SCREEN AGES

1st Edition

Case Studies

Chapter 1

Eadweard Muybridge: Scientist, Showman, or Artist?

From their beginnings, photography and motion pictures have been seen both as a means of “capturing reality” and as creative new art forms, as both objective and subjective, as both belonging to science and to the world of entertainment. The career of the early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge demonstrates how this ambivalence about the meaning and purpose of photographic screen experiences goes right back to the origins of motion pictures. Even his famous initial photographic motion study of a racehorse suggests both a serious scientific investigation into the nature of animal movement and a kind of publicity stunt done at the whim of a rich man.

Muybridge leveraged his photographic experiments and his invention of the “zoopraxiscope,” a method of projecting his sequential photographs to create the screen experience of movement, into a successful career as a lecturer, offering public exhibitions that combined education with excitement, science, and showmanship. His studies of human motion, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania and featuring both male and female students, have attracted critical interest and controversy since their first appearance. As we noted in Screen Ages, he combined studies of nude models—in part an effort to allow for the clear and accurate study of human movement—with aesthetic and decorative flourishes that both reflected and reinforced Victorian-era ideas about race, ethnicity, and gender. In terms of why audiences were interested in Muybridge’s motion studies, were they motivated by scientific curiosity about human physiological movement, or by a different kind of curiosity, the chance to see naked people as part of a socially respectable science lecture? Is it even really possible to separate the different motives of the viewers into categories such as “entertainment” and “education”?

The reception of Muybridge’s motion studies blurred the lines between science and art, between serious social purpose and provocative entertainment. In this way, Muybridge fit right in with the other forms of screen and visual entertainment that were a fixture of nineteenth-century popular culture in America and initiated our ongoing debate about the social role and effects of the movies and mass media. Even to this day, viewers disagree about how to regard these early motion studies. On the one hand, we can find online references to Muybridge’s work as part of this history of photography, cinema, and the science of human movement, as in Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities, a scholarly website devoted to Muybridge’s work (http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/). On the other, a stray comment on a YouTube example of one of Muybridge’s motion studies describes it as the “first porn video ever” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-IIaP4AErg), hardly a scholarly assessment, perhaps, but one that probably registers the reactions of a number of viewers.

In this Case Study, explore further examples of Muybridge’s work for yourself at sites such as Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities and Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of Motion (http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/index.htm) at the National Museum of American History virtual website. After watching several instances of Muybridge’s early human motion studies, make note of what you find surprising, interesting, or unusual about these early cinematic screen experiences. Then look into the larger scholarly and critical discussion of Muybridge as you respond to some of these questions:

  • How do these motion studies negotiate, exploit, and/or blur the lines between education and entertainment? Even more fundamentally, how do you define these two terms and their relationship to each other? Are education and entertainment always in opposition to one another? What different kinds of cultural values do we attach to terms like “education” and “entertainment”?
  • What do these motion studies tell us about attitudes and ideas about gender in the early years of American cinema? How do these motion studies relate to later popular actualities such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (https://archive.org/details/dance1895) or Turkish Dance (http://www.loc.gov/item/96509503/)?

Boxing, Sports, and the Movies

In 1894, Edison Studios paid the boxing star James John “Gentleman Jim” Corbett to fight a six-round exhibition match against Peter Courtney before the Kinetograph cameras at Edison’s New Jersey studio. Each round was made into a separate “movie,” and the entire fight sequence became a major hit at Kinetograph parlors, where viewers would pay anywhere from a nickel and a quarter to view each round, culminating in the planned sixth round “knockout” of Courtney. Portions of the first round have survived to this day and can be viewed at many places online, including the Library of Congress (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ47uIa7j5U).

Prizefighting and other sporting events proved popular subjects for early movies (remember that the cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge got his start photographing racehorses). Sports, with their self-contained drama, their visual excitement, and their colorful stars, were a perfect match for the new medium, and boxing matches, which took place within small, brightly lit spaces, were especially friendly to early cinema technology. As a result, the first fight scenes in American movie history involved actual fights.

At the same time, both boxing and early cinema were regarded as culturally suspect activities. Despite the popularity of boxing and the celebrity of fighters like “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, boxing matches were still illegal in most states. The fact that Edison and other early moviemakers quickly discovered and exploited the controversial appeal of boxing only heightened concerns about the new medium of the movies as a cultural activity. The popularity of these early boxing films not only helped revive the flagging peep show industry after the initial novelty of moving pictures had begun to wear off, but they also demonstrated the importance of narrative and storytelling to the development of the new medium. Boxing benefited as well from the movies. The popularity of boxing movies helped lead in part to the widespread legalization of prize fighting across the US in the early part of the then new century. By the 1920s, prize fighting had not only become a mainstream American sport, but it even rivaled the popularity of baseball.

We can learn a great deal about the evolving and complex role of early American cinema by exploring further the connection between sports—especially boxing—and the movies. Starting with the surviving film Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph, begin formulating your own answer to the question of “why was boxing so important to early American cinema?” Write down your own observations and reactions to this short screen experience. What strikes you as potentially exciting, attractive, or even illicit about this viewing experience? Keep in mind that the original audiences would be watching the movie through the individual viewing stations of the Kinetoscope parlor, an intimate screen experience that took place in a very public venue. Then go on to learn more about boxing and early cinema, paying particular attention to the following topics:

  • What does the popularity of early boxing movies tell us about how the first American movie audiences understood and responded to the new medium of the movies? How were these early boxing movies like or unlike other early movies and actualities?
  • What does the popularity of early boxing movies tell us about who was going to the movies? Live boxing matches, for example, were very much a part of a masculine culture of popular entertainment in turn-of-the-century America; peepshow parlors, on the other hand, allowed viewers, such as young women, who might have been otherwise reluctant or prohibited from attending a boxing match in public, to participate in this previously gender segregated activity.
  • How do these early boxing movies further blur the line between fiction and non-fiction actualities? As we noted, the Edison Studios arranged for the Corbett/Courtney “fight” to end in a knockout. As boxing movies developed, many movie companies (particularly the Lubin Manufacturing Company) filmed “fake” fights, recreations of famous prize fights that were sometimes presented as recreations, sometimes presented as the “real thing.” If audiences still enjoyed these “fake” fight films, how do we understand what difference the line between “real” and “fake” means in the visual experience of early cinema?
  • What do the history of early fight films tell us about the interplay among social class, ethnicity, race, and gender in turn-of-the-century America? The case of Jack Johnson can function as its own case study. When Johnson became the first African American to win the heavyweight boxing championship in 1908, the event triggered a bitter racist backlash that also involved efforts to censor any film records of Johnson, especially Johnson defeating white opponents.

Both Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520085336) and Dan Streible’s Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520250758) are rich resources for the study of boxing and early cinema

Chapter 2

Your Local Nickelodeon Culture

If nickelodeon theaters and the screen experiences of the first two decades of the twentieth century seem distant to us in time, the traces and legacies of early cinema are as close as the town or city in which you live. As the movie exhibition business exploded in popularity after 1908, virtually every community, urban or rural, whether in the US or around the world, featured their own version of a “nickelodeon”-type theater (whether they were actually called nickelodeons or not). As we learned in Chapter 2, some of these theaters were large and expensively appointed; others were little more than converted storefronts. Some were airy and comfortable; some were dark, poorly ventilated fire hazards. All played a part in the development of what we have come to know as “movie culture,” both nationally and as part of their local communities.

What was the early movie experience like in the community in which you grew up or in which you are going to school now? The proliferation of digitized online databases, especially archives of local newspapers, along with web-based collections of early movie trade magazines at places like the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject.org/) provide us with powerful and fascinating research tools to play movie history detective and identify some of the local theaters and nickelodeons where movie culture was born.

