Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog

Film Theory and the Problem of Chronology

2012-01-09T19:07:00.001-08:00

Jason Sperb has posted a couple of his syllabi, including one for a film theory class. His class has some terrific choices, which are already inspiring me as I fine tune my syllabi for my film theory classes this semester. He's also using the same anthology I'm using, Corrigan, White, and Mazaj's Critical Visions in Film Theory (Bedford St. Martin's).

I'll post my syllabi soon, but I wanted first to highlight a conceptual issue I've been wrestling with in teaching the film theory class: how much should I arrange a syllabus in chronological order? I don't mean chronology in the strictest sense, in which all writing form 1978 has to come before that from 1985. Rather, I mean organizing the syllabus according to the intellectual history of the field, with identifiable theoretical schools following one after the other. To be honest, this is my first inclination. There are a few reasons, but the biggest is that film theory itself tends to refer to prior schools and works. Even though I really like the Critical Visions anthology and find it a welcome improvement over prior anthologies, I do find it a weakness that the books skips certain conceptual steps and expects students/readers to figure out what semiotics, signification, or the "subject" mean without reading anything that explains these concepts.

Then again, I can imagine the editors would counter that an anthology has to start somewhere, and now that contemporary film theory alone has had a run of roughly 40 years, it's sometimes worth skipping to more current debates rather than have to recreate Cahiers' political thriller debate, Screen's realism debate, or Cinema Journal's melodrama debate.

For me, an additional issue is that I'm teaching mostly production students who are interested in theory but not invested in schematizing overview that one would need for an orals exam or even a journal article. For this reason, this semester I'm trying a more conceptual organization to my syllabus and addressing key problems that film theory tries to answer. I'm not dispensing with chronology altogether - I'm still teaching Bazin before semiotics before cultural studies. But I'm loosening up the focus on intellectual history. Maybe I'll learn that I need to go further.

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

2011-12-12T20:24:00.000-08:00

Call for papers:

Contemporary Screen Narratives:

Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012
Hosted by the Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to Anthony Smith (aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk) and Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur (aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk). Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length. The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

For updates, see the conference blog.

The Trouble With Women

2011-11-19T20:18:00.001-08:00

It's been tougher for me to track down the Paramount films from 1947, but it is seeming like they tend to specialize in genre films that would not be out of place five or ten years earlier: light comedies, action-adventure films, and "exotic" romances.

The Trouble With Women (Sidney Lanfield) would seem to confirm the notion of the Paramount as a stuck-in-the-30s studio, ignoring the broader changes of postwar aesthetics and ideology in Hollywood films. Whereas other comedies seem to update the screwball formula, The Trouble With Women reprises Bringing Up Baby, with Ray Milland in the bookish Cary Grant role:

The twist, though, is that Milland's character, Prof. Sedley, is a psychoanalyst famous for his counter-intuitive and misogynist theories of female sexuality. To my mind, this points to one of the recurring conventions of the late 40s light comedy: a social satire that cuts both ways. In this case, the film sends up both psychoanalysis and the Babbitt-like reactions of the townspeople to Sedley's ideas.

This dual satire plays out some, too, in the depiction of journalism, though I'm not sure the film departs much from the screwball conventions in this. The Teresa Wright and Brian Donlevy characters are journalists trying to write an expose of Sedley; in the process, they expose mostly their own lack of humanity, but they are still correct in their views.

Donlevy's McBride tries to undergo a social class transformation in the film:
What's striking to me is how the film is poised right at the historical moment of a class transformation of the journalism profession. There are a number of films of the late 40s that seem to be coming to grips with a dying petit bourgeois class.

CFP: Console-ing Passions 2012

2011-11-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers

Console-ing Passions

International Conference on

Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism

July 19-22, 2012

Suffolk University

Boston, MA

Founded by a group of feminist media scholars and artists in 1989, Console-ing Passions held its first official conference at the University of Iowa in 1992. Since that time, the conference has created collegial spaces for scholarly and other creative work on culture, identity, gender, and sexuality in television, digital and aural media, and gaming. In this anniversary year, the conference will focus on remembering its roots and forging its future.

Mindful that changes in media platforms and consumption practices have altered the field of feminist media studies, this year’s conference will reflect back on Console-ing Passions’ own history as well as highlight how contemporary research reflects these multiple alterations. Continuing the feminist legacies of the conference, the 2012 program will emphasize intergenerational conversations. To this end, equal emphasis will be placed on the histories, presents, and futures of feminist inquiry.

Organizers of the 2012 conference are seeking proposals for individual papers, preconstituted panels, or workshops on these broad themes investigated within the context of race, class, gender, and sexuality:

· histories and theories of television
· women in media industries
· media and globalization
· user-generated content and new media economies
· social networking
· television genres
· media and gay/lesbian/transgender politics
· gaming and virtual worlds
· media activism
· experimental media histories and criticism
· media spaces and local media
· social movements and global uprisings
· theories of apparatus and interface
· audiences/players/viewers/listeners
· mobile media
· theories of post-television

Deadline for receipt of proposals is January 10, 2012.

Guidelines for Proposal Submission:

Individual Papers: Individuals submitting paper proposals will be asked to provide an abstract of 350 words, a short bio, and contact information.

Pre-Constituted Panel Proposals: In keeping with this year’s theme, we ask that panels attempt to showcase a range of experience in the field; graduate students and junior members are encouraged to pair with senior scholars. Panel coordinators should submit a 200-word rationale for the panel as whole. For each contributor, please submit a 200-word abstract, a short bio, and contact information. Panels should have three to four papers.

Workshop Proposals: We seek workshop ideas that focus not only on scholarly issues in the discipline, but also on matters of professionalization. Topics might include: gender and sexuality in the workplace; teaching feminist media studies; tenure and family; publishing your first article or monograph; moving to full professor or administration; mentoring challenges and opportunities, etc. Coordinators should submit a 350-word rationale for the workshop (including some discussion of why the topic lends itself to a workshop format), a short bio, and contact information. For each workshop participant, please submit a title, short bio, and contact information. Workshops are intended to encourage discussion; contributors should plan on a series of brief, informal presentations.

Screening Proposals: We invite proposals for video, audio, or new media screenings. Proposals should consist of a 500-word abstract (including the length and format of the work), a short bio of the producer/director, and contact information.

Please submit all proposals, via the conference website at http://bit.ly/CPBoston2012

Direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to:
CPBoston2012@gmail.com

Follow us on twitter @CPBoston2012

Conference Organizers:
Miranda Banks, Assistant Professor, Visual and Media Arts Department, Emerson College
Nina Huntemann, Associate Professor, Communication & Journalism Department, Suffolk University
Deborah Jaramillo, Assistant Professor, Film and Television Department, Boston University
Suzanne Leonard, Assistant Professor, English Department, Simmons College
Jane Shattuc, Professor, Visual and Media Arts Department, Emerson College

How To Write About Film History, part I

2011-11-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

I am teaching a film history survey. It's only my second time teaching this survey and the first time it's been historically limited (1945-present). One issue I've faced is that this is the first film history course many of the students have taken. As a survey, it's not really a methods class, nor does a larger primary research project seem fitting for this sophomore-level class, but I still want the students to write papers that make historical arguments as part of a research-based project.

To this end, I've developed some guidelines in how to write a film history paper. I thought I'd share them in case anything is useful for other teachers out there, but also I'm open to feedback or tips.

Also, are there guides somewhere that I'm overlooking?

This first part is on coming up with a thesis. The second part, on research, will be in a separate post.

How to Write a Film History Paper: The Thesis

The basics of a thesis

A thesis should make a claim that is not obvious and that one could disagree with. You should be able to put (I intend to prove that) in front of the statement and have it be meaningful. For instance, the following is not much of an original thesis:

(I intend to prove that) The French New Wave was a movement of filmmakers who were inspired by Hollywood.

since few would disagree, but

(I intend to prove that) The French New Wave adopted a trademark black-and-white style because of cost and the influence of photojournalism.

gives a claim that asks the reader to understand the subject differently. (We think of New Wave films in relation to Hollywood, but perhaps Life magazine is just as important.) The thesis could be argued against: for instance, maybe New Wave cinematographers adopted their style mainly because of the need to show on B&W television or as a reaction against Tradition of Quality style. In any case, it's up to the author to present evidence to prove her/his case.

How to come up with a thesis

I have a lot of practice with coming up with thesis statements. It is easier to write a focused, specific thesis if you have read a number of other arguments in the field. Ideally, you should be reading materials for this class (and others) with an eye for figuring out their arguments, not simply absorbing information.

In the meantime, there are a few questions you can ask about your topic to help you come up a thesis:

- Is there some pattern of filmmaking that others haven't written on?
- What historical causes can you pinpoint behind some aspect of a film or group of films?
- Why could this film have only been made when it was made? (If you think the answer is obvious, it's not.)
- How can we think about the film/films as economic products in addition to art or entertainment?

Scope of a thesis

The scope of the paper will determine the length it takes to provide enough evidence. If the thesis is broad, a shorter paper will be too general. For a 5-6 page paper, narrow down your argument. You won't be able to talk about a whole movement or period in general. Find, instead, some aspect. You can focus on particular case studies (directors, films, etc) - this approach works better if you can do a little extra research into production, exhibition, or reception of the film.

Or, you can focus on a formal or ideological aspect - like New Wave cinematography (above), screenplay form in 40s Japanese cinema, or racial casting in 80s Hollywood. It's up to you and your creativity - and what's previously been written on the subject.

22nd Screen Conference CFP

2011-11-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

The 22nd International Screen Studies Conference is organised by Screen journal and will be programmed by Screen editor Karen Lury.

We invite papers on any topic in screen studies, i.e. cinema, television and digital media. Submissions for pre-formed three-person panels will be considered but not prioritised.

‘Other Cinemas’ will be the subject of the plenaries and will form a strand running throughout the conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Charles Acland (Concordia University), editor of Useful Cinema (2011)
Elizabeth Lebas (Middlesex University), author of Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema 1920-1980 (2011)

Looking into the past and the future of cinema has inspired increasing academic interest in films and film-making practices that are generally considered to be outside the ‘mainstream’ of commercial cinema. Screen wishes to encourage presentations that engage with these ‘Other Cinemas’. This might involve:

• ‘Amateur’ films;
• Educational cinema;
• Industrial films;
• Films produced for and distributed via different web platforms;
• Experimental or avant-garde work;
• ‘Sponsored’ films (municipal cinema, health films).

The deadline for proposals is Friday, 13th January 2012.

Please visit the conference site for full submission details.

Movie Title Sequences

2011-10-21T06:07:00.000-07:00

At the Notebook, Adrian Curry has a good entry on the title sequences by Jacques Kapralik. Another instance in which the modernism has blinded critics to the art and craft of classicism: "Sure we’ve all swooned over Saul Bass title sequences, and Annyas, of course, has a superb section devoted to them too, but have you ever really considered Warner Brothers end titles before? To see all these cards together is to discover a breadth of type design and handlettering, impeccably and inventively used over and over again." To me this is another instance of the way our understanding of classical Hollywood (and studio-era filmmaking in general) shifts a bit when we approach these films as an archive of films made more accessible through cable TV, home video, bootlegs, and downloads.

Decherney on Public Domain

2011-10-05T05:44:00.001-07:00

Peter Decherney has an op-ed in the New York Times on copyright law and public domain. I know this dovetails Peter's larger project on copyright in Hollywood, so it's no surprise to see a good op-ed piece, but it's still nice to see an accessible version of it circulating out in the broader public sphere. Film studies is not a field known for its public policy applications (one of Toby Miller's frequent complaints), but Peter's op-ed shows how what we do (at least the historians among us) illuminates policy issues in a clear, productive way.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Book Writing

2011-09-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

I look forward to reading Michael Newman and Elana Levine's new book on TV and cultural legitimization.

In the meantime, Michael has a good post reflecting on the book writing process. This is becoming one of my favorite blog post genres, in fact. Pulling back the curtain not only lets non-scholars know a bit more about what we do (as in Tim Burke's series of posts), but it allows scholars to see each others' work habits and get inspired by each other.

The Mid-Size Conference

2011-08-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

I have attended two conferences this summer that I would classify as mid-sized conferences: Screen had about 100 scholars presenting, Visible Evidence between 2-3 times that many. Both were terrific events and academically nourishing - good papers and panels where conversations actually emerged from the debates the papers engaged with. And the schedule was not too crowded. From what I gather, other regular conferences have similar benefits: Flow, Visible Evidence, Media in Transition, and Console-ing Passions.

As much as I do actually enjoy and look forward to SCMS Conference, it suffers in comparison with the smaller conferences on many grounds. I don't know the solution or even if anything needs to change. I would probably be happier with a variety of conference sizes, types, and themes, if there were a couple more mid-sized conferences for film studies in the US.

Visible Evidence 18

2011-08-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will be going to New York to attend the 18th Visible Evidence conference, devoted to the study of nonfiction film and media. I have promised to contribute the conference blog. I may also post here.

I look forward to seeing colleagues and (potentially) some readers there.

Vernacular and Formal Expression

2011-08-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

This Virginia Heffernan post on overhauling eduction to meet the demands of the future has gotten a bit of attention. Tim Burke chimes in his support for the idea.

So educators can argue that their immediate job is to ensure an even distribution of experience with new media practices and a richer exploration of interpretative and expressive work in those media.

Of course, to do so, educators themselves would have to have widely distributed skills and be practiced in those richer possibilities. This is not my sense of the current norms in higher education in the humanities and social sciences, nor do I necessarily see incoming faculty as being markedly closer to that goal, only that there are tendencies in that direction.

I always value Burke's reflections on liberal arts eduction. Even if I tend to be more slanted toward traditional disciplinary education, I admire his sense of purpose and ability to articulate it.

I'm left scratching my head here, though. I can't help but feeling that the academy is being set up as the fuddy-duddy straw man. What exactly is being proposed, either by Heffernan, Cathy Davidson (whom Heffernan is drawing on), or Burke?

From Heffernan: "When we criticize students for making digital videos instead of reading Gravity’s Rainbow, or squabbling on Politico.com instead of watching The Candidate, we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is."

It happens I have taught in the context of an intro class both The Candidate and internet political culture. I don't see these as mutually exclusive. Both benefit from ideas about mass media and from ideas about civics. Each has its historical context, so by nature The Candidate is less obviously relevant to contemporary culture than, well contemporary culture. That said, at least some of my students have found The Candidate an eerily prescient commentary on President Obama's star image. It's not as if TV culture or the political party apparatus has gone away.

Then, there's this claim: "Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers.... Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper. [She] concluded, 'Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.'”

I have used blog writing in the classroom, sometimes to great effect, sometimes not. Whatever the merits of students' blog writing (which does tend to have a more assured voice than the average term paper), is the proposal to spend more instructional time on vernacular expression and less on formal expression? The reason that blog writing is less tortured is that it comes closer to daily speech. Formal expression is valuable precisely because it is abstracted away from verbal speech - abstracted in the mechanics of written language, abstracted in its logical structure, abstracted in its ultimate ideas, and abstracted in the readership it imagines. This makes it difficult to teach, and the missteps painful to read sometimes, but expository prose is valuable precisely on all of these counts. The ability to deal in these abstractions is closely related to the formal expressive abilities that form the basis of professional life and specialized knowledge. I can't predict the jobs of the future, but they may be important then, too.

If this is a status and resource battle between literary and media studies, fine, I guess. Beyond that, I'm not sure what the overhaul being suggested means specifically.

The Foxes of Harrow

2011-08-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

Foxes of Harrow (2oth-Fox, John Stahl) is a historical drama set in antebellum New Orleans. At initial blush it seems to fit the genre formula: dynastic melodrama set on a Southern plantation; an Irish immigrant (Rex Harrison) who comes to America and moves from gambler to businessman in attempt to overcome his illegitimate status; his wife who is too guarded sexually to be able to deal with her husband; and tragic events that threaten to bring down the slave-owning patriarch.

A couple of things are unusual about Foxes of Harrow, though. First, it lacks the visual style we associate with the antebellum or historical melodrama. The black-and-white cinematography looks downright low-key and realist in comparison.

It's probably more accurate to call Joseph LaShelle's cinematography romantic minimalism than realist. Romantic, because its set ups provide washes of etherial light; minimalist because like Shamroy's work (also at Fox) it tends to be sparse with the number of lighting sources.

Fitting with the Fox style, the result exploits a deeper and darker spectrum of grayscale than other studios' cinematography.

The second unusual aspect of the film is that the novelist for the source book, Frank Yerby, was African-American. As a best-selling writer of popular romance-historical novels, his work does not fit comfortably in the canon of African-American writing. Foxes, after all, has slave-owning white characters as protagonists. In the film version, there is a depiction of the dark side of the slave trade, as in an auction early in the film, during which the wandering camera emphasizes both the inhumanity of the spectacle and the complicity of the spectator of Old South movies who does not watch the forced labor propping up the lifestyle of the slaveowners.

As in many late 40s films, there's a self-conscious critique of film representation and a sense of making films unlike the "Hollywood film."

Edited Volumes

2011-07-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts from another discipline on the relative lack of weight given to edited volumes in academic research standards. I think much of what Fabio Rojas applies to the humanities as well, though there are also some culture differences around publishing between sociology and film studies.

But beyond the matters of professionalization, I would pose the question of what role edited volumes and essays in such volumes play. Rojas poses "dumping ground," heterodoxy, and lit review as three basic functions, but I think there are plenty more.

- Applied scholarship. Film studies (and to some extent, I think, television studies) has the peculiarity that one former branch of the discipline - film criticism - is now subsumed into the branches of film theory and film history, which have more prestige and purport to tackle more complex questions. Interpretation and textual analysis are still part of the methodological toolbelt, but for journal articles, the expectation is often for bigger stakes than mere textual reading. Yet there are many, many films that merit close study and edited volumes give rooms for articles weighted more toward the film criticism side.

- Pedagogy. Edited volumes are rarely pedagogical in a way that textbooks are, but they can be organized and edited with an eye toward use in the classroom. Where monographs are too long and specialized and where journal articles are too oriented toward the vanguard of the field, the edited volume allows for a more accessible writing tone and fuller coverage of a topic. Rutgers' Star Decades and Screen Decades series are good examples.

- Agenda setting. Certain volumes capture and even christen scholarly agendas by pulling together work in a heretofore forgotten area or under a new rubric. The recent studies in world cinema are good examples.

- Compilation. I take it the compilation volume is going out of fashion because of the expense of negotiating and paying rights, but there's a real value for the reader to have influential and/or smart essays on a subject together in one book. Examples: Caughie's Theories of Authorship or Elsaesser's Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.

- Collective work. Humanities scholars are notorious lone wolves. The edited volume, however, can bring together scholars in a larger study, dividing up tasks or parts of the coverage. von der Knapp's volume on Night and Fog's reception is a good example.

- Synopsis. This refers more to individual contributions than to entire volumes, but frequently scholars use volumes as a place for work that condenses and excerpts a larger argument developed more elsewhere. Similarly, they may use the volume to riff off their more established argument in the context of a new subject or theoretical emphasis.

Are there other functions I am overlooking?

Film History syllabus

2011-07-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

I will be teaching a film history survey this Fall - the second part, form 1945 onward. I have a draft online - at this point I'm probably more concerned about weeding out possibilities in the interest of time constraints, but I'd happily hear comments and suggestions for what has worked for you before in such a class.

