obsessed with his role as a doorman and without his beautiful frock coat and his uniform and his ability to make money he withers. The film is provocative showing the hero is reduced to working as a bathroom cleaning attendant. He is derided by his family. They make fun of him and chide him for losing his job. At the end he wins a fortune at a lottery, and his fortunes reverse through money. He has status and power again. The film shows that the only thing people respect is his station in life and his money not his actual qualities as a human being. The last laugh is ironic since he only gets the last laugh because of money.
In 1927 Fritz Lang. produces one of the greatest German films of the era, Metropolis. It came at the very end of the German silent film era, and it’s a science- fiction film about a future world in which the people are controlled by a desperate government very reminiscent of what was to happen to Germany five years later when Nazi rule became reality. In the film, workers work long and brutal hours, and they often sufer hardship, pain and death on the job. They live and die tending the great machines that run the society. There is a scientist seeking new ways to control the people. The forces of oppression capture a freedom fighter, a girl named Maria who is organizing and motivating the workers to rebel. The autocrats in the city realize that to control the people they must control Maria so they build a robot to replace her. They transfer Maria’s life energy and consciousness into the robot and make the robot a weird parody of the girl. The robot is revealed, Maria is restored and the society is eventually freed. The film uses extensive special effects, animation affects, robots, flying cars, weird
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dreams, weird machines, and all the elements of german expressionist distortion. In on frightening sequence, when the engineer goes to sleep at night he sees a giant skeleton coming out of the city clock and using a scythe to kill him. The film is nightmarish and frightening.
Metropolis is also a historical film that has been recently rediscovered. It is also an important film for film restoration fans. The film was thought to be only two hours in length, but in recent years a two and one half hour version was uncovered in Germany and restored. Today we have a new version with 30 minutes of restored footage. The unknown version of Metropolis had been missing for 70 years.
Metropolis brings up the issue of film restoration. Without film restorers many classic films of the past could be lost and particularly films in foreign countries where film restoration was not been widely adopted and film institutes had little money to conduct restoration projects.
In 1931, one of the last films completed by Fritz (Metroplis) Lang before he departed Germany and Hitler assumed power was a film entitled M which told a creepy story of a child molester and murderer. It describes a pedophile and murderer who is wanted by the underworld as well. It featured the great character actor, Peter Lorrie who was also a German citizen who fled Germany for the freedom of Hollywood. Lorrie started acting as a player for Bertolt Brecht in the twenties, immigrated to the states in the 1930s and became very popular for exotic characters in films. He played Japanese detectives (Mr. Moto), monsters and freaks (Cormen’s Poe films), and seasoned criminals in Warner Brothers features (The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca One of his major starring roles was in The Mask of Demetrious in which he plays a writer and detective seeking a criminal who escaped from the law. Lorre was compelling in The Best with Five Fingers, a retelling classic hands of Orlac in which a pianist loses his hands but has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms turning the quiet pianist into a murderer. His work with Lang is frenetic and Lorre holds the screen with a glitchy nervous manner unmatched by most of his peers.
German cinema had a lasting influence especially on expressionistic aspects of cinema. In 1923 Hollywood’s universal studios embraced the German aesthetic in a series of horror films produced by German directors and craftsmen working in the US. This genre began with 1923’s version of Victor Hugo’s gothic classic, The hunchback of Notre Dame and in 1925 Universal created the original Phantom of the Opera and also an early vampire film, London after Midnight and Dracula in 193. All featured German technicians and aesthetics derived from ideas in expressionism or surrealism. These workers were hired from Germany to utilize their technical abilities and expressionistic style. Some German directors crossed the Atlantic and make their mark in America such as Paul Leni who directed The cat and the canary in 1927. The most notable ex-patriots including singer/actress Marlene Dietrich (John Wayne’s girlfriend during the second world war), playwright and screenwriter, Bertolt Brecht and director/actor Erich Von Stroheim.
Hitler’s Director: Leni Riefenstahl
One director stayed in Germany. Her name was Leni Riefenstahl. She had been a talented and beautiful actress in the 1920s. Hitler admired her work and asked her to Berlin to work on propaganda films for the German government, She agreed and made a series of powerful films to propagandize the Nazi regime. She was an important
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filmmaker for Adolf Hitler because she liked Hitler. She was ready to make the films that Hitler wanted. She had a long life (lived to be 103) and was productive for most of her career. After World War II, people tried to prosecute her for being a Nazi but her argument was that she was a good film director, not a Nazi, and the fact that she had been a good filmmaker for Hitler wasn’t a crime. It was just that she was an excellent filmmaker and she happened to relate to hitler and they were friends. She denied she was a Nazi and claimed she was a filmmaker first and last. She said she was an artist in service to a dictator. She simply made the films he wanted her to make. There was little evidence of any crimes Reifenstahl had committed except for publicizing the Nazi regime.
However Reifenstahl did produce successful films for the Nazi regime that supported the notion of Hitler as a national hero. The first was her staged documentary of the Nazi Nuremburg rally of 1934 entitled Triumph of the Will(1936). Hitler is treated like a God. The film starts with hitler flying into the rally on a plane and he literally descends from heaven to the crowd of adoring fans. World audiences seeing Triumph of the Will were in awe of the people’s love and veneration for Hitler. They were impressed and fearful of this new unifying German force, the Nazi movement. Hitler is shown flying in like a god descending from the heavens. He strides amongst the troops who greet him with cheers. They salute. He modestly enters a car and thousands cheer and throng him as he strides down the streets as a conquering hero. He gives a magnetic speech and everyone is in rapt attention to the charming and dynamic leader. the truth is none of that really happened. There was a rally, but everything was staged. Actors were chosen and placed in the crowd. People were brought in to cheer Hitler. The magnificent parades and set pieces were choreographed and people were drilled on how to react and what to do. Nothing was spontaneous. True hitler did have followers and many devout followers, but the massive crowds, the mesmerized wonder about hitler and the public love of t he man was entirely the work of Leni Reifenstahl and her complex directorial hand. Her greatest achievement was making this wholly unnatural event look natural and unplanned. For this, she was a genius. She could make the staged film look like a real event. Today people see Triumph of the Will and think this was the reality of the era and that Hitler was loved and adored. This was not the case. Hitler’s regime was brutal and manipulative and protest or rejection of hitler was not tolerated and opponent were jailed, beaten or killed. Sadly the only way that Hitler could have a film made about him that flattered him was to have it manufactured and staged. Riefenstahl effectively used camera angles and tracking shots to make Hitler look like a powerful magnetic leader. Many times the shots were from a low angle to make things look bigger more powerful and more colorful than they really were at the time.
Riefenstahl made a second film for Hitler in1938 entitled Olympiad which covered the German Summer Olympics in 1936. The filming was very innovative with camer shots from balloons, underwater and ariel images. The film was in two parts, both about 2 hours long and was controversial because at the Olympics Hitler refused to shake hands with American track star Jessie Owens, an African American runner sho soundly defeated the German team. Hitler was a racist and didn’t want to acknowledge that an Afrian American could beat a team of German Aryan athletes. In truth, Owens was the real star of the Olympics but Olympiad obscures his achievement because hitler refused
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to be seen as wrong. For the most past, the film she portrays the greatness of German athletes against other athletes in a world stage, but it doesn’t show that Adolf Hitler was a racist and when American track runner Jesse Owens had won many awards at the competition, Hitler refused to shake hands with him. Owens achievement was monumental. He was one of the greatest athletes in American history and did a fantastic job under tremendous pressure in Nazi Germany. There have been several films about his achievement. Nonetheless, Riefenstahl made a movie about the Olympics that Hitler approved, but that lied about events at the Olympics, maintaining the image of Hitler as a hero. The Olympics film was made to look like a justification of the policies of prejudice and the idea of an Aryan nation, putting a blonde haired blue eyed people above everyone else.
After the war and hitler’s suicide, Riefenstahl was put on trial for war crimes. Though she supported hitler and made pro hitler films, little evidence could be found to convict her. She lived another 60 years after the war and made films in Africa fearturing the lives and accomplishments of African tribesmen. It was a bizarre turn of events for a filmmaker that was associated with Nazism and Hitler. Some thought it was Riefenstahal’s repudiation of her past and some thought it was her service and penance for espousing Nazi ideas during the war, but Riefenstahl’s conversion to being a naturalist and a supporter of indigenous people and recording their lives seemed a real and genuine conversion from one of the most hated filmmakers of the world war two era to one of the rel masters of documentary filmmaking in later life. In the later half of the twentieth century, she left Germany after the war and spent the rest of her life making ethnographic films amongst the African people in the years after the war. Some people think that perhaps she did this to make up for her horrible purpose her early films for hitler were put to, and were intended to make up for her horrible experiences of helping the Nazis during World War II, but Riefenstahl never admitted to having done anything wrong in the war. She spent the rest of her life in Africa making films with the African people.
The history of German cinema is very important to the west especially the films that were made in the 1920s in in the German expressionist movement. Social disruptions and economic shortages of the Weimar Republic gave rise to new techniques, and new styles of German filmmaking that became associated with the expressionistic art movement, extreme color, extreme emotion, extreme angles, extreme distortion, extreme abstraction of human values, extreme transformation of themes, extreme distortion of reality, so that many of the non-human or non-realistic films reflected the ideas of fantasy, horror, crime, or science fiction. The outgrowth of German films in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s was that the society was unable to sustain the sorts of large cast spectacles popular in other lands. Directors in Germany had to find different ways of creating production techniques to create their own style and character, atmosphere, and emotion to make a form for German film in the 1920s. Also expressionistic filmmakers like Murnau and Laing were also concerned with darker storylines where science-fiction and psychologically-disturbed characters espoused expressionist emotions as directors developed innovative techniques to support their work. The German methods appealed to American audiences in the 1930s and 40s they used light and contrast to rescue film effects, camera angles, and movement to create a new original darker abstracted form of film then had been seen before in Western
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Europe. The German style supported the efforts to create horror movies and film noir projects in the United States. These directors and their innovations didn’t just stay in Germany, but had a huge impact on American film and world film. Many German directors and technicians were trying to remain relevant in the aftermath of Hitler and a wave of hatred of all things German that lasted throughout the the rest of the twentieth century. Further Germany was divided and weakened throughout the majority of the last half o of the twentieth century and had to fight to rebirth its economy and arts. German film had to stay alive and infuentail during a disastrous century, but German filmmakers prevailed against the politics and disasters of world wars.
Terms
Expressionism: Expressionism was a format of art that utilized heightened emotions, distortion, bright colors and abstraction to illustrate a distorted world view. Expressionism transferred extreme emotional angst onto film or canvas.
Nazism: The National socialist movement or the Nazi movement was a fascist form of government popular in Germany and parts of Europe and Asia in the early twentieth century. It derived from central control of the economy and businesses by a strong central government,
Films:
Murnau, F. W.: Nosferatu (1919)
Murnau, F. W. The Last Laugh (1924)
Lang, Fritz. Metropolis (1925)
Lang, Fritz. M (1931)
Riefenstahl, Leni. Triumph of the Will (1936)
Riefenstahl, Leni. Olympiad. (1938)
Readings:
Delaney, Darby. “A Beginner’s guide to German Cinema.” https://filmschoolrejects.com/beginners-guide-to-new-german-cinema/
AC Staff. “German Cinema Comes to Hollywood, 1930” https://ascmag.com/articles/german-cinema-comes-to-hollywood
11 cinema Soviet/Russian cinema
Russian cinema in the early days of the revolution was an important format of new cinema in Europe that had a great impact on The United States and the West. Russians utilized an expressive way of editing and new forms of film cutting to increase the impact of film’s impact on audiences. The Russians had been allies with the West against the Germans in the First World War period, however during the war discontent with the Russian government broke out and the tsar was attacked and overthrown by
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the Bolshevik communist forces. Russians rejected the old style of the world they knew and dropped out of the war and isolated themselves from the West. The French the British and the Americans blamed the Russians for leaving their coalition and disregarded the fact that they were having an internal revolution . The United states the British and the French were angry at the Russians and cut them off from trade.
For the Russian people there were very few film factories making film, so making movies became more difficult. The film schools in Russia had to determine a way to educate students about film without supplies of new film. They arrived at a strategy that focused on editing over the actual creation of films. Thus, instructors in Russian film schools used pre-existing films from many cultures to teach students about film production and editing. The process worked by instructors giving students existing films and having them recut the scenes into a different structure. This allowed them to reedit the film to create a different meaning. This technique was consistent with Marxist philosophy. Marxist thinkers belived the west and capitalism robbed the people and had them addicted to a false consciousness. Thus they believed socialism freed people from ideologies of greed and philosophies where rich autocrats at the pinnicle of society while others stayed trapped in poverty. To Marxists the keys to success in capitalism always alluded the common people and favored the wealthy. Communism or socialism freed populations from false beliefs of capitalist greed and delusions that the poor could pull out of poverty. So Marxist film theory argued that films sold the public a delusion of wealth and happiness and Marxist filmmaking told audiences more truthful stories of collectivism and hard work to make all people more responsible and productive. Russian Bolshevik communists believed that the West and its messages of propaganda and its messages of capitalism were destructive to the common people. The Russians wanted to revise and redraw the messages the West had been sending to people about greed and commerce and growth in the capitalistic system. Therefore they were interested in making films that could contain new messages and it made perfect sense to the Russians to re-write films to re-edit films to give them a different message.
The Russians were very theoretical about the creation of films, and they came up with a lot of theories and ideas about films. One of the first Russian film makers and professors to create new theories was Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov performed an experiment that later became known as the kuleshov experiment . Kuleshov would show two scenes juxtaposed together side-by-side and then he would show another scene to try to determine what people would think of the first two scenes. This technique was related to the Hegelian dialectic, a German idea from the 19th century that stated that human thinking progressed by steps. According to Hegel we initially have an idea this becomes the thesis or the main idea. This idea is often supplanted by a new idea which we call the antithesis or the new idea. Then often times we realize that the first idea and the second idea weren't successful on their own, so we devise a third idea we call the synthetic/new idea Thus a thesis and anti thesis creates a synthesis, a combination of the first two ideas. By dialectical processes, we create new ideas and society moves forward. Russians adopted this thinking. They assumed the west was a feudal system oppressing common workers. Capitalism was only modified feudalism still benefiting wealth and power. The third system, communism, shared amongst everyone benefited the poor more and equalized the means of monetary distribution.
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Through film editing Lev kuleshov tried to make this idea a reality. He would show an image of something a man a man face and then he would juxtapose that image with a portrait of a mother and a baby, The third image returned to the man in the first image. He seemed now to be smiling at the mother an child. Kuleshov argued the audience identified the first image with the second and third image. Audiences would immediately associate the first two images with the third image. The experiment showed the thesis/anti thesis combined by audiences to arrive at a synthetic third idea. In reality, Kuleshov manipulated audiences psychologically with the images. The third image merely repeated the original image. After the juxtaposition of images one has conditioned the audience to respond to the original Image according to conditions the editor has concocted.
Hitchcock explained the Russian idea to a reporter in an interview. He showed an image of himself and then juxtaposed the Hitchcock image with a picture of a baby. The effect is that Hitchcock is a kindly old man looking at a baby. Hitchcock repeats the experiment this time substituting a beautiful girl in a bikini for a baby. The effect is that now Hitchcock is seen as a dirty old man leering at young girls. In reality, people are responding to the same image with intermediary image interposed between the first and third image. The Kuleshov experiment was successful in showing audiences could have their consciousness changed by film.
One of the big film makers of the early Soviet period was Sergei Eisenstein. He agreed that film could alter thought. Ideological film altered the way films were built and constructed. Eisenstein created a film called Battleship Potemkin (1925) to exploit the potential of this ideological film process. The film portrays an attack on the Russian people by the czar’s men during the tsarist era.. In the film the people are attacked by the Russian tsarist soldiers and the people run to the battleship potemkin which is Harbored in the Odessa harbor. The people appeal to the Russian sailors on board the ship to help them against the soldiers on the ground. The sailors mutiny, overthrow their Tzarist commanders and help the people by firing on the Tzarist soldiers. Eisenstein employed the Hegalian idea with shots of the soldiers separate and then he made shots of the people running separate so there was a thesis/antithesis idea established. The third shot returned to the soldiers suggesting the soldiers oppressing the people. In essence the soldiers never hurt anyone, but the notion of harm is created by juxtaposition. Eisenstein shaped the minds of the audience..
Many of the films that utilize the Eisenstein idea of film editing have little to do with politics and more to do with psychologically manipulating audience emotions. For example one of the famous examples of the Kuleshov effect occurs in The Sixth Sense. The kid can see ghosts, but through juxtapositions we don’t know that the people in the film that appear alive may be ghosts too. The use of montage or the Kuleshov effect creates the sensation of hiding and revealing things to the audience.
The Kuleshov effect of manipulating audience attention or misleading the audience is common. An assumption of reality is often used and under cut by cutting in new information. What may be seen may mislead. The Butterfly Effect uses this idea to undermine our beliefs through the notion of chaos theory. In 2021, Joe Wright;s production for Netflix, The woman in the window with Amy Adams has a similar effect of seeing two things juxtaposed. The audience assumes because both are presented in
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sequence both bits of information are true. Wright feeds the audience some information that seems trustworthy which allows the audience to be manipulated.
There were other people that had different theories of editing in Russia. One of the most important film makers was Pudovkan who believed in a different form of editing. His editing style was more consistent with the ideas of the film. His form of editing was known as constructive editing. Eisenstein's form of editing was considered collision editing or a more violent form where two ideas compete for centrality. Two ideas are brought together creating a third complicated idea. Pudovkin’s idea simply constructs two coherent ideas together like building blocks in architecture. You build on those ideas and you build on the story by putting ideas that are consonant together. One of Pudovkin’s most important films was called Mother. In the film a mother has a son who is not a member of the Communist Party and doesn't adhere to the Communist Party principles. She tries to find a way to save him. She determines the only way to save him is to turn him in to the Communist Party so they can save him from a life of false
A third film maker did not trust the dangers of constructive editing and collision editing. He was afraid that his films might be misinterpreted. His name was Vertov and he made a film called man with a movie camera. Vertov’s film was a documentary film. Vertov did not trust editing to tell the story for fear the editing might be in re interpreted or misinterpreted in a film. Therefore, he claimed his films only showed real life and while he could put scenes together in a film in a wild strangely edited collision fashion, he claimed that everything in the film was real life and that he only recorded real life despite how speedy and clever the editing of scenes was. He used editing to increase or slow down the pace, to create interest in the film. He argued that editing was not used for the political purpose, and that the political purpose was simply the subject matter. Man with a movie camera simply shows day-to-day life for the working class communist people living in Moscow during the early days of the Russian Revolution.
Soviet cinema had a brief flowering from 1920 to 1930 when many experiments occurred and were allowed. By 1930 Joseph Stalin consolidated power. Stalin was insane, paranoid and feared any sort of experiment he didn’t understand. He killed thousands of artists and condemned millions to death in Siberia. He supported a form of film and art he liked and understood, Soviet Realism. If Stalin didn’t get the form, it was banned and often the perpetrator was killed. This form was simple, direct, and told the story of the Russian people working towards the ends of the Soviet regime. From the thirties to the fifties during Stalin’s reign Russian film was static. After Stalin died, Soviet film slowly revived.
The twenties allowed a brief window for experiment. Eisenstein practiced collision editing, Pudovkin offered constructivist editing, and Vertov used a style of editing that offered wild speedy shot but he disavowed editing as a tool to invoker film meaning. Today the ideas of collision editing are used to disorient the audience. Japanese horror films have used this technique to great effect in generating fear.
Editing influenced by Russian theorists was strongly influential in American television of the later twentieth century. MTV pioneered exotic editing to market pop music and pop groups and defined codes of behavior and dress for young audiences during the eighties. MTV showed that Eisenstein and Kuloshov were correct in assuming behavior could be altered via film editing.
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Terms
Constructivism: An art movement that arrived from the freedom found in the Russian Revolution. Constructivist forms were tied to cubism and abstracted images by reducing them down to similar forms.
Montage: Montage had a special place in Russian film in that Russian filmmakers believed that montage was a way to create meaning by constructing hegalian dialectical arguments in film. Russian filmmakers constructed scenes of opposing images, a thesis and anti-thesis that was reconstructed as a new argument by the viewer. Western European and American films were constructed in a more straightforward argumentative pattern.
Films:
Eisenstein, Sergei. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Pudovkin, Vladimir. Mother (1927)
Vertov. “Man With a Movie Camera.” (1929)
Tarkovsky, Vessily. Solaris (1972)
Readings:
Delaney, Darby. “A Beginner’s guide to German Cinema.” https://filmschoolrejects.com/beginners-guide-to-new-german-cinema/
AC Staff. “German Cinema Comes to Hollywood, 1930” https://ascmag.com/articles/german-cinema-comes-to-hollywood
Cinema 11 sound in film
There is a mistaken belief that many early films were silent but the truth is that from the beginning of film production almost all films had a form of sound. While early films did not have a sound track and dialogue accompanying them, sound was always a part of film culture from the beginning. Many early films had piano or organ
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accompaniment simply to emphasize emotional and sensational scenes in the film Sometimes narrators would narrate a film or amateur actors would include dialogue in a film in a live fashion. Early synchronization of film and sound was attempted using phonograph records. Phonograph records were created before films so the technology existed. A problem with phonograph records as an accompaniment to a film soundtrack meant that the sound had to be recorded ahead of time and synchronized properly with the film. if there was a mechanical skip in the record, it was possible for the sound to go way off.
The two principal problems for creating sound film were synchronization of the sound with the actual frames of the film and amplification of the sound. The motor that drove film projectors was very loud so being able to hear sound from a scratchy phonograph record with very poor amplification was very difficult and many people were unable to hear sound in film because of this. Therefore, amplification was difficult and was a problem to overcome the second problem was synchronization actually having the film and the sound play at the same time.
The answer to amplification in film came in the early twentieth century when Lee De Forest create the first amplification tubes in 1906. RCA and other companies were producing radios and the tube amplifiers allowed the sound from rados to be heard clearly and loudly. Companies like RCA developed paper cone speakers that gave better sound quality, but a bigger problem was amplifying the sound of the radio waves so that it could be heard in in the home. The need for a new technology to be able to amplify sound was a difficult problem. De Forest developed a vacuum tube that would take the signal from a record and literally turn up the volume or amplify that sound so the amplification tube literally pulled more electrical power out of the sound and amp using amplitude signals to create more sound so that the sound would be louder. Initially with the sound came a good degree of distortion but over time the engineers developed cleaner sound systems. They found ways to reduce the distortion so there would be a clearer sound coming from the amplification tube and quickly amplification tubes took off. By the 1920s, radio receivers had amplification tubes that glowed a bright orange or yellow light and had cone speakers that gave beautiful synchronized sound. The very first radio station that signed on in 1920 was KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA. By the time they had created amplification tubes and cone speakers it wasn't long until people would apply that to film.
The second issue was synchronization. Synchronization was difficult because it was hard to place the sound at the same time as the film. Different methods were used for starting a film at exactly the same moment as a phonograph record, and finally The Western Electric company developed a system of linking a phonograph to a film that worked reasonably well. They called this system the vitaphone system, and they tried in vain to sell the system to several film companies that rejected it because of the costs and the fears that outfitting a lot of theaters with this new system would be very costly. Eventually in 1926, the Warner Brothers film company bought the vitaphone system and began to use it in a series of shorts.Finally in 1927, for a big premiere of a popular film by a popular artist Al Jolson, vitaphone and Warner Brothers decided to make an entire film featuring vitaphone sound. This film from 1927 was entitled The Jazz Singer. The Jazz Singer became a big hit for a number of reasons even though there were still title cards in the film, and much of the film was silent. There were segments of
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the film in which people spoke using microphones and sung on stage specific songs. The Jazz Singer was a mixture of title cards and silent film and sound film put together. It was the first talkie because it was the first film where people actually spoke and sung in a film along with music in the film. The jazz singer was popular because it featured live singing and speaking as well. But the jazz singer was popular for other reasons as well. It was a very controversial film of its time. It told the story of a Jewish family who had a son that they hoped would be a Cantor in the synagogue in the Jewish church. Their son was enamored of Broadway musicals and wished to sing on Broadway for gentiles or non-Jews. While he was in rehearsal for a play on Broadway, he fell in love with a non-Jewish girl and this upset his family as well. Finally by the film's end his father who is a cantor in the synogogue is very sick and wishes his son to return home to sing in the church, but he refuses to follow his father's wishes until he realizes his father is very sick. So while his father is on his deathbed, the young son returns to his family's church and sings as a Cantor in the church. His father dies happy that his son has returned to the church. But the son is still enamored of a non-Jewish girl which upsets the family because they do not want him marrying outside the faith. But he is young and headstrong and wishes to pursue a relationship with a girl who is not of the Jewish faith. His saving grace is a doting mother that indulges everything he wants. His mother believes that he should be the man he wants to be even if it means being a different person than his father and faith desire him to be. She encourages him. He eventually sings on Broadway to his mother (song Mammie) and becomes a famous star. He marries the girl he wishes to marry, and all ends happily with his adoring mother by his side. But the film is extremely controversial . The film dealt with Jews and immigrant peoples. The film dealt with a young man who defied both of his parents to have the career of his dreams. The film dealt with a Jewish man marrying outside his own faith. The film dealt with mixture of different peoples from different parts of the world. The film dealt with immigrants coming into American Society and wanting to integrate into American Society. All of these elements labeled the film is highly controversial. These elements created a very,very popular film that was attractive to a wide range of diverse audiences. The fact that it was sound as well also made the film extremely popular and people went to the film simply to see the extravaganza of people singing live on stage in a film. The jazz singer was a breakthrough in many ways aside from the fact that it was one of the first synchronized sound films of its era. Not long after the jazz singer debuted the great controversy arose in the film community as to whether all the film community would move to sound film or whether sound film would simply be a gimmick to get people into the theaters. The answer was very quick. Within two years or 18 months after the jazz singer despite the high costs of adding speakers and an amplification sound system and new projectors that ran on a different film speed, the new systems at enormous costs were installed in nearly every theatre in the country by popular demand. The public demanded sound and refused to go to films without sound. By 1928 the public would not patronize silent films and by 1929 virtually all films being made were sound. By 1930, silent films were dead. The only silent filmsthat made profit in the thirties were films by Chaplin. Chaplin continued to do films that had sound that had soundtracks and music made by Chaplin. They had live sound in them, but Chaplin generally felt that he could make bitter films by simply using silent movie methods and Chaplin made City Lights in 1931, modern times in 1936 and the great
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dictator in 1940 that were mostly silent films with small elements of sound effects soundtracks and some dialogue when necessary. For the most part Chaplin was the only artist during the sound era that could actually make a silent film that people might still go to see. Sound prevailed very quickly in the field of film technology .
One of the great problems of sound films was that the actors had to stand near a microphone to be heard. Thus sound created films with less movement that were more static. People did not have to worry about sound in silent films. People could move anywhere they wanted to on the stage however when actors had to stand near microphone to be heard, movement in films virtually came to a standstill, and the talkies literally became the standstill talkies or the stockies as people jokingly called them.
There were several major film directors in Hollywood that set about solving that problem, and they used different devices to solve the problems that were created by sound films. One of the first directors to solve the problem with sound films and make movement come back to theaters was Rueben Mammelian. Mammelian was the director of the Oscar winning 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Frederic March based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Mammelian was formerly a Broadway stage director. The film literally dealt with the issue of how to get sound and movement in the same film by using a solution that mammelian had seen done in Broadway. On Broadway film producers decided that people wanted good sound and to do so, they provided a sound system with microphones on the stage, but instead of simply putting a single microphone for everyone to group around as they had in film producers in Broadway. They had placed different microphones on different sides of the stage in the center of the stage and above the stage. They used an audio mixer which was a device that allowed them to bring up the sound on one microphone and bring it down in another microphone so it wasn't picking up extraneous foot traffic during a scene. Mammelian said why don't we incorporate the idea of using microphones on various parts of the stage in our sound films which is exactly what he did. So in Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde there were microphones placed around the stage so that wherever March moved on the stage there would be sound that could easily be heard. Also they began to do post production mixing of sound into the film so that sound that wasn't recorded at the time the film was made, could be recorded later. Mammelian’s efforts were rewarded in 1932 with the superb attendance at the version of Jekyll and Hyde that he created with March. sound was very clear, very audible, and the actor March when the Oscar for best performance, because as Hyde, he could move across the stage and make sounds and use dialogue from anywhere. The other director that worked very hard to make sound successful was Victor Fleming. Fleming was famous for a number of films that he directed, including 1939 Oscar nominees Wizard of Oz that he directed and Gone with the Wind of which he was one of a team of four directors for the film. Fleming actually won the Oscar for best director in 1939 for GWTW and then in 1940, he made another great film, a second version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman. Victor Fleming had made a lot of movies with western stars and liked making westerns. He also wanted to make western films with live sound in the West. A lot of people thought it was impossible to have a truck with a Dolly (a raised platform device) and a boom microphone ( a boom was a pole on which microphones were hung above actors as they rode on horses to make sound that could be heard and could be audible and could
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be done properly. Fleming figured that he could get a quietly running low speed truck to be alongside the actors on horses with a boom operator operating a boom held above the horses. He believed you could hold a microphone over the actors as they rode on horses so the two actors could be riding on horses and having a conversation, and they could be clearly heard. People thought the sound of the noise from the horses and their hooves and riding on the ground and the sound of a truck and the sound of a boom operator noise coming from the truck would be too loud, and that you could not isolate the sound of the voices of the actors and you could not record westerns in this manner with live sound. Fleming proved them wrong. He put special baffling in the truck to make to make the sound of the truck's engine quieter. He put special baffling around the boom microphone so that it only picked up the sound of the voices of the actors and not the competing sound of the truck or the competing sound of the horses and the actors spoke clearly and loudly. Their voices came through loud and clear, so Fleming was one of the few directors that solved the problem of sound in the outdoors.
One of the other innovators in sound in 1940 was Orson Welles who had already worked in radio and worked on stage and was making his first movie Citizen Kane. Welles always laughed at the fact that most sound films from the first ten years of sound film did not have ceilings in the scenes because they had to use boom microphones and the boom microphones would not allow them to put a ceiling scene in a set. Welles made his technicians on Citizen Kane develop scenes with sets that actually had ceilings and people laughed at Welles and thought he was a fool. Welles laughed and said I can place a microphone anywhere and I know how I can make it work. Welles planted microphones in desks or in the sleeve of an actor or in a coat or in a newspaper or any place on this stage where it might not be seen, and he placed enough microphones in every scene where every aspect of every scene could be brilliantly recorded. In one of the most famous scenes at the end of Citizen Kane the 70 year old Kane begs his wife Susan Alexander not to leave him, and she defies him and decides to leave him, and he is left alone in her room. In a rage he begins to destroy everything in the room making a lot of noise in the process, tearing apart wooden cabinets smashing bottles, throwing things against the wall, tripping over things tearing up wires, throwing books, and throwing her clothing. The scene is a real mess but one of the really wonderful things about the scene is the way Welles records the sound so that you hear the man puffing all the way through as he destroys the room and you hear the actual torment of tearing a cabinets out of walls and throwing furniture and destroying property all the way through the scene. It's fun to watch because of its marvelous sound design in which you simply watch a man go berserk in a room. Here sound defines character.
