Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1976"

The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study

Abstract: knows that he is at the movies: this is the first and principal difference between the filmic and oneiric situations. We sometimes speak of the illusion of reality in one or the other, but true illusion belongs to the dream and to it alone. In the case of the cinema it is better to limit oneself, as I have done until now, to remarking the existence of a certain impression of reality. However, the gap between the two states sometimes tends to diminish. At the movies affective participation, depending on the fiction of the film and the spectator's personality, can become very lively, and perceptual transference then increases by a degree for brief instants of fleeting intensity. The subject's consciousness of the filmic situation as such starts to become a bit murky and to waver, although this slippage, easily begun, is never carried to its conclusion in ordinary circumstances. I am not thinking so much of those film shows (some still exist1) where one can see the spectators, often young children, sometimes adults, rise from their seats, gesticulate, shout encouragement to the hero of the story, and insult the "bad guy": manifestations, in general, less disorderly than they seem: it is the institution of cinema itself, in certain of its sociological variants (i.e., the audience of children, the rural audience, the audience with little schooling, the community audience where everybody in the theater knows everybody else), that provides for, sanctions, and integrates them. If we want to understand them, we must take account of the conscious gameplaying and group demands, the encouragement given to the spectacle by the play of motor activity. To this extent, the expenditure of muscular energy (voice and gesture) signifies almost the opposite of what it might first suggest to the observer fresh from the big city and its anonymous and silent movie theaters. It does not necessarily indicate that the audience is a little further down the road of true illusion. Rather, we have here one of those intrinsically ambivalent behaviors in which a single action, with double roots, expresses simultaneously virtually opposite tendencies. The subject actively invading the diegesis2 through a motor outburst was initially aroused by a first step, modest as it is-prescribed as it is, necessarily, by the

Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound

Abstract: Most film historians credit Warner Bros. and Western Electric with providing the major impetus for the coming of sound. A few allocate a paragraph or two to the European based "Tri-Ergon" patents, then go on to devote a large amount of space to an analysis of films using sound systems based on these patents. The discussion in Manvell and Fraenkel's The German Cinema lasts only one and a half paragraphs, in Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler one paragraph, and in Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now one-half paragraph.' Obviously all these accounts are incomplete. Jean Mitry in his massive, three-volume Histoire du Cinema chronicles in three pages the development of the Tri-Ergon system and its successor Tobis-Klangfilm. However he provides no documentation. Harry Geduld's treatment in his The Birth of the Talkies equals Mitry's in length. Yet Geduld adds only a smattering of new dates, corporate names, and court decisions.2 He like the others provides no theoretical understanding of why and how the Tri-Ergon system came to be, nor of how this technology entered commercial motion picture production and exhibition. None of these authors answers the most basic questions concerning the stages of invention, innovation, hnd diffusion common to all technological change. This article will devote considerable space to each of these three stages. Moreover court records and motion picture trade papers will provide the primary data to fill out this structure and thus provide the beginning of a coherent and theoretically consistent history of the Tri-Ergon sound system.

A history of the cinema from its origins to 1970

Abstract: The author of this book relates the movies and the people who make them, to the culture of their society.

Personal views: Explorations in film

Abstract: Robin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text "Personal Views." This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud "unreconstructed humanist," offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. "Personal Views" is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up "Personal Views" appeared during a pivotal time in both film studies - during its academic institutionalization - and in the author's life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood's overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.

