Authors: David Bordwell,Kristin Thompson
B0041VYHGW EBOK (184 page)
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
Many of the critical studies we have cited in the “Where to Go from Here” sections in
Parts Two
and
Three
repay attention as instances of film analysis. Here are some others that exemplify diverse approaches: Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson,
Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Noël Burch,
In and Out of Sync: The Awakening of a Cine-Dreamer
(London: Scholar Press, 1991); Noël Carroll,
Interpreting the Moving Image
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lea Jacobs,
The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Bill Simon, “‘Reading’
Zorns Lemma,” Millennium Film Journal
1, 2 (Spring–Summer 1978): 38–49; P. Adams Sitney,
Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Kristin Thompson,
Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), and
Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). The web journal
Senses of Cinema,
www.sensesofcinema.com
, hosts many in-depth film analyses.
Collections of film analyses include Peter Lehman, ed.,
Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism
(Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990); Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky, eds.,
Film Analysis: A Norton Reader
(New York: Norton, 2005); and John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, eds.,
Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
The British Film Institute publishes two series of short books analyzing individual films: “Film Classics” and “Modern Classics.” For lists of titles visit the Filmstore at
www.bfi.org.uk
.
Feminist Lizzie Borden’s personal perspective on
Raging Bull,
“Blood and Redemption,”
Sight and Sound
5, 2 (NS) (February 1995): 61, offers an interesting supplement to our analysis.
We have posted several other sample analyses in pdf format at
www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/index.php
. These were published in earlier editions of
Film Art
and discuss other films that exemplify the principles we outline here. Specifically:
Classical narrative and style:
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934),
Stagecoach
(1939),
Hannah and Her Sisters
(1985),
Desperately Seeking Susan
(1985)
Nonclassical approaches to storytelling:
Day of Wrath
(1943),
Last Year at Marienbad
(1961),
Innocence Unprotected
(1968)
Animation
:
Clock Cleaners
(1937)
Ideology
:
Tout va bien
(1972)
Documentary form and style:
High School
(1968)
We also occasionally analyze films on “Observations on film art and
Film Art.
” All of these involve spoilers, of course, so it’s best to see the film before reading the entry. “Lessons from
Babel
” talks about its “network” narrative and its style; see
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=147
. “Another pebble in your shoe” analyzes Lars von Trier’s cinematographically innovative
The Boss of It All;
see
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=202
. “Cronenberg’s violent reversals” compares
A History of Violence
and
Eastern Promises;
see
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1412
. On Martin Scorsese’s remake of a Hong Kong film, see “
The Departed
: no departure,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=18
.
We discuss Gary Giddins’ essays on film and quote some of his great writing in “Weather Bird flies again,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=358
.
Most analysis these days is done on DVD. But not all films are on DVD, especially older ones. We write about studying an archival print film closely on an editing machine in “Watching movies very, very slowly,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1024
.
Several DVDs of
His Girl Friday
have been released. Most of these have mediocre image quality and few supplements. A fine restored version is available from Columbia in its “Columbia Classics” series, which also contains an excellent commentary track by Howard Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy. Delta has released the same restoration sans commentary but supplemented by a documentary,
Cary Grant on Film: A Biography.
North by Northwest
is available from Warner Home Video. (Note that the more expensive “Limited Edition Collector’s Set” from Creative Design Art has no additional supplements on the disc itself but simply comes in a box with some cheaply produced photos and a poster.)
The Criterion Collection of
Do The Right Thing
contains an entire disc of supplements, including an hour-long documentary, “The Making of
Do The Right Thing,
” that stresses the filmmakers’ interaction with the community in which the film was made. It also contains interviews with the director and editor, and Spike Lee’s own behind-thescenes footage.
Breathless
is available from Fox Lorber, either by itself or in a boxed set including two other early features by Jean-Luc Godard,
Le Petit Soldat
and
Les Carabiniers.
The Criterion Collection’s two-disc set of
Tokyo Story
contains a restored print, as well as a feature-length documentary about director Yasujiro Ozu,
I Lived, But …
; an audio commentary by David Desser; and an essay by David Bordwell.
The Criterion DVD release of
Chungking Express
includes an informative commentary track by Tony Rayns.
Man with a Movie Camera
is available in the United States from Image, with an accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, and from Kino International, with music by Michael Nyman. The Image DVD has no region coding. The Kino version is also available in the U.K. from the British Film Institute.
