{"id":8032,"date":"2010-05-05T18:36:42","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T23:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=8032"},"modified":"2019-06-29T05:46:41","modified_gmt":"2019-06-29T10:46:41","slug":"a-hundred-years-plus-a-few-thousand-more-in-a-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2010\/05\/05\/a-hundred-years-plus-a-few-thousand-more-in-a-day\/","title":{"rendered":"A hundred years, plus a few thousand more, in a day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Charlie Keil, Yuri Tsivian, Henry Jenkins, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. Photo by Joel Ninmann.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last Saturday we held the symposium \u201cMovies, Media, and Methods\u201d<\/a> in honor of Kristin\u2019s arrival at age sixty. Four distinguished scholars, all professors from major universities, presented top-flight talks. As a bonus, Kristin gave The Film People a glimpse into her Egyptological work. I report on this very full day in the hope of giving a sense of how stimulating we found it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanhouser<\/a> was an American film company that flourished between 1909 and 1917. It has been overshadowed by Biograph because that firm put out more films and, not incidentally, employed D. W. Griffith. But Ned Thanhouser has been diligently gathering his family company’s output from archives around the world and releasing it in informative DVD editions<\/a>. The most famous Thanhouser production is probably Cry of the Children<\/em> (1912), a powerful attack on child labor. You could also try the thriller The Woman in White<\/em> (1917), adapted from Wilkie Collins\u2019 masterful novel. A study in sadism, and more subtle than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.<\/em><\/p>\n

Charlie Keil<\/strong>, an expert in 1910s US film from the University of Toronto, examined Thanhouser\u2019s films with two questions in mind. Did the studio have a \u201cdistinctive personality\u201d in its products? And does its output reflect the development of film style across the crucial transitional years of the early 1910s? Borrowing a method that Kristin had applied to Vitagraph films in an essay, Charlie took one film from 1911, one from 1912, and one from 1913. Charlie wasn\u2019t ready to conclude that these specimens displayed a unique studio style, but it was clear that across just three years, big changes in storytelling were taking place.<\/p>\n

The plot of Get Rich Quick<\/em> (1911) involves a man who joins a business that is scamming innocent investors. The film uses only five locales and plays scenes in long takes. The Little Girl Next Door<\/em> (1912) has a more complex plot, with two distinct lines of action that converge on a child\u2019s drowning. It uses many more locales and an ellipsis of a year to trace the changes in a family\u2019s fortunes. It also incorporates cut-in close views and point-of-view editing. The Elusive Diamond<\/em> (1913) is less psychology-driven than The Little Girl Next Door<\/em>, but its intrigue relies almost completely on dialogue titles and it includes many close-ups and variation of camera setups.<\/p>\n

Three films and three years: A vivid cross-section of the rapid development of what soon became classical visual storytelling. Moving from 18 shots to 53 shots to 74 shots, the films became less dependent on staging and more dependent on editing. At the same time, Charlie didn\u2019t fail to notice how the long takes in Get Rich Quick<\/em> allow some felicities of performance, particularly the way that the wife\u2019s handling of her apron charts her psychological states. She brushes it aside to show how poor they are, then she uses it as a giant hankie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Like all good papers, Charlie\u2019s left a lot to be discussed. People asked about how much pre-planning was done at Thanhouser, about the directors and screenwriters on staff, about the division of labor. We were left with a sense that here was another mostly unknown region that would reward further study.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fernand L\u00e9ger, Cubist Charlot <\/em>(1923).<\/p>\n

Yuri Tsivian<\/strong> of the University of Chicago carried us into the twenties with an in-depth examination of early Russian reactions to Charlie Chaplin. The paper held many surprises. Chaplin was popular in many countries from 1915 onward, and very soon after he was celebrated by European intellectuals. But Russia lagged behind; there\u2019s no concrete evidence that any Chaplin films were shown there until 1922. Yet the Soviet avant-garde embraced him. How and why?<\/p>\n

Instead of looking for a dual relationship\u2014Chaplin directly influencing Russian artists\u2014Yuri postulated a \u201ctriangular\u201d relationship, in which Chaplin\u2019s image was mediated through other European sources. For instance, L\u00e9ger\u2019s numerous images of a fragmented Chaplin led Futurists and Constructivists to declare Charlie \u201cone of us.\u201d They loved the idea of man as a machine executing precisely articulated movement, and what they heard of Chaplin\u2019s pantomime and gags led them to praise him. Chaplin, said Lev Kuleshov, is \u201cour first teacher\u201d because he knows bio-mechanical premises better than anyone. According to the photographer and graphic designer Rodchenko Chaplin instructs viewers in how to walk or put on a hat in the most perfect manner.<\/p>\n

