Showing papers on "Film genre published in 1979"

Metacinema: A Modern Necessity

Abstract: Reflexive cinema-a cinema about movies and movie-makers-must be understood in both its traditional and modernist contexts. In the orthodoxy of the traditional cinema, of which we can consider the Hollywood genre film representative, the goal of form is to be overlooked. Orthodox storytelling demands that narrative structure function as a transparency. In the many Hollywood and Hollywoodlike movies about movie-making we do not find the rules of traditional storytelling challenged. Sunset Boulevard, Singin'in the Rain, and Day for Night are reflexive films in the traditional mode. Sunset Boulevard is not about Billy Wilder's production of Sunset Boulevard, but about the problems of the characters portrayed within it' Reflexive elements are trained on the film (or proposed film) within the film that we see. Orthodox reflexivity affirms the role of narrative structure as a transparency; modernist reflexivity seeks to reverse this role. Reflexive elements in modernist films-for example, 8½, Persona, Wind From the East, and WR-are secondarily or not at all directed to "films within the film." Rather they are brought to bear on the films themselves. Opposing themselves to the orthodoxy that submerges form, reflexive elements in modernist cinema bring form to mind. Reflexivity, which means "consciousness turning back on itself," appears in aesthetic media in two ways: 1) in the artist reflecting upon his medium of expression; and 2) in the artist as creator reflecting upon himself. In the cinema, then, reflexivity is manifest in films about movie-making and in films about the movie-maker (or both). Early examples of these modes are Dziga-Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, concerned with the method of gathering, ordering, and disseminating filmed information, and Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, a journey into the psyche of the artist exploring the complexes, phobias, and childhood traumas that form the wellsprings of his creative output. We can call these two modes of reflexivity formal and personal. Reflexive techniques which draw attention to the formal qualities of film "as film" can themselves be divided into two categories: 1) the showing of the process and machinery of film production and presentation; and 2) the construction of narrative intransitivity. Examples of the first technique are Joe Gillis (William Holden) laboring over his script in Sunset Boulevard, the brightening of the carbon are and the film winding its way through the projector in Persona, the freeze-frame that burns up at the end of Skolimowski's Le Depart, the rushes and even the story conferences in The Last Tycoon. We have seen the whole gamut of movie-making from the first sweat of inspiration to tallying the box office receipts. Exposition of the mechanics of production is common to both orthodox and modernist reflexive cinema. Instances of narrative intransitivity seldom occur in traditional cinema, though they are by far the most commonly used reflexive techniques in modernist films. Narrative is rendered intransitive when the chain of causation that motivates the action and moves the plot is interrupted or confused, through spatial and temporal fragmentation, or the introduction of alien forms and information. Resnais' films, and the later Bunuel films seek to mystify in this fashion. Godard and Makavejev have made the interpolation of literary texts, skits, speeches, and printed slogans such an integral part of their style that we now regard it as conventional. In their work, reflexive techniques cause the films to lose their transparency and become themselves the object of the spectator's attention. The traditional cinema does not expose the process of production to alienate us from the story that's being told; rather the cameras, lights, and technicians are used as icons to authenticate the notion that we are enjoying a behind-the-scenes look at how the industry "really works." Reflexive techniques in the modernist narrative, on the other hand, mount an attack on our empathy by undercutting the "reality" of the characters and actions within the film. …