13 Rue Madeleine

2011-07-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

I had mentioned 13 Rue Madeleine (20th-Fox, Henry Hathaway) as part of a semi-documentary trilogy that Fox made in the postwar years. Actually, I tend to prefer the term pseudodocumentary for a general fictional style that mimics documentary, but contemporary usage (producers and critics) referred to these films as "semi-documentaries."

Fox and other studios made films in this vein beyond these 13 Rue Madeleine, Call Northside 777, and House on 92nd Street, but these three adhere to a strict formula:

1) a focus on government institutions, in this case Army Intelligence. Along with this comes the foregrounding of governmental buildings and the mise-en-scene of bureaucracy.

2) a foregrounding of technology, especially the technology of mechanical reproduction or communication. Overhead projectors, PA systems, film projectors, microfilm, etc.

3) use of a variety of actuality footage, whether documentary in nature, from newsreels, or simulated in 16mm filmmaking.

4) Narratives of espionage and/or detection alternated with footage organized according to intellectual-rational logic.

Jesse Lerner remarks of the semi-documentary that it "saved studios money by beefing up low-cost narratives shot on a studio sound stage (mostly typically noirs or tabloid crime dramas) with stock B-roll filmed on location and an authoritative, documentary-style voice-over." (F is for Phony 19). I can see where Lerner is coming from, since these films initially seem cheap and stilted and the realism-on-the-sleeve ham-handed. But I think he underestimates how the addition of "newsreel" impacts both filmmaking style and narration.

First, the indoor shooting (potentially sound stage, but likely location) uses drastically different lighting style and sound design. These involve fewer attempts to dispel background shadow (generally a sign of having to light in a room with a ceiling)

... and using flat front lighting.

Second, at least in 13 Rue Madeleine, the film goes out of the way to flaunt its location shooting, showing James Cagney in Le Havre or in a real car.

Third, the narrative structure departs from the usual cause-effect chain of a fictional narrative. Much of the screen time is devoted to montages of agent training and much of the film's narrative moves only through the information provided in the voiceover. Most striking of all, the ending is abrupt and departs from the typical climax-denoument structure.

In all, I see a real attempt to adapt to new cinematic vocabularies and to do so with an experimental élan.

SCMS 2012 Panel Proposals

2011-07-24T16:45:00.001-07:00

Regular SCMS members who are regularly consulting the forum on the SCMS website will already be looking over the panels proposed for the 2012 conference in Boston. But others may be interested in submitting a proposal to one of the panel proposals below. You do not have to be an SCMS member to submit, but if accepted you need to join to present at the conference. Deadline is August 15 for the panels (you should contact panel organizers much sooner) and Sept. 1 for open call.

I have not listed additional information on the panel topics. You can consult the SCMS website or Google them to see if calls for papers are posted on listservs elsewhere. In all this has to be the longest list of panel topics I've seen at this stage. A sign for a banner crop of proposals?

3D, Giant Screen and the Natural World: Collision or Collusion?
Active Women: Historical Understandings of Female Heroes
American Indians and Re-appropriations in Contemporary Media
Animating Space and Scalar Travels
Animation, in Theory: Film Studies' Special Relationship with Animation
Approaches to production design (including set dressing, props, costumes)
The Audiovisual Life of Biotechnology
The Autobiographical I/Eyes of the Cinema
The B-Film: History and Contexts
Il Bandito/a: Class, Crime and International Film Noir
Belly of the Beast: Queer Studies on Conservative Campuses
Beyond Backdrop: Psychological/Allegorical/Cultural Uses of Natural Setting
Beyond the Sunday Night Lineup: 40 Years of HBO (1972-2012)
Black Swans, Bridesmaids, & Barbarians: Extreme Bodies in American...
Bob Fosse
Bodies that Matter: Representations of Motherhood in U.S. Media
The Body Electric: The Search for the Corporeal Indexical in the Age...
Bollywood Does Hollywood
Boredom
Brian De Palma Reconsidered
Buddhism and Cinema
The Camera's Share: Camera Practice and Cinematic Innovation
A Case for Criticism: Journalism, TV Studies, and the Television Critic
Celebrity Activism: Industry, Culture, Society
Cinema and Community, Cinema As Community
Cinema and Multilingualism: New Perspectives
Cinema and Subjectivization: Moving Images and the Production of History
Cinema/Media/Systems
Cinemagoing and the City before 1930
Cinematernity - Representations of Motherhood
Cinematic Cities: Beyond the Metropolis
“Cinematic Time” Today
Circulations of the Flesh
Confronting Change: Media Industries at (Various) Crossroads
Contamination, Trash and Dirt in Visual Media
Contemporary Exploitation Cinema
Dealing with the Devil: Horror and Trauma in the Classroom
Deleuze from Behind
Depictions of Poverty in American CInema
Designing the House: Regulation and Disorder in Cinematic Spaces
The ‘Disciplinary History’ and the Identity of an Academic Discipline
East Asian Cinema, Urbanism, and Globalization
Exploring Indigenous Cinemas in Canada
A Face Was Not Born, But Made: Physiognomies in Cinema
Fictions of Reproduction: Representations of Contraception and,,,
Film Comedy and the Limits of Representation
Film Criticism: Medium, Cinephilia, Value
The Film Festival as Film Course/Pedagogy
Film Festivals in Latin America, Latin America at Film Festivals
Food for Thought: the cultural significance of food in Film and TV texts
Forms of Violence in Latin-American Cinema
Fragmented Nightmares: Transnational Horror across Visual Media
Framed Lives and Screened Deaths: Representations of Honor Killings... 6/30/2011
Gender and Fan Studies/Cultures
The Gendered Cyborg Reconfigured: Technology, Body & Gender..
Gendering Animation/Animated Gender
Ghost in the Machine: Technologies for Creating, Conjuring...
Girls' and Women's Media Production
Global Sports Media
Historical Fiction Film: Questions of Form and Ethics
Histories of Portability
Hitchcock and Adaptation
Home Noir: Domestic Space in Women's Melodramas of the 1940s-50s
The “Host City”: A Place-Centered Consideration of the Media Festival
Image Culture and the Environment
Imagining, Imaging, and Remembering the Method in the 21st Century.
Inner/Outer Space: Experimental Cinema, Interiority, and the Cosmos
Issues in Contemporary Geek Media
Issues of Age
Laughter that “encounters a void”?: On Humor & Cinema in the Middle East
Lensing Labor
LGBT Youth Identity, Media Representations, and Performances
Lifestyle, Taste, and Media Publics
The Logic of Cultural Boycott; or, To Buy or Not to Buy: Is That the Questi
Media Industries in the 1950s
Media Textures: Haptical Themes, Onscreen and Off
Men in Motion: Masculinity, Agency, and the Moving Image
New Media and Transgender Networks
Non-Theatrical Films during World War II
On the Job Training: Media Industries and the Cultivation of Labor
The Pedophiliac Imagination, Take 2
Perspectives on Kelly Reichardt
Places of American Horror
Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect
Political Marriage in American Media
Popular Music and Memory in Film
Psycho-Cinema: Technologies of Modern Affect
Realism and Film History: 21st Century Perspectives
The Renaissance of Ideas in Media Studies
Representing Queer Time, Engaging Queer Theory
Representing the Post-Industrial City: Film, Television, and...
Rethinking Space: Theory and Practice
Revising Classical Assumptions: New Takes on Classical Hollywood Film
Sex and Television
The Shifting Valence of Verité: Documentary in Distinct Cultural Contexts
Silent-Era Hollywood
Something Missing: Transnational Discourses and Practices of War, ...
Sound in Genre
Specialty Film Distribution
State Power, Media Technology, and New Forms of Documentation...
Stylized Moments—Film Style as Foreign Language
"A Take on the Ballet": Investigating _Black Swan_ (2010)
Teaching Film Studies in a Broadcast Environment
Teaching Genres Workshop
Televising the Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Disaster on TV Dramas
Theorizing Mock-Documentary Television
The Transformation of the Chinese Film Industry and Film Market (1980-2011)
Tuning In: What is/was Television Sound?
TV Myths and the Writing of Television History
Violent Images
Women and Comedy
You are What You Eat: Media and Diet

T-Men

2011-07-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

At the end of his supremely useful book, Hollywood Lighting, Patrick Keating uses T-Men (Eagle-Lion, Anthony Mann) as an example of "classicism at the margin" or, as I would phrase it, the peripeteia for the shift from a classical style to post-classical ones. Cinematographer John Alton is famous for extreme low-light and low-key setups and slightly off-kilter compositions. It's tough to approach T-Men without considering first as an Alton opus, one which helped define the ideal type of film noir's visual look.

The elements are all here: the inky blacks, the use of existing light sources, the transformation of locations, and the keeping of characters in the dark. Alton also foregrounds what the exaggerated style and technological changes allow that previously was not possible:

Equally interesting, however, are the less flashy choices, like the contrast in exposure of foreground and background subjects.

The visual choices mark a departure from the generic material, which adheres slavishly to the pseudo-documentary formula that Fox developed with the Henry Hathaway institution trilogy (House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, and Call Northside 777). There is the Reed Hadley-esque voiceover narration (with excessively expository copy written for it). The opening pan shot in demonstrative manner.

And the mise-en-scene of technology and bureaucracy framing the police procedural narrative.

But where Hathaway's DP, Norbert Brodine developed a look that at times mimicked newsreel and 16mm film and at other instances drew inspiration from them for a new realist style. Alton's work, however, operates with a looser and more expressionistic conception of "realism."

There is a case that the semi-documentary style became transformed into a generalized realism, but here the narrative exhibits a schizophrenic relationship between the Fox/Hathaway template and the sadistic-experiential approach of the Marlowe-influenced detective noirs.

The Egg and I

2011-07-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

I never know how much the received notion/industrial discourse of the "hix pix" matched what non-urban audiences tended to prefer in the classical years, but from a glance The Egg and I (Universal, Chester Erskine) seems to be the kind of "hayseed comedy" that American television would specialize in during the late 1960s. The narrative follows the newly-married MacDonalds (Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurry) as they live the city to follow Bob's dream of becoming a chicken farmer.

Its humor satirizes the city-slickers lost in the pre-industrial world of the American farm, though there are suggestions of the increased mechanization of farming, too. Hijinks ensue in what's a reverse Our Daily Bread, as the film sends up the romanticism of the back-to-farm mentality while ultimately also siding with it.

The film also introduced the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, whose popularity spawned a series at Universal. (Despite their status as secondary characters, they are featured prominently in some video cover art.) Stereotypical hillbillies, the Kettles and their fifteen children provide the other target of humor, of the rural from the viewing position of those who have become more urbanized.

There are also two Native American farm hands, whom Betty MacDonald confuses with marauding Indians, after Hollywood Westerns.

Her naivete is the butt of the joke, but of course these are movie Indians. Stereotype aside, the incident gives a good window into the comedic style of the film, which in the style of a Bob Hope film progresses from one self-conscious joke to another. The soundtrack comments comedically on the action, and characters show both awareness (Bob chides, "You've been watching too many movies") and lack of awareness (the Indians seem unaware that Betty's reaction is racist hysteria).

There are other self-conscious touches too, like the POV tracking shot from the vantage of an imaginary person (after the film treats schizophrenia as a gag):

The film, unusually, does not open with the credit title but rather a preamble (again, with gratuitous racial stereotyping) ending in direct address to the spectator.

David Bordwell has maintained in Classical Hollywood Cinema that such moments of self-conscious address were frequent for comedies. Interestingly, though, I have yet to come across many examples in 1947. Perhaps the studios I have watched more extensively - MGM, Fox, WB, and RKO - were the ones least likely to adopt such tongue-in-cheek rapport with the spectator. I look forward to seeing more from Universal, Paramount, and Columbia.

CFP: Velvet Light Trap issue on Media Materiality

2011-07-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

The Velvet Light Trap Call For Papers
#70, Fall 2012—Stocks, Screens, and Servers: The Materiality of Media

Submission Deadline: September 15, 2011

As culture becomes increasingly digitized—from downloading and streaming videos and music to digital film production and cloud computing—arguments for the "dematerialization" of media are becoming commonplace. However, media have always been, and remain, embedded in and structured by material objects, networks, and practices that constrain their uses and meanings. Any cultural artifact bears traces and consequences of the material conditions of its production, distribution, and reception, whether this be a result of the size and weight of the camera that shot a film's images, the geography of the shipping or cable network through which it was transported or transmitted, or the spaces occupied by physical record or DVD collections. Even ostensibly "dematerialized" digital media find material existence in hard disks, server farms, and wires—as well as in the proliferation of new interface devices, from smart phones to iPads.

The perception of the diminished materiality of media presents us with an opportunity to reconsider (and reaffirm) the material dimensions of media, both in terms of the present moment and from an historical perspective. To this end, The Velvet Light Trap seeks articles considering the implications of the materiality of media, welcoming studies of film, broadcasting, and new media from a range of approaches—including historical, theoretical, ethnographic, and/or textual.

Potential areas of inquiry include (but are by no means limited to):

- the effects of technological and other material factors on film/media craft practices and style,
- screen technologies and other exhibition devices, old and new,
- issues in the political economy of the manufacture and disposal of media objects and devices (e.g., labor conditions and e-waste),
- logics and operations of physical networks of distribution and transmission,
- media infrastructures and cultural geography,
- physical interactivity with media interfaces,
- the imitation of material objects in the digital realm (e.g., album art and liner notes),
- the resurgence of physical formats once presumed 'dead' (e.g., vinyl, cassette tapes),
- material dimensions of reception and fandom (e.g., collecting, scrapbooking),
- the aestheticization of media commodities,
- materiality, memory, and nostalgia,
- material media objects, cultural capital, and taste,
- material collections, archiving, and media historiography,
- the exploration of materiality by particular artists and/or texts,
- materiality and avant-garde cinema, and
- media materiality and policy.

Submissions should be between 6,000 and 7,500 words (approximately 20-25 pages double-spaced), in MLA style. Please submit one electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, saved as a Word .doc file; remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The journal's Editorial Board will referee all submissions. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. All submissions are due September 15, 2011.

Desire Me

2011-07-18T04:30:00.001-07:00

Desire Me (MGM, George Cukor) exhibits many of the trends of the postwar cinema, with a complicated flashback structure, in which Greer Garson's character Marise, tells the story of waiting for her husband Paul (Robert Mitchum) to return from war only to hear of his death from a war compatriot, Jean, who tries to woo Marise in her loneliness. It's an unusual love triangle in which tense and geography separate Paul and Marise for much of the film. Within Marise's flashback, there are objective scenes that Marise did not witness as well as subjective flashbacks from both Marise and Jean. There are also a couple of points of subjunctive voiceover, in which the image does not serve as the past of the voice but rather as the enactment of it.

Where a film like The Unfaithful makes explicit the soldier's wife's adultery as part of a larger issue of wartime dislocation and postwar readjustment, Desire Me does so implicitly, often through the visual look of the film, which oscillates between I Know Where I'm Going-like invocations of Brittany...

to newsreel documentary...

French poetic realism...

and finally a stylized low-key "action" style - see for instance a scene between Paul and Jean which avoids usual coverage and cross cutting in favor of complementary and oblique framing.

I'm not sure if this is Joseph Ruttenberg trademark style, but it's notable in a Cukor romantic drama.

The shift in visual style as well as the flashback structure and the star images of Garson and Mitchum (an unlikely pair) serve to invoke and contain wartime dislocation. Moreover, I'd read this film as yet another attempt at MGM invoking topical and "modern" sensibility within the constraints of studio house style and genre preference.

Trail Street

2011-07-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

One surprise I had first encountering B-film Westerns from the 30s and 40s is how they often don't fit my generic conception of what a Western is. They may possess the syntax of the genre (ranchers, cowboy hats, and frontier towns) but lack the usual themes and narratives. Rather, they tend to be melodramas in the older sense of the term - gangster-film-style battles between criminal elements trying to monopolize business illegally and forces of law-and-order. They lack the outsider-hero function and man-vs-nature thematics of the A Western.

Trail Street (RKO, Ray Enright) occupies a middle position between the A and B ideal types. Even stylistically, it has both the cheapness of lighting setups that are too hasty and minimal to disguise the multiple shadows cast by unmotivated lighting sources.

... while at other points camera movement and cookie-lighting common to A films give the scenes depth. (DP is Roy Hunt).

Narratively, it contains elements of both the crime melodrama and the A Western, with a narrative that starts off centered on the battle between ranchers and farmers but then explores the themes of overcoming nature, through Robert Ryan's concern to discover a way to work the land, and of social belonging, especially with the introduction of the Randolph Scott outlaw hero. Along the way, the film evokes the genre iconography, from the high-key wedding to the low-key shootout to the villain dressed in black.

Where Trail Street seems most ambitious, modern even, is in its transformation of the usual Manifest Destiny ideology implicit or explicit to the Western into a commentary on postwar prosperity. In this it predates Red River. The film opens with a documentary-style scene of drought facing Kansas, complete with voiceover narration, shots lifted from Pare Lorenz, and Soviet-style montage/framing:

The battle of farmers to eke an existence out of the inhospitable soil figures the American economy coming out of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. There are multiple heros in the film, but the most alluring one is the structurally-absent Kansas agricultural university, who provides the scientific knowledge that resolves the narrative.

One of my running convictions through the 1947 viewing is that the films of this period reveal surprising connections, aesthetically and ideologically, if we're just willing to look more closely.

Screen Conference bound

2011-06-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

I am heading off to this year's Screen Studies Conference. I may try to do some light blogging from the conference, but otherwise, I'll pick up the blog later in July.

Fun on a Weekend

2011-06-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

One medium term project I hope to spin out of this 1947 viewing is a closer look at 1940s comedy. Very little of the comedy I'm examining for this year makes much of an appearance in the canonical accounts of canonical Hollywood, and I'm inclined to think the omission is not accidental.

One problem is that I don't necessary have a good critical vocabulary to talk about comedy as a cultural form. The other is that I'm unfamiliar with radio comic traditions, which inform Hollywood considerably.

I can imagine a strong radio influence in Fun on a Week-End (UA/Andrew Stone Productions, Andrew Stone), a lowish budget independent comedy starring Eddie Bracken and Priscilla Lane as two down-on-their-luck people who meet on the beach of a fictionalized Palm Beach and hatch a plot to con their way into high society and wealth. There is a vaudevillian comic timing and delivery here, and both Bracken and Lane fit familiar comic types of the 30s and 40s. At the same time, the film draws upon the Preston Sturges films, with a send-up of upper-class mores and a madcap sensibility.

A couple of things work against a completely generic comedy, however. Eddie Bracken's vulnerability lends an edge of anxiety to the depiction of class. Accordingly, the film surrenders its barebones narration on occasion, as when a long-take tracking shot, one of the least ostentatious I've encountered, follows the protagonists during a scene of emotional transformation.

Desert Fury

2011-06-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

I wish I could read the PCA files for Desert Fury (Paramount, Lewis Allen). Much like Born to Kill, there is a subtext of a gay relationship between a criminal and his sidekick. But where in Born to Kill, the subtext was a secondary shade of characterization, here the narrative centers on a love triangle that develops when Paula (Liz Scott) enters the picture. The narrative development makes sense without acknowledging the gay subtext, but barely.

To the extent that this film gets remembered today, it's as a rare "color noir." But it's not really a noir, or at least only tangentially so. Sure, there is the familiar iconography of the dusty California desert town, popularized by James M. Cain for its intimations of deserted seediness and favored by Hollywood for its affordable location shooting.

But the narrative syntax is of a melodrama, the overlay of maternal-dynastic conflict with two love triangles. The semantic elements of gangsterism, gambling, and the American West serve mainly as backdrop to this. I have no idea if Desert Fury informed Johnny Guitar almost a decade later, but it's surprising how similar they are.

