Monday 28 August 2017
City of God
http://www.identitytheory.com/meirelles-city-god-movie/
https://www.cinemahumain.com/city-of-god/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/25/why-i-love-city-of-god-favela
http://cinephile.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/carlsten-cityofgod.pdfhttps://www.ukessays.com/essays/film-studies/essay-of-city-of-god.phphttps://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2004/06/the-movie-review-city-of-god/69527/https://sjfilmhistory.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/film-analysis-city-of-god/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(2002_film)http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9507E0D71E31F934A25752C0A9659C8B63https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265352231_Realism_and_Reality_of_Blood_City_of_God_10_Years_Later
http://users.wfu.edu/jarretes/jasonsg_City_of_God.htm
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2003/01/16/an-interview-with-fernando-meirelleshttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/dec/08/features.review1
http://fm4rev.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/city-of-god-2002meirelles-set-in-urban.htmlhttp://www.participations.org/Volume%208/Issue%202/3d%20Gregoli.pdfhttps://prezi.com/hyq_dcay03vy/representation-of-poverty-in-la-haine-and-city-of-god/
Monday 26 June 2017
Wednesday 26 April 2017
A2 Media Exam
This from an excellent Media department blog by JP Hibbert. Not evrything applies to what you're doing - but some of it does...
Ditto the presentation below:
Monday 3 April 2017
Tuesday 14 February 2017
Documentary
Types:
Essay Film
• The polar opposite of Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité is what is known as the essay film. Like a written essay, the essay film is about the filmmaker’s opinion on a given issue. Specifically, the filmmaker states a thesis early on, and then goes on to provide supporting evidence throughout the film.
• All sides of an issue are not necessarily shown. If they are, it is usually designed to expose or trip up the opposing party.
• The biggest criticism of this approach is that it is not balanced. Proponents say that there is no need for "balance" because these films are, in essence, essays—the filmmaker's opinion based on the way he interprets the evidence.
• Michael Moore uses this approach in his movies. In fact, most of the successful documentary films of recent years are essay type films.
Possible models or narrative strategies:
Expository: lecturing, overtly didactic, e.g. with a personal presenter or an explanatory voice-over.
Observational: like a "fly on the wall," the camera, microphone and film crew seem not to be disturbing the scene or even to be noticed by the participants.
Participatory or interactive: the film crew takes part in the action or chain of events.
Reflexive: the film exposes and discusses its own role as a film (e.g. the ethics or conditions of filmmaking) alongside the treatment of the case or subject.
Performative: the film crew creates many of the events and situations to be filmed by their own intervention or through events carried out for the sake of the film.
Poetic: the aesthetic aspects, the qualities of the form and the sensual appeals are predominant.
From Bill Nichols' work, e.g. Introduction to Documentary (Indiana University Press, 2001).
Using the above criteria, how would you define your documentary? Say, according to Bill Nichols (2001), there are six basic types of documentary; explain them and then say where yours fits. http://prezi.com/kiori4idzwed/theory-and-analysis-of-the-documentary-film/ Look at the Screenonline pages for documentary to give yourself some background: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/446186/index.html http://www.screenonline.org.uk/education/id/1271387/
Look at the purposes of documentary – where does yours fit? ‘It’s not so much what you get in the shooting but what you do with it afterwards’ Paul Watson doc maker
How does voice-over, selection of material, use of experts, hidden camera footage, found footage, sound selection of images, and use of editing construct a particular version of reality – and whose interests does this serve?
Why do audiences ‘trust’ documentaries? Think of the problems you’ve faced in making your documentary. Where couldn’t you film? Who couldn’t you talk to? Why? What were the restrictions placed on this project? Who is your audience? A niche audience? In what context would it be shown?
Essay Film
• The polar opposite of Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité is what is known as the essay film. Like a written essay, the essay film is about the filmmaker’s opinion on a given issue. Specifically, the filmmaker states a thesis early on, and then goes on to provide supporting evidence throughout the film.
• All sides of an issue are not necessarily shown. If they are, it is usually designed to expose or trip up the opposing party.
• The biggest criticism of this approach is that it is not balanced. Proponents say that there is no need for "balance" because these films are, in essence, essays—the filmmaker's opinion based on the way he interprets the evidence.
• Michael Moore uses this approach in his movies. In fact, most of the successful documentary films of recent years are essay type films.
Possible models or narrative strategies:
Expository: lecturing, overtly didactic, e.g. with a personal presenter or an explanatory voice-over.
Observational: like a "fly on the wall," the camera, microphone and film crew seem not to be disturbing the scene or even to be noticed by the participants.
Participatory or interactive: the film crew takes part in the action or chain of events.
Reflexive: the film exposes and discusses its own role as a film (e.g. the ethics or conditions of filmmaking) alongside the treatment of the case or subject.
Performative: the film crew creates many of the events and situations to be filmed by their own intervention or through events carried out for the sake of the film.
Poetic: the aesthetic aspects, the qualities of the form and the sensual appeals are predominant.
From Bill Nichols' work, e.g. Introduction to Documentary (Indiana University Press, 2001).
Using the above criteria, how would you define your documentary? Say, according to Bill Nichols (2001), there are six basic types of documentary; explain them and then say where yours fits. http://prezi.com/kiori4idzwed/theory-and-analysis-of-the-documentary-film/ Look at the Screenonline pages for documentary to give yourself some background: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/446186/index.html http://www.screenonline.org.uk/education/id/1271387/
Look at the purposes of documentary – where does yours fit? ‘It’s not so much what you get in the shooting but what you do with it afterwards’ Paul Watson doc maker
How does voice-over, selection of material, use of experts, hidden camera footage, found footage, sound selection of images, and use of editing construct a particular version of reality – and whose interests does this serve?
Why do audiences ‘trust’ documentaries? Think of the problems you’ve faced in making your documentary. Where couldn’t you film? Who couldn’t you talk to? Why? What were the restrictions placed on this project? Who is your audience? A niche audience? In what context would it be shown?
Monday 30 January 2017
Monday 31 October 2016
Monday 17 October 2016
Tuesday 4 October 2016
Monday 3 October 2016
Friday 9 September 2016
Friday 27 May 2016
Tuesday 24 May 2016
Monday 23 May 2016
Tuesday 17 May 2016
Friday 29 April 2016
Friday 15 April 2016
Thursday 17 March 2016
A2 Planning and Evaluation - with some theory chucked in for good measure...
A2 Planning
Planning needs to be thorough and show clear and excellent evidence of research into existing media products. Where possible, link relevant material on the Internet to your work.
Your blog needs to be a media production in itself, so you need to include the trailer or music videos you’ve analysed via YouTube or some other moving image file-sharing site. I know we can’t see that at school, but you can do it at home. You should also upload your music track – and others you have considered.
If you want to put a play list on (of stuff you like – this doesn’t have to be relevant to the project, but it could be), feel free. The more the blog looks less like an essay with a few pictures, the better. Try http://www.ehow.com/how_2227764_layout-widgets-playlist-blogger-account.html or http://pera-sa-internet.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-put-or-add-playlist-on-blogger.html or http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80259. There are plenty of other sites that offer advice and help, but don’t expect to be able to access them all at school and because of copyright issues, you might not have access to as wide a range of songs as you’d like – though there are ways around this, such as creating your own site to host the songs.
You should each have analysed at least two of the media products you’re creating, including those for your ancillary task. If you’re in a group, don’t analyse the same products.
Storyboards and flat plans must be scanned and included on the blog with relevant comments about layout and revisions etc. There’s no rule about what kind of digipack you use (reference sites like http://www.duplication.ca/printspecs/digipack.htm), but be consistent within your group – unless one of you wants to produce a limited edition – and produce variants of the cover in that particular style. Song titles can exist ones.
Compose a synopsis of the film you’ve made the trailer for; outline the story behind your video; transcribe the lyrics of the song explaining how they inspired you.
You should show that you’ve attempted to contact the record label that owns the music track (for trailer of music DVD) to ask their permission. You may not get a reply, but you can post the email that you sent on the blog. Explain that it’s for a school project and that you’ll send them a copy of the finished article as a matter of courtesy.
You must be able to show that you have edited your work – moving images and still – so reflect this (with images) in your planning and EXPLAIN why. The examiners will want to see the thought process behind such decisions. Try to be sophisticated about this – don’t just say you thought it looked better, even if you did.
Produce a profile of your ideal target audience member. Of course, you can make this up (name included), but you’ll need to suggest interests etc that fit in with what you’re doing and suggest they have enough disposable income to buy CDs, DVDs, downloads, go to gigs, wear the right clothes etc. Those of you who’ve done mood boards in art could do one for a target audience profile e.g. http://mediafoundationportfolio.blogspot.com/2009/12/crank-music-magazine-audience-profile.html.
To break up the blog, you should include some direct to camera pieces, preferably featuring you, but at the very least, you could film interviews members of your intended audience giving feedback on the finished product. This will get better marks.
