ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies The Star System/Technology.

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

The Star System/Technology

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System

“We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!”—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)


Fred Astaire


Lauren Bacall


Warren Beatty


Ingrid Bergman


Humphrey Bogart


Clara Bow



George Clooney


Gary Cooper


Joan Crawford


Tom Cruise


Bette Davis


Doris Day


Robert DeNiro


Leonardo DiCaprio


Marlene Diedrich


Clint Eastwood


Douglas Fairbanks


Henry Fonda


Jane Fonda


Clark Gable


Greta Garbo


Lillian Gish


Cary Grant


Tom Hanks


Rita Hayworth


Audrey Hepburn


Katherine Hepburn


Rock Hudson


Gene Kelly


Tom Mix


Marilyn Monroe


Polla Negri


Paul Newman


Jack Nicholson


Al Pacino


Mary Pickford


Robert Redford


Norma Shearer


Jimmy Stewart


Meryl Streep


Gloria Swanson


Elizabeth Taylor


Shirley Temple


Rudolf Valentino


Denzel Washington


The Star Machine

Stardom as a problem for the academic study of filmStudy of stardom must be both industrial and psychologicalStars as marketing devicesStars as “organising presences in cinamatic fictions”Barthes on mass culture as a system for showing/regulating “desire”John Ellis: a star is “a performer in a particular medium whose figure enters into subsidiary forms of circulation and feeds back into future formances”Anne Friedberg: a star is “a particular commoditised person routed through a system of sign with exchange value.”“For . . . profit to be realised, there must be at least a promise of pleasure. Enjoyment of the star has to be paid for.”The star is a person, but also a “form of capital, owned either by the studio or the individual, and also a form of raw material. . . .”


The Star Machine

Hollywood’s task: predictable and inventiveWere stars invented as a marketing device by independent producers, or was film stardom a continuation of an already existing theatre system?Do stars always properly “represent” a character fully? What if there is a “disjuncture.”Consider p. 112: how do different acts in famous role yield radically different results?What is trademark value?What is insurance value?How can a star “overturn the delicate balance between static image and narrative flow on which classic Hollywood cinema rests”?What does it mean to identify with a star?What happens when a star is read “subversively”?Is studying stars “banal”?


SemioticsSemiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Swiss Linguist

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). American Philosopher

The Co-Inventors/Discoverers of Semiology/Semiotics


SemioticsSemiotics

“One could . . . assign to semiology a vast field of inquiry. if everything which has meaning within a culture is a sign and therefore an object of semiological investigation, semiology would come to include most disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Any domain of human activity--be it music, architecture, cooking, etiquette, advertising, fashion, literature--could be approached in semiological terms.”

Jonathan Culler


SemioticsSemiotics

CODE. In semiotics, the usually unstated rules that govern the interpretation of a sign or signs. A scholar of western films once titled a semiotics of the genre “I Didn’t Know the Gun was Coded”; so, too, are the horse, the white and black hats, the woman, etc.


SemioticsSemiotics

DENOTATION. The literal meaning of an expression. The first order of signification. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes (is) Barack Obama.


SemioticsSemiotics

CONNOTATION. The suggestive or associative sense of an expression that extends beyond its literal definition. A second order system of signification which uses the denotation of a sign as its signifier and adds other meanings, other signfiers, often ideological in nature. A picture of Barack Obama denotes the actual person but connotes radically different meanings on the political left or right.


SemioticsSemiotics

MYTHOLOGY. For Barthes, investigation into the acquired connotative meanings of cultural signs in order to divest them of their acquired, taken-for- granted meanings. For example, television, though an object of wonder at the beginning of its history, is now a commonplace, its significance now so caught up in the culture's semiotic system that it is difficult to describe or explain. A mythology of TV would seek to decode it, to make its connotations again fresh and visible.


SemioticsSemiotics

SEMIOCLASM. The sudden destruction—implosion/explosion—of a sign, sometimes resulting in its complete rewriting.


SemioticsSemiotics

SEMIOSIS. The ungoing development over time of the meaning of a sign.


SemioticsSemiotics

SIGNIFIED. The immaterial aspect of a sign; that which the signifier represents. May be approached only through the signifiers of any given text. SIGNIFIER. The material aspect–an image, an object, a sound–of a sign. Signifiers tend to take on meaning through opposition to other possible alternative signifiers (i.e., woman/horse) not represented in a given syntagm. According to Saussure, the relationship of the signifier to signified in language is entirely arbitrary.