As for the color, much of the film is in a basic high-key Technicolor flooded in light.

There are, however, moments of subtle warm-cool contrast and use of effects lighting.

Sorry for the lousy image quality here. Just another testament for the need for Paramount to release their catalog on DVD. I'm still trying to get a fuller sense of the studio's releases. I am curious to see how Desert Fury fits in with the full offerings. Given the expense of Technicolor and the reputation of Paramount as a safer genre-oriented studio, the choice for color for this film seems surprising.

Woman on the Beach

2011-06-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

Some of the films on my 1947 list I approach cold, without previous knowledge or reading. And maybe I shouldn't confess this, but I really have little knowledge of Jean Renoir's work after leaving France. I have seen The Southerner (1945) a couple of times and had a vague sense of the reputation of aesthetic mismatch, of a great European auteur who suffered from the transplant to a more rigid studio system.

And at first blush, The Woman on the Beach, seems to bear that reputation out. The 70-minute RKO sort-of-noir shows much evidence of cheap production values and a bare-bones house style, from the sets...

....to the starkly plain lighting setups.

And then there's the uber-psychologized shellshock-vet motif common to so many of the postwar films. I'm still not quite sure what the nightmare scenes of the Robert Ryan character are doing in the film or if the frame structure actually makes any sense.

But the film is about illogic, and feels like a long-lost poetic realism classic. Particularly in the eponymous scenes on the beach, where the fog effect is unexpected in its heavy-handedness.

The main theme centers on an artist, Tod (Charles Bickford), whose blindness has kept him from painting and has imprisoned him to live in the past. (There are some clear parallels to Renoir père's battle with arthritis). It's not unusual for a Hollywood to use blindness as a conceit, but here the treatment is more complex. To begin with, the script has a genuine empathy for Tod's psychology - even more than it does for the ostensible main characters played by Ryan and Joan Bennett. Furthermore, the development of the narrative changes what the film seems to be saying about blindness and artistic creation.

I know in this review I've switched back to auteurist film critic mode instead of film historian mode, but I also can't shake the feeling that this work is at best merely adapting to industrial trends and at worst marginal to the direction of those trends. Much of my work with 1947 is to think about ways of constructing the "typical" of the studio system, but - unless I see more to see new patterns - Woman on the Beach seems not to match these ideal types.

Style sheets

2011-06-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

Now that summer's here, I'll be coming out of the regrettable blog hibernation.

For now, I have a petty gripe: why is that some publishers insist on their own citation style but give guidelines that are about a page long? There's a reason that the common style sheets are many pages long: there is a wide variety of sources that may have specific documentation needs.

That's aside from the question of why a standard citation style sheet couldn't do.

World Picture Conference: Distance

2011-03-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

2011 World Picture Conference
October 21-22
University of Toronto

Distance

Keynote speakers:

Lorenz Engell, Bauhaus University, Weimar
Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University

The annual World Picture Conference gathers scholars from a range of different disciplines to address the relation between critical theory, philosophy, and aesthetics. For this year’s meeting we welcome papers on questions of distance. Such considerations might include (but are in no sense limited to):

Distance and mediation (technological and otherwise)
Distance as abstraction (or alienation, estrangement)
Travel
Simultaneity
Spatial allegories of distance
Vision (as the prime sense organ of distance)
Modes of translation
Geopolitics (of distance)
Distance and/as interval (distance as time, not just space)
Distance and unknowing/ignorance
Critique of proximity/propinquity
Ecology and distance (global footprints, carbon calculations, etc.)
Scale
Emotion
Critical distance/objectivity

Please submit proposals (250 words, plus brief bio) by June 17 to: brian.price@utoronto.ca

The Web

2011-03-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Once again, a documentary-inflected opening - a tracking shot taken on a Manhattan street.

As I've alluded to in other posts, noir as an idea tends to impose a mythological consistency on top of divergent generic content. That said, The Web (Universal, Michael Gordon) encapsulates key elements of noir fiction that formed the backbone of film noirs: the petit bourgeois detective figure on the right side of the law yet sucked into illegality despite his integrity; the critique of moneyed classes and interests; and the sexual repartee as power play between the detective figure and the femme fatale. Here, the detective figure is actually a small-time lawyer (Edmund O'Brien), but the narrative pattern is the same as the detective story.

I find the film instructive for what it says about production values in 1947. Compare a shot from Gentleman's Agreement...

... with a shot from The Web.

Both are trying to visualize the same thing: the milieu of the upscale, modern Manhattan office. Both use white-washed studio-set walls with occasional furnishings (doorframes, plants, lamps, signs) to give the illusion of a more luxurious decor. But Gentleman's Agreement uses not only a more complicated scene coverage but also a lighting scheme/lens choice that gives the illusion of depth and of a sense of space. The difference reflects the gap between the high A and the near-B. Universal was upgrading itself at this point, sometimes with stylistic verve, but here it could put more emphasis on script than shooting and in any case had difficulty competing in the same leagues as Fox.

That is not to say that cheapness was merely simple. Much as in David Bordwell's description of classical blocking, the arrangement of characters in the frame communicates the narrative subtext of the scene, in which the romantic pairing between the Ella Raines and Vincent Price characters gets interrupted by the confidant who introduces the plot line of an embezzler released from prison. Raines remains in the background, outside of the dealings between the men, yet clearly affected and concerned by them. This will foreshadow her position in much of the narrative.

Which is to say that The Web is a highly classical film and conventionally so. Even the lighting effects seem akin to counterparts of the 1930s, as when Price gets a north light in a moment of sinister action.

So while I started off by noting that The Web perhaps fits the ideal type of noir, I would have to except the visual style.

My Wild Irish Rose

2011-03-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

I normally don't program seasonal screenings at home for every occasion, but My Wild Irish Rose (WB, David Butler) has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be viewed, and with St. Patrick's Day upon us yesterday I figured it was a good time to watch. And, wow, the film was packed with as much Irish-themed kitsch as you could imagine.

To my knowledge, Warners wasn't a studio known much for their musicals in this period (there seems to be only one other example from 1947). And, too, the studio produced only one other color feature in this year - a low number compared to other studios, even given the relative rarity of color in the 1940s. So it's arguable that the film lacks a clear anchoring to a studio house style, either generically or visually. Its cinematography is more in line with the MGM high-key look, a fact in stunning relief for me having just seen the underlit Forever Amber.

Also, like the MGM musicals, the mise-en-scene combines a minimalist background set design (usually in gray or neutral shades of brown) with a candy-pastel color palette. Particularly when the effect is to caricature the nostalgic version of Americana.

Generically, on the other hand, the film is not an integrated musical but rather a musical biopic very much in the 20th Century-Fox vein, with a fin-de-siecle setting and a protagonist based on a famous songwriter/singer. In this case, Irish songwriter Chauncey Olcott (Dennis Morgan) struggles his way to fame and, secondarily, to requited love. Lillian Russell (on whom Fox based an Alice Faye biopic) even is a key character. As with the Fox films, the narrative structure is more peripatetic than goal-oriented.

Also, the film borrows from 1946's The Jolson Story (Columbia) in its narrative of ethnic generational conflict (downplayed a bit) and in the extensive use of blackface. Perhaps this is impressionistic, but I found the use of blackface here to lack even the historical or thematic resonance that it serves elsewhere and to feel like a throwback to an earlier cinematic period. (The Jolson Story is ideologically suspect in a lot of ways, but at least it is trying to interrogate identity.) I have not come across much use of it in 1947 yet, and it will remain a worthy point of inquiry to see what future viewing holds.

Forever Amber

2011-03-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

I occasionally get questions about the status of my 1947 viewing. I'm about half-way through watching the Hollywood features for the year, with a good majority of the A films under my belt.

Forever Amber (20th-Fox, Otto Preminger) is one of those films that are fascinating objects while the genre material is out of step with even classic-Hollywood cinephilia. In short, the film has the genre syntax of Duel in the Sun with the genre semantics of the period piece and swashbuckler films (say, The Black Swan).

The film was, in fact, 20th Century-Fox's attempt to duplicate the box office success of Duel in the Sun and Gone with the Wind with their own roadshow Technicolor melodrama. Based on a best-selling novel, the story follows Amber Sinclair (Linda Darnell), a young woman of a Puritan town who escapes with the kindness of strangers, only to be trapped by her own impossible love for a privateer (Cornel Wilde). Historically, the film is notable for the censorship battles it faced and for the out-of-control budgets that hindered the film for Fox, despite a $6M or so box-office return. Censorship and boycott aside, th e return of a sleep-to-the-top narrative (nearly as forthright as Baby Face) does signal a softening of the Production Code in the postwar years.

Forever Amber is also a Preminger film. There are even neat little flourishes like the car window shot that the director was fond of in the 40s. Compare Daisy Kenyon with a carriage scene:

There are also some complicated camera movement and character blocking, though to be honest this a relatively straightforward directorial entry for Preminger. What's more typical is Leon Shamroy's cinematography, which uses trademark setup minimalism, atmospheric light on backgrounds, and intense cool-warm color combinations. The film is also very dark.

Perhaps because of the constraints of shooting Technicolor in low-light conditions, the focus tends to be fuzzy in focus frequently.

Such blurriness of the image may be the result of the source print or digital transfer, but in this instance it makes sense as a result of Shamroy's mood lighting.

The "and Media" Problem

2011-03-16T17:53:00.001-07:00

By which I mean the pretense of equality of film and media studies when in practice television, non-film mass media, and new media are frequent afterthoughts for film scholars. Yes, I'm guilty of this as much as (more than?) anyone. See the banner of this blog and compare to my posts.

Mabel finds another example, the "the strangely designated and equally broad (but I suspect more narrow than its title suggests) 'Nontheatrical Film and Media' group (I can’t imagine that includes radio and TV and computers, but those are nontheatrical media…)." I wouldn't be surprised if the SIG did include things beyond the realm of cinema in its purview. But "nontheatrical" as a term makes perfect sense in the context of film culture but none, really, in the context of other popular and moving-image media.

SCMS2011 wrap up

2011-03-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Chuck Tryon writes of this year's SCMS conference, "Ultimately, conference reports like this are grounded in the personal. Although I attended at least part of a panel during pretty much every session from Thursday through Saturday, given that there were usually 20-25 concurrent panels, others saw a much different conference." I agree that attendees' conference experience differed wildly. I'd venture that this is truer this year, as the conference continues the trend toward both methodological pluralism and tracking along subfield lines.

I do not have a full report of the presentations at this year's SCMS conference; while I did attend my share of panels, this conference was for me mostly about connecting with friends, talking with colleagues, and meeting new people in the field. In retrospect, I think the decision to focus on socializing and networking was a somewhat conscious decision, as an antidote to the somewhat isolating nature of my work and writing lately. For next year, I do have a goal of doubling the numbers of papers I see.

Justin Horton observes a big gulf between the Cinema Studies and Media Studies parts of SCMS. First, on account of the panel formats:

The 20-minute presentation model of SCMS was called into question numerous times on Twitter and in conversation around the conference, and, by and large, this sentiment seemed to come from the TV and media studies folks. In its stead, most preferred the workshop and shorter presentation format of FLOW. Most seemed to complain of being “read to” and the lack of interaction and collaboration, and I certainly understand where they are coming from—panels can be exhausting, especially when the arguments are tight and the presentation lacking. However, I think there is a place for both models.

I tend to side with Justin here and if anything be more in favor of the traditional conference format. Yes, it can be exhausting to listen to a dozen 20-minute papers in a row, but it would be more exhausting to listen to two-dozen 10-minute papers in a row. And there is a value to the formal expository essay form. That's not to discount dialogue or roundtables, but these formats can fail or be tedious just as easily as the 4-paper-plus-questions format.

If I were to make any sweeping change, it would be to have attendees submit full papers instead of abstracts and to have peer-reviewed conference proceedings published afterward. Yes, a gargantuan task for the Program Committee, so it's probably not going to happen. Barring that, my one complaint about the conference was the odd scheduling: panels on similar topics were programmed opposite one another frequently. I know scheduling is a tricky and thankless job, but it seems to me that minimizing such conflicts should be the overriding goal.

Justin and Noel Kirkpatrick also point to the (sub)discipline divide for Twitter usage. Indeed, I was one of those film studies people for whom it didn't even occur to check the Twitter back-channel until well after the conference. (I'm not a Twitter user.) I don't have anything profound to say about this, but it does seem a real difference in scholarly culture. Meanwhile, I am glad to see the Society commissioning, so to speak, a few blogs on the conference, even if I got to them only afterward.

SCMS bound

2011-03-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

I'm heading to New Orleans today for the 2011 SCMS conference. I look forward to the event every year as a chance to catch up with friends and meet new people. But, just as importantly it really is the most economical way to get a current snapshot of the field, however imperfect. Hope to see some readers and fellow bloggers there.

CFP: Film/Media-related Panels at 2012 MLA

2011-02-25T07:57:00.000-08:00

The deadline is approaching for these proposed MLA panels. As to be expected, many are about "literature or film" and an area study; I have tried to list film-specific or media-specific panels first. This year's convention will be in Seattle, January 5-8, 2012.

Film and the Virtual
Papers exploring the topic of virtuality and film, including film's relationship to computer-based media, virtual worlds, digital vs. analog formats, possible worlds and virtual realities. 350-word abstracts by 1 March 2011; Homay King (hking@brynmawr.edu).

Latin American Cinema in the New Millennium
Papers on last decade Latin American films that rewrite the nations present and immediate past. National/transnational trends in production, representation, and analytical perspectives. English/Spanish. 250-word abstracts by 10 March 2011; Gabriela Copertari (copertari@ucla.edu) and Carolina Sitnisky (csitnisk@scrippscollege.edu).

Multi-mediated Brecht
This panel seeks papers on how Brecht used visual elements to transform productions into multimedia events and how his radio/media theory reveals possibilities and risks in the digital age. 200-word abstracts by 16 March 2011; Kristopher Imbrigotta (imbrigotta@wisc.edu) and Henning Wrage (hwrage@wisc.edu).

Femmes Vital: Women Making Films Noirs
The influence of female writers, directors, producers on classic film noir: Lupino, Harrison, Van Upp, Frings, Kellogg. 300-word proposals, brief cv by 15 March 2011; Mark Osteen (mosteen@loyola.edu).

Global Horror
Papers that address global dynamics of horror genre in film. U.S. reception of international imports, influence of Hollywood abroad, Hollywood remakes, national cinemas and transnational cult films. Max. one page abstract by 15 March 2011; Nels Jeff Rogers (njrogers@uky.edu).

Marilyn Monroe's Fragments
Any approach to the recently-published archival text, including comparative, historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, materialist, biographical; Monroe as icon, poet, performer; in celebrity culture, fashion, politics, and film. 300-word abstracts. by 15 March 2011; Zachary Lamm (zlamm@uic.edu).

Docu-prosopography
Analyses of documentary films representing individuals who share some demographic trait(s) as in the Seven Up series and Twitch and Shout. Abstract by 15 March 2011; G. Thomas Couser (g.t.couser@hofstra.edu).

New Millennium Mafia Movies
Filmic representations of Italian or Italian American mafias since 2000; discussions of group identity, gender, trauma, violence; cross-cultural approaches welcome. 250 word abstract and brief bio by 15 March 2011; Dana E. Renga (renga.1@osu.edu).

The New Orleans of Treme

Papers that discuss the HBO Television series TREME and the literary, urban, and visual cultures that encompass contemporary New Orleans are welcome. 300-word abstract, bibliography and CV by 21 February 2011; Mark A. Reid (mreid122@aol.com).

Social Networks, Jewish Identity, and New Media
This panel explores how Jewish identity is shaped and circulated through new media. Historical perspectives on Jews, technology, and social networks also welcome. Abstracts (250 words) by 15 March 2011; Jonathan S. Skolnik (jskolnik@german.umass.edu).

Digital South, Digital Futures
Digital approaches to the U.S./Global South that embrace new tools, methods, audiences. Integration of scholarship, collaboration, and pedagogy welcome. Abstracts by 10 March 2011. Vince Brewton (vjbrewton@una.edu). Multi-media presentations/papers by 10 March 2011; Vincent J. Brewton (vjbrewton@una.edu).

Labor and New Media
How do new media affect representations of work, class, or labor? What new conceptions or recognitions of labor does new technology expose? 300-word abstracts and short cv's. by 15 March 2011; Alison Shonkwiler (a.shonkwiler@gmail.com).

Reflections of Mexico
This panel intends to inquire on what kinds of Mexico's narratives have been constructed through film or photography during the last two centuries. 300 word abstracts and contact information by 15 March 2011; Maria-Socorro Tabuenca (mtabuenc@utep.edu).

Islam in Francophone African Literature and Film
Collaborative session African Literature/Francophone divisions. New and past perspectives on and representations of Islams multiple manifestations. Pedagogical approaches welcome. 250 word abstract and short bio by 10 March 2011; Alain Lawo Sukam (lawosukam@tamu.edu) and Catherine Perry (cperry@nd.edu).

Digital Humanities v. New Media
How do "digital humanities" and "new media" relate? Do they complement or compete as academic memes and methods? Does one take text and the other the rest? Abstracts by 1 March 2011; Victoria E. Szabo (ves4@duke.edu).

Rethinking Fascism and Communism: Eastern European Film since 1980
Across Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism catalyzed filmic retrospection, as documentaries and feature films analyzed the Stalinist past and fascism's legacies. 1-page abstracts by 10 March 2011; Monique Yaari (mxy2@psu.edu).

Prosthetic/Aesthetic Re-visioning?: Disability in African Literature and Film
Papers discuss the representations of disability in African Literature and Film. Discussant: Prof. Ato Quayson. 300-500 word abstracts and short bio by 10 March 2011; Patrick Muana (pkmuana@gmail.com).

Children of War
Papers on representations of children as agents and/or victims of violence in texts and film about civil conflict in Africa. 250 word abstract and short bio. by 5 March 2011; Janice Spleth (jspleth@wvu.edu).

Yiddish Theater and Film
A panel on all aspects of Yiddish theater and film, with special attention to the role of translation, adaptation, and innovation. Short abstracts by 15 March 2011; Ken Frieden (kfrieden@syr.edu).

Alternative Ancestries
Post-humanistic literary or filmic representations that turn on epiphanies of disability as human variation imagined through alternative ancestries with other species -- the ironies of adaptation. One-page abstracts. by 15 March 2011; David Mitchell (dmitchel@gmail.com).

Women On Trial. Pleadings, Testimony, Verdicts
What legal and philosophical representations of women on trial are conveyed in contemporary film, literature and television ? 200-word abstracts by 15 March 2011; Eftihia Mihelakis (eftihia.mihelakis@umontreal.ca) and Daoud Najm (daoud.najm@mail.mcgill.ca).

Radical Friendships in South Asia
Papers exploring historical and/or contemporary instances in literature and film that compel rethinking of postcolonial theory, politics, and aesthetics beyond collective ties to empire, nation, community. 500-word abstracts by 15 March 2011; Karni Pal Bhati (kbhati@furman.edu).

Fairy Tales in Post-War Germany
Papers that examine the reception and adaptation of fairy tales in post-war German literature and film; the relationship between politics and magic. 500-word abstracts and brief CV by 7 March 2011; Qinna Shen (shenq@muohio.edu).

Crossing Over: Hispanic Women Representing Migrations
This panel will explore different perspectives and interpretations of migration in literature and film by contemporary Hispanic women. 300-word abstracts. English or Spanish. by 10 March 2011; Inmaculada Pertusa (inma.pertusa@wku.edu) and Melissa Stewart (melissa.stewart@wku.edu).

