My research

Ah, my research.As the man used to say:

“work is not a bird. Where you leave it, that’s where you’ll find it again.”

So, my research.It’s part reception studies, part history of representations, but it’s always film studies. I intend to reconstruct Hollywood aesthetics in the 1920s.

And, yes, you’ve guessed it. The usual reaction to this statement is: “and you chose that topic?”

More precisely, I want to look at silent Hollywood’s dealings with the real world.

Jerry: “And we want to know this because …”

With cinema, it’s either/or. Either fantasy, or realistic. Either entertainment, or statement. My contention is that Hollywood is not a fresh tomato — it’s more of a Moroccan dafina. I realize the reference may be obscure to some, but bear with me.Hollywood is hodge-podge, collage, pele-mele mix of conflicting values, conflicting projects, and marinated aesthetic projections from at least the 18th century, from painting, literature, high- and low-brow, theater, vaudeville, circus, and so on.Yes, David Bordwell, this research would like to be historical poetics:

This leads me to the third common proclivity that strikes me in the Cinema Journal essays [Bordwell's talking about Cinema Journal, “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn” (Cinema Journal 44, 1 [Fall 2004], 94–143)]. Like business history, the history of film as art is almost completely ignored in the symposium. No historian studying form, technique, or genre contributed an essay. Indeed, throughout the collection, there’s a persistent assumption that the only type of history worthy of the name is social or cultural, in both the first and last instance. Even Ross, who claims that “deconstructing” film “texts” taught him how to look at images, mentions social stereotypes (e.g., African-American drug dealers) as examples of how cinematic imagery must be taken into account (130). An accurate observation, no doubt, but not exactly the height of film analysis either.The odd thing is that in disciplines that study other media, it’s perfectly normal to pose formal and stylistic questions. Musicologists give us histories of tonality and sonata form. Historians of art and architecture trace the development of styles across periods. Historians of theatre explore plot conventions and traditions of staging and costuming. There are histories of Japanese verse forms, of Egyptian funerary sculpture, of African maskmaking. The study of an artform’s forms and styles occupies whole departments on some university campuses. Scholars in these disciplines conduct archival research (an important litmus test, according to many contributors to the symposium) and number among themselves many celebrated humanists: Riegl, Panofsky, and Gombrich in art history, Maynard Solomon and Leonard Meyer in musicology, Leo Spitzer and René Wellek in literary history. Yet in her survey of “history proper” (95) Higashi nowhere mentions such enterprises; she presumes that the only real history is socio-political history. Similarly, and with brief exceptions, her contributors ignore the possibility of writing the history of cinema as an artform. It’s as if film could never be studied as a historical artistic practice.(Film and the Historical Return)

I’d like to look at the history of the practice of realism in Hollywood cinema in the 1920s: where does it come from ? How does it function within the films and in the discourse about films in the 1920s ? What role does it play in audiences’ reactions to cinema ?

This is what my daily schedule should look like:

• start the day with a review of the latest posts, mostly from alt.movies.silent and from the invaluable Bioscope, with an occasional sprinkling of the crowd roars, film of the year, and davidbordwell.net
• write my own. The reason for this is that ideas generated at night-time (the last ten minutes before drifting to sleep are surprisingly prolific, wouldn’t you say?) need to be processed the morning after (sorry for the analogy here).
• afternoons: read / view (and analyze: shot by shot, metrics, and so on… cinemetrics-style) films. Late afternoons may see me back at the writing desk.