You should link to any useful examples of work or theory you come across and anything worthwhile in the sidebar of http://heworthmediastudies.blogspot.com/. You can change the layout of your blog and create a poll (in gadgets) that you ask (i.e. force) people to fill in as part of the feedback; you should enable comments – you can, after all, delete anything you don’t like; you should create a profile for yourself with a picture and enable followers, encouraging other people in the class to follow your blog – it’s no worse than Facebook and it’ll look as if you’re taking the blog seriously and it may get you higher marks.
Outtakes, even (especially?) embarrassing ones, should be uploaded as an extra track on the DVD and onto the blog.
A2 Evaluation
They can be bullet-pointed in places and you MUST address the following questions, so don’t write the whole thing in one lump and expect the examiners (or us) to sift through it and work out what’s what. Make it as easy as possible for the examiner!
- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
This next point isn’t a question but you would do well to consider it under the first point or the seconds – or a bit of both…
How did you attract/address your audience? You need references to theory here – Naomi Wolf, Marjorie Ferguson, Uses and Gratifications - you are exploiting the theory of Uses and Gratifications because your target audience will identify (though it may only be wishful thinking) with the lifestyle it promotes. Some of you have used people of a similar age to your audience to add to this appeal. Your audience will look to your product for a sense of personal identity and possibly aspire to be like some of the people featured or their lives and problems may reflect the lives and problems of people you know. Your theories need dates. Google them
- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
You need to consider what you’ve learned about the way the media produce, distribute and share material. You need to consider the synergy between the products and remember, your work will constitute only part of a promotional campaign for the product/artist and you will need to stress how this works – i.e. the need to buy advertising on television or radio; the need to have a PR department that can push your artist to radio and TV stations so they can get airtime and their work played; the use of the kind of posters and print advertising you see in magazines and billboards. Your artist or movie will have a website created by the production which will feature song samples, trailers, video extracts, photographs, interviews, features, competitions, opportunities for fans to air their views so they feel they are being given some kind of ownership of the product so they’ll be more likely to buy it. You will absolutely definitely need to say in the age of Media 2.0 that you world will be promoted virally on the Internet and on mobile phones, particularly as your target audience is of an age range that favours this kind of technology. You might release your work in advance to specific outlets – e.g. exclusive music video on…? Or how about a teaser trailer campaign leading up to a special screening of the movie (or even just the trailer) to a popular horror site like http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/ so they can post reviews that you can feature on the trailer? Or arrange for the trailer to be shown with popular movies in the same genre. Your movie may be low budget, but so was Paranormal Activity and this is what the filmmakers did there. Google Paranormal Activity and see the way it was promoted and became the success it is. See http://movie-critics.ew.com/2009/10/07/paranormal-activity-marketing-campaign/. http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/21095/1/PARANORMAL-ACTIVITY039S-MARKETING-HAUNTED-BY-THE-GHOST-OF-WILLIAM-CASTLE/Page1.html. You would hope this kind of publicity and releasing the trailer on YouTube would lead to the word being spread on the internet, especially amongst horror fan sites and blogs and influential message board sites like http://www.aintitcool.com/. However effective the combination is, you need to point out that what you’re doing would only constitute part of a larger campaign. Even if most people download music, people who do this still make use of cover art (which comes with the download anyhow, so the cover art is still relevant in the age of downloading. You are providing cultural meaning for the music/film trailer through commercial images and aesthetics.
Where possible link to real-life products and campaigns.
- What have you learned from your audience feedback?
You need to devise another questionnaire to help you with this - one that you could post on your blog. Is your audience one stable and easily identifiable group? Has the audience reacted in the way you expected? What has it found particularly effective about the product (include both tasks)? Why is feedback important in the media industry; how has it helped you construct your productions and how could you learn from feedback after the production is finished?
- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
It’s important you consider the blog itself as a media production. Unlike previous years, you are not just creating a production that will only bee seen by colleagues, teachers and examiners – you have actually published your work on the web where an audience of millions can see it. Using your blog, you have self-published and some, perhaps even many, of your audience is capable of doing the same, thus breaking down the idea of what constitutes an audience. New digital media “have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all the media” (David Gauntlett, 2007).
You also need to talk about your use of cameras and still and moving image editing software to create your media production, giving some specific examples of how and why you constructed particular images or scenes, texts, edits and so on, to reach your target audience.
Finally, some key points:
From past experience, don’t be too critical of yourself. If you say, “I could’ve cut out a particular photograph better,” my reaction would be: “Do it now and don’t be so complacent.” If you say, “I didn’t have enough time to do such and such,” then it’s clear evidence you’ve wasted time and you’ll be docked marks. In other words, if there’s anything you haven’t done, get it done now – and quickly.
This response MUST be illustrated all the way through with examples from your work or existing product when you make reference to it. If you don’t illustrate it, you won’t get a mark of C or above and we will be reluctant to enter it in case it results in the marks of the other students being pulled down.
If you’ve worked as a group, your contribution and that of your partners must be made clear.
You MUST use subject specific terminology – i.e. using the correct terms when writing about the processes you went through on iMovie or Photoshop; talking about the camera angles/distances correctly/ discussing conventions and what colours etc have connotations of, especially in terms of your target audience.
Ensure that you haven’t used ANY images that you’ve downloaded from the internet; this includes backgrounds or background patterns.
www.emusu.com - a promotion and digital distribution resource. It will help you consider your music promotion work in the digital age
Genre quotes:
(Tom Ryall, 1998) “patterns/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film-maker and their reading by an audience”
Steve Neale (1990) argues that Hollywood’s generic regime guarantees meanings and pleasures for audiences
Neale (1980)- much of the pleasure of popular cinema lies in the process of “difference in repetition” – i.e. recognition of familiar elements and in the way those elements might be orchestrated in an unfamiliar fashion or in the way that unfamiliar elements might be introduced e.g. Scream and its sequels: certain elements are similar in all three films, yet new ideas and material are incorporated into each sequel.
Neale (1990) – Genre is constituted by “specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”
Jonathan Culler (1978) – generic conventions exist to establish a contract between and deviation from the accepted modes of intelligibility. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
Ryall (1998) sees this framework provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
Genre has come to represent, as John Fiske (1988) has said, “attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.”
Music video quotes:
“They now provide pictures for the songs in our heads. Goodbye, imagination… No need to think, to embellish, to create, to imagine.” (Joe Salzman, 2000)
“Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band… Sometimes, the artist… will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it.” (Steve Archer, 2004)
The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on display and is, therefore, objectified and passive - paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975).
“Is the female flesh on display simply a cynical; exploitation of the female body to increase (predominantly) male profit margins, or a life-enhancing assertion of female self-confidence and sexual independence?” (Pete Fraser, 2005)
- There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals (with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics).
- There is a relationship between the music and the visuals (again with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music).
- Particular music genres may have their own music style and iconography (such as live stage performance in heavy rock).
- There is a demand on the part of the record company for lots of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist.
- The artist may develop their own star iconography, in and out of their videos, which, over time, becomes part of their star image.
- There is likely to be reference to voyeurism, particularly in the treatment of women, but also in terms of looking (screens within screens, binoculars, cameras etc).
- There are likely to be intertextual references, either to other music videos or to films and TV texts.
(Andrew Goodwin, 1992)
Tuesday 1 March 2016
Monday 11 January 2016
Northern Stars Film Academy
For the fourth year running, a student from Heworth was successful in gaining admission to the Northern Stars at the Tyneside Cinema
Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy to hold gala screening
Tyneside Cinema and intu will play host to the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy gala screening featuring work by teenagers
Gordon Barr
9 December 2015
Northern Stars Documentary Academy students working at the Tyneside Cinema
Teenage filmmakers from the region will get their chance to shine next week.
Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema and intu will present the premiere of four short documentaries made by young filmmakers at the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy.
The films will be shown at a screening for family and friends at the Cinema on Wednesday, December 16.
Over the autumn of 2015, 15 young people aged 15 to19 from across the North East took part in the free programme of workshops at Tyneside Cinema, which gave participants the chance to work with leading industry professionals and gain hands-on experience of directing, producing and editing their own short documentaries.
This year Tyneside Cinema partnered with Freedom City 2017, a programme that marks the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr being awarded an honorary degree from Newcastle University, and aims to empower and inspire a new generation, stimulate academic debate and an create artistic response to the themes of his speech – war, poverty and racism.
The filmmakers were asked to respond to a challenge from Freedom City 2017 to use the themes as a starting point to create their work.
The four resulting films include a portrait of worker from SSI in Redcar who has lost her job, the experiences of a refugee from Liberia who has settled in the North East, and a volunteer whose personal experiences led her to work with disadvantaged communities in Newcastle .
Mark Dobson, Tyneside Cinema’s Chief Executive said: “The young filmmakers have worked exceptionally hard over the autumn to create four fantastic and inspiring short films, and we’re very proud to present their premiere at Tyneside Cinema.
“This is the third year of the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy, and we’re incredibly grateful to intu for their ongoing support, which has and will continue to enable us to provide this free opportunity for even more young people in the North East to learn new skills.”
rved
The Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy has been made possible by the support of Intu Properties plc, who co-own intu Eldon Square in Newcastle and intu Metrocentre in Gateshead .
