Cinema History Take 2 (Mod 7 through)

Global (or World) Cinema History

As noted at the beginning of the course, attempting to teach a comprehensive survey of "global" cinema proves a daunting challenge. How can one begin to accurately or thoroughly address all of the complexities and eclectic array of factors impacting the array of cinematic product produced around the world. Moreover, the twenty-first century's era of digital convergence serves to make defining what constitutes "cinema" itself even harder. What should be included? What can be included in the time we have allotted? RTF 306: Introduction to World Cinema History included quite a bit of content related to Hollywood movies, which might have struck some of you as an odd or frustrating choice. Fair enough! The rationale that I would offer you is that mainstream Hollywood films, for better or for worse, constituted a global cinema culture of its own for the vast majority of the twentieth-century. Meaning, one of the challenges in defining "world cinema" is that, far too often, popular culture or even the most educated of critics view "world cinema" as anti-Hollywood or is any kind of cinema that isn't Hollywood. As you have (hopefully!) seen throughout this semester, world cinema exists as far more than just non-Hollywood fare! Besides that, would you feel comfortable saying that "Hollywood" movies are "American" movies? Where would filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux, Melton Barker, or even home movie makers shooting 8mm footage of graduations, domestic celebrations, or local parades factor into this narrow understanding of "American" film? Global cinema, therefore, tends to reflect geo-political boundaries by breaking down the world's filmic output based upon the equally difficult concept of "national cinemas." Concluding our class with a (very) short introduction to Indian Cinema functions to illustrate well the complicated nature of defining even a national cinema. As the author of the article assigned to you this module, Tejaswini Ganti, notes, the term "Bollywood" was coined in the 1970s as a bit of a joke by English language journalists, combining "Hollywood" and "Bombay" -- in essence, popular mainstream entertainment produced in Mumbai/Bombay. Ganti, importantly, continues: "As the dominant media institution within India, the Bombay film industry plays an important role in constructing and defining dichotomies like 'traditional/modern,' 'global/local,' 'Western/Eastern' and categories such as 'culture,' 'nation,' and 'Indian'...Feature films are produced in approximately 20 languages in India and there are multiple film industries whose total output makes India the largest film producing country in the world. The cities of Madras and Hyderbad are home to the Tamil and Telugu language film industries which are as, or more prolific than, the Bombay industry." (Ganti, 2013) Thus, "Bollywood" does NOT constitute a coherent, national cinema for India, but rather illustrates popular cinema within a particular demographic or segment of Indian society -- one increasingly wealthy, global in outlook and experience. I would argue that our course's look at Indian Cinema, with its privileging of Hindi language productions, points to an increasingly important factor in world cinema, possibly overriding that of national cinemas: Cosmopolitan Cinema. Or, in other words, the films shown in the more urban, wealthy, and well-traveled parts of the world. Bollywood films, in some cases, prove more popular in Buenos Aires, London, Hong Kong, and Houston than they would in a rural, non-Hindi speaking region in India. If you think about it, the same might be said for the Oscar-nominated films every year! I can assure you that my extended family would never be interested in, or really would have even heard of, titles like La La Land. Why listen to me, though, when you can have Chris Rock explain such a disconnect very clearly from his hosting of the Academy Awards in 2005: What constitutes a "national cinema," therefore proves as complicated and divisive as what constitutes "art!" Issues related to defining national cinemas can include: Nationalities of production team or personnel [But how many "Hollywood" movies are directed by non-Americans starring non-Americans?] Location of film shoot [Well, with location shooting, "Hollywood" movies are shot anywhere in the world.] Financing companies [Hmmmm - many films today serve as international co-productions with money flowing from all parts of the world.] Throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first, movies have show us the increasingly interconnected world in which we live and consume media. Who knows where online video will take us next!?

Studio and the Coming of Sound

By the early 1930s, motion picture production served as the second most significant industry in present day Mumbai. In fact, over sixty percent of India's film production companies during this period operated out of Mumbai. Factors relating to Bombay's success in early film: THEATRICAL HERITAGE: Due to Bombay/Mumbai's role as Great Britain's commercial hub, a culture of patronage towards the arts, and in particular, theater grew steadily there. The city gave rise to what became known as Parsi Theatre, which mounted productions in a variety of regional languages such as Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu. Many of these same theater companies grew into film producers as cinema itself evolved further into an industry The Parsi theatrical style greatly influenced the emerging Hindi-language cinema. Parsi theatre blended a variety of diverse traditions including Shakespeare, indigenous poetry and folk stories, religious themes, and, importantly, utilized an operatic structure with music and songs fully integrated into the narrative. ACTORS: During the silent era there were very few female actors allowed to perform on screen. "Nice" Indian women did not become actors. Think of nineteenth century or Victorian sensibilities that conflated actresses with prostitutes or courtesans. The women who did perform as early movie actresses were those already seen as "fallen:" Those of mixed race, particularly Anglo-Indian.Merle Oberon, one of the very few (perhaps only?) Hollywood actresses of Indian descent, rose to stardom following a few roles in British films before landing a major studio contract. Despite her large number of fans and well-regarded career, studio moguls (as well as the press and movie magazines) referred to her colloquially as "the half-caste." In case you are ever bored and/or feeling low about your lot in life, check out Merle's absolutely bonkers life story. Trust me, you will not regret it... SOUND: The talkies arrived in India in the early 1930s and, given what you know about India's linguistic diversity, had a huge impact on film production. India currently has 22 officially recognized languages, but an estimated 1500 spoken dialects remain in use. Bombay theatre, as noted above, originally used a number of different languages, but as personnel became more and more involved in motion pictures, a form of Hindi dialect less often used in the local area, became the industry's "movie language." In utilizing this form of Hindi, Bombay cinema became more associated with a 'national' cinema than purely local. The coming of sound had a profound impact on film genre and sound technology as well. Genre: No film historian appears to agree as to why Hindi language films created a unique formula of song, dance, and melodrama - but the genre has proven successful, even most recently on an increasingly global level. Contemporary Indian auteurs have moved away from these "masala" movies, but the appeal of such endeavors remains fairly limited to large cosmopolitan cities like New Delhi or Mumbai. Playback Singing: For a variety of reasons, Hindi films largely employ a mixture of dubbing, playback singing (i.e., the actors do not sing themselves), and synchronous recorded dialogue. Although recent improvements in sound recording have encouraged many directors to push for more synch-sound (i.e., a more "Hollywood" type audio mix), audiences have pushed back and maintained a popular preference for asynchronous sound. For an AWESOME example of how this works while in production, check out this behind-the-scenes footage from a great Bollywood film, Rab ne Bana de Jodi/A Match Made by God (2008) Don't forget to notice that crazy urban population density: From an industrial standpoint, fledgling studios and/or production companies (including in Bombay and elsewhere in the country) did not attempt or proved unable to vertically integrate during the 1920s and 1930s . Therefore, Hindi language film has never allowed for one or two companies to dominate the industry. During the World War II censorship and rationing caused a rise in the role of the black market. The initial Hindi-language studios crumbled and independent producers began financing films. Fun fact (if true, which is debatable!): It has long been rumored that, during times of war or insurrection against the British, Indian soldiers and civilians would light British features and short subjects on fire to use as quasi-bombs! (Remember learning about nitrate cellulose?) Anonymous sources recalled the great pleasure taken by torching a terrible British film and lobbing it towards Her Majesty the Queen's regiments...

US Occupation of Japan: Impact on National Cinema

Following the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces. Shortly thereafter, the Allies, led by the Americans, occupied the country and initiated a program to not only rebuild devastated cities and communities, but to establish a democratic form of governance. So, why are we looking at this period so closely for the purpose of a film class? • As you already know, the US Government declared Hollywood to be an "essential wartime industry" during WWII. During the US occupation of Japan (1945-1952), the US Government approached cinema, its value and influence as potential propaganda, in Japan just as seriously. General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito • President Truman laid out two key goals during the US occupation of Japan that General Douglas MacArthur's Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) carried out: 1) To eliminate Japan's ability to incite warfare. 2) To transform Japan into a more Euro-American, "westernized" nation. • With these priorities in mind, the US Government monitored the cultural values represented in product created by the Japanese film industry as well as produced a significant amount of filmed propaganda itself. • Anyone taking the class from San Antonio? The below video showcases B-Roll from a film profiling the experience of a young Japanese woman who had married an American soldier. Now living in Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, the young "war bride" was filmed recounting her life in the United States where she enjoyed her home, her new car, but really missed sushi. (If interested in seeing the entire translated film, see: http://texasarchive.org/library/index.php?title=Japanese_War_Bride_III) In Japan, the American Occupation Forces created a "cultural orientation committee" which banned certain subjects and demanded films on how to live peacefully. For example, the committee reviewed hundreds of films made in Japan between the years of 1931 and 1945 and deemed 236 of these films as problematic due to the films' narratives endorsing "ultra nationalistic" militaristic behavior. The US government not only banned these films from further distribution, but went about the proactive destruction of hundreds of films from the wartime era and before -- literally setting fire to the nitrate films.

Case Study: George Stevens

One of the most illustrious Hollywood directors of the mid-twentieth century, even if lesser known today, was a man by the name of George Stevens. Stevens' career merits a quick look for us as his experience before, during, and after the war well illustrates the complexities of the period -- and the impact of the war on Hollywood filmmakers and the movies that they made. Raised within a theatrical family, Stevens joined the film industry first as a cinematographer and gag writer for the Hal Roach Studios, home of some of the most hilarious short subject series such as "The Little Rascals" and "Laurel and Hardy." It was through his work with Laurel and Hardy, the comedic duo featured earlier in our class to illustrate the challenges of the coming of sound, that Stevens' career began to develop at a rapid pace. He soon became one of the more successful and sought after Hollywood directors, popular with some of the era's most powerful stars such as Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers. Stevens was known for his light, comedic touch and the ability to bring out the humor even in someone like the often serious Hepburn. In World War II, Stevens became an integral component of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and helmed one of the military's most renowned film units. Stevens and his men produced footage of some of the most important battles and moments of the war, including the D-Day landing and the liberation of Paris by the Allied Forces. In the 1980s, the director's son, George Stevens, Jr., began sorting through his father's belongings following the senior Stevens' passing in the 1970s. In a closet, Stevens, Jr. discovered reel upon reel of 16mm home movie footage shot by his father during the war. It turned out that when Stevens' was not shooting film for the Army, he was taking his own motion pictures of the unit's experiences. And what Stevens, Jr. had found was some of the very, very few color images of the latter days in the European theatre. Included in this material proved to be very unique and deeply powerful color footage of the liberation of several concentration camps in Germany. According to his son, George Stevens rarely spoke about his experiences in the concentration camps and, indeed, had not ever processed the footage. The films that he produced and directed after the war, however, would never again be comedic in nature. Stevens chose instead to direct the first cinematic adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank as well as a civil rights-infused film version of Edna Thurber's blockbuster book detailing the trials and tribulations of Texas' wealthy oil barons, Giant (1956). Although Giant might seem particularly sentimental, hokey, or simply silly to today's Texan students, the film deserves a brief look if only to see early advocacy for equal rights for Mexican-Americans in the southwest -- as told by a director who would never be the same following World War II.

Independence and Partition (1947)

Although you have already watched Main Hoon Na, the assigned film for this module (right??), you might not realize that you, therefore, already know about an infamously tragic period of contemporary Indian history: Partition. In the film, political crisis provides a MacGuffin (Remember that? Exam is a-comin'!) of sorts in the so-called "Project Milap" -- a government agreement between India and Pakistan in which both countries will facilitate the repatriation of citizens from either side of the national border. So, why would Project Milap prove so controversial in the film?? Answer: Partition and its decades-long ramifications. Even after decades of mutinies, revolts, and protests, particularly acute during the second world war, India had remained a part of the British Empire. In 1946, the British government decided to grant independence to the colony but struggled with how to grapple with increasingly violent tensions between the Hindu and Muslim constituencies in the region. The compromise? Great Britain decided to create two separate dominions: India for the Hindus and Pakistan for the Muslims. The so-called "Radcliffe Line," demarcating the boundaries of these two new nations was crafted in a rather legendarily arbitrary manner and based upon minimal research data. As a result, approximately 10 to 15 millions of people were physically moved from one side of the nation to the other within two months. The majority traveled on foot and, although estimates vary widely due to inconsistent documentation, between one to two million people died as a result of sectarian violence as well as the sheer physical toll caused by the relocation. The following images help illustrate the impact of partition on millions of men, women and children in the region. In 2017, the seventieth anniversary of partition ushered in a sober evaluation of the impact and longstanding tensions brought forth by the political decision. Although many news articles, photojournalist essays, and videos documented the tragedies therein, a high profile British-Indian co-production chose to honor the anniversary through a glossy motion picture entitled The Viceroy's House. An interesting, if a bit peculiar, choice noted many film critics and political pundits. See trailer to your right to see how the images above correspond with Gillian Anderson's British accent: Key Takeaway: India is, and has always been, a nation with an incredible diversity of ethnicities, religious beliefs, and languages. What's more, India's history and politics have always been bound up in the complex relationship between national identity and international commerce. Keep this in mind as we start looking at the international distribution of Indian Cinema.

For Your Consideration

Despite the celebratory popular and press attention given to "indie film and culture," there has risen a concomitant critique of indie film's race, gender, and class politics. Lest we think that all indie culture is white, urban, masculine and upper middle class, it might interest you to note that the most successful indie at the box office was not created by Stephen Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, or even Wes Anderson. PauseMuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time -1:02Fullscreen Instead, a little indie based upon the stand-up routine of a Canadian-American female comedian, Nia Vardalos, generated millions of dollars, a sequel, and even a short-lived television series: My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). Never saw it? Check out this ridiculously brilliant scene on your right for a much needed moment of zen... In essence, no matter what your textbook or google might tell you about indie film, the reality of how independent film is defined and/or consumed and by whom remains as contested and complicated as when cinema began to industrialize in the early twentieth century. Along these lines, and particularly as we head into the final modules of the course, it seems an opportune time to revisit some of the most significant themes of our course. I encourage you to reflect upon historiographical issues, i.e., how and by whom history is written. One of the core questions posed at the beginning of this module focused on the matter of WHO produces independent film. Above, the case study of My Big Fat Greek Wedding served to include Nia Vardalos as "auteur" to help complicate easy stereotypes of gender politics and the "indies." But a closer look at Ms. Vardalos shows that she was a longstanding member of the famed Second City comedy troupe, had guest appearances on numerous sitcoms, and ultimately became a close friend of Tom Hanks and his Greek-American wife, Rita Wilson who helped get her film produced. Just a few minor Second City Alumni So, would you consider Vardalos "independent" of Hollywood? How so? How might this matter? Or not? When popular culture discusses independent cinema, too often the term is conflated with what has been discussed as "indie" culture. Look no further than the readings you have on the topic for this module. Right underneath its sub-heading for INDEPENDENT MOVIES, our textbook states: "Brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein challenged Hollywood blockbusters at the edge by offering movies with non-traditional stories." What if the textbook authors had decided, instead, to widen its perspective to independent filmmaking and consider not only a wider array of directors, but to expand its definition of "independent" and include a more diverse array of US geographies as well. The picture accompanying this sentence? Quentin Tarantino on the set of Pulp Fiction (to your left, as a refresher). Pulp Fiction, independent? A film starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Travolta -- some of Hollywood's biggest names? For example, did you know that more film stock was used in the Detroit metro area throughout the twentieth century than was used in Hollywood? It's true!! Due to the global prominence and domination of the American automobile industry during the twentieth-century, independent production houses, particularly that of the Jam Handy Corporation, generated hundreds upon thousands of training, advertising, or industrial short subjects for General Motors, Ford, and many, many others. Automobile-oriented content, however, offers only one example of truly "American" independent film production, not just independents focused on narrative feature filmmaking. Take a look at the image below and to your right to see screen grabs of dozens of "independent" films from all over the United States. For more information on this topic, and to view many of the films themselves, take a look at the amazing work of the National Film Preservation Foundation's Guide to Sponsored Films. In Texas, the majority of industrial or sponsored film production grew from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In fact, despite the high profile attention given to Austin's "indie" film directors from the 1990s and 2000s (i.e., Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez), Dallas remains the top film production city for the state even today. Ever caught an episode of "Cheaters" late at night? Yup, filmed in Texas. (Don't know "Cheaters?" Good. It's appalling...). Over the last twenty years, a "hew" film history has emerged that has as its goal to expand contemporary understanding of the complex, ethnically, regionally, and generically diverse legacy of American filmmaking. Often grouped under a problematic label of "orphan films," i.e., films without a clear owner or copyright holder, such materials include these sponsored films, home movies, commercials, corporate training films, avant garde works, and much, much more. In researching the history of Texas filmmaking, with a particular emphasis and interest in such orphan materials, I came across an amazing story. Beginning in the 1930s, a Dallas filmmaker by the name of Melton Barker traveled across the United States, from town to town to town, making "local" versions of Little Rascals or Our Gang comedies. These two reel films followed the *exact* same script and "starred" local children in a simplistic kidnapping narrative. Entitled The Kidnapper's Foil, Barker's films echoed what you might remember from the very beginning of the course -- the "see yourself on the screen" films used to entice early audiences into theatres or fairground tents to see movies. Barker charged $10 per child to be in the film, and even more should the child have a speaking role. Although you will NOT want to watch the entire thing (unless you are truly an orphanista cinephile at heart), take a look at the first few minutes of the film to get a sense of Barker's independent filmmaking style. This particular version is from the tiny town of Childress in the Texas panhandle shot in approximately 1938 and found, abandoned in a cellar, in the early 2000s. Play Video Melton Barker made several hundreds of these films from the 1930s through the early 1970s, when he, literally, died on the road while producing yet another one in rural Mississippi. (Learn more about Melton Barker and the Kidnappers Foil here!) In addition to early African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, I offer Jam Handy and Melton Barker as alternative models for future film history research on the expansive legacy of independent filmmaking in this country. Another great example? A female director by the name of Nell Shipman who, when pushed out of the increasingly hierarchical Hollywood studio system, began producing commercials in rural Idaho. How different do we find these stories from the Richard Linklaters or Quentin Tarantinos? What constitutes "American Indies" after all? All this is to say something very basic, but vital to this course: History is never stagnant. Never. Depending on the kinds of questions being asked, and the emergence of newly discovered archival evidence, the history of American filmmaking, and its independent streaks will continue to evolve. So, stay tuned...

