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]
Sometimes a
cigar is just a
cigar!
S. Freud
…but a movie is
almost never
just a movie
"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?
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 (actualities…)
• ...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?
• Documentaries
• Slick and produced (e.g. Ken Burns, Discovery
Channel)
• Cinema verité (also called Direct Cinema)
• Ethnographic film / field recordings
•Mockumentaries
Primary (1961)
Dir. Robert Drew
What Kinds of Images Move?
• Educational / Instructional / Industrial films/video
What Kinds of Images Move?
•Promotional films (selling/explaining a program,
product, institution, etc.)
What Kinds of Images Move?
•Newsreels (the precursor of the 10:00 news)
What Kinds of Images Move?
•Propaganda (governmental, political, religious, social)
What Kinds of Images Move?
•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
The Movies: Approaches to studying
the Medium
• 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
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 and of telling stories)
• 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.
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.”
• Can be either wildly personal or attempt distance
• 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/focusing 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, new ways of potentially lying to the
viewer.
•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.
Race, Gender & the Movies
•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)