ENGL/EAST 279: Introduction to Film History – Midterm Review Sheet

Technological determinism

The idea that technology determines the form of cinema

Technology shifts social functioning

Cinema of attractions

Exhibitionist cinema, is characterized by presentationality and direct look at the camera.

Making images seen

Subjects the spectator to sensual or psychological impact

Grabs and shocks the audience

Narrative integration

Techniques shifting from showcased effects to actually being used to tell the story.

Cinematic devices: parallel editing, POV, close ups. Used to guide spectator’s attention.

Development of character psychology

Photogénie

Beings/souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction.

Movement is fundamental

Montage — Linkage vs collision and Top Down vs Bottom Up

The creative act of editing.

• Linkage vs Collision: (Sergei Einstein) Montage worked through collision and conflict, not linkage

• Top-Down vs Bottom-Up: Whether the film stimulus (Bottom up) or the viewer (top down) is more important in determining how we watch movies

Kyugeki

“Period dramas”

Filmed Kabuki theater

Used to capture a kabuki performer or promote them

The Benshi

Performers who provided live narration for silent films in Japan.

• Used female impersonators

Pure Film Movement

Not a moving picture, is a film, something which is completely different. Distanced from theater.

• No female impersonators or benshis

Modernization

Rationalization and instrumentalization — Fritz Lang Metropolis

• Rapidity of change, mashing up of time

• Fighting time

• Railway as motor of modernity, individual part of mass, all on same time

Surveillance, Taylorism, Fordism — Modern Times Charlie Chaplin

• Efficiency over humanity

• Surveillance: the connection between profit and labor

• Taylorism: Division of one job into smaller tasks to boost efficiency

• Fordism: beginning/growth of mass production and mass consumption

Rupture of the new — Sergei Einstein The General line (1929)

• Pornographic exploration of milking machine, making nature mechanical

• The continual emergence of the new

Mobility and speed — Rene Clair Entr’acte (1924)

• Increased speed and tempo of modern life, changing sense of space and tim

• Modern modes of transport

• Destabilizing of perception (we assume male body is female ballerina)

The masses — King Vidor The Crowd (1928)

• Development of a mass audience and mass culture

• Alienation and the breaking of social connections but also new sites of mixing

• Patterns of bodies moving, trying to make sense of urbanity

Sensory overload — Julien Duvivier Au Bonheur des Dames

• Extreme sensory overload—the “shock of modernity”, distraction and sensory overload

Urbanization

Linked with modernity, the hub of industrialization, transportation, infrastructure, and social mixing of populations.

Cinema as "dream factory"

Removes connection of the audience —“factory”

Cinema can manipulate the masses, what do people want from it?

Gives people things they could never have in reality

Creative ventures for capital gain, confusion between characters and real-life people.

Interacting with modernity in a superficial way

Mediated modernities

Unequal development, asynchronous premodern and modern coexistence, hybrid between innovation and imitation among spectators.

The Diffusion Model

Innovation is communicated over time among members of a group.

New ideas, some degree of uncertainty involved.

Possibilities of success and of failure.

Cinema as "secularizing"

Spectatorship crosses class and gender lines

Cinema "secularizes...only to replace religion with its own wonders"...

Melodrama

Plays out struggle felt when one conflicts with the status quo, "body genre" that does something to your body, metonymy as substitution for one thing as a metaphor for another thing.

National Film — What makes a Film a National Film?

1. Economic: Conceptual correspondence between national cinema and the domestic film industry

2. Textual: Text based approach; do these films share a common style/world view?

3. Exhibition/Consumption: who is watching these films? ‘Classic’ in the region?

4. Criticism-Led: Reduces national cinema to terms of a quality art cinema – what films “should” represent the nation according to people?

Chinese Film History — Civilized Plays, Left Wing Cinema, National Defense Film

“Civilized Plays”

• Spoken word drama about contemporary issues

• Space for chinese people to think through modern problems and become civilized; China must civilize and unify to survive

• Nationalist rhetoric, private firms look for profit

• Spoken in conversational mandarin, not dialects

• Film is art of the masses, can represent and include everyone

Left Wing Cinema

• National Film

National Defense Film

• Brought on by Japanese invasion, nationalist wartime capital

• Representing Majority of China’s population: rural instead of urban perspectives

  • Somewhat condescending, dumbing down for common people

Primitive Cinema

Style with frontal camera, unchanging distance in medium long shot, no camera movement.

