After many years, I'm re-watching The X-Files. Currently, I'm in Seaon 3. Here are some thoughts so far:
The episodic structure of the show continues to face off against its serial threads. It is a strange, almost surreal, combination of the necessity for endless repetition and forgetting - a key feature of character construction in episodic television - with the need for characters to change and have memory to build the show’s arch-mythological structure.
This strange combination is amplified beyond the confines of the diegesis (story-world) to the level of dramatic structure, since the show remains suspended in a realm of tragedy and comedy. On the one hand, tragedy underpins the show (the loss of Mulder’s sister, for example) and governs its direction toward the cruel and unjust fates and furies of life as Mulder and Scully continue on their quest, surviving near-death encounters, adapting and learning and changing as they go; on the other hand, comedy is equally present, returning us each week to the same endless cycles of spoof, parody and absurdity (contained deep within even the episodes played most straight or serious).
In other words, characters can both come back the same each week and yet also be developing along a path to some kind of resolution in the far off distance by which time it is expected things will have to come to an end and someone may have to die. Speaking back to this predicted finality is the incompleteness that marks the show - the indeterminateness of so many cases, the pursuit for truth that never ends, the possibility that no final truth can be known.
It is these characteristics that define X-Files as an enduring example of smart episodic television and an historical symbol of 90s romance and nihilism.
Please go to the link below to read an extract from my article on the Australian film Lake Mungo (2008) that I recently published in Screen Education. In the article I argue that that the film probes key questions regarding the relationship between visual technology, perception and truth. This means that rather than only view events that occur in the film at the diegetic level of character action and interaction, it is critical to appreciate how the film is engaging audiences at the level of form.
Conjuring the Real: Ghosts, Technology and Landscape in Lake Mungo (Extract)
In this anthology on realist film theory, I have a chapter on the work of Siegfried Kracauer.
Kracauer lived as a writer and critic in Weimar Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. He then momentarily moved to France in the 1940s and, finally, to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life.
In 1960 he published Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which is his main work on film realism. In my chapter I introduce this work and what Kracauer means by 'physical reality', particularly focusing on two key concepts that are essential to his argument: Jewish Messianism, a branch of Judaic theology, and phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that studies the structures of experience and consciousness.
To purchase this book, or to find out more information about it, please go here:
https://www.amazon.com/Major-Realist-Film-Theorists-Anthology/dp/1474402216
I have been published in the book Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema, which will be released in July 2016.
My chapter examines the films that Klaus Kinski did with the Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jess Franco.
For more information on the book please go here:
http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-9897-0
"I hate that [torture porn] label, that because a movie is necessarily violent to the story, that makes it torture porn. As if that’s all our fans our about". James Wan (1)
In 2006, film critic David Edelstein wrote a review entitled “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”, for New York Magazine. (2) He suggested there was a new trend in horror which he labelled ‘torture porn’. A range of different movies were offered as examples of this new trend, including Saw (2004), The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson 2004), Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean 2005), Hostel (Eli Roth 2005), and The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie 2005). Edelstein proposed that such films were not simply violent and gory but also had a number of features that set them apart from previous horror films. First, unlike the b-grade exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s, which showed ‘explicit scenes of torture and mutilation’ but were largely confined to the grindhouse and drive-in circuit, he suggested that the ‘torture porn’ flicks had high production values and were exhibited in popular, multiplex venues. (3) Second, he claimed that:
"Unlike the old seventies and eighties hack-‘em-ups (or their jokey remakes, like Scream [Wes Craven 1996]), in which masked maniacs punished nubile teens for promiscuity…the victims [in ‘torture porn’ films are] neither interchangeable nor expendable. They range from decent people with recognizable human emotions to, well, Jesus."