So strong was this \u201cvirtual\u201d image that artists could read Chaplin into the slapstick comedians they did see. Yuri showed that Varvara Stepanova\u2019s striking rendition of Chaplin as an airplane propeller derived from a film he wasn\u2019t in!<\/p>\n

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Perhaps she didn\u2019t care: Nikolai Foregger suggested that Chaplin himself was unimportant, that the crucial fact was that he created a whole school of comedians within what Yuri called \u201ca collaborative research community\u201d\u2014that is, Hollywood!<\/p>\n

Yuri\u2019s paper, in homage to the Russian Formalists, invoked the \u201claw of fortuity\u201d in art. This refers to the possibility that artistic borrowings, blendings, and crossovers are not determined by any broader social processes, as the Marxists were arguing, but are merely contingent. \u201cLife interferes with art from below.\u201d Accidents and unforeseen intersections, such as the Chaplin craze meeting the Constructivist movement, allow artists to seize on whatever is around them for new material. Yuri\u2019s reference was to Kristin\u2019s revival of Formalist methods in her \u201cneoformalist\u201d studies of Eisenstein, Tati, and other filmmakers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Janet Staiger<\/strong> of the University of Texas at Austin collaborated with us on The Classical Hollywood Cinema<\/em>, and she has for several years been the leading scholar of reception studies in film and television. In looking at the Indiana Jones series, her paper nodded to Kristin\u2019s work on the Lord of the Rings<\/em> franchise and her study of fans\u2019 responses to the films.<\/p>\n

\u201cNuking the fridge,\u201d Janet explained, has become fan jargon for an outrageous plot twist. The phrase comes from a notorious moment in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull<\/em> (2008), in which Professor Jones escapes an atomic blast by diving into a lead-lined refrigerator. The moment becomes a crux for clashing fan judgments: This is totally unrealistic<\/em> vs. Realism doesn\u2019t matter<\/em>. Janet went on to show how these and other fan responses, entwined in IMDB commentary threads, utilized several different interpretive frames.<\/p>\n

One was authorship. Like academics and journalists, fan are auteurists. They assign the director responsibility for major aspects of the film. But this doesn\u2019t mean that they agree in how to use this frame. In the case of Crystal Skull<\/em>, a certain Kid Mogul asked if Spielberg\u2019s willingness to reinvigorate the franchise was purely mercenary: \u201cIs it just about the money?\u201d Others took a more career-survey approach, noting that after prestige pictures like Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> Spielberg recalibrated his popcorn movies, particularly by handling violence more gingerly.<\/p>\n

Another frame was story-based \u201clit talk.\u201d Fans disparaging the film found it clumsily plotted and lacking in character development. Several were quite sensitive to narrative coherence, one-off gags (such as nuking the fridge), and pacing. Those defending the film appealed to the emotional burst of the final chase scenes.<\/p>\n

Janet\u2019s third frame of reference was what she called \u201cformula dissonance.\u201d She sought to capture what seeing the film would be like for those who knew Indy\u2019s story only through the TV series or video versions of the earlier installments in the franchise. She suggested that the formula was by 2008 quite abstracted and idealized for many fans. Their sense of the franchise was thus tested by the extraterrestrial twist that resolved the Crystal Skull<\/em> plot. Does it reframe the whole series in a cosmic context, or is it a violation of the premises of the Indy universe?<\/p>\n

Janet\u2019s survey of these types of responses made me notice that the assumptions of academic film studies and of journalistic criticism overlap with fan conversation. Fans who liked the film tried to make everything fit by appeal to organic unity, technical proficiency, emotional intensity, and other familiar criteria. It made me suspect yet another reason why \u201camateur\u201d and \u201cprofessional\u201d film criticism seem to be merging: Perhaps their conceptual frames of reference aren\u2019t so far apart. But their tastes and their degrees of commitment surely are.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You might have expected Henry Jenkins<\/strong> of the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California to talk about fans too. After all, he practically invented the modern study of media fandom with his book Textual Poachers<\/em>, and his work influenced Kristin\u2019s study of fan promotion of The Lord of the Rings<\/em>. Instead he turned to a survey of an artist\u2019s oeuvre. He showed how Kim Deitch\u2019s vast output of stories appropriate imagery from nineteenth and twentieth century mass media and present highly personal versions of the history of popular culture.<\/p>\n

