Monday, March 16, 2009
a film canon
In preparation for next week's class, you should browse Billy Stevenson's website, a film canon.
calligraphic modernism
Scraps of paper are very important to the plot of Piccadilly. In particular, the camera rests on the signature of Shosho, whose contractual relationship to the Piccadilly Club is never quite clarified, as if the matter of monetary loss and gain, ostensibly the engine of the story, can be established in writing but never disclosed with precision. The film's interest in scenes of writing establishes a special link between the written word and the cinematic. We see more action in Wilmot's office than onstage, and we see comparatively lengthy scenes of writing and blotting. Wilmot's blotting might have struck you as odd: it gestures to an archaic technology, the fountain pen, and a temporality of writing that generally escapes observation. When writing with a fountain pen, one either waited for the ink to dry or else blotted the page on a special kind of paper, blotting paper, which was often used as the "desktop" of a writing surface, as it is here. I'll have more to say about writing and in particular the use of calligraphy in Piccadilly. If you haven't yet watched the film, stay tuned for the scene where Shosho signs her contract with both a European signature and a series of characters.
Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.
Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Senses of Cinema and fanvid
There's a useful account of Rose Hobart at the online journal Senses of Cinema. Senses of Cinema is an extraordinarily useful resource for cinephiles and I recommend it to you in any case; Brian Frye's piece on Rose Hobart gives a good sense of Cornell's place in surrealist cinema. You might also find the style of the articles there an interesting model for your own blog entries.
Meanwhile, I want to say a little more about Rose Hobart in relation to fanvideos. Fanvids are generally short "collages" made by fans -- amateurs -- from material drawn from their fandom. For example, fans of the CSI or Law & Order shows will select excerpts from their preferred show and cut them together, often to the accompaniment of a song chosen to orient or skew their fan perspective on the show (these are sometimes called songvid). Romances between otherwise uninvolved characters can be made to "appear" through the work of fanvid. At the end of this post I've embedded one such songvid, featuring Bobby Goren and Alex Eames from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; I chose this couple because they are so decidedly not a romantic couple according to the show that the video demonstrates the kind of inventive work involved in fanvideos.
I'm interested in the way one might see the work of Cornell in Rose Hobart as a similar, earlier labour. Modern technology has liberated audiovisual texts in such a way that such work has become characteristic of our digital times (remember Burgin on this), but if you watch fanvideos across different fandoms you will notice that many of the techniques Cornell pioneered in his erzatz fandom are still present: repetition, slow motion, tints, anti-narrative cuts, asynchronous music.
Anyway, here's "Bring Me To Life," and here's a link to Henry Jenkins' article on How to Watch a Fan-Vid.
Meanwhile, I want to say a little more about Rose Hobart in relation to fanvideos. Fanvids are generally short "collages" made by fans -- amateurs -- from material drawn from their fandom. For example, fans of the CSI or Law & Order shows will select excerpts from their preferred show and cut them together, often to the accompaniment of a song chosen to orient or skew their fan perspective on the show (these are sometimes called songvid). Romances between otherwise uninvolved characters can be made to "appear" through the work of fanvid. At the end of this post I've embedded one such songvid, featuring Bobby Goren and Alex Eames from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; I chose this couple because they are so decidedly not a romantic couple according to the show that the video demonstrates the kind of inventive work involved in fanvideos.
I'm interested in the way one might see the work of Cornell in Rose Hobart as a similar, earlier labour. Modern technology has liberated audiovisual texts in such a way that such work has become characteristic of our digital times (remember Burgin on this), but if you watch fanvideos across different fandoms you will notice that many of the techniques Cornell pioneered in his erzatz fandom are still present: repetition, slow motion, tints, anti-narrative cuts, asynchronous music.
Anyway, here's "Bring Me To Life," and here's a link to Henry Jenkins' article on How to Watch a Fan-Vid.
Kaleidoscope, Hypnosis, Snack.
Here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals: we will be discussing those spirals further when we turn to Cocteau.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals: we will be discussing those spirals further when we turn to Cocteau.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
My City of Sydney
In a seminar last week, I mentioned this time capsule, the closing message Channel 7 showed in the 70s and 80s. Tommy Leonetti, the singer, hosted a variety show, but for many this was his most memorable moment on Australian television. Leonetti was American.
The song observes a similar logic to the "city symphony" albeit in miniature, offering a variety of perspectives on the cinematic liveliness of the city's arteries and nodal points. Its nightclub ambience and topographical drift from the Harbour to the Cross orients the viewer to her city as a place of adult recreation, which seems odd since it immediately precedes the cartoon of a kangaroo putting her joey to bed, kawaii before its time. Perhaps its implication is that the night-time, and so sleep, is an adult playground, one which ties it directly to the surrealistic dreamscapes we are investigating this fortnight. Sweet cosmopolitan dreams!
