Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1981"

Questions of Cinema

Abstract: Preface 1 On Screen, in Frame: Film and Ideology 2 Narrative Space 3 On Suture 4 Film Performance 5 Film, System, Narrative 6 The Question Oshima 7 Repetition Time: Notes Around OStructural/materialist FilmO 8 Body, Voice 9 Language, Sight and Sound 10 The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Cultural Form 11 Contexts Indexes: Films Names Terms and themes

Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System

Abstract: The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.

The Brechtian aspect of radical cinema

Abstract: A significant and contemporary study of director Howard Hawks by influential film critic Robin Wood, reprinted with a new introduction.

The Movie Palace and the Theatrical Sources of its Architectural Style

Abstract: Research into the film industry has concentrated primarily on production. Where it has embraced exhibition, the emphasis has been almost exclusively economic. There have been few studies of the movie theater itself in terms of its architectural design and social function, as the place where the process begun by production is completed by consumption. In this article I will explore the architectural antecedents of the movie palace-vaudeville theater, traveling show, circus, penny arcade, dime museum, Kinetoscope parlor and store. My purpose is to determine how the architecture of these locales, and its relationship to the role and status of the film, contributed to an architectural style unique to the movies as seen later in the movie palace. The palace incorporated many of the functional and iconographic motifs of these earlier, more "primitive" exhibition contexts. Among those that I will examine here are the open or recessed exterior vestibule, the box office, the marquee, the poster and electric light display, the architectural design and decoration of both the exterior and the interior of the theater, and the added accoutrements and extra spaces of the interior.

The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism

Abstract: The term "women's cinema" seems, if not necessarily simple to define, then at least straightforward enough. But the term "women's cinema" has acquired two different meanings which, to some minds, are diametrically opposed. It is at the hypothetical intersection of these two meanings, rather than with the favoring of one over the other, that I begin. First, women's cinema refers to films made by women. They range from classical Hollywood directors like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino to their more recent heirs, like Claudia Weill and Joan Silver; and from directors whom many feminists would just as soon forget, like Leni Riefenstahl or Lina Wertmiuller, to other contemporary European directors concerned directly and consciously with female modes of expression, like Chantal Akerman and Helke Sander. They range as well from independent documentary filmmakers like Julia Reichert (co-director of Union Maids) and Connie Fields (Rosie the Riveter) to more experimental independents attempting to reconcile feminist politics and avant-garde form, like Michelle Citron (Daughter Rite) and Sally Potter (Thriller). To attempt to account for the wide diversity of films represented in even this simple definition of "women's cinema" is a gigantic task in and of itself. The term "women's cinema," or more precisely, the "woman's film," has acquired another meaning, referring to a Hollywood product designed to appeal to a specifically female audience. Such films, popular throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, were usually melodramatic in tone and full of highpitched emotion, from which came the pejorative title: "the weepies." Indeed, Molly Haskell characterizes the "woman's film" as the "most untouchable of film genres." Here is how Haskell defines the genre: "At the lowest level, as soap opera, the 'woman's film' fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there

Legends on the screen : the Australian narrative cinema, 1919-1929

Abstract: This is a richly illustrated and documented study of the silent feature film and the social climate in which it was made.

Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge's Contribution to Germany in Autumn

Abstract: In 1962, the signatories of the Oberhausen manifesto proclaimed the death of the old German cinema. They welcomed the collapse of the German film industry (the ill-fated UFA had folded the previous year), because it removed the economic ground for a conventional mode of filmmaking, thereby giving the new film a chance to come to life.' Less than interesting in its actual content and rhetoric, the manifesto presented the first public and collective statement by young German film-makers in the Federal Republic. As such it has become something of a mythological point of origin for critics and historians, as if the current international celebrity of New German Cinema had evolved more or less organically from an otherwise forgotten pioneer act in the past. To return to Oberhausen in an essay on Germany in Autumn2 (1978) risks participating in a similar vein of mythologizing; if a continuity nevertheless is claimed, it has to be traced through the contradictions and aporias which evolutionist myths tend to elide. What might appear as a detour from the development of one kind of cinema, may in fact open up alternative routes towards a cinema different in kind.