This Case Study invites you to see what you can find out about the nickelodeon and other early cinema theaters around the year 1910 in the area in which you live now. In some cases, you may find a continuous history of a particular building or space being used as a movie theater, as an early nickelodeon may have been converted into a larger movie house, which may have given way to a later multiplex. In other cases, these early theaters may have appeared and then just as quickly disappeared with the turn toward feature films and sound movies later in the century. You may discover an existing community of early movie historians who have carefully researched and preserved the story of your local movie history, or you may be the first to pursue this project in your locale.

How to find these early theaters? Sometimes a simple Google search may provide a quick clue, but a more likely strategy may involve searching the archives of your local newspapers. Keep in mind there may have been several local newspapers in existence at the time which have since folded; this is especially the case in larger cities, which would typically have supported several daily newspapers in 1910. Locate the sections of those newspapers that feature entertainment listings or advertisements, and start looking for movies. Many of these archives can be accessed online through databases such as Newspaper Source, which your college library may subscribe to. “Analog” searching is also still a valuable tool. Your local libraries—including your college library—may maintain hard copy collections of historical newspapers. It can be both a fascinating and fun experience to leaf through the actual pages of a local newspaper from 1910, skimming the articles, the photos, and the ads, all of which create a rich impression of the popular culture of the time, including nickelodeon culture.

Trade journals such as The Moving Picture World, available through the Media History Digital Library and the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/index.php) are also good sources. Magazines like The Moving Picture World provided information and news to movie exhibitors and distributors and are full of advertisements listing new films and identifying local developments in the movie business. A quick search for mentions of Cincinnati, Ohio in The Moving Picture World for 1910, for example, produced this intriguing notice: “Cincinnati, Ohio—A new moving picture theater is being erected on the east side of Carthage Pike, north of Canal Bridge. It will be able to seat about 400 patrons and will be under the proprietorship of McMann & Jackson.” Further searching revealed that the name of Carthage Pike has been changed, and that the Canal Bridge no longer exists, but I was still able to locate the current neighborhood where this as yet unnamed theater was to be built.

The website Cinema Treasures, which contains information about thousands of movie theaters across the United States, including over 100 former movie houses in the Cincinnati area alone, led to the possibility that this was the Americus Theatre, opened in 1911 in the same area (http://cinematreasures.org/). Is this the same theater? Historical research is as much about refining questions as it is locating definite answers. This early find will lead to further questions: How sure can we get about the name of this theater? How long did it exist? Is it mentioned in local histories?

As you pursue early cinema in your area, consider posting your final results to the Screen Ages website. You can also contact local historical societies with your information, as well as history professors at your or other area colleges who specialize in local history. They may not only be able to help you with your own research but may very well value the contribution your work makes to an understanding of local cinema history.

Fan Magazines and Fan Culture

What did it mean to be a movie fan in 1914? What attracted audiences to a particular theater or nickelodeon? How did movie viewers relate to the emerging celebrity status of the “movie star”? One intriguing source of evidence about the growth of movie culture in the nickelodeon age is the fan magazine. Beginning in 1911 with the appearance of Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay, dozens of publications came into circulation focused on feeding the public’s interest in the movie business. Some of these magazines were started by movie studios as publicity vehicles, but all the fan magazines existed in a co-dependent relationship with the movie industry, providing publicity and trading on access to actors, writers, and producers. The circulation of the most popular magazines quickly reached into the hundreds of thousands, and they became a major part of movie fan culture that lasted into the 1970s, when they were replaced by more all encompassing celebrity magazines like People and Us. For this case study, take advantage of the increasing accessibility of historic fan magazines through sources like the Media History Digital Library <http://mediahistoryproject.org/fanmagazines/ to explore some of these magazines for yourself and to speculate about what they suggest about what the movies meant to these fans and how these fans shaped the development of the movies. Take, for example, the May 1914 issue of Motion Picture Magazine (the later name of Motion Picture Story Magazine) <http://www.archive.org/stream/MotionPictureMagazineMay1914/;. The cover features an illustration of two stars from Vitagraph, Norma Talmadge and Leo Delaney. Inside you will find a series of advertisements, many of them focused on how readers could themselves find work (and fame) in the movie industry (“I Guarantee You $10 for First Photoplay” promises one ad, a more impressive claim when you notice that the entire 180 plus issue cost only fifteen cents in 1914).

Don’t overlook the ads; not only are they fascinating (and in some cases puzzling), but they can tell us a great deal about who the advertisers thought were reading the magazine. Notice, for example, all of the ads offering “self improvement,” including acquiring “a real command of English,” or becoming a lawyer or (again) a screen play (called “scenarios”) writer. You will also find photographs of popular stars, some, like Lillian Gish, still familiar to us today. The heart of the magazine features (as the magazine’s original title suggested) short story versions of current movies, illustrated with stills from the films. In fact, you might be surprised by how “literary” the magazine is, not just by the idea that many fans enjoyed reading movies as well as watching them but also ads for editions of Shakespeare, popular novels, and the inclusion of original poetry, including poems written in praise of movie stars by readers of the magazine. There are also profiles of actors and others in the movie industry. Gender issues feature prominently, as in an article by Edwin M. L Roche entitled “A New Profession for Women,” about the number of women finding success as scenario writers and editors. Another article argues against government censorship of the movies, while still another predicts (with spectacular inaccuracy) that the phenomenon of Broadway stars attracting huge salaries will not be repeated with movie stars, an opinion that probably was more a reflection of the hopes of movie studio executives than a serious guess about the future.

As you review different examples of these early fan magazines, take notice of what features seem strangest and what most familiar to a twenty-first century student of the movies. The study of fan culture has become an exciting and expanding area of cinema studies in the digital age, particularly focused on the increasingly interactive nature of fan communities as expressed in blogs, fan fiction, mash ups, and social networking. What evidence of fan interactivity do we see in these first fan magazines? What can we infer about who the audiences were for movies in the nickelodeon era? Supplement and enrich your investigations with the work of contemporary scholars and historians on early movie culture, such as Anthony Slide’s Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010) <http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1260>.

Chapter 3

Local Movie Palaces and Small Town Theaters

If most of the early nickelodeons and other movie exhibition houses of the early years of cinema no longer exist, we can often still experience the physical presence of the movie palaces and downtown theaters of the later silent era. While many of the theaters built during the 1920s have also disappeared, there are still surviving examples of the movie theater culture of the heyday of silent movie features. Some, like the legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California (now called the TCL Chinese Theatre), have survived as active first-run movie theaters. Others, especially the downtown movie houses that were a fixture of smaller towns throughout the United States, have been turned into restaurants, clothing stores, yoga studios, almost anything, really, but they often still feature a marquee or elaborately lighted name that reminds us of a time when they were the center of the community’s movie screen experiences.

This Case Study is an extension of the online case study for Chapter 2 that asked you to investigate the local theater history of the nickelodeon era. Continue your exploration of your local cinema history and its connections to the larger trends and developments in American cinema history by locating and learning about your community’s silent movie palaces and central theaters. As with the nickelodeons, newspaper archives and the movie magazines accessible through the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject.org/) are great places to start, as is the Cinema Treasures website, a resource containing information about thousands of theaters across the United States (http://cinematreasures.org/).

As you learn about these theaters, find collections and examples of the posters, advertisements, and other promotional materials that the theaters used as part of their marketing strategies. One research goal might be to recreate what a night at a movie palace was like in the 1920s, at the height of the silent era. While the 1920s was almost one hundred years ago, many of the theaters built in the late teens and twenties carried on as movie theaters for decades. Look for opportunities to interview older movie fans, such as grandparents and seniors in your community, about their memories of the theater you are investigating from the 1940s and 1950s. What did “going to the movies” mean to them? How did the screen experience of the movies function as part of their day-to-day lives and how they connected to the larger culture around them?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Movies

The example of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation holds a prominent place in our discussions of the screen experience of race in early American cinema, but from the beginnings of moving pictures through the advent of the sound era, the American novel most frequently adapted into the movies was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The most popular novel of the nineteenth century, it is no surprise that early movie makers sought to capitalize on the fame of both the book and the hundreds of stage, vaudeville, and minstrel show adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that were a staple of nineteenth-century American popular culture (Martin Scorsese’s 2002 movie Gangs of New York includes a recreation of a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as might have been seen in the New York City of 1862).

