Lecture 3 – The origin of film: from the silent to the talking movies

Lecture 1 – The continuity in the codes of representation

Images as a means of communicating messages, of expressing feelings and ideas. Production of art is influenced by the social and political context of its time as well as the psychological state of the individual artist. Images predate language and can convey more condensed meaning. Multiple layers of meaning. Symbolism and the science of semiology. We read images according to our cultural background. We attribute meaning to the images according to our ideas, beliefs, worldviews.

From paintings to photography. European art centering everything on the eyes of the beholder. Camera transforms this through a decentering process. Renaissance in art drawing upon both religious and secular themes. Trade of art works among the elite. With photography images are democratised, become a mass phenomenon. The expansion of book trade, the creation of a print culture. Photography as the power of reproduction. Capturing a moment in time. According to Berger this destroys the uniqueness of the image whose meaning changes, multiplies and fragments into many meanings. “Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the spectator owner.”  

The condition of publicity. Coexistence and cooperation in a social space. The private and the public dichotomy and its gendered history. Class inequality and nationalist ideology dominating the public space. Yet publicity has a democratic potential. The public articulation of a discourse as a source of power. Commodification and the capital profit making logic. According to Berger “publicity is always about the future buyer”. Advertising logic as the envy of oneself as he/she might be. “Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure but of happiness as judged from the outside by others.” Publicity uses sexuality to sell a product or service. For publicity the present is by definition insufficient (ephemerality of the image).

John Berger's Ways of seeing. John Berger's study of oil paintings has produced a very important theoretical text. He argues that the male gaze is presupposed and assumed in the construction of the paintings. Women's bodies are turned towards the spectator while their faces are looking at the mirror.

There is a process of internalisation of the male gaze by women who look at themselves through the eyes of the man. They are being self-surveyed. The construction of the beauty ideal assumes that women should look appealing to men. Housewives should not look tired but should be attractive for their husbands who return home from work. Women should satisfy men's desires, and are not expected to have their own. “Men act, women appear” according to Berger since it is implied that men are the rational, thinking subjects whereas women are their objects of desire, emotional and beautiful creatures who are subservient and obedient to men.

Women as the property of men. Female naked body constructed as the object. “To be naked is simply to be without clothes whereas the nude is a form of art...to be naked is to be yourself, to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself”. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (the sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object)...nudity as a form of dress

Screenings: BBC documentary series Ways of seeing, episodes 1-4 (youtube)

Lecture 2 – Media of representation: from the novel to the cinema. Cartoons

Representation as construction of meaning. Imagination employed in order to “tell a story” with variable degrees of correspondance or relation with reality.

The concept of history as our present conceptualisation of past with an implicit view of implications and prospects for the future. The concept of myth as a system of values and beliefs which masquerades as a system of facts. Myth is present in everyday life and a very important aspect of society. It is the basis of ideology. The concept of narration as the method and form in which the past or the present, real or imaginary (as boundaries are often blurred) is communicated.

Narration is employed in both history and myth and is implicit in most forms of representation. The novel as a specifically modern way of narration using metaphors, allegories and symbolism. Often used to convey social and political messages. Didactic, entertaining, thought provoking. The structure: beginning, plot evolution, characters and protagonists, ending.

The print word as a specific cultural form. Linguistic standardisation, centering on the eye, reading as both passive (receiving thoughts) and active (decoding, interpreting them). The mass context. Reproduction and dissemination. The key role of illustration. Dressing the story, making the meaning visual. Book covers and the role of advertisement as shaped by the market context. The commercialisation of literature as the context shaping the content.   

Cartoons as a visual development of the novel form. More light, and more tuned to satire and entertainment. Drawings based on exaggerations, aimed to be humorous, attractive and easy to follow. Employing pictures as the main vehicle and words as the supplement. The sequence of pictures and the need for continuity. The narrative form of the novel is maintained but the descriptive and illustrative dimension become dominant. Depicting of multiple images in a chronological order in an attempt to develop the story. The moving image as an optical illusion – animation as the origin of cinematography. Parallel development of cartoons and films.