American Friends and New German Cinema: Patterns of Reception

Abstract: The making of the New German Cinema took place to a great extent in the United States. Previously ignored, indeed obscured West German directors gained much from the accolades accorded them by American cineastes; lacking a receptive audience inland, they managed to find one abroad. In the process, much went by the wayside. Junger Deutscher Film, a product of the 1960s ferment, the revolt of a generation disenchanted with its elders' abuse of the cinematic medium, became transformed into an arthouse commodity, a hot item circulating in the 1970s under the rubric "New German Cinema." This recognition had many consequences, to be sure. One forgot the long years of struggle, the fierce battles waged to gain film and television subsidies, the intense debates about the problematic nature of Germany's broken film history, and focussed instead on the scintillating personalities and the remarkable visions presented by these madmen from across the water. "The artist is made into a cult figure: a new

The Politics of the Sign and Film Theory

Abstract: The political events of 1968 produced a politicization of crucial sectors of western European and American film culture, evidenced in the opening of discussion surrounding the film practice of Godard, Straub and Huillet, Oshima, Makavejev, and others. Their practice was given a certain privileged status in influential film journals such as Cahiers du Cinkma and Screen. It was, in fact, proposed that filmmakers working in specified ways at the fringes of narrative conventions were building a politically significant cinema through the introduction of struggle within the production of images and sounds. Significant developments in film theory over the past decade are partly grounded in a placement-an identification-of this work as politically important. I want to review the theoretical premises for such claims. Godard himself has often proclaimed, both in film and in writing, that the matter is as simple as that: the production of images and sounds. But, of course, this simplicity is complex, for neither images nor sounds, nor their combinations, exist solely in the realm of the cinematic or the filmic.' If cinema or film is the production of images and sounds, it is only one form among many of such production. No form is socially innocent, nor are their interrelationships. No experience of them is pure, isolated from others.

Technical Quality Control of Motion Picture Theaters

Abstract: Spectator comfort in a cinema is of utmost importance. Visual, auditory, and seating comfort are the design elements one must take into account for the successful construction of a well balanced cinema theater. Parameters are discussed such as: perspective reproduction, image distortion, fine detail rendering, color and contrast reproduction, acoustical auditorium transfer characteristics, background noise, spectators' head clearance, seating area limits, and others. The CSTCF (Commission Superieure Technique du Cinema Francais) controls the quality of cinema theaters and awards a quality label to those cinemas that comply with the quality conditions specified in the French cinema standard.

The Derailment of A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract: When the film version of Tennesse Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning play A Streetcar Named Desire was released in September of 1951, nearly every reviewer agreed with Hollis Alpert of The Saturday Review, who felt that the film represented "one of Hollywood's rare attempts to give the whole meaning and scope of an author's vision" (1 Sept. 1951, p.28), and with John McCarten of The New Yorker, who believed that it was a "faithful translation to the screen" of Williams' searing drama about the destruction of aristocratic gentility by modern industrial brutality (29 Sept. 1951, p. 111).1 In the midst of all this praise, only one critic had the apparent temerity to express the opinion that the film was not a faithful adaptation; indeed, according to Manny Farber, "everything that kept the Broadway 'Streetcar' from spinning off into ridiculous melodrama- everything thoughtful, muted, three-dimensional-has been raped, along with poor Blanche duBois, in the Hollywood version ..." (The Nation, 20 Oct. 1951, p. 334). Farber's negative review, of course, did not prevent Streetcar from becoming an artistic and financial success which earned Oscars for Vivien Leigh, Karl Maiden and Kim Hunter, and instant film stardom for Marlon Brando. Since that time, the film has proven to be, as Maurice Yacowar has recently pointed out, "an invaluable record of a legendary production . . . and a landmark in American cinema."2 In light of the film's continued success and its frequent inclusion in film courses offered at universities and colleges, it is necessary to point out to those viewers who still pay money to see the film, or to those professors who teach it in their courses, that the screen version does not, as the early critics would have us believe, faithfully adhere to Williams' original script. ^ Indeed, any intelligent person who has seen both the stage version (which is still frequently revived in professional, amateur and university theatres) and the film version can't help but notice that there are marked differences between the two, some of minor, others of major importance. Given the same writer (Williams), the same director (Elia Kazan), and nearly the same cast (Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy as Blanche), we should expect that Streetcar's transition from stage to screen would have been a relatively painless voyage, involving only a variation in visual effects to accomodate the camera's interpretation of life in New Orleans. And, indeed, this was Kazan's original intention before the actual shooting of the film began. In an interview with Michel Ciment in 1974, Kazan revealed that he began work on the film intending only "to find visual equivalents for the verbal poetry" of the play. Kazan continued: I engaged a screenwriter and we began to "open it up" from the point of view of time, and from the point of view of where the events occurred, to work backwards into Blanche's past. . . . Then I read this script and I thought, well, we've done a pretty good job on it. Then I put it away and got involved in doing some other things, casting. I re-read it a week later and I thought it was awful -it had lost the best qualities of Williams' work . . . And I suddenly made a very radical decision-right or wrong, it was radical -I suddenly decided, I'm going to just shoot the play. And I'll even put most of it in the apartment ... So I photographed my production of his masterpiece-And I do think it's a masterpiece -almost precisely as he had written it for the stage.4 Yet the result which the American public saw a year later was significantly different from what theatre audiences had seen during the play's New York run. Kazan's intentions were honorable, but he had two formidable opponents- the censorship board of the Motion Picture industry and the ultraconservative members of the Legion of Decency. As a result of the additions and deletions demanded by these "moral guardians," the film of Streetcar differs from the stage version in both characterization and theme. …