Why Race Matters: Representations in Brazil
Papers are requested on the representation of race in Brazilian media, literature, film, language and art. Interdisciplinary approaches especially welcome. Abstracts of 150 words and a CV by 5 March 2011; Kathryn M. Sanchez (ksanchez2@wisc.edu).

Intermediality and Contemporary Cultural Production in Spain
Theorizations of the relationship between a range of media including the visual, the verbal, the aural. 250-word abstract. by 18 March 2011; Susan Martin-Márquez (susanmm@rci.rutgers.edu).

Realisms in Italian Culture
The (re)turn to the real, its articulation, conceptualization and representation in 20th- and 21st-century literature, cinema and various media. A 350-word abstract and bio by 15 March 2011; Manuela Marchesini (mmarchesini@tamu.edu).

Violence

2011-02-25T06:48:00.001-08:00

On paper, Violence (Monogram, Jack Bernhard) sounds like it retreads many of the thematic concerns of social problem films/noirs/films gris of the period: veterans returning to civilian life, political corruption, and amnesia. It is topically about the postwar moment - which direction America is going to take politically after the War's end. The plot centers on a fascist political movement bankrolled by a mysterious business interest but posing as a populist organization helping out veterans and fronted by a charismatic sermonizing speaker named True Dawson.

What's distinctive is that the elements do not line up in a way typical to noir or the social problem film. Amnesia does not induce flashbacks, create narrative enigma, suggest an unknowable femme fatale, or allegorize America's war experience. Rather, the plot device dramatizes political brainwashing and the specific politics of the left's encounter with the right in the Truman years.

In this way the film is a narrow product of its times - not only would leftism retrench in America, but also the postwar liberal consensus would make the idea of a fascist takeover of US politics seem a little paranoid. But its paranoia was prescient, and Violence seems to cover some of the 1970s conspiracy thriller territory years ahead of its time. Meanwhile, the casting of ideological positions as crime melodrama makes the film seem closer in spirit to Warner Brothers' 1930 problem film or "headliner" cycle than the postwar liberalism of the 1940s social problem film.

It is here, again, I wonder how much sense it makes to label this a film noir. Yes, it has a raw, Poverty Row aesthetic and a cynical critique of American society. And it is a crime film shot in low-key black-and-white. But its visual style, its narrative form, and its thematics lack the kind of pulp modernism that I would see as essentially to noir.

That said, Violence is an excellent example of the Poverty Row/B-film approach to lighting, which tries to punch above its weight, budgetarily speaking, by simply not caring about cast shadows. Many B and A noirs would take some of the same attitude (see the lighting in Born to Kill for instance).

And while much of the composition is pedestrian, there are some inspired framing and camera movement at times.

Film Noir Film Preservation Blogathon

2011-02-23T13:20:00.001-08:00

The film noir-themed blogathon is over, and you can read the many promising entries linked from the Siren's page. From there of from the Blogathon's Facebook page you can still donate to the cause of film preservation - it's a worthy cause, so please consider it.

I was a little too distracted to participate in the blogathon, but I would contribute two brief notes. First, the trajectory of scholarship on noir is similar to how Geoff Mayer characterizes the scholarship on "pre-Code" Hollywood: use of concept, followed by revisionism, followed by a return to the concept. In the case of noir, the return has fallen into two camps, the "yes but" approach of a James Naremore, who acknowledges the incoherence of definition but still thinks there is something to a popular crime modernism in 1940s Hollywood, and the approach of not engaging with the incoherence-critique. As far as the critique itself, Marc Vernet is the most polemical in denying film noir as an idée fixe, and Thomas Schatz's (and others') notion that noir really comprises distinct genres is an insight that does not get enough play. It's possible I'm overlooking some other good interventions in the field.

Second, 1947 is a banner year for noir (James Naremore cites it as the peak in noir production), so while I've not watched all of the 47 films or even 47 noirs, I've now had a good cross-section of them. What is striking is that the characterization of 47/the immediate postwar as a noir-heavy time does hold up, since noirs outnumber pretty much any other genre, except for maybe B Westerns. (I know this sounds odd to write, but I do think in other respects the historical picture of the period has been quite distorted by the canon and by film availability.) At the same time, not all that is low-key is film noir, and I keep coming across titles (Daisy Kenyon or Nora Prentiss, say) that get labeled noir by tenuous criteria. Moreover, Schatz's point holds: many of the noirs have an ur-genre (gothic, police procedural, detective story) that better fit them.

Medium Specificity

2011-02-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

A great post by Sean Cubitt, in which he argues that isolating medium specificity for arts is misguided and that it's particularly misguided in an age in which digital technology is blurring previous distinctions - in his words, "the divisions between film, video and digital media arts make no sense and weaken all three." In arguing this, he gives a claim that normatively is like Noel Carroll's attack on the "specificity thesis" but with a McLuhan-esque twist: the nodes of mediation become if not the essence then the most important aspect of artistic expression.

It's a thesis I find though-provoking, but let me propose another way at the question by posing it less about specificity of medium per se than about the specificity of aesthetic forms. Take prose literature in either its short-story or novel forms. In the 18th century the novel emerged as a literary form that imposes expectations for writer and guides aesthetic experience for reader. On one hand, mediation (the printing press and print capitalism) had everything to with its emergence (and magazine publishing for the later short story format). On the other hand, it's a remarkably stable aesthetic form that's largely independent of media and technology changes. Sure, there have been some important changes: writers can use word processing to write (maybe this has an aesthetic impact); readers can use digital copies in ways they could not a book (searching for instance); and arguably technology and newer media have contributed to a decline in literary culture. But the aesthetic experience of a novel is still comparable whether I experience it in book form, off a Kindle, or even as a book-on-tape. Cognitively, these are quite different experiences and mediations, but we (I'm generalizing: most consumers) tend to bracket the delivery to get to the symbolic matter and the aesthetic experience.

Cinema's a little trickier, but you see something similar. Here, digital culture is more overwhelmingly shaping cinema in a digital age - and I don't mean to minimize this - but there's a way in which the "cinematic" is an aesthetic form that gets activated in theatrical experience, in television spectatorship, and in internet video in different ways. The expressive track-in shot, for instance, codes a certain emotional and proto-narrative effect regardless of whether it is projected in a cinema or broadcast on television. And if film and media scholars are exploring the ways DVDs have changed film culture, film spectatorship, and even the films themselves, we tend not to place much, if any, distinction on an analysis based on a cinematic projection and a video viewing of the film.

I don't argue that there's some ontological quality to the novelesque or the cinematic. Rather, I'm more influenced by Bourdieu's tendency to look to more-or-less formalized aesthetic cultures. In other words, one does not have to be an idealist philosopher to see that certain ideals are accepted, even enforced, more than others. These forms change over time, but social institutions (education, arts organizations, art markets) can keep aesthetic forms around and formalized for quite some time, even with internal gestures of modernization.

Finally, I would stress that our understanding of medium specificity depends in part on what we're trying to specify. Above I tend to privilege the symbolic and narrative dimensions of the art, in part because I think that's what a large number of art consumers in Western societies tend to do: we take the half-tone reproduction of a Caravaggio painting and try to abstract the aesthetic meaning of that painting, even if we might wish to experience it firsthand. But clearly, the conditions of experiencing an art work are not meaningless; it's just that useful branches of the study of art by necessity abstract them away.

CFP: Cinema and the Museum conference

2011-02-10T05:02:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers

Moving Image and Institution:

Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century

The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)
Cambridge, England
Wednesday, 6 July 2011 to Friday, 8 July 2011

The conference organisers welcome the submission of abstracts for a 20 minute paper, or a 10 minute moving image/lens-based media presentation + 10 minute talk. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in total. The organisers would also welcome proposals for roundtables or structured discussion from groups of 2-4 museum professionals, artists or other practitioners.

The call for submissions is open to academics, curators, museum professionals, filmmakers and artists and all others with professional interests in this emerging field. The focus of these papers is not limited to the contemporary period: presentations may choose to explore earlier case studies or period with a contemporary methodology, for example. It is anticipated that a publication will arise from this conference.

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following themes:

Creative geographies
Transformative spaces of the cinematic
Film and moving image installations
Proto-cinematic technologies and the museum
Visual narratives in cultural institutions
Materiality and digital media
Sociological trajectories in cinema and in the museum space
The role of the public institution in moving image practice
Exhibition practices and cinematic exhibition
Curatorial practice in the new museum
Cinema and the new museology
Ethnographic film
Filming the archive and archiving the film
Performative spaces and screen language
The Virtual Museum
Film and user/visitor experience
Audio-visual mediation and the presence of the screen in the museum space
Museums on film
Museums and genre cinema
Period film and questions of authenticity
Museums, memorials and commemoration: display and exposure

Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be directed to jlgc3 - AT - cam.ac.uk with the subject heading "CINEMA AND THE MUSEUM CONFERENCE” no later than 18 February 2011. Where applicable please include two lines on your institutional affiliation and details of technical requirements.

Nora Prentiss

2011-02-09T19:01:00.001-08:00

Nora Prentiss (Vincent Sherman, Warner Brothers) often gets categorized as a noir, but to my this particularly is a case of superficial genre elements trumping a systematic genre categorization. I would say the case for the film as noir rest on some finite evidence: the inclusion of a crime investigation as one part of the narrative, an overall visual look in lower key scenes, and a flashback frame opening with the usual iconography of urban fast-film-stock realism and an ambiguous voiceover narration.

There are also occasional expressionistic moments, like this shot rendered with a remarkable visual abstraction:

But I am leaning toward considering the low-key cinematography just part of the Warners' house style of the late 1940s. That includes many noirs, but also is the part of the cinematic vocabulary for dramas in general. Or, perhaps more accurately: "noir" is a concept that tries to unite a wide range of visual styles with a few narrative patterns associated with American crime-fiction modernism. (I'm drawing here from James Naremore's work, though hopefully I'm not mis-translating the argument.)

Nora Prentiss demonstrates how the stylistic and narrative parameters do not neatly line up. For it's until not significantly into the course of the narrative that anything like a crime emerges. And the element of criminality is no greater than would be in a novel like Sister Carrie, of which Nora Prentiss feels like a distant adaptation. I've been curious about how literary naturalism gets translated into the commercial fiction film - this example is as good as any I could point to for a film that captures the spirit of naturalist literature. Interestingly, it's not marketed as such, but as something between pulp and melodrama - Warners' sweet spot.

Need I add that there's a amnesiatic thematic of forgetting the past?

Miriam Bratu Hansen

2011-02-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

Many in the field have heard by now the sad news that Miriam Hansen has passed away. Catherine Grant has a fitting tribute of a video lecture that Hansen gave. I would like to reflect a little of the importance of Hansen not only on the field of film studies but on my intellectual path particularly.

I never met her personally, but as someone who did the bulk of his graduate work in the mid-to-late 1990s, I looked up to Hansen's work. Though her writings on early cinema, silent film fandom, and Frankfurt School critical theory predated this period, by the 1990s they took on an agenda-setting quality. Partly because of Hansen's skill popularizing lines of German thought previously unknown or overlooked in the Anglophone film studies field. Partly because she connected the two "hot" areas of early cinema research and work on contemporary, post-classical cinema. Partly because the way she offered a grand unified theory of sorts, bringing together the two challengers to film studies' theoretical hegemony - cultural studies and historicism - and reconciling them with theoretical concerns like ideological formation, film aesthetics, and the nonconscious experience of movies. It was this combination of history and theory that particularly excited me. Hansen was one of those who gave me the history bug (I was in a theoretical program) and moreover made me think I could pursue both conceptual reach and detailed empirical work simultaneously. I don't know how well I've lived up to that ideal, but I continue to strive for it.

That disciplinary moment may have faded a little, but Hansen's intellectual spirit, erudite but engaged, is still inspiring. Her model of vernacular modernism is one that I find provokes the most controversy when teaching film theory; I don't think students initially give the complexity of the idea full credit.

I can't be alone in saying that she will be missed.

Cry Wolf

2011-01-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

It seems that Warner Brothers produced a number of gothic suspense film in the late 1940s. Cry Wolf (Peter Godfrey) is an example built around the star presence of Barbara Stanwyck and Errol Flynn. What seems distinctive about the Warners spin on the genre is the glee in portraying the sinister patriarch, where in other iterations of the gothic, the threat comes either from the charm of the husband or from his detachment. It's particularly interesting to see Flynn's star image retooled to this end.

The film is a good example of the Warners house style of the mid to late 1940s. We have the watery wipes for the credit titles...

the intense, low-angle practical lighting obscured by figures...

the low-level deep focus shots...

and the almost expressionistic effects lighting, like the "fireplace" gobo:
Cinematographer Carl Guthrie also provides some notable touches, like the tonal contrast between foreground and background in the ubiquitous mirror shot:

I have a fuller argument I'm developing about the fondness for mirrors in 1940s Hollywood. They appear quite frequently.

CFP: JFV on Media Writing

2011-01-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

Call for Submissions
Journal of Film and Video

Special double issue on Media Writing

Publication date: spring/summer 2013.

Guest Editor: Emily Edwards, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (ededward@uncg.edu)

This special issue is devoted to the current state of the creative scholarship of media writing. We see this endeavor as part of a larger question of the impact of new technologies, new delivery systems, and new resources on writing style, content and creativity.

Essays
This special issue is open to both essays of traditional scholarship as well as articles written in a more journalistic style. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Analyses of produced films with an emphasis on the screenplay and the screenwriter.
• Essays and articles on writing stories for newer media delivery systems. Topics may include writing for extremely short narrative forms, games and interactive media; new structures for traditional media; and the impact of newer media on traditional forms.
• New concerns for teaching media writing. We are particularly interested in essays that address the controversy of student peer review. The ability to give and take constructive criticism is an important writer’s skill, yet some educators believe student peer reviews can be hurtful to young writers as they are still developing their voices and understanding
the craft.
• Essays devoted to the occupational and creative concerns of media writers in the creative climate.

Reviews
We welcome reviews of writers’ Internet resources (InkTip and other writers’ websites), writing contests (a vetting of top contests with descriptions and an assessment of their merits for new and seasoned writers), professional reader services, writers’ software (Movie Magic Screenwriter, Final Draft, Celtx, etc.) and their online components.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: December 1, 2011

Submission guidelines at the UFVA website.

Ngram and Inference

2010-12-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

Google's new ngram word mapping has been making the blogging rounds. Basically, it charts the frequency of words that occur in Google Books scans. I think Kevin Drum aptly suggests "the potential here for timewasting disguised as scholarly research." But let me take seriously as scholarly research for a moment, because the ngram simply puts a quantitative face on a key practice that humanities scholars adopt regularly: the historicization of ideas. It's Raymond Williams' Keywords with numbers. See for instance, Aaron Bady's discussion of concepts of race.

My book-in-progress is historicizing both the concept of the "social problem" and consequently the "social problem film." This has involved an intellectual history of the former and a reception study of the latter. The word-mapping is a good, if very partial, check to see how representative either pursuit is.

The rise in "social problem" usage does at least correspond, roughly to first progressive discourse and second to functionalist sociology. Correlation does not equal causation, but at least it's not contradicting my main argument. The map of the "social problem film" is interesting because it suggests the genre term has become more solidified in the last few decades.

One caveat though: the ngram viewer maps only books, meaning that popular periodical usage is not present. I can attest the term is more prevalent in the 1940s than in the 2000s.

There are some other problems to consider. The search is case sensitive; to use an example from Bady's post, chart "negro problem" and "Negro problem" and you will get two very different timeframes. The chart also does not track tone or context. For that I would recommend the Corpus of Historical American English, which does more or less the same thing Google's service does, but with the context preserved. The COHA gives some further limitations of the Google charts and critique of their accuracy.

The Red House

2010-12-15T17:44:00.000-08:00

What is the relationship between the film noir and the B movie? Some, clearly, were B movies, but not nearly as many as commonly thought. The Red House (UA/Sol Lesser-Thalia Productions, Delmer Davies) for example runs 100 minutes and was released through United Artists, a non-integrated, non-block-booking distributor. I have plenty of B films to watch in my 1947 viewing, but so far the plurality of my noir viewing has been A picture.

But if many noirs were not B films then arguably a B-film aesthetic pervades all but the most prestige-leaning noirs (Laura, for example). There's a prevalent notion that equates this with a post-noir understand of the exploitation film, but I'm also interested in the impact of classical B filmmaking, beyond cheap budgets.

The Red House is an interesting missing link. The credit shot above borrows the iconography and titling design of the B Western (compare). The cinematography at times is evocative, but it relies on day-for-night shooting (not solely a B stylistic choice, but much more common in B pictures).

And there is minimal coverage, as in this 30 second transition scene done entirely in one take:

The gothic material lends itself to low-budget treatment (it does not have to show the horror). But, as I mentioned, The Red House is not a B film. There is Edward Robinson's star turn (even in a gothic version). There is the Davies script, rich in Freudianism and allegory about sexual repression. And, most of all, a complex narrative construction. Some of these traits would become staples of the noir-exploitation film.

Finally, I'm interested in how the opening once again begins with documentary-style voiceover narration, which never reasserts itself.

CFP: Volume on Special Effects

2010-12-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers
Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts

Edited by Michael Duffy [Towson University], Dan North [University of Exeter], and Bob Rehak [Swarthmore College]

Deadline for Abstracts: 1 March 2011
Deadline for Submissions: 1 January 2012

Recent decades have seen ever more prominent and far-reaching roles for special and visual effects in film and other media: blockbuster franchises set in detailed fantasy and science-fiction worlds, visually experimental adaptations of graphic novels, performances in which the dividing lines between human and inhuman – even between live action and animation – seem to break down entirely. Yet the cinema of special effects, so often framed in terms of new digital technologies and aesthetics, actually possesses a complex and branching history, one that both informs and complicates our grasp of the “state of the art.” At stake in studies of special/visual effects is a more comprehensive understanding of film’s past, present, and future in an environment of shifting technologies and media contexts.

We seek contributions to a volume focused on special effects as aesthetic, industrial, and cultural practices, moving beyond formal analysis to a wider consideration of special effects’ historical roots and developmental paths, their underlying technologies and creators, and their intersection with other domains of art, commerce, and ideology. We are particularly interested in essays that elaborate on specific periods of change that special and visual effects have undergone over the course of their history. Although we welcome work that deals with digital technologies and contemporary cinema, we encourage contributors to contextualise recent developments in relation to broader histories of visual illusion and spectacular artifice.

The book will integrate an online forum to develop an extensive bibliography, web links to further reading, and a scholar/practitioner directory.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

● Theoretical approaches to the study of special effects history and technique, including (but not restricted to) ‘ontology’ debates surrounding the interplay between analogue and digital technologies.
● Theories of spectatorship, visual illusions, and special effects.
● Critical histories/analyses of individual processes, e.g. matte paintings, compositing, bluescreen, the Independent Frame, miniatures, stop-motion animation, animatronics, prosthetics, motion capture, etc.
● Pre-visualization techniques, including production design, concept art, and animatics.
● The ongoing influence of effects pioneers including Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomon, James Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl, Albert E. Smith, R.W. Paul, and other makers of early ‘trick films’.
● Changes to studio structures and the evolution of the special-effects ‘house’.
● Industry “stars” such as Stan Winston, Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, Tom Savini, Eiji Tsubuyara, Rick Smith, Ray Harryhausen, Willis O’Brien, John P. Fulton, John Gaeta, etc.
● The uses of special effects and spectacle in the experimental or avant-garde works of film-makers including Peter Tscherkassky, Stan Brakhage, Norman McLaren, etc.
● The significance of special effects in non-Hollywood, low-budget and independent cinema.
● Special-effects fandom, connoisseurship, and critique
● How animatronics, puppetry and make-up are adapted/reconstituted/re-contextualized for studio/franchise rebirths.
● Visual effects in television, video games, and transmedia.
● Spectacular uses of colour, widescreen, IMAX, and 3D processes.
● Self-reflexive uses of special effects as a commentary on the history/ontology of media.

