Transcript Slide 1

ENGL 6310/7310
Popular Culture
Studies
Fall 2011
PH 300
M 240-540
Dr. David Lavery
10/24/11
Popular Culture Studies
Popular Culture Studies
Martin Scorsese, 1976
Film culture is a
complicated matter.
Watch on the Film History Blog
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Athanasius Kircher, Etienne Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge
Thomas Edison, August and Louis Lumiere, Georges Melies
Popular Culture Studies
Movie Archaeology
Camera Obscuras
Marey’s
Cinematographique
Gun
Phenakistoscope, Mutoscope, Zogroscope
Zoetrope
A Magic Lantern
Popular Culture Studies
Movie Archaeology
Eadweard Muybridge
Movie Archaeology
Popular Culture Studies
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves
art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie.
It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the
cinema people learn what they might have been
and discover what belongs to them apart from
their single lives.
John Berger, British art historian
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our
consciousness in the way film does, and goes
directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark
rooms of our souls.
Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Genre films essentially ask the audience, "Do
you still want to believe this?" Popularity is the
audience answering, "Yes." Change in genre
occurs when the audience says, "That's too
infantile a form of what we believe. Show us
something more complicated." And genres turn
to self-parody to say, "Well, at least if we make
fun of it for being infantile, it will show how far
we've come." Films and television have in this
way speeded up cultural history.
Leo Braudy, American film scholar
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Whatever his level of critical awareness, a viewer sitting in the dark alone and
suddenly face to face with the screen is completely at the mercy of the
filmmaker, who may do violence to him at any moment and through any means.
Should the viewer be forced beyond the pain threshold, his defense mechanisms
may well be called forth and he may remind himself that "it's only a movie" . . .
but it will always be too late . . . the harm will already have been done; intense
discomfort, and perhaps even terror, will already have crept across the threshold.
(125-25)
Noel Burch, French film theorist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
How do movies reproduce the world magically? Not by
literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to
view it unseen. This is not a wish for power over creation (as
Pygmalion's was), but a wish not to need power, not to have
to bear its burdens. It is, in this sense, the reverse of the myth
of Faust. And the wish for invisibility is old enough. Gods have
profited from it, and Plato tells it at the end of the Republic as
the Myth of the Ring of Gyges. In viewing films, the sense of
invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It
as though the world's projection explains our forms of
unknownness and our inability to know. The explanation is not
so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are
displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a
distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it
makes displacement appear as our natural condition.
Stanley Cavell, American critic
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s
another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the
world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain
point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed,
the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where
we are. The twentieth century is on film. . . . You
have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us
more important than the fact that we’re constantly
on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Don DeLillo, American novelist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
It is not perhaps entirely chance that the
invention of motion photography, this
sudden great leap in our powers of exploring
and imitating the outward of perception,
coincided so exactly with the journey into
inner space initiated by Freud and his
compeers. The year 1895 saw not only the
very first film but also the publication of
Studies in Hysteria, that is, the birth of
psychoanalysis.
John Fowles, British novelist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The cinema studio creates a looking-glass universe where, without bottles
labeled "Drink me" or cakes labeled "Eat me" or keys to impossible gardens,
creatures are elongated or telescoped, movements accelerated or slowed up, in a
fashion suggesting that the world is made of India rubber or collapsible tin. The
ghost of the future glimmers through the immediate scene, the present dissolves
into the past.
Babette Deutsch, American poet and critic
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is
something between art and life. Unlike painting and
literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it,
and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and
painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema
doesn’t.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
"Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end,’
harrumphed French film maker Georges Franju . . ."
"Certainly," replied Jean-Luc Godard. "But not necessarily in
that order."
Jean-Luc Godard, French film director and theorist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Pictures are for entertainment,
messages should be delivered by Western
Union.
Sincerity's the main thing, and once
you learn to fake that everything else is
easy.
Sam Goldwyn, American film producer
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
You should look straight at a film; that’s the
only way to see one. Film is not the art of
scholars but of illiterates.
We are surrounded by worn-out images, and
we deserve new ones. Perhaps I seek certain
utopian things, space for human honor and
respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets
that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes. Very
few people seek these images today which
correspond to the time we live, pictures that
can make you understand yourself, your
position today, our status of civilization. I am
one of the ones who try to find those images.
Werner Herzog, German film director
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
All television ever did was shrink the
demand for ordinary movies. The demand
for extraordinary movies increased. If any
one thing is wrong with the movie industry
today, it is the unrelenting effort to
astonish.
Clive James, British critic
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The cinema, like the detective story, makes
it possible to experience without danger all
the excitement, passion and desirousness
which must be repressed in a humanitarian
ordering of life.
Carl Jung, Swiss archetypal psychologist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,"
which I saw on an Italian movie
poster, are perhaps the briefest
statement imaginable of the basic
appeal of movies. This appeal is what
attracts us, and ultimately what
makes us despair when we begin to
understand how seldom movies are
more than this.