Sound also played a role in the enjoyment of animation, and one of the reasons why the Disney Studios became the principal studio for animation in the 1920s and later became the most important animation studio in in the world. Today Walt Disney Enterprises is responsible for about 70% of the films made in the United states because they own Marvel, Fox Miramax and many other production companies. Disney became successful despite the problems of animation (it took more time and manpower to make animated films). Disney would take three years to make a film like Snow White while MGM could make a movie a week because they had four soundstages constantly at work. However one of the drawbacks for the other studios was recording sound and
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recording it well. For once Disney had a distinct advantage. The animation could be done by the animators and the sound could be done slowly and parts could be integrated in postproduction. You didn't have to have good sound at the time you were making the pictures; you could add good sound after the pictures were made, which gave Disney a rare advantage. So in the process of a film like Snow White you have three years to find songs, vocalists and clever dialogue. Disney had access to the best singers, the best composers, and facilities to record and rerecord the sound slowly to make it mix in well with the film. In 1927 Disney Studios were the first studio to deliver a sound cartoon in their debut cartoon with Steamboat Willie which featured Mickey Mouse in a comedy on a steamboat with animals, an angry boat captian, and lots of goofy examples of sound, The film was extremely successful and from 1927 until 1937 when they produced Snow White, Disney was on a mission to bring a fully animated sound film to the market. This would literally entail 90 minutes of sound and that was a real struggle for Disney or for any studio during that time simply because of the complexities of making a sound film. Consider besides problems with sound, Disney animators had to draw 129,600 drawings per film. All of these had to be planned scripted, arranged, with foreground and background images, and vocal parts and songs written in and timed. But when Disney delivered Snow White in 1937 it was a massive hit because the voices and the music were beautiful, the animals had wonderful character voices, and the sound blended perfectly with the animated images. Disney didn't have to worry about the actors having good voices which is a problem for regular sound films because he could pick whatever actor he wanted, he found wonderful voice actors and talented singers.
The struggle to create great sound in film was very complicated and it didn't end there. Technology moved sound film forward. In the 1940s the federal government in World War Two realized that records (containing secrets and sensitive information) being transmitted across the Atlantic into France and England were very fragile and could break. They needed a new technology for moving secret messages to the allies in Europe fighting the Germans. They developed a new technology called audio recording tape so instead of recording on a plastic shellac record, they made audio tapes that were more flexible.One could plunge an audio tape into water and dry it out. You could twist an audio tape or distort it and still have it play unlike records. it was far more flexible and again it could run alongside celluloid film. Tape made things easier, so in the 1940s the film companies began to realize that if they could run an audio tape through a projector with a pick up at the same time they were running celluloid film they could do away with vitaphone records altogether, and they wouldn't have to play a record with a film anymore. They could integrate the two systems together. So recording with a tape recorder during filming simplified the process of tracking sound with the making of the visual film. By running the film at 24 frames per second they could get achieve higher quality sound. Early silent film ran in the silent film era at 18 frames per second. The slower film left very poor sound quality, but when you boosted the speed of the film to 24 frames per second FPS or frames per second you received a better quality sound signal. If anything World war two advanced sound technology.
Terms
amplification: the ability of the amplitude waves of sound to be increased. This was accomplished when Lee de Forest invented the vacuum tube.
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Synchronizaton: In early days of film production there was a great physical challenge making the picture and sound synchronize so that picture and sound were well coordinated. This problem was solved by Warner Brothers Vitaphone system which linked a record to the showing of a film frame. The system was later replaced by Western Electric’s system of attaching electronic magnetic recording medium alongside film frames so that the sound could be picked up simultaneously with the film’s viewing. Fps: Frames per second. The standard for sound film was established at 24 frames per second and silent films ran at 18 frames per second. The reason why silent films have jerky motion when translated to television is that early television projector transfer systems only ran sound film and only could translate film at that speed, thus early transfers of silent film to television tapes were recorded at THE WRONG SPEED thus making all silent films look like they are going to fast. This was a mechanical error because tv stations in the 1940s and 1950s did not possess the right projectors for dubbing silent films on to television recordings and monitors.
Films:
Mamaleon, Rueben. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” (1932) Crosland, Alan. “The Jazz Singer.” (1927)
Welles, Orson. “Citizen Kane.” (1941)
Readings:
Kushins, Jordan. “A Brief History of Sound in Cinema.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19566/a-brief-history-of-sound-in- cinema/
Filmsfatale. “Sound History in Film: Early Recording.” https://www.filmsfatale.com/blog/2020/5/26/sound-history-in-film-early-recording
Cinema 12
Hollywood studio system
The Hollywood studio system developed as a business model in the 1930s and 40s to control the production of films and to control markets in the U S Between 1930 and 1952. Most of the major studios were combined and the larger studios devoured the smaller companies to create complete control and dominance of the industry. By 1930 most of the principle players in Hollywood were assembled and smaller studios had been gobbled up.
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The Big Five and the Minors
By 1930 the major studios were 20th Century Fox (A combination of the older 20th century pictures and Fox studios) MGM (A combination of Metro pictures the Golden theatre chain and the film company of Louis B. Meyer), RKO (A combination of a few radio companies and film companies), Warner Bros, a studio owned by the three Warner brothers. Two of the brothers retired and left the running of the studio to Jack Warner. Paramount was the most European of the big five. Adolph Zukor ran Paramount and brought in foreign directors, actors and technicians to give Paramount films an arty and glossy look.
There were a few minor studios that specialized in one form of entertainment. Republic made cheap westerns and Saturday morning serials for children. Disney made mostly cartoons but later switched to a blend of cartoons and live action films because the live action films helped to underwrite the cartoon productions which took longer and cost more. Universal run by Carl Lamelle made mostly low budget horror films. By 1930 all of these studios competed in a very tight low margin market during the depression. Companies had to have constant hits or face bankruptcy. One film’s profits paid for the next film. Two or three disastrous releases could cause layoffs and sell offs of property, stars, equipment or real estate. Maintaining the rising costs of production was a day and night business.
Studio Methods
The studio system was often referred to as a star factory, because Hollywood realized after Chaplin that people liked to view films featuring familiar and dependable stars. Studios virtually owned stars. They paid for their plastic surgery, theor cosmetic enhancements, their hair, their clothes, their agents, their publicity, sometimes their residence and they even programmed star’s personal time and choice of lifestyle right down to charities and personal appearances. A star’s life was controlled in much the same way Korean boy bands are selected and governed today in Korea. They are a human industry bordering on bondage.
Further in the time of the studio system there was no human rights. If you were gay, you could not exist as a gay person. If you were a child there were no child labor laws or the studios disregarded them. If you were a woman, except for a few big stars, you had no control over your properties or the films that the studio chose for you. Your life, your career your residence, your appearance were all managed, and most people had to appear grateful to work 18 hour days, sometimes 6am to midnight to appear in movies. Wages were doled out by contracts that often abrogated basic worker rights. Studios were famous for reprisals against non-complying actors. Humphrey Bogart once angered Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner and was sentenced to play a lead in a horror movie, one of the lowest jobs in the business. Horror movies were not the venerable terror films of the modern period with lavish special effects, animation, cgi ,and clever jump scares. Mostly horror was a discount industry where the cheapest talent and the poorest production values prevailed. Rarities like Dracula and Frankenstein were unusual high budget versions of stage shows (Dracula) or classic novels (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel).
Factory Production
Many of the studios in Hollywood produced in a style of factory production like the factory methods of Henry Ford. The studio system decided they could create
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products like cars or airplanes or furniture or household products. They had a tightly controlled conventional way of making movies by factory methods. Films like Little Caesar in 1930 or Public Enemy and Scarface in 1932 started a sequence of gangster films. Other genres generated many sequences of films in that genre. The sixties had sequences comedies, gangsters, horror features, musicals, dance spectacles, screwball comedies, farces and historical epics.
Vertical Integration: Owning it All
Studio system films weren’t always wildly creative. Studios simply created a series of films that utilized contracted players, contracted directors, and followed very precise formats of filmmaking. The business model was known as vertical integration. Studios sought to control all aspects of production and eliminate, competition from companies outside the Hollywood area. Vertical Integration meant controlling production, distribution and exhibition. This meant that all films were built, directed and printed In Hollywood. The five studios ran all aspects of the films they filmed on their own studio lots. There were hierarchical orders in the studios. The lowest of the low at Warner brothers were the animators that made the looney tunes cartoons They were banished to the outskirts of the studio on the area near. The studio fence, a series of frame huts where animators had to draw in unaircionditioned bungalows. This space was known as cockroach terrace. The studios made a lot of money from looney tunes but did not respect or appreciate animators like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Fritz Freling. The animators at Warner’s responded by constantly producing cartoons that ridiculed or parodies warner brothers own films and stars. The animatords knew they were wild and often times annoying so they were happy to be away from the main offices. Closer to the main buildings were the secondary studios where grade b minor films were filmed with minor actors. At the center of the Warner’s lot were the big A studios where major stars like Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis created their classic films. These stars had a choice of some co-cast members and some say in the direction, but the studio heads made all final decisions. In the main buildings there were corporate offices for studio heads. Usually these offices were opulent and lush to show the power of the giants of the industry.
A major part of the studio complex was accounting. Hollywood accountants were described as magic accountants because outward appearances would illustrate that given films were hits, but the Hollywood accountants could describe the costs of production as producing a loss. The accounting process took into account the use of facilities, technicians, artists fees, acting talent, directors, studio production costs, writers, extras, and misc costs which could often turn a successful film into a loss, at least for tax purposes.
Apart from the studio facilities, the majors owned all the major distribution of ll films throughout the country. Big reels of physical films had to be transported by big trucks across the country to every small town that had a movie theatre. Even small towns of 10,000 people or less would have a theatre. Remember, apart from radio and live theatre, film was the only form of evening entertainment for most Americans. Most major studios released new films every week and audiences would go see the week’s big hit and return to the theatre weekly to see new hits as they arrived. In large cities, the Warners, Fox, Parmount trucks would roll into town weekly with new films. Later reels could be mailed to cities for pick up by downtown theatres. As films circulated
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across the country, prints would be traded from theatre to theatre. For super popular films, the studios would have to make extra prints of those feature films. The cost of prints in technicolor was expensive (the number of prints weighed against a film’s profits). A ragged print with burn marks, or scratches, or sound drop outs could annoy audiences and diminish admissions and depress revenue so keeping theatres stocked with quality prints was part of the business of the distribution chain. However in the end, each studio had mail rooms, trucking lines, print facilities, distribution points, and employees and full divisions devoted to distribution tasks.
The final aspect of vertical integration was the theatres for exhibition. The studios built beautiful theatres often referred to as movie palaces. They were large beautiful buildings with plush velour seats, red carpets, colorful and attractive concession stands and full cuisines. In the height of the depression when disposable cash was at a premium, studios equipped movie theatres with facilities to serve full meals for lunch, dinner and evening snacks. Stages were equipped with strong sound systems to host touring celebrities appearing in major markets to support their new film release. For example a popular thirties and forties act like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby would host radio shows that would promote their films. They would tour behind major releases touring through towns in the east coast. Films might open in the East in New York, travel to Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ohio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Madison, Wisconsin and wind up in Minneapolis. Movie stars were treated like today’s rock stars, staying the best hotels, doing continual interviews and publicizing the film and promoting its qualities.
The theatres were a place to commune on the weekends. People could go and stay all day and many did just that. The economics of the depression were precarious. Many people lost their homes and had to live with families, in trailers, or camps. If people could find a job (at one point 25% of the workforce was unemployed) people saved their slim wages for a date or a solo venture to the movie theatre. Food was cheap and these theatres were wide ranging entertainment centers. Big bathrooms for big families, arcades where people could play pinball and other novelties. Music was playing through speakers everywhere in the theatre. Sound was resonant and warm. The theatres were built to contain crowds for 18 hours on a weekend. Kids occupied Saturday morning with cartoons, short subjects, travelogues, weekly newsreels photographing and filming national events. These shows might extend from 8am until noon. Custodians would clean up cokes and popcorn and there would be a transition to afternoons which might be teens or pre-teens, families and older patrons. Sometimes theatres would host cheap bingo, scrabble, Pictionary style games with projectors and good sound systems. Audience members might be called on stage to help call bingo numbers. Winners might win depression glassware, pots and pans, silverware, and plate sets. People too poor for household items might win them at bingo for a nickel investment in a set of bingo cards. Big swing bands appeared on stage in some venues and audiences would dance the foxtrot in the aisles. Everyone saw almost everyone from the community at the theatre. It was a place for social gathering and social binding. More newsreels, news programming, serials, horror movies, crime thrillers and otherB features would be programmed in the afternoons.
Evening features came after a dinner menu of stacks and more substantial foods, including hotdogs, chips, peanuts, cotton candy, popcorn, and sometimes pizza and
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soup and other more exotic items. Again bands and games might fill in the intermission hours. People might come to the theatre early to win a set of glasses or there might be a free raffle of items, a collection for the needy, or possibly a USO collection for troops fighting during World War two. Many people pitched in to help at theatres as during the depression and war years, many men either were overseas or at world camps and details could not be home. They were living and dormitories and sending money home to their families. Women pitched in serving food, running projectors, tearing tickets and managing theatres. At around seven pm an evening double feature would begin with hit movies introduced by touring stars. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby appeared, performed a stage show, sang songs with a big band, sometimes broadcast a live radio show and entertained fellow actors and other touring stars. There was a lot of cross over between radio and film and plugs and ads for products that supported the film actors and radio shows would be inserted. Samples of popular products would be distributed to people. At special holidays like Christmas and Halloween masks or tinsel or other free items might be distributed. After the first feature there might be another stage show and then the main feature would premiere at 8 or 9pm. Afterwards most people finally went home exhausted but young people might listen to a small swing combo or a jazz band, eat more food and devour more soft drinks. Dancing and games might end the evening and often the theatres cleaned and closed after midnight. Theatres generated a culture that satisfied American needs for entertainment for nearly two decades. They were uncontested capitals of film pleasure.
The studios owned every facet of production including the development and creation of the film itself, the writers, and the cameras so that they could actually control what had been shot and produced that day. All was contained in house. They had built in development facilities so that film could be seen at night the same day it was shot. Productions moved forward daily and studio chiefs watched with actors technicians and directors. If the studio didn’t like a film they could end it in an evening. Mostly they pushed ahead with all productions. A production started and not finished lost money for the studio. Money was a big concern but so was prestige and good publicity.
Studios like MGM became extremely proficient, constantly developing scripts hiring writers, hiring actors, hiring directors, and producing films on a regular basis. MGM bragged that it could produce literally a film a week or 52 films a year, and it called itself the film production factory. People often jokingly called it the dream factory. Hollywood films could be distributed to every city in the nation to every movie theater in the nation. This strong distribution network throttled product and studios only distributed films that they either created or had created with an independent producer.
This vertical integration model existed from 1930 until 1946. In,1946 following the end of the depression and the end of World War Two, the Supreme Court and the federal government took action against the studios to break them up. Government determined that studios such as Paramount and Warner Brothers had too much control, and strangled emerging new independent cinema and foreign films from being shown. This was the beginning of the end of the studio system. By the early 1950s almost all the major studios had been divested of their of their theaters and their distribution networks. They had to fight with foreign producers to be able to create a space where their films could be shown.
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Today Hollywood production mirrors the past but is also very different. Rather than five studios, today there are about twelve domestic studios producing American films. We have studios that make films for distribution to theaters but we also have studios that make distribution directly to television such as Netflix and Amazon. Instead of the studios controlling actors and directors and production facilities themselves, today studios strike deals with major directors, actors, and writers, and they create a package that creates a production that is eventually funded. When a film is funded, it means that that film is greenlit or greenlighted and that means that the film has a potential to go forward because the funding is there, the actors have been paid, the studio has the money to finance the facilities, and they have the production ability to complete the film, perform post production tasks so the film can be released and shown to audiences. It is notable that over seventy percent of American film production is controlled by the Walt disneyt company who have mergered and bought other film companies (Miramax, Fox, and Marvel) so they have a strong control over what Americans see.
While there are many independent films made in the world today, still in the studio system and Hollywood. Much production is governed by demands dictated by money and business. The studios are hungry for blockbuster films that will make a lot of money. For example in the early part of the Millennium superhero movies were popular, but revenue declined by 2020, and it took a new spiderman film in 2021 to revive the genre. Money underlies the production of films. While A list directors generally can make the films they wish to produce, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, a remake of the 1961 classic sputtered in 2021 because few people patronized the film. A film genre dies if audiences do not watch it. Today, many studios insure audience response by dual releasing to theatres and streaming services. The 2021 release of Matrix revolution was promoted in theatres and on the streaming HBO max service. Studios fear losibng films to streaming services and pirating. The new distribution of films is a complex business. Many films partner with streaming services such as Netflix to maximize audience and revenue. Nexflix spends well over 10 billion a year to produce its own massive slate of productions to compete against older and more established studios. In Recent years, Amazon and Netflix have muscled into the complex business of maki ng films and their efforts have opened up the production market somewhat.
Hits that no one predicted as successful films are called sleeper hits. Often times sleeper hits surprise audiences and Hollywood and develop new genres. When Robert Downey jr. joined the Iron Man series he spurred the big super hero craze of the millennium era.
Terms
Vertical Integration: Controlling all aspects of film production. Producin g, distributing and exhibiting films.
Sleeper hit: Films not deemed hits by the studio but surprised analysts and became popular with audiences.
The Big Five: a group of large studios that dominated Hollywood production in the thirties and forties. Paramount, MGM, RKO, Warners, 20th Century Fox
Films:
Ford, John. “Stagecoach.” (1939)
Van Dyke, S. S. “A Night at the Opera.” (1935)
Werks, U. B. “Snow White.” (1937)
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McCarey, Leo. “Love Affair.” (1939) Curtez, Michael. “Casablanca.” (1942) Welles, Orson. “Citizen Kane.” (1941) Readings:
Kushins, Jordan. “A Brief History of Sound in Cinema.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19566/a-brief-history-of-sound-in- cinema/
Filmsfatale. “Sound History in Film: Early Recording.” https://www.filmsfatale.com/blog/2020/5/26/sound-history-in-film-early-recording
Cinema 13 film noir
Film noir was a style of film that erupted after the chaos of World War Two.
Noir was characterized as (1) a group of films about criminal, mystery, police, crime and larceny oriented entertainments. (2) Qualities of these films were dark and mysterious settings, dark lighting, shadow, shades and blinds, night time scenes, the use of weather and atmosphere to characterize events. (3) These films are characterized by a cynical view of human nature. (4) Women are particularly problematic with many women not considerd trustworthy or dangerous. The term femme fatale was conied to describe women in this genre. (5) Noirs often portray fate as capricious or working against the protagonists of the film. (6) The worldview of film noir is not only cynical but dark. People will lie, betray and disappoint us. Women are untrustworthy. Friends are not friendly. It is a world in which community or friendship does not matter and fate or other forces can intervene and bring the characters to ruin. (7) Noir is often fatalistic and the end result is death, crime, murder, betrayal, unhappiness, and disappointment.
Noir as a term arrived from French critics who saw American films after World War Two. France had been captured by the Germans in the early days of World War Two and was occupied from 1940 until 1945. When they were freed from German rule and captivity by the allies and the Germans were driven out of Paris and out of Northern France, French film critics that had watched American films through 1939 and had seen the studio system in 1939 at its zenith in films like Gone with the wind of mice and men Stagecoach Wizard of Oz son of Frankenstein hound the Baskervilles dark victory, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith goes to Washington love affair and a host of other brilliant and wonderfully realized films from the American studio system. But once Germany occupied the country in 1940, the Germans cut off the French critics from all American films for five years as part of their propaganda efforts to promote German society and criticize the allies and the other Western powers. When the allies returned and freed France in 1945 French critics saw American films for the first time in five years.
What they witnessed was a complete change in the style of American film from 1939 to 1945. American films had changed had become darker grittier and more cynical because of the horrors of war, the horrors of the depression, the deprivation of the American people, and the poverty that had swept the United States and the world. The
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darkness of the depression years followed by the sacrifices of a world war transformed film makers in Hollywood. They moved towards a darker cynical more grim style of film that reflected the feelings of the American people. Americans had seen corruption in their own country, had learned to sometimes fear authority figures such as the clergy and the police, and were very concerned about the shape of the world following the war. and the incursion of communism into Eastern Europe.
These films were dark gritty films therefore the French critics referred to these new films as film noir or black film because they were very dark in tone and they were very cynical and disturbing in their content. Most of the films of the noir era were crime films or mystery films or suspense films in which criminal elements or criminals were the focus of the film the police were no longer in charge, the clergy were no longer trustworthy, specifically women were no longer to be trusted, and the world was a darker and more corrupt place. Film makers that had made bright and happy films prior to the war started making much darker films. Alfred Hitchcock who had moved to the United States in 1939 when the bombing of London and worked for David O Selznick. When Hitchcock arrived Selznick was embroiled in gone with the wind.
Hitch specialized in this new style of suspense film or noir films during the film noir era. Hitchcock had great influence over world filmmaking including the French new wave, but became a major auteur who was smart and able to make clever and dark films within the shelter of the studio system. Hitchcock was able to wrest such control from the studios because he was clever, literate, budget conscious and made mostly popular films that pleased audiences. He also knew how to harness the media. He started several mystery magazines that spread the Hitchcock names and brand, and he quickly grasped the power of television and produced his own television program for ten years, making him the most well known film director in the United States.
Hitchcock started his United States tenure with a strong hit film. Rebecca was a popular novel by mystery writer Daphne DuMaurier, starring two young attractive actors, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine that won the Academy Award for best picture in 1940. Shadow of Doubt in 1942, co-written by Thorton Wilder who had written the stage hit, Our Town. In 1946, Hitchcock paired with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman for a spy thriller, Notorious. Hitchcock was a dominant force in the fifties creating a string of crime thrillers starting with stage fright in 1950 strangers in a train in 51 rear window in 1952, dial M for murder, the man who knew too much in 1955 the trouble with Harry 1956 Vertigo 1957 the wrong man 1958 North by northwest in 1959, In that ten year era, Hitchcock became America's most subversive filmmaker making films about dark corners of American Society. He toyed with films where corruption might dwell without anyone actually knowing it existed. The high point of Hitchcock's cynical view of America was Psycho, a dark fairy tale of sex, perversion, cross dressing, serial murder, and psychosis. The film takes a simple plot of a thief who is killed by a maniac running a motel and transforms that into a telescoped view of American culture. people for the rest of the film.
What exactly is film noir? It's a French term that means simply dark film or black film. It is marked by a very pessimistic view of the human race. It is a series of mystery and criminal films that were extremely popular in the era when Hollywood was in decline and television was in its ascendancy.
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The first film noir was 1945’s detour by Delmer Davies. The film is fatalistic, pessimistic has a femme fatale, sems almost like a surreal waking nightmare and is cheaply shot in black and white. It has many of the qualities of noir. The hero of the film, Al, is a vet from World War Two playing piano in a seedy bar with his girlfriend who wants to move west. When she decides to go to Los Angeles to become successful he follows her to Los Angeles. He hitchhikes and is a picked up by a guy named Haskell. But Al is waylaid by a series of events that destroy his happiness. He takes over driving for Haskell who falls asleep. At a stop, Al finds out Haskell has died. He meets a woman that needs a ride at a truck stop. Her name is Vera. She recognizes the car and tells Al , she knows he stole the car because she caught a ride with Haskell in that same car the day before. She coaxes Al to take her to LA and to help her with criminal acts. Al, trapped takes her to Los Angeles. She immediately gets drunk and threatens to call the police on Al. He tries to grab the phone cord from her. Sher runs to another room. Al tries to pull the phone cord from her. In her drunken state she wraps the cord around her neck. Unknown to Al, his pulling on the cord strangles Vera. At a truck stop Al is picked up by the police, assuming fate wants him dead. Fate, bad women and bad luck conspire to make this a classic noirish story.
Some qulaities of noir? There is the antihero protagonist who has either done something wrong or is a victim of fate. He can’t win no matter what. This kind of hero would be Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra where he is a criminal in a cabin up in the woods surrounded by the police with no way to escape. He wants to bring money to his girl so that she can have money to live.
In many film noirs there is an evil lying woman. In 1964’s remake of Earnest Hemingway’s The Killers there is Angie Dickenson who pretends to be in love with John Cassavettes to trick him into helping her and her boyfriend (Ronald Reagan) steal money. In the end, the killer (Lee Marvin) tracks the money to the girl. She proclaims, “I had nothing to do with it, it was all his (the boyfriend’s) idea. Marvin, who has been shot by Reagan and is dying and doesn’t believe her says, “lady I don’t have the time,” and shoots her. This is a common fate for a film noir heroine. These are usually women of low morality who are only interested in using men to get what they want and eventually these women destroy men.
Another aspect of film noir is schematic plotting that provides a template to the crimes and themes. Because many noirs were shot on the cheap a hallmark became dark simple and atmospheric lighting where low key dark scenes are infused with high contrast darks and lights. Shadows, fog, mist and rain made up for extensive sets. film makers didn't have enough money for complex sets so elements might be shrouded in black and white to keep people from seeing poor sets. Noir featured the war and war characters and often a theme was post war disillusionment. Many of the characters in film noir had fought in the war and believed they would come home to glory and good jobs, and what they found after the war was 4Fs (disqualified for fighting because of a disability) had found the best jobs and vets were left with minimal employment. Noirs also are peppered with characters with psychological angst and fear, much of it promoted by years in the military. In their world things were not fair and their psyches were damaged by the abuses of war and seeing the excessive violence. There is little sense that anyone will be successful in such films.
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For example in dial M for Murder, the husband is in deep financial trouble and wants to murder his wealthy wife. He hires a man to it. The killer attempts to kill her, but bungles the job and dies in the process. Hitchcock can’t avoid a joke When the husband calls and to his surprise has his wife answer. She cries, “someone tried to kill me.” The husband’s response is, “did he get away?” The darkly comical aspects of noir make the films amusing even if the subject matter is dark.
Film noirs were sociological dealing issues of social justice. In the Third Man, Harry Lime is a black marketeer giving people what they want. His dilemma is that criminality is what society needs to get products they want. Is he really a criminal? In Detour Al is just trying to get to his girlfriend and fate seems out to derail him. In th Asphalt Jungle the robbers don’t mean to hurt anyone and planned well but a security guard gets in their way, and his inconvenient death ruins their plans. In Crossfire, a group of servicemen are implicated in killing a Jewish man. Is it rage or anti-semitcism driving the men to murder?
Probably one of the earliest examples of noir was John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon in 1941. This film based on a Dashiell Hammett novel tells the story of detective Sam Spade who meets a woman and a series of criminals all trying to get Spade to help them locate a fabled valuable Maltese Falcon. The Falcon is supposedly a black bird covering a priceless gold statue. They killed Spade’s partner Archer to get the bird. The complicated plot indicates that virtually everyone is lying to Spade, and even Spade indulges in a little play acting with the criminals. By the end of the film Spade wants the object gone, so that the murder and larceny surrounding the object stops. In the end we discover that the Falcon is just a cheap statue covered in black paint. When all are arrested and all is revealed, the police famously ask Spade, ‘what is it?’ Bogart famously responds, ‘it's the stuff that dreams are made of.’ Though pre-noir in time period, Falcon has the Noir viewpoint of fatalism, deception and a pessimisitic view of human nature.
Another noir from 1944 was Laura where a detective investigates the murder of a beautiful but evil femme fatale named Laura. There’s a series of men who think she loved them, but we learn she was willful calculating and used everyone. This film focuses on the massive mistrust of women, probably a response to world war two and the growing power of women in the marketplace. Many men returned from the war to find women taking their jobs. This fueled resentment of women. The film in a way is about misogyny, but the lying and deception suggest a culture of criminal intent and suspicion.
In The blue dahlia from 1946 starring Alan Ladd and Veronica lake, and a sailor comes back from the war and discovers that his wife has been unfaithful and that his child has died due to his wife's alcoholism. Again the film critiques relationships, faith and American institutions like marriage. Again many men returned from the war to find their wives remarried.
Orson Welles enjoyed the genre as an actor and director and appeared in Carol Reed’s disturbing tale of black markets and smugglers in post war Germany, The Third Man. The character of Harry Lime was a bad black marketeer in the era of shortages and starvation in post war Germany. Someone has killed him and a reporter played by Joseph Cotton and the forces of interpol are investigating the death and black markets in late forties Berlin. Suddenly out of nowhere Lime appears, alive but haunted and
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hunted by various forces from the western authorities, the organized post war European mob and the communist authorities. It seems Lime has crossed everyone and now he is wanted and on the run. The film suggests the world is infested with criminal conspiracies, shady characters, and corrupt officials. There is no way to hide or to prevail in this seedy and dangerous time period.
Film noirs continued and in 1958 one of the last of the film noirs was Orson Welles famous film touch of evil in which a corrupt policeman Hank Quinlan is utilizing his corrupt police force to make money from people at the border of Mexico and the United States. The film depends on the idea that this interstitial world between two clear places with clear laws is the most dangerous borderland on earth. There is also the idea that borders are liminal places where new systems can be viewed and new ways of the seeing world can be visited. Unfortunately Quinlin’s little dictatorship of his piece of the world is a dangerous place.
But film noir's don't really end in 1960. The last noir may have been Touch of Evil or Hitchcock’s Psycho but many film noirs existed into the later decades of the twentieth century. Revamped noir of the late century was dubbed neo-noir incorporating younger players, more tech, and corruption of bad government and bad corporations added to the mix of noir topics. Perhaps starting with films like body heat (1980) with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner about a woman that hires a man to kill her husband. Lust and money make a bad mix. David Lynch’s Blue velvet in 1987 starring Kyle McLaughlin, Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern dealt with criminal conspiracies in small town America. Quentin Tarantino’s films including Pulp Fiction reservoir dogs, true romance, and kill bill all feature rotten underbellies of society and a strong and thriving criminal element. Noir is still thriving in feature films, television melodramas and popular police dramas.
Terms
Film Noir: noir was a style of film produced from 1945-60 that focused on criminal activity, fatalism, femme fatales, and interacted with mystery and suspense films. Femme Fatale: A French term describing women of low moral character who bring noir heroes to ruin.
Films:
Houston, John. “The Maltese Falcon.” (1941)
Hitchcock, Alfred. “Psycho.” (1960)
Welles, Orson. “Touch of Evil (1958)
Readings:
Kushins, Jordan. “A Brief History of Sound in Cinema.” https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19566/a-brief-history-of-sound-in- cinema/
Filmsfatale. “Sound History in Film: Early Recording.” https://www.filmsfatale.com/blog/2020/5/26/sound-history-in-film-early-recording
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Cinema 14
Italian neo realism
Italian neorealism was a style connected to the working classes of Italy. It was characterized by realistic storylines in sharp contrast to contrived American melodrama. The lighting was harsh and the filming was mostly in black and white. Italy was a poor country after the war and these films reflected the country’s lack of resources. The acting style was vibrant and denoted reactions taken in a single take. These were films that clearly described post war life in style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class. These films were made largely outdoors Many described conditions in Italy immediately after the war.
Italy was in very difficult position following the war. The country spent half the war as an ally of the axis powers until dictator Mussolini. When things went bad in the war, a mob dragged Mussolini out and killed him, and the new government embraced the allies and the war against Hitler. The allies didn’t know what to do with Italy following the war, and the country had trouble establishing a stable government, law and order and a civil code of behavior.
Neorealism has certain tendencies. (1) Harsh lighting and intense black and white filming. (2) Naturalistic stories relayed the plight of real people, mostly working class types. (3) The films dealt with the tragedy and aftermath of the world war. (4) Strong women dominated these films. (5) The films embraced a harsh and naturalistic realism with Italy’s national pain and character featured prominently. (6) The film were usually filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors. (7) Italians in this period were emotionally scarred by the war and psychologically the films show desperate and depressed people.