A Star Is Born: Fassbinder and the New German Cinema

Abstract: Fassbinder is one of the leading lights of the New German Cinema. A figure who has succeeded in attracting popular attention, critical acclaim and academic scrutiny', he now enjoys the status of an international star whose image as a kind of contemporary poete maudit has been further enhanced by his remarkable, "obsessive" productivity. It is tempting to account for his spectacular career in terms such as "talent" or even "genius," and indeed I have argued elsewhere2 that the institutional/ideological framework of the New German Cinema promotes precisely this kind of picturesque myth. I should like here to pursue this line of inquiry a little further. If concepts like talent or dedication are not adequate to explain the Fassbinder phenomenon, what in fact were the qualities called for in West Germany's aspiring auteurs and to what extent does he in particular answer to these requirements? To map the changing contours of the New German Cinema and to locate Fassbinder's position within it can afford a revealing perspective on this bumpy terrain where state and culture intersect.

Image and Ideology in Kazan's Pinky

Abstract: Because of numerous factors, among which were the lessening of racial prejudice brought about by black participation in the war, and the exposure of Americans to the horrifying effects of racism in Europe during World War II, American film audiences of the late 1940's were ready for a treatment of racial problems that was more daring than what had been provided previously by the white-controlled film companies. During the war years, the Roosevelt Administration had applied pressure on the studios to produce significant pictures in which Negroes played consequential roles. As Donald Bogle points out, the government's motive was to help along its program of increased employment for Negroes in previously restricted industries.! Blacks began assuming heroic roles in such war-time epics as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara (all 1943). Bogle singles out Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and Robert Rossen's Body & Soul (1947), as films which included dignified, intelligent roles for blacks. Bogle also contends that the popular entertainer films of the earlier '40 's, epitomized by such classics as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, had diminished in popularity due to the aforementioned factors and the critical failure of Walt Disney's stereotyped Song of the South (1946).2 The culmination of the trend toward black realism in the American cinema of the forties awaited the year 1949, with its unique cycle of pictures that tackled the race problem of America. These films all showed blacks at home in the United States, enduring the problems of civilian life, rather than the all-for-one, one-for-all heroics of war-time. Stanley Kramer's independently produced Home of the Brave dealt with the civilian re-adjustments of a Negro private who had cracked up under the strain of racial discrimination during the war. Louis de Rochemont's Lost Boundaries followed the critical success of Home of the Brave with a film treatment of a factual Reader's Digest account of a Negro doctor's family that had passed for white in New England for twenty years.3 1949 also saw a very well-received adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, which starred the great black actor, Juano Hernandez. The film in this cycle which seemed to receive the greatest critical success as popular entertainment was the Elia Kazan directed, Darryl Zanuck produced Pinky, starring Jeanne Grain in the title role and Ethel Waters in the supporting role of Aunt Dicey Johnson. The film was an adaptation from the 1946 bestseller, Quality^, a novel first serialized in the Ladies Home Journal. A reviewer for the New York Times characterized Quality as "conforming generally to the requisites of women's magazine fiction: including some fussiness in style, melodrama, typed characters (hard to avoid in fiction about the South), the emotional world of a schoolgirl's dream."5 Sumner also wrote two other novels, Tammy Out of Time and Tammy Tell Me True, which were adapted for the screen and which were popular successes irr both novel and film versions. These entertainments also featured dreamy adolescent heroines. The film Pinky opens with a shot of a train carrying the nurse, Pinky, back to her hometown in the Deep South. The audience observes the white actress Jeanne Crain, as she portrays Pinky 's emotional upset after fleeing from her white boyfriend in the North. At first surprised by Pinky's kinship with the colored washerwoman Aunt Dicey, the audience suspends its disbelief and accepts the plot device. But, like Pinky, the audience remains troubled by the situation to which the heroine returns: the poverty of her grandmother's home, the humiliation by whites who discover her colored identity. While her grandmother steers her to accept her life in the black community, we shudder at the abuse she receives from a razor-carrying black woman with whom she has argued over some money, and at her mistreatment by white police who have come to her rescue and turn against her when they realize she is black. …