SemioticsSemiotics

From David Lavery, Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992: 91, 99-100. Media critic Ellen Seiter, in a semiotic dissection of the "myth" of the Challenger, has noted that "on the connotative level, the space shuttle was used as a signifier for a set of ideological signifieds such as scientific progress, manifest destiny in space, U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." As a sign, the Space Shuttle "consisted of a signifier–the TV image itself–that was coded in certain ways (symmetrical composition, long shot of shuttle on launching pad, daylight, blue sky background) for instant recognition, and the denoted meaning, or signified 'space shuttle.'" This signification had been built up throughout the shuttle's brief history until it had become an ideological given. The explosion of the Challenger "radically displaced" these connotations.


SemioticsSemiotics

The connotation of the sign "space shuttle" was destabilized; it became once again subject–as a denotation–to an unpredictable number of individual meanings or competing ideological interpretations. It was as if the explosion restored the sign's original signified, which could then lead to a series of questions and interpretations of the space shuttle that related to its status as a material object, its design, what it was made of, who owned it, who had paid for it, what it was actually going to do on the mission, who had built it, how much control the crew or others at NASA had over it. At such a moment, the potential exists for the production of counterideological connotations. Rather than "scientific progress," the connotation "fallibility of scientific bureaucracy" might have been attached to the space shuttle; "manifest destiny in space" might have been replaced by "waste of human life"; and "U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." by "basic human needs sacrificed to technocracy." (31)


SemioticsSemiotics

In the New York Times of 29 January 1986, at the bottom of the same page that reprinted the complete text of Reagan's nationally televised tribute to the Challenger crew, a brief note announced the Ford Motor Company's cancellation of the advertising campaign for the Aerostar minivan. The ads, which juxtaposed the Ford vehicle with the shuttle in order to highlight the van's technological precision and aerodynamic shape, had lost their power. The producers of the "soon-to-be-released" summer movie SpaceCamp faced a similar problem. In the movie a woman astronaut and five boys and girls participating in a shuttle engine test on the launch pad are unexpectedly sent into space to prevent an on-ground explosion. Despite concern over how the film would be perceived, they decided to release the film as planned. It did only mediocre business.


SemioticsSemiotics

More than just seven brave men and women and a billion-dollar piece of machinery may have been lost on 28 January 1986. The prime "vehicle" for the metaphors of America's space boosting may also have been obliterated. "Since Challenger and Chernobyl," David Ehrenfeld has astutely and conclusively observed, "it is no longer reasonable to doubt that the world is entering a new phase of human civilization. The brief but compelling period of overwhelming faith in the promise and power of technology is drawing to a close, to be replaced by an indefinite time of retrenchment, reckoning, and pervasive uncertainty. At best, we will be sweeping up the debris of unbridled technology for decades, perhaps for a longer period than the age, itself, endured" ("The Lesson of the Tower" 367).


SemioticsSemiotics

Nonetheless, in fall 1987 my daughter's PTA sent home a "Dear Parents" letter displaying at its top a drawing of the space shuttle ("USA/PTA" is visible on the tail assembly) and beginning, "Successful Space Shuttle Missions depend on their dedicated crews to guide them from liftoff to touchdown. Our PTA is no different." And in the college glossy Campus Voice Bi-Weekly, the Air Force saw fit to place an "Aim High" recruiting advertisement with the shuttle on its launching pad as its prominent central image and the headline "Before you work anywhere, take a look at the tools we work with." Such attempts to overcome the post-Challenger connotation of the "fallibility of scientific bureaucracy" and reinstate the shuttle as a metaphoric vehicle reek of non-sequitur and would seem to suggest a clear and perhaps contagious case of historical amnesia; yet they testify as well to the resilience of the dream.



Rock Hudson


George Clooney

Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou?