Essays should run between 3000 and 6000 words in length.

Send abstracts (title, 500 word description of project, and author bio) or requests for further information to: fxnewhistories@gmail.com

Editors can be contacted individually at:

Michael Duffy [mduffy - AT - towson.edu]
Dan North [D.R.North - AT - exeter.ac.uk]
Bob Rehak [brehak1 - AT - swarthmore.edu]

All Roads Lead to Genre Criticism?

2010-12-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

I was discussing the 1947 project with a colleague at another school. One point she raised was the promise the project held for understanding genre in the studio years. It's interesting because I didn't start out conceiving of the project as primarily a study in genre. But that's been one consistent thread of it, largely because I keep seeing patterns of film narratives that don't fit the received genre histories.

Cass Timberlane

2010-11-27T07:56:00.001-08:00

1. Literature

From the opening credits, Cass Timberlane (MGM, George Sidney) foregrounds its status as adaptation. We can consider this both as marketing strategy (MGM exploits its pre-sold property) and middlebrow culture (the earlier ideal-type of prestige in my categorization). What I still need to research and explore is the culture status of Sinclair Lewis's work circa 1947. I receive him as a second-tier author in the American literature canon, but Hollywood also gave the glowing book-cover treatment to authors no longer canonized. The title touting its serialization in Cosmopolitan magazine highlights its in-between status: both mass-market and literary.

2. Melodrama

To a casual (modern) eye, the film will seem less prestigious or literary than melodramatic. Not only do major traumatic events (stillborn childbirth, infidelity, car accident) happen with relative suddenness in the narrative development, the overall pathos of the narrative is of social conflict that is inexorable and situational. Jinny is destined not to fit in with small-town society; Cass is destined to be mismatched to big-city life; Bradd is destined to be unable to act independently. There's been a good bit of scholarship on 1930s women's films and maternal melodramas and their exploration of class politics (especially since the overriding crisis of the women's picture is the navigation of financial prospects in the marriage market). But Cass Timberlane is interesting - "novelistic"? - because it places multiple characters, male and female, in positions of understanding the cause of their situation but unable to change it.

3. Divorce

Cass Timberlane is a judge in a small Minnesota town. The film opens with Cass ruling against a request for divorce - which Cass is categorically opposed to. Over the course the film, of course, his own marriage starts to face the very strains that he had blithely discounted earlier. Ideologically, the film attempts to straddle the contradictions of marriage in early 20th-century America by seeing the older moral order as unfounded while ascribing to its practical directives.

4. Postwar adjustment

As in The Unfaithful, divorce potentially allegorizes the changes of the War and adjustment to a postwar social order. The conversation between Cass and Bradd explicitly references the change in mores after the War; more broadly, the film deals with the status of small-town values in a largely urbanizing national culture. Its thematics aren't necessarily specific to the late 1940s (other Sinclair Lewis novels explore similar ideas, for instance), but the subplot of the war profiteering give a topical spin to them.

5. House Genre and Studio Allegory

MGM films sometimes shift locale between the small-town and the big city, but the Lewisian thematics here give the studio a chance to play 20th-Fox in drag, as the characters consider leaving the MGM genre of the small-town moralizing drama to the big-city sophisticated drama. This is marked by a shift between Victorian and modernist mise-en-scene. Of course, the MGM small-town milieu is reinstated at the end.

6. Realism

Realism is admittedly a relative term. And much of the harder-edged cinematographic look could be written off as a general visual fad in late 1940s Hollywood and the technology of new lenses, faster film stock, etc. By the same token, MGM did not specialize in a realist look in the way 20th-Fox did, so by comparison to the studio's house style, Cass Timberlane is markedly realist in its lighting and overall visual look.

7. Trompe l'oeil

The film does not open with a pseudodocumentary aerial shot, but it does give one halfway into the film, as the story moves to New York City. Only the camera zooms out to reveal it to be the actual aerial view of the main characters. Or, rather, a screen within the screen that the characters are watching with us.

8. Cameo

Walter Pidgeon makes an appearance as Walter Pidgeon, attending a New York party. I can't say the film is the only one to do such a cameo, but it's a little unusual to see one outside of a Bob Hope comedy.

9. Magical Black Person

In general the "magical black person" is a trope of contemporary, not classical, Hollywood - a way of reinscribing stereotype in a representational moment revising away from an older regime of stereotyping. At first blush, Mrs. Higbee (played by Jesse Grayson) seems a typical mammy figure - domestic and asexual. All the same, something is different. Richard Dyer (in his essay "White") identifies a "liberal" version of African-American representation emerging in late 1930s Hollywood, and Cass Timberlane fits that mold: Mrs. Higbee is smart, not buffoonish; her accent lacks an exaggerated dialect; and her provenance is New England, not the South. She partakes of low-culture radio serials but knows more than Cass at crucial moments in the narrative. If not exactly a "magical black person," her character is certainly a prototype for one.

10. The Between-the-Legs shot

I confess to be unfamiliar with George Sidney's oeuvre, who might be classified as more a house director than an auteur. As with other MGM prestige films, though, there's a sophistication in the style. Arguably, as Andrew Sarris would probably argue, it represents the style unfettered to substance - but that's a tendency common to the late 1940s. If there's any directorial stamp here, it would seem to be the between-the-legs shot, which repeats at various points in the film.

CFP: Velvet Light Trap on CGI, Animation, and Effects

2010-11-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers

The Velvet Light Trap
Issue #69, Spring 2012

Recontextualizing CGI, Animation, and Visual Effects

Submission Deadline: January 30, 2011

Has animation overtaken "live-action" as the dominant form of production practice?

As contemporary film and television increasingly relies on digital imagery, CGI, animation and visual effects have been seamlessly integrated into "live-action." The recent popularity of films such as 300, Avatar, Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World suggests an atmosphere in which audiences may expect to find more digital, visual effects and animation in live-action media. At the same time, as animation has become a staple in the corporate bottom line, they also constitute their own major category of film and television products. It seems that animation, visual effects, and cgi have been significant to the way that all films are made. It is therefore important that we recontextualize animation studies to rethink what we mean when we say "animation."

Issue #69 of The Velvet Light Trap, "Recontextualizing CGI, Animation, and Visual Effects," thus seeks to engage the intersections between these techniques in all aspects of the labor practices, production, exhibition, distribution, and reception of media. It is critical that this scholarship challenge traditional views, while suggesting new avenues for scholarly pursuit. This includes re-reading and reassessing traditional histories of animation, as well as examining the aesthetic, economic, and technological ways in which visual effects and animation impact contemporary cinema and television, especially with regards to (though not limited by) the following topics:

cinema of attractions
changing standards of realism
global and Local Labor practices
pre-production and post-production
3-D technologies
motion capture and rotoscoping
video games and media convergence
historical perspectives
earlier visual effects practices, such as mattes and process shots

Submission guidelines and details available at the journal's website.

CFP: Visible Evidence 18 (NYC)

2010-11-23T17:23:00.000-08:00

Visible Evidence 18
New York City
August 11-14, 2011

Call for Proposals

Visible Evidence, an international conference on documentary film and media, now in its 18th year, will convene August 11-14, 2011 in New York City, at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and other locations around the city. Visible Evidence 18 will feature the history, theory, and practice of documentary and non-fiction cinema, television, video, audio recording, digital media, photography, and performance, in a wide range of panels, workshops, plenary sessions, screenings, and special events. Proposals for panels and presentations are invited, according to the following suggestions and guidelines:

Threads and Themes

As in previous editions of the conference, proposed panels and presentations may address any aspect of documentary and non-fiction film, media, and performance, or any theoretical or historical approach to documentary. At the same time, Visible Evidence 18 will draw upon both the location of the 2011 conference and themes we’d like to see continued from previous conferences; proposals in keeping with these directions will be especially welcome. Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

¶ Life during wartime: in/visible evidence (photography, film, video, sound, print, and new media documentation) of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on the "home fronts” and the "black sites” of the "War on Terror” since 2001; local and global activist documentary responses to the September 11th attacks and their aftermath; documentary media of witness, testimony, and memory in the service of cultural and political movements for and against war; censorship, the law, and the sound or image of war; the un/authorized circulation of documents of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "War on Terror” at large, or wars of other eras.

¶ Archiving, preservation, and the material of actuality and documentary: lost and found documentary film, television, and recording; issues of storage, censorship, access, copyright, acquisition, appropriation, circulation and re-circulation of artifacts and records of documentary culture and practice; regional, national, and transnational collection and transmission of documentary history; museological, curatorial, technological, legal, and financial technics in documentary archives; new critical and creative approaches to visual, auditory, and print records and documents.

¶ Talking heads and other documentary sounds: voice, music, noise, scoring, and audition in/and/of documentary radio, video, film, theater, performance.

¶ Radical/experimental New York: individual, collective, and institutional practices of non-mainstream documentary and non-fiction art and media in New York City, 1890s to the present; New York as topic, source, location, and crucible of oppositional and avant-garde documentary practice; the city symphony in the five boroughs; New York City and state in the history of alternative, community, and public access television and video; the New York avant-gardes in international context.

¶ Transnational cities: New York and other urban spaces as loci of im/migration in documentary; urban documentary as form of intercultural practice; terrains of nation and ethnicity in documented cities; the "undocumented” citizen and the ethics, politics, labor, or aesthetics of documentary.

Panel, Workshop, and Paper Guidelines and Deadlines

o Each panel or workshop session will be allotted one hour and forty-five minutes.

o Panels will consist of three papers of no more than 20 minutes each. Panel chairs will ensure that at least thirty minutes is available for questions and discussion following paper presentations.

o Workshops will consist of between four and six opening statements, in which workshop leaders can present up to thirty minutes collectively of prepared or informal material. However, the emphasis of workshops is on the open and unstructured exchange of ideas and techniques between all workshop participants, and topics suited to this format will be given priority.

o Individual paper proposals may be submitted to the open call (see below).

o Proposed panels and workshops may be preconstituted, either through public calls for submissions or individual solicitation. Panel and workshop calls may be posted publicly until December 15, 2010 in the Panels and Workshops Forums area of the Visible Evidence website (http://www.visibleevidence.org/forum). Chairs of proposed panels and workshops must accept proposals until January 1, 2011. Prospective chairs are encouraged to require standard formatting of individual proposals (250-300 words; descriptive title; bibliography; brief bio, including history of VE participation) to streamline panel submission process.

o Proposals for preconstituted panels, workshops, and papers for the open call may be submitted for consideration at the Submission area of the Visible Evidence 18 website by January 15, 2011. Standard proposal formats will be expected for both individual presentations and workshops/panels.

o Participants may present in a workshop or on a panel, but not both. Chairs may present only on their own panel or workshop. Prospective participants may submit to a panel or workshop, or to the open call, but not both; prospective members of rejected panels may opt to have their individual presentation proposals reconsidered for the open call.

Complete submission instructions for each category of participation can be found at visibleevidence.org and the dedicated conference website. Sign up at the VE18 conference website to submit and register.

Questions? Email conference coordinator Jonathan Kahana, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU (jonathan.kahana -AT- nyu.edu); subject line: VE18 question.

Blaze of Noon

2010-11-10T18:57:00.000-08:00

Blaze of Noon (Paramount, John Farrow) is proof that the surface genre of many of Hollywood's films differs from its ultimate genre - or, in Rick Altman's terminology, that their genre syntax is at odds with their genre semantics. Semantically speaking, Blaze of Noon is a flying adventure film, much in the mold of Only Angels Have Wings. The plot focuses on four brothers MacDonald who trade in barnstorming for a growing industry of air mail delivery.

But, in the context of Paramount's 1947 releases, the film has less in common with Calcutta than it does Dear Ruth. Ultimately, the adventure gives way to romantic comedy between Colin MacDonald (William Holden) and his love interest (Anne Baxter), with some detours in melodrama. It's a genre hybrid that suggests that hybridity was often more the norm in the classical period than genre consistency (a point Altman has made).

The hybridity was probably a strategy noticeable in Paramount's output. I've increasingly become interested in Paramount's 1947 films because a) these are among the toughest to find, since they've not had much home video release and b) the studio has such an uneasy mismatch between the changing cinematic fashions of the postwar years and the brand of sound-stage luxury that had distinguished the studio in its heyday. For instance, the cinematography of William Mellor draws extensively from the "Europeanized" glamour lighting in its use of North light in its romance scene:

This contrasts to the otherwise brighter tonal register of the high-key scenes. As well as the thematics of nostalgia that I have noted elsewhere in 1947's output. Here we the spectator are invited to know that the MacDonalds are on the right side of history (aviation will in fact take off) but at the same time vicariously experience historical innocence as a superior state.

CFP: Music and the Moving Image conference

2010-11-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference: Music & The Moving Image

May 20-22, 2011

NYU | Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development

(conference website)

The annual conference, Music and the Moving Image, encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music, sound, and the entire universe of moving images (film, television, video games, iPod, computer, and interactive performances) through paper presentations.

In addition, this year’s conference will include a special session on teaching students about soundtracks. We invite those who teach within film, media, and/or music curricula to submit abstracts about applying particular theoretical approaches to the practice of teaching soundtracks. (For this special session, the faculty member should include with their abstract submission the courses they teach, their departmental affiliation, and the majors represented by their students.) The keynote address will be presented by Philip Tagg (Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music; Ten Little Title Tunes). Streaming video of the presentations will be available only at NYU from May 20-30, 2011.

The Program Committee includes Philip Tagg (see credits above); K.J.Donnelly (The Spectre of Sound, British Film Music and Film Musicals); Elsie Walker (Conversations with Directors; editor of Literature/Film Quarterly); and coeditors of Music and the Moving Image, Gillian B. Anderson (Haexan; Pandora’s Box; Music for Silent Film 1892-1929: A Guide); and NYU faculty, Ron Sadoff (The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation; Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood). The conference will run in conjunction with the NYU/ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop in Memory of Buddy Baker (May 24-June 2, 2011).
MaMI Conference website: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/scoring/conference/

Abstracts or synopses of papers (250 words) should be submitted to: Dr. Ron Sadoff mami.2011.conference@nyu.edu, chair of the program committee, by no later than Dec. 11, 2010. E-mail ron.sadoff@nyu.edu for more information.

CFP: Screen Conference 2011

2010-10-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

This sounds right up my alley...

Call for Papers:

21st International Screen Studies Conference

1-3 July 2011

University of Glasgow, Scotland

We invite papers on any topic in screen studies, i.e. cinema, television and digital media. Submissions for pre-formed three-person panels will be considered but not prioritised.

Repositioning Screen History will be the subject of the plenaries and will form a strand running throughout the conference.

25 years after the 'historical turn' in film studies, we want to explore what new approaches and theoretical models for the study of screen history have been emerging over the past decades, and how changing environments and contexts have altered fields of study.

To this end we encourage submissions addressing the following questions and issues:

Rethinking the Canon (directors, genres, movements, institutions, periodisations)
New sources for new histories
Issues of preservation and restoration
Archival theories and practices
The impact of digital technologies
Decentring European Cinema and Television in the context of global media (cross-cultural influences, cooperation, distribution, reception, the impact of migration)
Film History, Pedagogy, and Disciplinary Identity

Please submit your proposal using the submission template to screen - AT - arts.gla.ac.uk, marking the email subject box 'Conference 2011', to arrive no later than Friday 7 January 2011. For updates, please visit the conference website.

The Gangster

2010-10-23T06:07:00.000-07:00

One thing I like about the inductive approach to film viewing is that it shakes many received narratives I have about film history. Canonical genre histories, for instance, tend to treat the gangster film as a cycle that dies out by the end of the 1930s, to be supplanted by noir crime films, procedurals, and thrillers. There's some truth to this, but The Gangster (Allied Artists/Monogram, Gordon Wiles) is a classical gangster story, with some noir twists.

First off, key noir visual elements are here. One tracking shot in the ice cream parlor/rackets headquarters, for instance, exemplifies the Poverty Row noir stylistics, perhaps borrowed from Detour:

The language is borrowed from theater: spotlighting suggests a psychological interiority while the spatial separation of the characters at the end of the shot points out their isolation.

The set design, lighting and deep-focus cinematography create unusual, off-kilter compositions.

This is in addition to the B-movie production values of sound stage shooting and rear projection.

So the stylistics are typical of Poverty Row noir, and the characterization, too: the title character Shabunka (Barry Sullivan) is psychologically disturbed (even though his paranoia has some just cause) and there are existentialist undertones to his success drive. At the same time the narrative is an inverted American Dream trajectory, much like a classic gangster film. Even the femme fatale character (played here by the one-named Belita) is closer to the gangster-moll characterization than to, say, the vamp in Out of the Past.

Finally, on another note, I found myself intrigued by the painting in Shabunka's apartment. Done in some expressionist-meets-Goya style, it seems to comment on the character at key points, yet its message seems mysterious and oblique. People often read Ulmer's films as commenting on the clash between mass and traditional culture, but here too we have a purposive use of art within a B movie context.

Friday Giallo Blogging

2010-10-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

Lifestyle voyeurism: monochrome set design in The Killer Must Kill Again.

CFP: Console-ing Passions 2011

2010-10-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

Console-ing Passions, the leading international scholarly network for feminist research in screen cultures, will hold its 2011 conference in Adelaide, South Australia, 21-23 July.

Organisers are now seeking proposals for individual papers and pre-constituted panels. Proposals are due November 30, 2010 and may be submitted online.

Paper proposals must include the paper title, the author’s contact details and a 300-word abstract. Panel proposals must include the panel title, names and contact details of all participants and chair and a summary statement of no more than 1500 words to include abstract for each paper and panel concept statement. Panels may have a maximum of three papers each.

Below is a list of possible streams for the conference; these are suggestions, not limits. We strongly encourage contributions from across the Asia Pacific with an emphasis on regional issues, activities and trends.

National Screen Cultures and Feminism(s)
Women in Media Production
Children's Media and Gender
Women, User Generated Content and New Media Economies
Digital Games
Archival Research
Women, Sport, Broadcasting
Media Education
Indigenous Women and Media
Media, Scale and Mobility

1947 Project, Outsourced

2010-10-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Self-Styled Siren continues her thorough and fascinating write-ups of classic Hollywood movies with a post on a 1947 film, Ivy. This is in addition to her other 1947 entries Crossfire, The Man I Love, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, Dead Reckoning, and Nightmare Alley. There is a difference between her approach and mine, but a lot of overlapping interests, too. And in general, I'm humbled by the knowledge of many film enthusiasts.

UPDATE: And here's Catherine Grant compiling online writing on Black Narcissus.

Political Economy Arguments

2010-10-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

In a coda to Making Meaning ("Film Interpretation Revisited" Film Criticism 27, no. 3), David Bordwell argues that textual interpretation is a skill predictable in its rhetoric:

...[Making Meaning] suggests that within the profession, film interpretation has become routinized. One can quicken undergraduates' interest with critical moves that are long-practiced, but one's students are not one's professional peers.