In a way, though, Henry\u2019s talk involved fandom because Deitch is himself a prototypical fanman. He\u2019s an obsessive collector, likely to turn his search for a rare toy or drawing into a Byzantine odyssey on the page. Fascinated by Hollywood scandal, he has constructed a phantasmagoric history of mass media through fictional characters (e.g., fake movie stars) who confront real people (e.g., Fatty Arbuckle). He\u2019s particularly concerned about what he takes to be the warping of animated film by the influences of the mass market, epitomized by the Disney empire. The emblematic moment in Boulevard of Broken Dreams<\/em> comes when Deitch’s Winsor McKay stand-in addresses torpid animators at a tribute dinner and denounces them for selling out.<\/p>\n

Deitch\u2019s most famous character is Waldo the cat, and Henry traced the powerful connotations of this emblematic figure. Waldo recalls Felix, the most heavily merchandised comics figure before Mickey, as well as the black cat as a figure of deception, witchcraft, and even African-American minstrelsy. Through Waldo, Deitch could hop across the history of film and comics, from McKay to Mighty Mouse and 1940s abstract films. In Alias the Cat!<\/em>, Deitch finds in the 1910s everything that we associate with media today: serial narrative, stories shifting across different media platforms, an uncertain line between publicity and self-expression, and a mixing of news and sensational fiction.<\/p>\n

Henry situated Deitch in a broader trend of comic artists trying to find a new history of their medium, one that dislodges superheroes from a central role. Deitch\u2019s themes of old-fashioned craftsmanship, lovably antiquated technology, adult dread and degeneracy lurking behind children\u2019s stories, and the commodity demands of comic art link him to contemporaries like Chris Ware and Art Spigelman.<\/p>\n

Henry\u2019s talk spurred a lot of discussion, including the question of whether we can treat an artist as offering a history that is comparable to academic research. Can Deitch\u2019s hallucinatory vision of American media be a plausible basis for understanding what really happened? On the whole we don\u2019t expect an artist to offer rigorous arguments. An artwork appropriates history for its own end. (Not all the Greek philosophers actually gathered together in the way Raphael depicts them in the School of Athens<\/em> painting.)\u00a0 How cogent you find Deitch\u2019s critique probably also depends on whether you share his disdain for Disney. His floppy-limbed denizens fuse headcomix grotesquerie with the 1930s animation that most prestige studios abandoned. As in Sally Cruikshank\u2019s sprightly cartoon Quasi at the Quackadero<\/a><\/em>, Deitch\u2019s rubbery frames revive a style in which everything seems to throb and shimmy.<\/p>\n

Kristin<\/strong>\u2019s talk, \u201cHow I Spend My Winter Vacations: The Amarna Statuary Project and Techniques of Visual Analysis,\u201d had two parts. In the second part, she reviewed her recent work in assembling statues out of tiny bits that had been dumped by archaeologists decades ago. You can read some of this story here<\/a>. The side of her work most intriguing to students of film, I think, involves her attraction to Egyptian art in the first place.<\/p>\n

Egyptian art is often thought of as unrealistic, but during his reign in the fourteenth century BCE the pharaoh Akhenaten introduced a peculiar sort of stylization into it. When he instituted a monotheistic religion centered on the sun god Ra (embodied in the Aten), he also demanded a new pictorial style. Thus the Aten is depicted as a disc shedding rays, a symbol of life and dominion. In addition, the royal family displays biggish hips and thighs, which fit the fecundity theme. More strikingly to our eye, Akhenaten\u2019s family were represented as somewhat distorted, with long and narrow faces, hands, and feet. The ruler\u2019s crown is elongated as well. Several aspects of the new style are present in Kristin\u2019s favorite scene, a beautiful relief carving known as the Berlin family stela.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can see the Aten\u2019s rays ending in little hands holding ankh signs to the royal couple’s noses. But just as important is the human dimension of the scene, and two sorts of action displayed there: swiveled shoulders and pointing hands.<\/p>\n

Unlike the flat, frontal portrayal we associate with Egyptian art, the family members are caught in twisting postures that bring one shoulder forward. Kristin explained:<\/p>\n

Akhenaten is lifting his daughter, his foreground arm moving backward to hold her legs, the other moving forward to support her body as he kisses her. She reaches with her rear arm to chuck him affectionately under the chin, while her other arm moves backward in a pointing gesture. On the opposite site, Nefertiti\u2019s foreground arm is held bent and backward to steady the youngest daughter of the three present, who is standing on her thigh and reaching up rather precariously to grab a golden decoration hanging from her mother\u2019s crown. Nefertiti\u2019s rear hand goes forward to steady the second daughter, who is also pointing, this time with her rear arm as she twists to look at her mother. These kinds of gestures can be found again and again in such scenes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The twisting movement wasn\u2019t unknown among images of workers and private individuals; Amarna artists, presumably encouraged by Akhenaten, applied the device to portraying the royal family.<\/p>\n

