Thought for the day

L’imitation n’est jamais un reflet (passif) de la chose imitée, mais la construction d’un modèle de cette chose. (Paul Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction ?, Paris, 1999, p. 92)

Comment is free.

How We Advertised America (1920)

If you like to think that media, in the US, frame audiences’ view of reality, I have the reading just for you. George Creel, How We Advertised America, published in 1920, tells the efforts of the Committee on Public Information, created by President Wilson in 1917, and discontinued in 1919 by order of Congress. Creel was in charge of all the efforts of the Committee, and was he an active busybody for a while ! His responsibility was to organise the effort of the US government to communicate efficiently about its war effort, and to win hearts and minds, both at home and abroad among allies and enemies. (I’ll let you decide if it’s a sign of a healthy democracy or not to have a book about such a subject published so quickly after the facts — and then again, no need to read in the past our own problems is there?)

Back then embedding correspondents was not an option (rather, official tours of the front were the norm, or faked reconstitutions of battles). What Creel attempted was to bring the government news to the newspapers of the world — without it being government propaganda. It’s quite a trick to pull and it doesn’t quite work out, at least in his book. (I’m yet to check on how some of the newspapers covered his activities back then).

• On the one hand, he is adamant that no censorship was ever established, but that he communicated the facts, and only the facts. This is his defense of the Division of News in his Committee: 

 ”On the part of the press there was the fear, and a very natural one, that the new order of things meant “press-agenting” on a huge scale. This fear could not be argued away, but had to be met by actual demonstration of its groundlessness. Our job, therefore, was to present the facts without the slightest trace of color or bias, either in the selection of news or the manner in which it was presented. Thus, in practice, the Division of News set forth in exactly the same colorless style the remarkable success of the Browning guns, on the one hand, and on the other the existence of bad health conditions in three or four of the cantonments. In time the correspondents realized that we were running a government news bureau, not a press agency, and their support became cordial and sincere.” p. 73

“colorless style”: enough here to give fodder to those who see how Hollywood’s famed transparent style as masked ideology…(1)

• but on the other hand, he is equally clear about the role of the Committee: to win the support of the American (and later, the world’s) population for the war, including a fascist-like call for the fusion of the individual with the State:

“What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business, and every task a common task for a single purpose.” p.5

The interesting point, for me, is how he reconciles the obvious contradictions between truth and government message. He is aware of the contradiction, since he himself points out that such committee could only exist in war-time,

since “peace is far from simple, and has as many objectives as there are parties and political aims and prejudices. No matter how honest its intent or pure its purpose, a Committee on Public Information operating in peace-times would be caught inevitably in the net of controversy, affording the highly improper spectacle of a government organization using public moneys to advance the contentions of one side or the other.” p. 401-2

But he’s not too concerned with it either. Concurrent with a time when news was faked, when documentaries pretended to show the real thing (an example of that is given in this note on Homer Croy) but did not, truth and the ideological opinion I have of truth tends to be the same thing for him.

 We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts. p. 5

But later, this educational and “informative” emphasis gives way to something more sinister:

it was not only that the committee put motion pictures into foreign countries. Just as important was the work of keeping certain motion pictures out of these countries. As a matter of bitter fact, much of the misconception about America before the war was due to American motion pictures portraying the lives and exploits of New York’s gun-men, Western bandits, and wild days of the old frontier, all of which were accepted in many parts of the world as representative of American life. What we wanted to get into foreign countries were pictures that presented the wholesome life of America, giving fair ideas of our people and our institutions. What we wanted to keep out of world circulation were the “thrillers,” that gave entirely fallse impressions of American life and morals. Film dramas portraying the exploits of “Gyp the Blood” or “jesse James” wee bound to prejudice our fight for the good opinion of neutral nations. p. 281

Creel wants to have it both ways. He wants to show America in a good light (and he is proud of his success, pointing that “From being the most misunderstood nation, America became the most popular. A world that was either inimical, contemptuous, or indifferent was changed into a world of friends and well-wishers” p. 11), and he wants the world to believe that this is the truth about America.

In other words, this is another hit taken by the already much-maligned notion of authenticity. He’s not blind to ideology, he just plainly states that his is the authentic version. 