An Evening's Entertainment

Earlier in the semester, we discussed the changes in exhibition brought during the first few decades of the motion picture -- from makeshift nickelodeons to the grand movie palaces in cities all over the world. What we want to focus on here is *what* was actually screened in these now more luxurious environments! The first thing to remember is that, unlike today, a moviegoer did not show up at a theater to see one film. Although one particular title might bring in patrons, audiences would expect to view "an evening's entertainment." Or, in other words, a number of different motion pictures to accompany the main feature or features. For an amusing look at going to the movies during the 1930s and 1940s, check out "A Night at the Movies" (above) starring Robert Benchley, a popular comedian of the time. (Note: Sorry for the terrible clicking sound! Trying to fix ASAP, ugh) If you remember back to how you watched good, old fashioned television (back in the pre-streaming days), you can get a better sense of what going to the movies at this time was like: A constant flow of images. Newsreels before a cartoon before a "B" film, then a musical short subject or lottery drawing, and then an "A" picture. And then it would start right on over again! The term "B movie" might conjure up images of low budget westerns or monster movies, and such a reputation seems largely appropriate. "B" films, however, played a really important role in the success and survival of most of the major motion picture studios during this era. (The same could be said for short subjects, cartoons, newsreels and more...) Put bluntly, movie studios could not afford to produce only a small number of prestige titles. Remember, the studios owned a lot of property and supported a large number of staff and personnel. They had to keep the system operating on all cylinders. Moreover, the major studios owned their own exhibition chains and needed the programming for their theaters! So, what was the difference? "A" Pictures"B" Pictures Substantial budgetsLower budgets Recognizable, name starsLower grade stars Longer shooting scheduleVery short shooting schedule 85 minutes or longer run timeBetween 55 and 70 minutes Although this table makes it appear that there existed clear and clean distinctions between "A" and "B" films, the reality was far more complicated and messy. Some films originally intended to be a "B" title might end up quite popular and moving into more of an "A" position within distribution, or vice versa. For the purposes of this class, just remember that studios relied upon a wide range of motion pictures to remain so dominant in the global marketplace and, for audiences, going to the movies was not like today, but, rather, was an evening's entertainment ...

Complicating "Japanese" Film

Film historians and critics often refer to the 1950s as the "Golden Era of Japanese Cinema." Without wanting to minimize the achievements of the incredible films of the era, I do want to encourage your questioning such a complicated period of time: For whom was this a "golden age?" How does this so-called "golden age" compare to pre-war Japanese cinema, and, moreover, how can we know that since so much of Japanese cinema created before WWII was lost or destroyed? And, just as importantly, what is the increased role of post-war cinephiles and critics being introduced to Japanese cinema for the first time at international film festivals and in art cinemas? • With these questions/disclaimers in place, let's take a brief look at one of the most famous and influential Japanese film directors of the twentieth century: Akira Kurosawa (1910 - 1998) • Kurosawa began his career as an artist and an apprentice within the Japanese film industry as a young man and eventually worked his way up to the position of director during the wartime era. The arrival of the US forces impacted Kurosawa, whose films up to that point had dealt with wartime themes. SCAP's cultural committtee banned Kurosawa's 1945 jidai-geki film, Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi / The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail which caused the director to select different topics, most of which would be in accordance with Allied occupation policy. For example, an early success for Kurosawa lay not in samurai films, later a genre closely associated with the director, but rather in a quasi-film noir: Drunken Angel (1948). • The success of Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), your screening for this module, elevated and ultimately solidified the director's global reputation. Following its triumph at influential Venice Film Festival, Rashomon proved a festival "darling" and would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Fun Fact: Despite Rashomon's international achievements, many domestic audiences in Japan didn't particularly care for the film and many newspapers at the time documented a public desire for a more concrete ending vs. a cerebral discussion about "truth." It is rumored that a number of movie theatres in the country brought back Benshis to help provide further explanation... • Just like his contemporaries in the French New Wave, Kurosawa was very influenced by key Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and John Ford. Kurosawa, in turn, inspired another new generation of filmmakers - particularly in the United States during what became known as the American New Wave. It would be a challenge to find a new wave filmmaker who does not cite Kurosawa as a major influence. • As just one of many examples, to your right, watch famous American New Wave director Robert Altman talk a little about Kurosawa's Rashomon and its director's influence on key American "auteurs" of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond: Still wondering about Kurosawa and his longstanding legacy? Although critics often cite the significant Hollywood or European cinematic influences upon Kurosawa's aesthetic, it's worth noting that several of Kurosawa's films have been remade into some of Hollywood's most famous movies. The Seven Samurai (1954) was adapted as The Magnificent Seven (1960) (and adapted again most recently in 2016), Hidden Fortress (1958) is often cited as a primary source text for George Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), and Yojimbo (1961) was adapted as A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

New Technologies

In this module, we have focused largely on Hollywood and its collaboration with the U.S. government during a unique period of the twentieth century. We best not forget, however, that the U.S. government produced thousands of films during this time that had no relationship with Hollywood at all. Looking through the millions and millions of feet of film buried in the National Archives, researchers will find government-made films that circulated via movie theatres, churches, civic auditoriums, and libraries that attempted to provide a visual explication for complex wartime decisions. One of the most challenging of wartime actions taken by the U.S. government was the massive relocation program that moved American citizens of Japanese and German descent into internment camps across the country. The majority of the citizens affected by this program lost their homes, businesses, and financial independence not only during the war but for years to come. See here how this decision was dealt with via the moving image: As you can see, this documentary utilizes a variety of film material to illustrate the government's perspective and rationale. This film serves as just one illustration of a much larger government film production program. The American military, as well as other government branches, highly prioritized the documentation of war efforts on film. Motion picture production, when we look solely at Hollywood, was centered around the utilization of still quite cumbersome 35mm cameras and the concomitant lighting and sound systems. World War II demands, however, hastened the rise of the far more lightweight, hand held 16mm camera that was used all over the world to take films of the war's impact on society, culture, and the earth itself. Although the military's desire (and budget!) for hundreds upon thousands of these cameras paved the way for Kodak and other companies to mass produce them during the war, civilians had been using small gauge movie cameras for many years before 1939. Hobbyists, camera enthusiasts, and quite frankly, the wealthier segments of society who could afford them, became adept with shooting home movies -- a far more complex process than what we have today with our iPhones! Tatsuno's footage proved to be the second home movie to be included in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, after the induction of the Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. This particular footage offers valuable content for this course not only in its inherent content and production context, but illustrates, too, the central role and influence of technology to what kinds of stories are filmed, remembered, and accessed. In the years following World War II, small-gauge movie cameras would become available to wider and wider audiences, allowing for an increasingly diverse American film heritage to be produced. The look of so-called "amateur" footage, too, would prove influential on many of the post-war film directors emanating from Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Industrial Shifts

• By the 1980s, ticket prices rose significantly, further shrinking moviegoing in the country. At the same time, imported foreign films, especially Hollywood blockbusters, began to dominate the small market that existed. • Like in the United States, as television became more dominant within Japan, film attendance dropped drastically. • Japanese media industries had for decades been heavily involved in developing broadcasting technologies (such as high end televisions and the VCR!) and, in the 1980s, had become so globally dominant that companies such as Sony began acquiring American studios. Studio film libraries would prove important assets with which to license and replicate for playback on their own machines. Although Japanese cultural critics expressed concern that the country's emphasis upon the production of playback or gaming technology would negatively impact domestic creativity, one vital area of media making has proven such teeth-gnashing wrong: ANIME Hayao Miyazaki Japanese animation, and in particular, the anime films from Studio Ghibli and director Hayao Miyazaki have been commercially and critically successful in Japan and around the world. Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki have produced animated video games, commercials, and award-winning feature films. The studio's 2001 film, Spirited Away, garnered numerous accolades including Best Animated Feature from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In some ways, the global popularity of Japanese anime and Miyazaki specifically helps brings us full circle in terms of key takeaways from this module. Check out this beautifully edited trailer promoting a Miyazaki festival at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), one of the most respected and influential contemporary film festivals in the world: Film Festivals, and the cinema sanctioned by such organizations, play a vital if often contentious role in our understanding of film history and of contemporary global cinema. See the festival case study in your textbook reading for this module (the back of Chapter 12) to obtain additional perspective and a solid overview on this key topic for the remainder of the course.

The Blockbuster Era

• Corporate emphasis upon blockbuster films, and the filmmakers that created them, increased dramatically in the late 1970s and 1980s due to the immense popularity of blockbusters with a truly mass audience. Blockbusters convey more than just a "movie," but rather a film "event" that, particularly in the case of 1970s blockbusters like Jaws or Star Wars, people would return to see in theaters time and time again. • You might notice that this module's focus on Conglomerate Hollywood and the "Indie" movement echoes many of the themes already discussed with the rise of the American New Wave. High-profile corporate sales and takeovers continued to impact the structure and mode of production in Los Angeles during the 1970s, and it is within this context that a number of films by so-called American New Wave directors began to make BIG money at the box office. • Critics and historians point to Steven Spielberg's 1975 film, Jaws, as the beginning of the Hollywood Blockbuster era. Based on a best-selling novel, Jaws was made on a budget of $9 million and went on to earn $470.7 million worldwide, making it the highest grossing film of all time . . . that is, until 1977, when Star Wars was released. [NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with the fraught, chaotic production of Jaws on location in Massachussetts, check out the various stories about it online or, better yet, read Peter Biskind's bonkers discussion of the film and the era in general: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998)] • The contemporary blockbuster-driven mentality in Hollywood thrives within a specific industrial structure, one defined by both vertical AND horizontal integration. Horizontal integration occurs when a company expands its offering/production of goods and services at the same place in the supply chain in order to reduce competition, access new markets, diversify its products, etc. A few relevant examples of horizontal integration: Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. Disney's acquisition of Pixar . . . and Star Wars . . . and the Marvel Universe . . . to be continued . . . Below, enjoy one of the more brilliant recent parodies of horizontal integration run amok from the seventh season of NBC's Parks and Recreation. Play Video Vertical integration occurs when a company expands operations or acquires another company that does business at another part of the supply chain. Some contemporary examples of vertical integration: Target, which owns many of the brands it sells. Apple, which has always integrated hardware and software. Amazon, selling e-books and coming our with their own e-book reader, the Kindle. Remember 30 Rock's explanation? Play Video • Next we'll take a closer look at what we actually mean when we use the terms Blockbuster and High Concept, and we'll consider why this marketing strategy has continued up until the present day. High Concept Films Play Video • Besides its ability to make LOTS of money, what else defines a blockbuster? From a narrative standpoint, blockbusters are often described as "high-concept" films. A high concept film has a premise that's quick and easy to communicate. Jaws is perhaps the ultimate high concept film. Think how easy it would have been to pitch that film to a half-listening publisher or movie executive: "Here is the story: A massive man-eating shark terrorizes a local beach during the summer holidays." As another example, let's watch "no-stranger-to-terrible high-concept-films-star" Nicolas Cage demonstrate a high concept pitch in the clip to the right from the 2002 film, Adaptation. • High concept films tend to abide by specific aesthetic and narrative conventions as well. They are usually fast-paced, special effects-driven, and emphasize action over character development. • So why do high concept films prove the most viable potential blockbusters? Well, from a marketing perspective, high concept films reproduce across a variety of media platforms and, maybe most importantly, easily translate into related merchandise: Toothbrushes, hats, action figures, and it goes on and on and on and on..... One of my favorite examples, the Jar Jar Binks candy toy. With a lollipop tongue, this toy is *perfect* for kids everywhere, amirite? #tooterrifyingtomakeup High concept blockbusters often rely upon pre-sold elements like a comic book or popular novel) designed to appeal to a specific audience, and for this reason they are easy to organize massive marketing campaigns around. For example, Steven Spielberg agreed to take a gamble and direct Jaws in large part due to the fact that the film would be based on an immensely popular book. The film could almost guarantee success due to people interested in seeing an adaptation of a favorite novel. Can you see how vertical and horizontal integration might begin to play into this? Vertical and horizontal integration facilitate the broadest possible global market penetration for media content and merchandise. • High concept blockbusters are usually released wide in the summer, and if they are successful they can earn hundreds of millions of dollars from markets around the world. When a movie is *particularly* successful they can spawn a franchise with commercial tie-ins and extensive merchandising. Just think about how many tiny Iron Mans and Hulks you see running around every Halloween. Blockbusters and the Ancillary Market • Around this very same time (ca. 1970s and 1980s), another important market shift related to the movie industry on a global scale emerges. We briefly introduced the rise of video technologies in the Japanese Cinema module. Consider here more carefully as to how the influx of new playback technologies impacted film production, distribution, and exhibition practices during the latter half of the twentieth century. • Together, Pay-TV (spearheaded by HBO in the 1970s), and the rise of the home video market in the 1980s made up what became known as The Ancillary Market: the non-theatrical market for feature films. Before this time, the only way most people could ever see a film more than once would be in the theatre during its first run. After the film would be pulled from distribution, a few wealthy families or film enthusiasts could purchase small gauge projectors with which to show shortened versions of features on 16mm or 8mm. In the 1950s, audiences could wait to see if a particular film would be broadcast on TV. Video, however, transformed the mass home market in the United States and around the world. Although it took some time before home video technologies were affordable for most families, but as early as 1986 the ancillary market was generating more revenue than theatrical box-office earnings. In fact, by 2000 the ancillary market made up about 75% of studio revenue. You understandably might be scratching your head and wondering, Why on earth does the news still pay so much attention to how well a new film performs at the box office when it opens with this kind of economic data? It is because theatrical box-office earnings (especially for potential blockbusters) are used as indicators for ancillary market success. • The arrival of the home video market sparked a rather abrupt change in film distribution and marketing practices. But who exactly was doing the producing and distributing? Be sure to do your assigned reading for this module because Alisa Perren's "A Big Fat Indie Success Story? Press Discourses Surrounding the Making and Marketing of a 'Hollywood' Movie" makes this sometimes dizzyingly complicated media landscape more accessible. Key Takeaway: By this era, Hollywood has long ceased to be a group of prominent, vertically integrated film studios. Rather, "Hollywood" has become as sort of umbrella term to encapsulate: "a complex network of media industries in which major entertainment conglomerates exist at the center, financing products intended for distribution via a number of 'pipelines' around the world" (Perren 24). • In the next section we'll take a closer look at this complex network in order to determine what exactly puts the "independent" in independent film. PREVIOUS17. Conglomerate Hollywood and the "Indie" Movement / Blockbusters Vertical integration occurs when a company expands operations or acquires another company that does business at another part of the supply chain. Some contemporary examples of vertical integration: Target, which owns many of the brands it sells. Apple, which has always integrated hardware and software. Amazon, selling e-books and coming our with their own e-book reader, the Kindle. Remember 30 Rock's explanation? Play Video • Next we'll take a closer look at what we actually mean when we use the terms Blockbuster and High Concept, and we'll consider why this marketing strategy has continued up until the present day. High Concept Films Play Video • Besides its ability to make LOTS of money, what else defines a blockbuster? From a narrative standpoint, blockbusters are often described as "high-concept" films. A high concept film has a premise that's quick and easy to communicate. Jaws is perhaps the ultimate high concept film. Think how easy it would have been to pitch that film to a half-listening publisher or movie executive: "Here is the story: A massive man-eating shark terrorizes a local beach during the summer holidays." As another example, let's watch "no-stranger-to-terrible high-concept-films-star" Nicolas Cage demonstrate a high concept pitch in the clip to the right from the 2002 film, Adaptation. • High concept films tend to abide by specific aesthetic and narrative conventions as well. They are usually fast-paced, special effects-driven, and emphasize action over character development. • So why do high concept films prove the most viable potential blockbusters? Well, from a marketing perspective, high concept films reproduce across a variety of media platforms and, maybe most importantly, easily translate into related merchandise: Toothbrushes, hats, action figures, and it goes on and on and on and on..... One of my favorite examples, the Jar Jar Binks candy toy. With a lollipop tongue, this toy is *perfect* for kids everywhere, amirite? #tooterrifyingtomakeup High concept blockbusters often rely upon pre-sold elements like a comic book or popular novel) designed to appeal to a specific audience, and for this reason they are easy to organize massive marketing campaigns around. For example, Steven Spielberg agreed to take a gamble and direct Jaws in large part due to the fact that the film would be based on an immensely popular book. The film could almost guarantee success due to people interested in seeing an adaptation of a favorite novel. Can you see how vertical and horizontal integration might begin to play into this? Vertical and horizontal integration facilitate the broadest possible global market penetration for media content and merchandise. • High concept blockbusters are usually released wide in the summer, and if they are successful they can earn hundreds of millions of dollars from markets around the world. When a movie is *particularly* successful they can spawn a franchise with commercial tie-ins and extensive merchandising. Just think about how many tiny Iron Mans and Hulks you see running around every Halloween. Blockbusters and the Ancillary Market • Around this very same time (ca. 1970s and 1980s), another important market shift related to the movie industry on a global scale emerges. We briefly introduced the rise of video technologies in the Japanese Cinema module. Consider here more carefully as to how the influx of new playback technologies impacted film production, distribution, and exhibition practices during the latter half of the twentieth century. • Together, Pay-TV (spearheaded by HBO in the 1970s), and the rise of the home video market in the 1980s made up what became known as The Ancillary Market: the non-theatrical market for feature films. Before this time, the only way most people could ever see a film more than once would be in the theatre during its first run. After the film would be pulled from distribution, a few wealthy families or film enthusiasts could purchase small gauge projectors with which to show shortened versions of features on 16mm or 8mm. In the 1950s, audiences could wait to see if a particular film would be broadcast on TV. Video, however, transformed the mass home market in the United States and around the world. Although it took some time before home video technologies were affordable for most families, but as early as 1986 the ancillary market was generating more revenue than theatrical box-office earnings. In fact, by 2000 the ancillary market made up about 75% of studio revenue. You understandably might be scratching your head and wondering, Why on earth does the news still pay so much attention to how well a new film performs at the box office when it opens with this kind of economic data? It is because theatrical box-office earnings (especially for potential blockbusters) are used as indicators for ancillary market success. • The arrival of the home video market sparked a rather abrupt change in film distribution and marketing practices. But who exactly was doing the producing and distributing? Be sure to do your assigned reading for this module because Alisa Perren's "A Big Fat Indie Success Story? Press Discourses Surrounding the Making and Marketing of a 'Hollywood' Movie" makes this sometimes dizzyingly complicated media landscape more accessible. Key Takeaway: By this era, Hollywood has long ceased to be a group of prominent, vertically integrated film studios. Rather, "Hollywood" has become as sort of umbrella term to encapsulate: "a complex network of media industries in which major entertainment conglomerates exist at the center, financing products intended for distribution via a number of 'pipelines' around the world" (Perren 24). • In the next section we'll take a closer look at this complex network in order to determine what exactly puts the "independent" in independent film. PREVIOUS17. Conglomerate Hollywood and the "Indie" Movement / BlockbustersNEXT • Next we'll take a closer look at what we actually mean when we use the terms Blockbuster and High Concept, and we'll consider why this marketing strategy has continued up until the present day.