I don't want to cede the value of textual analysis - nor the ease of teaching it to undergraduates! - but the point is taken that disciplines shift the difficulty degree of scholarship as the field develops. It's no accident that film criticism today usually needs to be put to the ends of a theoretical or historical argument and that single-film readings are not as common as they used to be.

Moreover, though interpretation raises special hermeneutic issues, I don't think it's merely textual analysis that becomes a first order skill readily mastered by those outside the field. Consider political economy arguments about media industries. They're an incredibly valuable model of historical change for film, television, and media historians. I've used a version in my argument that prestige films shift because of economic conditions in the film industry. You can find excellent coverage of political economy work at Alisa Perren's Media Industries blog.

But note that film and media scholars are not the only ones to employ it. Edward Jay Epstein, for instance, writes well-researched but thinly-referenced popular-readership books on the contemporary movie industry. Consider his post on why TV is replacing cinema as prestige entertainment and Alex Tabarrok's follow up at Marginal Revolution. These posts present arguments that are familiar to historians studying contemporary television and film: competition with video pushes cable movie channels to diversify offerings, cable TV is able to pursue quality audiences, etc. In the process these posts demonstrate that media and film specialists don't have a particular monopoly on political economy arguments. (In fairness, Tabarrok is an economist.) I don't mean this as a slight on Epstein's writing, but as a question for what a PhD and research specialization bring to the equation.

But I have a methodological point, too: the political economy approach has its limits. Tabarrok references a "lowest-common denominator" aesthetics of the movies and free TV, which have to speak to a mass audience and sacrifice things like character and dramatic weight. This would explain the relative status of prestige TV v. film (some people like the idea of watching quality programming and "serious" films), but I don't buy it as a full explanation. Classical Hollywood, for instance, had a mass audience and some of the dramatic qualities signaled out as prestigious today. Epstein also notes that international distribution creates this common-denominator effect. True in one way, but that raises other questions. Why can't studios green light both Global Hollywood projects and prestige material meant primarily for a domestic US/Anglophone audience? Well, in fact they do just that, only their attempts (Assassination of Jesse James, for instance) get good reviews but little popular-press buzz. The sociology of reception matters a great deal with prestige product.

In my mind, political economy is best thought of as a fulcrum for rather than a driver of historical change. It effects, catalyzes, thwarts, or exacerbates both supply- and demand-side cultural changes taking place - it can even suggest the relative weight of supply and demand sides of cultural influence. But it does not substitute for culture itself.

Post-Classical Cinema

2010-10-18T18:08:00.001-07:00

I've written at various points about post-classical cinema, but I want to highlight a recent book that I've found useful in thinking through the subject. Eleftheria Thanouli's Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration (Wallflower Press, 2009 | press website) tries to define what postclassicism is. As the subtitle suggests, its main intervention is a) continuing the Bordwell-style history of style approach of generalizing about formal systems as historical artifacts and b) understanding post-classicism not simply (or even primarily) as a tendency of blockbuster Hollywood but also a style that cuts across national cinemas. Thanouli uses 14 films (a few examples: Amelie, Trainspotting, and Million Dollar Hotel) to identify key changes in story construction, spatial construction, temporality, and narration. Despite some lit-review-heavy writing style, the strength of the book is that provides both a broad model for understanding the historical shifts and specific case studies with an inductive eye. I might quibble with some of the observations but in all find the account quite persuasive.

1947 Cross-Index

2010-10-16T05:35:00.000-07:00

I decided it would be handy to catalog the blogging I've done so far on the 1947 films. So I created this reference list of all the films from the year, with links to posts on this blog. Right now, it is pretty basic in listing films by studio. Eventually, I'd like to list by genre and maybe other categories.

Incidentally, the list is a reminder that while I've seen a good number of films, especially from the major studios, I still have a lot of viewing to do.

Merton of the Movies

2010-10-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

Merton of the Movies (Robert Alton, MGM) is a perfect companion piece to The Perils of Pauline. I wrote of that film that it is "neither a remake of the silent serials nor a biopic about the star Pearl White, but rather a backstage melodrama that purports to do both." Similarly, Merton of the Movies creates a slapstick comedy out of an aspiring dramatic actor for the silent screen (Red Skelton in the title role) being cast in a satirical slapstick comedy, unbeknownst to him.

The film opens with a typically 1947 documentary montage about Hollywood, with voiceover narration.

There is a Vorkapich-like self-reflexive montage in the middle, too.

To all but the most nostalgic of fans, I suspect, much of Red Skelton's comedy comes across as a dated variant of rube-goes-to-the-city schtick. What is more interesting in the film is the way the film's reflexivity reinforces his star performance, so that the misrecognition he has of the world (and of what "acting" is) becomes the basis that movie producers use for their comedy.

In the process, the film plays with the history of silent film, both real, as in this reference to films like The Black Hand (1906)...

and apocryphal, as when Merton thinks he's going to be run over by a train.

It's a mainstay of ideological criticism to say that movies reconcile contradictions, and it's hard for me not to read this film as speaking to a recently urbanized America, who find themselves as on the other side of the changes of modernity and dislocation and therefore like to look back to a simpler time and a more sincere culture. There are similar ideological tensions later (c.f. Jim Collins' reading of the "new sincerity" in 1990s culture), but the 1940s strikes me as the last decade in which the small-town rube can function as a sympathetic figure.

The Nature of Disciplines

2010-10-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

An anonymous commenter riffs off my observations about the way the discipline has "moved on" from a 1970s moment.

Why are we so quick to refer arguments and claims to disciplinary consensus? Why do we stop short of making evaluative claims about the quality of scholarship, and of the objects it addresses, preferring instead to (implicitly) dismiss certain scholars for being "out of date"?

I'm pretty much in agreement with her or him. I want to be generous to the newer theoretical approaches - in part because I value conceptual innovation and in part because some of the work, such as the Langford essay I mentioned, is quite smart. All the same, I too think that some debates aren't as dead as people would like to act.

The comment raises a couple of good questions. First, how well can we characterize a discipline? Academic fields are large, messy collectives of scholars, with competing points of views and different movements. As the comment implies, there is no monolith of "70s theory." To use one of my favorite essays, in Christine Gledhill's reading (1978) of Klute, she disagrees with the favor for strict political modernism by arguing for a progressive realist practice. So while her conclusion differs from the 1970s take, her agenda belongs to it. Other theory - for instance Dudley Andrew's championing of phenomenology - adopted a different agenda but was still part of the discipline.

So... there's always a danger that when I'm trying to take a temperature of the field that I'm actually reifying it. Disciplines do not move in lock step, but they do move.

Second, why do disciplines reject past approaches? Certain disciplinary change may be mere faddishness. It can reflect professional ideology. But it can also be a way to build knowledge collectively. If we have to debate every point at every turn, it becomes much harder to form research agendas which are useful. For instance, it's useful to have textual analysis as a methodological tool without having to debate what the director intended or whether a film made for profit can express greater ideas. At its best, consensus closes off discussion but also opens up areas of inquiry. I would champion a Thomas Kuhn-model of how the discipline works but have to acknowledge that film studies is not a truly scientific field.

Political Modernism (cont)

2010-10-12T06:17:00.001-07:00

Alex Juhasz responds to my post, and she explains the value she sees in connecting formal self-reflexivity to political critique. One thing I find intriguing is her attempt to see an inadvertant political modernism of examples in contemporary networked nonfiction culture.

To clarify, I don't put Juhasz in the "sneaky" camp. I was drawn to her post because she seemed clear in her political modernism. I think the arguable "sneaking through the backdoor" applies to the new theoretical readings that privilege art cinema or experimental work as a site for a superior kind of spectatorship. One can point to any number of examples, but if I had to pick one, I'd say that Michelle Langford's reading of The Day I Became Woman (Camera Obscura 64) demonstrates this type of reading. Never does Langford directly claim that realist representation lulls the spectator into ideological complicity, but she does argue a) that the value of The Day I Became Woman is not in the explicit or implicit representations of Iran but rather in the complex philosophical state that the film puts the spectator in because of its formal strategies and b) that this philosophical state is a more nuanced and political relevant disposition than learning from any direct message.

What interests me is that a discipline that at first blush seems to have "moved beyond" the 1970s Screen theory style of political modernism has formulated a theoretical variant that in some regards (not others) is not too different.

Something in the Wind

2010-10-07T18:23:00.001-07:00

Something in the Wind (Universal, Irving Pichel) was a Deanna Durbin vehicle as Durbin's star image was starting to change. No longer strictly the girl-next-door teenager, she began to adopt a more sexualized, grown up image. However, Something in the Wind manages the contradictions of the changing image by bracketing it as the character's dissembling. Mary Collins is an ingenue whose identity gets mistaken as a kept woman for a diseased wealthy man. Her ire raised, she plays the part of seductress and gadfly for the wealthy Read family, shown here at a fashion show:

What emerges is a combination of social satire and screwball comedy. Like other light comedies, the narrative mocks mass culture, in this case radio. Mary is an on-air singer, and her profession sets up a few jokes at the expense of radio narratives.

I still want to explore more the generic workings of the Universal output and the light comedies which span across studio.

The Heritage of Political Modernism

2010-10-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

Alex Juhasz did not like The Social Network:

I’ve written extensively here about the mis-steps of the usually celebrated terrain of convergence: the too easy, sloppy, ill-conceived contemporary media moves between documentary, fiction, and hybrid back again. To my mind, Social Network is a textbook case for why I’d rather wait for what can be best delivered by a plain old doc....

In fictionalizations of contemporary real-life, even with great screenwriters and directors in charge, and fine actors playing the parts, or perhaps because of them, the complexities and contradictions of the real social networks of daily living, business codes, and personality get conveniently and conventionally condensed into types (nerd, socially adept entrepreneur, playboy), themes (unsatisfied sexual desire, male bonding), and (three act) structures that gut people and activities of the confusing, amorphous messiness that defines real life—and makes it so pleasurable to watch in a good documentary (and so hard to live well).

Like Juhasz, I value what a good documentary can do and recognize that documentary has, among other things, an economy of analysis impossible in even the most intellectual of narrative films. I mostly disagree with her assessment of narrative, because I think narrative film has a value, both as an aesthetic form and as popular culture.

Disagreement aside, I was drawn to Alex's post because it so clearly expresses a political modernist critique, very much of the sort championed by 1970s film theorists like Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey, or Stephen Heath. You do occasionally see it today - E. Ann Kaplan's work on historical trauma is a good example - but not all that often. Cultural studies and the historicist turn in film studies each from their own direction challenged the monolith of the spectator and the model of the classic realist text. Arguably, newer theoretical readings are sneaking political modernism in through the back door by privileging art cinema and a certain philosophically-inflected spectatorship. But rarely do I see scholars explicitly argue for political modernism.

Which does not necessarily make Juhasz wrong, of course, since unfashionable ideas can be right. Rather, it makes me wonder if I overestimate the consensus in the discipline on these matters. What is the heritage of political modernism in film studies today? This might be a good occasion to revisit D.N. Rodowick.

If Winter Comes

2010-10-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

I don't often analyze these title shots that I include in these 1947 posts, but the opening of If Winter Comes (MGM, Victor Saville) says so much. Most literally, the map of the British Isles points to the film's English setting. The parchment-like quality of the map signals historical or literary genre material, but the sleek, sans-serif font suggests both modernity and stateliness. (Bernhard Gothic - the synthesis of European modern design and American organic warmth).

The blurred historicity is also the narrative's. It adapts a novel set during World War I and recasts it as a World War II film. Generically, it is hard to describe a film like this (historical drama? literary adaptation? home-front film?) other than to note that it has close similarities with other adaptations of left-leaning 20th century novels like So Well Remembered, The Green Years, and Valley of Decision. I see films like this as a key bridge between the older, culture-citing form of prestige film dominant in the 1930s and the newer culture-invoking form emerging in the postwar years.

Stylistically, the film interests me for similar in-between qualities. Here, we have the visual style so typical of the 1940s prestige-drama: the cluttered mise-en-scene suggesting the "realist" domestic space, the low ceilings, cookie-heavy set lighting, and a relatively damped illumination on main characters.

The glamour photography is certainly less shadowy, but even here there is a flattening diffusion and a move to the middle of the gray scale, as on Walter Pidgeon here.

What I increasingly gravitate to - both on level of style and screenplay/narrative - is the paradoxical invocation of "realism" and the "emotional" as two sides of the literary and hence of the prestige film.

New Studies in World Cinema

2010-09-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

The adage about newspaper feature writing is that three instances makes a trend. What better indication of a scholarly emphasis than the recent edited volumes devoted to world cinema? Each has a different focus, but taken together they signal new directions and new theoretical concerns. There have been books on the topic before: ones on national cinemas other than the US, on globalism, or on film trade. But the latest interventions are notable for a few tendencies. They combine film theoretical concerns with film history. They turn away, even if with reservations, from a cultural imperialism model. And they respond to developments in contemporary world cinema.

Remapping World Cinema, Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds. Wallflower Press, 2006.

This is the first of what I see as new world-cinema studies, in no small part because of its introduction which interrogates the category of world cinema. As the editors/authors write, "'What is world cinema?' This is deceptively simple question that has proved to be a challenging theoretical problem." Many of the essays are more applied national-cinema case studies than theoretical explorations, but essays like those from Michael Chanan (who assesses the legacy of the underdevelopment thesis in a postmodern film-festival culture) and Lucia Nagib (who critiques Miriam Hansen's vernacular modernism thesis) supply valuable theoretical interventions. What makes this volume seem distinctive to me is its attempt to find conceptual means to deal with contemporary film culture - namely the invocation of "world cinema" in film criticism and film festivals.

World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman, eds. Routledge, 2009
As the title suggests, this volume compiles various arguments grappling with models of transnationality. As the editors note, the transnational signals cultural exchange above the level of the national but below the global. Moreover transnationality suggests a power relationship somewhere between parity ("international") and core-periphery ("global"). Not all of the essays theorize the nation state as directly as Newman's or Frederic Jameson's but the contributions to tease out theoretical implications, even when dealing with case studies. There are many strong and useful essays in this book, including those by Olivier Barlet (on popular African cinema), Mette Hjort (on Dogme), and Yingjin Zhang (on Chinese cinema), but I will single out as indispensible Dudley Andrew's essay on the concept of national cinema (he has contributions to the other two volumes as well) and Miriam Hansen's version of her vernacular modernism argument.

Global Art Cinema, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds. Oxford, 2010

In full disclosure, I do know the editors and have seen their work on this volume at various stages. This volume is as much a participant in newer studies on art cinema as in the scholarship on world cinema; where a generation of film scholars (with the notable exception of David Bordwell) were busy with putting art cinema in defensive quotation marks or marginalizing its study on sociology-of-taste grounds, with the assumption we already know enough about it, more recent studies have taken art films as a serious object of study, theoretically and historically. Contributions here, like Aneglo Restivo's on The Conformist, Dennis Hanlon's on Jorge Sanjines, and Patrick Keating's on Gabriel Figueroa all make me see the familiar in a new light. Mark Betz's updating of Bordwell's category of parametric cinema seems very useful to me. Like the Durovicova/Newman book, Global Art Cinema is particularly valuable for suggesting how transnational cultural exchange has always been operative, especially in the realm of art cinema, yet the transnational dimensions do not negate the importance of national policy and film cultures. Similarly art cinema has never been merely a European and Japanese phenomenon, though each have played a crucial role in its development.

In short, I have found all of these productive in challenging my understanding of national cinema and world cinema. These books have just one major drawback for me: I realize I need to watch many more films.

Born to Kill

2010-09-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

If I had to point to any one film that marked a new sensibility in film noir, it would be Born to Kill (RKO, Robert Wise). Of course, one can categorize noir according to genre (gothic v. police procedural) or production category (A film v. B film), but the sensibility shift I'm talking about is one from the (mostly) romanticized noirs of the 1940s to the "realist" style more dominant in the 1950s.

In true 1947 fashion, this film opens with location shots of Reno, Nevada:

Born to Kill is no Naked City, however, and such location shooting is contained to a few transition scenes. (The rear projection work is not too bad, incidentally). What marks the visual style as realist is its flatness: relative lack of diffusion and glamour lighting lend a harsh look. On top of that, the lighting set ups are complex but disordered in their placement.

Patrick Keating's recent book on Hollywood lighting notes how certain violations of rules (an extra shadow on the image) might be allowed if it served another function (storytelling emphasis, say). But what we see here is the acceptance of a previously unacceptable amount of stray shadows in order to accommodate two mutual exclusive goals: cheap budgets and luxurious, "artistic" lighting effects.

In addition to change in visual style, Born to Kill takes a sang-froid approach to its sexual subtexts. There's the psychosexually-disturbed killer, Sam, played by Lawrence Tierney and the sadism of the relationship with Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), who is turned on by his psychopathic nature. On top of that, there is the connection between Sam and his roommate-friend Marty (Elisha Cook). Marty covers for Sam and gets jealous at appropriate points; as the image above shows, they share a bed in the boarding house. Unlike the exoticized queerness of Laura, House on 92nd Street, or Gilda, the implied gay/trade relationship here seems seedy and mundane.

Political Economy of Film Festivals

2010-09-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Perceptive sentence, from Manohla Dargis, in a New York Times article about film festivals:

It may be that the Toronto International Film Festival has emerged as one of the biggest, most influential festivals in the world specifically because it learned how to bridge that art-cinema world and those conglomerate-owned movie studios we nostalgically refer to as Hollywood.

There's been a boomlet in scholarship on film festivals, so Dargis's observations are not uncharted territory. All the same, while I've seen some discursive, ideological, and industrial readings of film festivals, including on the TIFF, I think there's still room to bridge micro- and macro- levels of this cultural exchange.

On top of that, there's two broad tendencies in the field of film history. The Gomery appropriation of Chandler-ite business history, with a goal to understand how corporations actually work (governance, structure, and behavior in markets). And the Marxian tendency to critique corporate culture as an ideological form. The two don't always talk to one another. I get the sense, admittedly off the cuff at this point, that there's more investment in the sell-out thesis of film festivals' corporate leanings than a close analysis of what corporations mean for film culture.

The Arnelo Affair

2010-09-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

The Arnelo Affair (MGM, Arch Oboler) is another crime drama about marital infidelity. Anne Parkson, a dissatisfied wife of a workaholic lawyer, gravitates toward the advanced of Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), only to get caught up in a murder. It's proof that Hitchcock films weren't alone in the transference-of-guilt theme that the Cahiers critics liked to point out. I would say that a close examination reveals a difference; whereas the Hitchcockian transference is largely metaphorical, here Anne's guilt is literal, and the script makes explicit the sense that a wrong accusation of one crime is the (just) punishment for another.

Even though this film, like The Unfaithful, thematizes redemption and forgiveness of the cheating wife, it lacks the self-conscious invocation of a historical past. That said, the dialogue does venture surprising into social problem territory, as when the detective enters an argument on the seriousness of murder (!) with a retort that , "If we've learned anything these last few years, it's that harm done to anyone in the world is harm to everybody." This from pre-Dore Schary MGM could come from an Adrian Scott-unit film at RKO.

Stylistically, the film borrows extensively from radio aesthetics, as director Arch Oboler was known primarily for his work with radio thrillers. The Arnelo Affair uses extensive internal monologue with voiceover narration. But what most interests me is how it reveals the influence of Hitchockian subjective narration. Very few, if any, subjective shots mark the shooting and editing, but there is another, often overlooked attribute of subjective narration: the refusal to cut away from the reaction shot. Combined with many tight close-ups, this suggests a psychologically heightened state for the main characters. For most viewers, perhaps, the effect will not be a successful style - the equivalent of an exclamation point after every other sentence - but in its failure it shows the broader shift in stylistic practice in the 1940s.