Their partnership with Tyneside Cinema began in 2012, when intu Eldon Square offered the Cinema an unprecedented opportunity to create a unique filmmaking facility in a shop unit on High Friars.
The local success of Pop-Up Film School led intu to look at other partnership opportunities with the Cinema and the resulting development in 2013 of the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy is now a key part of intu’s corporate responsibility strategy, focusing on support for young people in the North East.
Alexander Nicoll, intu Corporate Responsibility Director, added: “I am very pleased with our partnership with Tyneside Cinema over the last two years and am glad we can support the young documentary filmmakers again in 2016.
“The quality and originality of the films made by young filmmakers since we started supporting this initiative back in 2013 has been outstanding and award-winning.
“The annual screening premiere is a very special occasion for all involved in supporting these talented young people from across the North East and is, of course, a well-deserved celebration for them.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/northern-stars-documentary-film-academy-10571460
Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy to hold gala screening
Tyneside Cinema and intu will play host to the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy gala screening featuring work by teenagers
Gordon Barr
9 December 2015
Northern Stars Documentary Academy students working at the Tyneside Cinema
Teenage filmmakers from the region will get their chance to shine next week.
Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema and intu will present the premiere of four short documentaries made by young filmmakers at the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy.
The films will be shown at a screening for family and friends at the Cinema on Wednesday, December 16.
Over the autumn of 2015, 15 young people aged 15 to19 from across the North East took part in the free programme of workshops at Tyneside Cinema, which gave participants the chance to work with leading industry professionals and gain hands-on experience of directing, producing and editing their own short documentaries.
This year Tyneside Cinema partnered with Freedom City 2017, a programme that marks the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr being awarded an honorary degree from Newcastle University, and aims to empower and inspire a new generation, stimulate academic debate and an create artistic response to the themes of his speech – war, poverty and racism.
The filmmakers were asked to respond to a challenge from Freedom City 2017 to use the themes as a starting point to create their work.
The four resulting films include a portrait of worker from SSI in Redcar who has lost her job, the experiences of a refugee from Liberia who has settled in the North East, and a volunteer whose personal experiences led her to work with disadvantaged communities in Newcastle .
Mark Dobson, Tyneside Cinema’s Chief Executive said: “The young filmmakers have worked exceptionally hard over the autumn to create four fantastic and inspiring short films, and we’re very proud to present their premiere at Tyneside Cinema.
“This is the third year of the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy, and we’re incredibly grateful to intu for their ongoing support, which has and will continue to enable us to provide this free opportunity for even more young people in the North East to learn new skills.”
rved
The Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy has been made possible by the support of Intu Properties plc, who co-own intu Eldon Square in Newcastle and intu Metrocentre in Gateshead .
Their partnership with Tyneside Cinema began in 2012, when intu Eldon Square offered the Cinema an unprecedented opportunity to create a unique filmmaking facility in a shop unit on High Friars.
The local success of Pop-Up Film School led intu to look at other partnership opportunities with the Cinema and the resulting development in 2013 of the Northern Stars Documentary Film Academy is now a key part of intu’s corporate responsibility strategy, focusing on support for young people in the North East.
Alexander Nicoll, intu Corporate Responsibility Director, added: “I am very pleased with our partnership with Tyneside Cinema over the last two years and am glad we can support the young documentary filmmakers again in 2016.
“The quality and originality of the films made by young filmmakers since we started supporting this initiative back in 2013 has been outstanding and award-winning.
“The annual screening premiere is a very special occasion for all involved in supporting these talented young people from across the North East and is, of course, a well-deserved celebration for them.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/northern-stars-documentary-film-academy-10571460
Friday 8 January 2016
Tuesday 8 December 2015
Wednesday 18 November 2015
I Am Sam
A short film made by Caitlin Gill, a past GCSE student while she took part in the Documentary Academy at the Tyneside Cinema in 2014.
Friday 2 October 2015
Friday 25 September 2015
Thursday 10 September 2015
Friday 10 July 2015
Monday 6 July 2015
Year 12 Summer Work
1. Make sure that when you come back, you know what you want to do. If you need to check the specifications at OCR – GCE Media Studies – and remember you’re doing A2 not AS...
2. Analyse at least three similar texts on your blog – I think five, overall, would be enough – and remember, Laura, one text per post. Think about the way you were taught to analyse texts for the AS exam; look at structure and mise-en-scène; think about genre and audience expectations; look at representation. The representation of women in music videos is an understandably touchy issue (see all the fuss about Rhianna’s latest magnum opus, for instance:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/04/feminists-fall-out-over-rihanna-video
Make sure you cover it. You might like to look at Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory, in which she suggests that women have become conditioned to view a film from the point of view (though not necessarily through the eyes) of the male protagonist. Women are, therefore, objectified as romantic interest, objects of sexual/romantic desire, victims (either from the male killer’s angle or from that of the hero who will rescue them.
3. You ought to use the following, depending on your choice of topic, but bear in mind that what you see and what you create may have some aspects of various theories and may not stick rigidly to one (and it is possible to relate music video, for example, to genre theory, depending on the individual video):
Genre Theory:
(Tom Ryall, 1998) “patterns/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film-maker and their reading by an audience.”
Steve Neale (1990) argues that Hollywood’s generic regime guarantees meanings and pleasures for audiences.
Neale (1980)- much of the pleasure of popular cinema lies in the process of “difference in repetition” – i.e. recognition of familiar elements and in the way those elements might be orchestrated in an unfamiliar fashion or in the way that unfamiliar elements might be introduced e.g. Scream and its sequels: certain elements are similar in all three films, yet new ideas and material are incorporated into each sequel.
Neale (1990) – Genre is constituted by “specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”
Jonathan Culler (1978) – generic conventions exist to establish a contract between and deviation from the accepted modes of intelligibility. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
Ryall (1998) sees this framework provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
Genre has come to represent, as John Fiske (1988) has said, “attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.”
Music video Theory:
“They now provide pictures for the songs in our heads. Goodbye, imagination… No need to think, to embellish, to create, to imagine.” (Joe Salzman, 2000)
“Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band… Sometimes, the artist… will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it.” (Steve Archer, 2004)
The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on display and is, therefore, objectified and passive - paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975).
“Is the female flesh on display simply a cynical; exploitation of the female body to increase (predominantly) male profit margins, or a life-enhancing assertion of female self-confidence and sexual independence?” (Pete Fraser, 2005)
Andrew Goodwin (1992):
There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals (with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics).
There is a relationship between the music and the visuals (again with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music).
Particular music genres may have their own music style and iconography (such as live stage performance in heavy rock).
There is a demand on the part of the record company for lots of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist.
The artist may develop their own star iconography, in and out of their videos, which, over time, becomes part of their star image.
There is likely to be reference to voyeurism, particularly in the treatment of women, but also in terms of looking (screens within screens, binoculars, cameras etc).
There are likely to be intertextual references, either to other music videos or to films and TV texts.
Documentary Quotes
‘It’s not so much what you get in the shooting but what you do with it afterwards’ Paul Watson documentary maker.
Possible models or narrative strategies:
Expository: lecturing, overtly didactic, e.g. with a personal presenter or an explanatory voice-over.
Observational: like a "fly on the wall," the camera, microphone and film crew seem not to be disturbing the scene or even to be noticed by the participants.
Participatory or interactive: the film crew takes part in the action or chain of events.
Reflexive: the film exposes and discusses its own role as a film (e.g. the ethics or conditions of filmmaking) alongside the treatment of the case or subject.
Performative: the film crew creates many of the events and situations to be filmed by their own intervention or through events carried out for the sake of the film.
Poetic: the aesthetic aspects, the qualities of the form and the sensual appeals are predominant.
News Values
Although this powerpoint was put together for work on TV news, Galtung and Ruge’s theory can be applied to print news.
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/tv-news-news-values-why-stories-make.html
Another couple of areas to look at it are Narrative and Character Theories
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-character.html
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-narrative.html
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-binary-oppositions.html
Again, the works you look at/create may not have all Propp’s character types and some may be combined; likewise, the text may go through Todorov’s narrative theory more than once to create cliff-hangers or the narrative may be disrupted and non-chronological or show different points of views – anachronic, in other words, like the film, Memento.
In your discussion of the texts, make sure you reference the relevant theories.
2. Analyse at least three similar texts on your blog – I think five, overall, would be enough – and remember, Laura, one text per post. Think about the way you were taught to analyse texts for the AS exam; look at structure and mise-en-scène; think about genre and audience expectations; look at representation. The representation of women in music videos is an understandably touchy issue (see all the fuss about Rhianna’s latest magnum opus, for instance:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/04/feminists-fall-out-over-rihanna-video
Make sure you cover it. You might like to look at Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory, in which she suggests that women have become conditioned to view a film from the point of view (though not necessarily through the eyes) of the male protagonist. Women are, therefore, objectified as romantic interest, objects of sexual/romantic desire, victims (either from the male killer’s angle or from that of the hero who will rescue them.