D. W. Griffith and the Use of Off-Screen Space

Abstract: Recent scholarship has helped to dispel the mistaken idea that the films of D. W. Griffith are outmoded museum pieces which, though not to be ignored for their historic value, are no longer of interest as art. Old prejudices die hard and despite the revival of later films, such as Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Dream Street, all too often a list of "firsts" in the history of the narrative film is the total consideration which Griffith is allowed. Even among individuals who have seen and appreciated Griffith after The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, there is an ignorance of the films which served as the director's apprenticeship. In fact, dismissing the scores of films directed between 1908 and 1913 at Biograph as simply a period of learning his craft by Griffith is almost as wrong as the previous tendency to write off the director as a pioneering footnote of film making. The mass production of the short films for Biograph allowed Griffith a unique opportunity for experimentation. In A Short History of the Movies,1 Gerald Mast writes: "Griffith made no technical innovations in his longer films that he had not already begun or perfected in the short ones." He adds: "Griffith was not just the cinema's first technician; he was also its first moralist, poet, auteur." Certainly, most of the Griffith Biograph films are simple narratives with many melodramas made quickly and inexpensively to answer the demand which had developed for them. But among the scores of titles are privileged moments as interesting today for their genius and technical ability as anything which has been made since. In fact, many of these short films demonstrate more initiative than most high-budget productions of our own time. One such film is A Corner in Wheat.

Punishment Park and Dissent in the West

Abstract: An analysis by Peter Watkins (director of The War Game, Privilege, Culloden, etc) of the repression within the United States of Punishment Park - a 90 minute feature film produced by Susan Martin and photographed by Joan Churchill, which - in the form of an allegory - examines the human condition of polarization, and which takes as its background a situation of escalating political opposition in America, and the Federal government's use of 'Punishment Parks' to correct the dissent In October 1971 Punishment Park was screened at the New York Film Festival The day after; Vincent Canby of the New York Times attacked the film, referring to it as a "fantasy" and "futuristic nonsense" The following day, the distributor withdrew from his agreement to release the film to the public Then the remaining New York critics re-inforced Vincent Canby's attack upon the film After a short delay, an exhibitor agreed to show the film but buried somewhere in an unknown cinema in down-town New York City The film opened with a minimum of publicity The exhibitor reported a poor attendance The ushers in the cinema were said to be shaking their heads at the audience as they entered the foyer It is the usual practice in the American film industry to let a film run for at least one week even if its attendances are poor, in order to allow it a chance to acquire an audience Punishment Park was withdrawn after four days The film was next shown at the San Francisco Film Festival It received a positive audience reaction The film then opened in a Walter Reade Cinema in San Francisco It was suddenly withdrawn after 10 days We were never told the real reason for both these abrupt withdrawals We then approached a cinema owner in Los Angeles - he told us, "I could never show that film If I did, I would have the F B I, the Sheriff's Department, the local school board all down on my neck I would get slung out of town" We then approached several major distributors for national distribution One told us, "You have got a fine film there, but it is too hot a political potato to handle" Another distributor told us: "We have had very bad luck recently with these "alienated youth" pictures now we're going more to the G P 'films things like Camelot are what the American youth want to see now" Punishment Park was then screened at a seminar outside New York City for the producers and executives of nearly 30 public television stations across America After the screening there was much tension, shifting in seats, anger at me and the film - "I would never show this, it is an entire false-hood," snarled one producer "Oh dear, wouldn't be able to show it with all that bad language," sighed another Then it was put to the vote, and it was agreed that'none of the producers present at that seminar would screen the film anywhere in America on public television There were two women executives present, as I recall One of them was in tears after the meeting "I feel so ashamed," she said Since that point in time - two years ago - not one cinema owner or distributor throughout the United States has accepted to screen Punishment Park to the public The film has had a limited number of screenings at a few universities And that, briefly, is the history of perhaps the first major political feature-film ever produced in America The "reasoning" for the nation-wide censorship of Punishment Park usually takes one of 2 positions I will deal briefly with each of these The first that the film is a "fantasy" and "futuristic nonsense" As best I can understand it, this criticism is based on two premises That Americans do not mistreat each other, and that there has never been a state of polarization within the United States In order to support this theory - which is perhaps the most widespread criticism used against the film - one has to obliterate from one's mind the past ten years of American political and social history One has to pretend that the following events did not occur in the United States between the years 1965 to 1970: The killing of white students at Kent State and black students at Jackson State …

Browning Without Words: D. W. Griffith and the Filming of Pippa Passes

Abstract: D. W. Griffith, the most revered and influential movie creator of his day, is now universally acknowledged as the most significant figure in the history of American film. A one-time stage actor and playwright, and before that a Kentucky farmboy and high school dropout, David Wark Griffith became a movie director in 1908. By 1915, the year he released his monumental film The Birth of a Nation , he had completely revolutionized the motion picture industry. Appropriately, it was this innovative pioneer of the cinema who first brought the work of Robert Browning to the screen. In 1909 Griffith made a version of Pippa Passes and, apparently encouraged by the favorable response it received, made a version of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1912.