Specificity of Critical Vocabulary

2010-09-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

One of the goals of my intro class is to introduce critical vocabulary that not only allows students to analyze movies but also allows them to do the readings in the field that an upper-level class might require. One distinction I make to that end is between the viewer, the spectator, and the audience. In my mind these are three distinct concepts.

However, if you read in the field, scholars often use these terms interchangeably. So from a certain perspective, my usage is overly prescriptive - if the field does not as a whole distinguish between these, why should I or my students? From another perspective, though, there's a good case to be made that analytical clarity for critical vocabulary is a worthy goal.

But raises the problem of critical words that are not precise. The concept of ideology, for instance, is just the sort of idea that intermediate to advanced scholarship in the field relies on heavily. Yet anyone who's taught the concept before will realize how several definitions comprise what we call "ideology." Part of this is the subject of explicit debate (Stuart Hall v. Louis Althusser) but part of this goes unremarked, since the assumption is that scholars can apply their own fuzzy logic to determine what model is being invoked.

Do we teach that kind of fuzzy logic or the precision of definitions and models?

The Unfaithful

2010-09-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

I often get asked in regard to my 1947 project: why that year in particular?

I have a few answers. There is the initial reason I picked it, as a barometer for the industry the year some major social problem films were released. And there's a sense of constructing the typical but resisting the canonical (1947 sees few canonical films). But the answer that I've developed after starting the project is that 1947 seems a pivotal year in the transition from the wartime (and the New Deal) to postwar life.

It's not just me. The films themselves seem self-conscious about the transition. None more than The Unfaithful (Vincent Sherman, WB), a noirish story about a murder whose initial appearance of self-defense by a housewife is complicated by a past infidelity she had with the victim.

The film's opening begins with a shot of a Los Angeles house, which pans right to reveal the street in pseudodocumentary fashion, while a voice-of-god narration intones, "Our story takes place in Southern California. The problem with which it deals belongs not to any one single city, town, or country, but is of our times."

The narrative, it turns out, literalizes the "crime" of wartime infidelity in a trial not only about the murder charge but more broadly about the legacy of World War II. "Have we forgotten the war so quickly?" Chris Hunter's defense attorney asks the jury. The jury - and the spectators - are put in the position of how to balance looking backward to the war's experience and looking forward to the postwar future.

Stylistically, too, the film looks both forward and backward. The Warners' house style revels in cookie-heavy lighting and shimmering surface on minimal set design yet also follows the vogue for deep focus.

Location shooting has a pseudo-doc feel at times, a romanticization at other times.

It's remarkable that a film so much a copy of the WB Mildred Pierce mold should evince its historical moment in such a distinctive way.

CFP: Rendering the Visible

2010-09-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

The deadline is approaching fast on this one....

Rendering the Visible
Feb. 11-12, 2011
Moving Image Studies Program at
Georgia State University

The doctoral program in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University welcomes paper proposals for a meta-disciplinary conference on the state of “the digital turn.”

Keynote speakers:

Akira Mizuta Lippit (University of Southern California)
Vivian Sobchack (University of California at Los Angeles)

One of the most pressing questions facing studies of the image today is how to theorize visuality as more and more moving images are given over to the digital. This conference proposes that the notion of “rendering” might provide a useful entrée for an exploration of theoretical continuities and discontinuities in our understanding of the technologically reproduced image, from Benjamin's “Short History of Photography” to CGI.

With regard to image and sound, “rendering” has both a technical and a theoreticalcurrency. It is a term that emphasizes layering, enveloping, and reversibility. In the processing of the image, rendering has the technical sense of the application to a sketch of various effects of “luminence” (transparency, translucency, etc.) under the assumption that light doesn't simply “strike” the object, but rather “envelops” it. Michel Chion relates “rendering” to sound theory with his notion of “rendu,” which describes the spectator as being “seized” by an immersive sonic environment.

If “rendering” presents us with a “point of no return” (in which layers must be permanently merged), it simultaneously implies the slippery act of bringing into being.

That is, when understood as a process, “rendering” shifts our attention to reversibility, oscillation, and becoming of the visual, which occur prior to the moment in which image layers are fixed. In this way, “rendering” emphasizes not the image but the image-state,which takes the digital as its “raw material” and embodies it, analogizes it, and thickens it in new and uniquely post-cinematic (and theoretically post-classical) ways. The inbetweenness of “rendering” may offer ways to understand new affects of visual images (across the photochemical and the digital) and their hybrid ontologies.

The conference organizers offer “rendering” as only one provocative tool but welcome paper proposals using any number of frameworks to consider how the digital turn might reconfigure fundamental (“classical”) concepts such as inscription, photogénie, the punctum, the gaze, the body, materiality, aura, analogy, contingency, the virtual, the archive, the uncanny, the labor of imaging, indexicality, visuality, visibility, and decay, as well as how “rendering” or, indeed, other innovative theoretical tools might enable us to think through more recent concepts such as reversibility, the fold, becoming, topological figures, post-humanism, the interface, and the glitch.

Send paper proposals (300–500 words) and short bio by 15 September 2010 to movingimagestudies@gmail.com. Queries can be directed to conference organizers Angelo Restivo, Alessandra Raengo, or Jennifer Barker. E-mail addresses at http://communication.gsu.edu/movingimagestudies/

New Course Draft Syllabus

2010-08-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of open-source course design, I thought I'd share a draft syllabus for the course I am preparing for the fall, Sexual Difference in US Film. It is cross-listed with Women's Studies and LGBT Studies and is a new course for me. And I say open-source because I've drawn on the syllabi of those who have taught the class before, Patricia Meltzer and Whitney Strub. If you have any suggestions on readings, pedagogy, etc. let me know. For instance, any readings on camp that you've seen to work better than Sontag's?

Either/Or Logic and Documentary

2010-08-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

If I might add my own split-the-difference argument, I would note that the discourse on documentary often indulges in either/or logic. Either documentary is reality or it is a construction duping spectators. (Thankfully some good scholarship has thought through this issue more complexly.) Either we look to documentary traditions or we sweep the traditions under the rug to make way for brand new nonfiction forms. Either documentary works according to a Griersonian ideal of a public sphere instrument or it fails.

On this last point is the ethics critique that Brian Winston poses - though others like Calvin Pryluck have made similar critiques - namely, that the use and abuse documentary makes of the social actor is not justified by the ends of public sphere debate:

[T]he tradition of the victim inevitably requires that some measure or other of personal misery and distress be, if not exploited, then at least exposed. The justification for such exposure is the public's right to know as a species of public good. Yet if no, or little, social effect can be demonstrated, how can that justification stand? (Claiming the Real, 46)

A good point, especially as it suggests that public sphere institutions have their own professional ideologies and self-interest, which present themselves as universal interests. Still, do we have to decide between documentaries instrumentally changing public policy or social/economic conditions and documentaries having no effect? In fairness, Winston does give a condition - if no or little effect can be demonstrated - but his tone here and elsewhere suggests he does not see the effect in practice, at least according to traditional models of the public sphere.

Yet just as some sociological research or some journalism more valuable than others, some documentaries do a better job at serving as public good, which may include its value as a public sphere instrument. And the public sphere utility cannot be measured simply by results; representing an unrepresented position in the public debate adds qualitatively to that debate, regardless of the outcome. Much as in social science research, there are enough documentaries which do not have much impact public sphere that we should be cautious or humble in applying Griersonian aspirations, but I don't know that we need to reject them outright.

Fandom and Spectatorial Investment

2010-08-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sure being a Top Chef fan myself has something to do with it, but I liked this post from Tim Burke:

What Top Chef viewers are saying back to the producers is that they’re not content to watch the show in a deeply ironic, postmodern fashion, knowing that it’s-just-a-reality-show and that whatever they’re seeing is simply the storyline that the producers have decided to show them. Instead, they’re claiming that at least some past competitions have had the virtue of authenticity, that the people and the food and the emotions have been real, and the reputational stakes have had genuine meaning in the careers and lives of the contestants.

If I didn't know better, I would think Burke was seeking a grand unified theory to reconcile British cultural studies and Screen spectatorship theory.

This reminds me of an article I read on Television Without Pity forums (Mark Andrejevic, "Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans" Television & New Media 9, no. 1 (January 2008): 24-46.), which was a good example of a cultural studies reading of fandom as participatory and productive. And while the Andrejevic isn't completely utopian about fan participation (he sees it as potentially abetting marketing needs of the networks), I have a slightly different take on TVwP: namely, that forum discussion can show both the media savvy of a certain set of viewers then in the next breath be unable to critique the shows as texts. For instance, the posters on the Top Chef board make clever references to the Magical Elves, while the posters on the Barefoot Contessa board talk about the recipes they like and which of Ina's friends they don't like.

SCMS 2011 CFP: All-Consuming Identities

2010-08-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a late posting I've received - I believe the panel is looking for one more participant.

SCMS Panel Proposal
2011 Conference
“All-Consuming Identities: Media, Identity, Consumption”

The emphasis on appealing to niche audiences in contemporary media products has encouraged interest in exploiting perceptible and potentially profitable identity traits—including race, class, gender, and sexuality—as a way to marshal consumption by specific audiences and to extend the value of consumable media beyond their originary forms. This kind of exploitation may seem to be the direct result of the current media environment, but it has arguably been an operative technique for designing media products and inducing their consumption since the inception of mass media in the nineteenth century. Looking at how identity traits have been deployed to promote consumption of media products in different ways and at different times is valuable to understanding the larger sociocultural and economic forces at play in the creation and overall proliferation of a variety of media forms. Accordingly, the main purpose of this panel is to look at how identity traits—of actors, celebrities, characters, producers, or audiences—are utilized to encourage consumption of media products both on and off screen. Submissions may address any aspect of identity and any form of screen or broadcast media and their extensions, and employ
• celebrity or star studies;
• auteur studies;
• branding;
• audience or reception studies;
• historical research; and/or
• industrial analysis.

Please email abstracts of 200-300 words and a brief bio (name, affiliation, position) by August 15th, 2010 to:
Jennifer Jones (jones334 -AT- indiana.edu)
Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Communication and Culture

High School film studies textbook

2010-07-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've had plans to update my intro textbook review. I've started the reading of newer editions but have not got around to writing anything up yet.

But a recent comment raises an issue that a few folks have emailed me about: what about a film studies textbook for high school classroom use? There does seem to be more high schools with a film-studies curriculum (en encouraging trend). That said, to my knowledge there are still no textbooks geared toward the secondary market. From what I gather the authoring and approval process for secondary ed is much more involved than even the college textbook.

So, given the current possible textbooks, I'm not even sure what criteria make for best adoption in the high school classroom. Clarity of writing and restraint in abstract vocabulary, I imagine. Beyond that I couldn't say which pedagogical approaches will be similar, which different.

This problem raises the question what role those of us in higher ed should be promoting film studies at other levels. I know there's been some talk in SCMS of this, but am short on specifics.

Robert Redford and Warren Beatty

2010-07-23T13:57:00.001-07:00

Just a note to announce that I have an essay on Robert Redford and Warren Beatty in the latest volume in Rutgers' Star Decades series, Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s. In short, I read both stars' image against the conflicted ideology of American liberalism in the 1970s, one which both looks back nostalgically to the consensus of the previous decades and aspires to radical critique.

A plea

2010-07-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

Can we put a moratorium on titles for books, essays, or conference papers punning on the homonym "real" and "reel"?

The City Montage, take 2

2010-07-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

I blogged already on the way that one Hollywood feature, Humoresque, borrowed its montage sequence from The City. Well, currently TCM is showing The Killer that Stalked New York (1950), an exploitation-noir take on the contagion thriller - a sort of low-rent Panic in the Streets. And if I'm not mistaken, it too lifts footage from The City. It's fascinating to see the extent of Hollywood's borrowing of documentary style - far more even than canonical histories discuss - and the undoubted impact that the 1930s documentary made on Hollywood.

Discipline Biography

2010-06-30T17:47:00.001-07:00

I'm currently doing further research into the history of American sociology for a chapter I'm writing. In addition to more standard histories of the field or more theoretical treatments of the history of sociology, I've come across a book (Fifty Years in the Sociological Enterprise) written by one sociologist, Charles H. Page, tracking his career trajectory across affiliated institutions, such as City College, Smith, and Princeton. Page was hardly a central figure in 20th century sociology, but his book is interesting precisely in its typicality, including solid programs that fall outside the typical Chicago-Harvard-Columbia-Wisconsin programs usually dominating such histories. More to the point, Page is not writing an auto-biography exactly but is approaching the history of the discipline through personal history.

I toss this post out because I'm curious about how we tell the history of the discipline. Autobiography certainly has its drawbacks as an approach; it can for instance exacerbate the "noise" of cliques, it can be unrepresentative, or it can be less efficient as an exposition. But while disciplines are abstract, aggregate terrains, they only work as embodied in its practitioners. As the plenary roundtable at the last SCMS conference showed, practitioner history can be illuminating. It leaves me wondering whose disciplinary biography I would most want to read.

CFP: Berkeley silent film conference

2010-06-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

The First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema
Cinema Across Media: the 1920s
February 24–26, 2011

Cinema’s institutional consolidation in the 1920s enlisted practitioners from many other fields and transformed the entire ensemble of established media. Avant-garde cinemas borrowed extensively from a variety of artistic practices, while the “cinematic” became the new standard for both modernist aesthetics and popular culture. Today’s multimedia environment brings cinema of the 1920s into new focus as the site of rich intermedial traffic, especially if the term “media” encompasses not only recording technologies and mass media, such as photography, phonography, radio, and illustrated press, but also the physical materials used for aesthetic expression, such as paint, print, plaster, stone, voice, and bodies.

We welcome proposals from scholars in a variety of disciplines, including music, architecture, literature, art history, theater, dance, and performance studies, and encourage international and comparative perspectives. The temporal boundaries for “the 1920s” include the transition to sound cinema. Workshop proposals from archivists and others interested in present-day media platforms (DVD, Internet, etc.) and their effect on silent film scholarship are welcome. The conference will last two-and-a-half days and include keynote lectures, concurrent panels, workshops, and screenings at the Pacific Film Archive with live musical accompaniment.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract (300 words), a short bio (100 words), and any A/V needs. Proposals must be submitted by October 15, 2010 to theconference@berkeley.edu. Notification will follow by mid-November.

Philadelphia-area film screenings

2010-06-18T11:16:00.001-07:00

For those in the area, I have a new site charting local screenings: Philadelphia Repertory Film Blog. Note that I will start writing and posting here more this summer - I promise!

Call for Curators: In Media Res

2010-06-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

Alisa Perren posts a call for "curators" for In Media Res, which combines an audiovisual clip with a short written analysis/polemic. Topics to include:

July 5-9 Sports and Media

July 12-16 Summer TV Season

August 2-6 Lady Gaga’s gender/queerness

August 9-13 Action Films

August 16-20 Wrestling

August 23-27 Regulation

August 30- Sept 3 Children's Culture

Sept 6-10 Dragon*Con

Sept 13-17 Film Festivals

For more details, check out the fuller call.

The Realm of the Legitimizable

2010-04-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Long time, no post, I realize. I hope to ease back into a more regular writing schedule here.

Drew Morton has a post up at Dr. Mabuse responding to Roger Ebert's claim that "video games can never be art." Drew's rebuttal is measured and pretty convincing.

But given as this comes the day after a class debate I witnessed over whether TV advertisements were art (and if so, in what circumstances), I thought it might be worth stepping back to think about the very terms of this debate. To my eye there are a number of positions out there.

1) The debate over whether something is art or not is beside the point. Usually this claim is made on the basis that art (by which in this instance we mean a generally positive, expressive phenomenon) is a highly problematic term, either because it's ideological or because it's too subjective. I don't generally subscribe to this position, since I think that some human activities are far more open to aesthetic contemplation and experience than others and that cordoning off such activities from non-art can be useful. But this critique of the "is it art?" question does at the very least give a valuable reminder that the question imagines a community that imposes its judiciary authority on the matter.

But if we accept that figuring out the relative aesthetic expressivity of videogames is a worthwhile discussion, I see a few positions specific to the medium:

2) Videogames are not art. The Ebert position. And many others' undoubtedly. To the extent the arguments do not appeal to a self-obvious truth, the objections can vary and may be based on perceived intention, on narrative experience, on content, on authorship, or any number of criteria.

3) Videogames are already art, according to existing criteria. Some argue that games do precisely the things that we already praise in, say, literature or film. They engage affect and identification. They explore complex themes. Et cetera. This is what I see Drew as arguing.

4) Videogames are not art but they will be. Possibly, the existing games to date have not so much offered us an art as a testing ground for new audio-visual vocabularies - and centrally, for interactivity - that will form the basis for the vibrant art of tomorrow. Grand Theft Auto may not be art (then again, it may - see #3), but the audio-visual art of the future may look a lot more like Grand Theft Auto than it does No Country for Old Men.

5) Videogames are art, but only if we shift our aesthetic criteria. Drew (among others) gives the analogy of the early days of cinema to the present reaction to video games: did film, too, not face similar disdain in its infancy? Indeed, but I think it's easy to underestimate how much of a cultural sea change it was to extend serious aesthetic consideration to cinema. It involved not merely getting over class associations (or erecting an intellectual edifice capable of dealing with them), it required new approaches to aesthetic apperception. If some are not capable of extending to games the aesthetic contemplation they regularly extend to cinema, it could be because of snobbery (reason #3) or lack of imagination (reason #4), but it could be because the things they look for in judging or contemplating art are based in a specific set of arts - things like a unified form-content relationship wedded to an affective involvement that builds over the course of the experience of the work. Video games may have these (#3) but they might not. Or at least not in forms conventionally recognized.

As you might guess I'm partial to #5 but will acknowledge that others partially explain the issue, too.

In his book on photography, Bourdieu divides culture into three realms: the sphere of legitimacy, the sphere of the legitimizable, and the sphere of the arbitrary.

table from Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art (Stanford UP, 1990), p.96

This is why I bring up advertising. Not because the analogy is perfect, but because it is a reminder there is no automatic or teleological process by which a new cultural passes from arbitrary to legitimizable. Cinema did (it's not fully in the legitimate realm yet, but is getting close), and television is currently. Videogames may, but they may mostly remain, like advertisement or cooking or fashion, in the realm of "culture" but not "art."

I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now?

2010-03-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

Talk about teleology. Not only does the title song of I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now? (20th Century-Fox, Lloyd Bacon) recur many times, but the narrative charts the completion of the song; songwriter Joseph Howard (Mark Stevens) has the tune early in the film but cannot find the appropriate lyrics. The rest of the film will set out to "explain" the lyrics. The song was maybe not even Howard's most famous composition, but it allows the script to create a homology between song and biography.

And like Lillian Russell (1941), this film is a musical biopic. Though known for their realist and dramatic fare, 20th Century-Fox had a musical unit and made a few for 1947 release. I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now is squarely in the Fox musical mold, which stresses the romantic drama to the point of not quite feeling like a musical. There are backstage musical elements....

and one intergrated musical sequence in which Katie (June Haver) imagines herself in the starring role...

But mostly the film is a light-hearted drama not too unlike Warners' Life With Father. From the standpoint of my 1947 viewing, two things most interest me. First, the turn-of-the-century setting - which repeats often enough not to be an innocent choice. Second, the slightly more complicated blocking of camera and action, such as in the ever-present mirror shot:

It's been fascinating to see both ideological tropes and stylistic devices repeat so consistently.

