Quantitative Snapshot

Harry Tuttle does the work of compiling a few sources of global statistics on cinema production and exhibition. Lots of fodder for thinking about national cinema and political economy both.

Compilation and Mashup Montage

Chuck Tryon has a noteworthy post up titled "A You-Tube Theory of Montage," assessing some of the art-world uses of YouTube for compilation films. His conclusions hinge on how the artists deploy (or don't deploy) YouTube's medium specificity, but I have a more basic, literal question: does You Tube employ a different type of montage?

After all, in my film analysis classes, I've been trying to articulate, specify, and even categorize the ways that edits convey intellectual relationships between images. And to begin with, the compilation (found footage) film often relies on intellectual connection of a second order: here, montage's meaning less likely states an intellectual relationship between images than an intellectual dimension to representation itself (or the implied author's position). Two examples from Report (Bruce Conner 67) illustrate the difference. In the first,



the word "wish" (in a whimsical sans-serif font connoting both children's cartoons and advertising) ironizes what follows. The exact message is hardly programmatic: the New Frontier might be an untenable fantasy sold to the American people as yet another consumer good; the public's charismatic attachment to politics might be what perished in 1963; or maybe the wish fulfillment lies in the retroactive construction of Camelot out of a particular figure of political power. Nonetheless, in some capacity, the edit presents Kennedy's administration as a wish.

Compare with the second example...



Any of these images might individually have thematic resonance with other parts of the film, but as a montage unit, they do not connect in a logical chain (the detective has no semantic bearing on explosions and battle). Instead, they signify "inundation of movies." Armed with some of the montage from the rest of the film, we can further read these three shots as suggesting that movies define American life as much as (or more than) its political reality, but that nonetheless popular culture reveals a secret key to the American psyche.

The second-order montage is even relatively restrained in Report, which stands out among Conner's oeuvre for the seriousness of its tone. The found footage film would play up the meta-level of signification more.

But what of YouTube? Possibly, second-order compilation montage has found a significant place on it. Another type of montage, though, seems prominent. Andy Borowitz's mashup of a Hillary Clinton Speech and a Tyra Banks Next Top Model flipout exemplifies it. The humor and frisson of the piece is a very particular belief/disbelief: the spectator knows the shots are disparate times/places cut together, yet the shots nonetheless synthesize into a new, seamless reality show. The same logic subtends the humor and power of the Shining trailer or the whole genre of fake and recut trailers. It's a different kind of belief/disbelief than Metz's two types of voyeurism - psychoanlaytic precepts might not be the best way to explain it. It, too, is a second order montage, saying as much about the disparity (and commonality) between official politics and reality television. It's both more audacious and less challenging than cinematic intellectual montage.

CFP: Revisiting Film Melodrama

REVISITING FILM MELODRAMA
Interdisciplinary and Transnational Aspects, Stylistic Issues, and Contemporary Extensions

27-30 November 2008
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Belgian Film Archive

Languages: Bilingual in French and English

Though addressed in Anglo-Saxon studies since the 1970s with diversified approaches ranging from auteurist perspectives, readings as a feminist sub-genre to diachronic studies, francophone research on the melodrama genre has been very fragmentary and predominantly thematic. The study of melodrama’s stylistic construction has not been taken up, several isolated initiatives notwithstanding. This situation to some extent reflects preconceived notions of the genre, but also the absence of a coherent definition.

Misunderstood, minimalized and dismissed since its cinema débuts, the term became pejoratively applied to a “melodramatic mode” that limited the genre to those films that manipulated the emotions of the public. There also is a problem with the multiple and sometimes contradictory usages of the word, resulting in a veritable semantic gulf. The first sense of the term connects elaborate spectacle and feeling, confrontations with moral issues and rhetorical figures of excess; later usage highlights the psychology of sacrifice and pathos. Confusion also stems from the fact that the term might refer both to the effects produced on the spectators and the means by which the effects are produced. While the sources of Classic Theatrical Melodrama are delimited and defined, those of film melodrama, by contrast, are diverse. Theoreticians attribute the origins variously to Greek tragedy, the sentimental bourgeois novel, Italian opera or Victorian theatrical melodrama.

Approaches to melodrama in current publishing, conferences and festivals are almost exclusively based on monographic studies and retrospectives. These privileged approaches are not conducive to developing new lines of research. Furthermore, when film melodrama itself is addressed, it is envisioned within very narrow limits, notably those set by emblematic directors in the genre. The goal of this international conference is to open the field to new historical perspectives, to revisit the most viable ones, and to calibrate those lines of theory with theories of cognition and emotion, philosophical investigations of suffering and pathos, the mythic dimensions of the genre, etc.

