Classical American Film Texts

Hollywood Films

between 1917 and 1960

Table of Contents

1. Film as Illusion

2. Classical American Film as Realist Film

3. The Paradox of Classical American Film

Film as Illusion ‘The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees

the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lighting was taken over by the sound film.’ Theodor V. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 126

Film as Illusion• Film creates the illusion that what audiences see on

the screen is continuous to and the extension of the world where they live.

• Illusion that what you are watching is a ‘real’ world. ‘… spectators experience the diegetic world as environment.’ Noël Burch(diegetic = in a story)

• Film as combination of ‘imaginary signifiers’ Christian Metz(imaginary = the state in which you cannot distinguish between the real and the invented > Lacanian psychoanalysis

Film as Illusion

Film creates the illusion that what audiences see on the screen is continuous to the world where they live.

• Illusion that what you are watching is a ‘real’ world. ‘… spectators experience the diegetic world as environment.’ Noël Burch(diegetic = in a story)

• Cinema as a chain of ‘imaginary signifiers’ Christian Metz• Spectator identification Primary identification with the camera Secondary identification with cinema characters

Film as Illusion

• Projected images on the screen in a darkened auditorium induce the cinema spectator to identify him/herself with the camera and then a character(s). Analogous to hypnosis.

‘Imaginary signifiers’ • The images on the screen are imaginary because:

- they are fictional

- they produce unconscious identifications, the

action in which the spectator lose the sense of

distinction between fiction and reality.

Film as Illusion

• Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)• Fantasy of the cinematic relationship between the

fiction projected on the screen and the reality exiting outside it. The fiction on the screen is a part of the reality and the reality the extension of the fictitious world.

Film as Illusion

CLASSICAL AMERICAN FILM AS ILLUSIONIST FILM

• American cinema developed its techniques and styles in order to dupe the spectator to take a narrative and images for reality;

• Or in order create more reality and truth effects.• The spectator is willing to accept illusion or

demand it in film.• The classic American cinema traded on the

desire of the spectator for the identifications.

American Classics as Realist Films• (Classical) Hollywood products between

1917and 1960 are considered as a type of realist films.

• Why 1917 and 1960?

• By 1917 most American fiction adopted fundamentally similar narrative strategies;

PROSIBILITY

American Classics as Realist Film

The studio mode of production had been organized around the division of labour, hierarchical managerial system, factory-like system of filmmaking

CONTINUATION of the established uniformity in narrative and visual styles

Classical American Film as Realist Film

• The 1960s - the end of the Hollywood’s traditions

• Studios moved to the production of television programmes → The breakdown of studio system (stars turning free agents; producers becoming independent; the death of B-movies and decrease in demand for studio directors and staff)

American Classics as Realist Films

• Challenge from international art cinema, e.g. Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Italian neorealists and French directors of Nouvelle Vague

DIVERSIFICATION in contents and styles

American Classics as Realist Films

TECHNIQUES, STYLES AND STRATEGIES EMPLOYED TO CREATE AN ILLUSION OF REALITY IN AMERICAN CINEMA

A) A story is the first key element.

B) Uniformity is a basic attribute of the visual style.

Classical American Film as Realist Film

C) The American cinema in this period purports to be realistic in an Aristotelian sense - true to the probable.

D) It strives to conceal its artifice through visual uniformity and ‘invisible’ storytelling.

E) It should be comprehensible and unambiguous.

American Classics as Realist Films

F) It should possess a fundamental emotional appeal which transcends class and nature.

PROBABLE, CREDIBLE, NATURAL AND REAL

American Classics as Realist Films

• Best Years of Our Lives (1946) directed by William Wyler

• About three ex-servicemen who try to cope with their lives after returning from the WWII.

American Classics as Realist Film• Story is the primary element of the film• Uniform film style• Probable story• Stylistic understatement• Unambiguous,

Comprehensible• Emotional appeal to

everyone

American Classics as Realist Film

• ‘Long take’ and ‘deep space photography’ generally associated with realist film.

• Long take = an uninterrupted shot which last much longer than a conventional one

• Length: 4917 seconds • No. of shots: 276 Best Years of Our Lives

American Classics as Realist Film

• Best Years of our Lives• Length: 4,917 seconds• No. of Shots: 276• ASL: 17.82 seconds

• The Hangover (2009)• Length: 1,952 seconds• No. of Shots: 502• ASL: 3.89 seconds• clip

American Classics as Realist Film

• Deep focus = a photographic and cinematographic technique using a long depth of field, the front-to-back area of a image. Much of the field is in sharp and clear focus. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Stephen Spielberg, The Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Deep focus photography in Best Years of Our Lives by Greg Toland, who also shot Citizen Kane

Deep focus photography could be used in formalistic manners, Citizen Kane

Paradox of Classical American Film

• Art vs. Nature / Artificial vs. NaturalPARADOX

• Art is needed to make a film look artless (natural), or artificiality is necessary to make a film seem natural.

• If you can make a film look not artificial but natural, then it is very likely that it looks realistic.

Shallow focus (only a narrow field of an image is in sharp focus) photography – generally associated with formalist cinema. Chen Kaige’s Life on a String

Chen Kaige’s Sacrifice Life on a String

Realism in Classical American Film

• Do ‘artless’ arts in American films in the classical period still dupe you to take narratives and images for reality?

• Do those films that the cinema audience in the early half of the twentieth century took realistic or ‘mistook’ as an extension of their reality continue to have the same effect on you now?

• If not, why?