Pauline Kael, American film critic
The Movies
Popular Culture Studies
Of course [the cinema is] a marvelous
toy. But I cannot bear it, because perhaps
I am too "optical" by nature. I am an Eyeman. But the cinema disturbs one's
vision. The speed of the movements and
the rapid change of images forces men to
look continually from one to another.
Sight does not flood one's consciousness.
The cinema involves putting the eye into
uniform, where before it was naked. . . .
Real life is only a reflection of the dreams
of poets. The strings of the lines of
modern poets are endless strips of
celluloid.
Franz Kafka, Austrian writer
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Roger Munier
Up to that time [of the first movie images] one said: the
smoke is rising into the blue, the leaves are trembling; or the
painting suggests such movements. In the cinema, however, the
smoke itself is rising, the leaf really trembles: it declares itself as
a leaf trembling in the wind. It is like a leaf that one encounters
in nature and at the same time it is much more, from the
moment when, in addition to being real, it is also, indeed
primarily, a represented reality. If it were only a real leaf, it
would wait for my observation in order to achieve significance.
Because it is represented, divided in two by the image, it is
already signified, offered in itself as a leaf trembling in the wind.
(90-91)
We try with our pathetic film syntax, with our editing and
camera placement, to organize discourse or at least a view of
the world. . . . it is always the world which has the last word.
Forever opaque, it outlives the transparence of human speech.
We have created machines and tools which no longer serve us
but which serve a world that now commands us. (89)
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
 A world complete without me which is present to me is the
world of my immortality. This is the importance of film--and a
danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either
because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I
left unfinished business (Hamlet). So there is reason for me to
want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its
coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without
me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the
world is coherent without me. That is essential to what I want
of immortality: nature's survival of me. It will mean that the
present judgment upon me is not yet the last. (160)
Roger Munier, French film theorist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The cinema is substantially and naturally poetic. . . . it is
dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a
cinema sequence and a sequence of memory or of a
dream and not only that but things in themselves are
profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a
human face photographed is poetic because physicity is
poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is
full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it
is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a
sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree?
God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us
in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore,
the cinema by directly reproducing objects physically . . .
is substantially poetic. This is one aspect of the problem,
let's say pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic.
Pier Paolo Pasolini,, Italian poet and filmmaker
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
In the evenings I usually watch television or go to
the movies. Week-ends I often spend on the Gulf
Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has
permanent lettering on the front of the marquee
reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is
I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable
moments in their lives: the time one climbed the
Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a
lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a
sweet and natural relationship, as they say in book. I
too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much
to remember. What I remember is the time John
Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was
falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the
time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway
in The Third Man.
Walker Percy, American novelist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Once regarded as a puerile, cowardly escape from life because they
begot and simulated dreaming, the movies are now recognizable as an
extension of the supreme power inherent in a universe of energy,
chance, evolution, explosiveness, and creativity. In such a youthful,
exuberant universe the movies' kind of dreaming gives concrete
probability and direction to the ongoing drive of energy, and as a
consequence what at one time was thought to be a vitiating defect is
now their greatest virtue. The new freedom they reflect and extend is
freedom within the world, contingent and not absolute, a heightened
vision of existence through concrete form beyond abstraction. In a
world of light and a light world—unanalyzable, uninterpretable,
without substance or essence, meaning or direction—being and nonbeing magically breed existence. Out of the darkness and chaos of the
theater beams a light; out of nothingness is generated brilliant form,
existence suspended somewhere between the extremes of total
darkness and total light. Performing its rhythmic dance to energy's
tune, the movie of the imagination proves, should there be any doubt,
that cinema, an art of light, contributes more than any other art today
to fleshing out the possibilities for good within an imaginative universe.
W. R. Robinson, American literary and film scholar
Reflections on
the Movies
Popular Culture Studies
Thomas Schatz's life history of a genre (from Hollywood
Genres) :
an experimental stage, during which its
conventions are isolated and established, a classic
stage, in which the conventions reach their
“equilibrium” and are mutually understood by
artist and audience, an age of refinement, during
which certain formal and stylistic details embellish
the form, and finally a baroque (or “mannerist,” or
“self-reflexive”) stage, when the form and its
establishments are accented to the point where
they “themselves become the “substance” or
“content” of the work. (37-38)
Thomas Schatz, American film scholar
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
In good films, there is always a directness that
entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
Susan Sontag, American critic, theorist, and
novelist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
You will see that this little clicking contraption with the
revolving handle will make a revolution in our life in the life
of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary
art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen
and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be
necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is
coming. But I rather like it. The swift change of scene, this
blending of emotion and experience it is much better than
the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are
accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, change and
transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the
soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery
of motion. And that is greatness.
Leo Tolstoi, Russian novelist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
People sometimes say that the way
things happen in the movies is
unreal, but actually it’s the way
things happen to you in life that’s
unreal. The movies make emotions
look so strong and real, whereas
when things really do happen to you,
it’s like watching television—you
don’t feel anything.