3. You ought to use the following, depending on your choice of topic, but bear in mind that what you see and what you create may have some aspects of various theories and may not stick rigidly to one (and it is possible to relate music video, for example, to genre theory, depending on the individual video):
Genre Theory:
(Tom Ryall, 1998) “patterns/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film-maker and their reading by an audience.”
Steve Neale (1990) argues that Hollywood’s generic regime guarantees meanings and pleasures for audiences.
Neale (1980)- much of the pleasure of popular cinema lies in the process of “difference in repetition” – i.e. recognition of familiar elements and in the way those elements might be orchestrated in an unfamiliar fashion or in the way that unfamiliar elements might be introduced e.g. Scream and its sequels: certain elements are similar in all three films, yet new ideas and material are incorporated into each sequel.
Neale (1990) – Genre is constituted by “specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”
Jonathan Culler (1978) – generic conventions exist to establish a contract between and deviation from the accepted modes of intelligibility. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
Ryall (1998) sees this framework provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
Genre has come to represent, as John Fiske (1988) has said, “attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.”
Music video Theory:
“They now provide pictures for the songs in our heads. Goodbye, imagination… No need to think, to embellish, to create, to imagine.” (Joe Salzman, 2000)
“Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band… Sometimes, the artist… will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it.” (Steve Archer, 2004)
The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on display and is, therefore, objectified and passive - paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975).
“Is the female flesh on display simply a cynical; exploitation of the female body to increase (predominantly) male profit margins, or a life-enhancing assertion of female self-confidence and sexual independence?” (Pete Fraser, 2005)
Andrew Goodwin (1992):
There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals (with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics).
There is a relationship between the music and the visuals (again with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music).
Particular music genres may have their own music style and iconography (such as live stage performance in heavy rock).
There is a demand on the part of the record company for lots of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist.
The artist may develop their own star iconography, in and out of their videos, which, over time, becomes part of their star image.
There is likely to be reference to voyeurism, particularly in the treatment of women, but also in terms of looking (screens within screens, binoculars, cameras etc).
There are likely to be intertextual references, either to other music videos or to films and TV texts.
Documentary Quotes
‘It’s not so much what you get in the shooting but what you do with it afterwards’ Paul Watson documentary maker.
Possible models or narrative strategies:
Expository: lecturing, overtly didactic, e.g. with a personal presenter or an explanatory voice-over.
Observational: like a "fly on the wall," the camera, microphone and film crew seem not to be disturbing the scene or even to be noticed by the participants.
Participatory or interactive: the film crew takes part in the action or chain of events.
Reflexive: the film exposes and discusses its own role as a film (e.g. the ethics or conditions of filmmaking) alongside the treatment of the case or subject.
Performative: the film crew creates many of the events and situations to be filmed by their own intervention or through events carried out for the sake of the film.
Poetic: the aesthetic aspects, the qualities of the form and the sensual appeals are predominant.
News Values
Although this powerpoint was put together for work on TV news, Galtung and Ruge’s theory can be applied to print news.
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/tv-news-news-values-why-stories-make.html
Another couple of areas to look at it are Narrative and Character Theories
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-character.html
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-narrative.html
http://heworthgcsemediastudies.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/action-adventure-and-binary-oppositions.html
Again, the works you look at/create may not have all Propp’s character types and some may be combined; likewise, the text may go through Todorov’s narrative theory more than once to create cliff-hangers or the narrative may be disrupted and non-chronological or show different points of views – anachronic, in other words, like the film, Memento.
In your discussion of the texts, make sure you reference the relevant theories.
Wednesday 3 June 2015
Saturday 30 May 2015
What Scared Alfred Hitchcock?
Hiatus at 4 a.m. - new books on Hitchcock reviewed
David Trotter
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd Chatto, 279 pp, £12.99, ISBN 978 0 7011 6993 0
Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much by Michael Wood New Harvest, 129 pp, £15.00, ISBN 978 1 4778 0134 5
Hitchcock à la carte by Jan Olsson Duke, 261 pp, £16.99, ISBN 978 0 8223 5804 6
Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II edited by Sidney Gottlieb
California, 274 pp, £24.95, ISBN 978 0 520 27960 5
Hitchcock liked assembly lines. In the long, consistently revealing interview he gave to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday?
I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!
The putative scene has the makings of a classic Hitchcock prank or hoax. ‘Where has the body come from? Not from the car, obviously, since they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see!’ Hitchcock was just short of his 63rd birthday when Truffaut interviewed him. He had remained staggeringly inventive throughout a long, prolific and highly profitable career, and there were seven films yet to come, including The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Two American television series – Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65) – converted the ‘master of suspense’ into an international celebrity. Since his death in 1980, his reputation has continued to soar. He must by now be the most written about film director of all time. In 2012, Vertigo (1958) displaced Citizen Kane at the top of Sight and Sound’s list of the best films ever made. But his art owed a great deal to its affinity with the assembly line.
Even the biographers, watching the life ‘start at zero’, have struggled to establish where the motivation for the inventiveness came from. The most popular hypothesis, not least because Hitchcock himself promoted it so vigorously, concerns timidity. ‘The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person,’ Truffaut observed, ‘and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in 1915? Did he read too much Edgar Allan Poe? It doesn’t really add up to very much. And yet – or therefore – the strong conviction persists. Fear is the key; and not just to the life. Interview the films, he once told an inquisitive journalist. Those who have interviewed the films often conclude that, like their creator, they too tremble. ‘Hitchcock was a frightened man,’ Wood writes, ‘who got his fears to work for him on film.’
For Wood, the question of fearfulness arises most pressingly when it comes to the tortures meted out to the women whose death or danger is a dominant feature of almost all the movies. ‘Is it sadism, as the dark view of Hitchcock proclaims, a pleasure in seeing beautiful women in harm’s way? The solitary joy of the otherwise uxorious director? A revenge on the mother the child thought might leave him for ever?’ Wood doesn’t believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too comfortable. There presumably were and still are those, even among Hitchcock’s most ardent fans, who feel that they could get by in life without a regular supply of blondeness. Still, it seems possible to agree that the women in harm’s way represent whatever was most at risk, not just for Hitchcock, but for a culture heavily invested in blonde iconicity. At any rate, I find it difficult to disagree with Wood’s further conclusion. The lingering over the heroine’s demise could, he says, be masochism. ‘But it could also be just an act of thinking the worst, an act of propitiation to the gods who take these treasures away.’ Hitchcock’s films are at their most Hitchcockian, Wood proposes, when they think the very worst. They are certainly lavish in their propitiations: it takes Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) 45 seconds to die in Psycho, but the scene required seventy different camera set-ups. Ceremony enough, surely. But Hitchcock knew that the gods who took the treasures away were not the kind to be propitiated.
The best commentary on this aspect of Hitchcock’s films (and on a great deal else besides) may be Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, a poem about the specific, all-consuming fear aroused by the most general and unavoidable (that is to say, banal) of all conditions. This is the fear not so much of dying, as of death, of mortality. Waking at 4 a.m. to ‘soundless dark’, the speaker sees ‘what’s really always there:/Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. His mind ‘blanks’, not inwardly, in remorse or despair, but outwardly,
at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
‘And soon’: the mildly querulous bit of time-keeping tucked away among the sonorous negations strikes the authentic Larkin note. For the blankness he has in mind is ‘a special way of being afraid/No trick dispels’: not faith, not courage, not the sound a poem makes.
‘I work all day, and get half-drunk at night’ is how ‘Aubade’ begins. That’s pretty much what Hitchcock did for most of his life, except that as he grew older the drinking encroached increasingly on the work (champagne with lunch, vodka and orange in a flask on set). The justification for the briskness of Ackroyd’s account (259 pages of text, where previous biographers have required twice as much, or more) is that Hitchcock didn’t linger either. He liked to think he could complete one film in the studio while starting another in his mind. The transitions between films became almost as swift and as seamless as the transitions within them. ‘He already had another project in mind’ is Ackroyd’s constant refrain. By the same token, the rare periods of ‘suspended animation’ during the course of a long career, when there were ‘no stories to consider, no treatments to contemplate, no stars to pursue’, became a ‘form of torture’. The final months of his life seem to have been truly harrowing for all concerned.
As far as I’m aware, Hitchcock himself only ever approached the topic of our sure extinction obliquely, and in relation to his films. For example, he reassured Truffaut that staging violent death all day hadn’t given him nightmares. He would go home afterwards and laugh about it:
And that’s something that bothers me because, at the same time, I can’t help imagining how it would feel to be in the victim’s place. We come back again to my eternal fear of the police. I’ve always felt a complete identification with the feelings of a person who’s arrested, taken to the police station in a police van and who, through the bars of the moving vehicle, can see people going to the theatre, coming out of a bar, and enjoying the comforts of everyday living; I can even picture the driver joking with his police partner, and I feel terrible about it.