Edelstein also made a suggestive, if loose, connection between ‘torture porn’ films and the images of US military personal torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, which were initially brought to the public’s attention by a 60 Minutes news report in April 2004, approximately 6 months before Saw, the so-called granddaddy of the ‘torture porn’ subgenre, was released. Edelstein wrote:
"Fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it? Post-9/11, we’ve engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture, fuelled by horrifying pictures of manifestly decent men and women (some of them, anyway) enacting brutal scenarios of domination at Abu Ghraib. And a large segment of the population evidently has no problem with this."
Not only did the ‘torture porn’ label stick – it became a shorthand term used in the press and in social media circles – but also the idea that a new trend in the horror genre had emerged was accepted by a number of scholars.For example, Gabrielle Murray stated in the online media journal Jump Cut in 2008 that prior to the growth in ‘torture porn’ productions: ‘the horror genre had been in one of its cyclic declines. The overblown reflexivity of films like the Scream series (Wes Craven 1996-2000) and Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans 2000) resulted in a comic trend in the horror genre, to the point where it seemed to have lost its edge’. (4) A year later Dean Lockwood proposed in an article in the academic journal Popular Communication that while journalists tended to lump a number of films together under the ‘torture porn’ umbrella, without paying pay sufficient attention to the differences between the films, there was still ground to argue ‘that a new, “extreme” subgenre [had] displace[d] the postmodern slasher’. Echoing Edelstein, Lockwood also suggested that one difference between the low-budget exploitation films of the 1970s and ‘torture porn’ movies was that the latter are part of a ‘mainstream, multiplex business’. He also claimed that this might be evidence that the films are feeding an appetite ‘for graphic and increasingly realistic spectacles of suffering bodies’. (5)
A number of the ideas associated with ‘torture porn’ can be contested. For example, there was a cluster of ‘extreme’ horror films made in the early-to-mid 2000s before Saw was released, films such as House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003) and the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003). Moreover, in France since the late 1990s, a number of films showing transgressive scenes of sex and violence had been produced, films such as Baise-moi (Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) and Haute tension (Alexandre Aja, 2003). These films were labelled New French Extremism by critic James Quandt.
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| Haute tension (2003) |
Furthermore, given the distribution and exhibition of films has become increasingly fragmented since the VHS era, and genres have arguably become more diversified due to the fact that 'subsidiary' segments of the movie economy – such as direct-to-DVD and Video-On-Demand (VOD) – constitute a major proportion of film sales – it is worth asking, along with Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan : ‘Where do the boundaries of genre begin and end when potentially thousands of films are produced each year, across several continents and in dozens of languages?’ (6) In other words, how true is it to say that there was a postmodern, comical trend in horror cinema during the late 1990s, early 2000s? The word trend suggests a general tendency or inclination, yet during this time Asian horror cinema, particularly the sub-genre known as J-Horror, had a strong presence in international art house markets as well as niche horror markets (both theatrical and non-theatrical). J-Horror quickly found a mainstream audience in the West via a number of American remakes, starting with Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002), a version of Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998). As Lobato and Ryan also suggest, a great deal of horror content has become increasingly fractured and diversified since the 1980s, starting with the VHS revolution in film distribution and exhibition which began a number of social and economic processes that have been intensified in the Internet era.