Andy Warhol, American pop artist,
painter, and filmmaker
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The camera . . . is more than a recording apparatus, it is a
means whereby messages from another world come to us, a
world not ours, leading us to the heart of the great secret.
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being
exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three
dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the
decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained
incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical
progress has passed them by.
The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden
of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to
be the audience and to select from what happens during the
day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala
night. His job is to preside over accidents.
Orson Welles, American film director
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
A modern film is to an old one as a
present-day motor car is to one built 25
years ago. The impression it makes is just
as ridiculous and clumsy and the way
film-making has improved is comparable
to the sort of technical improvement we
see in cars. It is not to be compared with
the improvement—if it’s right to call it
that—of an artistic style. It must be
much the same with modern dance
music too. A jazz dance, like a film, must
be something that can be improved.
What distinguishes all these
developments from the formation of a
style is that spirit plays no part in them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
What novels could tell, movies can show. Walls
drop away before the advancing camera. No
character need disappear by going off stage. The
face of the heroine and the kiss of lovers are
magnified for close inspection. The primal
situation of excited and terrified looking, that of
the child trying to see what happens at night, is
recreated in the theater; the related wish to see
everything is more nearly granted by the movies
than by the stage. The movie audience is moreover
insured against reaction or reproof from those
whom they watch because the actors are
incapable of seeing them. The onlooker becomes
invisible.
Wolfenstein and Leites, American psychologists
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
[The world of the movies is filled with]
material ghosts. The images on the screen
carry in them something of the world itself,
something material, and yet something
transposed, transformed into another
world. . . . Hence both the peculiar
closeness to reality and the no less
peculiar suspension from reality, the
juncture of world and otherworldliness
distinctive of the film image.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films
and Their Medium
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
A strange thing has happened—while all the other
arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been
born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has
anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of
finding two bars of iron to play with, had found
scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones,
trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and
had begun with incredible energy, but without
knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump
upon them all at the same time.
Virginia Woolf, British novelist and critic
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by
forcing us to reply ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer
encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness. Driven
by the profit motive, the commercial entertainer dares not risk alienating us by
attempoting new language even if he were capable of it. He seeks only to gratify
preconditioned needs for formula stimulus. He offers nothing we haven’t already
conceived, nothing we don’t already expect. Art explains; entertainment exploits.
Art is freedom from the conditions of memory; entertainment is conditional on a
present that is conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art
gives us what don’t know we want. To confront a work of art is to confront
oneself--but aspects of oneself previously unrecognized.
Gene Youngblood, American underground film theorist
Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Jacques Perrin, Jacques
Cluzard, Michel Debats,
2001
Science or art?
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Alfred Hitchcock,
1954
The movies encourage
voyeurism.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Billy Wilder, 1944 & 1950
Movies, too, have pointsof-view.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Orson Welles, 1941
A single movie can change
the medium’s history.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
John Boorman, 1987
Movies can be
autobiographically and
historically illuminating.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Robert Altman, 1971
The movies can enable us
to relive the past.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Steven Spielberg,
1998
The movies can enable us
to relive the past.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
John Mckenzie, 1980
Movies have brought back the art of
physionomy.
Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in
which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of
meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing
the distaste of the spectators. In this silent
monologue, the solitary human soul can find a
tongue more candid and uninhibited that in any
spoken soliloquy, for its speaks instinctively,
subconsciously. The language of the face [its
"physiognomy"] cannot be suppressed or controlled.
--Béla Balázs, Hungarian filmmaker and theorist
Popular Culture Studies
Watch on the Film History Blog
The Movies
Quentin Tarantino, 2004
Movies can be intertextually
illuminating.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Stanley Kubrick, 1968
The movies can take giant
leaps.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Federico Fellini, 1973
The movies can give us a
lift.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Stephen Norrington,
1998
The essence of the movies
is action.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Peter Jackson, 2005
The essence of the movies
is action.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
The Wachowski
Brothers, 1999
The essence of the movies
is action.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Paul Thomas
Anderson, 1997
The movie oner (or long
take) enthralls.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Roman Polanski, 1974
The movies don’t always
have happy endings.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Ang Lee, 2003
Movie magic may be a
redundant expression.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Christopher Nolan,
2010
Movie magic may be a
redundant expression.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Peter Jackson, 2001,
2002, 2003
Movie magic may be a
redundant expression.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Robert Zemeckis,
1994
Movie adaptation is not
necessarily faithful.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Armando Iannucci,
2009
The movies can be profane x 10.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Robert Rodriguez &
Frank Miller, 2005
Movies can be made
almost entirely with a
computer.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Kerry Conran, 2004
Movies can be made
almost entirely with a
computer.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
Movies excel at parody.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies
Mel Brooks, 1987
Movies excel at parody.
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The Movies
Sam Raimi, 2002
Movies enhance our notion
of the heroic.
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The Movies
Quentin Tarantino, 1994
Movies can help us make
important food choices.
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The Movies
Stanley Donen, 1952
Movies can give us pure joy.
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Popular Culture Studies
The Movies