Presentation Transcript

1. FILM 2700: HISTORY OF THE MOTION PICTUREPROFESSOR SHELDON SCHIFFER

   MAYMESTER VERSIONOffice hours: 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM Daily Office: 25 Park Place South – Room 1023 phone: 404-413-5623 email: schiffer@gsu.edu http://schiffer.gsu.edu/wordpress/history
2. [Lecture 13] Documentary & Animation Become Cinematic Art – Cinema Becomes Fine Art At the birth of cinema, the lives of humanity were documented by the first filmmakers, August and Louis Lumiére. (Remember the shots of trains of arriving (actualities), trips down the Nile (scenics), and teenagers fighting with snowballs (actualities), politicians signing international treaties (topicals)?) But once fiction filmmaking became a dominant attraction, and therefore a dominant product from which to base a business model, documentary became a secondary endeavor. Animation became amusement for children and their parents.
3. Art Cinema’s Early Exploration of Non-Fiction Representation of “Place” A movement of architectural-urban space filmmakers have been documenting cities since the 1920s. Concept born from the Bauhaus, a group of between-the-wars artists and designers, interested in creating useful visual forms that showed technology serving humanity – use montage approach to shooting and editng Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), Walter Ruttman – applied concepts of “metric” and “rhythmic” montage to represent the city itself as a “work of art” -
4. Historical Question 12.1 After the Lumiere brothers, what content attracted documentary filmmakers, what problems did this content create, and how did filmmakers adapt to the problems?
5. Institutional Non-Fiction and the Presumption of Realism A principal attraction for these non-fiction forms was the idea that they were “real” presentations of human behavior. However, each film, in their commercial form, were staged and pre-scripted, and allowed few instances for random events to occur. Filmmakers did research by first observing their subjects without a camera before attempting to represent their subjects in filmed "documentary” setting.
6. Hollywood Converts the “Scenic” Into Spectacle Classical Hollywood Style absorbed by documentary Hollywood stabilized its industry around fiction entertainment, its methods of shooting and editing: Continuity, Invisible Cuts, Close-up/Medium-shot/Wide-shot, Shot-Reverse-Shot
7. Hollywood Converts the “Scenic” Into Spectacle Robert Flaherty was renown for his daring adventures to distant places where non-Western cultures lived lives with stories and themes represented as universal. His were the commercialization of the scenic, which underwent a process of research, writing, production (which included staging of scenes based on research), and editing.
8. Early Documentary Staged Events for Camera: Why? Pre-WWII, equipment was heavy, transport expensive, no-production laboratories or support on location small crews production process cumbersome and slow final product, has to pay for itself by competing in an entertainment marketplace
9. Early Documentary Staged Events for Camera: Why? Early documentary faced great criticism by anthropological community In defense of Flaherty, how is writing as a symbolic form of representing culture, with its use of rhetoric and plot any less a “construction” than a staged and filmed event that was studied and replicated for the camera? But how far toward creating entertainment could/should a documentarian go in staging, and still claim to represent the “real”?
10. Major Flaherty Films Nanook of the North, (1922), Robert Flaherty – a “staged” documentary that represents a family’s “universal” struggle to endure a Canadian arctic winter. Tabu, A Story of the South Seas. (1931), FW Murnau (and Robert Flaherty) - depicts two “lovers” on a South Seas island who are forced to leave the island when the girl is chosen as a holy maid to the indigenous gods of the culture. The second chapter, "Paradise Lost", about the couple's life on a colonised island and how they adapt to and are exploited by Western civilization. Mix of actors and indigenous non-actors. Is this documentary intentions are to represent faithfully the Polynesian culture? Louisiana Story, (1948), Robert Flaherty – partly staged, partly candid, sponsored by oil companies, cultures of the bayou along the oil rich Gulf Coast
11. Governments Invent the Art of Visual Persuasion Before and during WWII, the use of the documentary also employed the combination of an all seeing and knowing narrator whose authority anchored the meaning of visuals into a clear political argument. Olympiad (1938), Leni Riefenstahl – presentation of the 1936 Olympics intending to bolster Nazi-Aryan supremacy, as a divine design. Music creates the “narration”. Why We Fight (1942), Frank Capra –  persuasion documentary to move the US public to fighting against Nazis and Imperial Japan.
12. Post WWII DocumentaryGoes to U.S. Living Room The rise of television immediately after WWII sucked most theatrical documentary film into television as part of the news units of TV networks, pressuring further a standardization of form and method Documentary was absorbed as short and long form educational informational programming, or as corporate sponsored filmmaking.
13. Countering U.S., Documentary in France Adopts Art Movement “Left Bank” filmmaker Alan Resnais engages his philosophical question on the limits of presenting and knowing history through documents Night and Fog (1950), Alan Resnais – first major documentary on the Holocaust, presents questions about how we create a body of “knowledge” with film, and whether it can prevent human violence
14. Historical Question 12.2 How did new technologies change the working methods of documentarians, both for art documentary and for long form “news” production crews?