 

(1) That would be…basically everybody today ? It probably all started taking shape with NARBONI Jean, and COMOLLI Jean-Louis: “Cinema/ideology/criticism.” in John Ellis éd., éd.: Screen Reader. Londres, SEFT, 1977, pp. 5-8.

Chang: a drama of the wilderness (1927

Dir.: Schoedsack and Cooper titles by achmed abdullah over a still image of jungle vegetation

The Natives “who have never seen a moving picture” (even though they are very good actors, as will be shortly seen) Wild beasts “who have never had to fear a modern rifle” (even though Kru and the other villagers will use nothing but rifles to do their hunting) “before man trod the earth – then, as now, there stretched across vast spaces of farther Asia a great green threatening mass of vegetation…the Jungle…”

hokum all…(even though the rifles really are not modern, and even if this is really the first — and last — film these actors ever played in)

The beginning is about…the beginning of civilisation itself: the battle between civilisation and the jungle. Rather than a “historical” introduction, it serves to build plot rather than background. Immediately after the film shows the life of the Kru family: daily life, details of farming, husking the grain. But the difference with a Flaherty is clear: Flaherty lets each gesture go to its natural limit, taking the time it needs (the tatoo ceremony in Moana), while here all gestures are as much as possible made to fit into some suspenseful narrative (the attack of the leopard, or the planting of the rice which is right away tuned into the suspense of rain and survival). Similarly, the “night” scene (obviously shot in the day) plants the family retiring to its fort-like house (retiring the ladder, closing a gate on top), and then lets loose all kinds of dramatic encounters (tiger and buffalo, leopard and goat). In the editing, it’s enough to let you agree with Bazin that reality in cinema is better translated in the long take…(whereas the editing carries meaning, plot meaning or philosophical or political or…).

The transformation into narrative and drama is astonishing: even the flight from the elephants and the subsequent leopards is staged, the family faking the panic, the flight of the monkey edited to make it look like it catches up with the family who waits for it at some point, the father faking his near-fall in the trap, and so on. It’s more than subtitles telling a story: the editing is strongly fictional.

And even when, as opposed to Flaherty, the lifestyle may not be reconstructed. Those villagers have guns and those do seem to be their houses–though this should be checked of course.Flaherty re-creates a reality long gone, but lets actions flow morre or less naturally (though drama is there too), so that he gives us a bit of nostalgic reality. Schoedsack and Cooper take a bit of current reality and turn it into a drama, to the point where even the elephants seem to obey them (or when the villagers transform what was their village into a huge elephant trap, one has the feeling to be watching the rehearsal for a Griffith battle — feeling also of desolation: what price for those spectacular images ? the entire village ? Why did villagers submit to this extensive safari ? Why did they agree to be turned into extras ? Apparently they got help from local missionaries into selecting the actors for the film — Kru for instance played the lead role, his wife in the film was some one else’s wife).

On the one hand, reconstituted fiction turned documentary; on the other, actual reality channeled into fiction. Even if that “reality” is strongly focused on the hunting. The plot is at times nonsensical: the village destroyed, do they repair it ? No, they build an elephant trap and go capturing part of a herd.

Everyday reality, undramatic, is abandonned rather quickly indeed. But then, also unlike Flaherty, Schoedsack and Cooper are upfront about it: they wanted to make a fiction, planned it as such. Flaherty disguises his staging as documentary truth. Is it a realistic fiction, then ?

SMITHER Roger (1993)

SMITHER Roger: “‘A wonderful idea of the fighting’: the question of fakes in ‘The Battle of the Somme’.”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 13, 1993: 149-168.

Etudie en détail l’authenticité des séquences du film Battle of the Somme (1916). 