While Stowe’s novel is unequivocal in its condemnation of slavery, it too has had a racial history as complex and almost as controversial as Griffith’s movie. While the novel focuses on the struggles and heroism of a group of African American characters trying to survive and escape from enslavement, Stowe regularly uses forms of dialect and descriptions of black characters that participate in condescending or paternalistic racial stereotypes. Issues of stereotyping only increased with the many stage interpretations of the novel, most of which featured white actors in blackface playing the main characters and imitating the exaggerated antics of minstrel performers.

When early American moviemakers began adapting the novel (beginning with Edwin S. Porter’s fourteen-minute “full length” version in 1903), these issues of racial representation persisted, as producers and directors tried to balance the novel’s anti-slavery message with the racist attitudes of early twentieth-century America (http://youtu.be/gfLj2nuc2Do). For this Case Study, trace the history of adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the silent era, focusing in particular on how representations of race operate in screen experiences meant to evoke the most famous abolitionist novel of all time while also fitting in with dominant racial attitudes. For example, the movies continued the practice of using white actors in blackface appearing as the title character of Uncle Tom until the director William Robert Daly’s 1914 version featuring Sam Lucas as Tom (http://youtu.be/0M7sDoydlzc).

Of particular interest is Harry Pollard’s lavish, two-and-a-half hour version of the novel made at Universal in 1927 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVFcTV5vFG8). One of the most expensive movies made in the silent era, Pollard’s film features the African American actor James. B. Lowe as Uncle Tom. The movie appeared shortly after the premiere of The Jazz Singer, and Universal pulled the movie in mid-release to add a musical soundtrack with two words of dialogue and several sound effects. The soundtrack also contributes to the racial stereotyping of the movie, with “white” and “black” music accompanying different characters. In addition to creating this sound version, Universal also produced different edited versions of the movie to show in different parts of the country, being especially worried about offending Southern white sensibilities. As a result, the movie is both an important example of race in the silent era and how recorded sound began to affect the screen experiences of the movies in the late 1920s.

The Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture website at the University of Virginia is an invaluable resource for learning about the impact and legacy of Stowe’s novel in American culture, including an extensive section devoted to movie adaptations of the novel (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/films/fihp.html). The site includes information about the various movie adaptations, including clips from the surviving movies, and a detailed analysis of Pollard’s 1927 Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The section on later appearances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the movies also contains fascinating and often shocking examples of the vexed history of race in the movies, including Disney cartoons and Judy Garland appearing in blackface as the rebellious child slave Topsy (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/films/cameos/hollywood.html).

In the years since the beginning of the sound era and especially as the twentieth-century civil rights movement revived after World War II, movie studios became much more reluctant to adapt Stowe’s novel. In part, of course, this reluctance stems from the novel itself becoming less of a prominent part of popular culture, but the challenges posed by the novel’s representations of race point to the complexities of dealing with race in a visual medium. There was a television movie version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1987 (Stan Lathan) that set as its goal a more faithful adaptation of the novel’s plot and spirit than earlier versions while avoiding minstrel show influences. Still, it is significant that a novel that was such a prominent part of the history of early American cinema wound up almost disappearing completely later.

Chapter 4

Exploitation Movies: Sex, Drugs, and Reefer Madness

“The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you.” So goes the warning that preceded Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier 1936), maybe the most famous of the hundreds of screen experiences known as exploitation movies, movies that existed outside the world of mainstream Hollywood cinema in the studios age but were still seen by millions of American moviegoers across the country. These were movies that focused on, to borrow the title of Eric Schaefer’s landmark study of exploitation cinema (https://www.dukeupress.edu/Bold-Daring-Shocking-True), the “bold, daring, shocking, and true!” Reefer Madness claimed to serve as a warning against the “scourge” of marijuana, but in making this warning the movie indulged in scenes of the wild sexual activity and violence that supposedly accompanied marijuana smoking.

Exploitation movies serve as a fascinating, startling, and often dumbfounding area of American cinema history and as examples of the social processes by which the screen experiences of the movies are divided into the mainstream and the underground, the respectable and the illicit, those that deserve critical scrutiny and those that are seen as easily ignored. From the beginnings of American cinema, the cultural reputation of the movies has been a recurring question, one having to do with censorship, with the different audiences for different screen experiences, and with the fundamental reasons we go to the movies in the first place. The bold, the daring, the shocking, and the (supposedly) true have always been a part of the attractions of the cinematic screen experience, and to this day we continue to argue about what we find most important and valuable about the movies:  Is it the moral significance of the stories they tell? The psychological insights they provide into the characters represented? The emotional power of the images we see?

Growing out of a series of “sex hygiene” movies made in the teens warning about the consequences of sexually transmitted infections, exploitation movies really began to flourish with the imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s and its prohibitions against the portrayal of a range of “controversial” subject matter in mainstream Hollywood movies, from drug abuse to sexuality to nudity to graphic crime and violence, all of which became fodder for exploitation movies like Reefer Madness, Child Bride (Harry J. Revier 1938), and Mom and Dad (William Beaudine 1945). These movies were made on the (very) cheap, outside of the Hollywood studio structure, including the B-movie structure of “Poverty Row,” and thus they were not subject to the Production Code. Exhibitors would take these movies from town to town, renting theater space and advertising the movies locally, usually with restrictions that the movies were for adults or that men and women attend gender segregated screenings. They tried to avoid local censorship laws by presenting themselves as “educational,” sometimes with so-called “expert” lecturers appearing along with the movies.

The movies were often shown under different titles, and different versions would be cobbled together to show in different parts of the country. Even crediting many of these movies to a single “director” is difficult, as the moviemakers would regularly reuse stock footage or recombine earlier movies into “new” movies. These screen experiences also resist the conventions of narrative and character continuity that came to define conventional moviemaking, one reason that a movie like Reefer Madness found new popularity beginning in the 1970s for its camp qualities, including what now seems like its ridiculous depiction of the effects of marijuana, but also for its feeble acting and apparent disregard for maintaining a consistent story line. And Reefer Madness can seem like a model of clarity and logic compared to others from the period. A movie like Mom and Dad, ostensibly a warning against teen pregnancy and in favor of sex education, includes long sequences taken from medical movies of actual childbirth, presented to provide both instruction and illicit excitement at watching something usually forbidden from the screen.

In this Case Study, explore the world of the exploitation movies of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s by watching Reefer Madness, available at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/reefer_madness1938), and doing further research into how a movie like this would have operated within the movie culture of the 1930s. Begin with your own reactions to the movie. What did you find laughable? Confusing? Most and least like a “conventional” movie? Move on to speculate about why you think audiences would have been attracted to a movie such as Reefer Madness. Begin to read in the literature surrounding the movie, from any contemporary notices you can find from the archives of a trade publication such as Variety.

Continue your research with the work of contemporary scholars such as Eric Schafer, who suggests that these movies are better understood in terms of their supplying audiences with sensational images than as simply poor imitations of Hollywood movies. Finally, consider the symbiotic relationship between the mainstream movie business and the exploitation movies. How does each depend on each other for their identities and in terms of attracting audiences? What about those film experiences, such as “hard core” pornography, that exist apart from either mainstream or exploitation movies? Can we see examples of how exploitation has influenced mainstream moviemaking?