Literary and Film Genres: Toward a Taxonomy of Film

Abstract: In August of 1978, the University of Southern California's School of Performing Arts hosted an "Invitational Conference and Workshop on Film/Video as an Artistic, Professional, and Academic Discipline." To a great extent, the four conference presentations of about a dozen position papers tended to focus on needs of professional standards, pedogogical strategies in face of a growing concern for accreditation of both cinevideo curricula and faculty. In his own overview of the Conference's scope, Robert Wagner cited one particular "need" that especially caught my attention: "the organization of knowledge in the field leading to a taxonomy."1 Typically, one associates taxonomy with biological classification, complete with traditional binomial Latin terms (i.e., genus cum species), families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms. From the perspective of such association, Wagner's use had to hyperbolic. However, more basically, taxonomy is a general science of classification (theory and practice). It deals with human concept formation with regard to a particular discipline (such as biology). Thus its concern is hierarchy, patterns of coordination (i.e., of the same order, rank, importance), and subordination (i.e., of lower order, rank, importance). Apart from the epistemological questions related to classification theory-innate and/or arbitrary structures of man's categorial activity2-are immediate pragmatic concerns. Does the resulting organization possess adequate heuristic power; will the particular coordination and subordination allow ongoing insights into extant and future structures? As Wagner himself was well aware, such "organization of knowledge" in the field of film and video is, at present, hardly begun, though "necessary to the establishment of film and television as a discipline."3 My own view is that what rudimentary beginnings are available seem limited to contemporary categorization of film genres, and that the bulk of these same efforts seem so misguided that they preclude essential heuristic hope. Further, that we stand at a point early enough in cinevideo scholarship to correct these errors, especially if we can benefit from the structural strategies of older, literary genre distinction. The trend of film genre study today is so well known that there seems no need to cite contributive works (which may be countless). In general its mainstay is subject matter (e.g. the western, disaster, horror, musical or war categories) and its great weakness is oversubordination (i.e., by and large relegating all productions, at times including nonfiction and experimental works, under the implicit paradigm of the theatrical narrative, the fictive feature). On the one hand, this results in some very simplistic demarcations, much as one would find in a children's library which featured a section labeled "sea stories." On the other hand, this curious emphasis on subject matter over structure results in a tunnelvision which not only often fails to recognize such robust genres as the experimental film but, perhaps worse, fails to understand them. For recognition and understanding both are attendant upon structural consideration. To speak of something as a "western" not only require modest sophistication but modestly addresses an aspect of a given work that finds similarity in, say, a fictive feature, a network documentary, a non-narrative experimental work, and even a television advertising commercial. Far more insightful and instructive would be distinctions comparable to those which separate the novel from, say, narrative poetry, or the epic from a lyric poem. Here I am reminded of Thrall, Hibbard and Holman's predication of literary genre classification upon structural rather than subject distinctions. Genre: A term used in literary criticism to designate the distinct types or categories into which literary works are grouped according to form or technique. . . . Genre classification implies that there are groups of formal or technical characteristics existing among works of the same 'kind' regardless of time or place of composition, author, or subject matter; and that these characteristics, when they define a definite sroup of works, are of basic significance in talking about literary art. …

Dracula Meets the Zeitgeist: Nosferatu (1922) as Film Adaptation

Abstract: No fly-by-night film genre, the vampire film has demonstrated durable appeal for decades. Universal Studios in America successfully cloned its Bela Lugosi vehicle Dracula (1931) throughout the 1930's and 1940's: Daughter of Dracula (1936) was followed by Son of Dracula (1943), among others, and finally Lugosi returned as Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Hammer Films in Britain introduced graphic horror in color to their demythologized but ferally sexual Horror of Dracula (1958), an international box office success that spawned a popular series that continues today with its star, Christopher Lee. More recent essays in resurrecting Dracula have included a British TV drama and a Broadway play. Not yet released at the time of this writing is German director Werner Herzog's new interpretation of the silent German classic, Nosferatu. Herzog's remake should bring the whole vampire genre full circle, since the original Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens appears to have been the first definitive, feature-length vampire film. Produced during 1921-22, it was released in Germany on 5 March 1922, and seven years later released in the United States with the title Nosferatu the Vampire. Nosferatu was a screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's popular novel Dracula, published in 1897. The first of many movies to be based on Stoker's novel, Nosferatu gave film credit to Stoker, but director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and scenarist Henrik Galeen used Stoker's property without permission. In an abortive attempt to evade the copyright law, they made several changes in the original. The setting of the story was shifted from 1897 England to 1838 Bremen, Germany. The names of the characters were changed, for example, Graf Orlok the Nosferatu in lieu of Count Dracula the Vampire ("Graf" is the German equivalent of "Count," and "Nosferatu" is Rumanian for "Undead"). Two striking, and related, revisions concern the character of Professor Van Helsing and the destruction of the vampire. In Stoker's novel, Van Helsing is Dracula's nemesis. Both characters represent authority figures by being male, having venerable titles (Professor, Count), and possessing the wisdom of maturity. In the book they Eire antagonists, each vying to dominate the situation and the lives of the other characters. Van Helsing is conspicuously absent from Nosferatu so that Graf Orlok is unopposed by any male authority figure. The denouement is therefore different. The vampire is not ambushed outside and violently staked and beheaded, but with the dawn's sunlight dissipates inside a bedroom. Whereas the setting in the novel is natural (the Borgo Pass) and the agent of destruction is social (a band of men), the setting in the film is social (interior bedroom) and the agent of destruction is natural (the sun). Whereas in the novel the vampire's ultimate demise is effected by male attack, it is accomplished by feminine surrender in the film. Why did the Germans make these significant changes? In view of these alterations, why "put the bite on" Stoker's vampire property at all? The assumption here, explaining the use above of the collective "Germans," is that the filmmaker, however strong his sense of personal vision, is never working in a vacuum, and that contemporaneous cultural factors may influence his work. Murnau may have, as a director of considerable merit, a personal vision that permeates his oeuvre,1 but the particular configuration of Nosferatu-especially the absent Van Helsing and the new endingcan be construed as owing much to the structure of social-psychological variables operative in Germany at the time that Murnau was making his film. This will be the focus of this study. Germany in 1921-22 was suffering through a period of real, not romantic, storm and stress. Instability was ubiquitous, a consequence of Germany's defeat in World War I and the overthrow of the traditional monarchy. The new German government was an experiment in democracy, but many officials in the Weimar Republic leaned to the political right. …