3 critères pour l’authenticité: 

 - le film est conforme à ce qu’annonce les intertitres (intertitres en gros conformes aux exigences de la guerre, notamment pas bcp de détails pour éviter de donner des renseignements militaires), 

 - le film repose sur une solide base documentaire (les dope sheets renseignent sur certaines séquences, la biographie de Malins n’est pas en revanche une base très solide), 

- enfin le film est conforme à la vérité historique.  (p. 154)

Au passage, note que le film BBC The Great War (1964) qui a remis au goût du jour les séquences tournées pendant la 1ère guerre mondiale n’a pas hésité devant les manipulations d’images. Mon exemple préféré:

“film was reversed to ensure that on the whole the Allies advance left-to-right across the screen and the Central Powers right-to-left as on maps of the western front, even if this resulted in whole regiments of left-handed soldiers” (p. 153)

Conclue que Malins et les autres caméramen du newsreel ont surtout cherché à améliorer leurs images, en demandant aux soldats d’accomplir certains gestes, en faisant rejouer d’autres scènes de combat en sécurité, etc.  Le nombre de séquences jugées inauthentiques reste faible – et ce ne sont pas forcément (sauf la séquence de sortie des tranchées) les plus dramatiques ou les plus intéressantes du film.

HAGGITH Toby (2002)

HAGGITH Toby: “Reconstructing the Musical Arrangement for “The Battle of the Somme” (1916).” Film History. 14, no. 1, 2002: 11-24.

Toby Haggith a reconstitué l’accompagnement suggéré par J. Morton Hutcheson (colonne “Music in the Cinema” publiée à l’époque dans la revue The Bioscope), en tentant d’identifier et de retrouver toutes les partitions (pas toujours facile: certaines ont disparu, d’autres survivent mais dans d’autres arrangements…). Hutcheson recommande pas moins de 33 morceaux différents, et choisit surtout des morceaux que le public pourra reconnaître (seuls 9 morceaux du 19è siècle).

Comparaison avec d’autres arrangements, modernes (notamment du pianiste Andrew Youdell qui avait enregistré la musique du DVD du film en 1993): plus de musiques différentes dans la version de Hutcheson, plus de marches militaires, un message portant sur la nécessité du sacrifice plus clair, mais aussi des passages tout autant élégiaques, ou émouvants, notamment sur les images des morts. 

Rôle de la musique pas négligeable: aide le message de propagande (la nécessité, la noblesse du sacrifice consenti gaiement), et aide la structure du film (en renforçant la narration: la musique permet d’éviter notamment un sentiment de répétition entre Part 1 et Part 5).

REEVES Nicholas (1997)

REEVES Nicholas: “Cinema, spectatorship and propaganda: ‘Battle of the Somme’ (1916) and its contemporary audience.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 17, No. 1, 1997: 5-28.

Etudie la réception du documentaire-newsreel “Battle of the Somme” en Angleterre au cours de la 2ème moitié de 1916. Note que c’est le réalisme qui impressionne, surtout les images des corps des morts en conclusion. Il est possible que ce film ait trop montré les horreurs de la guerre pour le goût de la propagande officiel (les films suivants sur les batailles de la guerre montreront moins les corps). Néanmoins, il est probable que, même si l’impact émotionnel du film fut fort, le sens fut récupéré par la considération que la guerre était juste (anti-Prusse etc.)

Pordenone diary – day seven

More music in silent film stuff.

Count me in as one of those that wasn’t overtly impressed by Michael Nyman’s playing for either Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice or Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda. A propos de Nice, a naughty, irreverent and poetic piece, I had seen last year already, with, per force, a different accompaniment. I can’t say the four or five musical themes that Nyman brought to the film and kept on repeating time after time after time did much for me. On some dreamy plane they did fit the film, but I suspect it’s because of the inherent nostalgic feeling most black and white silent films create in viewers. The repetition of lush musical themes will nicely contribute to the same feeling. But there was something utterly mechanistic about Nyman’s accompaniment, where one musical theme was tightly identified with one theme in the film (music for workers; music for people strolling; etc.). And to read, the next day, in the local newspaper, an interview where the maestro explained how what he wanted to do, with his music, was to surprise the listener…that’s too much for me to bear.