"Films can now be distributed online to niche audiences via both formal (legal video streaming and download-to-own services) and informal means (BitTorrent, unauthorized YouTube postings, etc.). [This provides] an outlet for many films that would not previously have been distributed in any meaningful sense... contributing to an increase in the number of films which are commercially (if marginally) released each year and a corresponding expansion of existing generic categories to include ever more films, along with a concomitant increase in the number of genres, sub-genres and extreme niche markets...As a result, it is now increasingly difficult to systematically monitor fluctuations in the horror genre" (7)
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| Ringu (1998) |
Gabrielle Murray has also pointed out that trying to establish a correlation between a current historical event such as 9/11 and a specific trend in cinema is fraught with difficulty. Drawing on David J Slocum’s critical reappraisal of the apparent relationship between an escalation in screen violence in New Hollywood Cinema (1960-1975) and the political and social unrest of the 1960s, Murray says that often it is presumed that a connection exists between violent film images and contemporary social events; however, such a connection has not in fact been rigorously debated or proved. Rather, much of the discussion about screen violence remains ‘circumstantial and speculative’. It should also be mentioned that a basic content analysis of 'torture porn' films reveals the fact they do not all present the same kind or degree of violence; indeed, Wan has consistently pointed out that it is only in retrospect, via the filter of the Saw sequels, that the original Saw movie is remembered as being extremely violent and gory. As he rightly suggests, the first Saw is a psychological thriller as much as horror film (8) and, arguably, the psychological violence in the film is more disturbing than the rare scenes of physical mutilation. As such, if 'torture porn' films are feeding an appetite for representations of torture, then these films are not doing so in the same manner; across the spectrum of 'torture porn' movies there are spectacles of psychological terror as well as of bodily pain and disfigurement and these spectacles are not all as equally confronting or graphic.
Nonetheless, the ideas associated with ‘torture porn’ have become part of Saw’s narrative image. Moreover, Saw itself is central to the marketing of Wan's films and to constructing Wan as a
particular kind of author. From the perspective of industry, the crediting of Wan in the posters
and trailers for his films – even if this billing largely happens
indirectly i.e. ‘From the director of Saw’ – aims to create some kind of
reciprocal relationship between the film being advertised and other
texts. In other words, the goal is to make sure the related texts have
complementary meanings that can be interchanged. In this sense, matches
are created between Saw and all the other films that utilise Saw as a
selling point. The correspondences between
these texts are designed to motivate people who are part of Hollywood’s
large national and international movie market to consume the advertised
movie; in the process of doing this, however, these paratextual
matches also function to address target audiences, since while
Hollywood films may end up as part of other screen cultures around the
world they are also packaged with particular audiences in mind. These
audiences are addressed on the basis of things like genre – which
involves the experiences and pleasures spectators expect to get out of
viewing films with certain generic characteristics – and what John Ellis
refers to as narrative image. The narrative image of a film has to do
with how the film functions as a component in public discourse; put
another way, it has to do with how cultural knowledge builds up around a
film – not only knowledge about what kind of film it is or, in other
words, it’s generic structure and tone i.e. a nasty or fun horror, but
also other concepts that help to define the film and differentiate it
from other texts in the market-place. These concepts can involve
everything from how the advertised film is identified with commercial
and/or critical success – either in terms of the past successes of
people involved in the making of the film or in terms of the box-office
results and positive reviews it has received – to how it is related to
other cultural phenomena i.e. related to the history of a particular
genre or to contemporary issues. Put another way, the narrative image of
a film has to do with the intertexual contexts within which a film can
be placed. Of course, many things can contribute to the creation of a
narrative image for a film. As Ellis says:
"The narrative image of a film is a complex phenomenon that occurs in a
number of media: it is the film’s circulation outside its performance in
cinemas. It consists of the direct publicity created by the film’s
distributors and producers; the general public knowledge of ingredients
involved in the film (stars, brand identifications, generic qualities);
and the more diffuse but equally vital ways in which the film enters
into ordinary conversation and becomes the subject of news and of chat." (9)
From the point-of-view of industry the aim is not only to contribute to
the creation of a narrative image for a film but to also utilise some of
the meanings that a narrative image accrues as it circulates within
formal media channels and the discourses of everyday life. The title
Saw, for example, can evoke different connotations over time,
particularly given there have been a number of Saw films made and each
of these films has contributed to the creation of the franchise’s serial
narrative and also played a role in generating a variety of ancillary
products, including supplementary narratives created by fans. (10) It should
also be pointed out that from the perspective of industry it is not
always a bad thing if the correspondences between the advertised film
and other texts generate meanings that are contentious and which
generate debate. In the case of low-budget films in particular it can
be essential to attract publicity via a controversial image or subject.