The War and 1940s Movies

World War II touched every aspect of American life and culture between 1941 and 1945. Thousands of (mostly) men enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces, the economy switched into a wartime production mode, and the government instituted massive propaganda campaigns (with the help of Hollywood, as we have seen) to mobilize public opinion and public action to support the war effort. We can see the most obvious evidence of the impact of World War II on American cinema in those movies that directly address the war experience, from “war movies” about the experiences of soldiers in combat to romantic melodramas like Casablanca set against the backdrop of the war, to Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons mocking Adolf Hitler and indulging in racist stereotypes about the Japanese. But what about those movies released during the war years that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with the war? Can we find evidence of the impact of the war on those comedies, musicals, crime stories, and melodramas that never explicitly mention the war or that are even set in different time periods? From another perspective, how does it affect our screen experience of Hollywood movies from the studios age to consider these movies as wartime movies?

For this Case Study, choose an American movie released roughly between 1942 and 1946 that you do not think of as a “wartime” movie and consider the question of what it might mean to view it in the light of the impact of the war on American life. Take, for example, Howard Hawk’s 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s classic of hard-boiled detective fiction, The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. The plot of the movie centers on a complicated story of blackmail and murder involving a wealthy Los Angeles family. Although apparently taking place in the “present” of 1945/1946, no character ever openly refers to the war (perhaps not that surprising in a movie based on a novel that was published in 1939).

Yet some small details suggest otherwise. For example, shots that include close-ups of the car that Marlowe drives reveal a “B” gas rationing sticker on the windshield. Almost every car in the US during the war featured one of these stickers, part of the gasoline rationing scheme that limited the amount of fuel drivers could buy per week. That Marlowe has a “B” sticker suggests that even though he is a private detective, his work was still considered more “essential” by the government than the majority of drivers, who only received “A” stickers.

More obvious are the women that the detective Philip Marlowe encounters during his investigation who are running libraries, managing a small bookstore (Dorothy Malone runs a bookstore that provides a stakeout location for Marlowe; http://youtu.be/AO9Q-81w6KQ), and most notably driving a taxi cab (Joy Harlow plays a taxi driver who helps Marlowe tail a suspect; http://www.dailymotion.com/video/), evidence of women stepping outside of traditional gender roles to take up the work of men involved in the war effort. That these women aggressively flirt with Marlowe could point to a combination of fascination and unease that accompanied this government-sanctioned involvement of women in jobs that had been considered appropriate only for men.

In terms of theme, we could argue that the focus on violence, murder, and disorder that defines a murder mystery such as The Big Sleep could not help but connect with the wartime anxiety of audience members (including active members of the armed forces; Hollywood movies were regularly sent overseas to entertain the troops, and this is certainly true of The Big Sleep, a version of which actually premiered for US troops in Europe before it played in the US). But what of a musical like Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincent Minnelli 1944)? This glossy, gorgeous MGM musical starring Judy Garland seems an obvious attempt to escape from the anxieties of wartime America by transporting viewers to a mythical version of turn-of-the-century St. Louis, where we watch a year in the life of the white middle-class Smiths, an idealized version of the American family. No major tragedy or conflict visits the Smith family; the major plot development turns on whether Mr. Smith will accept a lucrative transfer to New York or keep his family in St. Louis.

Even in this legendary example of the MGM movie musical, directed by the equally legendary Vincent Minnelli, overtones of the war seep through. For one, the depiction of such an idealized version of America fits in with the propaganda aims of the Office of War Information to emphasize, as the Capra documentaries state, “Why We Fight”—the preservation of the “American way of life.” Beyond that, there are darker moments in this bright technicolor story that would connect with the fears and anxieties of the wartime audience. The youngest Smith family member, the precocious little girl Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), for example, has a taste for the macabre, reveling in stories of murder and conducting funerals for her dolls who “die.” The Halloween sequence, which involves Tootie taking part in a prank that she believes results in murder, is filmed almost as a horror movie.

Tootie’s Christmas Eve despair at her family’s impending move results in her destroying the family of snowmen (surrogates for the Smith family) they have in the yard. The fact that these incidents all involve the cute and comical Tootie indicates we are not to take them too seriously, but at the same time they add a disturbing awareness of death and mortality to a story about American optimism and idealism. Even the Christmas carol that Judy Garland’s character of Esther sings to Tootie carries a special poignancy. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would go on to become a Christmas staple, but the lyrics deal with separation and longing in lines like “through the years, we all will be together/if the fates allow.” In fact, an original version of the song was reported to have the lyrics “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last,” a reference to the uncertainty of the war years, which MGM had changed (http://youtu.be/yudgy30Dd68.

As you write about the movie you choose for your Case Study, begin by documenting any possible references to the war you can spot while experiencing the movie. Reflect on how your awareness of this larger wartime context affected your screen experience, especially if this is a movie you had watched before without thinking of it as a “war” movie. Place your own reactions in greater context by locating contemporary reviews of the movie and information about the original production process. How aware or deliberate were the original filmmakers and viewers about the wartime context? Browse through the subsequent critical and scholarly discussions of the movie; to what extent do they refer to the wartime context? Your goal is an essay or blog post on “_____ as a wartime movie,” in which you synthesize your research and thinking about the movie into your own critically supported point of view.

Chapter 5

Post-War Avant-Garde Movies

It’s a movie titled, simply but in all capital letters, A MOVIE. It’s about twelve minutes long, and it can be found online easily. You can watch it here, but you should know ahead of time that it contains images you may find disturbing (http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/). What was your screen experience of A MOVIE like? What other kinds of screen experiences did it remind you of? What seemed most unusual? Most intriguing? Was your overall experience frustrating? Fascinating? Were you eager to see more “movies” like this?

A MOVIE was made in 1958 by the American artist Bruce Conner and is now considered a key example of American avant-garde or experimental moviemaking. Conner created A MOVIE by combining clips from many other films, from Hollywood features to documentaries to newsreels, including parts of movies conventionally seen as “outside” the “real” movie, like countdown numbers, title cards, and the announcement of “The End.” In making a movie called A MOVIE, Conner offers a screen experience that causes us to think about just what it means to watch a movie, about what our expectations are for watching a movie, and in what ways we have learned—or been conditioned—to experience movies in particular ways and for particular reasons. This Case Study asks you to explore examples of the burst of experimental avant-garde American filmmaking in the post-World War II era, a series of diverse, exciting, baffling, and challenging screen experiences that took place largely away from conventional movie theaters and apart from the mainstream Hollywood tradition but that had a major impact and influence on American movie culture.

Experimental filmmaking has always been a part of movie culture, both in the US and around the world. In a very real sense, all early filmmaking was experimental, as moviemakers, audiences, and studio owners developed what came to be seen as “conventional” movies, creating categories of the “normal” and the “strange.” The post World War II period, in particular, saw a resurgence of experimental, revolutionary, and avant-garde art across a range of mediums, from the Beat movement and the New York school in literature to Abstract Expressionism in visual art to bebop and free form jazz in music, and film was no different. These movements drew their energies from many factors, including the freedom and mobility of car culture, an increasingly affluent consumer culture that inspired a reaction against suburban conformity, the expanding civil rights movements, and the growing influence and impact of mass media.

The roots of this experimental tradition can be found in the work of filmmakers like Maya Deren, whose Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 helped demonstrate the possibilities of do-it-yourself sixteen-millimeter filmmaking, and Kenneth Anger, who made the experimental and groundbreaking example of gay-influenced cinema Fireworks in 1947 when he was only twenty. In New York City, a group of filmmakers centered around Jonas Mekas, who along with his brother Adolfas had started the magazine Film Culture dedicated to experimental movies and the idea of cinema as art. On the west coast, San Francisco, home to a flourishing Beat counter culture, became another center of experimental film. Wherever they were located, artists like Conner, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Baillie, Shirley Clarke, and others challenged and played with almost every aspect of screen experiences, from the compilation/collage style of Conner to Brakhage’s scratching the surface of the film itself to Clarke’s focus on gritty depictions of urban culture.