Jewish images in the French cinema of the 1930s

Abstract: (1981). Jewish images in the French cinema of the 1930s. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 139-150.

Text and Memory in Eclipse

Abstract: Day or Night During the night shooting of the sequence in which Piero's automobile is retrieved from the lake, the car, hoisted on a crane, fell back into the water Antonioni determined to continue the next morning so as not to lose another day of shooting, preferring to abandon darkness altogether rather than adopt the artifice of day for night The insistence on the purity of light as part if its prerogative in the rhetoric of Eclipse is suggested in the title of the film, as Red Desert asserts Antonioni's preoccupation with color, BIo w-Up with photographic modes How painful the renunciation of the night scene must have been is clear from the following passage of the shooting script, cut in the final version Piero: Wait Vittoria: What is that light? Piero: The headlights, imagine that They stayed on under water (Vittoria observes from afar the halo of light which, at sunet, makes even more of an impression) Vittoria: But it's stupendous! 1 Vittoria 's enthusiasm is Antonioni's own, anticipated in the conception of the script, and, in this instance, frustrated during shooting But elsewhere, often and successfully, headlights, street lights, lights in windows, lights turning on and off, suddenly and gradually, recur; sunlight, appearing and disappearing, punctuates the film from the dawn of the opening sequence to the dark of the close The narrative continuity is bound to that of light; it absorbs and reflects the dominant rhetorical bias of the film, as the synopsis that follows will underscore The film begins as day breaks over the EUR, a modern section of Rome, after what has clearly been a long and trying night for Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) Vittoria finally manages to leave Riccardo 's apartment, ending their long affair At noon she finds her mother (Lilla Brignone) among the compulsive followers of the stock market, and meets Piero (Alain Delon), a brash, successful young broker That night, at the apartment of a neighbor from Kenya (Mirella Ricciardi), Vittoria and a friend (Rossana Rory) dress in tribal costume, dance and beat drums to native music, before descending into the dark suburban street in search of Marta's errant dog The next day is spent in a jaunt to Verona by small aircraft Vittoria returns to Rome in time to witness a chaotic down-turn session at the stock exchange That night marks the beginning of her liaison with Piero, in the dark outside Vittoria's house just minutes before a passing drunk steals Piero 's car The car is recovered the next day A walk through the new quarter of the city ends at the intersection which is to serve the lovers as a place of rendezvous The affair continues in Piero's apartment and in his office after a second sequence at the intersection, and ends at the same crossroad as evening falls over the final sequence of the film, a very long, striking montage An extreme closeup of a street lamp, the concluding shot, gradually occupies more and more of the frame, and in the end, paradoxically, it is light that obscures all else The process of eclipse governs the final fourth of the film, the victory of light being the last in a series of conquests of the screen by one element of the rhetoric of cinema over another Character disappears before the final montage; words are eliminated with character; plot is subsumed by purely visual elements; music is all but silenced; movement is virtually arrested; representational forms vie weakly with abstract compositions Even time, here the visual analogue of light, stops in the last burst of glare, stationary after the extension marked by the passage from day to dusk to dark And then, of course, so does the film which, reduced to light alone, can no longer meet even the sparsest definition of cinema The shooting script of Eclipse describes the final sequence as follows : "The small piazza where Piero and Vittoria customarily meet …

A Selected Annotated Bibliography of Writings Connected with Avant-Garde Film.

Abstract: We have listed only articles printed in Eng lish, and have concentrated on those pub lished since 1973, since there is a good bibli ography in print which lists many of the articles published up to that time. This is Caroline Angell's, printed in The Essential Cinema edited by P. Adams Sitney. The only problem with Angell's is that it focuses ex clusively on films included in the collection of the Anthology Film Archives, a small per centage of avant-garde films, and a collection with a particular bias. We hope to compile a more complete bibliography in the future.