I think the police are a red herring here. All the vividness of the anecdote lies in the detail of the activities visible from the van, now conclusively beyond reach. Hitchcock identifies not so much with the suspected criminal as with the person (any person) whose number is up. The person taken out of circulation – it could be by a police van, or by an ambulance – sees, perhaps for the first time, what the world will be like when she or he is no longer in it. Hitchcock had already incorporated a version of the incident he so vividly pictures here into The Wrong Man (1956), a very good, uncharacteristically neo-realist film about a New York musician under arrest for a crime he didn’t commit. As he’s driven away by the police, the musician (it’s Henry Fonda) glimpses his wife, who doesn’t yet know he’s been arrested, moving around in the kitchen. When describing this scene to Truffaut, Hitchcock dwelled on details that either weren’t in the film to begin with, or got edited out.
At the corner of the block is the bar he usually goes to, with some little girls playing in front of it. As they pass a parked car, he sees that the young woman inside is turning on the radio. Everything in the outside world is taking place normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and yet he himself is a prisoner inside the car.
It’s not just that the normality will soon be gone for ever. It’s that it seems to be making precious little effort to stay in touch. The jovial policemen merely perform the indifference society at large is now understood to feel at the removal from circulation of one of its members.
The second film Hitchcock directed on his own was The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British-German co-production made in Munich. At its climax, an alcoholic husband gripped by delirium tremens is shot as he’s about to stab his wife. ‘When he is shot,’ Wood notes, ‘he comes to his senses, no longer drunk at all; he mildly says, “Oh, hello, Doctor,” to the man who has interrupted his fury and dies.’ The version of the film I’ve seen has no intertitle at this point, so I can’t be sure of the exact words. But it’s hard to mistake the jauntiness on the man’s face. The German producer complained that the scene was impossible, and in any case too brutal to be shown. Hitchcock kept it (he may have sacrificed the clarifying intertitle by way of compromise). ‘There is a sense, though, in which a casual, almost negligent registering of one’s last moment is scarier – not brutal or incredible as the German producer thought, but too natural for art, as if the erratic truth of death’s timing were more than we could bear in a story.’ I think that’s dead right. Except of course that nature has little to do with the way people die in Hitchcock’s films.
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment. In the course of a shrewd and properly demanding analysis of Vertigo, Wood draws attention to sequences of shots in the first hour of the film that mark a narrative threshold: a step-change in its relation to its audience. During these moments, our eyes and ears are ‘co-opted’ for the ‘sense of the world’ somewhat precariously maintained by the agoraphobic private detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), whose old acquaintance Gavin Elster wants him to trail his (apparent) wife, the luminous Madeleine (Kim Novak). We don’t exactly see what Scottie sees, Wood says. Rather, we see what he would see if his eyes were a camera. If Scottie can establish to his own satisfaction that Madeleine is prey to fugue states in which she assumes the appearance and personality of an ancestor, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide in 1857, he will feel justified in taking the job, and falling in love with her. In the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, Madeleine sits absorbed in a portrait of Carlotta, the bouquet on the bench beside her matching the one Carlotta holds. Scottie watches from across the room. As his gaze narrows, the camera moves in on the bouquet on the bench, and then by a swerve and sudden ascent, on its equivalent in the portrait. Scottie subsequently tails Madeleine home. He peers at her car, across the courtyard from him. Is that a bouquet on the dashboard? It’s as if he believes he could get closer just by wanting to. In the event, the camera does it for him, not by moving in, but by a new set-up, from a different angle, halfway across the courtyard. Yes, it is a bouquet. In Wood’s view, the sheer ‘extravagance’ of these manoeuvres ‘beautifully and scarily exploits the possibilities of the medium’, making our dependence on such possibilities ‘something like an addiction’. We become complicit with everything that has already happened, and everything that will happen, to Scottie.
Such moments had long been a feature of Hitchcock’s film-making, as much of an authorial signature as the famous cameo appearances, if a lot less obtrusive; and a great deal more consequential than the various motifs, riddles, visual puns, and other traces he is sometimes said to have scattered throughout his films. The earliest I can think of occurs in The Lodger (1927), which he himself described as the ‘first true “Hitchcock” film’. Quite distinct from the fluid, intricately choreographed camera movements which have been taken to exemplify his virtuosity (his ‘art’), these five-to-ten-second tracks forward – or, alternatively, the abrupt transition to a new and noticeably discrepant camera set-up within the space originally defined by an establishing shot – are strictly functional. In most cases, the dolly in or the discrepant angle follows a narrowing of the protagonist’s gaze, as it does in Vertigo. In Notorious(1946), for example, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), dining in Rio with the Nazi super-scientists among whom she has been planted, notices a commotion around the bottles of wine stood on the sideboard. A dolly in on a label shows us what she would like to see, but can’t quite from where she’s sitting. Now she’s truly hooked; and so are we. In The Birds, after the avian invaders have swept en masse down the chimney of the Brenner house and laid waste to the lounge, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) watches Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy), the mother of the man she’s fallen in love with, picking up broken crockery and straightening a picture on the wall, while her son bickers with the sheriff, who’s come to inspect the damage. After a couple of medium-long shots of Lydia from Melanie’s point of view, a third shot, now from a position she very evidently doesn’t occupy, takes us in much closer. The change of distance and angle is an act of moral and emotional intelligence. While the men bicker, Melanie, noticing Lydia’s distress, has understood something both about her, and about the scale of the catastrophe they all face. It’s the sort of awakening conventional in melodrama. On this occasion, however, awakening has been outsourced to a machine.
The changes of distance and angle sometimes arise out of the fiction’s premise. The protagonist of Rear Window (1954), L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), is a photographer who finds himself confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, so it makes sense for him to put down the pair of binoculars through which he has been scrutinising the suspicious goings-on in the apartment directly opposite, and pick up a telephoto lens instead. The closer view afforded by the telephoto lens reveals a man wrapping a saw and a butcher’s knife in some newspaper. It doesn’t in fact generate a great deal by way of additional detail; but we think it must do, because we’ve seen Jefferies swap the binoculars for a telephoto lens. Even more interesting are those cases – Blackmail(1929), Suspicion (1941) or The Wrong Man – in which the camera’s swift forward movement or repositioning doesn’t stem directly from the protagonist’s immediate point of view, but nonetheless takes place as it were on her or his behalf. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), for example, a dolly in on Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) from a position other than that occupied by the person currently talking to him, his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright), confirms starkly to us, but not to her, that he is indeed the killer we already know him to be. In such cases, an alliance has been created between audience and camera, an alliance in suspense: sympathetic to the protagonist, but apart from him or her.
These threshold moments are engrossingly human. They engage us fully in the protagonist’s first full engagement with the world’s meaningfulness. We, too, have been reanimated – thanks to the surrogacy of a machine’s-eye view. The something too natural for art that Wood discerns in the death scene in The Pleasure Garden has found a means other than jesting last words to embed itself in the narrative. Hitchcock, who never forgot what he’d learned as a director of silent films, understood that he didn’t need words at all, jesting or otherwise. For all the light at their disposal, his threshold moments have something of the feel of Larkin’s ‘soundless dark’. They all occur either without a word spoken, or deliberately against (or over) the distractions of speech. Their discrepant soundlessness puts us back inside the police van. The threshold moment could be our last glimpse of the ‘comforts of everyday living’: a world in which a bouquet is a bouquet, a bottle of wine a bottle of wine, a saw a saw, and a woman tidying a tidy woman. We know that the people on the streets are talking to each other as people ordinarily do, but we can’t catch a word of what they say. Psycho confirms the soundless dark of the 4 a.m. hiatus. We expect the threshold to announce itself during the scene in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having just set foot in the Bates motel, fences warily with Norman (Anthony Perkins) in a room full of stuffed animals. But this is a heroine who will be dead before she’s had a chance to notice anything truly suspicious. Hers is a post-mortem awakening. The camera starts on her lifeless face pressed against the bathroom floor, pans to take in the bedroom, and then speeds forward and up until it arrives at the newspaper on the bedside table which conceals the money she had stolen earlier in the day: the grim remnant of her all too human aspiration to a better life.
Of course, there are other kinds of Hitchcock film. He spoke sometimes of the need to adjust the ‘dosage’ of humour from one to the next, and the more humorous among them concern the special fear of dying only in so far as they resemble a trick used to quell it. In the films about nothing very much at all, we learn soon enough to stop worrying about what the villains have in store for the hero and heroine, and start worrying about what the hero and heroine have in store for each other. To demonstrate that romance, like danger, can keep us on tenterhooks, Hitchcock included in Easy Virtue (1928) a scene in which a switchboard operator eavesdrops on a marriage proposal. Pleasurable suspense, and its adroit resolution, took up a lot of space in his bag of cinematic tricks.