Prior to neorealism, there was a period of glossy conventional melodramas that were not very political or related to real life conditions of Italians. This was Mussolini’s answer to the world situation. Turn it off and treat reality as if it does not exist. Mussolini did not want films that questioned reality or social or political ideas. The war and economic hardship in Italy set the stage for social realism in films following the war. Italian Epics: Rome Open City, The Bicycle Thiefs, LaStrada
Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City is a harsh tragedy of Rome’s occupation by German troops at the end of the war when the Germans were being driven out of Western European strongholds. The film depicts a freedom fighter working with the underground to undermine the German occupation. Pina, a widow raising a son and
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seeking a new relationship with Francisco, a young idealist committed to the freedom fighters and the underground. The priest who supports the underground freedom fighters but must pretend neutrality to keep the church from being crushed and to be a guide to the young boys who need moral guidance.
Rossellini tests each character in the crucible of German rule. The Germans are near the end of their reign in Europe and are desperate and merciless in trying to put down the people and their rebellion. They buy off weak coutesians with whiskey and nylons. Most scenes are shot on the actual streets of Rome and many parts of the city were still occupied by German troops when the film was shot. Rossellini was greeted as a patriot and hero for his filming.
Rossellini films most scenes in intense and disturbing closeups bringing the audience into the action. When pina (Anna Magnana) learns her boyfriend Francseco has been picked up by the German police she tries to rescue him and is shot dead by the Germans. When the Germans find the freedom fighter they torture him for hours. Rossellini lingers over the details and shows the torture scenes in detail and focuses on. A blow torch and the face of the dying man. Finally when the priest sees his dead body he cracks and berates the germans. They take him to a field to shoot him but the Italian troops are afraid to kill a priest and shoot at the ground.
The film brutally describes German repression and its intense graphic black and white cinematography evokes the reality of the desperate Italian people, The film was judged a landmark example of a new Italian cinema
Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Victorio De Sica’s 1948 realist work The Bicycle Thieves portrays a young boy and his indigent father who are reduced to stealing bicycles for a living. De Sica uses on the street realism shooting in the dank and burned out ruins of war torn Italy. The actors are mostly real people and non professional actors.
The story is a mythic quest where a father and son hunt for a bicycle. It is a rough parody of the grail quest because for the duo the bicycle means everything. The father needs the bicycle to go to work everyday to hang posters on the walls. Without it he cannot work, he cannot earn money and he cannot provide for his son. The son is faithful and wants his father to succeed. The father hunt fruitlessly through the decimated streets of rome in vain for his stolen bicycle. Not only do they want the bicycle back they want to stop the thieves who are ruining people’s lives. The fruitless search adds to the desperation of the search and the ravaged city landscape makes the film look like some sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy only this time the apocalypse is real.
De Sica obtains beautiful blended performances from the non-professional actors playing boy and father. To add to the metaphor of a journey or a quest the bike company is called Fides (faith in English). The boy and man are in some way on a sacred quest. While there is a theme of social isolation and loneliness amongst the suffering Romans, the film is larger than a simple social tract. These characters are waging war against divine forces. By the film’s end the father is reduced to stealing a bicycle, but again his transgression is almost like a Greek fable and his fall has the sense of a tragic descent through loss of faith. The Bicycle Thieves is a tragic ride through the depths of post war depression and portrays a descent of common people into a mythic underworld.
La Strada (1954)
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Fellini practiced a form of realism that was offset by his interest in surrealism and fantasy. Fellini was a screenwriter for Roberto Rossellini and began directing in the early fifties often from his own scripts. In 1954 he developed a script about the circus and characters existing in that world. He cast his wife, Giuletta Masina and cast her as a young orphaned silent comedian. She meets a new recruit, a circus strong man, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn. The pair strike up a partnership and the exotic world of the circus and its freaks and eccentric personalities counter the hard life of the performers living on the road.
Unlike De Sica and Rossellini’s neo realism, Fellini’s scenario is tinged with a tenderness of youth and remembrance. Fellin worked hard and long on the film arriving at a nervous breakdown. Many attacked the film but it has arrived as one of the greatest films of the century, and Masina’s performance as the winsome Gelsimona. Her adventures with ampano become more depressing as Zampano proves to be a soulness and cruel partner. Eventually, Zampano kills a man and abandons Gelsimona. He later learns the sad clown girl died.
The film reflects Italian society on the run and disoriented searching for a direction. The film also has an atmospheric character that is a mixture of realistic characters in a raw and joyless life, but it is also a mythic film about two characters that are like Narcissus and Echo. Zampano only is out for himself and wants to be the star. He is a Narcissus character. Gelsimona is his echo and reflection. Her departure and death becomes the destruction of Zampano.
Terms
Neo-realism: Neo realism erupted after World War two as an Italian style that wanted to proclaim the truth about the world. The cinematography was glaring black and white and the actors practiced a serious form of direct confrontational acting and strong realistic storylines with actors often improving dialogue.
Surrealism; A form of film derived from surrealist theories that posts the strange and unusual particularly as various dream or psychological states.
Films:
Rossellini, Roberto. “Rome, Open City.” (1945)
De Sica. “The Bicycle Thieves.” (1948)
Felini, Federico. “La Strada.” (1954)
Readings:
Kushins, Jordan. “A Brief History of Sound in Cinema.” https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19566/a-brief-history-of-sound-in- cinema/
Filmsfatale. “Sound History in Film: Early Recording.” https://www.filmsfatale.com/blog/2020/5/26/sound-history-in-film-early-recording
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15 cinema
Bergman and Swedish film
Ingmar Bergman was one of the great directors of the twentieth century. He could be dark and morbid but was often simply stark and revealing. Bergman did not suffer from the Italian need for grim neorealism and often peppered his films with lonings for the infinite and the cosmic. His films were known for slow editing, long takes and slow moving narratives. Much of the understanding of Bergman may be wrong because Bergman liked comedy, humor irony and had a mixed view of people. He did not think that people always behaved well, but he also did not succumb to a pessimism, that the species of mankind was doomed due to our many flaws. Mostly, bergman appears as a philosopher looking out at the universe and seeking evidence of god and dinvine inspiration but finding little evidence of that. His films were widely seen in his own country, in Europe and had a strong following in the United States. Many American and world directors were strongly influenced by his technique and style and though his slow evolving narratives might run counter to Americans’ need for pace and action, there is something of his contemplative spirit lurking the best moments of Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrance Malick, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch’s work. More importantly, Bwrgman was a diverse and complicated director with vast and major periods of film work and intelligent progressions in his work and view of the world. Bergman, Scandal and Summer with Monika (1952)
Bergman was considered an ultra serious and ultra cerebral filmmaker but his career started with skin flicks and attacks on his immoral filmmaking. At the end of World War two the big studios started a long decline and American having tasted war and violence and poverty during the thirties and the forties wanted more graphic entertainment. New theatres opene,d the studios were divested of their theatres and art theatres began to proliferate across the country. Many showed foreign films and this broke the American studios strangle hold on film production. German, French, Japanese, Italian and the films of foreign nations began to flood the market. Low brow exhibitors and distributors were looking for the next big wave in entertainment and they would buy and distribute films they through might appeal to diverse audiences with diverse tastes. Distributors bought films for driveins for the youth market. Motorcycle films, horror films and science fiction were popular with that crowd. The art houses liked more cerebral brainy thoughtful European and Asian films. But there was also a big demand for skin flicks, early films from the mid century that had more nude scenes and more fleshy sex scenes, long prohibited in American cinema by The Hollywood
81
Production code. Enter struggling young Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman. He had finished a romance film entitled Summer with monika starring two handsome young Swedish actors, Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg.The story was.a simple tale of a young couple, Harry and Monika who meet and fall in love. They take a relative’s boat up to Stockholm and spend a romantic summer on the water romancing, dancing, making love and idling away the time. The film showed fleeting scenes of nudity and depicted a socialized society where hard work and labor intensive life was uncommon. The socialist images and the notion of free loving youth upset conservative groups and the nude scenes were horrifying to church and the conservative community. By the end of the film the couple’ relationship fractures, headstrong Monika is having affairs, her husband, Harry, slaps her and she departs for greener pastures. Harry takes the child to have it christen and soldiers on as a single father still remembering the vivacious Monika. The story was simple and the characters mostly naïve and tender. However, when American distributors realized the film had sex and nudity they immediately booked the film into art houses in the US in 1955 and Bergman became an overnight sensation. Monika was an examination of youth, morality, failed marriages and more of critique of Swedish life than a validation of free love, but Monika generated a strong buzz about Bergman and his work.
Bergman’s technique was (1) crystal clear shots in stark black and white film. (2) His use of editing was long shots with a stationary camera in which the characters acted out and emoted within the frame largely still and immobile but generating emotions in a small field. (3) Scenarios were simple and (4) the characters usually underplayed and portrayed subtle emotions. This style befitted the natural demeanor of Swedish people who are generally warm and generous but not terribly demonstrative. Swedish people do not touch profusely, they don’t hug and embrace, and they don’t show outward fury or extreme emotion. It is a matter of their nation al character. Bergman’s films resepcted that tradition and shot people in that manner. (5) the films focused on thoughts and ideas that may be best reflected in contemplative expressions on the characters’ faces. (6) Action, when it arises, and it does arise infrequently but powerfully is often swift and decisive. In Bergman films aren’t normally brutally physical but when they are the effort is powerful. (7) Bergman’s films often arrive at some fundamental philosophical point or issue that the film is trying to suggest or interrogate.
Seventh Seal
While Bergman was accused of pornography with his Monika his following films revealed a far more introspective persona. In Smiles of a Summer night in 1956, Bergman created a comedy loosely based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream where four couple try to work out their romantic woes. In Sweden people to often stay awake during rhe Summer solstice, the shortest night of the year and it is often a time for retreats and re-evalution of life. The film was the source material for Sondheim’s 1973 A Little Night Music and Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). However it was his next film that would establish Bergman’s reputation of as stoic, philosophical and deep. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman discusses bands of people traveling during the middle ages during the time of the Black Death, a horrible disease spread by rats, the Bubonic Plague. Max Von Sydow, an actor that would be bergman’s favorite performer for a decade plays a knight returning to Europe from the crusades. He is stalked by a black figure along the coast of Sweden who calls himself
82
death and is the incarnation of mortality. With some humor the knight offers to paly chess with death to avoid going with him. Here starts a titanic debate about life and death and Bergman delves into where death stands in our lives. Is death a constant presence or simply a one time visitor. Can death be avoided or must pain and anxiety exist side by side with death. In contrast to the dark debate Bergman introduces to a young travelling family of players including an actor father and mother who carry their children in a cart across the land. While many of the characters worry and bemoan their fate and live in fear of death, the players act to live and for the most part give a joyous and loving sense to their life and existence. The knight is impressed by their philosophy and attitude and considering his life mostly over, he toys with death just long enough to make sure the family of players departs and evades death’s clutches. Seventh Seal was hailed as a European breakthrough about life, human dignity and existential dilemmas. From 1957 on Bergman’s films were enshrined in a glowing reverence that has never diminished and grown only stronger over time. He sought other complex and thorny issues. He tackled psychoanalysis and psychiatric issues. He dealt with gult and contrition over a life time. He described the use of artifice and illusion in the theatrical art. He explored duty and obligation in marriage. He played with ideas about memory and family. He explored marriages and long term relationships and obligtions of people to their family and society.
Virgin Spring
Even Bergman was emboldened by his reception abroad and sought to tackle
more varied and complex issues in his films. Many of his films held complex metaphors and one of the best was 1960’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, The Virgin spring. In this short (90 minute) and powerful exploration of crime, guilt, expiation, revenge,religion, and forgiveness Bergman provides a lens for society. In the film set again in the middle ages, a prosperous famer sends his daughter, Karin, to deliver candles to the church,. Parents Tore and Maretta the girl alone may come to harm but they send their pregnant and unwed servant girl, Ingeri along to protect Karin. Alonfg the way the young teenager Karin encounters three seedy travelers. The three men ask her to stop and lunch with them. Karin innocently sits with them and even shres her food. Suddenly she realizes their lusty intent and become frightened and tries to flee. Ingeri, who has lagged behind watches all from a distance but does not become involved to help or harm. The men surround Karin rap her and one hits her over the head killing the girl. Three rapist/thieves leaveher body by a stream and the youngest, merely a little boy along for the travel tries vainly to bury the girl. The three arrive by accident at tore maretta house and beg for shelter. One of the murderers not realizing he is in the house of the girl he has killed offers to sell Karin’s cloak to the mother. The mother prophetically says, “I will speak to the master and see what reward should be paid for such a precious garment.’ She runs to her husband fearing the men have harmed her daughter. Tore undergoes a long night ritual of clensing and scourging his body to take revenge. He bathes in hot water, questions the returned servant girl Ingire and beats his flesh with a birch branch. At first light he withdraws his sword from the crusades and enters the chamber where the three men sleep and murders them all by hand, with sword to the heart, crushing one in wresting in the fire and breaking the little boy b throwing him into a wall and killing him. It is a brutal and powerful act of vengeance. At last Tore and Maretta find the body of Karin and at the stream where she
83
died. Tore not understanding how god could have allowed such an act of violence, he cries to the heavens saying, ‘god I don’t understand you. They life Karin’s head to g=begin the burial process. A stream of fresh water flows where her head laid and the parents take it as a sign from heaven. Tore promises to build a church where his daughter has tied and in some strange way the family achieves some peace with god over the tragedy of their daughter’s death.
Bergman’s films often deal with mythic issues and here the girl Karin’s grail quest ends tragically. Her death invokes rights of revenge and more canage but he result is a deeper understanding of god and a new covenant borne from the conviction that god does not sanction the actions of the wicked but that human action is needed to restore the balance of life. Some have seen Virgin Spring as a metaphor for the senseless carnage of the second world war and the harsh justice of the allies to clean the slate and start Europe anew. In many regards the stark scenes of Virgin spring are some of Bergman’s finest images. When tor learns the men have killed his daughter he goes to a windy plain and wrestles a lone birth tree to the ground causing it to bend and break. Hen he takes his sword to hack its limbs. It is a grand visual statement of Tore’s emotion wrestling with god and divine will. It stands as one of the great symbols of modern European film.
Bergman produced over 50 films and television productions during his 35 year career as a film director. After 1985 he retired from film and spent the next ten years as the national director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, the Swedish national theatre creating classic productions of new and classic dramas. During his life, Bergman was one of the most revered directors in the world both in theatre and film.
Terms
Swedish style: The form of Swedish film is nearly impossible to separate from Bergman’s style. Bergman’s sharp camera work first fro m Gunnar Fischer and later by Sven Nyquest was praised and imitated by nearly all directors across the globe. Bergman’s long takes, complicated philosophical positions and serious approach to subjects were a part of the Swedish tradition. Similarly there is great tenderness and humor in all of Bergman’s works.
Films:
Bergman, Ingar. “Summer with monika” (1952)
Bergman, Ingar. “Seventh Seal” (1957)
Bergman, Ingar. “Virgin Spring.” (1960)
Readings:
Wexler Center for the arts. “Bergman at 100.” https://wexarts.org/film-video/ingmar-bergman- 100?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3bmMkOuO9QIVi8mGCh35CQHDEAAYASAAEgIxo_D_BwE The Bergman Center in Sweden.
https://www.bergmancenter.se/in-english- 2/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3bmMkOuO9QIVi8mGCh35CQHDEAAYAyAAEgJ4nfD_BwE Love, Anthony. “The immortal World of Ingmar Bergman.” New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-immortal-world-of-ingmar-bergman
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15 cinema
Bergman and Swedish film
Ingmar Bergman was one of the great directors of the twentieth century. He could be dark and morbid but was often simply stark and revealing. Bergman did not suffer from the Italian need for grim neorealism and often peppered his films with lonings for the infinite and the cosmic. His films were known for slow editing, long takes and slow moving narratives. Much of the understanding of Bergman may be wrong because Bergman liked comedy, humor irony and had a mixed view of people. He did not think that people always behaved well, but he also did not succumb to a pessimism, that the species of mankind was doomed due to our many flaws. Mostly, bergman appears as a philosopher looking out at the universe and seeking evidence of god and dinvine inspiration but finding little evidence of that. His films were widely seen in his own country, in Europe and had a strong following in the United States. Many American and world directors were strongly influenced by his technique and style and though his slow evolving narratives might run counter to Americans’ need for pace and action, there is something of his contemplative spirit lurking the best moments of Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrance Malick, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch’s work. More importantly, Bwrgman was a diverse and complicated director with vast and major periods of film work and intelligent progressions in his work and view of the world. Bergman, Scandal and Summer with Monika (1952)
Bergman was considered an ultra serious and ultra cerebral filmmaker but his career started with skin flicks and attacks on his immoral filmmaking. At the end of World War two the big studios started a long decline and American having tasted war and violence and poverty during the thirties and the forties wanted more graphic entertainment. New theatres opene,d the studios were divested of their theatres and art theatres began to proliferate across the country. Many showed foreign films and this broke the American studios strangle hold on film production. German, French, Japanese, Italian and the films of foreign nations began to flood the market. Low brow exhibitors and distributors were looking for the next big wave in entertainment and they would buy and distribute films they through might appeal to diverse audiences with diverse tastes. Distributors bought films for driveins for the youth market. Motorcycle films, horror films and science fiction were popular with that crowd. The art houses liked more cerebral brainy thoughtful European and Asian films. But there was also a big demand for skin flicks, early films from the mid century that had more nude scenes and more fleshy sex scenes, long prohibited in American cinema by The Hollywood Production code. Enter struggling young Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman. He had
85
finished a romance film entitled Summer with monika starring two handsome young Swedish actors, Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg.The story was.a simple tale of a young couple, Harry and Monika who meet and fall in love. They take a relative’s boat up to Stockholm and spend a romantic summer on the water romancing, dancing, making love and idling away the time. The film showed fleeting scenes of nudity and depicted a socialized society where hard work and labor intensive life was uncommon. The socialist images and the notion of free loving youth upset conservative groups and the nude scenes were horrifying to church and the conservative community. By the end of the film the couple’ relationship fractures, headstrong Monika is having affairs, her husband, Harry, slaps her and she departs for greener pastures. Harry takes the child to have it christen and soldiers on as a single father still remembering the vivacious Monika. The story was simple and the characters mostly naïve and tender. However, when American distributors realized the film had sex and nudity they immediately booked the film into art houses in the US in 1955 and Bergman became an overnight sensation. Monika was an examination of youth, morality, failed marriages and more of critique of Swedish life than a validation of free love, but Monika generated a strong buzz about Bergman and his work.
Bergman’s technique was (1) crystal clear shots in stark black and white film. (2) His use of editing was long shots with a stationary camera in which the characters acted out and emoted within the frame largely still and immobile but generating emotions in a small field. (3) Scenarios were simple and (4) the characters usually underplayed and portrayed subtle emotions. This style befitted the natural demeanor of Swedish people who are generally warm and generous but not terribly demonstrative. Swedish people do not touch profusely, they don’t hug and embrace, and they don’t show outward fury or extreme emotion. It is a matter of their nation al character. Bergman’s films resepcted that tradition and shot people in that manner. (5) the films focused on thoughts and ideas that may be best reflected in contemplative expressions on the characters’ faces. (6) Action, when it arises, and it does arise infrequently but powerfully is often swift and decisive. In Bergman films aren’t normally brutally physical but when they are the effort is powerful. (7) Bergman’s films often arrive at some fundamental philosophical point or issue that the film is trying to suggest or interrogate.
Seventh Seal
While Bergman was accused of pornography with his Monika his following films revealed a far more introspective persona. In Smiles of a Summer night in 1956, Bergman created a comedy loosely based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream where four couple try to work out their romantic woes. In Sweden people to often stay awake during rhe Summer solstice, the shortest night of the year and it is often a time for retreats and re-evalution of life. The film was the source material for Sondheim’s 1973 A Little Night Music and Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). However it was his next film that would establish Bergman’s reputation of as stoic, philosophical and deep. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman discusses bands of people traveling during the middle ages during the time of the Black Death, a horrible disease spread by rats, the Bubonic Plague. Max Von Sydow, an actor that would be bergman’s favorite performer for a decade plays a knight returning to Europe from the crusades. He is stalked by a black figure along the coast of Sweden who calls himself death and is the incarnation of mortality. With some humor the knight offers to paly
86
chess with death to avoid going with him. Here starts a titanic debate about life and death and Bergman delves into where death stands in our lives. Is death a constant presence or simply a one time visitor. Can death be avoided or must pain and anxiety exist side by side with death. In contrast to the dark debate Bergman introduces to a young travelling family of players including an actor father and mother who carry their children in a cart across the land. While many of the characters worry and bemoan their fate and live in fear of death, the players act to live and for the most part give a joyous and loving sense to their life and existence. The knight is impressed by their philosophy and attitude and considering his life mostly over, he toys with death just long enough to make sure the family of players departs and evades death’s clutches. Seventh Seal was hailed as a European breakthrough about life, human dignity and existential dilemmas. From 1957 on Bergman’s films were enshrined in a glowing reverence that has never diminished and grown only stronger over time. He sought other complex and thorny issues. He tackled psychoanalysis and psychiatric issues. He dealt with gult and contrition over a life time. He described the use of artifice and illusion in the theatrical art. He explored duty and obligation in marriage. He played with ideas about memory and family. He explored marriages and long term relationships and obligtions of people to their family and society.
Virgin Spring
Even Bergman was emboldened by his reception abroad and sought to tackle
more varied and complex issues in his films. Many of his films held complex metaphors and one of the best was 1960’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, The Virgin spring. In this short (90 minute) and powerful exploration of crime, guilt, expiation, revenge,religion, and forgiveness Bergman provides a lens for society. In the film set again in the middle ages, a prosperous famer sends his daughter, Karin, to deliver candles to the church,. Parents Tore and Maretta the girl alone may come to harm but they send their pregnant and unwed servant girl, Ingeri along to protect Karin. Alonfg the way the young teenager Karin encounters three seedy travelers. The three men ask her to stop and lunch with them. Karin innocently sits with them and even shres her food. Suddenly she realizes their lusty intent and become frightened and tries to flee. Ingeri, who has lagged behind watches all from a distance but does not become involved to help or harm. The men surround Karin rap her and one hits her over the head killing the girl. Three rapist/thieves leaveher body by a stream and the youngest, merely a little boy along for the travel tries vainly to bury the girl. The three arrive by accident at tore maretta house and beg for shelter. One of the murderers not realizing he is in the house of the girl he has killed offers to sell Karin’s cloak to the mother. The mother prophetically says, “I will speak to the master and see what reward should be paid for such a precious garment.’ She runs to her husband fearing the men have harmed her daughter. Tore undergoes a long night ritual of clensing and scourging his body to take revenge. He bathes in hot water, questions the returned servant girl Ingire and beats his flesh with a birch branch. At first light he withdraws his sword from the crusades and enters the chamber where the three men sleep and murders them all by hand, with sword to the heart, crushing one in wresting in the fire and breaking the little boy b throwing him into a wall and killing him. It is a brutal and powerful act of vengeance. At last Tore and Maretta find the body of Karin and at the stream where she died. Tore not understanding how god could have allowed such an act of violence, he
87
cries to the heavens saying, ‘god I don’t understand you. They life Karin’s head to g=begin the burial process. A stream of fresh water flows where her head laid and the parents take it as a sign from heaven. Tore promises to build a church where his daughter has tied and in some strange way the family achieves some peace with god over the tragedy of their daughter’s death.
Bergman’s films often deal with mythic issues and here the girl Karin’s grail quest ends tragically. Her death invokes rights of revenge and more canage but he result is a deeper understanding of god and a new covenant borne from the conviction that god does not sanction the actions of the wicked but that human action is needed to restore the balance of life. Some have seen Virgin Spring as a metaphor for the senseless carnage of the second world war and the harsh justice of the allies to clean the slate and start Europe anew. In many regards the stark scenes of Virgin spring are some of Bergman’s finest images. When tor learns the men have killed his daughter he goes to a windy plain and wrestles a lone birth tree to the ground causing it to bend and break. Hen he takes his sword to hack its limbs. It is a grand visual statement of Tore’s emotion wrestling with god and divine will. It stands as one of the great symbols of modern European film.
Bergman produced over 50 films and television productions during his 35 year career as a film director. After 1985 he retired from film and spent the next ten years as the national director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, the Swedish national theatre creating classic productions of new and classic dramas. During his life, Bergman was one of the most revered directors in the world both in theatre and film.
Terms
Swedish style: The form of Swedish film is nearly impossible to separate from Bergman’s style. Bergman’s sharp camera work first fro m Gunnar Fischer and later by Sven Nyquest was praised and imitated by nearly all directors across the globe. Bergman’s long takes, complicated philosophical positions and serious approach to subjects were a part of the Swedish tradition. Similarly there is great tenderness and humor in all of Bergman’s works.
Films:
Bergman, Ingar. “Summer with monika” (1952)
Bergman, Ingar. “Seventh Seal” (1957)
Bergman, Ingar. “Virgin Spring.” (1960)
Readings:
Wexler Center for the arts. “Bergman at 100.” https://wexarts.org/film-video/ingmar-bergman- 100?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3bmMkOuO9QIVi8mGCh35CQHDEAAYASAAEgIxo_D_BwE The Bergman Center in Sweden.
https://www.bergmancenter.se/in-english- 2/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3bmMkOuO9QIVi8mGCh35CQHDEAAYAyAAEgJ4nfD_BwE Love, Anthony. “The immortal World of Ingmar Bergman.” New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-immortal-world-of-ingmar-bergman
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Cinema 18 Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the leading film makers of the twentieth century. Born in 1899 and active until 1980, Hitchcock was responsible mostly for suspense mystery films with a Modern sense of humor and a dark pessimistic view of mankind. He was born in England in 1899 and lived the first 40 years of his life in England and then in 1940 when offered an opportunity to direct for David O Selznick at the Selznick studios, moved to the United states in 1940 and continued to work and live in the United States until his death in 1980. He occasionally returned to England and Europe and produced hit films there (Stage Fright, Frenzy), but he became most famous in the United States for a series of mystery and suspense films that he made from 1940 until his death. His earlier British films are also considered classic films, but weren't as widely known in the United States. He attended Saint Ignatius College in of London School of engineering and navigation and worked mostly as an illustrator and attended the University of London briefly studying art.
Hitchcock was interested in in the growing field of filmmaking and initially in the 1920s actually made title cards and was an art director for a number of films. He worked with the Paramount famous Lasky players in London, with German film companies in London, and finally produced films of his own starting with an Anglo German production called The Pleasure Garden in 1925. He learned about many advanced qualities of film technique from UFA (German) studios. As an assistant director, he gained international insight from the combination of German and British methods of film creation. In 1926 he made his one of his earliest thriller films The Lodger, a story concerning Jack the Ripper that was a breakthrough film, and a good example of Hitchcock’s ability to place the audience in the mind of a villain.
Hitchcock’s plot of an innocent protagonist who's falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue was a key story line of many Hitchcock films. He also constructed many non-verbal scenes, clever gimmicks, elaborate chases, and concepts that tricked an audience’s perceptions. Hitchcock made the jump to sound film in 1929 with Blackmail the story of a woman who stabs an artist to death, after he attempts to seduce her. Hitchcock emphasizes the moment by really focusing on the knife. In 1930 he makes a film entitled Murder which makes an explicit link between sex and violence which is a theme of many of Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock is often the most Freudian and psychological of directors. In many of his films sex and violence or Eros and thantos are mixed together. In Dial M for Murder the husband rouses his wife from bed to attend her own murder, an act that goes horribly wrong for him. In strangers in a train this occurs when two seemingly conventional men meet and discuss swapping
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murders. In rear window this occurs when James Stewart sends girl friend Grace Kelly into mortal danger in an apartment across the street. in Psycho Hitchcock is always interested in the combination of sex and death and how those ideas come together, particularly when Norman Bates meets Marion Crane and begins to feel attracted to her.
In 1934 Hitchcock scored a big British success with his film the man who knew too much a film that he remade in 1955 with American actors. he makes it a suspense film in which there is also an investigation into family matters and family relationships. At the same time, many of Hitchcock's films are based on chases and usually the chases involved an innocent man who was accused of a crime by some criminal organization or by the police themselves. Hitchcock always had a perverse sense of humor injecting terrors into the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps Hitchcock's most popular film of this early period and the first film that showed complete mastery of the genre is his 1935 film The 39 steps starring Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll. In this film an innocent man is accused of a crime, a woman has been stabbed, and then a man is shot in a Music Hall. The protagonist, Richard Haney must find out why he's been accused of the crime, and why people are chasing him. It turns out that there is a criminal conspiracy, an underworld crime and spy ring, called The 39 steps and as he wanders around England being chased by the police and by the spies, he has to figure out where the spies are located, who the spies are, what kind of spying information they're trying to get out of England, and finally how to outwit them. Of course, this film takes place five years before World War Two erupted and suggested that these spies were German agents who were in England at the time. in 1936 he created secret agent and also sabotage. he worked on suspense films in which the audience knows something and was led to believe something, but the audience has gaps in knowledge about the characters and the situation. In the lady vanishes in 1938 Hitchcock sleekly dealt with the idea of a fast paced witty film that kept the audience guessing about a missing person from the beginning to the end. The plot revolves around a woman on a train that suddenly disappears, and her niece tries to find her and determine her fate. Many Hitchcock films developed around Hitchcock’s concept of the McGuffin, an object, secret or person that the hero and villains desperately need.
In 1939 Hitchcock makes Jamaica inn and then moved to the United states working for selznick producing Rebecca in 1940 both of which were novels by Daphne du marier and both were handsomely produced melodramas, but probably not really much too to Hitchcock's liking. In 1940, he set a new pattern in films directing foreign correspondent. Another spy film this film develops the mature Hitchcock style. In 1941 he tackles Suspicion in which a wife is afraid that her husband is trying to kill her. He is and the film starred big actors Joan Fontaine and a young Cary Grant. Grant’s charm and humor and Hitchcock’s droll plots dovetail nicely and their collaboration is warm and their films successful. In 1943 Hitchcock produces one of his masterworks shadow of doubt which he made with the writer Thornton Wilder who had written the classic American drama, our town. This stage writer crafted a story about Middletown America during the war, but Hitchcock used it as an examination of the corruption below the surface in American culture. The story takes place in a small town in the middle of the war in the middle of the country where the people of a tight knit little community are visited by a big city resident, the character of Uncle Charlie. Charlie’s name sake his niece a young girl idealizes her Uncle Charlie. When they find he is coming to visit they
90
are thrilled. But the female Charlie begins to realize that her uncle is not the pleasant older man that she thought he was, but is actually a serial killer who's been killing old women and taking their money, a character known in the press as the Merry Widower, killer. There's a very famous scene in the film in which he talks about older women and describes these fat older women that sit around going to lunch and having beautiful dinners on the money that their husbands made, but they themselves have accomplished nothing and all they do is live in their disgusting houses because they have money. Charlie’s sister smiles and says “well they're alive aren't they?” and Charlie looks at her and grimaces sardonically,”are they?” It's a funny dark film about a murderer and his niece who somehow still cares for her wicked uncle. Hitchcock is really interested in matters of female identity and in notorious in 1946 starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant it's a woman who has been asked to help a federal agent track spies living and working in the United states. She was invited because her family has been accused of being spies themselves. After World War Two Hitchcock did a variety of films that were interesting and experimental including Rope. In Rope, Hitchcock decided that he would make a film in which the length of reels of film would dictate the length of the scenes. A large 35 millimeter panavision camera could carry a reel of film that would last 12 minutes, so Hitchcock composed the entire film out of 12 minute segments in which the actors moved around the stage and conducted their business in 12-minute segments. Rope was also famous because it was the first filming of the Leopold and Loeb case, a very famous criminal case about two young men who murdered another young man because they felt they were superior and they thought they could get away with murder. Hitchcock was really always interested in some debauched idea that he thought would delight an audience.