But then, I don’t have much feeling for celebrities. I like the old Hollywood adage: 

you’re as good as your last film.

which Stroheim used as a sign of Hollywood’s utter philistinism (Stroheim enjoyed being lionized for his past achievements in Europe). I only wish it would apply to more professions…

Now day 7 for me: nothing about Shiryaev here. Couldn’t get past the social context, of a rich Russian enjoying life filming himself and his family in little summer playlets while Cossacks and poverty went raging through the land, and therefore I still fail to see the significance of all this

(but, as Urbanora said, “we’ll all be wiser” by the end of the festival…)

So I went to see the 1916 British newsreel/documentary film The Battle of the Somme. There was an introduction to this by the restoration team from the Victoria and Albert War Museum, with the keynote address being, for me, from pianist (and composer) Stephen Horne (the only pianist playing at Pordenone to have a groupies’ website on Facebook ?). How to restore the original score for the film ? 

Indeed the film had premiered with the 1916 score at Pordenone in 2006, and the restoration DVD will feature both that score and a new score by Laura Rossi (her goal: to find music that fits the mood of the soldiers shown on film). But the film, while very moving, was also essentially a propaganda piece at the time, and the music was supposed to reflect the upbeat, optimistic mind frame that military authorities were trying to project on what was a very bloody battle. To me the interesting point was how to gauge audience reaction by the music: did musicians in 1916 all play the upbeat music provided by the British Bioscope ? New Yorkers seem to have reacted to the devastation portrayed in the film with horror…would they have accepted a gay march to accompany the film ? Definitely more research in the reception of this film (or more reading!) is required.

Next: our last Pordenone day: Fields, Marion Davies, and Griffith, ever the visionary, starts the last film he ever made with a strong Obama endorsement.

News flash ! Trotsky was an extra at Vitagraph circa 1910

Yes, you’ve read it right. Leon Trotsky. The one and only.

That’s what we learn thanks to Vitagraph founder, Hollywood veteran, and Motion Picture Magazine founder J. Stuart Blackton, in an article he wrote on his magazine’s 14th birthday (Feb. 1925). Blackton is reminiscing about the differences between cinema in 1910 and cinema in 1925. Ah, the good old days before the star system when all hands were on deck to help out:

Except for Cos [Maurice Costello], every actor, cameraman and director hammered sets, ran errands, rummaged the neighborhood for props, and generally took the place of the
 machinists, carpenters, architects, designers, interior decorators, animal trainers and efficiency experts we have today. Anybody who wasn’t needed as a lead in a picture cheerfully played as extra. Perhaps, on the whole, this is the greatest difference between then and now ! I have stills in my desk showing Earle Williams, Norma, Constance and Anita [Talmadge] as a part of the mob. There was one silent, foreign chap who often worked in mob scenes for two dollars a day, who is now the ruler over fifty-million people. His name was Leon Trotsky.
 

Nothing is too good for Hollywood lore.

Houdini invents Television !

From Terror Island (James Cruze, 1920). Houdini plays a treasure hunter who perfects a submarine to salvage treasures from boats sunk by German subs during World War I. Two inventions stand out: one is a side-door to the sub that allows for quickly coming in and out of the sub. The other is dubbed “an electric periscope”, and Houdini demonstrates its use in this sequence:

     

Sure it’s not radio but it’s already the promise of the most ubiquitous window (actually a window fixed to a window!) to the world ever (this ad from 1932 makes that point most emphatically).

In terms of bringing reality to the spectator it could hardly perform any better: the young lad shown on periscope walking towards the audience to deliver a paper really delivers the paper

- and the point is ?

- That they’re making a redundant point…

- (under his breath) and so are you

- (pretending not to have heard)…about the new media’s ability to represent reality: it represents reality to the nth level. It shows reality as it unfolds. It shows it as something real, actual, happening. And one has to suppose that the same thinking informs their approach to cinema’s ability to represent reality.

- Though you could also argue that the opposite is true: they need to project their fantasies of representational authenticity on a new medium yet to be invented, since cinema with all its tricks and shortcuts and literary baggage is coming way short.

A pause.

- Yes, I guess you could.

 

Film Cartoon – news – 1924, or 2004 ?

From realist painter / cartoonist William Gropper, in Motion Picture Magazine, Feb. 1924, a little “edukational news” reel:

 

Film cartoon – more hokum !

One of the obsessions of film criticism in the 1920s was about film hookum. Motion Picture Magazine offers a good illustration of that: in the Feb. 1921 issue, G. Kauffman had already provided cartoon treatment to 4 “hokey” situations. Eldon Kelley is put to the task of illustrating yet another “hoke” story, by Frederick Van Vranken, in the July 1923 issue (“The Film Drama Versus Life”). 