Probably the most famous experimental filmmaker of the 1960s was also one of the most famous and significant visual artists as well, Andy Warhol. The experimental movies produced by his “Factory” studio during the decade achieved widespread notice, both positive and negative, especially Empire (1964), an eight-hour-long slow motion film of the Empire State Building at night, and Sleep (1963), a five-and-a-half-hour movie of a man sleeping. These were just two of the many films Warhol and his company produced, films that played with ideas of celebrity, challenged conventions of sexual and gender identity, and experimented with film style and narrative form. For many Americans, Warhol’s films came to define the idea of avant-garde film, both arousing curiosity and provoking anxiety and even hostility.

The reality is that the blanket terms “avant-garde film” or “experimental film” cover an astonishing diversity of screen experiences, from the extremely brief to the punishingly long, from abstract, formal compositions to openly political and subversive films. The only real common denominator may be the conscious desire to try something new and different, to expand the idea of movies beyond the conventions of Hollywood. For your Case Study, watch one of the five experimental movies below and explore the questions of what makes them experimental and how they make you think about the screen experience of the movies. After recording your initial reactions to the movie, watch them again to see how a new experience builds on your initial impressions. Then, find out more about the filmmaker and the context in which the movie was made. Read artistic manifestoes about avant-garde filmmaking from the post-war period such as the statement by the New American Cinema group in 1962, available at the New American Cinema Group/Film Maker’s Collective website (http://film-makerscoop.com/about/history).

How does your reading about the philosophies and purposes behind these filmmakers affect your experience of the movie you watched? Expand your search to read critics and scholars writing about the film you are studying and include this input in your findings. Some overall questions to consider:

  • Based on your Case Study, how would you define the meaning and significance of experimental or avant-garde cinema?
  • What are the main challenges the movie you are experiencing presents to “conventional” moviemaking? How does the movie make you more aware of what these conventions are (such as an emphasis on logical, linear continuity in narrative structure) and the effect they have on the expectations and experiences of viewers?
  • What influence can you see of these post-war experimental films on the evolution and development of Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s? Can you find evidence of “mainstream” directors and filmmakers citing the impact of experimental films on their work?
  • Finally, use your historical research to provide a basis for exploring contemporary avant-garde and experimental cinema.

The Movies

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid 1943).
One of the most significant avant-garde American films and one that influenced many post-war experimental filmmakers. Meshes of the Afternoon experiments with how to tell a story in film and plays with the boundaries between dream worlds and reality.
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger 1947).
Made by the twenty-year-old Anger in his parents’ Beverly Hills home, Anger’s film mixes surrealism with homoerotic themes and imagery that definitely challenged Production-Code-era representations of sexuality (http://vimeo.com/73727414).
A MOVIE (Bruce Conner 1958).
See link above.
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage 1963).
Brakhage’s short experimental film was constructed without the use of a camera. Brakhage embedded different thin objects—including moth wings—between two clear strips of film and had them processed into a movie (http://youtu.be/XaGh0D2NXCA).
Castro Street (Bruce Baillie 1966).
Baillie uses a wide range of visual effects in this film, shot near an oil refinery on the San Francisco street of the movie’s title (http://youtu.be/UPhu7Qdp3pQ).

Educational, Industrial, and Sponsored Films

Of all the multiple screen experiences that have defined the history of American cinema, one of the most common has often gone overlooked, whether in our popular memory of movie history or in scholarly accounts of the development of American film: the school classroom. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, American students began watching movies in school, a practice that continues to this day, whether the viewing situation involves a projector and screen, a television set and videotape player, or an Internet connection and video projector. The period from the end of World War II through the 1970s saw an explosion in the production of films for the classroom, especially in the 1950s. These films covered a wide range of instructional purposes, from explaining concepts in science and recounting American history to offering lessons in proper social and sexual behavior and, famously, explaining how best to survive a nuclear attack.

Some of these movies, such as Duck and Cover, produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1951 as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was intensifying, have attained camp status as an example of American propaganda directed at schoolchildren. Aimed at instructing elementary school students in how to “duck and cover” beneath their desks in case atomic bombs start falling, the movie’s use of an animated turtle named Bert and a jaunty song based on the movie’s title, along with what now seems like the absurd and disturbing juxtaposition of a lighthearted children’s song with an narrator warning that the atomic bomb could drop at any second, can make Duck and Cover seem bizarre and even ridiculous to contemporary viewers. To a generation of schoolchildren, however, films like this were a part of regular drills in preparation for World War III (https://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava11109vnb1).

Educational films are a part of a category of American cinema that the historian and archivist Rick Prelinger has described as “sponsored films,” including films made by corporations to promote their products and instruct their employees, short movies made by political groups to promote social policies, instructional movies concerning issues of public health and safety, and a wide variety of other purposes. These movies would be seen in classrooms, shown as short subjects before feature films in theaters, broadcast on television channels, seen at work or at places of worship, or in just about any place where people gathered on a regular basis.

Educational films can serve as a lens for studying changing attitudes, values, and ideologies concerning politics, gender roles, the purposes of school, the role of the citizen, and the place of the United States in the world. Thanks to the work of archivists such as Prelinger and others, thousands of these films are available online. For this case study, browse the collections of the Prelinger Archives housed at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/prelinger), especially the collection of educational films made by Coronet Instructional Films (https://archive.org/details/coronet_instructional_videos), and the collection at A/V Geeks (http://www.avgeeks.com/wp2/our-films-online/) to sample some of the movies produced for American classrooms during the period 1947 to 1966. For example, Are You Popular?, produced by Coronet in 1967, was made to instruct teens about how to achieve what the film defines as “true” popularity at school. Along the way, the movie offers a view of the gender and sexual values of the early post-war period as young actors portray dos and don’ts of social and dating behavior (https://archive.org/details/AreYouPo1947).

As you view these movies, consider the following questions:

  • What values, ideals, or attitudes does the film seem to reinforce? How explicit or implicit does this endorsement seem?
  • How does the structure and approach of the educational film reflect the expectations about what a “movie” is that viewers will have learned from watching mainstream Hollywood movies?
  • Speculate about how effective you think these films may have been as a way of constructing questions for further historical research into the strategies behind the filmmakers and how young audiences may have received these films.
  • How does the environment in which we have a screen experience—in this case, a classroom at school—affect how we make sense of and respond to that experience?

While the area of educational and supported films has received less scholarly attention and research than mainstream Hollywood film production, the last twenty years or so have seen increased interest in these movies. Books such as Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Ken Smith’s Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945–1970 (New York: Blast Books 1999) are good places to start.

Chapter 6

The Movie Ratings System

In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America officially replaced the Production Code Authority system of movie censorship, in place since 1930, with a film-rating system. Rather than a single standard that every movie must meet in order to gain MPAA approval, the rating system assigns each submitted movie a rating based on an age-based system of evaluation. When the MPAA switched to a rating system, it was reacting to a Production Code system that had been gradually falling apart since the end of World War II. But how did the new ratings system work in practice in its first decade of existence? What can the early history of the ratings system tell us about how screen experiences were changing in the 1960s and 1970s and what the flashpoints were in the evolution of contemporary movie culture?

Take, for example, Blow Up, a 1966 British movie filmed in London by the Italian director Michael Antonioni. The movie tells the story of a hip young photographer in the swinging London of the mid 1960s who comes to believe that he has inadvertently caught the picture of a dead body on film. The film may sound like a simple murder mystery, but Antonioni uses this set-up to play with the viewer’s expectations about reality and fantasy as they relate to both photography and the movies. Blow Up stars some of the most important young British actors of the time (David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles) as well as an appearance by the now legendary sixties rock group The Yardbirds. The movie was a huge popular and critical hit across Europe, and MGM wanted to capitalize on this success by bringing the movie to the US.