Just as significant are the pointing gestures we find in the stela. Some scholars have interpreted them as protective gestures, which are found in other images. But Kristin points out:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In those cases, the protecting figures hold their arms straight, they stare in the direction of the thing to be protected (as one presumably would in reciting a spell), and there is something dangerous present. None of this applies in the scene in the stela.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After pondering this scene quite a lot, it occurred to me that it looked like a really early film, a short scene, perhaps 30 seconds long, that we were to interpret as a tiny narrative. The pointing gestures seemed comparable to pantomime, where one has to interpret movements in the absence of intertitles.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given that so much Amarna art is about displaying the royal couple as having created life by giving birth to their daughters and as sustaining that life, it seems to me that this stela is full of indications of nurturing. The columns and roof indicate that the parents have their kids in a little shelter to keep them out of the hot sun. The rows of pots behind Akhenaten\u2019s stool are no doubt filled with cool drinks for them. Nefertiti carefully holds onto the two children on her lap while Akhenaten kisses the eldest. My interpretation is that the eldest is saying something like, why don\u2019t you kiss sister, too?\u201d and the one opposite is pointing out the kiss to her mother and saying something like, \u201cLook, daddy\u2019s kissing sister; I want a kiss too.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This may not sound like the sort of thing kids would say, but the circulation of affectionate gestures among the family members in these casual scenes is nearly universal. The chucking under the chin gesture used by Meretaten here shows up again and again, as do embraces and kisses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite all the stylization, then, Kristin concludes that the stela depicts a scene of intimate affection, complete with a child toying with a mother\u2019s ornament. This homely realism chimes with other realistic tendencies in Amarna art, such as the differentiation of right and left feet and the presentation of plants and animals in non-stereotyped ways. In sum, Kristin\u2019s ability to look closely at film style helped her make discoveries about visual narrative in a completely different domain.<\/p>\n

So our Saturday talks included cinema-related material from 1911 to about 2010, and with Kristin\u2019s lecture we flashed back about 3300 years. Every talk was crisp and lucid. We were spared the juggling of empty abstractions, the free-associative rambling, and the self-congratulatory cleverness that plague the humanities. We got knowledge and opinion presented with enthusiasm, modesty, and good humor.<\/p>\n

Kristin and I are grateful to our presenters, as well to all the friends old and new who showed up: Leslie Midkiff Debauche from Stevens Point, Carl Plantinga from Michigan, Peter Rist from Montreal, Brenda Benthien from Cleveland, Virginia Wright Wexman from Chicago, Vicente Jos\u00e9 Benet from Spain (via Chicago) and many others. In all, a day to remember.<\/p>\n

\n

For more information on Kristin\u2019s research see my earlier entry<\/a>. For other cinematic implications of the Berlin stela of Akhenaten\u2019s family , see Kristin\u2019s blog entry here<\/a>.\u00a0Her article, “Frontal Shoulders in Amarna Royal Reliefs:\u00a0 Solutions to an Aesthetic Problem,” is available in\u00a0The Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities<\/em> 27 (1997, published 2000).<\/p>\n

All of our speakers are represented on the Web: Henry here<\/a>, Charlie here<\/a>, Janet here<\/a>, and Yuri here<\/a> (and of course on Cinemetrics<\/a>). For more on Janet’s study of online critics and the frames they inherit, see her essay, “The Revenge of the Film Education Movement.”<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kim Deitch, Boulevard of Broken Dreams<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlie Keil, Yuri Tsivian, Henry Jenkins, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. Photo by Joel Ninmann. Last Saturday we held the symposium \u201cMovies, Media, and Methods\u201d in honor of Kristin\u2019s arrival at age sixty. Four distinguished scholars, all professors from major universities, presented top-flight talks. As a bonus, Kristin gave The Film People a glimpse into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268,8,47,154,116,10,7,1,84,12,14,5,58,59,51,57,34,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1910s-cinema","category-animation","category-comic-strips-and-cartoons","category-directors-chaplin","category-directors-spielberg","category-experimental-film","category-film-and-other-media","category-film-comments","category-film-genres","category-film-history","category-film-scholarship","category-film-technique","category-technique-editing","category-technique-staging","category-film-theory","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-people-we-like","category-silent-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8032"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42247,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions\/42247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}