The Office of War Information

Helmed by Elmer Davis, a print and radio news reporter, the OWI operated domestically in the United States as well as overseas. In operation from June, 1942 to September, 1945, the OWI supervised the flow of information between a variety of U.S. communities, including the armed services, civilians, agriculture, and industry. Modes of media that the OWI oversaw included posters, magazines, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and more.Of greatest interest to this course is the OWI's creation of an internal "Bureau of Motion Pictures" that worked closely with the major Hollywood studios during the war's duration.

A Colonial Past

India's history dates back hundreds and hundreds of centuries into the past where the rise and fall of numerous dynasties, or the flowering of a range of religious-based or imperial-led civilizations, dominated the vast geographical region of the present-day country. This course's focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century medium of film necessitates our focus on these same historical eras -- eras overshadowed, even if a bit overstated, by European empires. Beginning as far back at the fifteenth century, Portugal, France, Holland, France, Denmark, and England established trading posts and colonial settlements along the coast of India and began exploring further into the mainland of the subcontinent. When England's East India Trading Company, formed in 1600, first started operating along the coast of the Indian subcontinent, they were primarily trading with a series of independent provinces united in name-only under the Mughal Empire (i.e., a country of India did not yet exist in this region.) Colonialism would usher in a more nationalistic turn. Over the course of several centuries, The East India Trading Company (a company mind you) went from trading with various Mughal leaders and their people to ruling a significant portion of the subcontinent on behalf of the British Crown, eventually commanding more troops than controlled by the British Army itself! After a rebellion in 1858, the British Government officially assumed control of what became known as British India. Echoing the early rebellions in the American colonies or in parts of British controlled Africa, many people advocated and fought for India's independence from the British Empire from its very establishment. Nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film" by India in 2001, Lagaan's narrative offered a creative twist on stories evoking the imperial era by featuring a humble, eclectic group of rural citizens battling English governance through a game of cricket. As noted in the introduction to this module, Lagaan offered a different, more "mainstream," Indian film for Academy consideration (vs. earlier more festival-friendly "art films.") Lagaan also presents a great illustration to the idealized nature of performing Indian national identity. Meaning, India remains a country in which there exists huge discrepancies between the wealthy and poor, as noted in the ever-challenged, but still entrenched caste system. (For more information, see a recent BBC report on the subject.) Play Video In this sequence from Lagaan, the hero (played by Aamir Khan) rallies his fellow villagers, from every caste including the so-called "untouchables" to join him, in learning the British game of cricket. The general translation for much of the song is: "Again and again, speak my friend; may victory be ours and defeat be theirs; again and again, speak my friend; may no one be able to defeat you; come, let us move on; may whoever confronts you be defeated; even if pitch darkness shadows you, etc..."

Significant Genres

Significant Genres Musical Gangster Horror Western Comedy War Films Crime / Detective Science Fiction But while popular culture and scholars alike love to talk about HOLLYWOOD and the ups, downs, and scandals associated with production exploits, the reality of how the movie studios functioned involved a lot more mundane corporate and financial involvement from East Coast offices... Your textbook provides a great overview of the most prominent Hollywood studios of this era, so be sure to take a close look at these companies and the key films, executives, and stars associated with them. Using terminology of the time, the textbook breaks these studios into two categories: "The Big Five" (companies that were vertically integrated and owned their own theaters) and "The Little Three" (those that did not own theaters and had to rely upon "The Big Five" to screen their product in cities across the United States and around the world.

1990s and 2000s

Released in October, 1995, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/The Big (or Brave) Hearted Will Take Away the Bride (aka DDLJ) proved an immediate blockbuster hit, garnering over $32 million in India during its first year of release, and, equally significantly, earning nearly $5 million at box offices overseas. As of 2017, DDLJ is still playing at the Maratha Mandir cinema in Mumbai, one of the premiere Bollywood cinemas in the country. As the article assigned for this module notes, the 1990s witnessed an era of increasing economic liberalization in India. Meaning, the government proactively deregulated key markets and and reduced import tariffs to encourage greater foreign investment. As a result, India rapidly emerged a more prominent player within the global economy. Play Video Take a quick look at one of the many re-release trailers for DDLJ to your right, paying close attention to the locations featured. Meaning, can you get a sense of where a large portion of this film was shot? Hint: Not India... DDLJ's young Indian characters fall in love while traveling in Europe, before returning home. Without wanting to spoil the film's narrative, DDLJ features an interesting intersection between the generation of globe-trotting, cosmopolitan characters, as exemplified in the two leads, and the more "traditional" Indian values they encounter upon their arrival back to their country. Consider this plot within the socio-cultural and economic context of the 1990s: An increasing number of Indian citizens were living and working in places all over the world, Australasia, the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and former British colonies in Africa. In fact, the more than 15.6 million Non-resident Indians (NRI) living abroad make-up the largest diasporic population in the world. (If you watched the introductory video to this module, you might remember that I saw Shah Rukh Khan perform in Hong Kong - and was likely the only NRI in attendance.) For these reasons Indian Cinema has a massive audience both at home and abroad and Bollywood producers have shrewdly pursued these markets. As just one example, in Dallas, Houston, and Austin (and likely elsewhere here in Texas - let me know!), there are both movie theatres only showing Indian films as well as general movie houses presenting Indian movie next to Hollywood's latest fare. Key Point: Remember that we have primarily looked at HINDI LANGUAGE films in this module. Other successful Indian movie exports utilize Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu languages. In case you need to understand more why these films are fast competing with Hollywood in terms of global popularity, take a look at an incredibly innovative performance by Shah Rukh Khan in 1998's Dil Se. (Note: As a public service announcement tied to the morals of this film, try not to fall in love with a terrorist. It just won't end well...)

The Decline of the Neorealist movement

An increasing lack of national support for the Italian film industry and the lack of a sustained audience over time made for a short-lived movement. Additionally, the anti-Fascist front which had served as common political ground for the Neorealists soon crumbled into hostile partisanship and increased social stratification between the north and south of the country. The most iconic Neorealist filmmakers began moving in new, different directions. For example, Roberto Rossellini turned to creating more introspective, psychologically-driven features. Italian cinema, at least those films most revered by cinephiles and the growing audiences of international film festivals, moved into more fantastical realms. The so-called "post-neorealist" era featured the work of two high profile directors: Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. The above clip offers an iconic scene from Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) - a far cry from the downtrodden cinematic landscape of, for example, Umberto D.

More Research, More Reasons for the Code

As mentioned at the beginning of this section on the Production Code, most film scholarship on the topic has focused on issues related to the role played by representations of sex and violence in the creation and enforcing of movie censorship. More recent research, however, well demonstrates the importance not just of archival material in historical projects but also the influence of what kinds of questions are being asked by scholars in the first place. Confused? Let me show you what I mean... In the late 1990s, a graduate student began her doctoral research into forces that affected the global distribution of motion picture films. Although not initially envisioned to a project about the MPPDA and the Production Code, what this scholar discovered was that one of the most important reasons for the creation of the Lady about to be branded. (Lesson: Don't steal) Production Code was to protect MPPDA studio members' films from censorship and/or boycotts from foreign nations, in particular Japan and Mexico. For example, in the over-the-top film you saw earlier this semester, The Cheat (1915), the Euro-American protagonist loses a great deal of money to a Japanese man. When she attempts to pay him back, he refuses and, of course, decides to BRAND HER WITH A HOT IRON, marking her as his own. Now.... as you might imagine, trade and general government representatives from Japan did not appreciate this "portrayal" their citizenry and, with enough substantive lobbying and threats of boycotts, the studio altered the nationality of the character to be Burmese. (In essence, a small country without the amount of clout possessed by Japan financially and culturally within the United States.) From the advent of the motion picture, and throughout the years leading up to the implementation of the MPPDA Production Code, serious strife emerged from a very important market for Hollywood feature films: Mexico. Mexico's substantive fight against stereotyping (still an ongoing challenge) proved a decisive factor in the MPPDA leaning on its members to adhere to a less problematic portrayal of Mexicans and/or Mexican-Americans. The industry, and the United States Department of Commerce, realized that they could not afford to alienate further their North American import-export partner.

Module Goals

Cinema produced from within India offers a complex, challenging, but very rewarding case study for the varying aspects of cinema: Production, Distribution, Exhibition, the Star System, Narrative Devices, and more. We could easily spend an entire semester on the subject, so if you find this topic of interest, be sure to keep an eye out for "Bollywood" or Indian Cinema courses offered in the Department of Radio-TV-Film or across the university. For the purposes of this class, our Indian Cinema module will focus on just a few of the many unique aspects of moviemaking in this part of the world. One of the first things that must be done, however, is to provide a (ridiculously) brief introduction to the country's nineteenth and twentieth-century historical and socio-cultural context. Our short overview of the history of Hindi language cinema will be anchored in key moments as defined or illustrated by the key stars of these specific eras. The introduction of INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR, Shah Rukh Khan, will help ground our discussion of the increasingly global popularity of Hindi language cinema. More than just an excuse to watch great movies and fab clips, Khan's stardom offers a great example with which to investigate changes in late 20th century film distribution patterns. (As a side note, India is still one of the very few countries in which filmmakers actually still shoot on celluloid!) Finally, and perhaps most importantly for this course, our look at Indian Cinema returns us to one of the key themes of the course: What constitutes a "national cinema" for a particular country, who defines it, and how so?

The Production Code: Phase One

Demand for regulation rises during the 1920s for many reasons including: Concern over the potential effects of film as a MASS medium: Legitimate consternation over the production, circulation, and effects of propaganda created during World War One and the Soviet Revolution. Industry scandal: Exploits of the stars coming out of the Hollywood Hills and breathlessly covered by the movie tabloids, motivated concerned citizen groups to write to newspapers and local politicians. One of the most highly publicized scandals featured famed and beloved movie comedian Fatty Arbuckle. Accused (and ultimately exonerated) of rape, Arbuckle's career never recovered. As a result of the Arbuckle case, in addition to the sensational divorce of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and the murder of Screen Directors' Guild president William Desmond Taylor, a number of religious groups decried cinema and Good Housekeeping magazine, along with a number of civic organizations, urged boycotts of Hollywood product. In 1922, the eight most powerful studios (in essence, Hollywood's oligopoly) formed the MPPDA (The Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America) -- a lobbying and public relations organization for these companies (aka, "Hollywood.") The MPPDA made an important hire in the former U.S. Postmaster General, Will Hays, as the organization's director. Hays remains in the position for over twenty years and becomes so synonymous with the MPPDA that it eventually becomes knows as The "Hays Office." One of the first issues Hays must address is what to do with the increased number (and vocal!) calls for censorship and by the late 1920s, the MPPDA has drafted guidelines on appropriate subject matter for "the movies."

A Little Context

Despite the fact that the second world war has been documented ad nauseum (as many comedians have noted, the History Channel could easily be called the World War II channel), there are a couple of key aspects related to the inception of the war that inform our look at the intersection between cinema and the mid-twentieth century global conflict. 1939: War breaks out in Europe with the invasion of Poland by Adolph Hitler's Germany and the subsequent declarations of war by France and the United Kingdom against the Nazi regime. 1941: After years of diplomatic negotiations, US joins the Allied Powers following the loss of 2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians at Pearl Harbor. When discussing filmed representation of World War II, many students, in fact, point to 2001's Pearl Harbor, starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, and Kate Beckinsale. Even if you haven't seen it, a look at the trailer gives you a good sense of the film: What is often forgotten, particularly with the creative re-imagining of "historical" films like Pearl Harbor, is that although most Americans were in favor of US involvement in the war, many retained an isolationist perspective. To communicate his administration's rationale, as well as to monitor the flow of information during the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in June, 1942.