These new research lines should be conceived as systematically redefining the topoï of the genre, with special consideration of interdisciplinary dimensions in order to avoid clichés and stereotypes. While studies and research often have focused on literary and theatrical theories, those from opera, music, painting and other art forms have been neglected, despite their pertinence. Moreover, to move beyond the historical, that is, passéist, dimension, it will be necessary to relate melodrama to contemporary issues of the genre—television, dance, installations, multimedia work, etc.

Presentations will be 30 minutes long, including film clips, slides or other AV support. Proposals must be submitted before 1 May 2008 and will include a working title, an abstract of about 250 words, the writer’s title and institutional affiliation (with address, e-mail and telephone number), and a brief curriculum vitae (about 100 words). Proposals and questions should be submitted to abstract@melocoll.com.

Full call for papers and conference information available at the conference website.

NOTE: Deadline extended to May 30.

Whither Queer Cinema?

StinkyLulu has a running discussion on the state of independent queer cinema, and asks: "One: what's the most tedious trend in gay film? Two: what work does independent queer cinema have left to do? In short, what do you hate and what do you most yet hope to see?"

The first question is easiest for me to answer, at least with respect to the ideal-type gay indie flick: the simultaneous hyper moralist take on sexual libertinism, urban gay culture, body culture, and "the bar scene" with a shameless soft-core use of those very things to sell the film. My particular take on the genre aside, it's remarkable how this ideology is not all that different from Klute (which I just showed in intro) or, changing a few things, of classical Hollywood. To my eye, this is the best argument for a demand-side approach to ideological analysis.

Thinking more broadly, the Screen conference last summer saw a reinvigorated interrogation of queer cinema - what it meant, how to define the early 1990s moment, etc. I wasn't always in thrall with the answers provided: too much disdain of popular gay and lesbian genre production, universalizing what I see as particular sociologically-inflected taste and political preferences. But one interesting response: queer cinema is emerging most forcefully in a wide spectrum of European, Asian and other international contexts. The work of a new wave of scholarship, then, has grappled with gay liberation, queer politics and gay/lesbian visibility in national contexts beyond the Anglo-American axis that's dominated many discussions of gayness and gay cinema.

But writing as an only mildly cosmopolitan American gay man, with my own sociologically-inflected tastes and preferences, I'd say what I'd like to see is more credible syntheses of local color realism and romantic melodrama. To my eye, no gay representations have captured my imagination and identification since the British Queer as Folk.** Which is a long time to go ventriloquizing spectatorship.

**Brothers and Sisters comes close, Sex and the City is arguably not a gay representation, and the films I've seen have not delivered the generic pleasures and complexity that television has. Am I missing anything?

The Film History Survey

As one semester winds down, I'm getting ready my syllabus for a summer course, in this instance, a history of narrative film. It's tough of course to condense the history of all narrative film to 6 weeks. While every course requires some consideration of a disciplinary field, something about the history survey brings up the nature of the discipline most acutely. After all, the survey is predicated on selection and narrativization. I see at least a few principles at odds: canonical selection vs. counter-canons vs. the "typical"; cinema as a global enterprise vs. cinema as hegemonic enterprise; narrative as schematic vs. narrative as dispute; the emphasis on formal developments and movements vs. industrial and social factors explaining cinema's development; nationally-specific contextualization vs. wide sampling of national contexts. My answer, certainly one among many, has been to seek an 9imperfect) balance by giving some contour of an aesthetically defined canon while interrogating how the typical might be understood. In general, I tend to side wiith clear conceptual narratives that might be worth questioning on some levels of scholarly practice.

In that spirit, I've uploaded the draft of my syllabus for History of Narrative. Any suggestions or comments are welcome, especially now that I'm in the middle of nailing down a final syllabus for the course. The textbook I've chosen - and has been taught in the course here at Temple before - is Thompson and Bordwell's Film History. I hope to write more on film history textbooks soon.

PCMS: Elena Gorfinkel

May Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar

Elena Gorfinkel, Bryn Mawr College
"'Dated Sexuality:' Anna Biller’s VIVA (2006) and the Retrospective Life
of Sixties Sexploitation Cinema"

Friday, 9 May 2008
5:30-7:00pm

American sexploitation cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s has gained a second life in the past two decades through a boom in video and DVD distribution and re-release, and consequently a new, generationally distinct audience, who plumb the depths of the films for their political and aesthetic transgressions. This presentation proposes that what appeals to cult audiences in the present about the “impoverished” tableaus of sexploitation films, a genre that unfurls melodramatic male fantasies about women’s erotic agency in the 1960s, is precisely the shunted melancholia of obsolescence. This is an obsolescence that inheres not only in the strivings of the films’ politically retrograde plots, but also in their erotic content, in the material evidence of their mise-en-scène, and in the extra-textual residues of their embattled mode of production.

