National Tertiary Education Union
STRIKE & PICKET
Wednesday August 17
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GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: Film to Apps
Week 2: The Impact of Popular Cinema
– Look at screen culture around the first mass screens – early cinema – Think about film as (a part of) the public sphere
Looking at some contemporary film culture examples, we will think about:
– How does film culture today form a part of a public sphere?
– How does film culture look the same as it did in the past, and how does it
look different today?
Menti moment
https://www.menti.com/rnh6hwp7r2
If you like to watch movies, why do you like to watch movies?
Promotional poster for ’s film “Larroseur arose” (1895)
Early film in existing popular cultures
Yeh, -yu. 2015. “Translating Yingxi: Chinese film genealogy and early cinema in .” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9(1): 76-109.
“The cinema’s first audiences are interpreted as being unable to distinguish between the film image and reality. […]
While the fear and panic of the audience facing Lumiere’s locomotive is retold in the form of an anecdote, its status reaches much higher: reiterated over and over again, its figures as the founding myth of the medium, testifying to the power of film over its spectators”
(Loiperdinger 2004, 92).
Hugo (2012)
The origin story of cinema
“The wonder of early cinema wasn’t in stories or acting or montage [editing to make a narrative] it was just this; the mystery of suspended time, of captured motion. Just like train travel. . . . They were kindred spirits, both symbols of progress, both promising journeys to other places, both foreshortening distance and time in ways society had never imagined before.” and . Porter’s narrative breakthrough The Great Train
http://secretcinema1-accidentalbeauty.blogspot.com/2010/12/phantom-ride.html
• In fact, there were many “arrival of a train” films, even in the Lumiere brother’s own catalogue, so they could be considered something like a genre
The train films were also not just a “capture of reality,” that involved no acting or staging. Why?
Proto-documentary film
“The influential A Kiss In The Tunnel (1899). It consists of only three shots; train enters tunnel, man kisses woman in the dark compartment, train exits tunnel. It might not sound like much now but this was a major advance in editing and continuity leading the medium towards more sophisticated story-telling.”
On why The Kiss in the Tunnel matters http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/444230/index.html
The Sick Kitten (1901) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T33lNsnVFbI
Kisses in tunnels
From the British Film Institute:
“The Warwick Trading Company catalogue offered exhibitors just this middle shot – they were advised to splice it into train footage that they almost certainly would own from previous programmes (the version on Screenonline gives an example of how it would have been shown).”
The Smith film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vdb79xXMWg
The 1899 Bamforth Company remake, The Kiss in the Tunnel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwcnF9slyyc
Youtube comments on the BFI version of Smith’s film:
• “This was the 1899 equivalent of 50 shades of
• “Only a 1890s kid would understand.”
By 1912, A Kiss in the Tunnel was retrospectively included in debate over “sensationalism”
1912: British Board of Film Censors formed to advise local authorities on specific films (announced in the House of Commons November 1912; guidelines in operation from 1/1/1913), on “safety” and “morality”
[ billed as] Mrs. Basterds (2009)
Anxiety about the mass cinema audience
, The Moon is Blue (1953)
The audience, the crowd, and the “mass” audience The idea of the “impressionable” audience (cf Week 5)
Early 20th-century psychologists, sociologists, “educationalists”:
• Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, No. 128 (1926)
• , The Entertainment Film for Juvenile
Audiences (UNESCO, 1950)
What does “box office success” really tell us?
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• , “100 years ago, the first White House film screening sparked nationwide protests”. The
Conversation, 18/2/2015. Available at http://theconversation.com/100-years-ago- the-first-white-house-film- screening-sparked-nationwide-protests-37103
• , “‘A Public Menace’: How the fight to ban The Birth of a Nation shaped the nascent civil rights
movement”. Slate, 31/3/2015. Available at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2015/03/the_birth_of_a_n ation_how_the_fight_to_censor_d_w_griffith_s_film_shaped.html
• , “‘The Birth of a Nation’ at 100: ‘Important, Innovative and Despicable.’ Hollywood
Reporter, 7/2/2015. Available at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/birth-a-nation-at-100- 770620
“Tickets at ’s Liberty Theater, where it played for 44 weeks, topped off at an unheard-of $2.20 ($51.50 in today’s dollars). Throughout the silent era, the film was never far from a marquee.”
Do popular films reflect society? Or, do popular films influence society?
Broken Blossoms,
an exploitation film?
D.W. Griffith , Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)
Where does this film come from?
A different set of public debates to Birth of a Nation (1915)
Cultural context:
• World War I setting • “The Yellow Peril”
• Temperance (1920–) • Suffrage (1920–)
1917 NY Suffrage parade
“Eating machine” from ’s Modern Times (1936) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1apYo6- Ow
Assembly line
Eating machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1apYo6- Ow
Modern Times comments on / participates in public debates on:
Fordism and Taylorisation
• ’s assembly line
• Taylor’s time management
• Chaplin and the “House Committee on Un-
American Activities”
Article on Chaplin’s political problems:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/ 19/newsid_3102000/3102179.stm
What is “the public sphere” and what does it have to do with cinema?
The “public” – when we say something is “public” what do we mean?
The public “sphere”:
• JurgenHabermas,TheStructuralTransformationof
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
(1962/1989).
• “Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the
state in touch with the needs of society” (Habermas
1989, 31).
• The public sphere is neither “political authority” nor
strictly economic – e.g. literary salons, newspapers, coffee-houses.
In contrast to, The Frankfurt School and the critique of mass culture
Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry” (1944) critiques the culture industries for mass-producing not just films and generic conventions, but also what people desire.
“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.”
The Hunger Games as: – Action film
– Teen film
– Science fiction film
Rock universe in the multiverse of Everything, Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Three key criticisms of The Hunger Games as “neoliberal postfeminism”:
1. Makeover culture – commercial beauty culture plus what Gill calls “the confidence cult(ure)” sometimes referred to now as “neoliberal”
2. Fulfilment in romance – traditional girl- oriented rewards
3. The mythic success of individual agency – virtue and effort triumph despite the odds sometimes referred to now as “neoliberalism”
, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a sensibility”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.2, 2007: 147-166.
, “The ‘Can-Do’ Girl Versus the ‘At-Risk’ Girl”, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-first Century. Routledge, 2004.
– “Young women are… taught that while girlpower is about being
confident and assertive, it should not be taken too far” (29).
So Young (2013), Fleet of Time (2014), My Old Classmate (2014)
My Old Classmate (2014)
On the productivity of clichés:
– Fiske, John. 2010. “Popular Texts.” In Understanding Popular Culture, 146-164. London: Routledge.
– Morris, Meaghan. 2013. “Transnational Glamour, National Allure: Community, Change and Cliche in ’s
Australia.” In Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches, edited by , and L. E. Semler, 83-113. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Cultural context:
• OneChildPolicy(1980-2015) • Zaolian(earlyorpremature
love) discourses
• Varied school and university
regulations banning dating and/or premarital sex
Choose one of the Week 3 lecture examples (as listed in the Syllabus/Outline) and unpack what seem to you to be the public debates, or matters of public concern, raised by that film for its contemporary audience and for an audience today.
How exactly are these debates/concerns raised by the film, and what position does it take in relation to them? What are the limitations of thinking about film as an arena for public debate?
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