Transcript What Is Cinema: or When is a Movie More Than Just a Movie

What Is Cinema: or
When is a Movie More Than
Just a Movie?
Gary Handman
Director
Media Resources Center
Moffitt Library
[email protected]
"Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part
of the Twentieth-Century mind. It's the world seen from inside.
We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing
can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is
where we are. The Twentieth century is on film....You have to
ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than
the fact that we're constantly on film constantly watching
ourselves."
--Don Delillo (The Names)
“Everything wants to become television.”
--Gregory L. Ulmer (Teletheory : Grammatology in the
Age of Video)
What Kinds of Images Move?
Cinema aka THE MOVIES: 1886--
•The end product of several millennia of fooling
around with moving shadows.
•Evolves from:
• A simple recording instrument.
• ...To a toy for manipulating images and
simple, linear narratives and stories
• …To an art form (the advent of editing)
• A collective enterprise: notions of “authorship”
and responsibility have changed over the years
• A big business with big business aims
What Kinds of Images Move?
How to approach the serious study of
movies:
• Nationality
• Genres: Sci Fi, Gangster, Film Noir,
Musicals, Westerns, porn…etc.
•Eras
•Styles (e.g. expressionism, surrealism)
•Directors (“auteur theory”: Director as
“author”)
•Actors (Hitchcock: “actors are cattle”)
•Audiences / audience reception
What Kinds of Images Move?
How to approach the serious study of
movies (and TV):
• A diversion and popular entertainment
• A new and unique form of “grammar” (a new
way of describing/viewing/representing the
world)
• A mirror of collective cultural fantasy, fear,
longing, prejudice--a mirror of the zeitgeist…a
cultural snapshot or “text”
• A shaper of collective fantasy, fear,
longing…etc.
• Responsible for creating culture of
spectatorship
• A highly exportable commodity: a global good
with impact on global culture.
What Kinds of Images Move?
• Documentaries
• Slick and produced (e.g. Ken Burns)
• Rough/cinema verité (also called Direct Cinema)
• Ethnographic film / field recordings
• Educational / Instructional / Industrial films/video
• Promotional films (selling/explaining a program,
product, institution, etc.)
• Newsreels (the precursor of the 10:00 news)
• Propaganda (governmental, political, religious, social)
• Primary source materials: raw footage; reality footage
• Amateur films (home movies)
What Kinds of Images Move?
• TV: Network, Cable
• Programming (from sitcoms to sports to MTV to
reality shows)
• News
• Commercials/Infomercials
• Public service announcements
Non-theatrical Film and Video
•Documentaries / Ethnographic Film
• Roots in the earliest years of cinema: The Lumiere Brothers -actualities
• Look “real” or “honest” and immediate.
• Impulse toward revealing the drama in the everyday, the
historical.
• Attempt to identify and document “Defining Moments.”
• Techniques have been appropriated by other media forms and
formats (e.g. Dockers ads)
Non-theatrical Film and Video
•Documentaries (and TV news, too)
• Like movies, a product of the times that create them.
• The camera is NEVER totally objective!
• The act of choosing/focussing on a subject is SUBJECTIVE!
•“Defining Moment” is a subjective construct.
• No matter how subtle or artfully concealed: there is
ALWAYS a point of view
•Editing and other production factors contribute to point of
view, tone, overall impact
•New technologies = new ways of manipulating the image and
documentation of reality
•Critical viewing = “reading” documentary content,
documentary techniques, and documentary context.
Non-theatrical Film and Video
•Ephemeral materials:
• Educational / industrial films
• Commercials
• Propaganda
• Ephemera = the fleeting, temporary. Not intended for the
ages (often end up in the dumpster)
• Frequently produced for practical/commercial ends.
• Like the movies, useful for insights into hearts, minds, and
culture-ways of the times in which they were created.
• More difficult to find than produced documentaries or feature
films.
Bodies in Motion
• Edweard Muybridge - Motion studies: movies as mirror, body as classical
subject.
• The Cheat (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1915): The movies look at race and sexuality
• It (starring Clara Bow, 1927): The movies form fashion
• She Done Him Wrong (starring Mae West, 1933): Sexual parody 30’s style (or,
Is that pistol in your pocket…?)
• The Dentist (W.C. Fields, 1930): Sex and pain…what a laugh
• Attack of the 50’ Woman (1958): When nuclear paranoia and gender/sexual
paranoia collide
• Pillow Talk: (Doris Day and Rock Hudson, 1959): Sex (or lack thereof) in the
Eisenhower era
•Barbarella (dir Roger Vadim; starring Jane Fonda, 1968): Heavenly bodies on
Planet Sixties.
Bodies in Motion
• Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1939)
• March of Time (newsreel) (1945)
• Classroom education films (1950’s)
• TV Commercials , 1950’s-60’s
• Dialogues with Madwomen (Irving Saraf and Allie Light, 1993)