15. Technology Enables The Observational Eye By the late 1950s and early 1960s, cameras and sound recording became much smaller and more portable. Filmmakers from journalism and the social sciences were able to do their visual research or news-gathering in the field more rapidly, with smaller crews, and more inconspicuously.
16. Historical Question 12.3 What motives were governments trying to accomplish by funding documentary films?
17. Governments Fund Independent Documentary The presumption of government involvement is to attempt to educate the electorate in ways independent from ideologically biased journalistic sources to provided insight on the social and political issues of the moment. US, Canadian, European and Japanese governments develop government sponsorships
18. Film as Government Policy In Canada, the National Film Board  –  founded late 1950s In France, International Commission of Sociological and Ethnographic Film–  founded late 1950s In the United States, Corporation for Public Broadcasting – founded 1967 (Lyndon Johnson) and the Public Broadcasting Service (local network channels) – founded 1970 (Richard Nixon) Independent Television Service (Funding system) – found 1988 (Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush)
19. Historical Question 13.4 What were the production principles and aesthetics of Direct Cinema?
20. Direct Cinema and The “Objective” Approach Coming from a photojournalist background working for Life Magazine, Robert Drew created a documentary company intending to present journalism as “real” life drama.
21. Aesthetics Principles of Direct Cinema Seek out a crisis within a story, and build the film structure narrative around the forces and characters invested in the outcome of the crisis. Observe without intrusion, like a fly on the wall. Look for classic Hollywood shooting angles, but with a moving and always rolling camera and sound. Avoid voice-over, as much as possible.
22. Direct Cinema Films & Filmmakers Primary (1960), Robert Drew – story of Wisconsin primary, Kennedy vs. Humphries Most Drew Associates colleagues quit and went off to make their own companies and films. Salesman (1968), Albert and David Maysles – story of four competing Bible Salesman
23. Direct Cinema Films & Filmmakers Frederick Wiseman often works with minimal fragmented “stories” and is more interested in presenting institutional structures through the conditions of its human subjects. Events present conditions and institutional values based on policies and their execution. Titticut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman - about the treatment of inmates/patients at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane
24. Bringing “Reality” to Television Long before the reality-based programming of the 2000s, the initial impulse to use television was applied by US based PBS. An application of Direct Cinema on TV. An American Family (1971-1973) – a crew lives with the family documents and presents their life events as an on-going public TV show. Introduced controversial ideas such as teen homosexuality and divorce the Loud Family.
25. Historical Question 12.4 What were the production principles and aesthetics of Cinema Verité?
26. Cinema Verité and the “Subjective” Approach Anthropologists began to question their trustworthiness as presenters of non-Western cultures. A prevailing belief that a more “true” presentation would also show the documentation process, and allow the subject to document him or herself. Chronicles of Summer  (1961), Jean Rouch, a french professor of anthropology took the summer of 1960 to document French people and their social problems by allowing them to setup their own documentation process. Later, he used the same approach to document African cultures exposed to Westernization.
27. Historical Question 12.5 How are Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité different?
28. Historical Question 12.6 With the merging of subjective and objective approaches, what are the variant formal approaches of the contemporary documentary?
29. Toward a Merging of the Subjective and the Objective By the mid-1980s the documentary could not attract significant audiences beyond the television educational program Filmmakers revisited “classical” Hollywood aesthetics using: heroic storytelling structures, re-enactments, visual effects, stylized cinematography and sound deisgn
30. Toward a Merging of the Subjective and the Objective Used a combination VOG authorities (academics, poets) – the objective and actors as the voice of letter writers, - the subjective Used sound effects that were artificially constructed, - constructed re-enactment on sound with Foley recordings Visuals of documents, paintings, present day sites to reconstruct the story of the past using scan and pan. Creates what is called the “Ken Burns” effect – an approach to creating historical documentary often repeated.
31. Toward a Merging of the Subjective and the Objective The strategy taken by a generation of new documentarians was to appropriate Hollywood visuals with self-reflexive subversion of authority and truth The Thin Blue Line (1988), Erol Morris (find on Amazon.com) Uses extensive contradictory re-enactments Interviews in on-camera and voice-over provide contradictory content.
32. Toward a Merging of the Subjective and the Objective Or to make hyperbolic political rhetoric, essential op-ed documentaries that express a very direct and socio-political point of view. Roger and Me (1989), Michael Moore Uses first-person subjective narration and open ideological slant toward subject
33. Toward a Merging of the Subjective and the Objective The modern documentary often use all documentary modes: Voice-of-God (through interview or narration), Cinema Verite, Direct Cinema and Reconstruction of scenes with Classical Hollywood shots and cuts. Static Historical Documents (every documentary medium uses documents, including print)
34. Animation as a History of Technical and Cultural Experiments The first animators were engineers, scientists, with artistic interests
35. Historical Question 12.6 What are the technical innovations in the history of animation. How did these technical innovations solve problems that enabled new aesthetic possibilities? Were there economic factors that motivated innovation or adaptation of other media?