The Neorealist Movement

The artistic concept of neorealism had been applied to Italian literature beginning in the 1930s and later became synonymous with a specific trend within Italian cinema that emerged directly after the second World War. Neorealism suggests a return to an Italian iteration of "naturalism," in a specifically literary sense. Neorealist screenwriters and directors embraced realism in their depictions of the experiences of ordinary people and poverty brought by war and fascism. They told human-centered, contemporary stories that related the plight of everyday people to the plight of society as a whole. Cesare Zavattini (pictured right), a screenwriter and one of the first practitioners to actually theorize Neorealism, describes it as follows: The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realised that the necessity of the 'story' was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist's task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are. Often seen as the quintessential example of Italian Neorealist cinema, Rome, Open City (1945) was directed by Roberto Rossellini -- one of the most important and influential twentieth-century directors (and not un-coincidentally, famed actress Ingrid Bergman's second husband, and father to actress and once-wife-of-director-Martin Scorsese, Isabella Rossellini). Rossellini wrote the screenplay for Rome, Open City before the war had ended and shot the film within three months of the war's ending. Rome, Open City was shot on location and used mostly non-professional actors to tell a highly emotional story of resistance to the brutality of Italian fascism and German occupation. Check out the clip below Instead, I have assigned you another iconic Neorealist film that, too, illustrates the movement's core aesthetics in its utilization of PlayMuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time -2:56CaptionsFullscreen non-professional actors and shooting on the busy streets and alleys of Rome: Bicycle Thieves (1948), screenplay by Cesare Zavattini and directed by Vittorio de Sica. The protagonist of the film has finally attained a well-paying government job and the only requirement is that he have a bicycle for transportation. His bicycle is stolen early on in the film and he (along with his son) goes on a journey throughout the city to recover the lost bike. Another way filmmakers embraced realism in their films was to focus more on people and place than the creation of a conventional plot. In essence these films often employed an "anti-narrative" approach, which avoided Play Video resolution and is exemplified in Cesare Zavattini (screenplay) and Vittorio de Sica's (director) Umberto D (1951). The simple story of an elderly man and his dog trying to make ends meet in the devastation of post-war Italy, Umberto D's slow pace well illustrates the movement's interest in representing realistic "truth."

Blockbusters and the Ancillary Market

• Around this very same time (ca. 1970s and 1980s), another important market shift related to the movie industry on a global scale emerges. We briefly introduced the rise of video technologies in the Japanese Cinema module. Consider here more carefully as to how the influx of new playback technologies impacted film production, distribution, and exhibition practices during the latter half of the twentieth century. • Together, Pay-TV (spearheaded by HBO in the 1970s), and the rise of the home video market in the 1980s made up what became known as The Ancillary Market: the non-theatrical market for feature films. Before this time, the only way most people could ever see a film more than once would be in the theatre during its first run. After the film would be pulled from distribution, a few wealthy families or film enthusiasts could purchase small gauge projectors with which to show shortened versions of features on 16mm or 8mm. In the 1950s, audiences could wait to see if a particular film would be broadcast on TV. Video, however, transformed the mass home market in the United States and around the world. Although it took some time before home video technologies were affordable for most families, but as early as 1986 the ancillary market was generating more revenue than theatrical box-office earnings. In fact, by 2000 the ancillary market made up about 75% of studio revenue. • The arrival of the home video market sparked a rather abrupt change in film distribution and marketing practices. But who exactly was doing the producing and distributing? Be sure to do your assigned reading for this module because Alisa Perren's "A Big Fat Indie Success Story? Press Discourses Surrounding the Making and Marketing of a 'Hollywood' Movie" makes this sometimes dizzyingly complicated media landscape more accessible. Key Takeaway: By this era, Hollywood has long ceased to be a group of prominent, vertically integrated film studios. Rather, "Hollywood" has become as sort of umbrella term to encapsulate: "a complex network of media industries in which major entertainment conglomerates exist at the center, financing products intended for distribution via a number of 'pipelines' around the world" (Perren 24). • In the next section we'll take a closer look at this complex network in order to determine what exactly puts the "independent" in independent film.

The Legacy of the Talkies

• By 1931, all the Hollywood studios had converted to sound systems and had standardized operations. Keep in mind, however, that nothing is ever quite this concrete. We're talking about big studios and theaters in big cities without taking into account what this transition looked like in rural areas or regions far from New York and Los Angeles. • When we get to our unit on the Hollywood Studio System, you will be learning a lot about The Motion Picture Production Code, a set of regulations that dictated what one could show or say in a film. The coming of sound, as you will see, played an important part in stoking public anxieties about the potential negative moral influence of motion pictures. • The clip above is a final "artifact" from this transitional era. A bonkers little number called "Turn on the Heat" from the 1929 film Sunnyside Up. Aside from being delightful in and of itself, you can begin to see why talking pictures played a role in accelerating the calls for censorship.

The New Wave and Henri Langlois

• In many ways, The Cinémathèque Française served as training ground for these up-and-coming New Wave directors, a place where they could watch, learn from, and share ideas about countless films from the past. • Many of the New Wave filmmakers were young, first-time filmmakers. They did not get their training from a formal film school, but rather, from an archive/museum called the Cinémathèque Française and its founder, Henri Langlois. • Henri Langlois was a consummate cinephile, film collector, and early film "archivist." He believed not only that films should be saved, but that they should be shown and appreciated! Fun fact! During the Nazi's occupation of Paris, Langlois went so far as to bury films all over Paris so that Nazis couldn't get their hands on them.

The Musical

• Musicals positively flooded the film market during and directly after the transition to sound. In fact, audiences eventually got tired of so many musical "extravaganzas," each promising to be more spectacular than the last. • Musical production prompted an influx of New York stage talent in Hollywood, both behind and in front of the camera (ex. Jerome Kern, Ira and George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and perhaps most notoriously, Busby Berkeley). • In the clip to the right from 42nd Street you can see how even with the limitation of a static camera, the notorious Bugsby Berkely played with scale in his choreography in a way that felt different and new from the visual spectacles on film during the silent era.

Legacy of the New French Wave

• The legacy of the French New Wave is an aesthetic, intellectual, and industrial legacy. • The work of the early New Wave directors and the Cahiers du Cinéma forced film to be taken more seriously in the press, academia, and popular opinion. • Similarly, the work of Henri Langlois and The Cinémathèque Française underscored value of film archives and collections to film students, film critics, and film fans alike. • The French New Wave challenged and revised many conventional narrative strategies. • Perhaps most importantly, The French New Wave fundamentally changed how viewers worldwide study and talk about film.

The Gangster Film

• The transition to sound overlapped with prohibition and the rise of organized crime and the mafia in the US. Partly for these reasons, gangster films took on a new prominence in this era, a bit like "ripped from the headlines" episodes of "Law and Order." • Soundtracks helped to increase the popularity of these films. Gangster films (as you might imagine) are great films to play with sound effects: squealing tires, gunfire, accents, etc. • The clip to your left from The Public Enemy (1931) features Jimmy Cagney in a scene which demonstrates why gangster films worked so well as early talkies!

Vsevolod Puodovkin (1893-1953)

• Vsevolod Pudovkin approached montage and effective editing in a manner different from Eisenstein. For Pudovkin, montage created meaning through linkages or "bridges" rather than the shocking juxtapositions of Eisenstein. • For Eisenstein, Shot A + Shot B = Idea C • For Pudovkin, Shot A + Shot B = AB • Pudovkin's theory of of montage used linkages to bring the viewer to the next sequence. NOTE: This approach is something you already know by heart as Pudovkin's theory is essentially Hollywood editing -- supporting a non-disruptive approach to narrative.

World War II

• What is the first thing that comes to your mind (if anything?) about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II? In essence, what do you know not just about what happened on December 7, 1941 but why it occurred? If Hollywood feature films have anything to contribute to this question, the reliability of filmic information is doubtful at best. Do you remember the trailer for Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer's version of "Pearl Harbor" from our earlier module on the impact of the war on the USA? If you didn't watch it then, please watch it now. It is...somethin'! When studying twentieth century history in the United States, particularly in K-12 levels, students rarely learn of the stages leading to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. (In fact, I know that many students rarely even get to the twentieth century in history coursework at all!) For the purposes of this class and specifically our look at Japanese cinema, understanding that the Japanese nation-state, from the mid-1800s to the end of World War II, operated as an imperial government -- known as the Empire of Japan or the Empire of the Sun. Fun Fact: Director Steven Spielberg starred a very young Christian Bale in the 1987 film, Empire of the Sun... Although this topic could be the subject for its own entire class here at The University of Texas at Austin, the Empire of Japan aspired to challenge and overthrow Western, particularly European and American, colonial control within Asia and, more specifically in the case of the United States, Hawaii and the Philippines. The Empire of Japan sought to battle and conquer the centuries old imperial conquests of European powers. This wartime map (below), produced as overt propaganda by Japan to explain its vision for what was called the "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" well illustrates the country's imperial aims: Beginning in 1939, the Japanese government (much like all governments around the globe during the second world war) increasingly scrutinized, monitored, and attempted to control what kind of film content was produced. For example, any motion picture that featured Japanese soldiers leaving for the war had to behave proudly and courageously with no fear or misgivings about their future. Although some film producers thought this rule absurd and tried to complicate these narratives, they became labeled as "dangerous" filmmakers especially when intimating that mothers might be upset over losing their sons to combat... Censors would demand the deletion of any scene that promoted any kind of Anglo-American tradition or culture. Film historians note that examples of such culture included card playing, certain kinds of music, and, especially, birthday party celebrations. Just as we saw with the creation of US anti-Japanese propaganda (remember the Private Snafu cartoon?) the Japanese produced virulent anti-Anglo American pamphlets, posters, and, of course, films. See below for an example of a film about Pearl Harbor -- but from the Japanese perspective, NOT Michael Bay's...

Decline of the French New Wave

• While the French New Wave is a cornerstone movement within film art circles, it also has its critics. • For example, it is widely agreed upon that when taken as a whole, the depiction of women and homosexuals within the films of the French New Wave are particularly sexist and homophobic. • Additionally, the auteur theory has been challenged in subsequent years by the film theorists and historians who point to the many different creative and administrative professionals that must collaborate in order to produce a film. • Still, the filmmaking techniques of the French New Wave did not so much decline as become incorporated into mainstream filmmaking in France and the West in general. We will see more of this influence when we look at New American Cinema.

Legacy

A relevant clip from the Netflix reboot of Norman Lear's "One Day at a Time" Contemporary assessment of the Castro regime proves complicated and contradictory. While advocates point to improvements in health care and education after 1959 as critical successes of Castro's government, critics look to the stringent censorship and extensive human rights abuses under that very same system. • Mirroring the legacy of the Cuban revolution, the legacy of Cuban cinema remains controversial. Althought the ICAIC managed to re-focus Cuba's film industry on producing films rather than just distributing and consuming them, the ICAIC's goal of realizing a singular Cuban consciousness through a revolutionary and "imperfect cinema" fails to account for the many Cubans who were exiled but still proudly identify as Cuban. A particular challenge to the evaluation of the ICAIC experiment is its censorship policies. One of the ICAIC's first acts as a state-sponsored organization was to ban the film P.M., a short documentary filmed with a hand-held camera depicting Havana night life. The documentation of late night revelries including possible prostitution and homosexuality was *not* the image of the "new Cuba" that the revolution wanted to project, and so the ICAIC banned the film. Controversy surrounding this film served as a catalyst for a long standing debate within Cuba and abroad about the dangers of, and justifications for, censorship. • In 1979, the ICAIC premiered the Havana Film Festival or, in Spanish, the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana. This important festival has grown to be a vital focal point for the exhibition, distribution, and celebration of Latin American and Caribbean cinema on an increasingly global stage.

Film Content During the War

Almost immediately following the creation of the OWI, the government commissioned the production of documentaries "justifying the war." Organized by famed director, Frank Capra, the most well known of these initial documentaries, "Why We Fight" series featured a total of seven films that included topics such as American isolationism, a celebration of Allied resistance in China, Britain, and Russia, as well as exploring Japanese and German aggression. Take a look at a short clip of one of the "Why We Fight" films here to gain a sense of the general tone and approach. If you are interested, most of these titles can be found at www.archive.org and yield fascinating perspective on sanctioned U.S. film propaganda infused with Hollywood talent. Feature Films: As noted previously, the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures worked closely with the Hollywood studios' War Activities Committee both to monitor content in feature films as well as to encourage particular themes and topics for Hollywood to include. Many scholars have written about WWII era Hollywood features and note that while some titles, particularly combat films, took an overt, direct propagandistic stance, for example, Bataan (1943) propaganda was also worked into standard narrative or star-driven melodrama, for example, this noted scene from the legendary Casablanca (1943) Film studies scholars have written again and again about Casablanca, often pointing to the character of Rick as an allegory for the initial reluctance by the United States to enter the war...and then joining to fight for "good." BUT, it wasn't just the major studios producing propagandistic features; "B" movie companies joined the war effort as well! Training Films: In addition to the many men and women who left their work in the film industry to join the armed services, major studio personnel contributed their time and expertise to assisting the military in a variety of ways. Disney famously produced the animated components of the "Why We Fight" series, and, throughout the war, their artisans created so-called nose art for the army air corps planes: Hollywood animators proved in high demand during the war. Many of the men behind Warner Bros. popular "Looney Tunes" cartoons worked with the U.S. military to create short training films on how to behave, or more importantly, how NOT to behave during deployment. Some of these continue to amaze/disturb decades and decades later. For example, "Private Snafu" cartoons:

Italian Cinema After WWI

Although the Italian film industry was incredibly prolific prior to World War I, it faced significant challenges as explicated in your textbook. The difficult circumstances following World War I resulted in a socio-economic context within which Italy proved unable to compete with the growing domination of US film exports. In 1924 the growing fascist regime of Benito Mussolini nationalized the film industry. Remember Lenin's 1922 quote about film being "the most important of the arts"? Mussolini had a similar appreciation of film as a propaganda tool, stating, "cinema is the strongest weapon of the state." After nationalizing the National Institute of the Union of Cinematography and Education (LUCE), Mussolini's encouraged the increased production of documentaries and newsreels. As fascism rose, domestic film production actually decreased, and by the early 1920s, domestic films were only 6% of those screened in the country. In 1926, only 20 films were made in Italy. Importantly, while the early film industries in Italy had been spread out between Turin, Rome, Naples, and Milan (i.e. all over the country), during Mussolini's reign, the Italian film industry shifted mostly to Rome (the center of political power).

General Conclusions

As already noted, wartime and the immediate post-war period would prove the most profitable era in Hollywood history. Called an "essential war industry" that supplied information and provided a "therapeutic function" for the US population, the movies benefited by the government's general support. CAVEAT: Easy to mock or dismiss...(and, yes, this gif is from a WWII propaganda film...)but case studies of particular people and filmmakers ground us in the realities of war

The Code is Enforced

As noted above, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Code exists but is not particularly adhered to ... until 1934. The Depression began to make a, somewhat delayed, impact upon the motion picture industry. In 1933, box office attendance dropped and theaters began to close in locations across the country. Production mirrors this trend in fewer movies being made and a number of studios teeter towards bankruptcy, especially those who own large numbers of theaters as land values declined quickly and significantly. In addition, 1933 witnesses the formation of the Legion of Decency, an influential Catholic organization that galvanized its members to boycott and protest problematic Hollywood films. SO... The MPPDA establishes the Production Code Administration in 1934 to enforce adherence to the Code by its members. A former journalist, and strong Catholic, by the name of Joseph Breen was hired by Hays to supervise the PCA. No studio belonging to the MPPDA could release a film for widespread distribution and exhibition without a formal certificate of approval by the PCA. Serious fines were levied for violations, but a close look at the number of infractions (a very, very low number) indicates how closely the studios followed Breen and Hays' supervision. Will Hays and Joe Breen SO!? Why would the industry, or at least the members of the MPPDA, agree? An obvious answer would be that a choice between conducting self-censorship versus external censorship leaves a pretty clear choice. Less obvious, but equally important, is that to adhere to the MPPDA's wishes (i.e., the industry's East Coast-based lobbying organization) would assist in staving off government scrutiny of problematic business practices being conducted by the increasingly monopolistic studios.

The Production Code: An Overview

As you can tell from discussions of censorship in your textbook, the motion picture industry acted early to stave off any kind of governmental regulation of film content, whether from a county, state, or federal level. Problematic or titillating content had appeared on screen from the inception of the moving image in the 1890s. As calls for regulating the movies increased throughout the 1910s and 1920s, representatives from the major studios realized the need for collective action. So, what we will be looking at specifically is how the biggest of the Hollywood studios worked together in an attempt to self-regulate, or, in other words, to self-censor its own content. The so-called "Production Code" served as the immediate predecessor for what we now refer to as the MPAA ratings system. * The "Code" established a set of rules for Hollywood-produced content -- what could and could not be portrayed -- and created a "seal" of approval, without which it would prove impossible to exhibit films in major urban or metropolitan theaters (i.e., the ones owned and controlled by the major studios.) * The majority of research on the topic of Hollywood's Production Code has, for better and for worse, focused on provocative stars such as Paramount's Mae West, who attained celebrity largely through her one woman show entitled "SEX," and other similar topics, such as violence. * In truth, the reasons for the creation and the implementation of the Production Code are far more complex, multi-faceted, and even pragmatic.... Look above for a great image by Paramount set photographer, Whitey Shafer, who included in this one image, everything that was NOT allowed by the Motion Picture Production Code, "Thou Shalt Not" See how many transgressions you can spot (Hint: there are at least ten...)