Hitchcock was an inveterate practical joker. Mercifully, the jokes themselves now seem too boring to merit much attention. But they certainly had a part to play in the publicity campaigns which transformed a film director into a media brand. Jan Olsson has shown in great detail how Hitchcock consistently manipulated celebrity gossip in order to project the image of a creative genius who was as much ‘prankster’ as ‘master craftsman’. The biggest prank of all was his own body. Despite periodic bouts of binge-dieting, Hitchcock remained until the end of his life mountainously fat. In the mid-1930s, as his ambitions turned increasingly towards a career in Hollywood, he began to parlay his corpulence – and the appetites which had brought it about – into an instantly recognisable public persona. ‘His film fame, food reputation, and fabulous physicality were supreme assets,’ Olsson observes, ‘when he signed up for Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1955, on the cusp of Hollywood’s television era.’ His Englishness, too, presumably: no more of a mere hoax than Larkin’s, it had nonetheless to be kept in full working order, like the corpulence, by constant reiteration (the sober suit and tie worn to work every day, regardless of the weather). Not everyone would accept Olsson’s linking of the food and the physicality to the films. Introducing the most recent of the two indispensable collections of articles, essays and stories by Hitchcock and interviews with him that he has edited, Sidney Gottlieb notes that he has chosen to exclude material concerned primarily with food, weight and family life, topics ‘perhaps worth investigating’ as an element in the construction of a public persona, but not as important as the comments on cinema. Still, the cameo appearances did put the corpulence on ample display in the films; while it’s the confirmed pranksters, like Melanie Daniels in The Birds, who undergo the most rigorous examination by 4 a.m. hiatus. Even when he was at his most serious, in his commentary on cinema, Hitchcock had the air of a conjuror explaining his tricks.
He thought that montage was cinema at its most pure. In theory, his method involved a subordination to the capacities of the camera upheld with such completeness and consistency at each stage of the production process, from script and storyboards through principal photography to editing, that it became a kind of mastery. Before cinema, montage meant the action of assembling mechanical components. Hitchcock defined it as the ‘juxtaposition’ of ‘pieces of film that went through a machine’ in such a way as to create ‘ideas on the screen’. His own conjuring was by sleight of machine rather than of hand. ‘Emotions of many varying sorts, shades, degrees and colours have to be manufactured,’ he said, ‘and all must be photographically clear.’ Montage used the machine against itself, creating out of its excess of indifference (the seventy set-ups for the shower scene) a spectacle guaranteed to wring the heart.
The best of the films about nothing very much at all end superbly, the fulfilment of the romantic fantasies they explore achieved by small miracles of montage. In his Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (1996), the scriptwriter William Goldman offers an admiring analysis of the conclusion of North by Northwest. When we recall what happened at the end of the film, Goldman says, we suppose that it must have taken a narrative age to get from the moment at which Eve Marie Saint dangles helplessly from Cary Grant’s hand on the face of Mount Rushmore – while America’s implacable enemies stand poised to tip them both over the edge and make off with the state secrets they’ve been safeguarding – to the moment at which he pulls her up beside him into a bunk in an express train about to enter a tunnel. In fact, it takes a mere 45 seconds, so economical is Hitchcock’s editing. North by Northwest was modelled to some extent on The 39 Steps (1935), which permits itself three minutes to get from the climax of a national emergency involving the design of a new warplane to the blissful union of hero and heroine. Both films conclude at a lick: the pieces don’t so much fall into place as cascade. There’s a kind of heartlessness in that, too. Montage has become cinema’s indispensable, delightful, futile prank. It’s not just corpses that tumble out of the vehicles rolling off the Hitchcock assembly line, but pairs of newly-weds, in radiant, fully automated succession.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n11/david-trotter/hiatus-at-4-am
David Trotter
4 June 2015
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd Chatto, 279 pp, £12.99, ISBN 978 0 7011 6993 0
Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much by Michael Wood New Harvest, 129 pp, £15.00, ISBN 978 1 4778 0134 5
Hitchcock à la carte by Jan Olsson Duke, 261 pp, £16.99, ISBN 978 0 8223 5804 6
Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II edited by Sidney Gottlieb
California, 274 pp, £24.95, ISBN 978 0 520 27960 5
Hitchcock liked assembly lines. In the long, consistently revealing interview he gave to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday?
I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!
The putative scene has the makings of a classic Hitchcock prank or hoax. ‘Where has the body come from? Not from the car, obviously, since they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see!’ Hitchcock was just short of his 63rd birthday when Truffaut interviewed him. He had remained staggeringly inventive throughout a long, prolific and highly profitable career, and there were seven films yet to come, including The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Two American television series – Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65) – converted the ‘master of suspense’ into an international celebrity. Since his death in 1980, his reputation has continued to soar. He must by now be the most written about film director of all time. In 2012, Vertigo (1958) displaced Citizen Kane at the top of Sight and Sound’s list of the best films ever made. But his art owed a great deal to its affinity with the assembly line.
Even the biographers, watching the life ‘start at zero’, have struggled to establish where the motivation for the inventiveness came from. The most popular hypothesis, not least because Hitchcock himself promoted it so vigorously, concerns timidity. ‘The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person,’ Truffaut observed, ‘and I suspect that this trait of his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in 1915? Did he read too much Edgar Allan Poe? It doesn’t really add up to very much. And yet – or therefore – the strong conviction persists. Fear is the key; and not just to the life. Interview the films, he once told an inquisitive journalist. Those who have interviewed the films often conclude that, like their creator, they too tremble. ‘Hitchcock was a frightened man,’ Wood writes, ‘who got his fears to work for him on film.’
For Wood, the question of fearfulness arises most pressingly when it comes to the tortures meted out to the women whose death or danger is a dominant feature of almost all the movies. ‘Is it sadism, as the dark view of Hitchcock proclaims, a pleasure in seeing beautiful women in harm’s way? The solitary joy of the otherwise uxorious director? A revenge on the mother the child thought might leave him for ever?’ Wood doesn’t believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too comfortable. There presumably were and still are those, even among Hitchcock’s most ardent fans, who feel that they could get by in life without a regular supply of blondeness. Still, it seems possible to agree that the women in harm’s way represent whatever was most at risk, not just for Hitchcock, but for a culture heavily invested in blonde iconicity. At any rate, I find it difficult to disagree with Wood’s further conclusion. The lingering over the heroine’s demise could, he says, be masochism. ‘But it could also be just an act of thinking the worst, an act of propitiation to the gods who take these treasures away.’ Hitchcock’s films are at their most Hitchcockian, Wood proposes, when they think the very worst. They are certainly lavish in their propitiations: it takes Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) 45 seconds to die in Psycho, but the scene required seventy different camera set-ups. Ceremony enough, surely. But Hitchcock knew that the gods who took the treasures away were not the kind to be propitiated.
The best commentary on this aspect of Hitchcock’s films (and on a great deal else besides) may be Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, a poem about the specific, all-consuming fear aroused by the most general and unavoidable (that is to say, banal) of all conditions. This is the fear not so much of dying, as of death, of mortality. Waking at 4 a.m. to ‘soundless dark’, the speaker sees ‘what’s really always there:/Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. His mind ‘blanks’, not inwardly, in remorse or despair, but outwardly,
at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
‘And soon’: the mildly querulous bit of time-keeping tucked away among the sonorous negations strikes the authentic Larkin note. For the blankness he has in mind is ‘a special way of being afraid/No trick dispels’: not faith, not courage, not the sound a poem makes.
‘I work all day, and get half-drunk at night’ is how ‘Aubade’ begins. That’s pretty much what Hitchcock did for most of his life, except that as he grew older the drinking encroached increasingly on the work (champagne with lunch, vodka and orange in a flask on set). The justification for the briskness of Ackroyd’s account (259 pages of text, where previous biographers have required twice as much, or more) is that Hitchcock didn’t linger either. He liked to think he could complete one film in the studio while starting another in his mind. The transitions between films became almost as swift and as seamless as the transitions within them. ‘He already had another project in mind’ is Ackroyd’s constant refrain. By the same token, the rare periods of ‘suspended animation’ during the course of a long career, when there were ‘no stories to consider, no treatments to contemplate, no stars to pursue’, became a ‘form of torture’. The final months of his life seem to have been truly harrowing for all concerned.
As far as I’m aware, Hitchcock himself only ever approached the topic of our sure extinction obliquely, and in relation to his films. For example, he reassured Truffaut that staging violent death all day hadn’t given him nightmares. He would go home afterwards and laugh about it:
And that’s something that bothers me because, at the same time, I can’t help imagining how it would feel to be in the victim’s place. We come back again to my eternal fear of the police. I’ve always felt a complete identification with the feelings of a person who’s arrested, taken to the police station in a police van and who, through the bars of the moving vehicle, can see people going to the theatre, coming out of a bar, and enjoying the comforts of everyday living; I can even picture the driver joking with his police partner, and I feel terrible about it.
I think the police are a red herring here. All the vividness of the anecdote lies in the detail of the activities visible from the van, now conclusively beyond reach. Hitchcock identifies not so much with the suspected criminal as with the person (any person) whose number is up. The person taken out of circulation – it could be by a police van, or by an ambulance – sees, perhaps for the first time, what the world will be like when she or he is no longer in it. Hitchcock had already incorporated a version of the incident he so vividly pictures here into The Wrong Man (1956), a very good, uncharacteristically neo-realist film about a New York musician under arrest for a crime he didn’t commit. As he’s driven away by the police, the musician (it’s Henry Fonda) glimpses his wife, who doesn’t yet know he’s been arrested, moving around in the kitchen. When describing this scene to Truffaut, Hitchcock dwelled on details that either weren’t in the film to begin with, or got edited out.