Brad Pitt

Pitt in Burn After Reading


Jack Nicholson

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: The Star System/Technology

Acting

the Kuleshov effectHitchcock: “doing nothing extremely well”Actors as revelations of “performance”Goffman on performanceNo hard and fast rules about good acting“All good movie actors understand the characters they play.”Impersonization (and winning awards).“It is John Wayne getting on a horse in The Searchers (1956), not simply Ethan Edwards (Wayne, incidentally, is ‘played’ by a man whose real name was Marion Morrison).The actor who plays a single character.The actor as chameleon (Johnny Depp).Stanislavsky: immobility, gestureless moments


Acting

King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972); The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)Thinking for the cameraExhibitionistic acting: AstaireStagy acting: Martin in The JerkDifferent styles in the same film: Cobb and Brando in On the WaterfrontEarlier meaning of “actor”The camera moving closer.Hawks: actors’ small movement; the smallest twitch (Cruise)The Method: Lee Strasberg in The Godfather, Part II“Emotional memory”Brechtian actingComic acting—Marx brothersDigital actors, robots, Schwarzenegger


Stars Before Sound

Early AnonymityDifferentiating the brandStars and transgression


Stars After Sound


Stars in Postwar Cinema


Contemporary Stardom

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies: Technology

Technology

Mike Allen


Introduction

Film technology has been foregrounded since the beginning“legendary moments”“the suppression of radical potential”“[A]ny innovation and development in film technology is market-led or, at least, is in a symbiotic relationship with the market.”Colour and widescreen could have happened in the 1920s.“New technologies do not simply emerge, but by virtue of their development, the market promotes their use (sometimes to the point of insistence), creating needs which the new technologies serve to commercial advantage” (Peter Wollen).The “differentiation-appropriation cycle.”


Introduction

“Each new technological development—the advent of sound, colour, widescreen, and so on—can be see, through a materialist scenario, to restore briefly the cine,ma’s initial identity as a novelty, foregrounding the new technology in ways which distrupt the medium’s carefully constructed, seamless surface of invisibility.” (Belton)

“These moments [of television narrative complexity] push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality . . . . (Jason Mittell 35)


Introduction

Improving existing practicesMajority of technological development—intended to enhance, not change the paradigm.Times of flux foster innovation.

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”—Harry Lime in The Third Man

The ramifications of a new technology—right hand column, top, 140No technology happens in isolation.


Introduction

War and film technologyPaul Virilio (pictured)Clip from Dr. Strangelove


Introduction

The purpose of all innovation: to contribute to experiencing film as if it were real life (and Bazin’s “myth of total cinema”)"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke.


Sound

Behind the screenUnreliable accompanimentVast expenditure of the move to soundAdvent of sound set back “mobile framing”The decision to use one microphone (middle of 2nd column, p. 143)Magnetic tape—Allies captured from the GermansLive recording of sound—actors had to continue even if lines were forgotten (and Fellini’s post-synching)THX, Dolby and “surround sound”—personal stereo even in an auditorium


Colour

Color lay dormant for almost three decadesHand-coloring—not unlike today’s colorizingTechnicolor1935: color added 30% to production budget.1940: % of American Film in Color--41941: % of American Film in Color--511967: % of American Film in Color--751976: % of American Film in Color—94Gone with the Wind—canning Cukor


Deep Focus

The Debate: Bazin vs. EisensteinWelles, Gregg Toland, Renoir, WylerThe desire of cinematograhers asseting their importance

Below: Orson Welles, Gregg Toland, Jean Renoir, William Wyler


Deep Focus

Citizen Kane(Orson Welles, 1941)


Deep Focus: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)


Deep Focus: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)


Lighting

Not originally artisticLighting for dramatic effectRevelation and expressionThe effect of the coming of sound (humming carbon lights had to be replaced)


Widescreen

Gance’s NapoleonCompeting with other amusements—becoming more participatoryFormat wars: CinemaScope/VistaVisionFraming and subject matterAnamorphic lenses: Harold and MaudeIMAX

“Anamorphic widescreen uses the entire frame by vertically stretching the image to fit on the negative. This is accomplished with special lenses that compress the image as it is filmed. To correct the distortion caused by a 2.39:1 image being stretched to fill a 1.37:1 frame, another lens, this one on the theater's projector, is used to correct the picture's proportions. Anamorphic widescreen has greater resolution because more film area is being used to project the same picture.”—Wise Geek Website

http://67507750.blogspot.com/2010/09/kevin-brownlow-discusses-abel-gances.html


Widescreen“Next time I write a poem I shall use a wider sheet of paper.”--Jean Cocteau


Cameras

Kubrick storyHand-heldShaky-cam


Digital Video

Sky CaptainGreen-screenRe-creating dead actors


Editing

Women as early editors (labor intensive)Editing bench/tableDigital editing

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies The Star System/Technology.

Documents

film studies

star system slide

star systemtechnology

star system tom cruise

star system tom hanks

star system tom mix

star system henry fonda

star system jane fonda