ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

1. ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

2. Survey of Popular Culture

3. Survey of Popular Culture

4. Martin Scorsese, 1976 Film culture is a complicated matter. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

5. Athanasius Kircher, Etienne Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge Thomas Edison, August and Louis Lumiere, Georges Melies Movie Archaeology Survey of Popular Culture

6. Camera Obscuras Phenakistoscope, Mutoscope, Zogroscope Marey’s Cinematographique Gun Zoetrope A Magic Lantern Survey of Popular Culture Movie Archaeology

7. Eadweard Muybridge Movie Archaeology Survey of Popular Culture

8.  What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives. John Berger, British art historian Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

9. Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our consciousness in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

10. Genre films essentially ask the audience, "Do you still want to believe this?" Popularity is the audience answering, "Yes."  Change in genre occurs when the audience says, "That's too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated." And genres turn to self-parody to say, "Well, at least if we make fun of it for being infantile, it will show how far we've come." Films and television have in this way speeded up cultural history.  Leo Braudy, American film scholar Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

11. Whatever his level of critical awareness, a viewer sitting in the dark alone and suddenly face to face with the screen is completely at the mercy of the filmmaker, who may do  violence to him at any moment and through any means. Should the viewer be forced beyond the pain threshold, his defense mechanisms may well be called forth and he may remind himself that "it's only a movie" . . . but it will always be too late . . . the harm will already have been done; intense discomfort, and perhaps even terror, will already have crept across the threshold. (125-25) Noel Burch, French film theorist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

12. How do movies reproduce the world magically? Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen. This is not a wish for power over creation (as Pygmalion's was), but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens. It is, in this sense, the reverse of the myth of Faust. And the wish for invisibility is old enough. Gods have profited from it, and Plato tells it at the end of the Republic as the Myth of the Ring of Gyges. In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It as though the world's projection explains our forms of unknownness and our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition. Stanley Cavell, American critic Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

13. Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. . . . You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. Don DeLillo, American novelist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

14. It is not perhaps entirely chance that the invention of motion photography, this sudden great leap in our powers of exploring and imitating the outward of perception, coincided so exactly with the journey into inner space initiated by Freud and his compeers. The year 1895 saw not only the very first film but also the publication of Studies in Hysteria, that is, the birth of psychoanalysis. John Fowles, British novelist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

15. The cinema studio creates a looking-glass universe where, without bottles labeled "Drink me" or cakes labeled "Eat me" or keys to impossible gardens, creatures are elongated or telescoped, movements accelerated or slowed up, in a fashion suggesting that the world is made of India rubber or collapsible tin. The ghost of the future glimmers through the immediate scene, the present dissolves into the past. Babette Deutsch, American poet and critic Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

16. The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t. • All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. • "Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end,’ harrumphed French film maker Georges Franju . . ." "Certainly," replied Jean-Luc Godard. "But not necessarily in that order." • Jean-Luc Godard, French film director and theorist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

17. Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union. • Sincerity's the main thing, and once you learn to fake that everything else is easy. • Sam Goldwyn, American film producer Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

18. You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. • We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones. Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honor and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes. Very few people seek these images today which correspond to the time we live, pictures that can make you understand yourself, your position today, our status of civilization. I am one of the ones who try to find those images. • Werner Herzog, German film director Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

19. All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish. Clive James, British critic Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

20. The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. Carl Jung, Swiss archetypal psychologist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

21.  The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this. Pauline Kael, American film critic The Movies Survey of Popular Culture

22. Of course [the cinema is] a marvelous toy. But I cannot bear it, because perhaps I am too "optical" by nature. I am an Eye-man. But the cinema disturbs one's vision. The speed of the movements and the rapid change of images forces men to look continually from one to another. Sight does not flood one's consciousness. The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform, where before it was naked. . . . Real life is only a reflection of the dreams of poets. The strings of the lines of modern poets are endless strips of celluloid. Franz Kafka, Austrian writer Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

23. Roger Munier • Up to that time [of the first movie images] one said: the smoke is rising into the blue, the leaves are trembling; or the painting suggests such movements. In the cinema, however, the smoke itself is rising, the leaf really trembles: it declares itself as a leaf trembling in the wind. It is like a leaf that one encounters in nature and at the same time it is much more, from the moment when, in addition to being real, it is also, indeed primarily, a represented reality. If it were only a real leaf, it would wait for my observation in order to achieve  significance. Because it is represented, divided in two by the image, it is already signified, offered in itself as a leaf trembling in the wind. (90-91) • We try with our pathetic film syntax, with our editing and camera placement, to organize discourse or at least a view of the world. . . . it is always the world which has the last word. Forever opaque, it outlives the transparence of human speech. We have created machines and tools which no longer serve us but which serve a world that now commands us. (89) Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

24.  A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is the importance of film--and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I left unfinished  business (Hamlet). So there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the world is coherent without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: nature's survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the last. (160) • Roger Munier, French film theorist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

25.  The cinema is substantially and naturally poetic. . . . it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinema sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream and not only that but things in themselves are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicity is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore, the cinema by directly reproducing objects physically . . . is substantially poetic. This is one aspect of the problem, let's say pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic. Pier Paolo Pasolini,, Italian poet and filmmaker Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