36. Hand Painting on Film Earliest Surviving Animation: PauvrePierrot(1892), Emile Raynaud (part of series Pantomimes Lumineuses) Reynaud, created a large-scale system called Theatre Optique (1888) which could take a strip of pictures or images and project them onto a screen. Demonstrated his system in 1892 for Paris' MuseeGrevin. First instance of projected animated cartoon films Images were painted directly onto the frames of transparent gelatine (with film perforations on the edges), and run through his projection system
37. Single Frame Photography of Illustration and Stop-Motion The Enchanted Drawing (1900) J. Stuart Blackton Humorous Phases of Funny Faces  (1908) J. Stuart Blackton The Haunted Hotel (1907), J. Stuart Blackton Used standard cinema camera to photograph 2 frames of each illustration state. Then projected drawing steps at 20 frames per second. Haunted Hotel took same basic technique, but applied to photographed 3-D objects, rather than drawings. Blackton was a newspaper cartoonist, and Vitagraph practitioner who worked for Edison as a filmmaker.
38. Illustration Transformations Fantasmagorie, (1908), Emile Cohl Mixed live action hand to reference creative act. Expanded the idea of the transformative line drawing, where one character/object representation can transform into another. Worked for Gaumont after seeing drawings stolen from his cartoons. Saw Blackton's Haunted Hotel and Gaumont required he master technique. Later moved to Pathe, and then later Eclipse. Moved to New Jersey Eclipse US office.
39. Adapting Comics Little Nemo in Slumberland(1911) Winsor MacCay Winsor MacCay had created Nemo and other characters for the newspaper, mostly W.R. Hearst papers. MCCay leveraged the popularity of his characters to afford the creation of animation of them where they can dance, and move.
40. Character-Driven Stop-Motion Animation Cameraman's Revenge (1912), Ladislaw Starewicz Inspired by Emile Cohl, working in Moscow. Advanced the technique of using dead preserved animals, reanimated by cinematography. Sided with White Army (Menshevicks), exiled to Crimea and later Paris. Teams up with Melies for a time.
41. Fixed Registration Peg of Illustration (Cartoons on Tour) Tales of Silas Bunkam, The Kelly Kids' Kite, The Fountain of Youth, Pleasure of Being a Grandpa (1915), RaoulBarre So that each drawing would allow for continuous motion within the frame of a mounted camera, a series of pegs could hold each drawing with paper hole punched precisely in the same place.
42. Cel Animation Bobby Bumps (series) (1919-18), Earl Hurd The intensely laborious process made animating thousands of drawings too slow for creating a streamlined production method. Hurd patented a technique where a transparent cel drawing could contain stationery layers of a drawing, while allowing another cel on top to contain serial drawings of the mobile layers. The cel were held in place by Barre's registration pin system.
43. Animated Simulation of an Event Sinking of the Lusitania (1911), Winsor McCay Working against the interests of his employer, W.R. Hearst, who did not want the US to  enter WW1, McCay animated on his own time and expense, a political cartoon of the event where a German submarine sank an allied passenger ship.
44. Character as Superstar Felix the Cat - Feline Follies (1919), Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer Felix became a wildly popular character internationally, largely promoted by toys, postcards, comic strip, ceramic figurines, stuffed animal toy.
45. Design Motion Graphics Lichtspiel Opus (1921) Walter Rutmann A Bauhaus design school member, explored animation to extend theories of design for motion graphics, used color theory and shape theory to advance the language of visual motion.
46. Conceptual and Abstract Animation Anemic Cinema (1926), Marcel Duchamp Dadaist Marcel Duchamp uses animation to critique the logic of shape and word as a critical motion poem.
47. Talking Character Superstar Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie (1927), Walt Disney The use of sound for an animated, lip synch character voice, with extensive sound effects to create a talking character superstar with as much international fame as Buster Keaton, who is referenced in Steamboat Willie.  Recall Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) of the same year, Keaton's last silent film.
48. Rotoscoping (Inkwell Studios or Max Fleischer Studio ~1915-42 )Koko's Earth Control (1928), Max Fleischer Animators sought a rapid means to draw the photographable world. Thus, taking photograph or filmed shot, animators could back-project the image against a frosted glass. Then, using cel and or paper, registered by pegs, animators would trace over the back-projected image. This technique also lead to mixing live-action and animated images. In that case, the negative of the back-projected image could be exposed to the same positive as the photographed animated frames.