Independent from what?

Based on popular discourse, it would be fair to assume that scrappy "indie" films operate in a space wholly separate from the far more wealthy and powerful Hollywood film. The reality, however, proves more nuanced and complicated than "indie" vs. "industry." So-called independent films and blockbusters provide equally important corporate marketing functions, both following the quest for profit, fame, and, (maybe?) artistic achievement. For example: Pulp Fiction ( 1994). PauseMuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time -2:58FullscreenCheck out your textbook's case study of director Quentin Tarantino's successful indie darling (and its super weird original trailer to your right...). Produced by Miramax, Pulp Fiction's commercial success inspired the remaining Hollywood major studios to establish their own divisions to distribute independently made films. Twentieth Century Fox created Fox Searchlight, Universal spawned Focus Features, and Warner's fostered Fine Line Features (a division of New Line Cinema) until fairly recently. Many of the films distributed by these special divisions achieved significant commercial and critical success. Ever heard of any of the following titles? The Crying Game (1992) The Usual Suspects (1995) Shakespeare in Love (1998) Billy Elliot (2000) The Blair Witch Project (1999) Memento (2000) Little Miss Sunshine (2006) Juno (2006) Key Takeaway: During this period, entertainment media conglomerates developed special divisions for the theatrical distribution of independent cinema as well as for the distribution of this content on ancillary markets (pay-TV, VHS, DVD, etc...). Thus, rather than functioning in opposition to Hollywood behemoths, indie films served as an alternative revenue source for the very same network of major entertainment media conglomerates.

Mizoguchi and Ozu: Two Beloved Auteurs

Before our look at the World War II era and its profound effects on Japan's film industry and art film legacy, let's highlight two of the Japanese filmmakers your textbook and other film historians most frequently reference: The final scene from Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy (1936)Play Video • Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) directed both jidai-geki and gendai-geki. Often drawn to melodramatic narratives, Mizoguchi became well known for shooting from a somewhat removed perspective, using medium to medium long shots. Film critics have posited that the long shots serve to distance the audience from identifying with or being affected by the characters' heightened emotions playing out on screen. The trailer for Tokyo Story (1953), widely considered to be Ozu's "masterpiece"Play Video • Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) began making films at only twenty-four years of age, but, for most of his career, was seen by his peers as a relatively standard, unexceptional director. • In the mid-twentieth century, however, international art film circles began heralding Ozu as one of the premier "auteurs" of Japanese cinema. (In a sense, mirroring what had occurred with relatively mainstream Hollywood directors being lauded and praised by the cinephiles of the French New Wave...) • Ozu's films often employ a static camera and lots of interior shot so as to allow for slow exchanges between characters to dominate the screen. His films posit change as painful, positive, and inevitable. Celebrated still today, Ozu's Tokyo Story exemplifies the director's focus on the emotional toll of generational and societal transitions.

High Concept Films

Besides its ability to make LOTS of money, what else defines a blockbuster? From a narrative standpoint, blockbusters are often described as "high-concept" films. A high concept film has a premise that's quick and easy to communicate. Jaws is perhaps the ultimate high concept film. Think how easy it would have been to pitch that film to a half-listening publisher or movie executive: "Here is the story: A massive man-eating shark terrorizes a local beach during the summer holidays." As another example, let's watch "no-stranger-to-terrible high-concept-films-star" Nicolas Cage demonstrate a high concept pitch in the clip to the right from the 2002 film, Adaptation. • High concept films tend to abide by specific aesthetic and narrative conventions as well. They are usually fast-paced, special effects-driven, and emphasize action over character development. • So why do high concept films prove the most viable potential blockbusters? Well, from a marketing perspective, high concept films reproduce across a variety of media platforms and, maybe most importantly, easily translate into related merchandise: Toothbrushes, hats, action figures, and it goes on and on and on and on..... One of my favorite examples, the Jar Jar Binks candy toy. With a lollipop tongue, this toy is *perfect* for kids everywhere, amirite? #tooterrifyingtomakeup High concept blockbusters often rely upon pre-sold elements like a comic book or popular novel) designed to appeal to a specific audience, and for this reason they are easy to organize massive marketing campaigns around. For example, Steven Spielberg agreed to take a gamble and direct Jaws in large part due to the fact that the film would be based on an immensely popular book. The film could almost guarantee success due to people interested in seeing an adaptation of a favorite novel. Can you see how vertical and horizontal integration might begin to play into this? Vertical and horizontal integration facilitate the broadest possible global market penetration for media content and merchandise. • High concept blockbusters are usually released wide in the summer, and if they are successful they can earn hundreds of millions of dollars from markets around the world. When a movie is *particularly* successful they can spawn a franchise with commercial tie-ins and extensive merchandising. Just think about how many tiny Iron Mans and Hulks you see running around every Halloween.

Early Italian Cinema

Between 1905 and 1931, Italy produced almost 10,000 films. However, only approximately 1,500 have survived. Along with France, Italy was one of the dominant global film producers during the early era of cinema. By 1910, the Italian film industry lagged behind only France in terms of the number of films the country exported around the globe. Italian film production was centered in the cities of Rome and Turin. When the growth and success of French cinema began to further threaten the Italian market, Italian producers responded by prioritizing the three most popular genres in Italy: Historical films, documentaries, and comedies. The success of Italian historical epics, both at home and abroad, eventually drew an even wealthier class of investors to Italian cinema. The 1914 historical epic, Cabiria, produced by Italia Film, is often cited as the pinnacle of early Italian filmmaking. This film is set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. s your textbook notes, the box office success of Italian feature films abroad, especially the big budget, historical dramas, greatly influenced the American film industry to move out of producing short subjects and into the creation of feature length narrative films.

Indie Film as Aesthetic

But the era's independent films have played more than a socio-economic role in the contemporary media landscape. The look, feel, and style of indie films -- their aesthetic -- have significantly influenced a generation or two of filmmakers as well. • While deriding blockbusters for their crass commercialism, critics and pundits position independent films as ART and the filmmakers behind them as AUTEURS. (Sound familiar?) PauseMuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time -0:52Fullscreen For example: Wes Anderson. Once rather hilariously proclaimed to be the next Martin Scorsese by none other than . . . Martin Scorsese, himself, Anderson's career grew to prominence following the production and release of Bottle Rocket in 1996 -- a feature based on a black and white short created by Anderson and his fellow UT-Austin alum, Owen Wilson. Although the film bombed commercially, Anderson and Wilson's work on Bottle Rocket garnered much critical praise and interest which led to the creation and release of the now cult-classic, Rushmore (1998.) Wes Anderson's films have a particular look and feel to them and, for many critics, illustrate quintessential "indies" -- seen as a "cooler" and "more authentic" alternative to homogenized corporate film product. Anderson, rightly or wrongly, has been seen at the center of the rise of the twenty-first century "hipster" culture. And, not unsurprisingly, Austin, where Anderson spent some formative years, can be seen as a hipster heaven. So, why is Austin (or any of the cities featured on this map) seen as a hipster-approved city? What is the culture that "hipster" or "indie" has implied? And how does film factor into this question?

The Production Code: Phase Two

For the most part, however, the Production Code's initial guidelines largely remained suggestions throughout the 1920s. The rules appeared more symbolic than any real kind of attempt at policy, and they were adhered to in varying degrees by individual studios. This somewhat ad-hoc situation changes in the 1930s for a number of identifiable reasons: More "scientific studies" that produce substantive evidence of mass media effects, especially on children. (Above right, check out this researcher monitoring a child watching a movie!! What the what??) The introduction of sound to the movies created a more 'realistic' experience in the cinema, which, in turn, created more concern over the effects of popular genres like the gangster film.But, most likely, the most important cause for the MPPDA members to begin enforcing the Code arises through: Economic crisis (aka, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s): When the industry begins to suffer economically, studios respond with even more racy films, like Baby Face, Scarface, and 1930's Morocco (see below), to drive box office attendance. This approach would backfire...

Definitional Challenges

In the late 1980s and early 1990s. a new generation of so-called "independent films," better known as "indies," achieved both significant financial success and critical acclaim. But what do we mean by these terms? Are these terms referring to: 1) A particular industrial structure 2) A specific set of aesthetic choices 3) A film culture 4) Marketing or branding Maybe all of the above? Just as importantly, from what are these films seen to be independent? Who is making and acting in these films? Finally, who is watching these films and where? * Keep these key questions in your mind as you review this section on independent cinema.

1970s and 1980s

India suffered serious political unrest after 1971 and the Indo-Pakistani War, which ended with the formation of the new nation, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) and the return of approximately 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war held in India to Pakistan. Additionally, India suffered an economic crisis during the 1970s. Social stratification increased even further, and the film industry experienced a shortage of footage and a breathtaking increase in bureaucracy. Generational frustration erupted, and the movies witnessed the rise of a new era - one influenced by a variety of cinematic traditions including East Asia - and new acting styles. As your textbook explains on page 383, one of the most important contemporary archetypes of Indian cinema emerges during this period: "The Angry Young Man." A hero that will fight for truth and justice, even (especially?) if that means going up against the established authorities (and their concomitant bureaucratic rules, requirements, and processes.) Check out the video above right to see a short clip from Zanjeer (1973) which launched the career of Amitabh Bachchan, arguably Bollywood's most beloved star, who specialized in anti-establishment roles and remains one of the most successful actors in Bollywood history. Fun Fact: Amitabh Bachchan starred in the 1975 mega-hit film, Sholay. Screened continuously at a popular cinema in Mumbai for over five years straight, Sholay held a longstanding record for the longest active run in a major theatre. That is, until another blockbuster film came along in the mid-1990s...

Early Indian Cinema

Like so many of the countries we have visited throughout the semester, India first experienced cinema by viewing the Lumière shorts brought over by the French company's sales agents in 1896. Remember, however, that, at this time, India remained under British colonial rule. So, a closer examination of where and how the first films were shown in India indicates that they premiered in the Watson's Hotel in Mumbai (pictured at right). Watson's Hotel was not only designed and constructed in England before being shipped to India, but the British expatriate owner of the hotel had declared it a "whites-only" establishment -- a true colonial outpost. Therefore, the first films projected in India were European in origin, and solely European in audience. Motion pictures, however, soon proliferated and became visible (and popular) to a wider demographic in the cities -- particularly Bombay/Mumbai, the gateway to commerce and trade within the country. Film historians now estimate that the first indigenous Indian production occurred in 1899 when a Mumbai photographer, Harishchandra Bhatavdekar (aka Save dada), saw the Edison and Lumière films and began importing equipment. Like early filmmakers in all parts of the world, Bhatavdekar's films and making short, topical films of local residents, daily activities, and colonial celebrities. One of his first films documented the arrival of the current Viceroy of India to the Delhi Durbar (an event to honor European royal succession) in 1903. In 1910, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (aka Dadasaheb Phalke, the Father of Indian Cinema) watched a French film, The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1903). Phalke had visions of how this technology could be used to celebrate India's own culture. The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) Phalke later reflected on the experience, stating: "While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell...Could this really happen? Would we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen? The whole night passed in this mental agony." After obtaining his own equipment, and traveling to London for training, Phalke first created short topical films (i.e., the planting and growth of a pea plant) but went to create India's first feature films. In total, it is estimated that Phalke directed over nintety-five features and twenty-six short subjects. Although debated, many film historians believe this film, Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra (1913) to be the first "true" Indian feature film:

War Benefits the Studio System

Once the United States entered the war, many movie theatres located near industrial or manufacturing plants remained open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week so that the many people working odd shifts could still relax at the cinema. In essence, the war, with serious rationing including gasoline, offered the studios a "captive audience" for their movie theatres. As you can see illustrated by the photo above, newsreel theatres (i.e., cinemas showing only the latest newsreels) emerged to cater to audiences wanting more war footage and/or documentaries often produced by the OWI. By early 1946, nearly 100 million people attend the movies every week -- what will prove cinema's all time high. [Compare this to approximately 80-85 million people per week during the 1930s.] The war helps improve the film industry's image or reputation through its collaboration with the government's efforts to keep up morale. Through partnering with the Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs, the major studios mobilized for the national defense effort. The studios, particularly those a part of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, created the War Activities Committee who carefully monitored wartime film content, as well as negotiate all important government contracts, alongside representatives of the Bureau. An eclectic array of studio personnel, from producers and theatre owners to actors and representatives from the major labor unions comprised the ranks of the War Activities Committee. However, not all that Hollywood did during the war stemmed from pure patriotism or benevolence. Collaborating with the federal government at this particular moment made sense from a business perspective as well. Why? In 1942, the United States government deemed motion pictures an "essential wartime industry," alongside munitions and auto or airline manufacturing. Meaning, Hollywood could continue to acquire the goods and products required to produce and distribute their films, with which they would profit, while other corporations struggled to continue operations Moreover, the Department of Justice backed away from their investigation into Hollywood's monopolistic practices (remember that pesky vertical integration??) as studio involvement in the war effort was deemed a priority. Also put on hold during the war were the initial steps by congressional representatives to interrogate communist influences in Hollywood -- what would emerge, in the post-war period, as the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Enduring Influence

One last thought: Even if you might feel very distant from the events and films of World War II, many of the movies that influenced your childhood or your parents' teen years, were produced by men extremely passionate and even romantic about the war era. A notable example, amongst many would be in the career trajectory of blockbuster director Steven Spielberg. Years before his films like Schindler's List (1993) or Saving Private Ryan (1998), itself an homage to a 1944 Twentieth Century-Fox propaganda film, Spielberg made amateur films with a home movie camera about the war. In essence, to understand the context within which the most famous of American filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s created their movies, one must consider the enormous influence and impact of the wartime period, and its motion picture propaganda.

Case Study: Walt Disney Studios

One of the most popular, beloved, and often revered of the Hollywood studios is that of the Walt Disney Co. Founded in 1923 by Walt and his brother Roy, the Walt Disney company largely operated as one of the smallest, most independent studios during the height of the "Classic Hollywood Era," but ranks now as the first or second largest entertainment corporation in the United States, depending on what data you use. Disney logo prior to their move to Burbank, CA Perhaps it is because of the sincere affection felt by so many people about Disney that the company provides such a great case study or illustration of the severe unrest and class struggles within the Hollywood studio system. Meaning that the contrast between the genuine admiration (as well as expert marketing) of 'Uncle Walt' and his animated friends and the harsh realities of working long and exhausting hours in the film industry create understandable tension. Following the success of Disney's first, full-length animated feature, Snow White, in the late 1930s, the Walt Disney Studio -- previously a small "mom and pop" studio -- moved into much larger premises and grew quickly into more of an industrial operation. What Walt soon discovered was that unionizing efforts would impact his, and his company's, life for a long time... Although the sequence below is quite a long clip, please watch in its entirety as it is an *excellent* overview, filled with amazing archival content, of the Disney company's move into a more formalized industry structure, and the concomitant labor issues that arose and affected so many involved. Far more eloquent than a plain textbook or power point could ever be...

Key Studios in the Hollywood "Factory" System

Since the success of Thomas Ince and other early motion picture pioneers, the main L.A. based studios operated in similar ways to other American industrial titans of the twentieth century. Play Video Your textbook provides a great overview of the most prominent Hollywood studios of this era, so be sure to take a close look at these companies and the key films, executives, and stars associated with them. Using terminology of the time, the textbook breaks these studios into two categories: "The Big Five" (companies that were vertically integrated and owned their own theaters) and "The Little Three" (those that did not own theaters and had to rely upon "The Big Five" to screen their product in cities across the United States and around the world. The Big Five Warner Bros. MGM/Loew's Paramount 20th Century Fox RKO The Little Three United Artists Columbia Universal

The Impact of the Production Code

The Production Code served to: Helped the "Big Five" and "Little Three" Hollywood studios further centralize control. Since a movie had to have a PCA seal of approval for mainstream distribution and exhibition, independent entrepreneurs faced a very difficult challenge in both obtaining a seal (as non-MPPDA members) OR in finding outlets for non-MPPDA productions.** In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the eight owned approximately 15% of the nation's theatres. BUT these 15% earned over 70% of Hollywood profits due to their large size and key locations in major citiesMPPDA members increasingly defined the practices of the entire Hollywood film industry through their vertically integrated structure. Marginalize and minimize the production of particular genres during the heyday of the Production Code era (i.e., the sex film or the gangster film) Demise of the Code In essence, many filmmakers viewed the Code as a challenge: How could it be subverted and/or manipulated?? Filmmakers behind the era's most beloved Romantic or Screwball Comedies became expert at "tweaking" the Code... By the early 1950s, as television quickly assumes the country's central form of moving image media, the Code begins to be broken down. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that movies could be protected by the First Amendment (which they hadn't been before) which allowed boundaries to be further tested. Bit by bit, the Production Code is challenged until the MPPDA/MPPA replaces it with the now familiar "Ratings" system in the mid-to late 1960s.