Drawing upon popular themes. The history of cartoons must be seen as parallel with the history of social imagination. The attempt to understand, subvert and transcend reality. The playful style, the injection of fairy tale rationale, the address to the children. The magical and the mythical dimension. Imagination and inspiration from real life – projecting it out of its bounds. Social models and roles – heroes and villains. Reflecting social and political norms and values. Celebrating nature and/or technology. Using the animal world in order to talk about the human world.     

Screenings: youtube

History of cartoons part 1 (9.49) [general introduction]

The skeleton dance (5.32) [1929, music and image synchronisation, entertainment]

Walt Disney animations steamboat Willie (7.23) [the first sound cartoon, 1928, Mickey Mouse famous]

Plane Crazy, Mickey Mouse Classic (6.00) [Walt Disney, 1928 with sound]

Nu Pogodi episode 1 (Soviet series that started in 1969]

Lecture 3 – The origin of film: from the silent to the talking movies

Silent movies dominant until the late 1920s. Technological means determining the cultural form. Giving rise to a particular form of film art. Key role of gestures, facial expression and body language. Open ended, leaving it to the spectators to make sense of the narrative and understand the meanings and messages. According to some Frankfurt school theorists this was more progressive, democratic and potentially revolutionary as it gave more freedom of interpretation to the spectators. More room for active participation in the evolution of the story, more liberty of sense and thought. Talking seen as constraining.

Lenin considered film as the highest form of art and sought to employ it for the purposes of revolution. (next lecture on soviet film). Walter Benjamin also talked about the revolutionary potential of cinema as it was able to bring people together to share emotions and stimulate their thought. The special effects sound and visual and advanced technological means in general were expected to shake the spectators (seeing as active subjects) and provoke reactions on their behalf bringing about new higher levels of consciousness that could make them overcome alienation. [the Marxian thesis of the proletarian passage form class in itself to class for itself.]

There was a transition from silent to talking cinema taking more than a decade. This transition was not smooth, not automatic but contested and debated. Charlie Chaplin for example continued to make silent films until the late 1930s. The first talkies were theatrical and radio works. Many saw talking cinema as a distortion of what cinema was really about. Synchronisation of speech and sound with visual image was seen as a degeneration by Paul Rotha in his 1930 global survey “The film until now”. Aesthetic quality was seen as dropping as a result of increased and more exact standardisation of camera and projector speed. In the short run the introduction of sound caused major difficulties in production.

Cameras were noisy so a soundproofed cabinet was used in many of the earliest talkies to isolate loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of the drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera. This led to the use of multiple cameras. However it was necessary for the actors to stay within the range of still microphones and this meant that the actors had to limit their movement unnaturally.

Commercial boom in the industry but this had an adverse effect on the employability of actors in Hollywood. Voice and accent became important, singing talent and vocal quality overshadowing to a certain degree their skills in dramaturgy. Movie house orchestra musicians found themselves out of work as musical tracts became prerecorded.

Film engaged with everyday themes: love, poverty, crime, work. Comedy as the most dominant genre in the 1920s. Entertainment as a commercial strategy. The origins of the modern mass spectacle. The film industry as both an economic and a cultural phenomenon. Profit making oligopolies and the combination of producers and artists. Investment, market and control. The individualised careerism and the super-star phenomenon.

Screenings: youtube

A trip to the moon 10.29 [1902, the beginning of cinema]

Making a living Charlie Chaplin (8.51) or Charlie Chaplin A Jitney Elopment (25) [1914 and 1915, building the character]

Charlie Chaplin the mirror maze [the circus] (4.34) [1928, already a star]

Modern Times, factory scene 7.25 [1936, introducing sound, social critique]

Chaplin-the dictator speech (5.00) [politics, Chaplin speaking]