He played with many ideas from psychoanalysis including in his 1945 film Spellbound starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. It was the story of a psychiatrist treating a man with memory loss. Hitchcock incorporated dream sequences designed by Surrealist artist, Salvador Dali. In the 1950s, Hitchcock became even more famous for crime movies as audiences sought pure entertainment following 20 years of war and depression. The period of film noir was enormously popular with audiences ,and in films like strangers on a train in 1951 Hitchcock used humor to get very perverse ideas past censors. The notion of two men swapping murders was disturbing but Hitchcock handled the crazed idea with humor and amusement. Hitchcock’s brand of macabre humor and the strength of the actors and plots made Hitchcock’s lewd and disturbing films popular with audiences. In strangers on a train a tennis player who wants to divorce his wife bumps into a guy on a train and strangers discuss a strange idea for a murderer. Bruno, the stranger, and the man he bumps into, Guy, a professional tennis player discuss the reason why people get caught in murders. Bruno suggests the problem is motive. He suggests that what if two people who didn't know each other meet on the train, and they decided to do each other's murder, then no one could tie them to the murder. The murder goes crisscross. They would perform a murder for each other. Hitchcock makes the unsavory idea fun with animated performances, clever twists, and a great chase sequence. It is still a disturbing film, but a very funny film because one person is talking about the murder and the other person doesn't take the idea of murder very seriously.
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Hitchcock continued during the 1950s to do a series of films about murder. In 1954 he did dial M for murder in which a man tries to kill his wife, unfortunately for him, unsuccessfully. In 1955, in To catch a thief he deals with a thief who has gone out of practice, but is called back into the game, so that he can catch a thief that is using his his style of thievery to steal things. he is being accused of crimes he didn’t commit, so he has to get involved to protect himself. He did a remake in 1955 of The man too Knew too much and the black comedy also in 1955 the trouble with Harry about a dead body that keeps popping up throughout a town.
During this period he had several masterpieces including rear window in 1954 which deals with the idea of voyeurism, or people who gain pleasure from watching things. The story features a photographer who broke a leg and is stuck in a wheel chair. Bored, he is looking out his apartment window and sees a murder and must prove his neighbor is a murderer. He gets his girlfriend to go over and investigate for him and this brings her into jeopardy with the murderer. In 1958 Hitchcock takes on the creepy idea of the myth of of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the myth Orpheus’ wife Eurydice is bit by a snake and dies. He must go to Hades to retrieve her. Hitchcock’s film regarding reviving the dead was entitled, Vertigo, ostensibly the film is about a guy who's afraid of falling. The psychological implications of loss are discussed and the film is clever but audiences stayed away. It was too cerebral for them. Later it became one of Hitchcock's masterpieces of the era dealing with superficial concerns and deeper psychological themes again exploring death and love or thantos or eros. Then in the late 50s he turned his attention to a more wild melodramas including North by Northwest in which he repeats a lot of the ideas that he used in the film Saboteur from the 1940s.
In 1960 he arrives at Psycho, a creepy little horror movie that became the largest grossing film of Hitchcock's career, and he incorporated the beautiful music of Bernard Herrmann making the film more creepy, darker. It tells the strange story of Marion Crane and Norman Bates and the Bates Motel. Next he embarked on a horror film, the birds in 1963, based on an apocalyptic idea of the world’s end. In 1964 he created a film filled with psychological nuisance and compulsion, concerning a psychotic thief entitled Marnie.
Hitchcock finished the sixties with two lesser films, Torn Curtain and Topaz, both of which were created when audiences were not interested in suspense but in music in Swinging London and the Beatles. He returned to England and to form in his last films. Frenzy in 1972 and family plot in 1976 were both entertaining little films using a variety of character actors.
Throughout he dealt with personal themes with specific themes that haunted him. One disturbing theme was that the people more obsessed by love, also sought death. In Vertigo for example as the hero gets closer to the girl, the girl gets closer to committing suicide. In psycho as the girl is trying to get away from all of her troubles she gets mildly interested in Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates at the hotel and this results in her death. in Marnie Sean Connery falls in love with Marnie but he also wants to control her and capture her, to capture her wickedness. In frenzy the villain of the piece likes to strangle women with his necktie. For him seduction and murder are the same. Finally in family plot there is a theme of dopplegangers of two groups that seem to mirror each other. There is a couple of thieves who were involved in thievery, and there is a couple who are criminal investigators who are both mildly dysfunctional but both are
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determined to find the stolen jewels and win the contest of wills. The film is sort of a couple’s dual. Many of Hitchcock films feature the theme of the wrong man wanted for a crime. North By Northwest, The Man Who Knew too Much, The 39 Steps, and Frenzy are all wrong man themed films. For example in vertigo, James Stewart is accused of letting a woman die although that didn’t happened. In North by Northwest Cary Grant is accused of being a spy. He is not. In to catch a thief Cary Grant is accused of a crime he hasn't committed. He must find the actual criminal to acquit himself. In notorious Ingrid Bergman is accused of being a spy or from a family of spies and she has to spy to save her reputation and the reputation of her family. Certain themes reoccur to Hitchcock throughout his career. Sometimes Hitchcock goes into a very dark place sometimes for humor and sometimes, philosophically just to make a statement. In psycho, killing a major character early in the film makes one question his values about the sanctity of human life. By the end of the film we're not really sure that Hitchcock cares much about who gets killed so long as there's a thrill involved. With family plot he seems to have returned to a normalcy after a period of kind of chaotic and violent films. Today Hitchcock is seen as a great technician, using his ability to focus on pivotal incidents and pivotal objects in a film. One of the techniques that Hitchcock used is the mcguffin. The mcguffin was basically a term made up by Hitchcock which meant an object that the characters in the film needed. A mcguffin by itself has no meaning. it didn’t matter what the mcguffin was. It could be a nuclear bomb it could be a secret formula it could be an object it could be a weapon it could be money it could be any number of things, but it was really simply a mechanism for gaining audience attention through the movie. It helped audiences to know what the characters wanted and why they needed that item. Usually if the mcguffin was strong, for example the woman in the Lady Vanishes. Everyone wants to know what happened to the woman. This usually makes the film strong. If the Mcguffin is weak then usually the film is also weakened.
Hitchcock was a trickster playing with audience perceptions. During Psycho, he refused to allow audience members to enter the theater after the film is started to surprise them with the death of the protagonist of the film unveiling the mystery of the murderer. Hitchcock was always interested in technical challenges in his films. He would have long passages in films like Vertigo where there was no dialogue because he wanted the audience to follow the film with their eye. When he used dialogue he liked clever dialogue and witty dialogue so people would have an interest in the characters because they were funny and unusual. He also was wedded to strong leading men whom he enjoyed working with and he would simply cast certain leading men over and over again. He worked with Ray Milland who was in Dial M for murder and appeared in his television show. He liked Joseph Cotton and worked with in a couple of films shadow of doubt and under Capricorn and he also worked with him in The Alfred Hitchcock Presents series. His favorite actors were Cary Grant and James Stewart and he worked with both of them on four films. Towards the end of his career most of the actors he admired had retired and he was constantly in search of new talent. Hitchcock had certain people that were attractive and delivered good performances. He had a stable cast of female leads, beautiful blonde women in the 1940s through the 1960s. He had cast and worked with Ingrid Bergman repeatedly, and
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in the 1950s he worked with Grace Kelly repeatedly and in the 60s he worked several times with Tippi Hedren.
Actually by 1960s it seems that Hitchcock had moved from female actors to working with male actors more. in 1960 he gets a grand performance from Anthony Perkins in psycho, he gets a brilliant performance from Rod Taylor and the birds, he gets a marvelous performance from Sean Connery in Marnie, he gets a so-so performance in 1966 from Paul Newman in in torn curtain, he gets a memorable performance from from John Forsythe in Topaz in 1969, and he gets a amusing performance from Jon Finch in frenzy in 1972 and a series of splendid performances from the cast of his last film family plot in which he's working with William Devane Karen black Bruce Dern and and Barbara Harris.
Terms
Pure cinema: The notion of pure cinema is the combination of image, music and idea that Hitchcock carefully wove together in films to gain the focus of a scene. The shower scene of psycho or the opening scene from strangers on a train or the climactic scene in Rear Window where Stewart watches Grace Kelly in the house in his view all qualify as moments of pure cinema.
McGuffin: A device Hitchcock used. A device in films that kept the audience interest. Usually the object the criminal or the hero is after in a film (a formula, a person, a valuable object, money, a hostage)
Films:
Hitchcock, Alfred: Strangers on a Train (1951)
Hitchcock, Alfred: Dial M For Murder (1954)
Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho(1960)
Readings:
Ursell, Joe. “The Phenomenal influence of Alfred Hitchcock.” https://www.intofilm.org/news-and-views/articles/hitchcock-feature
Wilson, Bee. “Alfred Hitchcock,from silent film director to inventor of modern horror.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/15/alfred-hitchcock-inventor-modern-horror
Chapter 19
Post war British Cinema
British society was not interested in fighting in world war two, until Hitler’s aggression made the war inevitable. Prime Minister Chamberlain claimed that England would have peace with Hitler and that the dictator’s demands were reasonable. Like much of Europe, England felt that Germany had been overly penalized after World War one with massive payments and reparations bankrupting the German economy. In essence these drastic tendencies to punish Germany led to the rise of ultra-nationalistic parties like the Nazis who claimed they would restore German national pride. What people did not foresee was this nationalistic trend would lead to the rise of the war mongering genocidal Nazi regime.
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Post War
British film was devastated by the war. Throughout the war from 1940-1945 London was mercilessly bombed and thousands of British people died. Many children and young people were exported out of the city to be safe from the bombing. During air raids people hid in churches, and many badly manufactured bombs (made by slave laborer jews and middle Europeans who hated the Nazis) did not explode on impact and London had the bigger problem of unexploded bombs found throughout the city. Many of these devices have been found buried in buildings to this day.
War effort films
Strong British actors like Lawrence Olivier returned to Britain during the war to make hyper patriotic films like Olivier’s stellar version of Henry V the Shakespeare play of the brave British king who fought the French in the hundred years war between England and France. Such films with color and pageantry showed the brave face of the British people during war time.
David Lean
One of the most astounding directors who trumpeted the British way of life was David Lean who produced films from the forties through the eighties and produced epic entertainment that championed British values and a British world view. His Brief Encounter in 1945 was a story of love between two people during war time.
His Great Expectations from 1946 and Oliver Twist from 1948 valorized the history of British people fighting diversity and poverty. Poverty was a big theme in post war British culture. The farms in England were destroyed and crops and fishing were disrupted, food was scarce and was rationed. In the films Great Expectations and Oliver Twist a poor young man must deal with corruption and adversity in an England where corrupt business interests prevailed. The triumph of pip in GE and Twist in OT was a metaphor for the struggles of the British people in the post war era.
In 1957 Lean scored perhaps his biggest successes with the Oscar winning Bridge on the River Kwai showing the bravery of british soldiers against Japanese oppression in the horrific Japanese work camps (death camps) of the WWII conflict. Lean’s tragic war movie illustrates the values of cooperation and hard work even during war time and the film is an aggressive statement against the futility of war. Another Oscar went to loon time favorite Alex Guinness for his brilliant performance as a British commander, twenty years before he played in star wars.
Another notable triumph was the four-hour epic of the great military hero from Britain, T.E. Lawrence, the English cultural attache who organized the Arab tribes into a unified body to fight the Turks for the British. Lean’s epic dealt with ideas of British racism and how Lawrence overcame both British and Arab prejudices to create a fighting force to help win the first world war. Peter O’Toole became a world famous actor, the 70 millimeter cinematography was lavish, and established a world love of desert scenes and middle eastern peoples and their struggles. Maurice Jarre’s notable score reflected the epic scope of its doomed and magnetic hero, perhaps the greatest English hero of the century.
In 1965, Lean journeyed to the cold reaches of Russia for an epic story set in the Russian revolution, Doctor Zhivago. The film was a love story with a backdrop of war and revolution and the idealistic Doctor Zhivago pitted against a pitiless Communist force.
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Lean’s last film, E.M. Forester’s a A Passage to india was about a woman’s journey to India and her engagement with a people that were held captive by the British for over a century. It is a film that suggests the barriers of prejudice and limits of Englishness in a diverse world. Lean was probably the most powerful of the post war mainstream popular filmmakers.
Post war Comedy
The British Ealing Studio made a variety of funny and significant comedies in the post war period. These films gave rise to a zany form of British comedy. The first British comedy to arrive after the war and become a large popular success was Robert Hammers’ film kind hearts and coronets. This film dealt with a maniacal killer who needed to kill everybody in the family line in order to inherit money. The 1949 film featured an enjoyable lead performance from Alec Guinness who played six different characters in the film including several men and several women. British comedy became an international success. In 1951 Charles Creighton produced the Lavender Hill Mob about a doubty bank teller who plans the perfect robbery. Things go horribly awry a chase ensues and most of the money is lost. Comedy arises from the bungling of the thieves. In the same year, 1951 Alexander McKendrick produced the man in the white suit a social comedy about a tailor that produces a suit that never gets dirty. All the other Tailor’s want to kill him because his suit never needs cleaning. Another entry was 1955’s Alexander MacKendrick film, The Lady Killers where a group of thugs are undone by a smart landlady who realizes they are criminals, and reports them. All of these comedies deal with everyday people navigating absurd situations. Alec Guinness moved from comedy to drama with Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai and Star Wars became the central figure in Lady Killers, White Suit and Lavender Hill. Another popular figure was Peter Sellers who excelled at multiple roles. In1960’s The Mouse that Roared the Dutchy of Grand Fenwick is a small impoverished country that decides to wage war against the US to obtain war reparations since the US is famous for helping countries it defeats in war. The US of course refuses to fight a poor defenseless country and surrenders which makes things more complicated. It is an absurd farce and Sellars plays multiple male and female characters. It is a cold war comedy with a subtext in world politics and seeks to top Guiness’ achievement playing multiple characters a decade earlier.
British Horror
In the 1950s the small Hammer studios began a series of horror films that were based on the same mythology that has launched universal studios in the twenties and thirties. None of the characters in Universals court were copyrighted because they were taken from books and articles pre-twentieth century in the public domain. They reinvented the universal monsters in gory technicolor with less campy direction, improved special effects and atmospheric noirish settings. The cycle began with 1957’s Horror of Dracula and 1955’s Curse of Frankenstein. These films were immediately massive hits domestically and in the States. Though they took the same characters from the Universal films and they added Technicolor more blood and beautiful women. The characters were more contemporary and England lacked the American production code so the relationship to Eros and Thantos could be more explicit. Characterization was more sexual and licentious and villains were more contemporary anti-heroes.
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Recognizing the power of the label Hammer assigned a sequel to Horror of Dracul in 1960 to talented Hammer director Terrance Fisher. This 1960 feature entitled Brides of Dracula featured a follower of Dracula, Baron Meister decides that attracts young women to him, seduces them and creates his own vampire cult of followers. Fisher’s hammer films featured a deeply Freudian Dracula who is handsome, attractive young and summons girls like a rock star. There is no work involved in seducing women, they willingly succumb. Further Van Helsing played by the indomitable Peter Cushing (who also played Dr. Frankenstein in the Frankenstein films) immediately established himself as an important adversary as the resourceful doctor and vampire exterminator. More importantly, when Dracula tangles with Van Helsing he perversely bites the strong male on the neck. This suggests homosexuality in the relationship that Dracula has with his community. In another scene Dracula has been chained by his mother to his bed room. When freed Dracula possesses his mother and bite her on the neck it suggests not only vampirism but a carnal lusting relation incestuous relationship to his mother. The Freudian bond is further complicated by Van Helsing’s later relationship with mother now a vampire. Dracula is also served by human female servants who nurture his dead victims and help them emerge from their graves. Finally Dracula is physically able to marshall several helpers to assist him against Van Helsing and Van Helsing saves himself from Dracula’s curse by quick thinking, holy water and a cross shaped windmill.
Hammer quickly found ways to revive werewolves in Curse of the Werewolf starring a very young Oliver Reed and a version of the mummy based on the 1932 version starring Boris Karloff. In this version of the mummy is portrayed by Christopher Lee who along with Cushing becomes a mainstay of the hammer horror films for three decades. By the eighties Hammer had moved to television production.
A British post war new wave cinema
There was a new wave in French cinema and a corresponding new wave in British cinema. After years of deprivation with food rationing antiquated appliances, poor housing and few jobs, the film industry responded with a crop of dark brooding realist works showing the hardships of life in post war England. One of the first new wave cinema works was Jack Clayton’s cynical 1959 classic Room at the top. Lawrence Harvey plays a British heel who wants to move up in society and is willing to sleep with any woman who can provide benefits for him. He finds an unhappily married middle aged /French woman, Simone Signoret, and she is attracted to him. However over time he realizes that there is more money to be made by wooing the boss’ daughter so he leaves the girlfriend that has befriended him for a younger woman who can provide more advancement. In the end of this moral fable, his destitute girlfriend Simone Signoret is tragically killed and he goes off to a marriage to a woman he does not love for money status and an escape from poverty. These films all face the reality that working class people could never rise to the stature of wealthy British people. Class systems in the UK, bound people to a class for life. In 1960 Karel Reisz created a monumental study of working class discontent entitled Saturday night and Sunday morning. This film featured a very young Albert Finney as a young factory worker who sleeps with his best friend’s wife, eventually is found out and beaten by his friend’s military thug friends. The film portrays the hardships of life for working class people. The only thing the work poor had were weekend drunks and bouts of infidelity, little
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agency for a life of hardship and backbreaking work. Finney was often effective as the heel and by the mid-sixties graduated to the costume epic tom Jones in which he plays a libindinous English adventurer. In 1974 he was Oscar nominated as Hercule Peirrot in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
In A taste of Honey in 1961 Rita Tushingham plays a young lonely girl who had an affair with a Black American solider and her subsequent pregnancy ostracizes her from society. Her only friend, a gay youth helps and supports her through the ordeal, the American father long gone. She faces the prospect of finding no love and no support for a mixed-race child and mother in sixties England. Tony Richardson directed this 1961 essay on prejudice and loneliness for the working class. His following film dug deeper into class values. This film entitled The loneliness of the long distance runner dealt with a Bristol boy who also happened to be an expert runner. The film’s hero, colin was from a family of pick pockets and thieves. They learned to run quickly because the whole family were chased by police throughout their careers. Colin is a Borstel boy because he has been sent the famous boy’s reformatory, Borstal. In the film a young Tom Courtney portrays the boy who is a student at Borstal and still maintains a connection to gangs, theft and larceny and is only surrounded by cheap girls and seedy friends who continually push him to more acts of larceny. The cops have it out for him but for some reason the headmaster played by Michael Redgrave takes a liking to colin and nurtures him, not because he likes the boy or really wants to help him but because he hopes the boy can win the cross country race for the school against an interschool play off between reformatory track teams. Colin is an excellent runner and he is flattered and confused by the attention his non-criminal activity gains for him. The master promises him an apprenticeship and a tickey out of Borstal for his help and Colin is swayed by the offer. He realizes early on in the pivotal race at the film’s climax that he can beat the opposing runners but he has to consider will he sell out his class and criminal dna for a chance to move o=up into the middle class and a position as an apprentice. Colin’s decision is the mirror of British society in the sixties when change and opportunity were in the air. He chooses the last seconds of the race to make his stand and determine where he will be in the future. Will he be a pawn of big wig or his own rebellious self? The film is a great study of social realism in England in the sixties.
In 1963 this sporting life by Lindsey Anderson cast Richard Harris as a young soccer player who realizes that his only way out of poverty is by being a sports hero and it changes him into a callous person who cares nothing for his mates, nothing for his teammates, and nothing for his girlfriend. He becomes a more callous person who is successful with the sport but he’s sold his soul for money and pretty society.
British film revealed holes in society in the early 1960s. However these films developed their own vocabulary of tricks and ideas. They showed a new style of quick camera work, black-and-white gritty filming, jump cuts, interesting editing choices, partial dialogue, improvisation, acted scenes from British life including new style musicals created by British directors that featured emerging pop groups of the sixties.
Amongst the notable and influential hits was Richard Lester’s very famous breakthrough new wave movie A Hard days Night featuring the Beatles 1964. The film was a breakthrough for various reasons. First, the Beatles wrote great music and were naturals as young comedians in the film. Second the scenario was grand and dialogue by Alun Jones featured a day in the life of a group of British musicians from the
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emerging British new wave music of the 1960s. Thirdly Richard Lester who had previously directed commercials realized that he could use the same qualities that he brought to commercial filming to make a fiction film. he determined that he could create an entire new style of musical. It is difficult to imagine that Lester and the Beatles created literally the new style of musicals that would later become MTV (1981) marketing a whole new bright style of pop music. In 1964,the Beatles in a hard days night transformed the British musical into a new style of performance in which natural acting, music and playing music became a natural part of life for young British people. British spectacle emerged from Lester and the Beatles vision of swinging London,
in the mid to late 1960s Guy Hamilton emerged with the epic sweep of Goldfinger which propelled Sean Connery and the James Bond series to a worldwide phenomenon. This style continues until the present day. Spy films and swinging London dominated the sixties. Despite the hipster epics, the vein of British social realist films continued. In 1966, Lewis Gilbert delivered Alfie starring Michael Caine as a sour London heel who only supports his massive ego at the expense of the women around him. The prior year Caine became the second major British spy character in a series of spy films based on Len Deighton’s hard knocks spy films about a working class spy, Harry Palmer. The Ipress File and Funeral in Berlin were major hits for a world market hungry for violent spy stories during the cold war. Unlike the James Bond films, these were filled with grim scenes of a still suffering post world war two Europe in which the rebuilding of institutions had stalled and poverty and corruption ravaged many corners of the new Europe. Here, there was no sense that spies were heroes but rather government workers given the dirty job of cleaning society’s messes. In the films Caine’s Palmer is a cold-blooded killer who serves the state to enforce the laws of Britain and to avoid the collapse of a British culture with the influenced by the Soviets and Russian culture.
By the middle of the decade many British films are sex farces (What’s New Pussycat ) and social dramas. One of the new breed of socially conscious kitchen sink dramas was Georgy Girl in 1966.. The kitchen sink dramas were so called because they revolved around average people with average jobs and many of the main conversations and debates of the films were carried on in the doubty kitchens and unattractive apartments of middle class people living humdrum dull lives with dull working class jobs in factories or shops. In Georgy Girl, a young woman is pursued by two men, Joe the husband of her best friend and flatmate, Meredith and an older man, leamington, an older married man who employer to her family. He even proposes a contract to make Georgy his mistress, a less than romantic proposal. In the end, Joe rejects his responsibilities and runs, and Leamington’s wife dies and he proposes to Georgy. She takes up Leamington’s stable offer of marriage, and secures a future for Meredith’s child whom she has adopted. It is a film of the average girl, chubby and largely unloved, finding a measure of happiness in a miserable society.
English films begin a trend towards historical films that glorify English history and literature, a spectacular veneration of a nation’s past glories. These films pave the way for the institutionalization of British historical drama in the television series Masterpiece theatre that begins in the seventies. Films like Lean’s Dr. Zhivago (1965), Zinneman’s A Man for all Seasons (1966)(the biography of British intellectual and politician, Sir Thomas More) and John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) from a
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Victorian epic novel set in the 1870s rural England set the stage for British historical films of the next fifty years. In Schelesinger’s Crowd, Bethsheba inherits land and decides to manage herself but makes a series of romantic missteps including rejecting the love of shepherd Gabriel, marrying a troubled a neighbor who winds up working for her, marrying a troubled cavalry officer who was engaged to another woman and flirting with a rich local landowner. Most of her romantic plans go awry and she winds up with Gabriel where she hammers out a tough but workable relationship.
Late sixties faire including a musical adaptation of Oliver Twist by noted filmmaker Carol Reed, and Cy Enfield’s Zulu that copes with the issue of British colonization of Africa and the response of subject people that rise up against the British forces. For the British this is a contest between British military authority and unruly indigenous people, not a story of brave subject people fighting for their freedom. Finally D H Lawrence’s Women in Love by Ken Russell tells the story of rising feminism amongst women in the nineteenth century and the response of their suitors. In the seventies British film turns to crime with films including the caper film, the Italian job (Michael Caine) Get Carter (again with Michael Caine) and important social films like Sunday bloody Sunday that discuss characters who are well adjusted successful and either gay or bi-sexual. In Sunday bloody Sunday, an artist has an affair with a woman and a gay man and has to decide who or what he is and desires. England’s economy crashes in the seventies, and in 1971 Stanley Kubrick directed one of his most interesting films about British culture A Clockwork Orange based on the Anthony Burgess novel about a future society where juvenile delinquents use drugs and violence to relieve their boredom. Criminal dialogue is based on Russian slang words suggesting the growing influence of Russian culture in the west. Alex, the film’s protagonist is the subject of the society’s draconian experiments at reforming wayward youth and is ultimately cured of his anti-social tendencies, sort of. In the mid-seventies Fred Zinneman delivers the dark crime novel Day of the Jackyl which expertly follows a contract killer through the steps of a big syndicate deal to murder French President Charles DeGaul. It is a spectacular form of suspenseful crime drama. Edward Fox stars as a hired contract killer who is paid a fortune to murder the top leader.
Terms
Kitchen sink drama:a style of drama popular in England in the fifties and sixties reflecting the lives of middle class people in which many debates occur around the kitchen, the center of domestic life
Social realism: A form of drama framed around prosaic everyday experiences of common people. A drama concerned with the struggles of working class people
Films:
Schlesinger, John. “Sunday, bloody Sunday.” (1971)
Schlesinger, John. “Far From the Madding Crowd.” (1967)
Richardson, Tony. “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” (1962)
Readings:
Bedford, tom. “The history of British cinema.” https://www.filminquiry.com/history-british- cinema-1-rise-studio-film/
Calhoun, David. “the 100 best British movies.” https://www.timeout.com/london/film/100- best-british-films
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Cinema 21 French new wave
French new wave cinema began in the 1950s and was a modern form of movie making that was popularized by journals from France. French new wave cinema has been deeply influential in American film in the last 50 years strongly influencing the work of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Alejandro Gonzalez in Innuratu. The French new wave originated in the 1950s due to the influence of the magazine cashiers de cinema . This magazine illustrated the interest in a new style of film based on the work of classic film makers that young film critics in France in the post war years found to be valuable but were largely underrated by the cinema establishment. Amongst the film makers they lauded were Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Jean Renoir. This style of new film was referred to in French as the Nouvelle Vague. (the new style).
Characteristics of this new form of filmmaking included (1) avoiding conventional narrative that had been practiced in film since the beginning of the 20th century and (2) reducing the importance of narrative. These mostly young film makers used (3) improvisation, (4) existential storytelling technique and (5) new techniques of editing and cutting films together to (6) create a lively sensation of real life. The work of these young critics and film makers transformed the industry of film and led the way to the years of (7) auteurs and young independent film makers that arose in the 1960s and 70s and are still felt today. Most of the French film makers felt that the studio system of Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s was very contrived filmmaking and they wanted freedom not allowed to film makers by the studios to create films to a different model. The French felt that the old Hollywood films with easy to follow narratives we're too unconscious and did not demand enough of the audience. Their plan was to create a style of film that would demand more of an audience and engage the audience more fully.
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The French new wave also began with film critic Andre Bazin who created cashier's du cinema, and made it a popular and influential publication. This magazine employed young film makers and critics including Jean Luc Goddard, Francois Truffaut Eric Rohmer, and others that wanted to make films through a more creative process. The members of this group of cinema aesthetes believed they had the skills to create a new style of cinema, and they wanted to exert full control over a new style of films. One of the theories that controlled their filmmaking was the auteur theory, or the author theory. It claimed that there was one universal controlling mind behind the creation of all films and that whoever that person was became the author or auteur of the film. They did not agree that film production was a joint group enterprise but believed in the theory that one individual controlled the making and shaping a film. Despite the auteur theory many films made by the new wave directors did have a group communal creation format. Rohmer was especially fond of getting a group together and working on the scenario as a group. The French critics saw from their experience of covering classic films the influence of an auteur or a guiding intellect. Usually this person was the director or the writer. They identified the work of individual film makers and the individual styles they promoted as being distinctively different than the work of the studios that could be very routine and deprive the work of any nuance or individuality.
For example today the Disney Studios exhibit tight control over their products. Disney animations depend on princesses, Pixar family-friendly works, or Marvel superhero movies the fall under very tightly controlled templates. This was exactly the limitations the new wave producers wished to avoid. They wanted to use the auteur theory to break free of that tight autocratic style that they had seen in American films. The members of the auteur theory group at cashier's do cinema firmly believed that auteurs controlled every part of the film and that people like Renoir, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford were clever individual artists separate from the studio system.
After publishing their ideas in the magazine and writing about these theories the young writers cinemaphiles, and aesthetes took action pushing their ideas into the real world using very small budgets and unknown actors. They determined to enact their theories by creating small films that utilized ideas of auteurism. Because they had small budgets they used outdoor lighting, simple sets, unknown actors, and a very raw style This natural lighting and sound became mainstays of the new French new wave style and influenced American films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Late sixties experimental American film owes a large debt to the innovations suggested by French filmmakers.
The French new wave style was a complex style. Reverberations of this style are still being felt in the way new young film makers construct films. The new wave still contrasts with studio style. three characteristics define that that French new wave style. (1) First these film makers rejected the ideas of the style of the studio. They rejected the control imposed by studios over their work. They did not use the large money of the studio system. They did not like the tight control of autocratic producers in the studio system, and they did not have the complicated distribution system that made the large studios incredibly profitable and depended upon mass audiences. This group of film makers made their films for a small select audience of people like themselves, cinema philes, aesthetes, professors, and people that concentrated on the aesthetics and art of
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film, rather than purely the entertainment value of film. Thus the films of the French new wave looked incredibly different from the kind of films that Hollywood had been producing.
The directors of the French new wave would use cheap handheld cameras. They would record sound on location. They would use natural lighting and natural locations. There would be very little extreme cutting done. At the time the film was produced takes would be long. Actors would improvise in a scene. The films would have a very natural look unlike the controlled contrived films made by the studio era.
(2)A second characteristic was that new wave films tended to depart from strong narrative traditions. Where Hollywood films followed very strong narratives with very strong scripts, often times the scripts for French new wave films might just be an outline, and actors would be free to improvise around the script to create dialogue on the fly. People in Hollywood films might become complacent while watching them, because they would know where the film started and where the film was going. But in the French new wave films there was always the sense of danger that the film could depart from a strong narrative into some structure that the filmmaker thought was important. They rejected the well thought out scenario of Hollywood and strongly embraced the audience’s ability to be involved with the film and the actors and the concept of improvisation. A way of doing this was to use jump cuts, and actors directly addressing the audience to remind viewers they were watching a film. They rejected the idea of the strongly scripted films created in Hollywood.
(3) A third aspect of French new wave film was the idea of expressing extremely complex ideas to an audience where in films of the Hollywood studio era ideas would be compressed and simplified so that audiences would have a simpler time of watching the film. In the French new wave films ideas about existentialism, ideas about philosophy, ideals about ideas, ideas about consumerism, socialism, politics, life, or religion might be expressed in a very direct way expecting the audience to confront complicated difficult ideas in life. Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s tended to compress ideas, to simplify ideas, and not to make audiences face ideas that might be difficult or painful for the audience to embrace or accept.