At the corner of the block is the bar he usually goes to, with some little girls playing in front of it. As they pass a parked car, he sees that the young woman inside is turning on the radio. Everything in the outside world is taking place normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and yet he himself is a prisoner inside the car.
It’s not just that the normality will soon be gone for ever. It’s that it seems to be making precious little effort to stay in touch. The jovial policemen merely perform the indifference society at large is now understood to feel at the removal from circulation of one of its members.
The second film Hitchcock directed on his own was The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British-German co-production made in Munich. At its climax, an alcoholic husband gripped by delirium tremens is shot as he’s about to stab his wife. ‘When he is shot,’ Wood notes, ‘he comes to his senses, no longer drunk at all; he mildly says, “Oh, hello, Doctor,” to the man who has interrupted his fury and dies.’ The version of the film I’ve seen has no intertitle at this point, so I can’t be sure of the exact words. But it’s hard to mistake the jauntiness on the man’s face. The German producer complained that the scene was impossible, and in any case too brutal to be shown. Hitchcock kept it (he may have sacrificed the clarifying intertitle by way of compromise). ‘There is a sense, though, in which a casual, almost negligent registering of one’s last moment is scarier – not brutal or incredible as the German producer thought, but too natural for art, as if the erratic truth of death’s timing were more than we could bear in a story.’ I think that’s dead right. Except of course that nature has little to do with the way people die in Hitchcock’s films.
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment. In the course of a shrewd and properly demanding analysis of Vertigo, Wood draws attention to sequences of shots in the first hour of the film that mark a narrative threshold: a step-change in its relation to its audience. During these moments, our eyes and ears are ‘co-opted’ for the ‘sense of the world’ somewhat precariously maintained by the agoraphobic private detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), whose old acquaintance Gavin Elster wants him to trail his (apparent) wife, the luminous Madeleine (Kim Novak). We don’t exactly see what Scottie sees, Wood says. Rather, we see what he would see if his eyes were a camera. If Scottie can establish to his own satisfaction that Madeleine is prey to fugue states in which she assumes the appearance and personality of an ancestor, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide in 1857, he will feel justified in taking the job, and falling in love with her. In the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, Madeleine sits absorbed in a portrait of Carlotta, the bouquet on the bench beside her matching the one Carlotta holds. Scottie watches from across the room. As his gaze narrows, the camera moves in on the bouquet on the bench, and then by a swerve and sudden ascent, on its equivalent in the portrait. Scottie subsequently tails Madeleine home. He peers at her car, across the courtyard from him. Is that a bouquet on the dashboard? It’s as if he believes he could get closer just by wanting to. In the event, the camera does it for him, not by moving in, but by a new set-up, from a different angle, halfway across the courtyard. Yes, it is a bouquet. In Wood’s view, the sheer ‘extravagance’ of these manoeuvres ‘beautifully and scarily exploits the possibilities of the medium’, making our dependence on such possibilities ‘something like an addiction’. We become complicit with everything that has already happened, and everything that will happen, to Scottie.
Such moments had long been a feature of Hitchcock’s film-making, as much of an authorial signature as the famous cameo appearances, if a lot less obtrusive; and a great deal more consequential than the various motifs, riddles, visual puns, and other traces he is sometimes said to have scattered throughout his films. The earliest I can think of occurs in The Lodger (1927), which he himself described as the ‘first true “Hitchcock” film’. Quite distinct from the fluid, intricately choreographed camera movements which have been taken to exemplify his virtuosity (his ‘art’), these five-to-ten-second tracks forward – or, alternatively, the abrupt transition to a new and noticeably discrepant camera set-up within the space originally defined by an establishing shot – are strictly functional. In most cases, the dolly in or the discrepant angle follows a narrowing of the protagonist’s gaze, as it does in Vertigo. In Notorious(1946), for example, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), dining in Rio with the Nazi super-scientists among whom she has been planted, notices a commotion around the bottles of wine stood on the sideboard. A dolly in on a label shows us what she would like to see, but can’t quite from where she’s sitting. Now she’s truly hooked; and so are we. In The Birds, after the avian invaders have swept en masse down the chimney of the Brenner house and laid waste to the lounge, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) watches Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy), the mother of the man she’s fallen in love with, picking up broken crockery and straightening a picture on the wall, while her son bickers with the sheriff, who’s come to inspect the damage. After a couple of medium-long shots of Lydia from Melanie’s point of view, a third shot, now from a position she very evidently doesn’t occupy, takes us in much closer. The change of distance and angle is an act of moral and emotional intelligence. While the men bicker, Melanie, noticing Lydia’s distress, has understood something both about her, and about the scale of the catastrophe they all face. It’s the sort of awakening conventional in melodrama. On this occasion, however, awakening has been outsourced to a machine.
The changes of distance and angle sometimes arise out of the fiction’s premise. The protagonist of Rear Window (1954), L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), is a photographer who finds himself confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, so it makes sense for him to put down the pair of binoculars through which he has been scrutinising the suspicious goings-on in the apartment directly opposite, and pick up a telephoto lens instead. The closer view afforded by the telephoto lens reveals a man wrapping a saw and a butcher’s knife in some newspaper. It doesn’t in fact generate a great deal by way of additional detail; but we think it must do, because we’ve seen Jefferies swap the binoculars for a telephoto lens. Even more interesting are those cases – Blackmail(1929), Suspicion (1941) or The Wrong Man – in which the camera’s swift forward movement or repositioning doesn’t stem directly from the protagonist’s immediate point of view, but nonetheless takes place as it were on her or his behalf. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), for example, a dolly in on Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) from a position other than that occupied by the person currently talking to him, his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright), confirms starkly to us, but not to her, that he is indeed the killer we already know him to be. In such cases, an alliance has been created between audience and camera, an alliance in suspense: sympathetic to the protagonist, but apart from him or her.
These threshold moments are engrossingly human. They engage us fully in the protagonist’s first full engagement with the world’s meaningfulness. We, too, have been reanimated – thanks to the surrogacy of a machine’s-eye view. The something too natural for art that Wood discerns in the death scene in The Pleasure Garden has found a means other than jesting last words to embed itself in the narrative. Hitchcock, who never forgot what he’d learned as a director of silent films, understood that he didn’t need words at all, jesting or otherwise. For all the light at their disposal, his threshold moments have something of the feel of Larkin’s ‘soundless dark’. They all occur either without a word spoken, or deliberately against (or over) the distractions of speech. Their discrepant soundlessness puts us back inside the police van. The threshold moment could be our last glimpse of the ‘comforts of everyday living’: a world in which a bouquet is a bouquet, a bottle of wine a bottle of wine, a saw a saw, and a woman tidying a tidy woman. We know that the people on the streets are talking to each other as people ordinarily do, but we can’t catch a word of what they say. Psycho confirms the soundless dark of the 4 a.m. hiatus. We expect the threshold to announce itself during the scene in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having just set foot in the Bates motel, fences warily with Norman (Anthony Perkins) in a room full of stuffed animals. But this is a heroine who will be dead before she’s had a chance to notice anything truly suspicious. Hers is a post-mortem awakening. The camera starts on her lifeless face pressed against the bathroom floor, pans to take in the bedroom, and then speeds forward and up until it arrives at the newspaper on the bedside table which conceals the money she had stolen earlier in the day: the grim remnant of her all too human aspiration to a better life.
Of course, there are other kinds of Hitchcock film. He spoke sometimes of the need to adjust the ‘dosage’ of humour from one to the next, and the more humorous among them concern the special fear of dying only in so far as they resemble a trick used to quell it. In the films about nothing very much at all, we learn soon enough to stop worrying about what the villains have in store for the hero and heroine, and start worrying about what the hero and heroine have in store for each other. To demonstrate that romance, like danger, can keep us on tenterhooks, Hitchcock included in Easy Virtue (1928) a scene in which a switchboard operator eavesdrops on a marriage proposal. Pleasurable suspense, and its adroit resolution, took up a lot of space in his bag of cinematic tricks.