There was one problem, however. The movie features nudity involving young women, and the Production Code refused to approve it unless those scenes were cut out, something Antonioni refused to do. Knowing how weakened the Production Code had become and banking on the idea that the controversy over the movie could only help with publicity, MGM released the movie anyway. Their gamble paid off; the movie was a critical and box office hit in America as well, and many film historians point to the Blow Up case as accelerating the replacement of the Production Code with the ratings system.

In this Case Study, choose one of the key movies below to explore further how each played a role in the often fitful development of the movie ratings system. Begin by reading about the history of each movie’s encounters with either the Production Code or the new ratings system. What were contemporary reviewers and others saying about the movie at the time? For example, Bowsley Crowther began his review of Blow Up in the New York Times by directly alluding to the controversy with the Production Code:

It will be a crying shame if the audience that will undoubtedly be attracted to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up because it has been denied a Production Code seal goes looking more for sensual titillation than for the good, solid substance it contains—and therefore will be distracted from recognizing the magnitude of its forest by paying attention to the comparatively few defoliated trees.

As you work on your Case Study, identify what recurring issues, concerns, and arguments about the ratings system persist to this day. How do the stated purposes for the ratings system, as they were articulated in 1968, compare to the rationale for the rating system today? Some key books that deal with the ratings system include Jon Lewis’s Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), Frank Miller’s Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, and Violence on Screen (Atlanta: Turner, 1994), and Gregory Black’s Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated offers a pointed critique and exposé of the rating system.

The Movies

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967).
If Blow Up showed the fatal weakness of the Production Code, many point to Bonnie and Clyde as the movie that finished it off. The movie provoked strong arguments over its graphic depictions of violence—particularly in the slow-motion execution of the title characters that concludes the movie—as well as its sympathetic portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde. This critical debate along with word of mouth gradually turned Bonnie and Clyde into a hit movie and demonstrated to Hollywood the public demand for movies unfettered by the Production Code.
Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger 1969).
In terms of its place in the history of Hollywood censorship, Midnight Cowboy is famous both for being the first—and to date only—movie with an X or NC-17 rating to win the Best Picture Academy Award and for baffling many viewers as to why the movie received the MPAA’s most restrictive rating. An emotionally complex character study of two people living on the margins of New York in the late sixties—Joe Buck, a naïve young Texan trying to make a living as a male escort, and Ratso Rizzo, a sickly street person Buck befriends—Midnight Cowboy seems no more explicit in terms of language or nudity than most of the R-rated movies of its time. Many critics suggest that the movie’s references to gay sexuality were enough for the MPAA to react as strongly as it did, making Midnight Cowboy a key film in the representation of sexuality in American movies.
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976)
In Screen Ages we discuss the controversial history of Taxi Driver, and its challenge to the ratings system is a significant part of that history. Reacting to warnings from the MPAA that the film would receive an X rating for its scenes of graphic violence, the producers and Scorsese responded not by cutting any material but by “desaturating” the color of the most violent scenes, in effect making the blood less vividly red. These kind of detailed negotiations between filmmakers and the MPAA provide a fascinating window into the vexed history of screen violence, including how we define the term “violence” and what makes some scenes of violence more “graphic” than others.

Note

Titicut Follies, Direct Cinema, and the Documentary

In 1968, the first year of the movie ratings system and a year before Midnight Cowboy would win the Best Picture Academy Award in spite of its X rating, a judge in Massachusetts ordered another movie banned from general distribution, a ruling that for all intents and purposes kept it from being seen by audiences until 1991, some twenty-three years later. That movie was Titicut Follies (1967), the first documentary made by the filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who would go on to become one of the most influential documentarians of the last fifty years. The movie explored the day-to-day activities at the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts, a psychiatric institution that treated men incarcerated in the state prison system. The state of Massachusetts sued to have the movie banned, arguing that Wiseman’s film violated the privacy of the inmates/prisoners. Wiseman countered that the state really wanted to suppress a movie that exposed the inhumane treatment by the guards and doctors of the men confined to the hospital.

The screen experience of Titicut Follies is striking both for the disturbing actions depicted and for its distinctive style. Filmed with a handheld camera, Titicut Follies has no narration or “outside” commentary of any kind. There are no interviews with experts explaining what it is we are seeing; we only hear (or maybe overhear is the right word) what the people in the movie say to each other and the ambient sound of the world they live in. As in this clip available on YouTube, we listen as a patient argues with his attending physician over whether his confinement at Bridgewater has helped or harmed him, without intertitles telling us who these people are or a disembodied voice providing context or explanation.

This style of documentary filmmaking, which Wiseman has repeated in the forty films (and counting) he has made since, all titled after the institutions they chronicle, from High School (1968) to The Store (1983) to his recent movie about higher education, At Berkeley (2013), has been called by various names, including Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité. Theorists and historians argue about the distinctions between Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité (and Wiseman himself rejects both terms), but they all share the general characteristics of a kind of observational documentary filmmaking, including the aforementioned handheld camera, the use of ambient sound, and a reluctance to provide any explanatory framework or intrusive narration. The effect of this screen experience is to make the viewer feel like a fly on the wall, dropped into the middle of the action as if they were there as witnesses.

The development of this style of documentary filmmaking in the 1960s was enabled by the technological development of lightweight sixteen-millimeter cameras and a portable system of sound synchronization that revolutionized on-the-spot filmmaking, both in terms of documentary movies and broadcast journalism. This style of documentary filmmaking was a worldwide phenomenon; its most important adherents in American cinema included D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles, Robert Drew, as well as Wiseman. The 1960 movie Primary, for example, made by Drew, Leacock, and Pennebaker, followed the two aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, as they worked for votes in the Wisconsin primary. The movie has a behind-the-scenes quality, providing what seem to be unguarded moments with the candidates and their campaign staffs as they canvass the state, shaking hands, making speeches, and relaxing in hotel rooms. 

Pennebaker went on to make the groundbreaking music documentaries Don’t Look Back (1967), following the young Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England, and Monterey Pop (1968), chronicling some of the key figures in 1960s rock at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. The Maysles brothers made movies about both the glamorous (What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA 1964; Gimme Shelter 1970, about the disastrous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway outside of San Francisco that resulted in the murder of a fan) to the ordinary and everyday (Salesman 1969, about the daily on-the-road struggles of four Bible salesmen).

But just how direct is Direct Cinema? The immersive style of this kind of filmmaking can produce a powerful reality effect in the viewer, but, as Frederick Wiseman always reminds us, these screen experiences are still very much constructed, dependent on the choices made by the filmmakers about what to film and how to edit and structure these scenes together. In this Case Study, choose a significant example of a Direct Cinema-style film from the 1960s or 1970s such as one of those mentioned above, and explore the specific issues regarding point of view, perspective, and reality that have formed the larger cultural conversation about the movie, from the time of the movie’s first appearance until now. The controversy surrounding Titicut Follies provides a particularly striking case study, involving as it does issues of privacy, purpose, and point of view that have only become more relevant in the era of viral videos and YouTube (see the accompanying online Case Study for Chapter 8 to explore these issues further).

The issues of realism raised by this documentary style have become ingrained in our movie culture and screen experiences. The shaky handheld camera, for example, has become an almost clichéd signifier of “reality,” an association only strengthened with the development of home camcorders in the 1980s and the contemporary smart phone. Fiction filmmakers have borrowed this strategy, along with the use of ambient, overlapping sound, from the 1960s to the present, to suggest the idea of a greater, more immediate, and somehow “truer” screen experience. Horror movies in particular, such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez 1999), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves 2008), and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli 2007), use the “Direct Cinema” style to increase a sense of reality for their decidedly non-realistic stories about monsters and ghosts. The study of these groundbreaking documentaries can provide us with historical context for our ongoing discussion and debate about the relation of our screen experiences to our everyday encounters with the world.