There are many good examples of the new wave cinema. Some of them directly from the French with some of them influenced by films made by the French that arrived at a later time. Some of the most important films that came out of this style were the 400 blows in 1959 directed by the young Francois Truffaut. This is a film about childhood and coming of age. In 1960 there was Jean-Luc Godard famous film breathless in which jean-paul belmondo plays a minor criminal in France who is channeling the ideas and the lifestyle of a modern day Humphrey Bogart character.
One of the popular French films of the sixties, Un homme et una femme (a man and a woman) (1966) was a simple love story of two people meeting and falling in love. However many aspects of this popular film were influenced by new wave style. There are jump cuts that are jarring. There is common and outdoor filming in natural locations. There is a cinema verité feel to many of the scenes of race car driving that seem to mirror a documentary style. The love scenes are warm and tender and largely improvised. Dialogue is spare and some of it is made up on the spot. Director Claude LeLouche allowed his actors the freedom to improvise and be successful as common everyday people.
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French new wave movies become more and more eccentric and individual, like 1974’s weird little film, Celine and Julie go boating. This is a film about two women that meet in a park Celine drops a magic book in front of Julie who is sitting on a park bench reading a book. The women chase each other around the city for a while and end up living together in the same apartment. Then they begin to dream an adventure in which they are thrust into a house where there is a little girl who is alternately murdered and reanimated. Every time the girls entered the house they are occasionally ejected from the house. The story begins again. Finally the women realize they are not just members of the cast of the story, but that they themselves can become authors of the story and change the outcome of the story. The film is a meta-film questioning the value and power of narrative. At one point they actually rescued the girl from the house and bring her into their modern world in 1974, and they have realized that they have the power to re-author the story the way they want to do so. At the end of the film, they are in the park and they are traveling on a boat. they see other people from the story of the murdered girl flying by them in another boat, and they realize that these are simply symbols from the story that they have retold. At the end of the film Julia sitting on a park bench and Celine comes by and drops her magic book again.
French new wave films can be challenging, but highly rewarding. In many French new wave films there is an opportunity for the audience to become involved in the narrative. These films are more open and less planned than traditional studio films from the United states where conventional formats guide and lull audiences into a state of stupor. French new wave films of the fifties, sixties, and seventies encouraged audiences to engage with the material, allow for a more open format, provided the author or authors of the film with license to make the film novel and new, and did not provide convenient conventional formats for audiences. People watching such films have to keep thinking their way through the film. The French new wave style has influenced contemporary filmmakers For example Richard Lester in 1964 created a hard day's night with a very controlling powerful script like a Hollywood film of the studio era but the filming style including a lot of jump cuts and varieties of improvisation borrowed heavily from the French new wave style. Films of the nineties onwards from Quentin Tarantino in American films also have strong scripts and strong directorial control. But there are also elements of improvisation in Quentin Tarantino's films that mirror the efforts and ideas of the French new wave film makers of the mid-century. Terms
Jump cuts: Jump cuts are jumps in editing that expect audiences to leap mentally from one scene to the next.
Auteur theory: auteur theory argues there is one strong controlli ng mind behind every film. This theory was promoted by the magazine Cahier du cinema and the American critic Andrew Sarris in the American magazine, The Village Voice.
Films:
Goddard, Jean Luc. “Breathless” (1959)
Truffaut, Francoise. “Jules and Jim” (1961)
Rohmer, Eric. “The Green Ray.” (1986)
Readings:
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Hitchman, Simon. “French New Wave. Where to Start/”
http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to- start.shtml
Maio, Alyssa. “French New Wave films.” https://www.filminquiry.com/history-british- cinema-1-rise-studio-film/
22 Cinema
Kurosawa and Japanese cinema Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
Kurosawa was possibly the most important Japanese director of the twentieth century. His films exploited both Japanese and Western values and he pioneered a strong style of Japanese samurai films and a sort of east meets west Japanese western or action film.
Rashomon (1950)
Kurosawa’s first big international hit was based on two folk tales, In a grove and the story, Rashomon. It is a philosophical murder mystery told and reflected by a buddhist monk, a wood cutter and a common peasant. They sit in a burned out Buddhist temple during a rain storm recounting a murder trial they witnessed earlier in the day. They are puzzled. The witnesses describe the events in flashback. What was known was that a tough thief was nabbed for a murder of a samurai and attempted rape of his wife. Those are the only facts we know. The story is first recounted by the thief that has
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been caught. He is a tough customer and he is played by Toshiro Mufune who becomes a popular and influential Japanese actor. He tells the tale as a conquest and reassertion of his manhood. He likes the girl, kills her husband she runs away. The second version is by the widowed wife. She claims she is a victim of male power. The thief and the husband were both mean to her. She tried to kill herself but failed. The third tale is told by the ghost of the dead samurai channeled by a local witch. He claims he committed suicide out of disgust with everyone’s behavior. The fourth tale is by the woodsman who saw it all as a an eyewitness from the woods. He claims both men were cowards, were afraid to fight and the wife was worthless. No one in the end knows the whole truth and everyone makes up stories to justify themselves. The film was so popular there was a term coined the Rashomon effect that described a situation where the truth was relative to person telling the story. The film ends with the finding of an orphaned baby which the woodsman promises to raise and to be a better person, news that reassures the monk there are still good people in the world. Rashomon is still the thinking man’s mystery many all-time classics."
Seven Samurai (1953)
Here seven powerful samurai without masters agree to band together to protect a village from bandits. Along the way most of them die but their honorable sacrifice makes them noble and justified warriors loved by the children of the town. Remade in the United States as the Magnificent Seven the film is a great example of the group aesthetic and the need for powerful indomitable heroes.
Ikuru (1954)
Ikuru is a different sort of film and a brilliant social drama. Ikuru tells the story of an accountant and civil servant who pushed paper all day and does no good. He learns he is dying of cancer and fights to build a children’s park in the city before he dies. He walks to the park after it is completed sits in a child’s wing and swings. He is found dead in the cold snow the next morning. The men he worked with all become emotional and cry during a ceremony in his honor. It is a warm and charming story of Japanese people and the sense of community.
Hidden fortress (1958)
Hidden fortress tells the story of a tough Japnese princess held captive by an evil warlord. Two lowly servants try to rescue her to no avail but they align themselves wit ha rogue samurai, (Toshiro mufune) and with his help they are ableto brak into the castle where she is held captive and rescue her. The princess doesn’t need much help and arrives as a fully developed female hero in her own right. This folk tale was translated into George Lucas’ Star Wars twenty years later.
Terms
East meets West: Curiously, Kurosawa films blend eastern and western aesthetics and many of hi samurai films resemble American westerns.
Music: In Kurosawa’s films a blend of western music and Japanese traditional music was used. This created an interesting blend of western and eastern aesthetics.
Action sequences: Kurosawa pioneered action sequences in which frantic movement was paralleled with stillness and calm control.
Films:
Kurosawa, Akira. Rashomon (1950)
Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samuai (1953)
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Kurosawa, Akira. Hidden Fortress (1958)
Readings:
Audie Bock, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Directors (St. James Press, 1994) pp 550-51
Fred Shimizu, Directory of World Cinema: Japan (Intellect Books, 2010) pp 31-33 Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 2003) pp 255-56, 422-24
Cinema 23
Seventies; The Myths of American Life on Film
Genres and myths of American life become popular again in the sixties and seventies. There were major changes in three areas:
o Film Industry o Technology o Content
Changes in Film Industry included the blockbuster mentality. Films could not simply break even or make a little money. Studios wanted continual massive hits. It was not sufficient for films to make back the investment of money and time, films had to provide big revenue to companies and their investors. This created more pressure on the industry. Many techniques emerged to increase revenue. Some ideas were marketing ideas like sequels. If you make films similar they should be successful. Another aspect of growing revnue was to use new tevhnology like dolby sound to attract people to
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theatres and to make the home market enjoy the entertainment on home screens. Some of the techniques used to increase revenue included:
The sequel
The Dolby soundtrack
The videocassette, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray
The direct-to-video release
The camcorder
The computer and
The “all-powerful talent agent” (585).
They all meshed together to encourage a milieu that started developing a new film product. There
Were science fiction spectacles by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and others. There were creepy ironic directors like David Lynch, political fables by Spike Lee, and these kinds of film persist unto the present day. The Seventies changes film marketing and style: Star Wars made science fiction popular for kids and these became Disneyesque space operas. Disney even bought Lucas’ Star Wars franchise to capitalize. New films began to resemble morning serials of the 1940s. Sequels were used to enhance revenue, in other words, the same product was resold. The terms for films that keep returning are franchises. In 2021 we had the return of spiderman with the eight spiderman movie, this time copying the ideas from animated Spiderverse cartoon film several years ago. Films like Hunger Games, Transformers, Twilight, Harry Potter, Jaws and others depend on franchises to provide revenue for studios. This began when Universal released Jaws in 1975 in the summer scaring people out of the water and into the theatre. This film ushered in an era of blockbuster thrillersChanges in Technology changed how films were viewed and heard. Dolby noise reduction improved the quality of sound. Dolby SVA soundtracks gave the audiences more intense listening experiences both in the theatre and later on home stereo systems. You might have forgotten the film, but the soundtrack could still be played to remind audiences of every moment in the film.Steadicams were used to improve picture quality.Enhanced images contributed to the magic of Forrest Gump and the special effects of merging different time periods in the film. This same trick of merging footage from different eras was successful in putting actor Woody Allen into different eras in the comedy science fiction pseudo-documentary, Zelig. Into the nineties the pace of technological change increased. In The Matrix there was the use of stop motion photography and the new digital images referred to as bullet time because faster shooting timing of 60 to 100 to 1000 frames per second could give the effect of stopping g time or stopping bulllets in motion. By the millennium theatres had mastered digital projection and could show films with a digital copy on a hard drive and no longer needed to rely on mechanical film projectors where moving parts or film could break and delay a show.
Many changes erupted in the Hollywood business climate including a drive for technological films because technology based films like Jurassic Park’s photo realistic dinosaurs were thrilling and novel to audiences. They had never seen anything that big and real appearing before. Also with the dolby sound systems the thunderous sound of the dinosaurs feet were astoundingly real, like listening to thunder from a movie theatre.But apart from technological films there were changes in Hollywood deals.
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Business films were greenlit after a few meetings. If producers could secure bankable stars, directors and successful idea or attach a team to a franchise marketers believed such films were immune to failure. These predictions were not always foolproof. George Lucas’ much lauded return to directing Star Wars in 1998’s The Phantom Menace was universally panned as a poor movie in the series, but audiences hungry for star wars came to see it despite the negative press. Atill sometimes audiences negate fer shure projects. For example in the period between 2015-2020 many Marvel films that previous were part of a successful franchise series floundered despite positive reviews. Audiences simply were immune to the same thrills repeatedly. Howeer many films have succeeded despite negative press because famous names were attached to the property. Also several film connected to formerly popular television programs became successful as film projects simply because audiences already knew the shows and went out of loyalty or nostalgia appeal. A peanuts movie, a simpsons movie and a South Park movie all benefited from name recognition and loyal audiences who had seen the properties on television.
Changes in Content
Seventies-Eighties Archetypes arrived that helped to transform film. For example
films featuring Supermen: Big strong invulnerable guys that reminded men of how men used to be revered were popular in the era of the seventies and eighties. Films such as Superman, Rambo, Dirty Harry, Terminator were all successful in that time period. After the chaos and damage from the poor economy in the seventies, slasher films featuring unstoppable demonic killers that nothing can destroy were fashionable with anti hero murderers like Jason, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers.
Cop Films like Heat, Serpico, French Connection made cops movie heroes for a generation. This was ironic given that sixties hippies denied cops, called them pigs and feared authority figures with badges and guns. Some of the popular movie heroes came from films like Lethal Weapon, Dirty Harry, and actors like AlPacino (Serpico, Godfather, Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon0 and Robert , DeNiro (Casino, goodfellas, The Irishmen, the godfather, Taxi Driver).
Genres were revived and revered and audiences flocked to new genres. Monster films like Jaws, Alien, Jurassic Park were box office success and audiences thrilled to see people chased by big scary monsters. There was a vogue for Teen Movies, and many were produced yt producer director John Hughes including Sixteen Candles,Footloose, Dirty Dancing, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Risky Business, and Home Alone.Heroes though young seemed more grown up and cynical. Pop heroes were filled with irony including Forrest Gump, Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and Hans Solo), and anti-hero losers like Ed Wood. Some of the biggest franchises that arrived fron seventies through the nineties included Lucas and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park films. There have been four Indiana Jones films with a fifth on the way for 2022, nine Star Wars movies and spin offs and cartoons, and five Jurassic Park movies with cartoons and spin offs arriving yearly.
Spielberg and Lucas birthed a new generation of clever young directors. Some of the New offbeat directors included John Carpenter, David Lynch, Tim Burton, John Waters, Jim Jarmusch
John Badham who directed Dracula, Saturday Night Fever, Blue Thunder, and War Games with young stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. War Games was an
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important film for being one of the First big computer game movies, for bringing Paranoia about nuclear war, and for providing Action-adventure for the eighties generation and for being a film that aped the Spielbergian style of production and editing.
New Comedy
New forms of comedy emerged from cynicism and ironic perspectives. The Coen brothers produced bloody crime movies and more winsome comedies in the eighties onward with films like Blood Simple; O, Brother, Where Art Thou? The Big Lewbowski and Fargo, Spielberg’s protégé and an arch conservative filmmaker Robert Zemekis produced Back to the Future with a white Marty McFly teaching Chuck erry hot play guitar and duck walk, Forrest Gump with Gump never criticizing he Vietnam war, and Flight with a pilot that saves a plane full of people going to jail. Ivan Reitman produced Ghostbusters, Dave, Stripes, and Evolution.
Another new genre was intensely violent films reflecting the outbreak of mass violence in the U. s. including assassination, daily mass shootings, violence at schools and even insurrections at our capital. Ironically, despite wild high profile acts of violence in film, the rate of real violence declined in society from the seventies to the millennium, but on film it wildly escalated. There were films by Oliver Stone (JFK, Doors, Natural Born Killers), Michael Cimino (Deerhunter, Year of the Dragon) Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Inglorious Bastards, The Hateful Eight)John Sayles (Roan Inish, Secaucus Seven,Lone Star, Matewan) James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Abyss, Titanic).
There were also fillmakers who became known for their versatility and skill in action and drama including Hong Kong’s John Woo (Broken Arrow, MI2, Face Off, The Killers), Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, Ice Storm, The Hulk), the team of Merchant and Ivory (Remains of the Day, Room with a View, Howard’s End) and the versatile Ridley Scott (Alien, The Guccis, Gladiator, Hannibal,
Black Hawk Down, Matchstick men, GI Jane, the Martian). From the seventies forward, Hollywood was streaming content at a furious pace.
Important things to know about the United States in the 1970s and beyond
In the 1970s, there were three commercial television channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC; there was also PBS, the public broadcasting system. This situation allowed a great deal of unity among the citizens. Why? They were all watching the same things on television, the sitcoms, the dramas, but most of all, the news.
Recent disunity is caused to a great extent by the fact that now we do not all hear or read the same story; therefore, we don’t all tell the same story. Now we get our news from media that target a certain demographic, leaving everyone else to find their own story from a different source, which is also targeting a certain demographic.
But disunity was also happening in the 1970s: violent protests against the war in Vietnam, women’s struggle for equal rights, and corruption and the disgrace it caused led a president to resign rather than be impeached.In the 1970s, three major events happened in or to the United States:
awar
a struggle for equality
a national scandal
The War
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Our young men were being sent to the other side of the world to kill or be killed.Protests against the war in Vietnam were mounting, and continuing through the 1970s; veterans returning from Vietnam organized as Vietnam Veterans Against the War and agitated for an end to the conflict. American citizens were bitterly divided over the war, and much of the division was based on the fact that most of the young soldiers sent there were from poor families and families of color; they had no political power, wealth, or influence to keep them safe. Those who did enjoy those assets included George W. Bush, who, as a member of the Texas Air National Guard, and was assigned to run a political campaign as his military duty; William Jefferson Clinton, who was studying overseas as a Rhodes scholar; and Donald J. Trump, whose doctor got him a deferment from the military draft
because he had bone spurs on his heels. Ironically two of the only politicians who served valiantly, John Kerry who was wounded decorated and saved men’s lives in Vietnam, and John McCain who flew bomber missions in Vietnam, was captured and tortured for years during the war, were both soundly defeated by men who either never served or never fought in the war. Such ironies illustrate America’s complicated vision of such wars which greatly impacted our films and memory of such wars.
Students whose grade point average fell below a certain level lost their draft deferments and were shipped to Vietnam. The average age of these soldiers was nineteen.
The Vietnamese War was also unpopular because the United States was not fighting to protect itself, but to keep the communist Soviet Union from taking over the country of South Vietnam.
Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred, and twenty (58,220) young Americans died there for this cause, and those who returned are still feeling effects of the war; for example, the use of Agent Orange to defoliate the forests of Vietnam poisoned many Americans slowly, and some are still dying from its effects.
Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the communist North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975, and Americans fled Vietnam, taking as many Vietnamese allies as they could fit into their planes and helicopters.
Those Vietnamese nationals who had aided the American effort would be killed or “re-educated” under the communist leader Ho Chi Minh, and they tried to get at least their children on the planes and helicopters.
The U. S. embassy in Saigon was the last point of departure: U. S. military helicopters landed on the roof of the building, crowded in as many bodies as they could, and flew them out to waiting U. S. aircraft carriers.
When the carriers’ decks became too crowded with human bodies for the helicopters to land, empty helicopters which were out of fuel were pushed into the ocean to make way for the incoming helicopters.
The passion, discord, and insanity of these events are captured in a poem by David Wojahn:
“It's Only Rock and Roll, but I Like It”: The Fall of Saigon
The guttural stammer of the chopper blades
Raising arabesques of dust, tearing leaves
From the orange trees lining the Embassy compound;
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One chopper left, and a CBS cameraman leans From inside its door, exploiting the artful Mayhem. Somewhere a radio blares the Stones, "I like it, like it, yes indeed..." Carts full
Of files blaze in the yard. Flak-jacketed marines
Gunpoint the crowd away. The overloaded chopper strains
And blunders from the roof. An ice-cream-suited
Saigonese drops his briefcase; both hands
Now cling to the airborne skis. The camera gets
It all: the marine leaning out the copter bay,
His fists beating time. Then the hands giving way."
The passion, discord, and insanity of these events are also depicted in Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
The Struggle for Equality
Women were struggling for equal treatment at home and in the workplace. The Women’s Lib movement (as it was called) of the late 1960s and 1970s was the second feminist movement, and it succeeded in raising the awareness of many Americans that women had not gained full citizenship. Even though the women activists in the 1970s pushed through an Equal Rights Amendment that had been first introduced in 1923, it was not ratified by enough states and so failed. Its failure “reflected a history of both female participation in politics and exclusion from power” (De Hart 217).
Enthusiasm for women’s rights soon led to several strong female political candidates for national office: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm made a bid for the Presidency in 1972, and in 1984 Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was nominated by a major political party as its candidate for Vice President of the United States. Beginning in July 2009, the Equal Rights Amendment has been reintroduced in the House of Representatives every year, until now it needs ratification by only one more state to become law.
Women’s struggles for equal rights are shown in a couple of films as examples: Nine to Five (1980), directed by Colin Higgins, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), directed by Martin Scorsese.
The National Scandal
A national scandal at the highest levels: an impeachment proceeding resulted in the resignation of a president before he could be tried by the Senate. His resignation itself resulted in the installation of a man in the office of President of the United States who was never elected, but chosen by the disgraced president, Richard M. Nixon.
Thus Gerald R. Ford, handpicked by Nixon to replace Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew (who had resigned in disgrace over his own illicit deeds), moved up to the Presidency. And immediately issued a blanket pardon of Nixon.
All the President’s Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula, depicts the events leading up to Nixon’s resignation.
Important things to know about films and filmmakers in the 1970s
Because the studio system disintegrated in the 1960s, there came the first generation of filmmakers who hadn’t come through the system or via theatre, novels, or television; instead they had learned film as film. Raised on watching movies on TV from an early age, they had learned their craft at film school.
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Coppola went to UCLA, Lucas and Milius to USC, Scorsese to NYU and De Palma to Columbia. Spielberg created his own movie curriculum by making his own films, which were both technically proficient and steeped in film lore. These directors’ movies are full of allusions to other films, Hitchcock (De Palma), Kurosawa (Milius) and Walt Disney (Spielberg).
Big movies came back, and the ideas of the way we live were presented as
myths
Jaws (1975, directed by Steven Spielberg)
The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)
American Graffiti (1973, directed by George Lucas)
Science fiction movies were popular, as evidenced by
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, directed by Stanley Spielberg)
Star Wars (1977+, directed by George Lucas)
Star Wars became a franchise, with nine separate but connected films in the sequence.
T erms
Disunity: American society begins to fragment in the seventies reaching a zenith of divided thinking at the insurrection in Washington in 2020.Sadly Americans can no longer agree on basic facts so making films for multiple voices becomes more complicated.
Films:
Stone, Oliver. JFK. (1991)
Zemeckis, Robert. Back to the Future (1985)
Eastwood, Clint. Sudden Impact (1984)
Readings:
Apocalypse Now. Film clip. Dir. Francis Ford Coppolla. Paramount Pictures,1979. Youtube. youtube.com/ watch?v=Bs9X6NkJDBY.
Glatzer, Robert. Beyond Popcorn: A Critic’s Guide to Looking at Films. Spokane:Eastern Washington UP, 2001.
Green, Willow. “Movie Movements That Defined Cinema: The Movie Brats.” Empire onLine. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/ features/movie-brats-movie-era/ Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Mast, Gerald, and Bruce F. Kawin. A Short History of the Movies. 11th edition. Boston:Longman, 2011.
Steinberg, Randy. "Theatrical Films." Encyclopedia of International Media andCommunications, Donald Johnston, Elsevier Science & Technology, 1st edition, 2003. Credo Reference.
Trailers
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), dir. Martin Scorsese. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf08x-Sk59Y (2:30) Ellen Burstyn.
Nine to Five (1980), dir. Colin Higgins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= PVKTZ4CEM90 (2:16) Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin.
All the President’s Men (1976), dir. Alan J. Pakula. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DC3YFyah_Yg (2:51) Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman.
in these films, including
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), dir. Stanley Kubrick. https://www.youtube.com/ watch? v=oR e9y-bka0 (2:30) Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter.
Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IkrhkUeDCdQ (3:48) Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford.
Star Wars (1976), dir. George Lucas. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XHk5kCIiGoM (2:01) Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness.
Cinema 26 The 60s
The 60 something important time of transition in American film many Americans it stops going to the movies and started watching the new medium of television they’ve been around 10 years but has begun to rival film with his complex camera shots good Scripps young actors and really bring out new ways of telling a story much like cereal TV in the millennial. Has taken all three stations like AMC and Netflix to create long cereal longer films in the 1960s the 1960s challenge the output of Hollywood Hollywood not respond well to television in fact most of the major studios refuse to make a films for television and only reluctantly in the 1960s did film studios begin to partner with television stations to create a film that could be shown in both mediums many of the experiments crossing over from television to film created interesting hybrids in the two forms and some of the most interesting films in the 1960s use the television form to grade a fact and some of the of the 1960s use the television form to great effect many of these films in the 1960s again illustrate that society has changed that Madison Avenue in advertising has change the way we think and that we will be quickly becoming a consumer culture so of the films that took off in the 1960s here are some of the most popular ones that really had an impact.
The apartment (1960)
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The apartment from 1960 directed by Billy Wilder in written by Wilder and his his writer AL diamond created a really scathing portrait of American culture in the early 60s in the same way British films in the era had illustrated the problems in British society in the 1950s and the 1960s with his class conscious conscious style and society in the film generally a well-known and nice guy in films Frederick Murray plays a classic he’ll in the film there are three pathetic characters there is Jack Lemmon who is functioning as it is as minor role in a large company his corporate boss played by Fred Meyer brewery and Shirley McClain who is a rising actress the time who plays a lowly office girl who is a pine for the men’s affections in the film Jack Lemmon to court favor with his boss offered to loan his apartment to his boss on certain days of the week his boss played by his boss played by McMurray is a married man who is having an affair with Shirley McClain who is an office girl who falls madly in love with the older Fred McMurray Jack women at first feels no compulsion about loaning his apartment for his boss to use during the week to have a rendezvous with his lady love but overtime lemon character falls in love with the girl himself which creates complications for all the film deals the film deals with the issues of corporatism in America and how large businesses and large corporate raiders can have authority and power over peoples lives the individuals don’t have. The film is a lovely description of all the working class people in the hands of a very nasty old are more entitled people who are farther up on the food chain of American society the apartment is a great indictment of American culture and the disparity between the working class and the corporate leaders society it also illustrates that the corporate leaders of society are not better people just people with more entitlement and more money.
Psycho (1960)
Perhaps not seen as revolutionary at the time Alfred Hitchcock psycho from 1960 is probably one of the most revolutionary films of all time and certainly one of the most revolutionary films of the 1960s Hitchcock wanted to make a cheap horror film to cash in on the trend towards cheap horror films that were being shown in drive-ins and making millions of dollars for cheap exploited directors his studio Paramont did not want him to make a cheap horror film because he was a classic Director of classic Hollywood and he knew how to make really beautiful films Hitchcock did not see himself as part of the value system of upper class society and wanted to make films that were entertaining to all segments of society and that’s why he wanted to make a cheap horror film like psycho he chose the story of Ed Gein who was a important serial killer of the 1950s and his keys in Kansas and made headlines across the country distracted horror writer Robert block to write a novel about the egg in case entitled psycho about the the corrupted Norman Bates and his weird relationship with his mother Paramount objected to Hitchcock wishing to make a horror movie on such a lonely scale and simply refuse to back such a film. Hitchcock was insistent that he could make a great horror film and whatever budget he was given and he had already been directing a television show the Alford Hitchcock presents show for the last five years since 1955 a show that was a massive head and only can only ended after 10 years because he grew tired of doing hedge was not detoured from doing the film of his choice he had always been able to do really what he wanted in Hollywood he just had to find a means to do it so he prompted paramount his company to allow him to make the film if he would put up all of the money for the film Hitchcock actually mortgage his home in Beverly Hills to afford to be
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able to make the film he agreed to a very limited budget of $500,000 he agreed to ship the film in six weeks and he agreed to shoot the film he agreed to shoot the film using his television crew from his television show and he shot the entire film in black-and- white in six weeks using fairly unknown actors the largest actors in the cast were Janet Leigh who played the lead in the film and and a young up-and-coming actor Anthony Perkins who played the young and creepy Norman Bates. The film was shrouded in secrecy Hitchcock was worried that he was going to lose everything if the film was not successful Heist Hitchcock shrouded the film in secrecy and made sure that nobody told anything about the film while they were making it he used a special publicity campaign that said the film would be stronger than secrecy and that no one would be admitted to the film after the film began so that no one could give away the ending so this became a real cause célèbre for a lot of people watching the film that wanted to go see with the special secret film that Hitchcock it made was going to be like in the film Hitchcock also had the surprise of having the star of the film Janet Lee kill killed off in the first half of the film nobody knew the surprises that Hitchcock intended and nobody expected the graphic violence that Hitchcock provided in the film including a frightening shower see sequence and a frightening sequence inside the bathroom open till psycho there had never been a bathroom sequence really filmed in American film before so Hitchcock was striding into new territory with every sequence for psycho when the film arrived Hitchcock demanded that nobody allowed to be allowed in the film after the film after the film had begun the film was a smashing success and audiences around the world thrilled to Hitchcock psycho Hitchcock also made a deal with you Wasserman who was his age as a time and was also getting involved with universal studios a small studio that was in a growth phase Hitchcock it generally received a specific payment for a film but he made a new deal for the distribution of of psycho he agreed to pay all the cost for the film himself upfront and all Paramont had to deal with Hitchcock and Paramount like the arrangement because the studio didn’t have to pay any cost for the film Hitchcock paid all costs and then made all revenue off the film and then his agent Lew Wasserman a secured a deal with Hitchcock where he could obtain money for the film in stock in Universal and the Stock in Universal was growing at a rapid rate and Hitchcock became a very wealthy man immediately after he took stock instead of payment for a psycho universal by the mid-60s had become a major corporate after the success of Hitchcock of psycho Hitchcock never had to work again and basically psycho paid for all of the rest of the films that he would make during the decade and Hitchcock became so wealthy from the stockade purchase three universal they split many times that he didn’t really feel I need to work much after 1970 and only made a couple of films because he felt like making the films but frankly because he become so wealthy through the start of the universal it really change the way films were made in in the late 60s. West Side Story (1961)
Another influential head of the 1960s was west side story directed by by Robert wise who had been the engineer for a citizen Kane in 1941 W. side story was in the style of musical that included people in the downtown area of New York with warren gangs of Puerto Rican and white street gangs fighting for territory in the town. The film was based on Leonard Bernstein’s story that played on Broadway which was a music which was a musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet only featuring street gangs in the New York environment during the early 1960s when social unrest was brewing because more
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immigrants were moving into United States especially from Caribbean countries from Europe from Asia from South America and this social realism of the film really struck a chord with a lot of Americans who realize that a lot of Americans today were coming from different parts of the world than previously been seen before West side story was especially a big hit for young audiences who saw themselves and their diversity reflected in the film and the music was new and novel and featured a new style of American music that was much cheaper and was derived from jazz and Pop sounds unlike musicals in the 1940s and 50s that were conventional pop music.