26. In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Week-ends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in book. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man. Walker Percy, American novelist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

27. Reflections on the Movies Once regarded as a puerile, cowardly escape from life because they begot and simulated dreaming, the movies are now recognizable as an extension of the supreme power inherent in a universe of energy, chance, evolution, explosiveness, and creativity. In such a youthful, exuberant universe the movies' kind of dreaming gives concrete probability and direction to the ongoing drive of energy, and as a consequence what at one time was thought to be a vitiating defect is now their greatest virtue. The new freedom they reflect and extend is freedom within the world, contingent and not absolute, a heightened vision of existence through concrete form beyond abstraction. In a world of light and a light world—unanalyzable, uninterpretable, without substance or essence, meaning or direction—being and non-being magically breed existence. Out of the darkness and chaos of the theater beams a light; out of nothingness is generated brilliant form, existence suspended  somewhere between the extremes of total darkness and total light. Performing its rhythmic dance to energy's tune, the movie of the imagination proves, should there be any doubt, that cinema, an art of light, contributes more than any other art today to fleshing out the possibilities for good within an imaginative universe. W. R. Robinson, American literary and film scholar Survey of Popular Culture

28. Thomas Schatz's life history of a genre (from Hollywood Genres) : • an experimental stage, during which its conventions are isolated and established, a classic stage, in which the conventions reach their “equilibrium” and are mutually understood by artist and audience, an age of refinement, during which certain formal and stylistic details embellish the form, and finally a baroque (or “mannerist,” or “self-reflexive”) stage, when the form and its establishments are accented to the point where they “themselves become the “substance” or “content” of the work. (37-38) • Thomas Schatz, American film scholar Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

29. In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Susan Sontag, American critic, theorist, and novelist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

30.  You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. The swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, change and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness. Leo Tolstoi, Russian novelist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

31. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything. Andy Warhol, American pop artist, painter, and filmmaker Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

32. The camera . . . is more than a recording apparatus, it is a means whereby messages from another world come to us, a world not ours, leading us to the heart of the great secret. • I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by. • The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents. • Orson Welles, American film director Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

33. A modern film is to an old one as a present-day motor car is to one built 25 years ago. The impression it makes is just as ridiculous and clumsy and the way film-making has improved is comparable to the sort of technical improvement we see in cars. It is not to be compared with the improvement—if it’s right to call it that—of an artistic style. It must be much the same with modern dance music too. A jazz dance, like a film, must be something that can be improved. What distinguishes all these developments from the formation of a style is that spirit plays no part in them. Ludwig Wittgenstein,  Culture and Value Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

34. What novels could tell, movies can show. Walls drop away before the advancing camera. No character need disappear by going off stage. The face of the heroine and the kiss of lovers are magnified for close inspection. The primal situation of excited and terrified looking, that of the child trying to see what happens at night, is recreated in the theater; the related wish to see everything is more nearly granted by the movies than by the stage. The movie audience is moreover insured against reaction or reproof from those whom they watch because the actors are incapable of seeing them. The onlooker becomes invisible. Wolfenstein and Leites, American psychologists Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

35. [The world of the movies is filled with] material ghosts. The images on the screen carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world. . . . Hence both the peculiar closeness to reality and the no less peculiar suspension from reality, the juncture of world and otherworldliness distinctive of the film image. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

36. A strange thing has happened—while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time. Virginia Woolf, British novelist and critic Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

37. By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by forcing us to reply ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness. Driven by the profit motive, the commercial entertainer dares not risk alienating us by attempoting new language even if he were capable of it. He seeks only to gratify preconditioned needs for formula stimulus. He offers nothing we haven’t already conceived, nothing we don’t already expect. Art explains; entertainment exploits. Art is freedom from the conditions of memory; entertainment is conditional on a present that is conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art gives us what don’t know we want. To confront a work of art is to confront oneself--but aspects of oneself previously unrecognized. Gene Youngblood, American underground film theorist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

38. Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzard, Michel Debats, 2001 Science or art? Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

39. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954 The movies encourage voyeurism. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

40. Billy Wilder, 1944 & 1950 Movies, too, have points-of-view. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

41. Orson Welles, 1941 A single movie can change the medium’s history. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

42. John Boorman, 1987 Movies can be autobiographically and historically illuminating. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

43. Robert Altman, 1971 The movies can enable us to relive the past. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

44. Steven Spielberg, 1998 The movies can enable us to relive the past. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

45. John Mckenzie, 1980 Movies have brought back the art of physionomy. Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing the distaste of the spectators. In this silent monologue, the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited that in any spoken soliloquy, for its speaks instinctively, subconsciously. The language of the face [its "physiognomy"]  cannot be suppressed or controlled. --Béla Balázs, Hungarian filmmaker and theorist Survey of Popular Culture The Movies Watch on the Film History Blog

46. Quentin Tarantino, 2004 Movies can be intertextually illuminating. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

47. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 The movies can take giant leaps. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

48. Federico Fellini, 1973 The movies can give us a lift. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

49. Stephen Norrington, 1998 The essence of the movies is action. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies

50. Peter Jackson, 2005 The essence of the movies is action. Watch on the Film History Blog Survey of Popular Culture The Movies