Chapter 7

The New Queer Cinema 20 Years Later

In 1991, the Sundance Film Festival awarded its highest award, the Grand Jury Prize, to Poison, written and directed by a young filmmaker named Todd Haynes. A low-budget movie shot in 16-millimeter film and inspired by the novels of the legendary gay French writer Jean Genet, Poison interweaves three different stories told in three very different styles, from a cheesy television news documentary (complete with talking heads and cheap-looking graphics) to a black and white exploitation horror movie featuring deliberately bad sound dubbing to a mix of gritty neorealism and the obvious use of a sound stage with fake rocks and trees. The three parts—“Hero,” “Horror,” and “Homo”—deal with a very young boy who murders his abusive father and then apparently flies away, a scientist who turns into a monster after isolating and drinking the human sex drive, and an imprisoned man who falls in love with another inmate. Imaginative, experimental, and well-versed in movie history, Poison also focuses on issues of sexuality, desire, and the cultural taboos and restrictions that govern and try to suppress both of these fundamental aspects of human experience.

The next year, the film scholar B. Ruby Rich cited Poison as a key example of what she called the “New Queer Cinema,” a series of mainly American and British movies that began to appear at film festivals across the country in the late 1980s and early1990s. Like Poison, these movies, including Swoon (Tom Kalin 1992), The Living End (Gregg Araki 1992), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant 1991), and Paris is Burning (Jenny Livingston 1990) not only portrayed the lives of gay and lesbian characters but did so in bold, imaginative, and theoretically informed ways. Taking energy and inspiration from the GLBT liberation movement that gained momentum after the Stonewall demonstrations in 1969 as well as the devastation and political activism that resulted from the AIDS epidemic that began in the early 1980s, the New Queer Cinema challenged cinematic assumptions of a conservative form of heterosexuality as the norm as well as the standard genres and narrative conventions of Hollywood storytelling. Rather than trying to fit in with the mainstream, these movies explored gay sexualities as a potentially revolutionary social force.

Ten years before Poison took the top prize at Sundance, the gay scholar and activist Vito Russo had published The Celluloid Closet, a history of Hollywood’s complicated and repressive representation of queer sexuality from the beginnings of cinema to the book’s present. The young directors of the New Queer Cinema were consciously working to come out of the celluloid closet, and they drew on the work of previous gay and lesbian filmmakers, many, like Dorothy Arzner, James Whale, or George Cukor, who worked as part of mainstream Hollywood, and others, like the avant-garde filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, who more openly challenged the sexual conventions of American movies.

Poison also landed in the middle of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, as right-wing critics denounced the movie (most of whom had not seen it) because Haynes had received some funding from the government-sponsored National Endowment for the Arts. In spite of this opposition, the New Queer Cinema led to a number of gay and lesbian themed movies in the 1990s, including Go Fish (Rose Troche 1994), The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (Maria Maggenti 1995), and further work by Van Sant, Araki, and Haynes. Haynes has gone on to become one of the most influential American independent directors of the last twenty years, with films such as Far From Heaven (2002) and I’m Not There (2007), and Van Sant has moved between mainstream successes such as Good Will Hunting (1997) and more independent fare like Elephant (2003), an exploration of a high school shooting modeled on the Columbine tragedy of 1999.

This Case Study invites you to consider the long-term legacy of the New Queer Cinema. How has the representation of sexuality changed in Hollywood movies over the last twenty years? In the early 2000s, for example, movies like Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are Alright (2010), and Van Sant’s own Milk (2008), based on the life and assassination of the pioneering politician Harvey Milk, won the Best Picture Academy Award for that year, a milestone for a movie featuring an openly gay hero. In what ways do movies like these reflect a greater openness towards a wider expression of human sexuality? In what ways might this mainstream acceptance also involve restraining some of the more radical and innovative impulses of the New Queer Cinema?

In your study, choose a representative movie from the late 1980s or early 1990s, such as Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1986) or Hayne’s own Poison and what you see as a contemporary example of “queer cinema” and compare and contrast how they create their screen experiences as a way of considering issues of sexuality and cinema. Rich’s original article is a great place to start, as is her more recent book-length study, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 2013) which considers some of these same questions regarding the legacy of the nineties generation of queer filmmakers. The 1996 HBO documentary The Celluloid Closet, based on Russo’s work, is another good source.

Notes

  • B. Ruby Rich. “New Queer Cinema.” Sight & Sound 2.5 (September 1992): 30-34.
  • New York: Harper and Row 1981, revised 1987.

Music Videos and the Movies

In August of 1981, a new channel debuted on the still relatively new screen experience of cable television: MTV, shorthand for “Music Television.” The channel originally mimicked a Top Forty radio station, with “Vee-Jays” instead of DJs playing music videos all day and all night long. By the mid-1980s, both MTV and the “music video” had become buzzwords, signifying not only a particular kind of screen experience—the visual presentation of pop music songs—but almost a cultural revolution. For fans, music videos provided an exciting new way of experiencing their favorite music and an exciting new medium for artistic experimentation and innovation; for critics, MTV and music videos became a shorthand for the triumph of flash over substance, for what some saw as an increasingly shallow and hyperactive popular culture.

This debate was especially heated when it came to the question of how music videos were influencing the movies. As we know, music has been part of American movies since the so-called “silent era,” including audience sing-alongs in nickelodeons. With the coming of sound, elaborate musical numbers became a staple of movies as the musical became one of the most popular and enduring genres of American cinema. As early as the 1940s, Hollywood even began producing “soundies,” music video-style short films that could be viewed in portable screening machines. Later, as part of the New American cinema moment in the late 1960s, popular songs and rock music began to be incorporated into more and more American movies, creating movie montages that also very much resembled the later music videos.

But for many critics in the 1980s, the MTV music video was blamed for a variety of what they saw as troubling developments in American movies. They pointed to an increasing use of quick editing, of chaotic action sequences that were confusing and hard to follow (at least to these critics), of an emphasis on style over narrative and character development in movies like Flashdance (Adrian Lyne 1983) and Top Gun (Tony Scott 1986). As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the production of music videos served as a training ground for many future movie directors such as Spike Jonze, David Fincher, and Michel Gondry, evidence for some of a positive impact of movie videos in providing space for moviemakers to give free reign to their visual imaginations, a sign for others of the enduring negative influence of music videos. Today, over thirty years after the debut of MTV, the channel features very few music videos, most of which are now found online. Still, the debate over the impact of music videos on American movies remains.

For this Case Study, develop your own sense of the influence of the music video revolution by constructing a genealogy of a particular 1980s music video, a genealogy that looks both before and after the video for continuities and discontinuities, for what has changed and what has remained the same. For example, take a look at this iconic video featuring one of the artists most associated with the development of the music video, Madonna’s “Material Girl,” directed by Mary Lambert, who has gone on to a career as a feature film director (http://youtu.be/DNSUOFgj97M).

The video includes an homage/recreation of an equally iconic musical sequence from the 1953 musical directed by Howard Hawks, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” just as the song “Material Girl” can be seen as an updating of the sentiments expressed in Monroe’s number (http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/497401/). Madonna consciously modeled her artistic persona as a tribute to and critical commentary on the glamorized constructions of female identity associated with stars like Monroe, and the video offers a “behind the scenes” look at the life of a music/movie star, ending with a seeming rejection of the pragmatic and even cynical materialism of both “Diamonds” and “Material Girl.”

This deliberate evocation of a famous moment of America movie history in itself provides interesting material for considering the impact of the music video on Hollywood, as “Material Girl” demonstrates how this relationship was very much a two-way street, with the music video modeling itself on the Hollywood musical, including a happy ending for the star. But what of the longer-term influence of music videos on contemporary movies? Rather than music videos imitating the movies, have we instead seen more and more movies copying the style of music videos?