Dr. no (1962)
In 1962 Terrence young directed one of the major hits in the 1960s the start of the big spike race it was a film entitled doctor know and was based on a novel by by Ian Fleming that starred a young Sean Connery an up-and-coming Scottish actor who had really not been in any major films before but it had the parts in a series of smaller movies that had debuted in the late 50s and early 60s immediately Sean Connery became the embodiment of influence the embodiment of Ian Fleming’s James Bond with his smooth ways with spies and his indomitable ways with women and his unflappable Waze with dangerous criminals the James Bond films might become bigger and better and better attended but Doctor No really set the template for all the James Bond films that were to follow they were action Epix about diabolical villains powerful superhero kind of characters and a strong strong melodrama
8 and 1⁄2 (1963)
International cinema was really becoming popular with American audiences and one of the big hits that was a worldwide hit from Italy and there are a lot of them Italian films that were becoming popular films in the 1950s and 60s was it filmed by Federico Fellini about the movie business itself and a movie Director play it played by Marcello Mastrianni the film was entitled 8 1⁄2 and it dealt with the idea of how film directors and Italians in Rome lead their lives during the profitable 60s when the film community in 8 1⁄2 Fellini shows a society in which everybody is in love with filmmaking and filmmakers and the filmmakers are living in a decadent society in which love sex bones drugs are common place in every day life. What the film wants to show is this horrible wife is an important part of Italian society but it’s not the only thing to live for that society must have deeper values and really wanted to make the point that filmmaking is a lot of fantasy and that yeah people get very involved in their fantasy life when they really should be involved in their day-to-day life with the people they love and the people that are interested in their life and being real people as opposed to movie stars making false artificial films
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Stanley Kubrick’s 19 64 fours comedy Dr. Strangelove deals with the idea of nuclear annihilation through a mistaken command that a American plane go to Moscow and blowing up Kubrick this did not believe in the idea of nuclear war and did not think it was something to be worried about and made the film a comedy there had been a number of films about the dangers of nuclear war. In the 1950s Roger Corman and other directors and made a variety of films about about the dangers of nuclear radiation specifically in Rodger Corbins world without end which is a cheap and low budget science-fiction film which talks about life after the nuclear apocalypse in which people have been turned into zombies and in mutants by the nuclear radiation although
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Coremans films were laughing at the time a lot of people took the idea of nuclear annihilation seriously in 1959 Stanley Kramer produced one of his political Epix film called on the beach based on a popular novel by Neville shoot at the time on the beach deals with the story of the apocalypse of of the world coming to an end because there has already been a nuclear war and when nuclear sub basically reaches harbor in Australia and all the people they are just waiting for the tradewinds to carry nuclear radiation to Australian kill everyone who’s left on earth it’s a very dark and sobering film. In 1960 for sitting with me made a very serious film about nuclear war entitled failsafe in which buying electrical error a group of farmers in the strategic air command from the United States are given a mistake in mission to fly to Moscow in Bonn Moscow Laplatte avail safe is very dark in that the president must figure out how to deal with the political crisis of a plane that is mistakenly given the order to blow up Moscow what the president decides to do in the film is one of the most faithful moments in all films in the 1960s he tells the Russian ambassador if one plane gets ruined bombs I will send an American plane to blow up New York and of course that’s exactly what happens at the end of the film and it’s a very frightening film but Stanley Kubrick did not see the idea of nuclear war is frightening he saw this comical and then the film Dr. Strangelove he has the character played by Peter Sellers play the president ate a British lieutenant and even Dr. Strangelove in the film and then his multiple roles in the film Peter Sellers excels at making fun of the concept of nuclear war the film is a parity of what would happen if an American plane was sent to Russia to launch a nuclear attack and even at the end of the film slim Pickens who plays the commander of the American playing can’t get the bombs are dropped so in the end he has to jump on the bomb himself and write it down into Moscow himself to actually caused the nuclear Armageddon. Although it’s a funny film it’s also a very silly film but it also makes you think about the issue of nuclear war and how nuclear work affect the entire world
A hard Day’s night (1964)
What are the most impressive musicals in the 1960s is a hard days night featuring the Beatles it is a film that was created very quickly after the Beatles appeared on and celebrate in February 1964 the producers of the film wanted to cash in on the group quickly because nobody thought the Beatles would last so they wanted to film out quickly assuming the Beatles might have a six month lifespan well of course the film was put together in March and April and the script is written in the film began production in May and was released literally April and was literally released in June 1964 so the entire film from idea to filming to editing to actual released to theaters took Wesson six months and was a remarkable success for all involved the Beatles were natural comedians and were very very funny in the film the script was very good and gave the Beatles some very funny biting lines where they could make fun of their working class origins and talk about working class structure in England that the Beatles in Millie Lynn through and The Beatles literally the Beatles had the opportunity to play themselves a group of four working class musicians who were working in the British music industry at a time when British music was taking off in the world audience. The work of Richard last year the Director was exceptional in which he included in the film examples of his cinema style that he learned directing commercials in England he put the Beatles in jump cuts he used a rapid fire style editing he used a close-up shots he was black and
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white film he use jump in musicals of the 1940s and 50s people with simply burn burst in the song inappropriately in the Beatles a hard days night the Beatles were literally sing like they were a rock group singing a song on TV or in rehearsal getting ready to perform in a live performance so everything in the film seems like a natural relationship to the actual environment the Beatles were in and the film still makes enormous sense the audiences that watch it and understand the Beatles are a group of working musicians playing songs they are working on for the film as they’re filming the film Good Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The good the bad and the ugly from 1966 was the third of a trilogy of films created by Italian directors Surgi surgery Sergio Leone and the only light making Italian films that were modeled on American westerns but with of course some of the elements of the Italian cinema the 1960s longshots major vistas many of these films were shot in Spain Clint Eastwood who have been in American television star from Rawhide became an international hero in these films starting with a fist full starting with a fist full of dollars a few dollars more and finally the epic the good the bad and the ugly a three hour western epic from the 1966 era and featuring a lively performance from Clint Eastwood and beautiful camerawork and marvelous iconic directions from Sergio the only the Director of the film. The film was popular with young audiences who liked the ideas of the American western translated into in Italian and Internet idiom.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde produced by Robert town the writer and author pan the Director and actor Warren Beatty in 1967 was a brand new style of film created from the ideas of the French new wave town and pan used our jump cuts in the film that didn’t really make sense the way old-fashioned American films used cutting but we’re completely essential to the rhythm and the methods of Bonnie and cried. Bonnie and Clyde in real life for two 1930s outlaws who were disturbingly our universe disturbing the wall is people who eventually were assassinated by the police who were afraid of them and were afraid that they were rallying the people to their cars because of the depression and because of of prohibition a lot of Americans did not like their government and rebelled against the government and sided with criminals in the 1920s and 30s. Al Kapone al Kapone was considered the fuck hero to a lot of Americans in Bonnie and Clyde with they’re wicked ways were also considered a heroic young people to a lot of Americans. But the film also doubt with criminal Association of beautiful people and Bonnie and Clyde played by Warren Beatty and fade Dunaway in the movie or two very young people who have a glamorous luck and many ways in the film we are told not to hate them but I love them because they are beautiful and they are rebuilding they are rebelling against a society that is old and decadent and what Bonnie and Clyde stand for is the ruthlessness and lawlessness of youth and in the film we get to see a lot of Bonnie and Clyde including their sexual dysfunction cry doesn’t seem to really be terribly sexually attracted to Bonnie and therefore they’re there romance is blunted in more ways than one Robert town writing the script influenced by influenced by the French new wave provides very very little dialogue to cover the deeper issues the film such as sexual dysfunction and such as lawlessness and how it plays a role in American society however the film has enormous Lee graphic visual effects including up to that time the longest on on stage shoot out using gunfire of any film either. Warren Beatty becomes an action star because of the film and they done away becomes a
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overnight success the film also makes stars in Estelle Parsons who wins an Oscar for best supporting female actress and Gene Hackman who plays Clyde Barrow’s tomb older brother but borrow it is a riveting and disturbing film filled with violence film with gun play and film with a wicked sense of humor about the depression about how American society sees poverty and wealth.
In the Heat of the night (1967)
Norman Jewison since 1967 racial prejudice film in the heat of the night deals with a Philadelphia African-American policeman played by Sidney Poitier who confronts a southern racist sheriff played by Rod Steiger in a drama that deals with prejudice against people of color in the south while the two women are trying to solve a murder case it is one of the earliest films to feature an app it is really early films to feature an African-American as a leading performer Sydney Poitier had rocketed to fame in 1963 as the star boys in the field about an African-American laborer who helps a group of German nuns in the Arizona desert create a church he had continued his success with a series of films and this was the first film in which he directly dealt with the issue of racial prejudice in the south plane opposite a white character who is clearly a victim a victim of his own prejudices.
The Producers (1967)
Also in 1967 Mel Brooks has his first major success as a Director with a little film called the producers a comedy about a very warped subject and the producers a group of Broadway producers decide to make a film the day to make a play that they think will be a sure fire loser the goal is that they will have so much insurance on the play that the play will be sure to make money for them even even after the play falls the subject a pic to assure that the play will be a massive failure is a comedy about Adolf Hitler the play is entitled Springtime for Hitler in Germany and they’re even songs entitled Springtime for Hitler in Germany and the idea is that the play will be so offensive to audiences in New York many of whom of course would’ve either remembered World War II might be Jewish might have lost family members in the holocaust that everyone will find them that audiences will find a place so abominable that the play will close overnight despite their best efforts to craft a losing play the producers here played by Gene Wilder a great comedy actor of the 60s 70s and 80s and zero Mostel who has been a great comedy actor in the 50s 60s and 70s discover that despite their best efforts to make a loser play the play has become a massive six the play success creates all kinds of problems for the producers because of course they don’t want to glorify the reign of Hitler and the horrors that he perpetrated on the world and of course they don’t want to profit from a play about Hitler but their entire scheme was to craft a play that would lose money and now they are discovering they have crafted a play that will probably make the money the play is very funny and the film of the players very funny the producers is a very odd film in there as a the Prius is a very odd film is it is there is a film about a group of Broadway producers trying to produce a play and then later in the 1990s the film of the presence is remade into an actual play on Broadway and actually becomes a popular head play on Broadway in the 90s and then of course for things to go full circle the film of the play version of the producers is produced in the early millennium. So so literally the producers deals with the eye deals with the idea of a film about the making of a play that becomes a play about the making of a play there is then translated finally into a film about the making of a play again.
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Planet of the Apes (1968)
1968 science-fiction films began to become popular again and planet of the apes based on a novel by pure boredom who had written also bridge in the River Kwai was produced by Anthony Schaeffer and the film illustrates a group of astronauts they have crash Landing on the planet that is run by a group of apes what they don’t realize is that their own society over the years has evolved into a structure in which eighths of the dominant species and humans are inferior species species the film portrays the problems of humans and apes getting along and is it in Leavelle reference two the political struggles of the civil rights movement in the mid 60s if you think about it in 1968 the United States was on fire with race riots across the nation Martin Luther King had been associated and Robert Kennedy was assassin is not long afterwards America was filled with violent acts and there was no way that Americans could live in peace and harmony in that environment.
2001 (1968)
1968 also gave us another science-fiction film that was revolutionary Stanley Kubrick’s 1968S a space opera lavishly produced in photographs of 2001 a space Odyssey based on a short story by RTC Cork who was a science fiction writer who is deeply invested in the realities of science. In the film the astronauts on board a mission to Jupiter realize realize that their computer how he’s not acting properly and he’s becoming a sentient being and wants to make decisions without the interference of humans in the film the idea of the singularity is is discussed and the concept of perhaps an alien species helping humans or helping the the human race on earth to become sentient thinking beans is explored in complex and thrilling ways there a long passages of beautiful movements in wow large parts of 2001 a space Odyssey are simply a space opera or a journey or a travel log through space the film is also an interesting investigation of man’s destiny in the future and how men will utilize space travel as a way to evolve the human species and the film is long but very beautiful to watch.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The other major film about prejudice in 1968 is George Romero’s low budget $150,000 film production of the living dead shot in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Romero wanted to talk about the racial divide in Pittsburgh where the north side was all African- American people on the southside was all white people and he use the metaphor zombies to do a great job of describing the problem. The film as one of the very first films to have a black protagonist and certainly one of the first films they have a black protagonist in a horror film the hero of the film survives the night and protects the girl from the zombies and realizes that he save them from the fate of being eaten eaten by zombies in the morning sees farmers with shotguns finishing up the zombies he runs out to tell them that he save the girl and protected everybody and in the end they shoot him and kill him so the film is really a thinly veiled metaphor about racial disharmony in the 1960s
Easy rider (1969)
Easy Rider is one of the pivotal films of 1969 and jobs with a two motorcycle riding guys who want to avoid the structures of living in a town environment or living under the laws of provincial small people in small towns played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper the characters of easy Rider are simply freewheeling Americans who
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want to be left alone to pursue their own course of action along the way they pick up a lawyer played by Jack played by jack Nicholson who also wants to be a free wheeling American and along the way they made violent police and violent other gangs who are hostile to their free loving free riding ways eventually Nicholson is killed the performances by finder Hopper and Nicholson or emblematic of the new style of youth oriented American film motorcycle films films about the American frontier and films about American lifestyles that is a color cultural film directed by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda Young people who identified with music and identified with the free wheeling lifestyle of people riding motorcycles as a way of life who is a part of the new style of film that was dealing with an alternative American lifestyles counter cultural lifestyles music youth culture bike riders and people that didn’t fit comfortably in the categories in American culture and signaled the birth of the counter culture is a real alternative lifestyle in American culture in the 1960s and 70s.
Cinema 24 Technological cinema
The end of the Millennium
The years from 1988 until 2000 were years of relative calm in American society. President George H. W. Bush was a far more moderate republican than his predecessor Ronald Reagan and President Clinton had the largest surplus and reduction in American debt during the century. Unemployment was low and the economy strong and no foreign wars haunted the country. Progress seemed to be occurring in race relations and the Soviet union collapsed, the Berlin Wall was torn down, Berlin and Germany were reunited, Isrealis and Arabs looked ready to sign a peace accord over the Palestinian territories and Clinton sent George Mitchell to hammer out a deal to fix fighting in Northern Ireland. American foreign policy was successful, welfare had been replaced by workfare and poorer Americans had seen real wages rise for the first time in over a quarter of a century. By all accounts thins were looking up.
Technological film. JFK
Borrowing cues from the French new wave Oliver Stone produced a controversial film revisiting the Kennedy assassination nearly thirty years after it occurred. With a star
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studded cast, Stone questioned the official record of the Kennedy assassination and suggested a barrage of theories of who really killed the president. The film used rapid MTV editing, a theis and anti thesis format to probe the results of the investigation and dynamic leads from Kevin Costner, Joe Pesci and Sissy Spacek. The film fueled renewed speculation about the honesty of the American government and was wildly entertaining.
Silence of the Lambs
Owing to tour de force performances by British veteran Anthony Hopkins, Scott glenn and Jodie Foster, Joanthan demme’s Silence of the lambs single handedly rebirthed slasher thriller films. A few years later Demme would do one of the first features about the AIDS crisis, Philadelphia, about a young victim of the AID crisis and his treatment by the legal system starring Tom Hanks.
Terminator II
James Cameron followed his action spectaculars Terminator and Aliens with Terminator two, a sequel that used many new technological improvements in computer generated film and ushered in tech heavy science fiction films. Cameron followed with the Abyss, True Lies and Titanic having a superb run of hits during the decade. Cameron was an early advocate of more tech and his films had a strong visual sheen, if progressively empty acting and plots.
Jurassic Park
Based on Michael Chrichton’s science fiction novel Spielberg’s Jurassic park wedded chaos theory, genetic manipulation, dinosaurs, paleontology with econlogical messages about the value of all life including animal life to the planet’s survival. The film also featured impressive improved sound with thunderous Tyrannosaurus that surpassed anything previously committed to the screen. Spielberg delivered a knockout set of action sequences with intelligent dinosaurs, plotting acting in tandem and opening doors. Now cgi characters had sentience. The films pace, lively script, charming performers, and clever conclusion mesmerized audiences.
Forrest Gump
Despite director Robert Zemekis’ determinedly conservative view of 50 years of American history (Gump never criticizes Vietnam, Gump serves loyally and quietly, penny and the black panthers and or anyone who criticizes American foreign policy either dies as a rebel or dies of aids or is a drug user, Gump’s only political pronouncement is that’ stuff happens’ or ‘life is like a box of chocolates.’ American achievements are seen only as progressive and good. There is no criticism of prejudice or other aspects of society), the fable and fairy tale of Forrest gump is a pleasant departure for American film towards magical realism. Gump magically loses his leg braces and learns to walk. Despite his limited IQ he becomes a hero a leader and an avatar. The film provides a winsome if vastly untrue portrait of mid 20th century culture. It also uses technology successfully 9like woody allen’s Zelig to merge characters from the past and present into a common place.
Toy Story
Part of Disney’s efforts to dominate and monopolize the film industry and implant the Disneyfication of American culture into the minds of all, working with Steve Jobs, Pixar, and animator John Lassiter, Disney produces the first feature length cartoon film using fully computer capability to make clever, sophisticated and joyful characters in
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woody and Buzz lightyear. Toy Story was the first film fully created digitally and it spelled the eventual demise of physical mechanical film culture. At a time when most computers might not even possess a gig of full memory, Lassiter and his crew linked together hundreds of computers to create the power needed to process 90 minutes of digital animation. The film was a massive success, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs, and secured him so much positive press that his old company, apple hired him back and he created the revamped company that still is one of the most successful firms in America’s technological history. Toy Story lauched toy story two that was an early example of digital distribution of film and birthed an era of Disney Pixar production that stretch to this day.
Run lola run
1998 was an eventful year for tech in film. Tom Twyker’s run Lola run was 90 minutes of watching Fram Potenke run scream and emote her way through a blazing philosophical action film utilizing the Hegalian dialectic. Lola works by threes. Fist she attempts, then she revises her plan and then she synthesizes various ideas to arrive at a successful solution. Lola is fun to watch with animated segments and a simple plot. Lola has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marc for his boyfriend Manni who owes money to the mob and must pay up or die. Lola is on the run to help and Tywker poses many philosophical quandries for our red headed hero.
Phantom Menace
Marred by some racist ideas of a flippant Jar Jar Binks, evil Arab looking aliens and Asian sounding conspirators, and featuring only white anglo heroes in the boy, Ewen Macgregor’s Obi wan and Liam Neeson’s Jedi warrior, still the much maligned film brought back star wars and now converted the action to a virtual synthesized playing field with digital robots and powerful effects.
The Matrix
Dealing again with notions of false consciousness and the notion that the people have been fooled regarding the real nature of reality, the Matrix challenged people who believed in conspiracy theories to get out and fight the power. The concept of the red pill and blue pill became themes in hundreds of stories and Neo’s awakening and mergence in the real world was a revealing look at a culture of consumption and no deeper values. The real miracle of Matric was the use of stop motion high speed cameras hat allowed filmmakers to manipulate anything in time and space and to suspend motion and battles anywhere.This corresponded to action films like Chinese martial arts movies where strings and lifts could suspend fighters in the air for minutes. The film also deals with ideas of surrealism.
Terms
CGI: CGI was a process of animation conducted inside a computer in which a computer produced animated tweened shots in between drawn animated moments in a film. This greatly reduced the amount of drawing needed and freed animators to work on key scenes, set ups and character design.
Bullet time: bullet time was a speeded up use of camera speeds so that many effect seemed to suspend time character could hang in the air while fighting in compsotied shots where one image progressed and another brackground or foreground image lingered.
Films:
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Demme, Jonathan. “Silence of the Lambs.” (1991) Spielberg, Steven. “Jurassic Park.’ (1993) Wachokski Sisters. “The Matrix.’ (1998) Readings:
Filmsite. Films of the nineties.
https://www.filmsite.org/90sintro.html
Roberts, Kayleigh. “Film of the Nineties.” Marie Claire.
https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/g22520389/best-90s-movies/
28 cinema
foreign film recently
The Four aspects of modern world style:
Magical Realism
It is nearly impossible to describe modern foreign film because of its incredible diversity and wild swings in style and theories several things come to mind immediately first many of the films that are existing today in the international cinema participate in the style known as magical realism magical realism is a style that merges our reality with aspects of magic or the unreal. Among such films are Guillermo Del Toro’s pans labyrinth or the shape of water or Lars Von Trier’s melancholia but magical realism isn’t just a style or a way of mixing fantasy with reality it’s a way of interrogating the reality we live in and determining whether the reality we believe to be true is as true as the reality that we find in dreams fairytales and alternative planets.
Postmodern Methodology
A second quality we find in modern European and Asian film and South American film and a Australian film and film from across the globe is a tendency to embrace post modern concerns. Search films are involved with meta-referentiality. That is these are
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films that comment on filmmaking itself and often comment within the film on themselves.
Direct Address
A third quality that distinguishes these films is the ability of many of these films to to address the audience directly and to make the film a statement about the actual Director or a tourist view of what’s going on. This sense of self directed a tour author direct address to the audience is nothing new but it seems more pronounced in modern films where the fourth wall is it just broken often times it doesn’t seem to exist.
Idiosyncratic Films for a Constrained World
A fourth and final quality of these modern European world films is the sense of decorum or the sense of standards of any kind whether it be violence or social morays or religion or standards of conduct or beliefs systems seem to be totally and completely often times abandon. The world becomes a personal place where a person makes their own decisions against a very corrupt and unusual and unyielding world that tries to contain the individual in all of these films the individual tends to be up against powerful infrastructure’s that tend to restrain and confine people but throughout almost all of these films individuals seem to find a way to succeed and thrive in a world order in which individuality is often Hamden forgotten or sacrificed.
Neo-classics
Frankly it’s too early to tell if some of the films from Europe in the last 20 years are actually classics or just notable experiments. However many of the films coming from Europe and Asia are extremely experimental and extremely fun to watch because they offer different takes on reality than things we have found in American films. These are some of the notable foreign films from the last 20 years that I’ve had an impact on international cinema and have been widely enjoyed not only for their stories and entertainment value but for their sense of experimentation.
Amelie (2001)
First is Jean Pierre Jeunet first is Jean Pierre Jhené’s 2001 film family. Emily is a romantic comedy about a eccentric young woman who desires to make everyone’s life around her as attractive and beautiful as she imagines her life to be. All the way is a do- gooder who wants the word rest of the world to be as quirky and as fun-loving as she is weird.
Happy Go Lucky (2008)
A second feature in this style of film is the 2008 film happy go lucky a British film featuring the plucky sally Hawkins who is a joy in every film she is in. In the film Hawkins is an attractive young kindergarten teacher who lives a carefree life hobnobbing in the clubs at night and working hard by day. She doesn’t take life too seriously and doesn’t expect too much from life but she attends to have a good time while doing good for others. She transports herself around town using mass transit but she decides that she should learn to drive and obtain a car. She finds herself in the hands of the world grumpiest driving instructor and she finds herself constantly being rated for her bad driving and lackadaisical attitude. Hopkins takes this provocation as an opportunity to enlighten her instructor and to transform his life and make him a happier person it’s part of a charming group of movies that are about people that are normally better than people normally are.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2001)
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Ang Lee’s provocative 2001 film crouching Tiger hidden Dragon is a delightful surprise. Posing as your typical martial arts film providing great starring vehicles for Cholla in fat and Michelle Yeoh the film develops into something more. I love story about honor and redemption through the art in and attractiveness of martial arts fighting. People have often criticized Chinese martial arts films for their lack of sensibility but here the very talented Lee and his cast pull off a minor miracle by making a martial arts film a deeply philosophical film of action in the act of doing good for a cause that is worth more than life itself.
Amour (2009)
Amor (2009) is another striking film by Michael hen key it is a film about a husband who is taking care of his wife who has had a stroke. It is a reaffirmation of the idea of love and hanky actually makes the idea of caring for someone who is disabled very endearing and charming and it’s gentle and loving subject is attractive to all audiences City of God (2002)
Fernando morales Catia ones 2002 film city of God is excruciating in watching children navigating through the city of Rio de Janeiro where crime and corruption is rampant. There are more action sequences watching children run through the streets of this city in danger from all sides than there are in all of the fast and furious films put together. An absolute miracle of action sequences set with children in an area where we don’t think children should be and we don’t think of the world as being a hostile place but in the city of God everything is dangerous and everything is exciting.
Spirited Away (2001)
Hayao Miyazaki’s spirited away from 2001 is certainly one of the most provocative and entertaining anime films ever made my sake makes a fable about a family on vacation in which the parents are translated into animals and the daughter must do service and servitude to save them and redeem them back to this world. The term spirited away means literally that ghosts and demons coexist with us and some of the demons inside ourselves must be dealt with to bring people back to the world and to bring the world back from the brink.
The Lives of Others (2006)
In 2006 the lives of others directed by foreign Henkel made a deeply powerful impact on the world by describing the horrific practices of surveillance by the east German secret police during the era of the east German communist takeover of east Germany. In the film a conscientious east German policeman survey Survey is the wife and ongoing daily struggles of a couple that are suspected of being spies or insurgence by the police what the policeman discovers is that the most corrupt thing in east Germany is the east German government in the east German secret police something that even he can’t live with by the end of the film a powerful film and a powerful indictment of surveillance culture in any culture as in Porten today as it was as it was when it was first released a powerful film. When are the academy award for best foreign film in 2006.
Oldboy (2003)
Some films just benefit from old fashion violent action and that’s what happens in old boy by part-time walks in 2003 film with a lot of swagger and some knockdown drag out parts that just make you want to cheer for the wonderful violence in action that is portrayed not just a film for guys who like action and martial arts movies but I film about tolerance and intolerance of life and what one is willing to do to stay free free in a
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society that wishes to a press and hold you down. A tonic for all people who enjoy strong good violent action films.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Pans labyrinth is one of the most horrific fables of recent years. Released in 2006 Guillermo Del Toro’s startling film about a little girls fantasy life in a labyrinth of magical creatures focused during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s illustrates the horrific barbarity and cruelty of the Spanish Civil War and how Spanish people were horrifically violent and cruel to each other and how even children weren’t safe or protected from the violence of life in such a culture enormously important film about history in the 20th century about man’s cruelty to man about faith and believe in spirits about the interaction of the supernatural and the magical in every day life and certainly one of the great vindication of the style of magical realism in modern day film. Del Toro has read has remained one of the principal filmmakers of Central and South America and one of the best filmmakers working in worlds Cinema today.
In the Mood for Love (2000)
Wong car weighs 2000 love story in the mood for love was a remarkable romance between two people who are neighbors who realize that their spouses have been having an affair. What makes the film memorable is that every action every new ones every glance every touch every eye-movement is catalog in the film as important and you have to watch every nuance of every character to understand what is truly going on a remarkable film.
Terms
Magical Realism: Films and media where elements of the real are merged with the unreal, fantasy or ghostly elements. The mixture is often uneven
Postmodern media: Media that arrives after 1960 which accelerates the themes of modernism: experimentation, collaging the past and present, provoking originality or eschewing originality for a parody of pastiche of contemporary or past media.
Films:
Lars Von Trier: Melancholia (2011)
Joe Wright: Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Boon Jung Ho: The Host (2006)
Guillermo Del Toro: Blade II (2002)
Readings:
Canet, Fernando. “The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema: Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop as a Case Study.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279280988_The_New_Realistic_Trend_i n_Contemporary_World_Cinema_Ramin_Bahrani%27s_Chop_Shop_as_a_Case_ Study
Stone, Rob. “World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable and the hard place of the as yet unknown.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785273.2021.1873572
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Cinema 30 Horror
There are many genres in films that are really popular with audiences and have been since the beginning of film and one of the most popular genres was the horror film. The genre began with the beginnings of film in the early 20th century and has remained a popular idiom for film for the last 120 years. The first horror films were based on literary genres such as F W Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922 which was based on Dracula but Bram Stoker’s widow refused to sell the rights to Murnau. Bram Stoker have been a literary agent working in England in the 1890s. His widow was reluctant to sell his famous masterpiece to a German Director because the British had just been through a very brutal World War with the Germans.
Early horror
The early literary forms of horror where they were based on many bad things that happened in Victorian times. Dracula was the image of all the bad things visited upon British society at the time. One of the great fears in British society was not just the scourge of vampirism, but economic vampirism by large companies. Some people in England were getting very rich at the expense of a lot of other people who were getting progressively poor over the time. Dracula also discussed new woman who had freedom of movement, had more power to navigate society alone. Women were changing things and making men uncomfortable and uncertain. Dracula himself had a certain feminized quality in that he was very mysterious. We rarely see him clearly. He continually changes as he becomes more beautiful obtaining nutrition from drinking more blood and nourishing himself. Then we see the growth of the feminist literary aspect of society.
There is a growth in special effects. Actors like lon Chaney develop complex makeups to play bizarre characters like the Phantom of the Opera or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis are reliant on special effects to impact audiences. Then in the twenties and thirties universal horror in the United States makes all these literary characters film characters including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1931) Dracula (1932) the werewolf of London (1936 ) the wolf man (1940 ). These filmsevolve into more scientific horrors including King Kong (1935) the invisible man (1935) and characters born of scientific mistakes.
Atomic Monsters
Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 the film community began to envision more monsters from the sky and more monsters born of nuclear energy. At the same time war made the world more fearful of adversaries from the stars. The fifties began with a series of monsters from the stars. John W. Campbell, a science fiction editor from the thirties had written a story entitled, “Who goes there?” about an alien who attacks an arctic base. Howard Hawks bought the property and produced an early gruesome horror tale of men isolated from society and fighting a creature that was hard to kill. The story was even more frightening but Hawks crew had to eliminate nearly thirty minutes of footage because it was deemed too disturbing. The fifties brought lots of monsters created by nuclear energy. There was Them which brought giant ants to ravage los Angeles. The Incredible Shrinking man had a man shrunk to mouse size by
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an atomic cloud. More horrors came from space. In War of the worlds, H. G. Welles nineteenth century classic was modernized as a martian invasion in contemporary times.
Science and Poe
In the late fifties paranoia about science and invasions increased. In the fly the scientist is trying to transmute matter and ends up merging his atoms with a fly. Separating the fly parts from his DNA is no simple matter. Just as frightening was Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which pods from space transformed people into pod people. In the US, Roger Corman embarked on a series of films inspired by Edgar allen Poe. First, there was the Fall of the House of Usher, then The Premature Burial, the Pit and Pendulum, Ligeia and Tales of Terror. Corman focused on classic horror actors such as Vinent Price, boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre. Corman’s films were part camp, part thrills and part Poe’s romanticism.
In England, a small struggling studio, Hammer films determined to revive the classic monsters of Universal’s catalogue. By the forties the universal catalogue became comedies with Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein. The thrill had gone. To revive the universal catalogue the Hammer studios wishedto reinvent classic horror and reinvigorate the characters that had lost their edge. Using a younger generation of British character actors they began with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in a revised Curse of Franenstein with many new additions. The films were in technicolor, attractive women, and gore were more apparent. England did not suffer from the Production code and English films were able to show more violence more blood and more nudity. These graphic films were popular with youthful audiences in England in America at drive-in features. Hammer followed the film with Horror of Dracula. Hammer’s vampires were smooth, attractive and seductive. Women did not mind being biten by a count that was sexy and alluring. In 1960’s Dracula sequel, Brides of Dracula, Hammer went further evoking deeper psychological and Freudian interpretations of the vampire. Baron Meister, the anti-hero at the center of Brides is a nobleman influenced by Dracula who not only carnally recruits a series of female brides but he even transforms his mother via the carnal embrace of vampirism. This beckoned comparisons to Freud’s Oedipus complex. Later in the film he seeks to recruit Van Helsing by biting him which suggests a homosexual subtext.
In the sixties, Robert Wise delivered one of the most psychologically frightening films of the era, The Haunting based on Shirley Jackson’s the Haunting of Hill House. In Wise’s version the character played by Julie Harris is lonely and wants to be loved and finds love from the ghosts in a haunted house. In the seventies the supernatural turned religious in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist based on exorcisms performed in the early twentieth century. Swedish actor Max Von Sydow became an international sensation as Father Merrin fighting Evil demons. The late seventies brough slashers to the screen with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the thirteenth, Nightmare on elm Street, and the Halloween films. Though aimed at teen audiences these films pointed to underlying anxieties in United State culture. People feared dreaming, people feared loneliness, and people feared their own families in these films. Anxieties undergirded lots of films marketed in the United States.
At the end of the millennium, Japansee horror such as Ringu, Shutter, and Hju- on (the Grudge) debuted and frightened world audiences. The characters in the
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Japanes e horror films were often women , they often had long hair, many of the protagonists were dead or related to dead characters. These characters had been traumatized. Their characters had been victimized and many times the dead characters were not so much evil as much as troubled.
Today many horror films such as It Follows explores the metaphor of horror as a disease. In it follows a girl has sex and the act of sex curses her with a a spirit that follows her and inhabits all who she has some sexual contact. Scarlett Johannson’s Under the Skin explores an alien that can only understand humans be intercourse and this ritual kills her human partner/victims. Birdbox and Don’t Breathe deal with sensory killers. I Birdbox seeing attract monsters that can kill. In don’t Breathe making any noise can attract killing mysterious alien creatures. Some horrors have become deeply biological. In John Carpenter’s clever and gory rmake on the Thing the monsters emulate people and become them. It is not even clear if the people realize they have been replaced by an alien presence, In Jennifer’s Body the attractive body of a girl is a lure to destroy those lured by physical beauty.