49. Color Animation The Little Dutch Mill  (1934) and The Cobweb Hotel (1936), Max Fleischer The development of color film processing techniques, first two-color, then three-color techniques (Technicolor), Became an important attraction for the animated film to show off the new technology and bring in more audience through technical innovation.
50. Animation Transitions From Theater to Television What Opera, Doc? (1957), Chuck Jones Huckleberry Hound (1957), William Hannah and Joseph Barbera As theatrical movies sought to bring audience's back to the movies and away from their TVs, animation included more spectacular action and slapstick violence on a large screen scale. Chuck Jones, creator for Merrie Melodies of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, spent six times more production time on the What's Opera, Doc.  The reference to other movies, animations, operas continues a tradition of insider creative reference. Then, William Hannah and Joseph Barbera developed animation for TV seres primarily, starting with Huckleberry Hound, Tom and Jerry and then Yogi Bear. Huckleberry is a southernism for amateur.
51. Theatrical Rotoscoping with Big Budget Stars and Marketing Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Robert Zemeckis Animated features had been waning in the box office. Years had gone by when a feature animated Hollywood film had been released. The introduction of spectacularly interactive rotoscoping demonstrated a combination of acting, compositing and rotoscoping that few films had pulled off ever before, and none for so many scenes. The stars were Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd. The estimated budget was $70 million. Gross was a little more than $150 million. An early monster budget for an animated film.
52. Adult Audience Animation for Theaters Fritz the Cat (1972) Ralph Bakshi and Robert Crumb
Heavy Metal (1981) Gerald Poterton, Columbia Pictures With the popularity of head shop comic books (comics sold at legal stores that sold drug paraphernalia but not drugs themselves), filmed entertainment of these sub-culture characters developed by Crumb, and later Frank Frazzeta (Wizards, Lord of the Rings) and the popularization and entrance into the mainstream of drug culture, Heavy Metal and Columbia Pictures attempts to capitalize on the expanding subculture.
53. Adult Audience Animation for Television The Simpsons (1989-2014+) The fledgling new 4th television network, Fox, needed hit series to capture a younger generation of viewers in late teen to twenties bracket. The strategy was to focus on content that was on the edge of the scale of cultural acceptability. Matt Groening, influenced by alternative culture comics such as Fritz the Cat had developed his own alt comics in the free press paper as skewer of the suburban family. The Simpsons comic strip ran in the The LA Weekly. Fox picked up the series and cast the voices of known edgy comic actors in LA and Chicago. Harry Schearer became the voice of Homer and others.
54. Historical Question 12.7 What art movements may have influenced and extended itself into the film media? What are the categories of experimental film?
55. Experimental Cinema As Personal Expression Cheap, portable and lightweight equipment, enabled studio artists from other media to explore filmmaking ideas. These experiments are well understood if considered from the artistic movements and their lines of inquiry with formal.
56. Existing Art Movements That Used Film Media Extensions into film from existing art movements form other media (painting, photography, sculpture, theater) Dadaism/Surrealism Anemic Cinema (1929), Marcel Duchamp Bauhaus Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) – Walter Ruttman Surrealism Le Retour a La Raison (1923) Man Ray Ballet Mechanique (1924), Fernand Leger
57. Existing Art Movements That Used Film Media Abstract Expressionism Recreation (1956) Robert Breer Window Water Baby Moving (1959) Stan Brakhage Pop Art Empire (1964), Andy Warhol – b/w film of many hours static on Empire State Building Conceptual Art (not for any test in class Performance Art (not for the test in class) Modern(ist) Dance Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren – also an experimental narrative
58. Existing Movements That Used Film Media Film movements within Art, Technology and Literary Movements
59. Existing Movements That Used Film Media Experimental Animation - visual movement of people and objects photographed, (see Dadism and Bauhaus examples above), and done by both photographic and electronic means Schwechater (1958) PetreKabelka - uses electronic and photographic techniques to create images of consumption. Film was commissioned as a beer commercial
60. Existing Movements That Used Film Media Abstract Cinema - visual experiments with material processes of film emulsion and printing, (see Abstract Expressionism example above) Mothlight(1962) Stan Brakhage - (abstract cinema) uses a collage of moths temporarily adhered to negative to create photograms that make negative impressions against the film emulsion along the length of a 4-minute roll of film
61. Existing Movements That Used Film Media Experimental Narrative - experiments in narrative logic and philosophy – initiated by Left Bank filmmakers La Jeteé(1962) Chris Marker – (experimental narrative) uses still photos (except one shot), and constructs narratives from documentary and fiction visuals and sound – Left Bank filmmaker Hiroshima mon amour (1959) Alain Resnais – (experimental narrative) love affair set in Hiroshima, where the collective guilt and moral ambiguity of the nuclear bomb distracts a couple from their encounter