Sexploitation films maintain a hold on contemporary viewers precisely through the films’ constriction by history, by their seeming containment within their own historical moment and inability to transcend it - as if “time capsules” without a destination. An exemplar of the penchant for “dated sexuality,” filmmaker Anna Biller re-stages the pro-filmic universe of the sexploitation oeuvre in her film VIVA (2006). A Far from Heaven of sorts for the sexploitation cineaste, VIVA’s narrative of two women’s “entrance” into the sexual revolution and its meticulous reconstruction of the genre evokes both Radley Metzger’s lush soft-core films as well as the commodified landscape of the late 60s and early 70s, embodying itself as a time capsule constructed in retrospect. Biller’s vintage mise-en-scène exhibits a collector sensibility that indulges in a productive form of historical fetishism. In “the big lighting, the plethora of negligées, and the delirious assortment of Salvation Army ashtrays, lamps, fabrics, and bric-a-brac,” the film stages the archive of the 1960s and early 1970s as a diorama or an art installation, a space which Biller (as central character Barbi/Viva) enters and inhabits. VIVA, in its indulgence in the artifacts, shoddy conventions and “outdated” precepts of the genre, encourages a historiographic reconsideration of the sexploitation form, particularly in how it speaks to the spectatorial experiences of women, the “undesignated” audience of the genre, as well as to public memories of the sexual revolution. Professor Gorfinkel argues that Biller’s relay of her own spectatorship of the sexploitation genre represents a way of imagining female spectatorship as a form of cinephile wandering through the historical frame – and through a cathexis on the world of forgotten bodies and discarded objects, both material and cinematic.

Respondent: Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 420

Scholarly Humility

Quote of the day, this time from a Janet Staiger essay I stumbled upon:

Having studies film history for little more than five years, my first tendency, like so many youth in any field, is to presume that the older histories are wrong. Revisionist history has, I am usre, as much to do with the Oedipal complex as it has to do with changing ideological conditions which position those of us in more recent times to see facts in new ways. Of interest, to me is that the more I study US film history, the more I realize that the older histories are less wrong than I used to believe they were. ("Seeing Stars" in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Gledhill 1991)

Staiger articulates (articulated, since her words are approaching two decades in vintage) a sentiment I'm increasingly feeling. Of course if I felt I had nothing to contribute to film historical or theoretical knowledge, I'd just pack it all in and call it a day, but working on 1940s Hollywood, one also has to reckon with the fact that a lot of scholarship has been written on the period, much of it quite detailed and thorough. There is a value in reinventing the wheel - if new scholars and new students don't revisit the period, then the knowledge no longer is embodied, so to speak - but I also need to stake out new arguments while maintaining a good deal of humility in face of previous work.

PCMS: Suzanne Gauch on Tunisian Cinema

April Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar

Suzanne Gauch, Temple University
"Cultural Politics, Women’s Rights, and Recent Tunisian Film"

Friday, 25 April 2008
5:30-7:00pm

Often highlighting women’s issues, internationally-distributed Tunisian films contribute integrally to Tunisia’s cultural politics both at home and abroad. This talk explores the transnational discourses that enable many recent Tunisian films to promote the post-independence Tunisian government’s exemplary women’s rights record while simultaneously offering a critique of Tunisian society. It further focuses on two recent films,
VHS Kahloucha and Bedwin Hacker, that begin to move beyond entrenched cultural politics to broader criticisms of social, political, and economic policies while simultaneously addressing the lingering Orientalisms that make these same cultural politics possible—and necessary—in the international arena.

Respondent: Jessica Winegar, Temple University

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 420,

Gentleman's Agreement

As promised, I'll be posting more 1947 films I've seen before starting the project. Of those, none exemplify the qualities of postwar Hollywood I'm so interested in more than Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 20th Century-Fox). A social problem film par excellence, the film represents the directions of the postwar prestige film, particularly the house style of 20th-Fox. This style comprised two qualities.

First a pseudodocumentary impulse and its integration into the fictional narration. The opening shot starts off like many of the 47 films:


The camera pans left and tilts down, with a narrational emphasis, signalling that the story we are about to see is one of many going on in New York City (The Naked City will make this conceit explicity). The next shot fulfills the expectation with Phil Green (Gregory Peck) and son (Dean Stockwell) strolling in midtown.