To See It Feelingly: King Lear through Russian Eyes

Abstract: King Lear (A Lenfilm Production, 1970). Scripted and directed by Grigori Kozintsev. based upon Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of the play. Photographed by Jonas Gricius. Sets by Y. Enei. V. Ulitko, and S. Virsaladze. Sound by E. Vanunts. Music by Dmitri Shostakovich. CAST: Yuri Jarvet (Lear), Valentina Shendrikova (Cordelia). Elza Radzins (Goneril). Galina Volchek (Regan). Oleg Dal (Fool). K. Sebris (Gloucester). L. Merzin (Edgar). R. Adomaitis (Edmund), V. Emelyanov (Kent), A. Vokach (Cornwall), D. Banionis (Albany), A. Petrenko (Oswald), I. Budraitis (France). It would not be entirely accurate to say that seventy years of cinema history were to pass before any film director could meet the challenge of King Lear. Some attempts were made in the early years during that flurry of Shakespearian exploitation when the movies were still novelties seeking an appropriate substance to which style could be molded. But even then, in comparison to the numerous Hamlets and Othellos, there were very few Lears. A Vitagraph Lear in 1909, for example, apparently tried to pack the big dramatic moments of the play into a little film; but, as Robert Hamilton Ball reasonably observes: "Of all the plays King Lear seems least suited to radical condensation without audible language."1 In short, it is doubtful that any of the early attempts really met the challenge after all. And a formidable challenge it is! King Lear, it almost goes without saying, is Shakespeare's richest and most complex dramatic poem. Of all the plays, it certainly deserves to be filmed. Yet not until the 1970's did directors of the international cinema have the presumption or the courage to approach it. Those who finally took up that challenge both approached the filming of this tragedy through the theater: Peter Brook had directed Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he brought this dramatic version to the screen along with Paul Scofield in the title role; Grigori Kozintsev also worked, towards his visualization of Lear through a dramatic production, in his case at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater in Leningrad.2 Kozintsev's approach to the play had been scholarly, pragmatic, and exegetical. Appropriately, therefore, his film was released in North America to an academic audience attending the World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver in August of 1971. According to one observer, the film was well received by this demanding audience, who gave the director a five-minute standing ovation after it had been screened.3 In 1971 Grigori Kozintsev was sixty-six years old; over the years he had grown and developed with the cinema in his native Russia. Few directors - if any - have come equipped to the task of filming Shakespeare with the cinema credentials of Grigori Kozintsev. His artistic genius was tempered in the post-revolutionary crucible of dramatic and cinematic experimentation in the Soviet Union. This was his training ground: Kozintsev was one of the founding directors of the "Factory of the Eccentric Actor" (FEX). Consequently, Kozintsev and his colleague Leonid Trauberg experimented with cinema as part of the FEX group effort at about the same time another experimenter, Sergei M. Eisenstein, from the Proletkult Theater, was involved in making his first film. Strike.4 But even though Kozintsev was present at the creation of the Soviet cinema, so to speak, he was at first eclipsed by other talents Eisenstein, Pudovkin. Dovzhenko. Well after the passing of these gifted compatriots, the achievement of Kozintsev's Hamlet (Lenfilm, 1964) brought him international acclaim and recognition. Sadly, King Lear was destined to be his last adaptation of Shakespeare to the screen. Kozintsev's Lear, then, may reasonably be seen as the culmination of a long and productive career. It undertakes a bicultural transformation of its Shakespearian original and translates Shakespeare's poetry into a coherent structure of unforgettable images. Its approach is "traditional" in that it does not undertake an interpretation of the play currently in fashion. …