1894-1908

Classical Cinema

Shifts in filmmaking

Changes in camera movement, changing camera distance so spectators experience more

Characters more profound and connected to spectators

Gestures less overpowering and elaborate

Vernacular Modernism

Focusing on the link between modernism and modernity

Helps cultures understand modernity

Cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity — fashion, design, advertising, architecture, etc

Mediated Modernities

Mediated Modernity and Latin America

• Unequal development → unequal participation in global symbols and unequal reception depending on different social/cultural norms

• Western culture decentered

• Premodern and modern coexist; asynchronous

• Hybrid between innovation and imitation among spectators

• Share in a modernity while simultaneously excluded from it

• Arrives via the “routes of modernity” (trains)

• Industrialization and cinematic advancement happening at the same time – “cultural lag” that increased the wonder of the cinema

Indigeneity vs Alterity

Self conscious spectatorship: Latin American spectator participant while just someone looking in

Mexicanidad; Seeking representation of what it means to be Mexican/your own culture on screen

Cultural Democratization and Cinema

No one to mediate reactions to a scientific and technological leap forward due to Mexico’s “cultural lag”

Technological revolution let popular sectors emerge from cultural isolation

Melodrama (Week 3)

Telenovelas

• Social Change

  • Plays our struggle felt when you conflict with the status quo

• “Body genre”

  • Something that does something to your body; makes you cry

• Metonymy

  • Substitution for one thing as a metaphor for another thing

  • Family as social/national conflict, woman as a stand-in for nation

• Gender and patriarchy

  • New roles/models of behavior played out to make sense of changing world

• Reflection and negotiation

  • Inevitability of industrialization, rural/traditional life as obsolete

Mental Vista and Obstruction/Non obstruction

Made through long takes and slow-motion

Observing life happening naturally

Gloomy mood of old china

Neorealism

• Techniques

  • No cuts, lingers in space, looks at what is there directly

• Mission

  • Watching life as it happens

  • Everyone is an actor; not completely focus on star figures like in Hollywood

  • Function of cinema not to tell fables

• Content

  • Life not what’s invented in stories, what actually happens

  • All echoes and implications of any minor action/scenario

• Production

  • Not compatible with capitalism; anyone can film or act in neorealism

Bazin — Faith in Image vs Faith in Reality, Depth of field/deep focus

Bazin: (1918-1958) Ran film screenings and published reviews during WWII

• Faith in image vs. faith in reality

  • Reality laid bare – “confessing under relentless examination”

  • Images don’t add or deform anything to reality

• Depth of field/deep focus

  • Unity of image in space and time

  • Relation with spectator/image closer than with spectator/reality

Melodrama (Week 5) — Periods of social/cultural change

• Moral occult

  • Genre of excess

  • Spiritual values, radically democratic

• Excess of effect over cause

  • Preparation/motivation always insufficient ; Emergence of terms: Fate, Chance, Destiny

• “Too much, too soon”

  • Thickening/condensation of time violates reality

• Women

  • Femininity subject to radical changes

  • Fascination with “modern woman” – prostitute, dangerous sexuality, erring/wandering urban woman

  • Sexual thrill

• Desire

  • We love to watch a woman; desire at core of melodrama

  • It is an accident that your desire is deferred in your real life, so you can get it through cinema.

Femme Fatale

• Male loses access to body during era of production, body a vessel to produce goods

• Women have overrepresentation of their bodies; femme fatale as the antithesis of maternity

• Body produces nothing in a society that fetishizes production

• Power despite herself

Film Noir and the Housemaid

• Good and evil hand in hand

• Actions confused, motives unclear – like a dream

• Contradictions and confusion make the viewer co-experience feelings of anguish and insecurity

• Marked by pessimism, fatalism, menace; world suspicion of evil, loss of clarity

Housemaid as Film Noir

• Set in a confused moral universe

• All of the characters make selfish decisions; unlike the excessive moral codes of melodrama

• Reflects a general social mood of instability

Cultural Hegemony

• Domination/rule maintained through ideological or cultural means, through social institutions, allows those in power to strongly influence values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society

• Antonio Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony:

  • People are rarely governed by state violence; no society can do that all the time

  • What governments really need to rule people is spontaneous consent, created through systems of power throughout society that control people

  • Systems control common norms; influence people to consent to being controlled

Cold War Cosmopolitanism

• North Korean Cold War Cosmopolitanism:

  • Believed that cinema was the most important art in influencing the masses

  • A critique of capitalism; very popular abroad amongst communist countries

• ”The Wedding Day” worked as a film displaying Korean culture

• Wanted to draw foreign viewer in by the songs or costumes or melodramatic generic plot

• Wanted to define and display national culture

Shinpa

Films have a contemporary setting, naturalist drama dealing with contemporary issues.

Any film set in the contemporary era based on theater.