Hitchcock was an inveterate practical joker. Mercifully, the jokes themselves now seem too boring to merit much attention. But they certainly had a part to play in the publicity campaigns which transformed a film director into a media brand. Jan Olsson has shown in great detail how Hitchcock consistently manipulated celebrity gossip in order to project the image of a creative genius who was as much ‘prankster’ as ‘master craftsman’. The biggest prank of all was his own body. Despite periodic bouts of binge-dieting, Hitchcock remained until the end of his life mountainously fat. In the mid-1930s, as his ambitions turned increasingly towards a career in Hollywood, he began to parlay his corpulence – and the appetites which had brought it about – into an instantly recognisable public persona. ‘His film fame, food reputation, and fabulous physicality were supreme assets,’ Olsson observes, ‘when he signed up for Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1955, on the cusp of Hollywood’s television era.’ His Englishness, too, presumably: no more of a mere hoax than Larkin’s, it had nonetheless to be kept in full working order, like the corpulence, by constant reiteration (the sober suit and tie worn to work every day, regardless of the weather). Not everyone would accept Olsson’s linking of the food and the physicality to the films. Introducing the most recent of the two indispensable collections of articles, essays and stories by Hitchcock and interviews with him that he has edited, Sidney Gottlieb notes that he has chosen to exclude material concerned primarily with food, weight and family life, topics ‘perhaps worth investigating’ as an element in the construction of a public persona, but not as important as the comments on cinema. Still, the cameo appearances did put the corpulence on ample display in the films; while it’s the confirmed pranksters, like Melanie Daniels in The Birds, who undergo the most rigorous examination by 4 a.m. hiatus. Even when he was at his most serious, in his commentary on cinema, Hitchcock had the air of a conjuror explaining his tricks.
He thought that montage was cinema at its most pure. In theory, his method involved a subordination to the capacities of the camera upheld with such completeness and consistency at each stage of the production process, from script and storyboards through principal photography to editing, that it became a kind of mastery. Before cinema, montage meant the action of assembling mechanical components. Hitchcock defined it as the ‘juxtaposition’ of ‘pieces of film that went through a machine’ in such a way as to create ‘ideas on the screen’. His own conjuring was by sleight of machine rather than of hand. ‘Emotions of many varying sorts, shades, degrees and colours have to be manufactured,’ he said, ‘and all must be photographically clear.’ Montage used the machine against itself, creating out of its excess of indifference (the seventy set-ups for the shower scene) a spectacle guaranteed to wring the heart.
The best of the films about nothing very much at all end superbly, the fulfilment of the romantic fantasies they explore achieved by small miracles of montage. In his Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (1996), the scriptwriter William Goldman offers an admiring analysis of the conclusion of North by Northwest. When we recall what happened at the end of the film, Goldman says, we suppose that it must have taken a narrative age to get from the moment at which Eve Marie Saint dangles helplessly from Cary Grant’s hand on the face of Mount Rushmore – while America’s implacable enemies stand poised to tip them both over the edge and make off with the state secrets they’ve been safeguarding – to the moment at which he pulls her up beside him into a bunk in an express train about to enter a tunnel. In fact, it takes a mere 45 seconds, so economical is Hitchcock’s editing. North by Northwest was modelled to some extent on The 39 Steps (1935), which permits itself three minutes to get from the climax of a national emergency involving the design of a new warplane to the blissful union of hero and heroine. Both films conclude at a lick: the pieces don’t so much fall into place as cascade. There’s a kind of heartlessness in that, too. Montage has become cinema’s indispensable, delightful, futile prank. It’s not just corpses that tumble out of the vehicles rolling off the Hitchcock assembly line, but pairs of newly-weds, in radiant, fully automated succession.
Tuesday 19 May 2015
Owen Jones on representation in Benefit Street
What effect can this sort of representation have? Here's a video of Ian Duncan Smith, the Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary under David Cameron in which he uses the programme as evidence that people who claim benefits need radical change - but not necessatily in a helpful way...
"We let these problems be ghettoised as though they were a different country. Even now, for the most part they remain out of sight – meaning people are shocked when they are confronted with a TV programme such as Benefits Street."
Duncan Smith claims: "Too often for those locked in the benefits system, that process of making responsible and positive choices has been skewed – money paid out to pacify them regardless, with no incentive to aspire for a better life."
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/22/duncan-smith-benefits-street-shock
Thursday 26 March 2015
Friday 16 January 2015
Thursday 25 September 2014
Wednesday 9 July 2014
Saturday 7 June 2014
Thursday 22 May 2014
Wednesday 21 May 2014
A2 The Selfish Giant (2013)
LITTLE BIG MAN
May 20, 2014
Noel Vera
Set in a relatively benign junkland, Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant is about two kids who salvage parts for a living, probably at this point, who have nothing better to do with their lives.
You might say Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013) is one-third Of Mice and Men (two friends, one of them not ostensibly smart), one-third Oliver Twist (boys seduced into stealing for a modern-day Fagin) and maybe less than a third Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale.
Fact is, the eponymous giant’s status in this picture is rather ambiguous: the title might refer to unscrupulous junkyard dealer Kitten (Sean Gilder - terrific actor, if not exactly of impressive stature); to the tall steel-and-concrete structures looming in the film’s background; to any adult seeing these kids and failing to act decisively (pretty much all of them, when you think about it).
Barnard borrows from the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh (Loach’s Kes being an especially vivid precursor), borrows from the kind of kitchen-sink realism Great Britain specialized in back to the ’60s; one also suspects the presence of the Dardenne brothers in the gene pool - the focus on the poor and marginalized, the mostly handheld camera, the total lack of music (other than what you hear from a passing radio, or what onscreen characters sing or whistle aloud), the naturalistic acting, the often bleak urban landscape, the even bleaker weather.
Barnard does make the style her own, however: once in a while she inserts what one might call “pillow shots,” images that bridge the transition from scene to scene - ong shots of transmission pylons, transformer stations, nuclear reactor cooling towers, all often shrouded in haze like immense figures striding straight out of myth and legend. In Barnard’s case her repeated use of these larger-than-life constructs (the majority of which for some reason - they’re the biggest and easiest to find? - involve the power-generating industry) suggests that the story takes place in some fabled fallen kingdom, the ruins a reminder of the glory that was postwar industrial England.
Enter Arbor (Connor Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas); the two had just been kicked out of school for fighting. Good for them; they’d much rather work for Kitten, salvaging junk metal and cable copper from wherever and whenever.
Barnard again makes a point, following these children as they drive a horsecart through the streets of Bradford, West Yorkshire: in this depressed economy the enterprise of choice isn’t innovation or manufacture, but salvage - clambering in and out of junk piles, ripping motors out of fridges and washing machines for the coils of precious copper, on occasion stealing the wire out from under an unwary neighbour’s nose.
A police officer spells it out for Arbor’s mother: stealing cable (and not in the digital download sense) is a criminal offense that could land them in jail. But Arbor doesn’t care; school’s a waste of time, bills need to be paid, and he has nothing better to do with his life.
What follows has the quiet desperation of ants crawling over a dead horse’s near-clean carcass, of little creatures competing fiercely over increasingly slim pickings. The boys have to contend with police, with social workers, with their own occasionally worried parents, with property owners who care about their pilfered property, with other adults on a similar mission who wouldn’t mind shoving aside a smaller competitor if it meant snatching a hunk of metal worth ten quid at Kitten’s.
Kitten is equally unscrupulous; when Arbor had been paid a particularly generous bounty, Kitten pulls out a few bills from Arbor’s hand and calls it “tax, collected direct.” Arbor still doesn’t care; he has a little pocket money now, and Swifty can help pay for his family’s overdue electric bill.
Along the way Arbor talks yearningly of boosting power cables from the transmission pylons standing like sentinels over the Yorkshire countryside; like Wilde’s titan they also hold up treasure of a value beyond dreaming, plainly visible but just that far out of the boys’ reach.
That said, the town of Bradford is not exactly Hell on earth. Barnard’s film isn’t as harrowing as Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, where the Mexican slums teem with murderous adults, uncaring-to-the-point-of-perverse parents, and out-and-out child sociopaths; nor are the working conditions as bad as in Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys where kids use cheap plastic snorkels to dive for scrap metal in the sea, of all places (Jover notes that a child goes missing every other week, thanks to underwater currents, or sharks, or who knows what else).
Interestingly, Bunuel and Jover opt for a chillier, more distant emotional tone, knowing that with material as harrowing as what they have you don’t need to pump up the drama for a strong film, that in fact you need to tone it down considerably or else it all becomes too much - the audience is in more danger of breaking out in laughter than breaking down in tears.
Barnard gives us a bleak but relatively benign milieu where the children are taken care of (albeit indifferently) and the adults do stop short of seeing their offspring as literal prey. In this not-quite-best-of-worlds, a purgatory if you like caught between extremes (with perhaps a bias towards the lower), she’s free to do the vulgar thing, reach out for the melodramatic, explicitly touch our hearts.
http://bigozine2.com/feature/?p=104
A2 Representation of the Working Class and Collective Identity - past questions...
2. Compare the different ways in which one or more groups of people are represented in the media.
3. Analyse the ways in which at least one group of people is mediated.
4. Discuss the social implications of media in relation to collective identity.
5. How do media representations influence collective identity?
6. Discuss the different ways in which groups of people are represented by media.
7. Discuss how one o more groups of people are represented through the media?
8. Explain the role played by the media in the construction of collective identity.
9. Analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people.
10. What is collective identity and how is it mediated?
11. With reference to one group of people you have studied, discuss how their identity has been mediated.
12. ‘Media representations are complex, not simple and straightforward.’ How far do you agree with this statement in relation to the collective group you have studied?
13. Analyse the ways in which the media represent one group of people that you have studied.
14. ‘The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it.” Discuss.
Monday 19 May 2014
Friday 16 May 2014
Thursday 15 May 2014
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