Literary Origins: Sternberg's Film: The Blue Angel

Abstract: Literary Origins: Sternberg's Film: The Blue Angel In his book on the aesthetics of the Filmed novel, Bluestone reminds us that "there is no necessary correspondence between the excellence of a novel and the quality of the film in which the novel is recorded," that the destruction of the adopted novel is unavoidable, since "the filmist becomes not a translator for an established author, but a new author in his own right."1 Further, the film adapter "looks not to the organic novel, whose language is inseparable from its theme, but to characters and incidents which have somehow detached themselves from language and, like the heroes of folk legends, have achieved a mythic life of their own."2 Through the use of a camera, however, the film can approach creative literature both in content and technique.3 The film camera, like the novel, can make us "see" and "feel" the complexity of space, thought and time. Through technical manipulation of the film strip and editing, the film can render suspension, tension and movement. Simile, metaphor and symbol-the figurative language of written literature-occur in the contemporary experience of viewing a film.4 Nevertheless, the close relationship between films and their adopted novels has often led to singular value judgments from both critics of film and critics of literature. These observations range from Sarris' defense of the director-as-author to Murray's subjective conclusion that the big screen enables the film maker, more than the novelist, to "communicate ecstasy or sorrow with a palpability that is almost unbearable," and that as a result, "it must be owned that emotions and feelings are expressed with more directness in the film than in the novel."5 Movie and film critics like Kael and Simon rarely support the filmed novel, and with them it seems unimportant that direction and editing can unite to make good films from great novels.6 Films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Tom Jones (1963) and Fellini's Satyricon (1969) are, however, acknowledged filmic adaptations of literature and prove the point that a film under a good director can "invest its images of man with some sort of significant order."7 In the twentieth century, film has taken near control of the human image as its subject, while nonrepresentational painting and sculpture have often alienated audiences otherwise receptive to new aesthetic experience. It is in this latter sense that movies are criticized unjustly as a mass art. Parker Tyler's remarks that photography and the movies revived the human image are applicable to Hollywood's filmed novel.8 There is finally a direct relationship between a successful film of literary quality and its adopted novel. An interest for novels is stimulated among a public that all too often ignores, deliberately or passively, both popular and quality literature. The marriage between a film and its adopted novel is nevertheless a complex one: creative, aesthetic and social factors are relevant topics in any meaningful discussion of the filmed novel. Josef von Sternberg's film, The Blue Angel (1930), adapted from Heinrich Mann's novel, Professor Unrat (Small Town Tyrant, 1905), survives to this day as an exception to the rule that good books should be left alone, that intellectually, the film will never match the novel. Mann's Unrat is as important for contemporary German literature as Sternberg's Blue Angel is for the history of movies.9 Both works survive as classics in the separate media of film and literature. Essential differences prevail, however, in terms of theme and plot, and are most evident in the area of characterization. Discussion of these changes in film and novel is the special concern of this study. The creative problems involved between moving from one aesthetic medium to another betray the distinction between novelist and film director. In toe process, however, Sternberg emerges as an auteur communicating visually and philosophically a view of life as profound as the novelist Mann himself. …