Here are the six illustrations drawn by Kelley for the article (my favorites are #1 — because I’ve actually not seen it that often in silent films — and #5):

     

Film cartoons – ideas for censors, 1923

This from Leo Kober, 1923: “If I were Will Hays”….

Film cartoons – The Old Hokum Bucket

Today we relax with Motion Picture Magazine, February 1921, and four hokey situations that felt already old in 1921 (drawings by G. Francis Kauffman):

the transformation of the melodramatic hero

The Troy o’ Hearts: a motion-picture melodrama, Joseph Louis Vance, 1914

Take this description:

He was a young man and had been personable.
Just now his face was crimson with congested blood
and streaked with sweat and grime; his lips were
cracked and swollen, his eyes haggard, his hands
bleeding. (. 31)

Note to Hollywood, c. 1914: how do you fit this into an entertaining, attractive formula ? It’s going to take some penetration of realistic styles before this purple-prose battering of the hero can find its equivalent on the not-so-forgiving film image. (It’s easy to uglyfy your hero by words; but on the screen?) And indeed, notice how the face is anything but “crimson”, “haggard” and the like:

How long before serials would show “crimson” for what it is ?

The Red Ace, which began its run in February 1917, represents a milestone of sorts: it is the first serial, as far as I know, that began showing profuse amounts of blood during fight scenes. All previous serials were bloodless (although one does not notice the absence when watching them). The blood greatly intensified the graphic violence critics of sensational melodrama found so objectionable. (Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, p. 217)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silent movies in the classroom – teaching History

Another link that comes through The Bioscope: Motion pictures in history teaching; a study of the Chronicles of America photoplays, as an aid in seventh grade instruction (1929)

Thank you Bioscope !

Silent movies in the classroom — teaching English

Found a fascinating little journal article this morning, written by an English teacher based in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923. It’s the result from a little test to see whether movies could help teach children about English literature, better than books. (CUNNINGHAM Adelaide: “Teaching English with the Movies.” English Journal. vol. 12, no. 7, sept. 1923: 488-490. You need a JSTOR subscription to access it).

Incidentally, this English teacher in 1923 has no qualms about using the word “movie”, though she seems to prefer “moving pictures” and she uses “movies” in between quotation marks the first time around:

The promise of a “movie” stimulated the class like an electric current. The idea that a school book was actually suitable material for a movie gave it a charm never before associated with the textbook, which had ever been the symbol of “all work and no play.” A movie! They would study Silas Marner in order to understand and enjoy the movie.

Now, results are indeed encouraging, not just as regards interest and attention of students (some things never change), but also plot retention, moral lesson, and – my favorite – documentary value:

The effect of the movie upon the pupils was expressed also by a theme written November 1 upon the subject “The Pleasure and Profit I Derived from the Silas Marner Movie.” To quote from several of the themes: “It is a pleasure to be able to sit down and see the people who lived in the seventeenth century pictured before me. Their quaint dresses and customs are interesting. I think that if a person reads a book and then goes to see the picture of that book, he will understand the book better. The events in Silas Marner were made clearer in my mind by seeing the picture. It showed plainly the different characters and helped correct any wrong ideas I had about their appearances.

Miss Cunningham may have been a rather enlightened individual (though movies, even fictional movies, were often thought in relation to their educational value in the 1920s):

it seems to those of us who teach English that our pupils should in a great measure guide and determine our methods of teaching. It is useless to condemn moving pictures; we may as well condemn all novels because “dime novels” are pernicious. Why not bring the movies into the schoolroom ? The future appears bright for the educational moving picture. The schools of New York City are using it in the teaching of English, history, and science.

Still, she does seem unaware that images also lie. One can wonder at the “truthfulness” of the last example she gives:

A film is being staged in the “Sleepy Hollow Region” featuring the comedian, Will Rogers, as Ichabod Crane.