This realist trope is but part of a continued sociological gaze of the narrative. 20th Fox's prestige films in general were set in a solidly white collar milieu. Gentleman's Agreement moreover makes its problem film about "country club" anti-Semitism, where literally about resorts...


... or more generally about the various haute bourgeois and white collar locales of prejudice. (Notably, Phil Green passes as Jewish as part of his investigative journalism.) My book-in-progress is exploring, among other things, the ways that the film signals locale in sociologically specific ways, from the parkside residence to the more modest apartment building befitting a newspaper writer.


The point, of course, is not that these are fully verisimilar, denotiig spaces as actually inhabited by their social types. (In general, Hollywood set design prefers flat surface, regardless of context). But the specificity does strike me a change from a generalized creation of "city," "rich," or "poor" in 30s set design.

Alongside the realist tropes, the camera style marks the prestige filmmaking. One good example is a shot during a party scene. Phil talks to vampish fashion editor Ann Detrie (Celeste Holme). Simple, yet complex, the take lasts 1m15sec and tracks three times left to reframe the characters as they take in the buffet. The staging is similar to a following shot in today's film/TV, but here the classical planning is controlled and evidenct. It's striking in its unobtrustiveness, since the tracking shot does not serve stylistic flourish or even emotional emphasis, but rather serves almost as a secondary marker to distinguish 20th's prestige filmmaking from lesser, more pedestrian stagings that Hollywood might normally do of this scene.


It's worth noting that the film was pretty much Fox's biggest success story of 47, bringing critical praise, Academy awards, and strong box office receipts on a decent but reasonable A budget of c. $2M. For reference, The Late George Apley, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Nightmare Alley all cost about that much.

Variety Reviews

Via the Boston Globe's Ty Burr, I came across a caustic Variety review of 88 Minutes. It's entertaining enough for those who like snark (I sometimes do), but for me it raised a larger question: when (and why) did trade press reviews start sounding like their counterparts in the popular press? At the very least, I've read a number of Variety reviews from the 40s and 50s and then there was a distinct sensibility for each. In short, the trade press made its judgments on a film quality with an eye to how it expected it to play to audiences. The reviews were a service to exhibitors planning their bookings and an indicator for Hollywood studios to assess the viable prospects of competing studios. A lot, of course, has changed then: saturated releases have made films and film exhibition more genuinely national, the studio system has dissolved in favor of producer and/or agent package projects, and, oddly enough, distibution is more oligopolized than it was under the studio years. The question I have is who the trade press now serves. Has its primary audience shrunk from the studio years to now?

Moreover, questions of this sort keep circling around my head as I try to deal with trade press reviews and popular press reviews in their social specificity. It's become a truism of reception study and historical method that reviews do not give transparent insight into any audience mentality. But if we can build their social genesis into the model, so to speak, that might help us read them better.

Dear Ruth

If Calcutta represents Paramount's more quotidian style reserved for action films, Dear Ruth (William D. Russell) represents the quintessential Paramount A picture: high production values, well-honed, theatrical-quality script, and generic appeal. In this case, the film is a satirical comedy, part of a strain of wisecracking comedies emerging from the 30s screwball comedy but shifting in its class milieu and referents. It might even be said to be a personal subgenre of writer Norman Krasna. To my eye, it's the best argument that what drove romantic comedy success in old Hollywood was not a particular gender role configuration (helpful that might be) but a means of nurturing and using a talent pool of writers riffing off one another. Rather than a culturalist account of the screwball comedy, I'd give an industrial account.

The conflict begins when an Air Force Lieutenant, Bill Seacroft (played by a dreamy eyed, ever-smiling William Holden) comes to woo the small-town girl Ruth (Joan Caulfield), who had written him letters overseas. Only Ruth did not write the letters; it was her political activist high-school sister Miriam. You can imagine where things take off from there.


I'm wondering if 1947 serves as a watershed year, the last time that World War II so dominated the American screen. I'll have to watch more late 40s/early 50s films to know for sure (Twelve O'Clock High, for instance comes 2 years later in 1949), but it's remarkable that the war is pretty much told in present tense here, much as it is in Voice of the Turtle.

The mammy figure of Dora (Marietta Canty) would be unremarkable, perhaps, were the narration not so blatant in marginalizing her. I am not the most naive viewer, but even I was shocked at the tracking shot that completely forgets about Dora's existence.