Indies as Distinctive Film Culture

Throughout the entire semester, we have highlighted the importance of film festivals to the exhibition, distribution, and, indeed, canonization of "global" cinema. Unsurprisingly, film festivals also play a vital role to the creation and cultivation of independent film culture from the late 1980s through today. Newer film festivals, in particular Sundance, Toronto, and, to a lesser degree, Austin's SXSW, emerged as the markets at which the next "indie blockbuster" would be discovered and purchased. Seen as the moment that launched the "indie" era, director Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1989. After taking home Sundance's prestigious audience award, sex, lies and videotape later won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It is likely that you have never heard of this film (although maybe you have heard of Soderbergh's more mainstream titles like the Ocean's Eleven films as well as 2012's Magic Mike?) To get a sense of what made Soderbergh the well known auteur that he is today, check out the trailer for sex, lies, and videotape to the above right. After watching the trailer, listen to Steven Soderbergh talk about his work on this film as well as the experience of its screening at Sundance (below right.) • Miramax purchased the distribution rights to sex, lies, and videotape at Sundance and the film eventually grossed $24.7 million (off of a $1.2 million budget.) • Although Sundance had launched in the late 1970s and had worked in relative obscurity, the incredible financial and critical success of sex, lies, and videotape helped cement the reputation of the Sundance Film Festival as "indie-central" for the 1990s. In 1984, the festival had 400 attendees; in 1994, Sundance hosted over 6,000 people. • In essence, Sundance itself has become its own corporate brand with its own cable channel, film distribution platform, and educational programs. The culture of "indie film" had been born. But this successful trajectory points us to a broader and harder to answer question about independent cinema: Have the "indies" -- their filmmakers, aesthetics, and cinematic culture -- devolved into mere commercial brands themselves? Even if you remain totally uninterested in indie films, you likely already have a good sense of the feel and style of such films. Test this knowledge by watching this parody to your left to see if you "get" the joke...

The Hollywood Film INDUSTRY: Labor Issues

Throughout this course thus far, we have emphasized the concept (reality?) of the Los Angeles-based motion picture studios as forming the basis of the country's film industry. Analogies have been made time and time again, conflating the studios with other major American manufacturing industries of the twentieth century, in particular the automotive industry. General Motors Strike, 1970 When we think about labor and strikes in U.S. history, we often think of Detroit and the auto worker strikes of the latter half of the 1900s. But it is vital to think about labor issues when studying the film or media industries as well. Maybe in some ways, it is even more important with the Hollywood or entertainment industries as the product produced in said industries are intended to entertain and convey a mystique of glamour, wealth, and escapism. But the importance and role of unions, or, trade guilds, within Hollywood cannot be underestimated. Even if you think that you don't really know about this topic, you likely do! Why? If you have ever read about or, heaven forbid, watched the Academy Awards broadcast, you have seen the power of these guilds in action. In order to vote for a specific category, with the notable exception of "Best Picture," members must be a member of the specific guild: Costume, Make-Up, Editing, Directing, etc... (Ever wonder why credit sequences have gotten so long?) The need for the creation of unions became all the more important in the years following the coming of sound:

1950s and 1960s

Video During the years following independence and partition, India experienced a period of serious transition. With domestic challenges of severe poverty, wars with neighboring Pakistan, and the efforts of creating a new political infrastructure, supporting entertainment would not prove a government priority. In fact, very few functioning screens and theaters operated within the country in the years after partition. The reigning star of the era was Raj Kapoor who you can see in the video to your right. "Awara Hoon" is a hit song from the classic Hindi film Awara (1951). Keep in mind that music plays a vital role in the production and potential success for a Bollywood film. Music can make up over one quarter of the film's total budget. Moreover, songwriters and playback singers are as popular and, in some cases, even more popular, than the actors starring in the films themselves. Important Note: During the 1960s, the Central Government of India established the Film Finance Corporation to support "art cinema" and filmmakers like Satyajit Ray. Like other countries around the world, India established a National Film Institute and School. The films produced under the auspices of these programs, however, did not resemble what we have discussed as "Indian" cinema to this point. Be sure to read more about the contributions of Ray, social realism, and the "New Indian Cinema" on page 381 of your textbook. And. if needed, revisit the introductory video for a clarification of why we are focusing more on popular Hindi cinema in this module...

Sound Technologies

While we often refer to THE COMING OF SOUND as if it were a smooth, instant industrial and aesthetic transition, the truth is that:1) The concept of sound synchronized with moving images was envisioned (and attempted) from the inception (and before!) of cinema. In fact, many different inventors were experimenting with recording sound around the world. 2) When the motion picture industries within the United States and abroad did finally transition to sound pictures, the transition was anything but instantaneous or linear! While you've surely heard of successful early talkies like The Jazz Singer (1928), the fun part of studying messy industrial histories such as these is looking at the false starts as well as the triumphs. Enjoy(?) the video to your right as an example just one of many less-well remembered gems from this transitional period. Gus Visser and His Singing Duck, singing "Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me" is from 1925. This is an early example of sound on film technology which you will learn a little more about below.

Entertainment During the War

With a class like ours, one that focuses on the motion picture, we want to ensure that we don't lose sight of the fact that cinema was just one form of cultural pastime during the twentieth century. Live theatre, sports, dancing, parlor games, and more occupied a central role in many lives. During World War II, radio, NOT the movies, served as the number one source of information about the global conflict, alongside enormously popular radio entertainment like soap operas, serialized comic strip narratives, music, and game shows.According to one major study, Americans listened to the radio an average of 4.5 hours per day during the war.The national radio networks, familiar logos like NBC or CBS, increased the percentage of news coverage from approx. 4% to 30%. Although movie newsreels included war footage, the OWI monitored very closely that no overly horrific imagery (or overly negative) content would be distributed to the American public. Movies, in turn, emerge as the number one "leisure" activity featuring a relatively cheap and largely escapist entertainment for the whole family

So... Why care?

ontrol of the country's film industry serves as a model still used by countries around the world and operated in direct contrast to the corporate, increasingly conglomerate financial structure of the Hollywood film industry. Keep this in mind through the upcoming look at French and Japanese cinema in particular... Although flourishing for only a brief period of time, the Italian Neorealist film movement illustrates one of the earliest (and one of the most important) examples of post-war alternatives to the big-budget Hollywood features that we so often identify with the era. In addition, Italian Neorealism has been arguably one of the most influential film movements on an international level! Global auteurs such as Sanjait Ray in India and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran have learned from and adapted various theories and practices of neorealist filmmaking for their own purposes. Director Martin Scorsese has repeatedly cited the movement as having huge impact on his filmmaking, particularly with 1980's Raging Bull. See the below clip (esp. starting at his comments at approximately one minute.) More recently, the influence of Italian Neorealism can even be seen on television! If you're a Master of None fan then you may have noticed that the second season of the series was riddled with references to famous Italian films, most obviously The Bicycle Thieves in episode 1 of season 2.

The Revolution and the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC)

• After the revolution of 1959, the majority of footage produced and disseminated through the West about the country's political change appeared anti-Cuban and anti-Communist, similar to the video on the far right. For this reason, Cuban filmmakers viewed it imperative to produce Cuban moving images to express the country's own experiences and vision. • Echoing Lenin's avowed commitment to cinema following the Soviet Revolution in Russia, the Cuban government created the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) less than three months after the Rebel Army entered Havana and Santiago de Cuba and proved the first decree concerning cultural affairs to be ordered and passed by the Revolutionary Government. Fun Fact: The ICAIC obtained their initial filmmaking equipment and studio facilities by confiscating them from members of Fulgencio Batista's (the Cuban President/Dictator from 1940-1944 and 1952-1959) entourage. • One of the principle objectives of the ICAIC was to make Cuba a nation that produced Cuban cinema as opposed to simply consuming foreign imported films. The video above is a newsreel produced by the ICAIC. The tonal contrast between these two videos offers some insight into the increasingly hostile relationship between Cuba and the United States during the second half of the 20th-century. • While the founding members of the ICAIC approached film primarily as an art form with which to express a common Cuban consciousness, they also acknowledged the necessity of developing functional and sustainable production, exhibition, and distribution infrastructures to support a national film industry. • The 1959 Revolution's alignment with a particularly Soviet brand of communism meant that international economic relations between Cuba and other countries, especially the United States, became very strained. This made it difficult on a practical level for Cuba to procure at a reasonable price the necessary film stock to sustain a national film industry. For example, while the ICAIC preferred to shoot on Kodak's Eastmancolor film, they often settled for the Japanese made Fuji film -- an option that still required significant foreign trade negotiations. • The importation of foreign films proved equally challenging! Cuba could only import films through foreign trade agreements with communist-bloc countries. Even then, Cuba could only obtain between six and eight prints of a single film for the entire country. Thinking from a material history perspective, just imagine how scratched and damaged those films must have been after making a full circuit of the island - not to mention how long it must have taken to see new product!

Expanding Perspectives

• Although the ICAIC evolved directly out of the socialist revolution of 1959, many of the films produced by the ICAIC in the decades that followed unabashedly critiqued central aspects of Cuban society and government doctrine. De Cierta Manera (1974), directed by Sara Gómez. One of only two Afro-Cuban directors within the ranks of the ICAIC, director Sara Gomez tragically died from an asthma attack before finishing her film, De Cierta Manera. Gomez did complete cinematography and while the film was finished by Alea and others who received credit for the entire film after her death, her work and contribution demands attention. This unique film combines documentary footage and fiction to take a hard, honest look at the intersections of race, class, and gender in Cuba's revolutionary context. • Portrait of Teresa (1979) directed by Pastor Vega, was an incredibly popular film at the time of its release. In its first two weeks it was seen by 250,000 viewers. It's a straightforward drama that addresses the "double-day" of work that working women with a family in Cuba are still expected to do, even after the revolution. • Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas is a scathing political allegory for maddening bureaucracy that proved incredibly popular with the Cuban public in the four days it was released before being yanked from cinemas by the government.

Why should we care about exploitation?

• As you might imagine from some of these trailers, the Mystery Science 3000 crew has spent a considerable amount of time making merciless fun of exploitation films like these, films that are "so bad they're good." So why should we care about films like Cat Women of the Moon, High School Hellcats, Blood Feast, or The Incredible She Monster? • These films don't announce themselves as high art the way the films in the next unit (The French New Wave) might, but when we take them seriously they present us with different ways we can approach film history. While the dominant trend within film studies curricula to date has been to approach film as an aesthetic form of expression, exploitation films encourage us to also consider films as cultural products, artifacts that offer significant insight into the evolving cultural norms and social anxieties of a specific time period. • Additionally, exploitation films often served as a training ground for young talent of the period, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme. • Finally, anyone who has ever seen a Quentin Tarantino film knows that exploitation films have had a profound influence on Hollywood genres, even today, in terms of genres, styles, marketing... and content!

International Distribution

• As you might imagine, talking pictures threw a wrench into well-established and lucrative networks of international film distribution. During the silent era, cultural and linguistic difference was much easier to translate and market abroad. Intertitles could be translated and spliced into film prints relatively easily. In fact, many of the silent films that survive from this era are prints that have been repatriated from abroad and have intertitles in a language other than English. For example, you recently learned about the Oscar Micheaux film Within Our Gates, (1920). The only known surviving print of this film was actually discovered in Spain with Spanish intertitles. • With dialogue in specific languages and sound on film technologies, you can't just edit out language barriers. So the film industries had to grapple with multi-language Hollywood films. One of the first ideas was to use different casts. In the case of Spanish language content this was relatively easy. Take the 1931 Universal Studios Dracula for example. A lot of money was put into this film which was shot on the Universal lot in English during the day, and then again at night using the same set pieces and a different cast. • Several major stars of the silent era were even asked to perform in other languages despite the fact that they did not speak them. Recently, some Laurel and Hardy films featuring the comedy duo speaking Spanish have been released. In order to make these films someone would stand off-set holding cards with the Spanish dialogue spelled out phonetically for the two actors. While early sound films were very talky, you can still see a lot of the slapstick humor that was popular throughout the silent era in these clips. These curious artifacts give testament to an interesting moment in this transition and offer us some insight into how the industry was trying to grapple with the practical challenges of this major technological, commercial, and aesthetic shift in filmmaking. • Several of the studios realized that financially speaking, subtitles might be a more sustainable way to overcome language barriers and market their films abroad. Still, none of these changes came cheap. • Even more big money was invested in Hollywood production during this transitional period, especially Wall Street money, and by the mid-1930s, sound had been effectively and smoothly incorporated into the "classical Hollywood style" and industrial structure. While we pointed out earlier that sound initially hindered filmmaking, rendering more fluid and dynamic approaches to cinematography static in order to accommodate the limited range of the microphones of the time, there were also many creative uses of sound early on. For example, Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 film Blackmail.

Screwball Comedies

• Comedy takes a turn during this era. For the most part, during the silent era, comedy was physical (slapstick). Physical comedy has never gone away, but at this juncture, dialogue heavy comedies where the humor and pathos are based in language and not physical comedy become more popular and more prominent. • Screwball comedies, for example, are one of the more unique aspects of film history which were more or less unique to this period. Pithy dialogue was the meat and potatoes of the screwball comedy, which often centered around a battle of the sexes and played with gender and class expectations as comedic fodder. • Obviously, talented, creative screenwriters (so often the unsung heroes) were critical to this particular genre. The clip to the right is from, arguably, the original screwball comedy, It Happened One Night (1934). Again, if you want to start a fight, ask some film historians to define the origins and ends of the screwball comedy as a genre.

Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)

• Even though the Soviets had very little money in the years directly following the 1917 revolutions, the party prioritized film production and even created and supported a film school -- quite possibly the first of its kind in the world. • Lev Kuleshov was on the faculty of the state film school where he led filmmaking workshops. One of the key challenges faced by Kuleshov and his colleagues was a lack of film stock. Confronted with the conundrum of how to make films without film, so to speak, Kuleshov and his students became very creative film editors. They would edit, and re-edit, and edit, and re-edit, again, exploring the potentials for a visual language through film. • MONTAGE, a term derived from French that literally means "to assemble," described how individual shots are arranged in relation to one another. For Kuleshov, montage proved the core or essence of filmmaking. Kuleshov and his students explored how particular combinations of shots could yield different emotional reactions or how it could play with geography. • Kuleshov is most famous for the eponymous "Kuleshov Effect." (See your textbook on pgs. 116-117) The Kuleshov Effect posits that shots have two values: 1) The shot by itself 2) The shot in relation to other shots • Kuleshov observed that the juxtaposition of one shot after another creates a meaning that is more and different than the individual shots alone.

Hollywood Reacts

• Hollywood did not immediately jump on the "talkie" bandwagon. The moguls running the studios were shrewd businessmen, and they knew that the widespread installation of and adjustment to sound technologies to produce, distribute, and exhibit motion pictures (both domestically and internationally) would be an enormously disruptive undertaking. They already had a well-oiled system in place, why fix what's not broken? For these reasons many of the studio moguls wrote sound technologies off as a fad. • Warner Brothers, which was a small studio in the late 1920s, decided to take the risk. They selected the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, and their first feature with "sound effects" was Don Juan in 1926. Their first sound feature with segments of synchronized dialogue was The Jazz Singer in 1928 featuring vaudeville star Al Jolson. • The Jazz Singer brought in approximately $3.5 million dollars in profit, making it impossible for other studios to continue to ignore the money to be made producing "talkies."

Political Change

• In the years leading up to the Russian revolution, the vast majority of the country's population lived in dire poverty and less than 50% could read and write. • When we talk about the so-called "Russian revolution" it's important to note we're really talking about two revolutions. The first, in February of 1917, overthrew the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II, effectively ending the Romanov dynasty (aka, the monarchy.) The second revolution in October of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was a socialist revolution. After several years of infighting, the Bolsheviks effectively reconstituted themselves as a Communist Party in order to pave the way for the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. • With the rise of the Communist party and the concomitant socio-economic and cultural transitions, the largely upper-class pre-revolution film companies shut down, and in some cases fled the country. Lenin and the new government nationalized the film industry. Announcement from an agitki/agit-prop train • With a largely uneducated population speaking an estimated one hundred different dialects, Lenin undoubtedly saw the great potential for film in helping nation-build for the new government regime. Lenin believed that the predominantly visual medium of film could serve as a vital teaching tool (or, from another perspective, a propaganda machine.) Lenin famously stated, "Cinema is to us the most important of the Arts." • For example, the government distributed educational films using agit-props / agitki, trains that traveled throughout the USSR bringing news, educational content, and government propaganda to widely different populations. • The filmmakers of the 1920s were supported by the Communist government to endorse the political goals of the state. However, they also saw cinema as a revolutionary medium in both form and content. Importantly, Soviet filmmakers made films that would celebrate the collective mass, not the individual. Meaning, Soviet films would never foreground a hero like that of the lone American cowboy, but would rather champion the work of regular people, united together. In the next section we will meet a few famous filmmakers from this era and learn a bit more about 1) their intellectual theories of filmmaking, and 2) their editing process and aesthetic visions.