The dating of the clip is ambitious; the Opera House is still under construction (so it's pre-1973), and Tommy's outfit suggests to me we are on the cusp of the seventies. To give you an idea of the way in which this clip oriented the feeling of being a "Sydneysider" in the 70s, you might want to watch the punk cover by XL Capris, also at YouTube. Frenzal Rhomb also did a cover, in the 90s.
The song observes a similar logic to the "city symphony" albeit in miniature, offering a variety of perspectives on the cinematic liveliness of the city's arteries and nodal points. Its nightclub ambience and topographical drift from the Harbour to the Cross orients the viewer to her city as a place of adult recreation, which seems odd since it immediately precedes the cartoon of a kangaroo putting her joey to bed, kawaii before its time. Perhaps its implication is that the night-time, and so sleep, is an adult playground, one which ties it directly to the surrealistic dreamscapes we are investigating this fortnight. Sweet cosmopolitan dreams!
The dating of the clip is ambitious; the Opera House is still under construction (so it's pre-1973), and Tommy's outfit suggests to me we are on the cusp of the seventies. To give you an idea of the way in which this clip oriented the feeling of being a "Sydneysider" in the 70s, you might want to watch the punk cover by XL Capris, also at YouTube. Frenzal Rhomb also did a cover, in the 90s.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Vox popular
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Blogging Sites
For creating your blog I suggest three sites:
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
One class member, Matthew, has already created his blog. It's linked to the right, under "student blogs." A comment on his blog suggested it might be a good idea to create a Facebook group for the class, and that was something I'd been wondering about as well. So -- I have. Just search "cinematic modernism" and you will find it.
The group can give anyone who wants it another point of access to discussion and distribution of material. I'm very interested to see how you all make use of the space, so don't want to comment too much more on that: it's for you to play with.
The group can give anyone who wants it another point of access to discussion and distribution of material. I'm very interested to see how you all make use of the space, so don't want to comment too much more on that: it's for you to play with.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Rose Hobart
Rose Hobart's collage makes extensive use of the 1931 jungle flick, East of Borneo. East of Borneo is now in the public domain so you can torrent it here if you like, perfectly legally. The film narrates the story of Linda Randolph, who goes to Borneo to track down her errant husband. She meets up with not only her spouse but also the Prince of Marudu and a bewildering array of animals from all corners of the globe, though principal players in the animal kingdom are a horde, or herd, of frantic crocodiles. The Prince, he tells us, is descended from a volcano visible through palace windows, and the extinction of his life will be marked by the extinction of Marudu by volcanic eruption. And so it is.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
You may like to ponder the monkey who makes a brief appearance as Rose's companion. In East of Borneo this monkey meets a swift and unpleasant end. In Rose Hobart its appearance is also transitory, auguring not only the film's origin in a "jungle movie," but also a series of representations of animal-human interactions that will reach their zenith for us in King Kong and Wise Blood. Perhaps it's not accidental that an advertisement for East of Borneo appears on the marquee of a cinema in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
A Mascot: Tilly Losch
The image to the right is a detail from one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, Tilly Losch.
Cornell's name for the work remembers a Viennese actor and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films of the thirties and forties as well as in a wide variety of dance and avant garde theatrical performances. She was later a painter.
Cornell suspends Tilly in time: she embodies both the spectacle of performance and the attentive spectator at work, held or animated by a fragile collection of threads. She sits amidst, or aloft, the sublime spectacle of alps. Miniaturised and poised, Tilly has a body that is still and yet in action. She is seated in a space whose contours describe a simulated theatre; inside and outside, her location mid-air makes her half-audience, half-curtain (raiser).
You can find more information about Joseph Cornell here, here, and here, and we will be kicking off the unit by viewing a Cornell film, Rose Hobart. You can view it here.
You can find more information about Tilly Losch here.
Cornell's name for the work remembers a Viennese actor and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films of the thirties and forties as well as in a wide variety of dance and avant garde theatrical performances. She was later a painter.
Cornell suspends Tilly in time: she embodies both the spectacle of performance and the attentive spectator at work, held or animated by a fragile collection of threads. She sits amidst, or aloft, the sublime spectacle of alps. Miniaturised and poised, Tilly has a body that is still and yet in action. She is seated in a space whose contours describe a simulated theatre; inside and outside, her location mid-air makes her half-audience, half-curtain (raiser).
You can find more information about Joseph Cornell here, here, and here, and we will be kicking off the unit by viewing a Cornell film, Rose Hobart. You can view it here.
You can find more information about Tilly Losch here.
Cinematic Modernism, Son Of Cinematic Modernism
This is the blog for ENGL3604, Cinematic Modernism, as it is being taught in 2009. I originally taught the unit in 2007, using this blog. This year, I will be adding to the content of the unit of study as it shifts in emphasis and interest, directed by both my experience of teaching the unit last time and by the interests of class members. Some material will be repeated, but you can read the 2007 entries if you want to see one version of its life.
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