Consider the 2001 Australian/American musical Moulin Rouge! Written and directed by the Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann and produced by 20th Century Fox, Moulin Rouge! was, as you probably know, a major hit both commercially and for the most part critically as well, although some viewers were divided in their reactions. Part of this division had to do with the perception that Moulin Rouge! owed more to music videos than to the classic Hollywood or Broadway musical. As Gloria Goodale put it at the time, “If it [Moulin Rouge!] becomes a model for Hollywood studios, as some industry insiders predict it will, the movie musical of the future will draw more heavily from MTV than from ‘My Fair Lady.’”

What would make contemporary critics see Moulin Rouge! as reflecting the influence of music videos? To complete our genealogy example, locate a copy of Moulin Rouge! and watch the scene in the movie that combines both Madonna’s “Material Girl” and Gentleman Prefer Blondes, the high-energy production number version of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,”—complete with an inserted chorus from “Material Girl.” Here the movie deliberately invokes both the classic Hollywood musical and the music video, in a scene supposedly set in a Paris nightclub in the year 1900 at the dawn of the movies. In this scene, we can see the rapid editing and over-the-top visual spectacle that many point to as the legacy of music videos, but the same lavish production number can also evoke the equally over-the-top visual spectacle of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical sequence. There are many online examples of Berkeley’s work, including this famous performance of “We’re In the Money” from Gold Diggers of 1933 (http://youtu.be/UJOjTNuuEVw). So is Moulin Rouge! a prime example of how music videos have influenced the movies? Or are music videos themselves an offshoot of a longer tradition in Hollywood movies?

For your own Case Study, you might start by choosing a well-known 1980s music video (the thirteen-minute video for Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” directed by John Landis, with its tribute to 1930s Universal horror movies, is a likely choice) or a more recent movie that seems to reflect the influence and impact of music videos (such as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette from 2006, which is set in the eighteenth-century French court but features a soundtrack of 1980s pop music and its own music video sequences) and look for connections with earlier and later movies and videos. Contemporary reviews of the videos and movies can be good places to start: What influences did viewers at the time see in these different kinds of musical screen experiences?

Follow the critical histories of your choices to see how views of the videos and movies have evolved over time. There is also a growing scholarship on both the history of the music video and the influence of music videos on the movies. Marco Calavito’s essay, “‘MTV Aesthetics’ at the Movies: Interrogating a Film Criticism Fallacy,” provides both a good overview of the debate over the influence of music videos and offers a corrective historical perspective on arguments that there is such a thing as a single distinctive “MTV” or music video style.

Notes

Chapter 8

Pixar and the Computer Animation Revolution

Take a look at the following two cartoons. The first is Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ 1928 classic that marked the debut of Mickey Mouse, arguably the most famous screen character of the twentieth century: http://youtu.be/BBgghnQF6E4.

Steamboat Willie, the short movie that launched both the Disney Company and led to the development of the feature-length cartoon with Snow White in 1937, was made the old-fashioned way. Ub himself created over 14,000 separate drawings for the cartoon, each one almost an exact duplicate of the one before except for the slight repositioning of the characters and objects that created the illusion of movement. Although Snow White would be made with a multiplane camera, allowing background images to remain the same from drawing to drawing, animation remained a laborious, time-intensive, hand-drawn process for the next half century, whether based on individual drawings or on the “stop-machine” technique involving making small movements in figurines and photographing a few frames at a time.

Now watch another cartoon from about sixty years later in 1986. It’s equally revolutionary in its own way as Steamboat Willie, if much less famous. It’s called Luxo Jr. (http://youtu.be/D4NPQ8mfKU0).

Luxo Jr. is the first experimental animated movie from a computer company called Pixar. Started by George Lucas’s Lucasfilm company and bought by the Apple computer founder Steve Jobs, Pixar initially focused on making computers to be used in animation. Luxo Jr., however, directed by John Lasseter, represented the real future for Pixar: the creation of computer-animated movies, culminating in the company’s first feature film and the first major computer-animated feature, Lasseter’s Toy Story in 1996.

Chances are, if you were born any time after 1985, Pixar movies and computer-animated features have formed a significant part of your early screen experiences. Computer animation also represented the most radical change in the production of cartoons since Winsor McKay’s early silent films featuring Gertie the dinosaur in 1914. No longer reliant on thousands of hand-made drawings, computer animation relies on software to make the millions of changes from image to image that produce the final animated movie. It’s still a painstaking and laborious process, but one that can allow for levels of detail, complexity of motion, and the illusion of depth (both in 2D and 3D versions of computer animation) difficult to achieve with traditional hand-drawn animation. The movies of Pixar and the other major computer animation companies, including DreamWorks (makers of Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen 2001) and other movies) and Walt Disney Studios, now form a major part of contemporary Hollywood and dominate the animation industry.

As with any technological innovation, such as the advent of sound movies or, more recently, the rise of digital movies as opposed to movies on film, the question arises of what happens to the “old” way of doing things. When Toy Story debuted in the mid-1990s, for example, Walt Disney Studios (which distributed Pixar and would later buy the company in 2006) was in the middle of what many call a renaissance of their great tradition of animated features, a string of traditionally hand-drawn animated movies (although using some computer assistance) beginning with The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Muster) in 1989 and continuing with Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise 1991) and The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff 1994) among others, which were international hits. By the turn of the century, however, there were questions about whether the success of computer animation meant the end of the hand-drawn tradition. Disney itself turned to computer animation, winning their first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (an award that only began in 2001) with the computer-animated Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) in 2014.

For your Case Study, compare and contrast two examples of contemporary animation, one computer-generated, the other hand-drawn or stop-motion (including movies like Coraline (Henry Selick 2009) or Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson 2009)). Your question is to speculate on how you think the advent of computer-generated animation has changed the way we experience animation and what these changes might mean for the future of animation.

What, for example, do you see as the relative strengths and weaknesses of each type of animation? Are there differences in how viewers respond to each kind of cartoon or animation? You should also factor in the importance of economics to the equation: studios can produce computer animation more rapidly than hand-drawn cartoons. At the same time, a kind of arms race has developed, as computer animators try to outdo each other in terms of visual spectacle and innovation. Has hand-drawn animation now acquired a new distinguishing and attractive quality as representing a more traditional and authentic form of animation?

YouTube and the Viral Video

As we have explored throughout Screen Ages, the term “movie” has never been a stable category, no more than the variety of evolving screen experiences that have defined the history of American cinema. In the Case Studies included in the hard-copy version of Screen Ages, you are asked to consider the future of movies in the twenty-first century. This Case Study turns this question around a bit, asking you instead to focus on one of the most ubiquitous screen experiences in contemporary culture, the short video, whether seen on YouTube or Vimeo, and whether “short” refers to a screen experience several minutes long or the six-second time limit of the Vine video or the current popularity of the equally brief animated GIF. Again, as we have noted in Screen Ages, in many ways the proliferation of Internet videos recalls the earliest days of American movies, when viewers enjoyed equally fleeting glimpses of current events, shocking images, sports stars, even amusing cats. We traced how the cultural experience we call “the movies” developed from this early variety, but we can now explore the relationship between Internet videos and the movies in the twenty-first century.

The motivating question for this Case Study is simple: is a YouTube video a “movie”? In considering this question, you can explore related issues:

  • To what extent have YouTube and other online video sites developed their own conventions of form, genre, and purpose? What makes for a “classic” YouTube video?
  • What are the keys to the popularity of short videos? What causes a video to acquire “viral” status? How do these criteria relate to our expectations and assumptions about what makes for a feature movie?
  • How do our experiences with short Internet videos affect our experience of other, longer screen experiences?
  • Can we trace an influence of Internet videos on more mainstream Hollywood moviemaking?

Your response to this Case Study can itself assume the form of a video essay, an analytical essay in the form of a brief Internet video.