One can also wonder about the unrecognized paradox of an art form that is described in the same breath as close to “dime novels” and as having educational value — or Will Rogers as historian. (the film mentionned by miss Cunningham appears to be the 1922 version of The Headless Horseman)

Before science-fiction – advertising

In 1843 Willliam Henson had prints made showing his invention, the Aeriel, a steam-engine flying machine, fly high above London, India, Egypt. The prints were circulated among newspapers and were quite a sensation. And indeed, there’s only one problem: the Aeriel was never more than a prototype that never quite made it to completion (steam-engine seemed to have been a poor choice for airplanes).

So the images ? Fake news, or science-fiction ? Either way, they rely on realistic conventions to be taken at face value:
Observe all the details here not only concerning the Aeriel and the launching pad, but also details of India, and efforts to inscribe the Aeriel in an acceptable image of “everyday life in India” (plants, birds, the elephants of course, but also people reclining on the ground, doing nothing).

(more on William Henson here and here)

What’s a silent film, film forgers ?

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Film forgery has a couple of examples of silent films forged in mockumentaries around the years. I’d be especially intrigued by Forgotten Silver (1995) as I haven’t seen it yet; but judging from the screen grabs that Bordwell has made available, the pastiche references (Cecil B. De Mille’s 1916 Joan of Arc for one) seem pretty obvious.

Forgery was so prevalent in silent Hollywood films that I’m surprised it is not mentioned in Bordwell’s post at all: from faked WW 1 battle shots presented as authentic to safaris that never quite took place, not to mention the countless times that the trade press reports an “authentic” background, or a “historically correct” background, opr a raging debate about how “authentic” a background is in a film — when what you really you get is a beautiful fantasy land of “Hungary” or “Europe” as Hollywood sees it –forgery was a constant. I’ve given a few examples of faked news on a previous web site of mine, cinebuds which I’ve stopped maintaining for some time. I’m sure one could find plenty of other examples.

And all this forgery was never an issue — not until, that is, the Ingagi scandal in 1931: a faked African documentary made of shots lifted from other documentaries and faked jungle scenes, and forbidden by the MPPDA in 1931

not because of the insinuations of relations between the African women and gorillas, but because Congo Pictures had represented the film as authentic when in fact it wasn’t. (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2007)

So far, Ingagi is the only and earliest example I’ve found of a film forbidden on the ground of its being “unauthentic” and of not being what it purports to be (on that ground wouldn’t most Hollywood films of the 1920s have to be forbidden ?). I’d love to get more examples. So far, and given the absolute lack of precedence, I don’t really understand why Ingagi was such a big deal…

Hollywood, fighting to make a difference between reality and fiction

From The New Yorker : fact : content

“I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality.” [says 24 TV show screenwriter]
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call” was.

I agree people can, but I’m not sure Hollywood can.

a dreary world

From The Show Off (1926)
Youth, and Louise Brooks’ hard glaze, give this close-up its power.

Historical film or melodrama ?

Not sure we’d see the difference today. But Epes Winthrop Sargent certainly did back in 1914:

His best work [Charles Kiener of the Kalem company] has been some historicals on the early California days, but he has also done some excellent melodramas
(Moving Picture World, July 11, 1914)

Morality, technology, Truth

Bright Lights Film Journal | Bleeding Realism Dry (1)

That the first such film, Roberta Findlay’s X-rated Snuff
(1976), spliced a phony verité murder scene into an unrelated Argentine crime film and promoted it as real only proved realism’s hypocritical machinations. In Snuff, the cinema’s unsteady truth is reproduced by cues of realism audiences had already been conditioned to expect: the wobbly handheld camera whose dismissal of the tripod and exaggerated bounces are absurdly equated with the realism of “natural,” motile vision, and a seamless, mise en scene presentation of blood unaided and unobscured by guileful montage. Because we laugh at the transparent suture of Mary Queen of Scots’s beheading, we should be shocked when the death gesture is accomplished without the benefit of a montage-based system which unconsciously deludes us but of which we in our wiser moments are suspicious — the formal technology shocks, not the violence in itself.
(emphasis added)

Exactly what i had in mind here. One should not confuse morality with pixellisation.