Of course, this is a tough heritage to face in studying/teaching classic Hollywood. The whiteness and marginalization/trivialization of African-American characters is omnipresent and egregious. I happen to think the films are still valuable to watch on a number of levels - as aesthetic experience, as historical index, and as model for what the medium can do. And there's a case to be made that in other areas the 1940s have political possibilities later shut down. (Miriam, for instance, represents a radical Eleanor Rooseveltian politics that are often glossed over by cultural memory of the period as homogenous.) That said, I can empathize with those who would prefer to spend their time with less offensive racial representations.

Calcutta

Part of the effect of an extended project seeing a lot of similar films is that the repetitions bear noting even at danger of retreading familiar ground. To that end, Calcutta (John Farrow, Paramount) is typical on a number of fronts. For starters, it represents a vein of Hollywood Orientalism that sometimes colored all aspects of narrative, music, and mise-en-scene but particularly marked subgenres of "exotic" locale. From the imdb plot summary:

Neale [Alan Ladd] and Pedro [William Bendix] fly cargo between Chungking and Calcutta. When their buddy Bill is murdered they investigate. Neale meets Bill's fiancée Virginia [Gail Russell] and becomes suspicious of a deeper plot while also falling for her charms.

Paramount seems to have specialized in this material: their 1943 Night Plane from Chungking was itself a remake of their Shanghai Express. I'll have more to say about this orientalism when I write up Universal's Singapore, but in some respects Calcutta muddles Eastern geography further, combining India, Burma, and China in some strange unspecified cultural imaginary that's both incidental (the main characters are white and American) and not (the noir sense of enigma draws metonymically from the "enigma" of the East).
.
The film, too, exemplifies a workhorse classicism, neither loose nor flourishing in its style. The blocking, for instance, anticipates character movement as a series of distinct compositions.


I have not done the research, but the style strikes me as a well-made B, an intermediary programmer (A or B), or at best low-A film. The narrative is not as fully developed, nor the production values as high as Paramount's more prestigious A pictures.

Finally, while like many noirs, the femme fatale is drawn in full unknowability, the lighting obsessively distinguishes a harsh, dark light on Ladd from a glowing bright light on Russell.


I find Ladd's star image fascinating. I think there's a real study to be done to explain its dimensions and appeal, historically. There's a case to be made that he marked a new style of American screen masculinity (hat tip to Marc Vernet for his observations along these lines - "Film Noir on the Edge of Doom"). And perhaps more than stars whose images seem immediate, something about Ladd's image resists semiology: what's most important in it is an apparent spectatorial desire for sadistic, suave patriarch.

What the... ?

I was flipping through the channels in those pre-primetime Sunday evening doledrums when I stumbled across a particularly shameless Food Network self-promotional puff piece, and who was the talking head extolling the network's power and reach but Toby Miller! I will say I'm happy that someone besides Robert Thompson is getting TV studies punditry gigs. And I'm normally not terribly judgmental about what academics do in their off time. But it felt a little weird to see a preeminent scholar lend gravitas to a marketing strategy already built on selling the channel's sociocultural importance. What do others think? Is there anything wrong with such appearances? What practices should scholars follow in punditing for the media, particularly in an age where pseudojournalistic forms and promotional programming change the equation? Is it our role even to ask or judge?

It's funny: film scholars and even humanities-based TV scholars have so rarely been consulted as pundits on any meaningful scale that the ethical issues of punditry seem novel. But given that I myself was quoted in a Philly Inquirer article recently means I should probably start thinking more about these things.

ADDENDUM: Jason Mittell offers his own experiences as TV studies pundit for NPR, reminding us of how soundbites get taken out of context.

For what it's worth, I was well aware that Miller's appearance was highly excerpted and recontextualized. It's the nonjournalistic context that raised my eyebrows - but that could be my fussy, pre-postmodern sensibility. But should I be forgiving of the narrativizing that professional journalism does?

Film of the Month Club

Yes, I know the last thing I need to be doing is starting another blog. But Girish's post on old and new cinephilia - and the comments to it - inspired me with the idea of an online movie forum: Film of the Month Club. Take a look at the introductory post, and drop me a line if you're interested in joining.

The Value of Mannheim

In preparing my lecture tomorrow on ideology, I've been dusting off, logically enough, Karl Mannheim. In the process I'm wondering why I have spent so many hours reading film and cultural studies arguments that act as if there's a simplistic false-consciousness Marxist model and a complex, nuanced, or what-have-you Althusserian model without ever once reckoning with Mannheim as an intermediary that, whatever you have to say about his work, is not simplistic. Clearly, many in the field are reading and have read Mannheim; it's not as if we're talking about an obscure figure.