Horror has also taken on a cyber identity. In William Gibson’s Johnny Mnenomic the character plugs his brain in like a massive hard drive. In Ex Machina, a scientist wants to know if the robot he has created can think or is she simply imitating human behavior. In Replicas, Keanu reeves is rebirthing his family as clones because he killed the genuine items in a car crash. In the lawnmower man by Stephen king a intellectually deficit young man is given expanded intellectual power by a computer which transforms him into a menace.
Hunchback of Notre Dame
Perhaps some of the best horror films celebrate humanity. Charles Laughton’s 1939 performance in the Hunchback of Notre Dame is a portrayal of a character that Is disgusted and ashamed of himself. In the end he loses the girl Esmeralda to a handsome young man and he is left all alone in the church, one of the saddest ending scenes in all film, to be ugly distorted and alone is perhaps the worst fate of all.
The Curse of the Cat People
The cat people films deal with people who are aware they might transform but are haunted bt the knowledge and they don’t want to be strange, different or some exotic creature. These films are disturbing because they deal with the characters fear and uncertainty about their origins and purpose in the universe.
Alien
A character only bent on murder and exterminating anything in its path is frightening. The alien in alien is bent on survival by murdering everone in his path. Terms
Freudian horror: Freudian horrors are drawn from repressed fears in the mind.
. Used in cinema as photographic film stock.
Films:
Neumma, Kurt: the Fly (1958)
Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho(1960)
Readings:
Gelder, Ken. The horror reader. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ubnEyBh3tegC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=a
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rticles+on+horror+films&ots=5SUcwufgkF&sig=OA0Kxkd- _JwyCusoWqiZ_9bYQQs#v=onepage&q=articles%20on%20horror%20films&f=false
Cinema 31
lars von trier
One of the gloomiest Danish directors of all time is a character named Lars von Trier TRIER. Mars volunteer has created a group of very shocking and defiant films that started back in the 1980s and continue to the present day this year he just turned 65 and his films have been provocative from the beginning until the present day some of his films deal with extremely shocking subject matter are you in a lot of audiences might consider his subject matter shocking or perhaps almost pornographic but Lars von tour is an important artist who has been nominated for Oscars has won the Cannes film festival has had a variety of films filmed in this country with American actors like Nicole Kidman with European actors like Björk the singer with actors like John heard from England Stellan Skarsgård Lauren Bacall he’s active with such a wide range of people doing a wide range of people doing such interesting films that he’s very hard to ignore and his films have taken place over a 30 year. And whenever there’s one arriving it’s always a major event to come and take a look at large mentors work.
Anti-christ
Mini films by Larsmont tour are very disturbing and difficult to watch one of his most important films is a film entitled anti-Christ and he deals with ideas religion and transgression and horrible events in at a husband and wife while making love disregard their child climbs out a window and falls out of window and dies the wife of courses stricken with grief about this event because she feels she wasn’t vigilant and then we began to go through a series of psychotherapy and the woman becomes more
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deranged and violent events take place in sexual encounters take place and attempted murders take place and eventually there is a resolution that is extremely violent of the film a lot of people simply cannot watch the Mars one tours films because of the excessive amounts of gruesome violence and irrational behavior in them but in the end it antichrist there are lots of symbols that perhaps the woman or the man or some other creature represent the antichrist in the film and all the terrible things he just shows this all of these events and asked us to think for ourselves about such a Vance.
Dancer in the dark
Another disturbing and symbolic laws run tour film is dancer in the dark star in the the Icelandic singer of Björk and your plays a check immigrant living in the United States who is losing her eyesight and she works at a very modest factory and she has a son whom she is afraid will also lose her eyesight find me one of the people working in the factory accuses her of stealing things and there is a confrontation in a fight and of course murder and death so a suggestion in the film of how people act and get along together and sometimes how they don’t act and get along together and how society suffers from the fact that people can’t learn to get along together and have decent lives as a unit as a society so dance in the dark is very important but there are some very beautiful moments when your character is is dancing by herself in the darkness because she can’t see anymore and there are some very tragic moments that are illustrated by Larsmont tour in that very a gross and graphic moment in the film when these things occur
Dogville
All of Larsmont Tours films are very weird one of the weirdest of them all is 2003 Starkville starring Nicole Kidman in a wide ranging cast of players John heard Stellan Skarsgård Lauren Bacall James Caan all players playing on a stage the plot concerns grace a character who is hiding out from the mob because she has seen a murder and the Marlboro looking for her so she comes to Dogtown and everyone she encounters in the town has some sort of mean they are mean to Grace and over and over again she tries to assert herself and have a wife but the people of God will make that very difficult eventually a group of mobsters actually come to the town and when Grace meets them we discovered that Grace is not wanted by the mall because she had seen witnessed a murder she was wanted by the mall because she is the daughter of one of the mobsters so she argues with her father for a moment and realizes that the only thing is the town will understand Power in violence so she everybody else in the town very weird film very weirdly staged on a stage but in a strange film to watch an interesting example why respond tours strange aesthetics
Breaking the waves
Perhaps one of Larsmont Tours most popular films in one that was nominated for several Oscars in this country was 1996 is breaking the waves starring Emily Watson the British actress and Stellan Skarsgård as her husband in it her husband is an oil worker in an oil rig in the North Sea oil rig area in working for British Petroleum in an accident on the oil rig he is hit with a chain when they’re drilling into the water to find oil and heat and he is horribly hurt and damaged and crippled and unable to move and has lost all mobility because of the horrible damage and he tells his wife to leave him that he’s no good to her anymore and she can’t have a relationship of any kind with him and he just wants to be left alone to die. So his wife goes out into the town outside where
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they live and she is not mentally very well. So in her mind she feels that somehow she has sinned and in some sort of fabulous way with some sort of allegorical manner if she feels the only way she can redeem herself and redeem her husband because a person is that she must go out and sacrifice herself and the way she decides to do that is to have sex with tons of men just to punish her self and punish your body it’s not out of enjoyment it’s not to obtain money it’s simply to vilify her body to scourge her body so that she so that you can show God she is penitent for the sin in her life by sacrificing her body to all of these horrible men and therefore hopefully God will take pity on her for all the bad things she’s done in her life and won’t take it on her husband and maybe store her husband well of course after time she just realizes that she sacrificed her body for no good reason and let her sacrifices in anyway helping her husband but it’s a very tragic story about a woman who believes in a mythology of suffering pain will enable somebody else and so she decide she will suffer to make her husband which of course has no impact and her husband is just horrified by her sacrifice so it’s a very dark and bleak movie probably more as mine tours most popular film ever was the 2011 film melancholia.
And melancholia Kristen Dunst an American actress plays a woman who is about to get married and her sister is very unhappy and is going undergoing a psychiatric treatment her sister is unhappily divorced has a child from that marriage and has a very unhappy life both sisters are very puzzled by a recent news report that describes the fact that they have discovered a new planet that is going to pass very close to earth on the eve of her marriage Kristen Dunst goes out into the wilds takes off all of her clothes in communes with nature because she is sure that something is going wrong because of this planet coming close to the earth so what she does is she has indiscriminate sex with a man prior to her marriage simply because she is feeling uneasy guilty troubled about this planet coming into the atmosphere of the earth and as the planet grows nearer as the planet grows near her she becomes more upset and begins to think that perhaps the earth will be destroyed by the planet that’s the first hour and a half of the film and then in the second hour and a half of the film we see the other sister dealing with her emotional depression and we realize that both sisters suffer from a deep form of depression and that they act out the depression in different ways and eventually towards the end of the film the two sisters after suffering mightily for three hours come together with the sisters child and they build a TP in the they build a teepee in the property of their family as the planet comes close to earth and when it’s too late to do anything everyone begins to realize that the planet is going to strike the earth and the two planets are going to come together and everyone is going to be destroyed in the world will be destroyed and in the end of the film the two planets crash into each other and everyone dies
Meaning in Von Trier’s films
so where is Van der thirst films are very dark very depressing very scary but they’re also films to deal with a lot of philosophical issues that probably the probably Americans haven’t dealt with and probably don’t think about such as she is probably most Europeans and probably most people across the globe don’t think of the same issues that Lars von tour think so but he is a very interesting Director again many people criticize his films has been incomprehensible many people criticize his films has been anti-religious many films many people criticize his films have been anti-intellectual many
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people criticize his films have been pornographic but his films have a slight audience his films are very adventurous his films are very films are very difficult to watch and they deal with very complex issues from a very complex philosophical standpoint and they do attract audiences to each separate film and each film is very different and deals with different subject matter in a different way using a lot of international actors working together as a team Larsmont Tours films are some of the most challenging films made in the world today very complicated and difficult for many audiences to watch but often times rewarding for people that want to think deeply about troubling philosophical issue such as is religion useful or valuable to people is Armageddon something that we’re ready for is religion useful or helpful are people suffering a state of depression do people suffer from false beliefs systems do we actually have an anti-Christ and will that person punish us or cause the end of the world can we trust people does sexuality have something to do with the value of our lives or is it completely nonsense do we believe in social beliefs or do we reject mankind as a hopeless entity that doesn’t do much the scooter valuable for anyone all of our sponsors films are interesting complicated films but again not for all audiences.
31 cinema
post modernism and film
Film is involved in a lot of political and theoretical ideas. One of the most important ideas in contemporary film is the notion of post modernism postmodernism is a style of filmmaking that follows the modern period. The modern period was an era in American art in which there is a wide range of experiment and a real dissection of the past many ideas and themes in modernism were derived from classical ideas. Some of the ideas of modernism for example included mythology history racism new forms of media new ways of presenting information and basically some of the ideas the drive from Ezra Pound who suggested that all modernist artist make something new. Graph paragraph paragraph
Post modernism extends the themes of modernism and goes further than modernism in his experimentation first of all postmodernism is a socially Socio economic Socio cultural aesthetic format it includes new forms of theoretical isolation it is suspicious of unify theoretical frameworks it is philosophical it is sociocultural and it deals with a wide range of aesthetic debates postmodernism does not believe in the idea of universal or all embracing systems of thought postmodernist critics believe that thought changes over time some of the most important post modern critics including Jean François leotard in the post modern condition suggest that there is a growing incredulous incredulity Credit you would see towards what he calls grand schemes or metanarratives of western thought the modern system of thought associated with the enlightenment is no longer tenable to a lot of the post modern critics the project of
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science fiction scientific explanation and mastery of the national and social world the natural and social world the idea of progress characteristic of the enlightenment is no longer acceptable some of the ideas that motivate postmodernism are one suspicion of totalizing theory is an explanation and attempt to offer a comprehensive and all embracing account of all phenomenon to an anti-foundationalism that rejects absolute or universal foundations of knowledge three a rejection of the false universalism or ethnocentric euros centric systems for an anti-essentialism rejects both deep epistemologies and over arching theories of knowledge postmodern theory then basically says the world is heterogeneous not homogeneous people are not all connected together but Herald heterogeneously different groups assert knowledge. For example in contemporary films like the power of the dog we see descriptions of groups there a heterogeneous such as in power of the dog there is an underlying element of homosexual culture in the old west of the Americas that has really been described in American restaurants new films tend to digitalize the world and talk about individuals as smaller groups not as massive homogeneous groups. Therefore it is impossible for a unified or comprehensive account of the world. So they are often sociological and cultural debates in post modern culture this is a post industrial society and although a lot of media is utilized and technology is utilized in such films such as Jurassic Park the matrix and other films terminator many times there is a suspicion of media and technology first there is a tradition and feudalism is represented as the advent of capitalism in the 15th and 16th century however many films that deal with postmodernism tend to go back to the future listing way of thinking not a a capitalist way of thinking second circuit Second economic and social changes characteristic of the 19th and 20th century especially ushered in by industrialization and urbanization in the emergence of mass social movements tend to be profoundly different in post modern films there is a transition from the old industrial order to a most new post industrialism a decline in manufacturing and replacement of old models of standardized or forest mass production with new models of things being very individualized therefore in modern films therefore in modern films a lot of things are individualized for example when you see examples of characters in West Anderson’s films such as the at the hotel grand Budapest you often see characters that are extremely individual and idiosyncratic the idea Wes Anderson films is that he’s not dealing with a holistic society anymore in which people are similar or common or average but he’s dealing with distinctly individual esoteric idiosyncratic individuals that have really wild generations in movement and way of seeing the world for example a film from the post modern era that gives you a good sense of the individualism of these films would be Lars and the real girl. Lars is suffering from mental delusions thinking that a blowup doll girl he has ordered online is actually a real live living girl that can be his girlfriend. This marks him as being a unusual character and part of a new breed of people that are very idiosyncratic characters in a post modern film post another aspect of post modern film is a decline in additional working class society that is that the number of people that are a part of that society no longer exist therefore there’s a domination of the significance of class identities and divisions because people don’t really belong to any specific class anymore at least that’s something films want us to believe the shift away from the politics of mass movements towards the politics a difference seems to really focus on issues of difference for example many modern films deal with feminism the roles and the roles and crises of
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women dealing with society so you no longer have a class struggle but you have a family struggle putting women against everybody else. A second element of this is that we have films directly for specific audiences African-American films Asian American films gay films these are films that break people down by their specific social group and don’t break them down by a cultural group or a class group I would argue that such films actually do exactly the same thing they turn people into specific classes in groups and that and that unfortunately politically you no longer have the commonality of a group of people they’re fighting against organize system you have gay groups women’s groups Hispanic groups African-American groups Asian American groups which really if you think about it defeats the ability for a C lol requires a socially economically challenged class defines the power of the larger organized power groups so that the 10% of the United States for example that controls the majority wealth continues to control the wealth because now instead because now instead of people seeing themselves as part of a working class group they now see them selves is a much smaller group women or Hispanics or Asian Americans or African-Americans and when you think about it instead of being the class of the 90% there are oppressed by the 10% you now have African- American films about 10% of the audience who are really dealing with the rest of society and have a very small ability to fight back against the other 90% of society so Innoway postmodernism is actually weekend the traditional class structure of one thing that becomes clear from post modern films is that these films are extremely political in their content there is a shift away from the politics of mass movement towards the politics of difference there is a new computing in and communications technology is utilized in the sounds but often times it doesn’t seem to help people it seems to hurt them such as films like the matrix or Johnny pneumonic or Jurassic Park or or the terminator all these films basically focus on the way in which technology helps to a process and hold people down inside that’s in the new films of the new technological post modern era new technologies were seen as exhibit at the reshaping social experience in subjectivity two main themes can we determine first there is a speeding up at the circulation of information and images so that people know about a lot more stuff a lot more quickly secondly there is an increase in compression of time in space so the things happen more rapidly and we go through periods of time quicker there’s a DT realization of culture in the construction of forms of identity with your no longer strongly identify with the place so people so people acquire new identities but those new identities are very flexible and they don’t stay with us Geminis for very long how the media and media images and signs are increasingly identified by a key to reality in the modern citizens change the way we see media and signs. Transitions from the old industrial order based on labor and production of goods to a new social production order based upon communication and the circulation signs images and signs have become our private reality and we live we live now in a world of produced signs Jean Baudrillard the famous French philosopher of the late 20th century argued that there was three levels of simulation that are society was going through and these levels of simulation have had a strong impact on the way modern and postmodern films have arrived. For for Jean Badri are there were three levels of simulation won the first stimulus simulation level was at a very obvious level so you would have a puppet or an animation that look nothing like a puppet or a simulation that we look nothing like a real person at the second level the simulation the doppelgänger the the the copy of the person begins to look a lot more
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like a real person but it’s still obviously a robot or not real and then finally you arrive at the third level simulation where the character becomes so much like a real character you actually can’t determine whether or not it’s real or it’s fake. For example in a post modern film like her starring Joaquin Phoenix and using the voice of a scarlet Johansson we have a love story we have a love story be between an AI artificial intelligence and a man who is lonely. In the film her Joaquin phoenix talks to this artificial intelligence woman that he meets online voice characterized by scroll Johansson and the further he gets to know her the more in love with her he becomes because he’s lonely because he can’t find a real woman that needs his high-level criteria for the perfect woman so he begins to start a relationship and Scarlett Johansson’s character in the film. But over time Joaquin Phoenix begins to realize there are problems in this relationship and that his computer AI girlfriend is not always around when he needs her that if she isn’t a constant companion available for his every need and win. When he finally discoveries of the end of the film is that although she is an artificial intelligence and although she can access his girlfriend she is already engaged in about 10,000 different relationships simultaneously because she’s just a computer processor who is talking to a lot of men simultaneously so the idea in this computer simulated representation as John Badri I would say is that we have reached the third level of simulation in her Joaquin Phoenix can no longer distinguish a real woman from the AI that he speaking to online and everybody are that is a very dangerous situation for mankind then because instead of trusting but what we see in front of us is real we have three layers of simulation that are presented to us we have things that are obviously simulated and don’t seem to be real we have things that we have things that seem to approach the real that are close to being realistic but aren’t real and then we finally have things that are so mirroring reality we can’t determine the difference between the the simulation and the actual real object so in films like like her we begin to see that the danger of simulation arising to that level and that’s a very postmodern concern in such films finally we start to see in this hyper reality we live we began to live not just in our primary reality with which would be in the real world beyond the primary reality we now have a secondary virtual reality or hyper reality that we live in an N even though you might find this will be kind of a silly thing to worry about now if you think about it we have many people in our society that would rather spend time in a video game environment then working and living with real people so the idea of a hyper reality or virtual reality universe that Baudrillard suggest might be the third stage simulation made for many peoples lives have already occurred we don’t really need to have a singularity a moment when computers become sentient for people to follow themselves into believing that a hyper reality is a better place to live in the reality they live in so we are the first problem that we deal with in post modern film is the idea of multiple levels simulation the first level of simulation is very very fake and obvious the second level simulation is harder to detect and the third stage of simulation where the simulation becomes so much like the real that we can’t tell the difference between the real and the simulation. Also another problem that we deal with in the bard reality and vision is the Omni presence in the temporary culture of media signs images that are increasingly detached from exterior realities. So what we’re seeing all the time is receiving a reality in which we see it altered reality that appears to be very much like the real for example in the films in the marvel studios with the constant referees representations of
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superheroes that seem to crowd out the reality of life and if you think about the marvel films all you really see is the hawk and door and Iron Man and Spider-Man battling some obscure otherworldly character for the majority of the film Marvel films they were very little reality oriented problems like people don’t really worry about money or they don’t really worry about about love and they don’t really worry about things in the real world they worry about everything that’s in the simulated world of the Marvel universe in the whole concept and description of the Marvel universe it’s self is disturbing it means it’s a separate universe in the world universe or world we exist in every day which makes it a little bit more removed and threatening to the real world that we actually existing supposed modern concerns very real concerns when you’re dealing with film and film technoklogy.
The start of postmodernism actually began in the 1970s and dealt with the idea of universal reason or the ideas of progress that were no longer excepted by a lot of people that believed in the post modern world there would not be universal progress and they were not be an idea of universal reason. If you think about the last four years of the Trump administration there have been contrasting ideas of truth and reality that have been presented by the president that often times do not agree with science or technology or the medical community particularly during the coronavirus this doesn’t mean necessarily there any group is wrong or at some other group is prickly right what it means is that we now exist in a world in which the contrasting views of reality there might be a Republican or a Democrat or a green party or socialist party or a communist party or a or a Chinese view or an Indian view or European view or South American deal the world and all of those different views in the world might actually be true for the people living in the societies or in those parts of the society but they may not be the total way we see the world and there’s a lot more belief in multiple realities in multiple versions of truth we can look at for example scientific reality and the idea of perhaps how people perceive religion as being very very different but think about the different ways in which people perceive truth in today’s world there isn’t one necessarily understanding of truth for example when postmodernism first began to arrive in a row arose in the 1970s because many architects in the 1970s were seen architecture quoting various forms of architecture from previous centuries and seeing the resurgence of different forms of architecture in different times. One of the most prominent architects of the 20th century Frank Lloyd Wright was a real fan of making things new and filling them into the contemporary environment and he was a real critic of things in the past. For example Frank Lloyd Wright often with jokingly say that we need to keep buildings like the capital building and the Lincoln Memorial that are based on Greek temples because they were mistakes from the past. Frank Lloyd Wright had no problem with Greek temples being quick Frank Lloyd Wright has no problem with Greek temples being created by Greeks but I did have a problem with Greek temples being created for contemporary society because contemporary society should be making new buildings the deal with the new structures the new building materials and the new environment that we live in. For Frank Loyd Wright the idea of building a building was to make something that was brand new and they’re sitting with the contemporary environment. To make something from the past like a Greek temple place in Washington DC or some other location would seem out of place for him therefore Frank Lloyd Wright thought of buildings from the past being inserted into the modern environment as being mistakes
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but he joked about them and said well we need to keep borings like the capital and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial because even though they’re kind of silly examples of trying to re-create the past in the present day they really don’t they shouldn’t really exist in today’s world but their mistakes but we can overcome them by making better new buildings are new materials that deal with the environment that we live in today and this is from a man once again who died in the 1950s but had a really good idea but had a really good idea from the modernist period of what would make the modern world the proper world to live in and not to be obsessed with ideas from the past. But post modernist in the post modern era argue that the past and present and future coexist together and unlike unlike frankly rights dictum that the post modern. Or the modern is. Should be doing new things a lot of postmodernist believe that you have a collage of different styles of building constantly going on so you might have a tutor style Bill a tutor style building that looks like something from the tutor era of architecture in England during the tutor. And you might have next door with something that’s a very post modern looking building that was built in the late 20th or early 21st-century that looks very different for post modern architecture there’s nothing wrong with the co-ops and coercion different styles existing together but for a lot of modernist they really felt that if you were going to use the past you had to reinvent the past in some sort of meaningful way for example for architect architecture a pretty Charles Jenks post modern for example for a post modern architecture acrylic Charles Jenks post Martin architecture should be seen as a response to the failure of the modern’s. That is your bringing in different styles of architecture because the stuff that was created in the modernist. From about 1872 around 1950 or 1960 would be considered sometimes a failure if people didn’t like that form of architecture they might respond to it by using a scale from the past that’s for Jenks post modern architecture six to reconnect with its occupants by rejecting the functionalism of modernism and making use of decoration ornamentation and mixing styles of decoration and different periods in places including the vernacular to make a new style of architecture that’s very quiet oriented and very distinctly different and such a Jenks refer to modern architecture or post modern architecture is double coding it would use something modern if it needed to use something modern but the same time it might respond to some form of architecture from the past because that might be more appropriate for what people were thinking and in an era in which they can call upon all the different styles of architectural format because we exist in a time in which the media allows us to sample any architectural form from any architectural. That we are able to see a vision or an image of interestingly enough in post modern art there is often a failure or exhaustion of modernism that is the adolescence of shock or the corresponding loss of modernisms transgressive power ask us to look at art in a brand new way pop art in the 1960s basically took the images from advertising and transform them into a new style of art. People like Andy Warhol actually utilized power pop art or images from society like Marilyn Monroe pictures or Campbell Soup cans or pictures of chairman now because he figured these were the common images people were saying every day. They didn’t want to see great art they wanted to see images that were familiar to them from advertising in the media on a daily basis so far part of the 60s depended on that it was eclectic there was an erosion of aesthetic boundaries and declining of emphasis on originality like. Perhaps Andy Warhol in his art in his film and his prince was the first person to recognize that the idea
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of originality that was so important modernist art and modernist film wasn’t that important to post Martin’s film so if you look at the work of Andy Warhol he actually steals ideas appropriate ideas from other artists and uses their ideas in his art for example he just cardboard copies the labels off of a Campbell Soup can because it’s simply easier for him to do so. If you look at the film of the 1960s you begin to see a new style film that irrupt Ing there is based on styles the past that isn’t totally original for example in a film like Bonnie and Clyde made by one of brothers studio in the 1960s Bonnie and Clyde is nothing more than a re-creation of the 1930s gangster movies that Warner Bros. was making in the 1930s only now they’re remaking the same movies into the 1960s just a little difference in style but the repeating the past and they’re not being original because audiences don’t necessarily want anything original do you Andy Warhol audiences just wanted more of the same so for example in the in the millennial. We seen a hyper reevaluation of this world whole idea of audience it’s just one of the more of the same you don’t just get one Iron Man movie you get Iron Man two and you get Iron Man three you get enough for one you get door to you get door three and soon to be Thor four or if you’re Spider-Man you get Spider-Man one Spider-Man two Spider- Man three and then you get the amazing Spider-Man and then you get the amazing Spider-Man two and then you get Spider-Man no way home can you get Spider-Man in the spider universe and all of this until you get such a confusing array of all the old objects that are really a part and parcel of the original that you realize there’s very very little new being created in this new style of creating art so acquaintances in and erosion aesthetic boundaries and declining of emphasis on originality is one aspect of it eclecticism is basically drawing on and mixing different style genres and artistic conventions including those of modernism as some people refer to it as a stylistic promiscuity that is just stealing styles from old all different kinds and styles of work and central component of this process has been a mixing of elements from both high and low culture that is that you can have some thing that is really high culture such as a film about Mozart like Amadeo’s but the same time you connect the character in Amadeus to be very very silly like it every day average guy now I have his time but of our time so therefore when you make a film like Amadeus you were mixing the low culture of a guy who is kind of a buffoon like Mozart really was in real life but at the same time he’s also high culture and he can also create a form of music is very beautiful and a work of genius or an interesting enough and a lot of post modern culture there’s a lot that is relative in very little is absolute so there isn’t an absolute answer to many problems but there’s just a relative answer that works for now there’s a declining premium on originality a lot of modern films are very original and don’t try to be they try to fit into a genre they might have the personal imprint of the author but it might not be a very personal film a lot of modern films for example with critics like the heritage the cabbage brings out the point they’re in a lot of modern culture there’s a lot of parity there’s a lot of simulation there’s a lot of pastiche and there’s a lot of allegory that’s going on in modern films for example a lot of modern horror films or a literally simulations or parities of other horror films for example the conjuring is nothing more than another haunted house movie even though it was made in the contemporary. They’ve been haunted house movies for 100 years so there’s nothing terribly original event like that it’s really more of a pastiche a former versions of the films and even more clearly we have a lot of earlier films another modern modern films were simply made as simply purely remix of other
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films were made years ago psycho in 1960 is remade in the 1990s psycho they just don’t do anything but just out of reach shoot the film scene for scene for scene house on haunted Hill comes out in 1959 and again is reborn in the early millennial. Just called house on Horace Hill again there’s Texas chainsaw massacre in the 1970s and there’s another version of Texas chainsaw in recent years even in the millennial. There of been copies of films there is a Blair witch film made around the time of the millennium and there was a more recent Blair witch film made it simply copies the original film using the same style. So postmodernism and film came first of all talk about the destruction or the re-creation of the film industry itself has been to exemplify post modern features that is Hollywood has undergone a transition from being about Mastrent rent mass production to be in about forms of independent production that feature idiosyncratic very specific individualistic dress Second films have gone in various ways from two exemplify post modern things or the offer images of post modern society many of those themes are dystopian and character and finally films have been seeing the show is that it features such as a great decision and the collapse of a traditional artistic hierarchies that is a lot of films might merge different styles of films altogether. In 1993 Quinton Tarintino’s pop fiction literally merged together a group of pop fiction crime stories into it he’s into a single film it seems like a lot of filmmakers want to repeat and rebirth the past there is a reactionary postmodernism and a postmodernism of resistance that deals with a lot of different themes for example many modern day post modern films are very self- conscious they’re very aware that they’re quoting the past they’re enter textual films their films that rely on the audience having knowledge of earlier films there’s a lost horse Historia city that is films that are about history tend to deal with the way in which we see the loss of his story yesterday just means that we don’t understand historical times as well so we might make a historical film about somebody from a different era but they seem a lot like people in our contemporary era they don’t seem like they’re really historical figures from another time they seem to be widely aware of things that we might have in the modern era there are so many of the post modern films or conservative that is they operate in a blank slate of things they don’t know anything about the past they don’t know anything about other cultures they literally exist in a period where things are conservative because they don’t have any of what went before are often times many the modern post modern films are anti-modern they don’t believe in progress they don’t believe in technology they don’t believe in in government they don’t believe in institutions that we used to hold sacred in modern society in many times post modern films offer a mixing of conventions are they mixed together different conventions for example a TV show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is also a film rate depends on the idea that it’s a team TV show set in the high score but it’s also a vampire vampire show in a horror show said it the same time as being a teen show also a lot of modern films from the modern era or parody other films for example you might have a film like the grand Hotel but Budapest and in that film you see that there’s a very ironic point of view or a film like Raiders in the yard the last Org UC Indiana Jones is a character that’s very ironic he supposed to be a hero but sometimes he doesn’t act very heroic sometimes he’s afraid of snakes sometimes he’s even afraid of women so there’s a parity in an Ira another aspect of a post modern film is the on the oven guard is still showing or the unusual showing is the common place in the films of David Lynch for example you have a mixture of every day a common place themes with some very very
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avant-garde uses a film and the tour put together side-by-side when you look at Twin Peaks the return for 18 hours you see some really avant-garde moments in the film that David Lynch is created and let you see some moments that are very conventional with very conventional actions Dre conventional figures
So according to Jameson Inn many theories about post modern film you see an increase in stylistic self-consciousness uses and references to film history’s quotation from other styles and other films Jamison divines post modern culture in terms of depth of the snow is there is it doesn’t have any depth anymore there’s nothing deeper to represent a new culture of the image of the simulacrum a specialized temporary temporary Alan Aliti awakening of his story yesterday and creation of a new type of emotional ground tone that is people are very blank and they don’t have a whole and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of depth of emotions and a lot of the characters in contemporary films there’s a lot of pastiche and inner text your reference that his films are often quoting each other and there’s a post modern loss of historical gap search films he claims are unable to re-create a real pass but only a simulation of the past because nobody knows about the past and knows what the past was like so when you see a modern day version of World War II like saving Private Ryan it starts off with a lot of energy which is probably what was happening in World War II but frankly immediately turns into a fairly long slog Long slog of simply looking for one character who in the end isn’t all that really important to the story it’s more about the journey than it is about actually finding Private Ryan finally critics of recent Hollywood Cinema for both is emptiness and ideological conservativism are arguing that Hollywood has become more conservative and isn’t trying to push boundaries it’s just trying to push product on younger and younger audiences that they can capitalize on and make money from a more conventional and conservative Hollywood from the mid 70s on this simply means it from the 1970s on we just get more and more of the same we get more terminator we get more Star Wars we get more but more superhero films but we don’t get a whole lot of films that are truly an rationally different and when we break groups up into smaller heterogeneous groups African-American women you know white nails or gay man or whatever we get smaller and smaller groups that have less power to oppose the system and then the largest groups for example like Disney has colonized children those groups obtain the most because companies like Disney cynically exploit that youth market and simply produce more princess movies to accommodate that market without doing much this original or new the characters in modern Disney movies might be different skin tones but they basically share many of the same features that Snow White and Cinderella shared and 50 to 100 years ago so Disney hasn’t really move things forward they’ve just been a conservative company let’s continue to profit off of a very small demographic that they were able they’ve been able to enlarge by marketing the same by marketing the same films to generations of you or us over and over again when it’s done it is then it’s best to raise the traces of 60s and 70s experimentalism in the 60s and 70s there was an attempted real experimental film. People like Andy Warhol created films are eight hours long such as empire in which Andy Warhol simply set up a camera and record the Empire State building for eight hours without stopping that was a very experimental film and simply demanded that we choose to look at things in a brand new way. Whereas Disney films where is Disney films by repeating the princess theories they’ve used in the past seem to be creating new films but really all
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they’re really doing is simply re-creating the same film over and over again so while we might think the Disney film is more entertaining because it presents a princess in a new story really the Disney films might very well be more repetitive than the post modern 60s 70s experimental films Vandy Warhol he just points a camera in the single building. Strongest the post modern films are really antimodernist and reactionary postmodernism that reject the present or the future and reach back in the past and try to create a product that is very self-conscious about film history film technique extensively use as references in quotation and mix is the high and low of our conventions together to create a new film front of Jamison’s distinction between purity in prestige may be helpful this regard. He involves a sense of criticism remark read the text or texted her being parody pasty simply pastiche is simply a blank parity in which is simply a neurotically a minute without parities of ulterior motive’s. For example I feel like the great dictator by Charlie Chaplin in 1940 is making fun of Adolf Hitler because he knows all the conventions of what Hitler a grand dictator is like a pastiche just simply insert images of Hitler into a movie without any reference to really knowing or understanding who Hitler was and why he was important and why mentioning his image would be import. I think in modern parity films like the last night in Soho we see a rendition of the 1960s being performed by actors in in the year 2021 because we want to reach back 60 years into the past to try to understand how films were seen and described and how people acted in there. Last night in Soho is a very knowing film because it represents our way of viewing the past and utilizing the past to try to understand the past and its relationship to the present era
In post modern film ideological conservativism cannot be seen as the standard form for all post modern film post modern films or by their nature diverse and unique oppositional bank and contested Tori potential of postmodernism can be found in many films unlike Jamison holds out the possibility of Hollywood films making use of irony and parity both to address history as Woody Allen doesn’t selling and to subvert Hollywood conventions from but Hollywood films often are in a challenging mode and as a result of the reliance upon irony they may be ideologically ambivalent or contradictory what tends to be unusual in Hollywood films is it in films like blade runner these inconsistencies and dialogical problems may exist without being resolved by the end of the film. In a film like blade runner by Ridley Scott in 1982 the dilemma as to whether Decker or his girlfriend I really robots are actually real people is never resolved. Philip K Dick always holds a lot of ambivalence about the future and about authority figures and their ability to be truthful. And he also determines that the future may be a period of ambivalence in which the robot figures may be as helpful as the human figures in the story I see many of the post modern films are our bond guard in nature they deal with the surface play death list Ness but as part of a critical project to deconstruct and subvert old meanings as well as construct new ones through the repositioning of artistic and cultural discourse is there is a questioning in a lot of post modern films of earlier traditions for example in a film like the queen Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth the second as a monarch who is very aware of her past but many people treat her as this supreme leader of British society there’s a good scene in the queen in which Helen Mirren has her has her car breakdown and the British authorities that she calls offer to rescue her and she bluntly says no I was building transactions in cars back in World War II I know the car is far and I know there’s something wrong with it I can take care of myself so a lot of these films juxtapose the
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way people are with the way people think the world is to challenge original ways in which particular social groups or others such as blacks or indigenous people or women or gays or Post modern films often represent these people in a different light the promise of postmodernism for feminism is it implies the tactics of pastiche irony quotation in juxtaposition it’s a verts the intent and the reappropriating of the meetings there is a counter practice and a lot of post modern films that contest and critiques the predominant forms and images of such films for example in Steven Spielberg’s 19 1993 Jurassic Park there’s always a lot of irony and play throughout the film in 1993 Jurassic Park the scientist jokingly say well thank goodness the dinosaurs aren’t able to open doors which will keep us safe inside and then there is a scene where one of the velociraptors walks up to a doorway looks at it and puts his hand in the doorway and learns how to open the door which provides a lot of irony for what the sciences suggest said. They have assumed that because they are thinking humans they will know more than the dinosaurs but actually the dinosaurs prove them wrong by their actions and their ability to think through a situation when and with the new media so often times we employ a post modern strategy of appropriation which through reworking your pre- existing documentary footage vines sound quotations the lake involves a disarticulation and a re-articulation I’ve given signifying elements of hegemonic racial discourse so basically many times in a film we say synchronism or hybridity in which characters that were assumed to be one thing end up being something very different. For example in Jurassic Park the dinosaurs are assumed to be that deal with a racially mixed England in historical periods and in the contemporary era we have we have a new understanding that produces a contextualized way we will see people of color in these English shows because of the way people of color have been presented in the past. For example inside Enfield’s 1964 Zulu we see African people as being tribal and showing a lot of hostility towards English people who are fighting them in in Africa during the times of the African rebellion but when we see people of color represented in modern modern television shows like Sanditon or Bridgerton or some of the other shows the deal with the mixture of racially mixed groups in England we see the way they are portrayed is much more benign often times superior to some of their white allies in photos and clearly on an intellectual par and in a social park with many of the people that exist in contemporary and classical or British errors so what we begin to say is in all cases filmmakers in the Third World or seem to make use of make use of make use of first world techniques and conventions but for politically subversive ends that is it is argued that it in the respect to the difference in plurality in their self consciousness about their status is a simulacra and has texted engage with a contemporary mass mediated sensibility without losing their sense of activism the jujitsu strategies such films as the aboriginal films and modern films about subject peoples deal with the debate on post colonialism in a very specific way of recontextualizing people of people of color in a new framework less easy to identify is a distinctive post modern film theory mini post modern films are just very distinctively different and each one represents a different technique of how to make that film different and how to suggest post modern philosophies of the future post modern polemicizing against universalizing until the totalizing theory have led to a certain refocusing of interest on the local in the specific which have been detected in the turn away from the screen. The 1970s and even feminist feminist theory recent years what we see is the convergence of feminism and cultural studies and we
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appear to see micron errors in micro history is the say a fragmented female and other spectator rather than any totalizing meta-meta-psychology of the subject of the cinematic apparatus it must remain theoretical and hold onto some large narratives of the social social critical power of feminism is to be maintained.