Russian Cinema Before 1917

• It's important to note that pre-WWI Russian cinema was very different from Soviet Cinema. • Because neither cameras nor film stock were produced in Russia at the turn of the century, Russian film production companies developed differently from those in the US. Entrepreneurs in Russia dealt primary in importing international films and distributing them throughout Russia. This allowed them to invest the money they made from film distribution into native film production. • Early Russian cinema, mirroring national tendencies in literature and theatre, dealt primarily with the upper classes, was highly melodramatic, and was characterized by its unhappy endings. Denmark's film industry (a major player before WWI) notoriously produced films with two different endings: a happy ending for the American audiences, and a sad ending for the Russian audiences. * To your right is an example of a "Russian ending" from Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913) (page 113 of your textbook). • While we have approached the technological, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural development of US cinema as a (more-or-less) linear process of development, massive social and political changes would alter the course of Russian/Soviet cinema forever.

Unique Cinematic Conventions of the Silent Era

• Japanese cinema did not merely imitate Western cinema. Rather, it fused characteristics of Western films with indigenous cultural practices and aesthetics. • For example, early Japanese filmmakers incorporated Kabuki, a 17th Century form of theater using elaborate make-up and acting styles into their films. (See a short clip featuring a quick look at Kabuki performance to your left.) Oyama • In addition, silent Japanese films featured male actors, called oyama, in female roles. The oyama did not simply dress in women's clothing, but performed by mastering and utilizing a complex set of codes and techniques to communicate femininity; codes that had evolved throughout the long tradition of Kabuki theatre and, for a short period at least, became the norm in Japanese cinema as well. • The art of the benshi remains one of the most unique aspects of early Japanese film exhibition! Benshis served as live narrators or interpreters of silent film, standing to the side of the screen producing a unique fusion of cinema and live theatre. They provided narrative as well as dialogue for silent films. For this reason, early Japanese films were much less dependent on intertitles and editing than early western cinemas. In this sense, the exhibition practices of the Benshi did as much to influence the aesthetics of early Japanese film as the production studios. Each benshi developed his or her own individual narrational style, and some even became celebrities in their own right. Be sure to read the fascinating interview with Midori Sawato, a modern day benshi, about how she learned her craft and hear her discuss her passion for film in the short video below.

The Arrival of Film in Japan

• Just like all of the other cinematic cultures we have discussed throughout the semester, pre-cinema Japanese entertainment featured a variety of optical toys before the arrival of moving image technologies. As only one example, magic lantern shows, called utsushie, were shown in civic halls and theaters around the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. • Moving image technologies appeared in Japan almost as soon as they were created. Edison's kinetoscope, Lumière's Cinématographe, Edison's Vitascope, and the Lubin version of the Vitascope were all exhibited in Japan by 1896. Around 1897, the British motion picture camera, the Baxter and Wray Cinematograph, had also made its way to Japan. Early movie makers filmed performances of "traditional" Japanese activities or pastimes such as below. Play Video • Japanese filmmakers, themselves, began making topicals and trick films, although the domestic market was dominated by French, British, and U.S. films until 1908 when several Japanese studios began to emerge. • Between 1909 and 1914 four major vertically integrated studios set up operations in Japan: the Yoshizawa Company (in Tokyo), the Fukuhodo Company (in Tokyo), the Yokota (in Kyoto), and Pathé. (Remember our friends from France, Pathé? Dominant on a global level, they maintained a production unit in Tokyo).

Early/Silent Cinema in Cuba

• Moving pictures first came to Cuba, brought by Gabriel Veyre, an agent for the Lumières, only eight months after the unveiling of the cinématographe in 1896. Mirroring developments around the world, the Edison company traveled to Cuba the following year followed quickly by Biograph. Competition for global film markets remained fierce in these early years! • Cuba's sugar-based economy uniquely fit the needs of early film distributors. The extensive transportation and communications networks in place required for the harvesting and exporting of sugar from rural plantations proved excellent for importing and disseminating cinematic product as well.• By 1920, there were approximately fifty cinemas in Havana and more than three hundred scattered across the rest of the country. • French companies such as Pathé and Gaumont dominated the early market, while Mexican, Argentinian, and North American productions would emerge as the most popular after World War One, especially the melodramas! • Theaters were mostly owned by the commercial classes, local business people who later established the country's radio stations. However, like most developing nations, Cuba remained more dependent on the USA, Mexico, Argentina, and Europe for a regular supply of film product than it would for broadcasting material. Fun Fact: Although movie attendance began a steep decline in the United States in the late 1940s, cinema audiences in Cuba continued to grow until 1956! Despite a small dip in box office receipts in 1957-1958, the Cuban revolution in 1959 attendance served to increase film attendance again...

After the Occupation

• Once the US occupation of Japan ended, the Japanese film industry underwent several significant changes in terms of structure, economic challenges, and cinematic product. • During the US occupation, filmmakers were not allowed to address the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any way that did not present the bombings as a necessary evil employed strategically to end the war. • Following the American departure, Japanese cinemas began reckoning with Japan's post-war and post-atom bomb reality. One of the most famous of these film's was Toho studio's Gojira (1954) AKA Godzilla, a film about a monster who, once awakened by US nuclear tests, destroys Tokyo. * At last count, there have been over 30 separate "straight" Godzilla films as well as countless references or representations in television and cartoons. • Monster films, such as Godzilla, succeeded overseas, despite producers' frustration over poor translations and problematic alterations made by US distributors. Despite the fact that some of Japan's greatest cinematic talent had been involved in the Godzilla films, many Americans found them wonderful films to mock as a result of these cheap and careless changes. Japan's Toho studio specialized in these kinds of monster and science fiction films and, despite challenges, found global acclaim. • In addition, the Jidai-geki, or period drama films, had been somewhat discouraged during the US occupation. Once the occupation ended, the Toei film company managed to make significant profits by resurrecting the jidai-geki period drama in widescreen formats.

The Legacy of Soviet Cinema

• Somewhat ironically, Soviet montage enjoyed critical acclaim in more elite circles, while the popular or "mass" response to montage filmmakers was less enthusiastic. • State sponsored film was not the only filmgoing experience available in the USSR after the 1917 revolution. In fact, the most popular films in soviet Russia continued to be the more narrative oriented films from the US and Europe (which were still being imported). Supposedly the Errol Flynn-starring vehicle Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) -- a great example of a film with an individual hero -- was extremely popular in the Soviet Union during this time. Classic melodrama continued to be popular as well. • By the end of the 1920s, much of the government's financial support for montage filmmakers had eroded amidst accusations that filmmakers were prioritizing form or style over content and not sufficiently supporting the party. • Still, the legacy of Soviet montage is significant: Soviet montage accelerated improvements in editing and helped develop alternative means of storytelling. The Soviet filmmakers we have studied thus far were both film scholars as well as film creators. Individuals such as Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and others crafted a new language and model with which to discuss cinematic construction and meaning.

Demographic Shifts

• The 1950s saw a significant decline in the urban movie palaces we looked at in the "Birth of Hollywood" unit, and a rise of the suburban drive-in. • Suburban drive-ins were particularly popular with families and teenagers, a demographic of increasing importance to the movie industry! • Additionally, in this post-war context, the film industry was competing with the rise in popularity of television. Movie producers had to convince audiences that going to the movies offered an entertainment experience they couldn't get watching television in the comfort of their own living rooms. • Some numbers for context: TV set ownership climbed from 64 percent in 1955 to 93 percent in 1965. By 1965 the average household spent 5.5 hours with the TV on.

The New Wave Style

• The directors of French New Wave each created their own distinct styles, but there are a few similarities in their formal choices that allow us to talk about a discernible French Wave style. 1. Limited resources: These young men didn't have the money to make films with high production values, so they embraced alternative methods of filmmaking: Hand held cameras, non-professional actors, and filming on the streets of Paris without artificial lighting and elaborate set designs. 2. Challenging traditional cinematic language and "rules:" French New Wave "auteurs' did not embrace Hollywood's style of continuity editing (i.e., editing that facilitates narrative fluidity and a seamless, polished look). Instead, they called attention to their intentionally disruptive editing! Let's look at a few examples of this New Wave style. The clip to your right is a famous scene from François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups / 400 Blows (1959). This clip exemplifies several New Wave characteristics such as unconventional editing and improvised dialogue from the young actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud. Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle / Breathless (1959) is an homage to gangster films/film noir which Godard actually dedicated to Monogram Pictures. À bout de souffle is often held up as one of the quintessential films of the French New Wave for its use of hand held cameras, location shooting, jump cuts, rebellion against generic convention, and self-reflexive movie references. This next clip, below and to your right, is a trailer for Les Demoiselles de Rochefort / the Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), directed by Jacques Demy. You may notice two obvious differences from the previous two clips, namely that this film is 1) in color, and 2) a musical. Demy's films are an example of a New Wave director synthesizing an homage to Hollywood musicals with his own creative vision. Demy was especially known for his use of color.

The Cahiers du Cinéma

• The intellectuals behind the French New Wave found a physical space in the Cinémathèque Française to meet and debate their ideas about films. They then published many of these ideas in a film journal co-founded by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. • This journal was called the Cahiers du Cinéma, and it was the first film magazine of its kind! It was not a trade journal or a fan magazine. This was a publication which approached film and filmmaking as an art, as opposed to film as commercial product. • Contributors to the journal (including André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Renais, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer, many of whom you will hear from in your assigned reading, "Six Characters in Search of Auteurs") debated the formal criteria that elevated film to the level of art. • In the process they ended up celebrating various directors of the Hollywood studio system era whose individual style, they argued, was discernible across the body of their work, or their "oeuvre." Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles, Buster Keaton, and Howard Hawks were among these Hollywood "auteurs," they championed, filmmakers whose artistic vision transcended the industrial limitations imposed by the Hollywood studio system's factory mode of production. • They were particularly enamored of (and even named) a little genre with which you might be familiar: Film Noir. • These intellectuals went on to make their own films, paying homage to the "auteurs" of the past, while also challenging what they saw as Hollywood's industrial mode of production and polished, artificial aesthetic.

Technological and Aesthetic Innovations

• The movie industry had to come up with creative strategies to convince audiences that leaving their homes and going to the movies could offer them a unique entertainment experience their small, black and white television sets could not hope to match. • So, as you might imagine, they began marketing a BIGGER, W-I-D-E-R, MORE COLORFUL cinema to audiences. • During this period, Hollywood films were released with a variety of technological and aesthetic innovations to draw in audiences. They experimented with color formats (Technicolor and Eastman color), widescreen aspect ratios (Cinemascope, Vista Vision, Todd-AO, Panavision, etc.), and roadshows (more expensive limited releases of longer films, often with an intermission and musical accompaniment). During the 1950s, the film industry also produced films with incredible gimmicks to entice audiences back into the theater. • You may think of 3-D movies as a more recent innovation, but 3-D movies were one of the gimmicks during the 1950s that movie studios hoped might boost movie ticket sales. • Cinerama (a wrap around screen technology that required three cameras, three projectors, interlocking, semi-curved screens, and four-track stereo sound) and Aromarama and Smell-O-vision (viewing experiences that pumped scents into the theater that corresponded to the action on screen) were some of the other gimmicks that studios and theaters employed to attract audiences away from their televisions.

Sound Catches On

• The transition to talking pictures was every bit the production, marketing, and distribution nightmare the studios had anticipated. It was also, however, incredibly profitable. • As we've seen with examples such as the "unchained camera," by the end of the 1920s silent film cinematography was becoming downright dynamic. Unfortunately, the microphones used to record sound on disc and sound on film had a very limited range, which is why many early talkies employ much more static camera work than lots of earlier silent films. • Movies started to emphasize "sound for sound's sake," which meant further production of films with lots and lots of talking. This meant that language, diction, and voice quality (elements that had not seemed so important during the silent era), became cornerstones of narrative filmmaking and stardom. • This increased emphasis on language and dialogue naturally produced changes in the types of actors employed and their respective performance styles. With an influx of New York stage talent, film acting became more "naturalistic." • While many silent stars never successfully made the transition to talking pictures, some names you will undoubtedly be familiar with rose to prominence within the studio system in early talking pictures: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, just to name a few.

Exploitation Genres

• There were several different genres of exploitation films. You've already seen examples of what exploitation horror films looked like, but let's take a look at a few others. Keep in mind, we'll be looking more at "Blacksploitation" films in our unit on the 1970s. • There were the "weirdies" - most often low-budget, sci-fi, monster films. Check out the trailer for The Astounding She Monster (1958). • There were teen pictures that focused on juvenile delinquency, good teens gone bad, and the "rock-and-roll" lifestyle. Check out the trailer for the AIP production High School Hellcats (1958). • And there were "Sexploitation" films. Although most of the examples we've looked at so far have taken commercial advantage of sex, sexual themes, sexual difference, or sex appeal in some way, "sexploitation" films doubled down on the commercial exploitation of sex. Case in point, let's look at the trailer for Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965).

Sound on Disc and Sound of Film

• Throughout the 1920s, multiple recorded sound technologies were produced that were viable for adoption by the Hollywood studios and other national industries. There were two main technological approaches: Sound on disc and Sound on film. Sound on Disc • The Vitaphone System was the most commercially successful early sound on disc technology within the movie industries. It used a glass disc phonograph to record sound in sync with a moving image. When projected, the record player was physically attached to the film projector in order to sync the sound with the moving image. • As you might imagine, there were a few hiccups with this technology. For one, the glass disc shattered easily. Additionally, proper synchronization and sufficient amplification were significant issues with the Vitaphone. PauseMuteLoaded: 0%Progress: 0%Remaining Time -10:01CaptionsFullscreen Sound on Film • Sound on film technologies used light to record sound on the actual film itself! Check out the video to your left to see exactly how this technology worked. • You might have guessed, but physically printing the sound on the film strip itself solved the synchronization problems with sound on disc technologies. It ALSO gave rise to a new industrial standard for projection speed: 24 frames per second (fps). • If you ever want to start some trouble, get a bunch of early film scholars and archivists in a room together and ask them what the standard projection speed for silent film was. You'll get answers from 12 fps to 26 fps and the debate will get rowdy. This standardizes with sound on film technologies, because the audio and the image had to be synchronized on the same film strip. Is 24 frames per second objectively the optimal frame rate for moving images? No. It's a standard that evolved to balance image quality with economic and technological imperatives (read more here if you're interested). So if you hated seeing The Hobbit films in 48 fps or the next time you hear Quentin Tarantino wax poetic about the "magic of movies" and 24 fps, you can marvel at our capacity as humans and consumers to develop affective relationships with industrial standards.

The Early Japanese Film Industry

• Unlike many of the European cinemas we have looked at thus far in the semester, Hollywood movies did not overshadow the Japanese film industry during the silent era. Such success proved even more remarkable because Japan did not depend on extensive international distribution networks. Domestic film production succeeded at home. • The Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, however, decimated a significant portion of Tokyo where three of the four major Japanese film studios were located. Although the studios rebuilt following the massive destruction, the earthquake serves as an important reason that so few silent Japanese films survive today for us to study and enjoy. The Kyobashi Nikkatsu-kan theater, built in 1924 after the Great Kantō earthquake. Note the lectern for the benshi to the left of the screen. The (Slow) Coming of Sound The "talkies" succeeded later in Japan than in other parts of the world due to a number of factors: 1. The popularity of the benshi 2. The global depression which led to financial challenges for film compnanies 3. The ongoing industrial and government concern over western or American "cultural imperialism" in the once isolated country. • Not until 1937 did Japan convert film production studios and exhibition spaces to sound-on-film technologies. Concomitantly, benshi performances began to wane and decline in popularity. • During this new motion picture era, two key genres emerged: Humanity and PaperBalloons (1937) a. Jidai-geki: Historical or period films, often known as samurai films. b. Gendai-geki: Films of contemporary life. These might include children's films, gangster films, melodramas, and "nonsense" films, or farces.