The Thin Blue Line
is available on DVD (from MGM), alone or in a boxed set with two other feature-length Errol Morris documentaries:
Gates of Heaven,
on pet cemeteries; and
Vernon, Florida,
focusing on a small Florida town’s eccentric citizens. Morris maintains a provocative blog on documentary problems in
morris.blogs.nytimes.com
. Several entries discuss
The Thin Blue Line.
The “Two-Disc Special Edition” of
Meet Me in St. Louis
(Warner Bros.) has an excellent transfer of the film, as well as a solid background supplement, “The Making of an American Classic.” (It also contains “Hollywood: The Dream Factory,” a history of MGM made in 1972.)
Raging Bull
(MGM) is available as a single disc or a “Special Edition” with a supplementary disc that includes several short documentaries on various aspects of the production.
“Not everything is possible at all times.” This aphorism of art historian Heinrich Wölffin might serve as a slogan for our final chapter. So far, our survey of film art has examined various formal and stylistic possibilities, and we’ve drawn our examples from the entire range of film history. But film forms and techniques don’t exist in a timeless realm, equally accessible to all filmmakers. In particular historical circumstances, certain possibilities are present while others are not. Griffith could not make films as Godard does, nor could Godard make films as Griffith did. This chapter asks, What are some ways in which film art has been treated in particular historical contexts?
We consider those contexts first by period and then by nation. Although there are other equally good tools for tracing change, it’s illuminating to note filmmaking trends in different times and places. In some of our cases, we’ll look for what are typically called
film movements.
A film movement consists of two elements:
- Films that are produced within a particular period and/or nation and that share significant traits of style and form
- Filmmakers who operate within a common production structure and who share certain assumptions about filmmaking
There are other ways of defining a historical context (for example, biographical study or genre study), but the category of
movement
corresponds most closely to the emphasis of this book. The concepts of formal and stylistic systems permit us to compare films within a movement and to contrast them with films of other movements.
Our range of choice will be narrowed still further. We’re concerned with Hollywood and selected alternatives. We’ll trace the development of the commercial American narrative cinema while contrasting it to other approaches to style and form.
Because we’re exploring historical contexts, we go beyond noting stylistic and formal qualities. For each period and nation, we’ll also sketch relevant factors that affect the cinema. These factors include the state of the film industry, artistic theories held by the filmmakers themselves, pertinent technological features, and cultural and economic elements. These factors necessarily help explain how a particular trend began, what shaped its development, and what affected its decline. This material will also provide a context for particular films we’ve already discussed; for example, the following section on early cinema situates Lumière and Méliès in their period.
Needless to say, what follows is drastically incomplete. The writing of serious film history is in its early stages, and we must often rely on secondary sources that will eventually be superseded. Moreover, there are many unfortunate omissions. Important filmmakers who don’t relate to a trend or movement (for example, Tati, Bresson, and Kurosawa) are absent, as are certain important film movements, such as French populist cinema of the 1930s and Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo movement of the early 1960s. What follows simply seeks to show how certain possibilities of film form and style were explored within a few typical and well-known historical periods.
CONNECT TO THE BLOG
Some filmmakers have tried to escape this inevitability by imitating older films. Does it work? On
The Good German,
see “Not back to the future, but ahead to the past,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=66
;
on
Casino Royale,
see “Can they make up like they used to? continued,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=195
.
CONNECT TO THE BLOG
For a detailed account, see our other textbook,
Film History: An Introduction.
We discuss how we wrote it in “Around the world in 750 pages,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=3682
.
In order to create the illusion of movement, still pictures must appear in rapid succession. To prepare them and display them at the right rate, certain technologies are necessary. Most basically, there must be a way of recording a long series of images on some sort of support. In principle, one could simply draw a string of images on a strip of paper or a disc. But photography offered the cheapest and most efficient way to generate the thousands of images needed for a reasonably lengthy display. Thus the invention of photography in 1826 launched a series of discoveries that made cinema possible.
Early photographs required lengthy exposures (initially hours, later minutes) for a single image; this made photographed motion pictures, which need 12 or more frames per second, impossible. Faster exposures, of about
second, became possible by the 1870s, but only on glass plates. Glass plates weren’t usable for motion pictures since there was no practical way to move them through a camera or projector. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge, an American photographer, did make a series of photographs of a running horse by using a series of cameras with glass plate film and fast exposure, but he was primarily interested in freezing phases of an action, not re-creating the movement by projecting the images in succession.