I think we can understand postmodernism better if we look at it as a continuum from modernism to postmodernism to high postmodernism to see how the styles irrupt and form over time for example in a film like Citizen Kane which is a high watermark of modernism we see that there is a real in interest in how the film is put together particularly Wells uses a lot of very clever an interesting transitions to make the film to make the film a clear void through certain forms of new film technology he also uses sound in camera work in a distance away one of the things the king does very well it’s transitions like he even uses Mr. Thatcher’s diary as a way of transmitting us from the present to the past so we can understand the origins of of Cain and what kind of man he was a second of all there are a lot of cuts that are obvious and interesting and it’s in the film that describe to us many aspects of the film. Wells uses a wide range of technical exaggerations including close-up a long shots deep focus shots and track tracking shots that move from different directions to give us a real sense of the moving of the camera and the fact that we are being placed on the stage watching events as their unfolding. One of the modest moment one of the modernist moments in the film is the way in which Orson Welles uses Bernard Herrmann score to create a music of extreme emotion the operatic score is six in Alexander’s opera and the music that highlights kings youth shows great nostalgia and great sadness and also there is a sense of the Gothic in her about the life of someone who is very powerful but has a very tragic end. Often times to dialogue reveals deeper emotions as when as when Cain speaks to his friend Jeff Leland and says to love on my own terms Jed the
Another good line that symbolizes the power of dialogue in the film is when Cain is at the breakfast table talking to his wife and she looks at him and sees the paper and she says really Charles what will people think in Kane’s is back to her what I tell them to think which is a very funny line but also very dark line in the play people also the play the film of Citizen Kane also illustrates the people and their emotions cannot be controlled and that despite our goal of controlling people people are generally Jennifer generally well for an uncontrollable of figures the world is and another thing that comes through from Kane I think that shows the modernist sense is that the world is frustrating in the world cannot be controlled when I think of some of the elements of Citizen Kane Joaquin is frustrated with his wife I often think back of the car so screw Nager gonna go with paint in the car so dear to illustrate the horrors of war when the town of Grico’s with band during the Spanish Civil War and I think they can live through a similar. In his life where he can’t control some of thosePeople cannot be controlled where Kane can’t control some of the events in his life that frustrate him and despite all of the frustration in the modernist view of the world in citizen Kane I think there’s an underlying theme to the entire movie despite the frustration and the rebuffed we get from the world it is very important in the modern is film in the believe in modernism in the belief in progress in the belief and technology that we constantly continue to try to make the world a better place so even though Cain is frustrated in his own life and even though they attempt even the attempt to make the world a better place fails I think the cane symbolizes
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somebody who underneath it all underneath his frustrations underneath his dictatorial Ness is really at heart a romantic and really firmly believes in the goodness of man and really firmly believes that he can transform the world I think this may have been a core belief of the modernist. Especially when you have the issue of Hitler and then you have in the United States the wonder of somebody like Franklin Delano Roosevelt who does believe in trying and don’t believe in progress and don’t believe in trying to make the world a better place. You know for all of his problems and his insistence on progress and technology modernism and his score is basically a fairly positive for varsity that even the bad things will occur in the future in an hour time by trying by working on the future we can make the world a better place. Psycho probably is a precursor to the post modern era but I think it shows the tensions involved in modernism and how they conflict directly with what’s arriving in the post modern era the first thing that we see the first thing we see in cycle I think is the conception that the world is not controllable or noble that even though Marion crane thinks she can get away with a robbery she doesn’t really know enough to actually be able to pull it off that the world is still a dangerous and very undesirable place secondly I think the second thing that occurs that distorts modernism and psycho is the idea that mysteries abound in confounds all the time and finally I think a third thing that really distorts and destroys modernism in the film is the idea that contain a third problem in psycho that distorts modernism is the idea that the vent the conventions of our we’re all the things we think to be true may not be true after all and that the world may be a more dangerous and more noble place and we believe it to be for example I think today and are still our perceptions about science in the world I don’t think we really necessarily know enough about the planet to be as confident as we are for example the problems we’ve had with climate change in recent years illustrates to us many things we thought to be true about the planet and the climate are things that we can alter in a very dangerous and negative way so things that begin to arrive in in psycho include the idea that there can be surprises that can be unexpected and disturbing and often deadly and that’s something that modernism doesn’t really take into account and I think it takes into account that the world is different and the things are going to occur in the world that are going to change things for us but the idea that surprises can be deeply unpleasant and might even kill us because of course Miriam not realizing that Norman is completely insane doesn’t realize that he is going to victimize her and murder her before she can respond Marion is very confident of her own abilities but she did she is not ready for the unreasonable chaotic aspects of the world that are presented by this post modern element of Norman Bates who is way beyond the rational and way beyond anything that we see in our lives so surprises can be unexpected and disturbing as an important aspect of this transition from modernism to postmodernism finally there is this idea that there is simply no larger order. That man stands alone in the universe and that man and that man can be taken out by the universe anytime the universe decides to do mankind mankind in. Another problem that manifested in cycle is the age of the chaos is rampant and dangerous and constantly unsettling when Marianne goes in to take her shower she has resolved to return the money and she’s going to go back and undo the wrong she is done but she doesn’t determine if there’s something even more chaotic than her own actions she is self obsessed in her own little universe and she doesn’t realize is that why are university is deeply in trouble and that she is going to pay the ultimate price so chaos is rampant and
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dangerous and constantly unsettling our plans in this chaotic universe motorcycle in the world psycho
. Perhaps even more unsettling is the idea that there is no ultimate understanding of all the underlying elements in the world that things simply happen in a random way without any sense or order finally I think we we fear that there is this fear and horror that look around every corner in the world this is the idea that I think we get from Hitchcock that there is no safe place but every place you go danger can lurk in Hitchcock’s 1942 film shadow of doubt he takes his camera into middle of May middle America there we meet the young Charlie who is named for her uncle Charlie and we discover through the course of the film the uncle Charlie is not a benign uncle who is coming to visit his family in middle America during World War II in a very safe place but that uncle Charlie is a horrible killer of older women who simply kills them for their money and this is something that simply Charlie had no understanding of Indian have any way of knowing that her uncle could be this horrific discordant element in society and there is a wonderful scene in shadow of doubt in which uncle Charlie talks about the women in New York he goes yes these fat old women that have these beautiful lunches to eat up all the money their husbands made and they don’t even deserve to live in one of the women at the table says whether they’re alive are they and uncle Charlie looks over the camera and says are they it’s a very devastating moment in the film but I think a lot of the moments and psycho reassure us that the violence and chaos of the and the violence and chaos of the universe is a universal factor that we have to deal with on many levels and we have to except at the very end of cycle that’s one of the most disturbing film moments in any film from any era and it’s Norman Bates still dressed as his mother whom they found in the basement as a skeleton and he looks directly at the camera and says I’m gonna tell them I’m such a sweet old lady that I won’t even swap this fly this and it’s on my hand I’m gonna show that I’m such a sweet old lady I won’t even sweat this fly. Moment the thing that makes the final moment in psycho so compelling is the fact that Norman Bates is completely lost his mind and it’s gone into a fantasy world and we realize that there has been no justice for marrying crane there will be no justice for this man he will not serve time in jail because he’s completely insane and he doesn’t even understand or realize what he is done and he’s completely dissociated with himself he’s gone completely insane so we’re living in a world in which the ultimate rules of reality and society and conventions in law and human diesel decency no longer exist and we’re living in a chaotic universe in which the most bizarre and weird events can happen and there’s no repayment for them there’s no way back from that horror that we see in front of us the void the darkness the the abstract terror in horrible world that makes absolutely no sense so I think that that film encapsulates the problem is that modernism runs into what happens when you get into this new world and there is no nothing but just chaos
Fear and horror lurk around every corner
Sense
But then I think in high post modern art there tends to be a return to almost a Victorian broke sense of order and I think of a film like 19 $.95 and sensibility a Jane Austen novel directed by Asian Director angry and how that film illustrates the way in which the world is seen in this 19 century culture but how it also relates to how we see the world in the post modern culture first of all the film is narrated by and has a woman protagonist
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the subtle change in cents and sensibility is that women are at the center of the story and women dictate the story and we don’t find anything usual unusual or wrong about that the world has changed. Next we discover and sensitive sense and sensibility that women have inside and women can see deeper into things that men have seen so we’ve actually seen a different version of the world presented to us by a woman woman’s gays and remember even though the Director angry is mail the writer of the film Emma Thompson also a famous actors in the film gives a very specific female sensibility to the film that just that derives from Jane Austen seal the World resort rides from a modern day women’s appointment seen by finally we have this idea from postmodernism that humor is kind of a salve to life that humor can actually make life a bit better even when things are at their most horrible and when we don’t really know what’s going on in the world you were can save us and perform a form of salvation in our world that was completely unexpected and provides us with a marvelous relief from the horrors of life and there’s a good scene in which the little girl is hiding under the table and Emma Thompson and you grantor having a conversation about the glow and they’re talking about how things are situated on the globe and they’re trying to explain where locations are in the globe and of course they’re getting everything wrong in a little girl hiding under the table says no it’s not there it’s here and she tries to communicate with them and explain things to them but eventually she stops hiding under the table because she finds their discourse so absurd and so wrong but the humor the same about getting the world wrong and getting the world right is what comes through clearly from the scene that humans do get the world wrong but there’s humor in that and it’s not always is there always a tragic event another thing that’s important I think in the film is that kindness is often more important than drama a lot of people and in the film seem to see their lives is it a dramatic a tragic event but that will come through in the film is that if someone is very kind of someone they can reduce the drama in a persons life and make life more livable secondly I think we have the element of duty and emotion are important for both must be answered well these are very individualistic ideas that come from Jane Austen but remember Jane Austen’s novel and the films in the 1990s are starting to become more individualistic because the reflecting the worldview of individualism there is an outgrowth of the post modern era so in this post modern insight into people the miss judging of emotions the use of humor as a self and the way of using kindness to interject meanness in society and interactions with people come through as very individual ways in which to conduct oneself in a world that sometimes appears chaotic and difficult difficult to understand another aspect of the film is this idea of duty and emotion and both are showing to have their place in society but both are important and bust my butt must be answered a person can’t live only for duty and a person can’t live only for emotion and this kind of contradicts some of the ideas the postmodernism presents that we have to live a life of duty or be robotic or we have to live a life of fully committed to our emotions what the film suggests is there is in postmodernism a middle path in which duty duty and emotions have to be answered in every persons life another aspect of the life in post modern society that comes up in this 19 century stories the idea that money is important to happiness but it’s not it’s self happiness people after the Reagan era the yuppies versus the hippies decided that they had to make it big and they had to make a lot of money but what this 1990s film which is a metaphor from the once again the the early 19 century. To the late 20th century.
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Suggest suggest is that money by itself will not make people happy but without many people may not be happy so there’s a middle ground about happiness and wealth and how those things should be adjudicated in everybody’s life in the film. Finally the FilmRise at the idea that creative thinking and logic or good products of the mind and there’s a marvelous scene in the film in which Kate Winslet is complaining about her love life and her relationship with her boyfriend that is turned out badly and Emma Thompson who is put up with her sister and her emotional life for the entire film finally just is frustrated and runs away from her sister and goes to a corner of the room and says if anyone had a reason to be upset it’s me I’ve sacrificed everything in my life to be a good sister to you why did you whine and complain whine and complain about everything while I have had a lot of heartbreak in my life and I have not been able to reveal that to you or to anyone and what I like about it is is in the end after some very serious creative thinking and after the time of several engagements being broken or you grant comes to court Emma Thompson at the end of the film she burst into tears because the creative thinking that she has a ride that has eventually resulted in a successful release a successful relationship with the man that she has one and all along so hope which seems to have been out the window and probably wasn’t going to survive ends up helping the characters in the film to survive and do quite well with the films and so it’s nice to see that arrive in a very positive viewpoint of postmodernism using the vehicle of the metaphor of the 19th century novel to try to explain how those images and ideas can occur and help people live in a society that might seem crazy and chaotic
Creative thinking and logic are good products.
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Cinema 32
Diverse modern cinema
It is difficult to say where film is going in the near future. Upsets like the worldwide corona virus epidemic curtailed some productions and fueled a rush to embrace streaming media. The murder of George Floyd galvanized activists who wished to see better representation by minorities in American and world film cultures. Better technology made streaming and at home viewing seamless putting pressure on cinemas and outside venues to compete with the comfort of home viewing. Consolidation of the film industry in the states had people wondering if there would be any films but disnety films left. The giant company had used its money and clout to buy up most other film producers acting out a Amazon scenario of devouring competition thus making the remaining player the winner. Foreign films continued to grow making the world cinema market an actual world cinema fueled by film productions across the globe. Countries that were not previously thought of as film capitals such as Brazil or Nigeria were developing their own robust film empires. Video games and reality shows continued to nibble away at the cinema market making these other entertainment ventures as lucrative and viable or more viable than the field of film. Below ar some emerging trends in the film business.
Business and Mergers
There is a disturbing trend in American and world cultures to breed larger corporations to own all the media and therefore have a lock on a market and audiences. Recently high profile figures like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan have cashed out their interests in their songwriting catalogs for millions, perhaps billions of dollars in cash payment revenue. Question remain if these mega-corporations have that much cash and if they may billions for Springsten song titles, are many people likely to record multiple versions of Born to Run in the future. While it hasn’t happened yet, could the same be far behind for movie and television catalogues. Would many people want a constant diet of old episodes of Laverne and Shirley the Golden Girls or Dukes of Hazard? Are we reaching a point where only one company will license and control all previous film products on the internet. Further if Disney continues to buy up film companies do we really want Disney to be making Warner Brother’s crime movies, paramount glossy epics of Universal monster films? There isn’t much evidence that Disney has helped the sputtering Star Wars franchise or the equally sputtering Marvel series which have had a mass of recent failures (XMen Dark Phoenix, Shang Chi, and The Eternals) to name but a few. While in some businesses economies of scale can be an advantage the only people that seem to get an advantage from owning all of a specific media is the company, not consumers, not the public, and posterity.
Magical Realism
Magical realism was a trend most specifically in South American and world literature in which elements of reality and fantasy blended into a seamless whole. Films by Central American directors like Guillermo del Toro, Alfonzo Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu have popularized the genre and these directors often blended reality and fantasy as in Cuaron’s Gravity, del Toro’s The Shape of Water or Inarritu’s Birdman.Such films suggest that audiences now live in a world in which the real, the fantasy and the surreal co-exist seamlessly. This might seem odd but consider that a large number of Republicans still think the 2020 election was stolen despite
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considerable evidence to the contrary. We live in a world of contingent and relative truth in which people can convince themselves through selective social media to believe whatever they want. Even when such beliefs are counter productive or perhaps dangerous.
Thus it is easy for magical realism ideas to penetrate the public consciousness and link reality and real ideas with fake ideas or at least merge the real with ideas that are questionable. What is certain is the elements of rational western thought are more liable to questioning than ever before. The notion of progress, by who and for who is also questionable. In a society in which wealth and power has been sliding towards the hyper wealthy for two or three generations it is easier for the wealthy who control the financial system and the media to manipulate the minds and opinions and the sense of reality characterized by the media. Further knowledge that government was largely unable to control or curtail the corona virus for several years, the government’s abysmal record on civil rights for indigenous people and foreign immigrants, the violence against people of color by local and federal law enforcement authorities and the government’s own admission that they misled the public for years about UFOs fuels an era of mistrust that is reflected in a film culture where dreams and reality overlap regularly and seem to have equal weight. Maybe Disney’s cartoon dream factory is the right place for American film to be centered?
Decentering and Diversity
The shape of the Academy Awards and other Awars in recent years has led to the notion that film production has been more diverse and global and recent decades. The 2021 Academy Award Winner Nomadland dealt with issues of homelessness where a woman has to live in a nomad camp outside of major cities because she cannot get work, pay rent or live in large metropolitan cities where such resources are often beyond the reach of single not well financed people. The film dealt with the dire problem of homelessness and how one group of people dealt with the issue. Over 65,000 people exist in Los Angels just in skid row. There are thousands more living in parked cars and going to work daily at Target, Walmart and Walgreens but hey do not make enough to pay rent.
Further diversity has extended to foreign cultures and foreign films. The academy awards awarded the Best picture award for the first time to a foreign film, Bong Joon- ho’s Parasite, a film about scheming grifters who fight the aristocracy to gain the rights to a life and property. Films about wealth inequality and deeply held anger at unfair economic systems are growing in the media.
Technology
Many new technologies are impacting film. More and more people use streaming and portable media to watch film. The elegant experience of watching films in a big theatre seems to be fading fast. People struggle to pay for multiple phones for full internet access and for streaming devices that they can take and watch anywhere. People are more and more wedded to a digital device. Phones or really small personal computers seem to be central to continuing daily life.
Streaming services such as HBO, paramount, Netflix, AMC, Apple TV, Peakcock, Amazon prime, Disney + and Hulu seem to be the standard for entertainment in our culture. There seem to be new services arriving daily. Further these services seem to be comfortable with being the producers, the distributors and the central destination for
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all media. Netflix has taken a buy it all approach to providing media for television, reality programming, documentaries, feature films and is currently entering the game market.
Along with the increase in tech seems to be an increase in product to feeda media frenzied population who still want to keep watching.
Postmodern condition
Several elements of postmodern culture are fueling changes in cinema. For one thing technological change is accelerating how film is viewed and regarded. In a lifestyle in which people are continually online and connected, the notion of a complete two-hour retreat to film may be reduced to mini series segments. Martin Scorsese’s epic film the Irishman at over three hours in length was not continually viewed by some film fans but watched as segments. Apple tv’s presentation of Peter Jackson’s edited film of the Beatles Get Back sessions was shown as an 8 hour plus mini-series in segments as opposed to a full length film. Length and editing styles may convince people that longer format films may be viewed as mini-series. Conventional longer films maybe segmented.
The growing demand for interactive entertainment may transform film to something akin to the cutscenes in a video game where viewers with a joystick controller determine what segments they will watch and how they will interact with the content. DVD presentations of films were already heading towards multiple content choices within a package. Viewers in that format could choose trailers, deleted scenes, extended edits, alternative endings and multiple angle scenes. The future of video delivery may be akin to further interactive menu choices.
Postmodern culture also has predicted that late stage capitalism may combine forces into super large companies. Without government intervention this trend has already been seen. Larger corporations may have more resources, exert tighter controls or liberalize the availability of media. Corporations are always looking for innovations that could provide more revenue and different offerings could make more subscribers and more media forms available.
Collapse and exhaustion are also conditions of the postmodern condition. A new form like super heroes may be popular for a time and then that media collapses to be replaced by a new form or genre. This cycle of collapse and rebirth of different formats may be a symptom of the public’s restlessness at media usage. There is also a tendency for boundaries in media to dissipate. For example the division between drama and comedy may have been blurred by films such as Being the Ricardos and The Grand Budapest Hotel. People often receive media today as blends of different styles of entertainment.
Terms
Streaming: Streaming in the delivery of films via digital content across the globe. Diversity: Diversity means the film industry has input from a variety of sources.
Films:
Anderson, Wes. Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Cuaron, Alfonso. Children of Men. (2006)
Melfi, Theodore. Hidden figures. (2016)
Sorkin, Aaron. Being the Ricardos. (2021)
Readings:
Oliver, David. “The Pandemic Fueled Diversity in Film.”
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/04/22/hollywood-diversity- report-pandemic-paved-way-inclusion-movies/7317279002/
Sharf, Zack. Alfonso Cuaron Didn’’t want to Direct Harry Potter.” https://www.indiewire.com/2018/09/alfonso-cuaron-harry-potter-prisoner-azkaban- guillermo-del-toro-1202000189/
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Writing About film Process
The process of writing about film involves a series of steps. Students should have a good subject, a strong thesis, good sources, a logical development pattern, a substantial conclusion based on facts, text notes, a strong bibliography and excellent writing.
Subjects
In the field of film there are multiple subjects that people might consider. Obvious topics are actors and good performances or moments that are crescendos. Here are some popular topics that can provide good essays.
The use of a group of actors to create an ensemble.
Discuss how the scenes and sequences of a film are structured.
How does the film deal with difference in gender, race, social background or diversity. How does structure increase or decrease a film’s impact. For example in Saving Private Ryan the film starts with action but has a fairly slow last two hours. A film like Blackhawk down starts slowly but has a last two hours filled with action. How does such structural choice effect a film’s reception.
How does a film construct reality. In films like M. Night Shamelan’s The Sixth Sense, or the Wachoski sisters’ The Matrix, visions of reality are constructed only to be revealed as false later.
How do films like Being the Ricardos question and discuss what we know about famous people like Lucille Ball.
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How does a film like Star Wars deal with issues of family?
How do films in a series like Star Wars establish repetitive patterns that are repeated again and again.
How do films like Alien, Terminator, Halloween, Scream and others promote females as protagonists and heroes instead of male characters?
How do films like hidden Figures or The Help explore issues of representation of people and diversity?
These are only a few subjects that one could explore, but finding a subject that is less obvious and reveals a depth to a film can be useful.
Thesis
A thesis is usually a strongly prepared idea that has a strong subject, a strong defensible opinion and hopefully some preview of where the essay will go. For example there are many flawed thesis statements that do not make audiences want to read further but there are some thesis ideas that are intriguing and keep audiences interested. For example saying that Citizen Kane is a great film is nice but sort of boring. It doesn’t tell us much or intrigue us about the film. However, writing a thesis like this, might make audiences read the essay with interest. While people think Citizen Kane has great male characters (subject) it is really the female characters that make the film change (opinion) as when Kane’s mum makes him leave home to be wealthy, (preview one) or his first wife becomes disgruntled with his newspaper work, (preview two) or his last wife leaves him simply to spite him. (preview three). A thesis like that tells the audience exactly the subject, and has a very definite opinion and a very specific set of three examples (the mum, the first wife, the second wife) that can be fully developed in subsequent paragraphs.
Here is another complex thesis that might start a good essay. Star Wars despite its major characters is really a political film about how totalitarianism impacts subject people particularly illustrated in the way people act in the bar scene, how the soldiers and lieutenants act serving Grand Moff Tarken and Darth Vader and how the sand people conduct their business on the desolate sand planets. Again this complex thesis has a weird topic that has little to do with the main elements of the Star Wars films. It is an idea about minor characters and how they are used in the film. It would require students to draw examples from little known or less famous scenes and it would require people to think about people and scenes that few critics discuss. Would the essay be interesting? It might particularly in the writer can show how politics is exhibited in each scene.
So lets look at how film views marginalized characters. Consider this thesis. In films from Japanese/Thailand horror producers such as Shutter, The Ring, and The Grudge, the view of female ghostly characters is often negative, but perhaps it is a mistake to see these female ghostly characters as the villains and the antagonists of such films since it is Sadako who is the victim desiring justice in Ringu, Kayako, the murdered wife requiring justice in Ju-on (the Grudge), and Natre, the spurned girlfriend of Tun that desires retribution in Shutter. (Shutter) This thesis has a provocative thesis that maybe reading are reading these films all wrong and that such films really are about wrong females and not about male characters at all. These are films where female characters are victimized, abandoned or harmed by men. The examples from each film give writers a chance to focus on the female characters in these horror films.
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Sources
When writing about film it is good to have good sources that can help you.
Sometimes you might seek good sources first and construct the thesis and subject around sources you can find. The first place to find good sources is NOT on google or in Wikipedia. Those are general non specific sources used by children and often uneducated laymen. They don’t provide specific evidence, they are not written by scholars, they are often unsigned and anonymous, they don’t use sources, they present unsubstantiated opinion, they were not edited or verified by anyone, and they might describe or contain information that is either false or untrue. Where possible it is vastly more helpful to look thing up using our specific and targeted databases.
Ebsco e books. These sources are full books on film and social topics
Wilson omni file. Millions of articles on topics related to a film topic.
America one-file. Millions of articles related to topics on film.
JSTOR: A collection of hundreds of thousands of articles related to film topics all written and edited by scholars in a wide range of publications.
Many of the specific databases will give the writer the proper format for listing the source which can save writers time in writing and listing sources in the bibliography.
The use of good sources promotes good writing. You don’t have to use the whole article and you don’t have to read the whole article. Skim the article and look for items that relate to your thesis. Cut and paste quotes and plug those quotes into your own writing where relevant. Whenever you use a quotation or a paraphrase from an article you must place a text note (the author’s name and a page number) and the source in the bibliography. Also paraphrases and quotes must be inserted so that they support your ideas. That is quotes serve and help your writing. If the quote doesn’t help than don’t use it. You use quotes to prove you are right and your ideas are supported by other learned people with similar ideas.
Bibliography
A good bibliography should have anywhere from five sources or more in even a short paper. Why? People reading your writing want to know that you searched and found information on the subject that gives you a comprehensive and full understanding of the subject. If you look at five different sources you may not know everything about a topic but you derive a deeper understanding of the subject and know more varied opinions about it. You could still be wrong about it, but the more research you perform, the deeper your understanding will grow.
Most bibliographies in film can include books, articles, films, interviews and bibographies of people in the film business. Most sources are listed alphabetically in a bibliography by the authors last name, the title of the article, the place it was published, the publisher’s name and the date it was published. Llke this:
Kael, Pauline. The Citizen Kane Book. NY: Harcourt, 1971.
A film generally is the same data listed basically as the film title, the director, the production company and the date. It looks like this:
Star Wars. Directed by George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977.
Magazines are the author, the title of the article, the name of the magazine, the date it was published. It looks like this.
Arthur, Bea. ‘The Bizarre world of Hitchcock.” Ladies Home Journal. 1965.
Sterritt, David. “The Mysterious Mr. Hitchcock.” Christian Science Monitor. April 9, 1983.
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Writing About film
So remember if you have a good subject, a strong thesis, good sources, some
good quotes and paraphrases, a strong bibliography and good writing style you will probably find readers and gain people Interested in your writing.
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