Nordisk Film

World Record Nordisk Film Centenary
I was intrigued, in this article from the magazine of the Danish Film Institute called Film (latest issue available here), to read about the material that made Nordisk (and its producer Olsen) famous in the 1907-1920’s: if it had an exotic setting, if it dealt in something exotic, a bear hunt in Russia, a lion hunt somewhere in Copenhaguen-recreated Sahara, or a love story

in the desert-like dunes of Råbjerg Mile on the tip of Jutland

(and how about 3 films with the same star and title released 3 consequent years with similar story lines: Gunnar Tolnaes as the Maharaja in Oriental Love), then it was popular throughout Europe. Even Dreyer started by writing some of that mysterious-lady-mysterious-poison stuff. Hollywood was of course doing the same thing then, and for the same reasons. The taste for oriental hokum was widespread, not least in Europe.

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Virtually true, or maybe not

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Virtually true, or maybe not

We can probably expect to see more extensions of fictional worlds to the webworld. Are Hannibal Lecter podcasts next?

I’d argue that each new advance in visual technology gives rise to confusions about the nature of what’s shown — as in the claim of cinema’s intense realism and the reality of obviously faked news footage during WW1.

I’ve argued here that this media convergence is nothing new. It was going on in the 1920s just as it is going on today, and with the same cross-referencing where the limits of what’s real and what’s fake are blurred to the point of moral ambiguity (see the execution of Saddam where pixels were treated as morality). And it was going on in the Renaissance also.

Film of the Year: 1924: The Great Swashbuckler

Film of the Year: 1924: The Great Swashbuckler

Camera and editing tricks are well used to power the Arabian Nights-inspired magic items. But, some of the creature effects (especially the beasts our hero tackles along the way) appear less-than-believable and I wonder how these looked to the film’s contemporary audiences. The New York Times review lends a clue, “[the Princess] beholds the daring Thief on his white-winged horse, loping along with the chest he has found at the bottom of the sea. To us this sight of Fairbanks on his steed is one of the finest bits of satire in this beautiful screen effort. It was merely a white horse decorated with wings…when it appeared before the audience the theater was filled with laughter.” (“Fairbanks and Fantasy,” New York Times, 23 March 1924, X5). Based on that I’d say the fake-looking bits looked as unreal to audiences back then as they do to us today. However, we enjoy this picture because it submerges us into a realm of fantasy, not reality, and there’s nothing real about magic ropes of Ispahah, cloaks of invisibility or flying carpets either, and yet they’re all fun to watch.

Because they’re real, and appear for what they are, real ropes, the ropes are magic. By drawing attention to the artifice the magic becomes alive. The magic then as now looked unreal, as true magic should.

curse of the videophone

There’s neat little video piece on Slate today on how the videophone is going to take us to see all about “real” life.
But that’s highly misguided. About Saddam’s hanging, the comment is that the videophone can come

to upend neat little narratives

Beware of realism and realistic devices. Just like there’s nothing inherently realistic about cinema, there’s nothing inherently realistic about the videophone. It doesn’t show you reality, it still shows you narrative. Most of the examples given in that video are examples of video-narratives: people staging stunts, or a violent police arrest shot from behind a counter so you can guess more than you can see — which is not saying, of course, that the slaps, the happy kissing, the tazing, the abuse at Saddam’s hanging, or Kennedy’s assassination did not happen (denying their reality will get you nowhere). But they may not have meant what the images are telling us they mean. The images, whether they’re cinema or now videophone images, are either mum about their own interpretation (Kennedy in Dallas), or they offer an interpretation that’s highly debatable (narratives). With or without videophone-images, truth is still elusive (probably because truth is always constructed as part of a narrative linking causes and consequences together).

the useless gal and the atheist

The Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A trip inside the body of important scientist who needs brain clout removed. With Raquelle Welch what do you expect but…

still the ol’ confusion

About the online petitions to have her [Ms. Fanning] arrested, she said that the district attorney’s office in Wilmington was busy prosecuting real sex crimes, like one in which a 10-year-old girl was impregnated by her father. “All these cases are reported in the newspaper, and nobody ever calls them about that,” she said. “But they get 10 to 20 calls a day from people insisting that my movie be prosecuted.”

That’s in the NYT article on a rape scene involving a 12-year old in an independent film at Sundance –