The "Special Period" and an Era of Co-Productions

• When the Soviet Union, Cuba's main source of trade, was dissolved in the late 1980s, Cuba suffered a severe economic crisis, entering into what historians refer to now as the "Special Period." • Keep in mind, most of the films we have looked at in this unit were first premiered at the Moscow film festival so the loss of this key ally impacted not only the country's economy, but its cinematic networks as well. During the special period, many filmmakers left Cuba and the ICAIC and production slowed dramatically. • Therefore, the ICAIC had to rely increasingly on co-productions in order to secure financing to produce and distribute their films. Tomás Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carolos Tabio's Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberries and Chocolate) (1994), co-produced with Spain was one of the most sucessful films to come out of Cuba in the 1990s. Fresa y Chocolate tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a young, pro-Castro university student and a gay artist, fed up with the Cuban government's homophobia and censorship.

One genre of "indies": EXPLOITATION

• When we think of independent film, often the image that comes to mind is small, quiet, art house cinema. What comedian Eddie Izzard might describe as a "room with a view with a staircase and a pond" kind of movie. But the independent filmmaking on the rise during the 1950s was doing something quite different. Like the studios, they were going bigger, louder, and bolder, but on a smaller budget and with the intention of shocking their audiences thematically as well as visually. • These productions were, for the most part, made outside the traditional studio system we learned about in the first third of the course. They were relatively inexpensive productions that were self financed and shot on tight production schedules in order to keep under budget. Let's take a moment to compare studio produced spectacle (left) with independently produced spectacle (right) from 1953.

Cinema of the ICAIC

• While Cuba experienced a particularly orthodox brand of Soviet communism both politically and economically following US sanctions, the ICAIC embraced a wide range of international cinematic movements: Soviet montage and social realism, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and Brazilian Cinema Novo. • One of the most exciting elements of Cuban cinema is the breadth of genres, content, and aesthetics Cuban filmmakers experimented with after the 1959 revolution. • Julio Garcia Esponisa, one of the founders of the ICAIC, described Cuban cinema at the time as an "imperfect" cinema. He believed: Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in those who struggle, and it finds its themes in their problems. . . We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which "beautifully illustrates" ideas or concepts which we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has nothing to do with those who struggle.) . . . Imperfect cinema is an answer, but it is also a question which will discover its own answers in the course of its development. Imperfect cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. It can use whatever genre, or all genres. It can use cinema as a pluralistic art form or as a specialized form of expression. These questions are indifferent to it, since they do not represent its real alternatives or problems, and much less its real goals. These are not the battles or polemics it is interested in sparking. • Rather than working to create a seamlessly edited and polished finished film product, an "Imperfect" cinema prioritizes process in content, aesthetics, narrative, and production. But what did this rather cerebral approach to cinema ultimately look like? Lucia (1968) Directed by Humberto Solás Lucía is a three-part drama that tells the story of three different women named Lucía at three different but pivotal moments in Cuba's history: the war of independence from Spain, the 1930s, and the 1960s. Memorias del Subdesarollo (1968) (roughly translated as Memories of Underdevelopment), Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Another good example of ICAIC material, Inconsolable Memories / Memorias del Subdesarollo, employs documentary footage and a fragmented narrative in the style of the French New Wave to tell the story of a disillusioned, bourgeois writer in Cuba in the years after the revolution of 1959.

Case Study: American Independent Pictures (AIP)

• Who were these independent producers? • American Independent Pictures (AIP) was one of the most prolific of these independent producers, and Roger Corman (left) was one of their most well-known and prolific directors. AIP made exploitation films in all genres and served as training ground for many young directors who would later come to prominence during the American New Wave. • AIP's production strategy was to begin with a (often salacious) title and then to test that title with exhibitors. • AIP were brilliant distributors. With five independent production units, they were able to keep films in over 8,000 theaters. • In the case of popular director William Castle (right), for example, they would hire a screenwriter to begin with promotion and then start production. • The marketing materials would lean into BALLYHOO! (showmanship), ensuring audiences a movie-going experience they couldn't possibly get from their television. Promotional materials would emphasize the lurid subject matter and promise to "shock, titillate, horrify or offend" audiences. Often times they would take a "Ripped from the Headlines!" approach.

Cuban Cinema and Cuba on Film

• You have already seen one of the earliest examples of Cuba on film in our "Origins and Inventions" unit when you watched the short subject, The Skirmish of the Rough Riders (1899). However, this was a staged re-enactment, shot in Cuba, for a North American audience. In this unit we will focus more on the Cuban film market and on productions indigenous to Cuba. • Cuba was home to various Mesoamerican cultures before being claimed as a Spanish colony in the late fifteenth century. It remained under colonial rule until 1898, and, following the "splendid little war" between Spain and the U.S., was governed by the United States for three years. Cuba ultimately gained its independence in 1902. • Why does this matter in the context of Cuban film history you might ask? Well, take a closer look at those dates. Cuba was gaining its independence at the exact time that film was growing into a popular mass medium on around the world! As you might imagine of such a young country, much of Cuban cinema throughout the 20th-century would prove explicitly political. The movies in Cuba struggled with difficult issues, from grappling with questions of identity in relation to its colonial past, the country's close intersections with the global slave trade, and its complex relationship with its neighbor to the north. The Communist Revolution of 1959 would offer additional challenges and opportunities.

Contemporary Homages

As noted previously in this class, parodies (i.e., an exaggerated, comedic imitation of a popular or well-known cultural object) of particular films or cinematic movements offer a good illustration of "canonical" titles or eras. For Soviet Cinema, Woody Allen's "Love and Death" offered a great send-up of Eisenstein's most famous works. And for the French New Wave, look above for HBO's "Flight of the Conchords," which, according to the band, is the "almost award-winning, fourth most popular folk-duo in New Zealand." Lastly, this rather hilarious take on stereotypes between classic, auteur-driven "French" films and Hollywood movies, became an internet phenomenon in 2017. In it, notable Hollywood denizens are asked if they might be interested in making already produced and, in some cases, successful French films. The Hollywood reactions are, as the French say, parfait!

Popular Genres

Just as we saw with films during the transition to sound, these 1950s technological innovations that played with color, aspect ratios, and sound, lent themselves to specific genres, particularly those that emphasized SPECTACLE! • One genre studios embraced during this period was Biblical and Historical Epics. These productions often featured all star casts, ran much longer than a typical feature film of the time (we're talking 3 + hours), and took full advantage of new widescreen, color, and sound technologies available. Some films from this era include: Ben-Hur (1959), Cleopatra (1960), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Spartacus (1960). • Musicals once again grew in popularity during this time. Of particular importance were the MGM "Freed Unit" titles, named for Arthur Freed who headed up the unit that made MGM the leading producer of film musicals. Some of the most famous titles from this period will undoubtedly be familiar to you: Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Sound of Music (1965), and My Fair Lady (1964). For your viewing pleasure, to the right is an iconic Fred Astaire dance sequence from MGM's 1951 musical, Royal Wedding. Play Video • Science Fiction films at the time were essentially big budget versions of independent exploitation films. We will talk more about exploitation films in the next section, but these films were often widescreen, technicolor productions that boasted elaborate special effects. Some memorable titles from this period include The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Them! (1954) (This one involves giant ants in the sewers of LA, we're not kidding, CHECK IT OUT), The Blob (1958), and The War of the Worlds (1953) (trailer to your right). Play Video • Finally, this era of filmmaking also produced a number of Melodramas, or Social Problem Films. These films often employed over the top, splashy production values (especially color technologies) in order to work through social issues around race, class, and gender during this transitional period. Film scholars often hold up the work of filmmaker Douglas Sirk as emblematic of this genre: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Written on the Wind (1956) are three of his most famous melodramas. Industrial Shifts • This chase to re-capture the mass movie audiences of the 1940s proved more and more expensive (and more and more unrealistic) as box office sales continued to decline. • Overspending on the part of the studios caused major changes in distribution! Studios become primarily financing and distribution entities which meant that they were not nearly as involved in production as they had been in previous decades. • Of particular importance was the 1948 Paramount Decree in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the vertical integration of the studios (monopolistic control of production, distribution, and exhibition) was in violation of US antitrust laws. This meant that the major studios had to divest themselves of their theaters as studios became more heavily involved in distribution than in production or exhibition. • For these reasons, this era saw a rise in "independent" production, including the exploitation film genres we'll take a look at in the next section. • Science Fiction films at the time were essentially big budget versions of independent exploitation films. We will talk more about exploitation films in the next section, but these films were often widescreen, technicolor productions that boasted elaborate special effects. Some memorable titles from this period include The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Them! (1954) (This one involves giant ants in the sewers of LA, we're not kidding, CHECK IT OUT), The Blob (1958), and The War of the Worlds (1953) • Finally, this era of filmmaking also produced a number of Melodramas, or Social Problem Films. These films often employed over the top, splashy production values (especially color technologies) in order to work through social issues around race, class, and gender during this transitional period. Film scholars often hold up the work of filmmaker Douglas Sirk as emblematic of this genre: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Written on the Wind (1956) are three of his most famous melodramas.

The "Auteur Theory" / Politique Des Auteurs

• Clearly, for New Wave filmmakers, films were more than just a commercial product. They were Capital-A Art, and the director was the artist, the creative visionary, the auteur. • Whether or not you use the term auteur in day-to-day conversations about movies, you are already familiar with this concept. You employ it every time you attribute a specific formal choice to a director or decide to see a film because you like the previous work of that director. The Auteur Theory, or Politique des Auteurs, fundamentally changed how the world discusses cinema and helped paved the way for film to be so legitimized that we can have a class like this at UT-Austin today...

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)

• Sergei Eisenstein was as much a film theorist as he was a filmmaker. He firmly believed that cinema should be for the masses (not an elite few), be utilized as a teaching tool, and, most importantly, that it it should SHOCK audiences into action, or at the very least, a reaction. • Eisenstein developed and authored his "Theory of Intellectual Montage." Highly influenced by Kuleshov and Hegelian philosophy, Eisenstein's Dialectical Method described effective film editing as a discursive collision of opposites. Eisenstein theorized that: SHOT A (Thesis) + SHOT B (Antithesis) = IDEA C (Synthesis) Eisenstein's approach was intentionally revolutionary and anti-bourgeois. He did no studio shooting, eschewed individual heroes, movie stars, or professional actors. Instead, he embraced the use of geometrical motifs, expanded time at crucial moments, and (perhaps most famously) increased the number and frequency of different shots he used in his films exponentially. • But what kind of cinema would such a theory and approach to filmmaking even produce? The two clips below from October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) will give us a feel for Eisenstein's very distinctive aesthetic.

Industrial shifts

• This chase to re-capture the mass movie audiences of the 1940s proved more and more expensive (and more and more unrealistic) as box office sales continued to decline. • Overspending on the part of the studios caused major changes in distribution! Studios become primarily financing and distribution entities which meant that they were not nearly as involved in production as they had been in previous decades. • Of particular importance was the 1948 Paramount Decree in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the vertical integration of the studios (monopolistic control of production, distribution, and exhibition) was in violation of US antitrust laws. This meant that the major studios had to divest themselves of their theaters as studios became more heavily involved in distribution than in production or exhibition. • For these reasons, this era saw a rise in "independent" production, including the exploitation film genres we'll take a look at in the next section.

WWII

Due to an embargo against Hollywood films and other foreign imports, domestic production surged during the Second World War. Cinecittà Studios began producing hundreds of films and short subjects each year. While Fascists (and Mussolini's family) were heavily involved in this film production, a new, younger generation of film directors and artisans became increasingly active before the end of war. Many of the Italian screenwriters and directors who would grow to become most closely associated with the post-war Neorealist movement began their filmmaking careers within the fascist, controlled environment of the wartime era. French realism and Soviet cinema both had a profound influence on post-War Italian cinema, while the Italian journals Bianco e nero and Cinema provided an intellectual space for key figures of the Neorealist movement to exchange and debate ideas about what cinema could and should be.

The Aficionados

Final sequence from El Megano (1955) , directed by Julio Garía Espinosa, an early "aficionado" • While steep production costs kept the Cuban film market dependent on foreign imports, an alternative production scene developed on the island: The "aficionado movement." These Cuban artists and intellectuals embraced alternative film formats (like 16mm film) and lower production values as a point of cultural resistance against what they saw as the imperialist capitalist forces of Hollywood products. • Many young filmmakers who honed their talents as a part of the aficionado movement would come to be some of the most important creative forces within the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) after the 1959 revolution.

India! Some facts...

In addition to the incredibly charged and challenging history of India during the twentieth century, other key factors impacting the production and consumption of Indian cinema include: India's Movie Capital: Film production based in Mumbai generates between 150-200 films per year and can be seen as the center of Hindi-language film. Formerly known as Bombay during the British Raj, Mumbai contains a population of approximately nineteen million people, and currently ranks as the fourth largest city on the planet. The Numbers: The production of Indian movies, however, takes place in many, many different places in the country (and world) and a number of separate industries exists within the country, largely predicated on language. India's cinematic output combines to make India the largest film-producing country in the world. Language: Check out the map to your right to get a visual sense of India's linguistic diversity. Now, think back to earlier in the semester when we addressed the complexity of international distribution with sound films. In India, these linguistic challenges exist not only in other parts of the world, but in their own country! Feature films in India are produced in over 20 languages! Urban Density: Although the country itself does not have a population density problem, the cities do. Some numbers for comparison: Singapore: Population density of 2,535 people per sq. mile Berlin: Population density of 1,130 people per sq. mile (i.e, the most dense city in all of Europe) Mumbai: Population density of 33,000 people per sq. mile with some parts of the central city having nearly 1 million people per sq. mile!!!! Mumbai has the highest population density in the world. Why might this issue matter? In addition to such populations assisting in keeping cinemas alive, many prestige, big budget Hindi films shoot on location at popular tourist sites or major cities. When shooting, such intense population density (virtually inconceivable for most Americans) can create substantive problems for production and can impact how films ultimately look and feel. Capturing sync-sound, as only one issue, becomes....impossible. For example, first watch a song/dance number from the 2004 blockbuster, Lakshya:

Film Quotas

In our unit on the origins and inventions of cinema, we learned that prior to WWI, France was one of the dominant film producers in the world! This changed after WWI, but in 1928 (as you will recall, an important time due to the rise of the "talking picture") the French government made an effort to stimulate national film production once again. The French government employed a tactic that many other nations have used to keep imported Hollywood pictures from dominating domestic markets. They proposed a quota that, after substantive negotiations, stipulated that for every seven foreign films imported to France, one French film had to be financed and produced. • Now, this is a good example of one of our cornerstone questions for this course (i.e., what actually constitutes a "national" cinema?), because quotas like these beg the question, what makes a film a French film? For example, would you consider a film produced in France by a foreign production company to be a French film? Interestingly enough, the French Ministry of Public Instruction did. And as you might imagine, Hollywood took this as an invitation to produce more films in France in order to provide some of those requisite "French" films. This all made French exhibitors very happy as Hollywood films typically did quite well at the box office in France. • This is not to say that there were not French directors, actors, and producers involved in filmmaking at the time. Definitely check out pages 204-210 of your textbook to read about some of their incredible achievements in filmmaking. Filmmakers like Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné made groundbreaking films without a centralized industrial structure. • After WWII, the French film industry was again in shambles. But between 1947 and 1957 the newly established Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) helped to revive the French film industry by 1) financing film production, distribution, and exhibition, especially for young and first-time filmmakers 2) encouraging co-productions with other European film producers, 3) setting up new film quotas to reduce Hollywood imports. • This is the industrial context in which the French New Wave emerged. Next we'll look at how this industry shifted and some of the key players involved in this transition.

1930s: National(ized) Cinema and Feature Films

The economic depression following the first World War caused even greater problems for the struggling Italian film industry. Therefore, the government became more proactive and established strict protectionist measures. In 1933, the government required that all domestic theatres show one Italian film for every three foreign films shown, or their license to exhibit films would be revoked. In April of 1937, the government established the Cinecittà Studios Rome as part of their effort to revitalize the struggling film industry. During this period, Italian production was largely divided into: • Pro-Mussolini Documentaries/Propaganda that took one of several forms: Patriotic/Military films, Historical epics and costume dramas, films about Italy's "African Mission"/Colonial Aims, or Anti-Soviet propaganda films • Escapist films (e.g., the White Telephone films). The vast majority of films produced during the 1930s were escapist, or basic narratives produced for pure entertainment. Such fare became referred to as "white telephone films" for the shining white telephones of the wealthy characters who populated these stories of luxury. White telephone films were primarily comedies, melodramas, or costume dramas and are often interpreted as a rejection or side-stepping of the far from perfect economic, political, and social realities of the time.