Escape Me Never

2010-02-25T13:38:00.001-08:00

Escape Me Never (WB, Peter Godfrey) is the sort of romantic melodrama that comes across as outdated today. In later 19th century Italy, Ida Lupino plays the role of Gemma, a gamine who's taken in by womanizing, underemployed composer Sebastian (Errol Flynn). She falls for Sebastian, who is busy chasing women, including his brother's fiancée. She decides to accept his errant ways but pays a price.

Such a narrative has especially retrograde implications by making the woman bear the brunt of "settling" in the marriage market. Yet I wonder if what's mostly come since - the downplaying of "settling" and the market - is not itself ideological. In other words, there's got to be some way to offer critique without slipping into historical chauvinism.

That the genre requires a high-key approach is no surprise. What surprises me is how fussy "polish" ends up being in much of the film. There's almost a Victorian over-adornment of the image with illumination and shadow. And, too, there are some thoroughly conventional choices, even leading to comic moments like this, where the illumination seems to be coming from both sides of the door!

Flynn, meanwhile, gets the full glamor treatment, even showing off more of a diffused glow than Eleanor Parker.

At other times, the cinematography is surprisingly dark, even minimal:

The image quality here shows how much film restoration matters for what we see. Sol Polito's work not only looks better but also makes more sense in a polished print/transfer like Now Voyager than here.

Truth Claims and Reality Effects

2010-02-24T15:07:00.001-08:00

I know no issue seems more trodden than the issue of documentary veracity - or in particular the spectatorial investment in the real that documentary and documentary style engenders. I'm glad the field of documentary studies has found new research agendas and new angles of approach. Yet, like a moth to a flame, I return...

Post cultural studies, there's been a working consensus that the reality effect (to borrow Barthes' term) was overstated and even a straw man. Of course, viewers know that they are watching a film and are not just dupes to illusionistic filmmaking.

Well, two films I've seen lately have reminded me that I'm a dupe. The Hurt Locker falls short of being pure pseudodocumentary, but it uses a hand-held aesthetic to suggest a documentary-like veracity. There are a few moments when I was keenly aware of the camera's narrational presense, such as the racking of focus or the positioning of camera in a position in direct danger of gunfire. And intellectually, I was able to dissect the deconstructive action film/war film generic repurposing going on. But viscerally, I felt I was watching a slice of historical reality.

Perhaps more interesting theoretically was a similar investment in the historical real I felt watching Manda Bala (Jason Kohn, 2007), a documentary about kidnapping and political corruption in Brazil.

What's interesting is that the film is fairly stylized. Where The Hurt Locker appropriates documentary for the fiction film, Manda Bala appropriates a lush, fictional shooting style for documentary. True, there are moments of video images that stick out in reality-effect fashion:

Rhetorically, though, the film only partially uses these reality effect moments to buttress its arguments. Most of its truth claims come from the structuring of testimony, in which artifice of mise-en-scene corroborates the "officialness" of the bureaucrat.

The seeming paradox of much postmodern documentary - that Manda Bala creates a spectatorial investment in truth via means of artifice - is only a paradox because it overlooks the latitude documentary narration has in sublating the indexical trace to larger truth claims. Unlike Errol Morris, Jason Kohn does not back into his argument. Rather, he relies on the expository thread of the film's structure to carry a good deal of style.

The Bishop's Wife/Heaven Only Knows

2010-02-23T07:54:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure, but I suspect that Here Comes Mr. Jordan was responsible for a cycle of afterlife comedies. Down to Earth was pretty much a direct sequel, but other 1947 films revolved around angels coming to earth to rectify human wrongdoing.

Heaven Only Knows (Nero Films/UA, Albert Rogell) grafts the western and the romantic drama onto the afterlife comedy. Angel Michael (Robert Cumming) comes down to earth and becomes the fish out of water, the good guy mistaken for a sharp shooting outlaw. His goal is to get outlaw frontiersman Duke (Brian Donlevy) to find his missing soul and become law-abiding citizen - the key of course is the love of schoolmistress Drusilla (Jorja Curtright).

Visually, a high-key A-picture style pervades the film. Shot by Karl Strauss, the film oscillates between undistinguished setups, the generically-motivated effects lighting, and visual inventiveness. Take one scene, in which an angered Drusilla storms across the street to confront Duke.

The first shot is a highly diffused, barely modeled shot of Curtright, the second a typically high-key but contrasty exterior shot. Each shows a highly conventional approach to the subject matter. The interior at Duke's on the other hand, is staged deep, with three separate lighting zones for foreground, midground, and background. It's a quintessentially 40s shot - experimenting with staging in a non-showy way.

There are Strauss-ian touches like an underneath shot (POV from a book?)

and extreme effects lighting on a devil figure.

Ideologically, the film is a disguised social problem film. Much like Boy With the Green Hair (1948), it both implores for world peace and seems pointed against Jim Crow.

The Bishop's Wife is a message picture of sorts, though much more up-front in its theme. Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) is trying to raise money for a new cathedral and in the process has lost sight of the ordinary people whom the church is supposed to serve. That is, until angel Dudley (Cary Grant) arrives and among other acts seduces Henry's wife Julia (Loretta Young).

"Seduce" is used advisedly. The Bishop's Wife is a category E film if ever I've seen one: the romantic tension between Grant and Young characters threatens to derail the official message of the film.

And yet the film's contradictions can be its strength. Gregg Toland is DP here and the film's aesthetic seems to be to avoid generic treatment in order to shoot the fantastic in realistic style.

A rich, inky-black look is barely broken even by Loretta Young's glamour treatment.

The Bishop's Wife perhaps best exemplifies the in-house independent trend of the 1940s. It is very much a Goldwyn prestige picture, yet uses RKO stars and director. Narratively, it seems to be in an in-between spot between "Goldwyn film" and "RKO picture."

Technology and Aesthetic Adaptation

2010-02-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

This week in the film history class I taught, not for the irst time, Paul Ramaeker's essay on diopter shots (“Notes on the Split-Field Diopter” Film History v. 19). In so many ways it's a remarkable essay, both for the quality of its research and writing and for the substantive contribution to cinema history. Plaudits aside, the essay interests me because it happens to be a well-executed example of an evolutionary model of technology and film style dominant now.

Essentially, this is an approach to film technology querying aesthetic adaptation of film technology and giving a somewhat dialectical picture. First, there is a stasis, generally defined by strong aesthetic conventions. Second, an external shock comes in the form of a new technology. Third, while some artists hesitate to embrace the new technology, others experiment with it, often through indiscriminate use. Fourth, artists learn how to reconcile the new technology to existing aesthetic conventions. Fifth, more assertive artists then learn how to tinker with these conventions. Utlimately, of course, the cycle can end as new technologies arrive or older aesthetic conventions fall into disuse.

Not every film historian of technology posits all of these steps (commonly accounts will stop at step 4 or 5), but a number of studies of technology fit it. Not only Ramaeker's essay, but Scott Higgins book on Technicolor, James Lastra's on sound, Patrick Keating's on classical cinematography, and David Bordwell's work on deep focus.

There's a good reason for the success of the adaptation-evolution model. It makes sense of the empirical, especially in reference to commercial film industries in which conventions are both highly internalized and highly enforced. Additionally, it finds an in-between spot between conflict and functionalist social models of the film industry: film technology is not mere science or mere ideology. As such, we find a clear research agenda that weights primary research without falling into the traps of discourse analysis.

For all these reasons I'm drawn to this model in my own research, which is arguing that Hollywood's adoption of social relevance, including a visual “realism,” was actually a give-and-take process rather than an imprint of Depression politics or wartime exigencies.

But a nagging part of me is wondering if there are other ways to conceive of aesthetic adaptation to new technology. Do some technologies proceed without a dialectical trajectory or such strong equilibrium toward the conventional? As usual, I worry about the totalizing danger of conceiving of a “system.”

Blessing in Disguise

2010-01-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's Film History textbook this semester. They devote a considerable amount of space to a polemic for a distinct film historiographic practice. Some of it is dated (film history is no longer brand-spaking new), and some of it still holds. Reading past the substance of their argument, though, one can detect an underdog fetish:

We estimate that nearly half of the theatrical-length motion pictures made in the United States are lost forever. Consider the enormity of this loss for the historical study of cinema. It is difficult to construct even a hypothetical analogy on the same scale in another branch of history. To do so we would have to propose, for example: What if two-thirds of all the paintings done in the twentieth century were destroyed, and most of the remainding one-third were saved through happenstance rather than through systematic preservation?

Well, for all we know, two-thirds of all paintings painted in the 20th century were destroyed. Not every painter is famous or later becomes famous or shows work in respected galleries or museums. Certainly work of a certain caliber has had a leg up in surviving because of fine art's consecration as a cultural good, much more than cinema's status as ephemeral and popular commodity status in the first half of the 20th century. And, yes, film poses distinct archival and preservation challenges.

But there is an advantage to this situation: we are in a position where the field has an open mind that all films are interesting on some level and worth preserving. We actually are concerned with those destroyed or lost 2/3 of cinema. Our handicap is also a strength.

CFP: 50 Years of the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research

2010-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

On, Archives!: A conference on media, theater and history
Celebrating 50 Years of the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research
July 6 - 9, 2010
Madison, Wisconsin

In 2010 the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research celebrates its 50th anniversary. Formed in 1960 as a joint project of what was then the Department of Speech at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society, the WCFTR was one of the earliest institutions in the United States to perceive the value in preserving and collecting archival materials in American film, radio, television and theater. Conjointly with the WHS's extensive Mass Communication collections, the WCFTR has continued to build a resource used by scholars, researchers, students, and the general public alike to keep the history of media and the dramatic arts alive and to aid in our understanding of cinema, radio, television, drama, and popular culture as globally vital phenomena.

In this its 50th year, the Center will celebrate by hosting a conference focused on film, radio, television and theater history, and on the challenges of archiving in these areas. We invite a broad range of scholarship touching on the concerns of the collections here at Madison, and particularly invite those whose work has brought them here to consult our papers, films, recordings, and graphic materials in the course of their work. Equally important are considerations of archiving popular, aural, and visual culture. We invite presentations of historical work – and contemporary work with roots in the historical – in the fields of film, theater, and broadcasting, and in archival issues and debates, for a four-day celebration of the study of media and performance culture in America and around the world, July 6 - 9, 2010, in Madison.

We invite you to submit papers in any of the following areas, or on related subjects. We are particularly interested in work that makes use of the Center's or the Society's collections, or that of other archival venues.

* The history of film production, exhibition, and distribution in the US and abroad
* The history of broadcasting in the United States, and its transnational influences
* The history of American theater production and performance
* Issues and challenges of media archiving, including the digital future
* The role of history in the study of media and popular culture
* Historiographical methods and theory
* Creative authorship in film, broadcasting, and theater
* The future of media and theater history

Send paper, panel, or workshop proposals of no more than 300 words to Michele Hilmes at wcftr50 - at - gmail.com. Details of the proposal process can be found on the Conference Details page.

Deadline: January 30, 2010

The "On, Archives!" conference will also host a symposium on Broadcasting in the 1930s: New Media in a Time of Crisis. This is a conference-within-a-conference, with its own submission process. Conference attendees are invited to attend all sessions at both events.

Friday Giallo Blogging

2010-01-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

The ideological trope of J&B scotch...

This example from The Bloodstained Shadow. One of the things I love about giallos is their inventiveness in finding new visual means to achieve conventional generic ends. Take this shot of the killer entering the apartment building:

Normally, suspense films withhold the information of the killer's identity by a) keeping the killer offscreen; b) framing part of the killer's body but never the face; or c) illuminating so that shadow falls on the face. Here, inspired no doubt by the low-light cinematography of Gordon Willis, the camera points directly at the killer and the key illumination of the scene. I cannot claim this is the first film to do this, but in some ways that's beside the point - the generic pleasures of giallo is the systematic rule-breaking.

Spring 2010

2010-01-13T15:44:00.001-08:00

I have also uploaded syllabi for this semester's versions of my Intro to Film/Video Analysis class and the graduate Film Theory class.

I see that Alisa Perren has shared a syllabus for her grad Media Industries class - the course looks great. I am hoping to collect any shared syllabi in the field. Pointers welcome.

Reality TV genre

2010-01-13T06:35:00.000-08:00

Watching Tabitha's Salon Takeover, I kept think of Rick Altman's genre syntax/semantics model, since the show has the semantics of a interior-design makeover show (any of the HGTV programming, but even more Restaurant Makeover) but the syntax of Supernanny. I don't claim it's necessarily the first such combination (I never watched Kitchen Nightmares, which clearly is in the mix), but the syntax/semantic combination does distinguish the show from other Bravo shows which otherwise seem comparable stylistically.

Which makes me wonder what scholarship has addressed the genres of American reality TV. I know there's a tendency in popular discourse to treat it as one genre, but either a format might be a better way of conceiving of it or else if it is a genre then the subgenres bring important distinctions. Yes, I know some searching around some databases and a few hours reading can answer my question, but that's a project I'll have to put off for now.

Hollywood Cinematography syllabus

2010-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

The semester is starting up soon, which means getting syllabi in order. I am teaching a new class this Spring, an Advance Film History class focusing on Hollywood cinematography. I've uploaded my draft syllabus of the readings and films. If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears.

The Unsuspected

2010-01-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Here we see Warners taking a page from Fox's true-crime pseudoducmentary book for a credit sequence:

In general, if I had to pick one film that exemplified the trends of the late 1940s, I could do worse than The Unsuspected (WB-Curtiz Productions, Michael Curtiz).

In house independent production. The 1940s was a period in which tax structures encouraged independent production, often with stars or directors producing their own films and releasing them through a parent studio. The Unsuspected is both a Warners film and not. It was produced by Curtiz, a WB director and relied heavily on the studio's talent. Consequently it looks and feels like a Warners film, yet it departs in its imitation of Fox and others.

Noir and gothic narrative. The Unsuspected borrows liberally from Laura, with a literary radio host and a haunting portrait. It also suggests other noir sources, like Nightmare Alley. It takes the noir hallmark of pushing the enigma of the narration to its stretching point in the opening scene, in which all of the major characters and scenarios are introduced, yet without the clarifying exposition that situates them for the spectator.

At the same time, there is a strain of the women's gothic: the cavernous house, the young woman in distress, and windows that suddenly fly open. Oh, and there's the Laura-esque portrait:

The portrait is of Matilda (Caufield), a young heiress who lived in the family house with her beloved uncle Victor/Grandi (Raines) and her cousin Althea (Totter). It is not giving too much away to say that Matilda returns from the dead - the narrative here departs from Laura by turning into a gothic story focused on the danger to Matilda.

Noir Style. Most obviously, this opening scene partakes of noir style and iconography - it feels to me like Warners is doing RKO drag...

This includes the subjective camera. The film is not an extended experiment in subjective narration, like Lady in the Lake or Dark Passage, but clearly Notorious has had its influence in the scene in which Matilda gets drugged.

A-Film Stylistic Flourish. The Unsuspected is not pure noir, though, not even pure A-film noir. Curtiz's style here is only part Mildred Pierce - the rest of the time it is the elaborate, fluid style common to the decade's prestige product. Roving, emphatic camera and complex blocking abound. And lots of mirror shots with confusing spatial implications.

Deep-focus spatial articulation. Patrick Keating has argued that tenets of classical cinematography became default because of their functionality. Watching some of the late 40s films, I am inclined to think that deep-focus and deep-space arrangement became a new default, only one not always keyed to functional ends. It feels to me as faddish as the use of zoom in 1960s cinema.

Realist location shooting. The interiors are done in studio, but the film breaks out for exterior scenes shot in New York and its environs. The cinematography is contrasty and fast, reminiscent of Fox's pseudodocs.

Coded sexual perversion. Missing here is Laura's gay subtext (at least I don't see one), but like Laura the film paints its heterosexual pairings as pathological. Matilda is too attached to her uncle, who in turn seems to fester with a desire he can not consciously allow. But even the "proper" match, Matilda and Steve, is odd, a pairing based on chance and duplicity.

Amnesia. There are a crop of 40s films depicting amnesia. Instead of a shell-shocked soldier, here it is Matilda who cannot remember the crucial accident. But Steve too seems without a past, a soldier who may have been in love with a murdered woman, but did not know her well. With so much backstory that is minimally explained, The Unsuspected seems paradoxically unconcerned with the past.

Critique of the Public Sphere. The film borrows the device of the radio broadcast from Laura, but here the emphasis is different. Where the former played up the effete literary quality of Waldo, Victor represents the mass public in its middlebrow-ness. Here the film is more in line with the representations of radio in Letter to Three Wives and other 40s films which implied cinema's medium superiority.

Come to think of it: Some people ask me what I am looking for when watching these 1947 films. The above list is as good as any of my preoccupations.

The Influence Fallacy

2009-12-15T17:40:00.000-08:00

There is a tendency in some cultural criticism – it's rife in rock music criticism – to claim that some art work or artist is important because it or she/he influences a later art work or artist. Almost invariably, the latter is a consecrated, acknowledged “great.”

Just recently I saw on TCM one of those remembrance pieces on Sidney Poitier, claiming that his importance is the influence he had on future black actors. The piece gave the influence argument a “pioneer” spin: Poitier, in its version, allowed Denzel Washington to happen.

I'm left scratching my head, not because Poitier does not offer performances worthy of imitating or because I think contemporary actors do not think themselves in debt to Poitier. But because if I entertain the counterfactual I can see a few possible avenues of historical causation:

1) Without Poitier, American cinema stays suspended in the race-representational regimes of the 1940s and in the labor practices of the studio years. A Denzel Washington or Danny Glover gets no employment in decent roles.
2) Without Poitier, American cinema develops more or less the same. Another actor, maybe as talented, maybe not, is cast in the same role of the “model Negro with dignity” to correspond to discursive and representational demands. This of course would be the hardcore Marxian-materialist explanation.
3) Without Poitier, American cinema does change, but with a time lag. That is, it continues to refuse (or not even imagine) dignified, rounded roles to African-Americans and thereby gets swept up in broader social change in a much more revolutionary fashion than it even experienced in fact.
4) Without Poitier, American cinema could have found another, less politically compromised figure to experiment in well-rounded, positive characterization. Or at the very least might not have been so invested in one star. Multiple stars may have opened up representational possibilities, with their own future consequences.

Numbers 1 and 4 are possible but do not strike me as very likely. My gut tells me 2 and 3 are about even in their chance, though there is no way of knowing. The point is that the influence argument is fallacious because, among other things, it reads causation backward.

Beyond causation, what of the aesthetic value we assign to influence? Again, I'm a little baffled. If Godard draws inspiration from Sam Fuller and Monogram pictures, without these he'd presumably have found other material to be inspired by.

Michael Baxandall, in Patterns of Intention, sets out another critique of influence arguments; they get the vector of influence reversed: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters, the second is always the more lively reality” (59). In Baxandall's example, Picasso's work forever reinterprets what Cezanne's meant. One could easily substitute in Godard and Monogram Pictures.

The influence fallacy is more common in popular criticism than academic film studies, but it abounds here too. I have already mentioned examples in Jon Lewis's textbook. Often, I suspect, we adopt the influence fallacy when we want to seem relevant, to make that obscure older film seem vital to the contemporary culture our students claim in defiance of academic taste and bygone historical periods.

Conference Calendar

2009-12-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

In order to better keep up with relevant conferences myself, I have set up a Google calendar. A listing from it is embedded in the right sidebar. If anyone finds this of use, it is a public calendar, so feel free to add it to your own calendars.