As Justin Wyatt has said, given low-budget films cannot generally afford to
hire star-actors, orchestrating a publicity campaign that stimulates
argument, or maximising the public attention that a film’s controversial
subject matter generates, ‘substitute(s) for stardom as the most
significant selling tool’. (11) Hence, the label 'torture porn' can be used for marketing ends.
To read my article in Senses of Cinema on how Wan is promoted as an author through the film tittle Saw please go here: http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/issue-69-december-2013/paratexts-and-the-commercial-promotion-of-film-authorship-james-wan-and-saw/
Endnotes
1. James Wan, 'James Wan & Leigh Whannell Interview', Feo Amante's Horror Thriller, 2010, Accessed 12 December 2013 http://www.feoamante.com/Movies/STU/Saw/Saw_Inter_view.html#.UrVOv2f_ZnU
2.
David Edelstein, 'Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn', New York Magazine, 2006, Accessed 12 December 2013 http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/
3. It is worth noting that the total budget for Saw was approximately only $US1,000,000. Undoubtedly, one reason Wan has, so far. had a successful career in Hollywood is because he is able to make small-budget films look like big-budget films.
4. Gabrielle Murray, 'Hostel 11: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture-Porn', Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 50, Spring 2008. Accessed 12 December 2013 http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/
5. Dean Lockwood, 'All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of "Torture-Porn", Popular Communication, No. 1, Vol 7, 2009, pg. 41.
6. Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan, 'Rethinking Genre Studies through Distribution Analysis: Issues in International Horror Movie Circuits', New Review of Film and Television Studies, No. 2, Vol. 9, 2011, pg. 194.
7. Lobato and Ryan, pg. 194.
8. See for example 'Director James Wan Discusses "Insidious"' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXgcdxcIkKs
9. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1982, pg. 31.
10. See for example Saw Fan Fiction Archive https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/S
11. Justin Wyatt, 'Economic Constraints/Economic Opportunities: Robert Altman as Auteur', Velvet Light Trap, Fall 1996, pg. 65.
Noël Carroll has suggested that the work of Hungarian theorist and artist Béla Balázs (1884-1949) belongs to one strand within the classical film theory period. This period is generally thought to have ended by the late 1960s, early 1970s once works such as Christian Metz’s Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, the first volume of which was published in 1967 and the second in 1972, and Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', first delivered as a paper in 1973, started to substantiate the introduction of fields like structural linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis into film theory discourse. Carroll says that the strand within classic film theory that Balázs belongs to is the silent-film theory strand:
"All the major silent-film theorists – such as Munsterberg, Balázs, Kulehshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Rotha – tend to resemble each other in two respects: 1) they generally – with the possible exception of those like Vertov – see the role or value of film to be its capacity to make art, and (2) their different theories of art – with the possible exception of those like Victor Freeberg – are generally anti-mimetic in their fundamental bias, that is, they all demand divergence between artworks and represented real things as a criterion of art." (1)
Carroll argues that Balázs values cinema insofar as the medium is able to meet the traditional criterion of art. As indicated by works such as The Visible Man (Der sichtbare Mensch, 1924) and Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (2) Balázs takes this criterion to involve the creative use of techniques to stylise the world and express the inner consciousness of the individual artist or, more broadly, the human subject. In other words, what Balázs prizes is the act of exploiting the medium’s properties. This is not only in order to materialise the internal psychological and metaphysical qualities of characters but also anthropomorphise inanimate objects. In this respect, Carroll suggests that Balázs promotes an anti-mimetic definition of film art based on “showing all the ways that film diverge[s] from a perfect recording of reality”.(3)
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| Béla Balázs |
Carroll also says that Balázs consistently demands of filmmakers that they ‘allow the emergence of expressive or formal qualities’ within pro-filmic material. (4) In other words, by transforming for artistic purposes whatever stands before the camera, Balázs feels that the inner life of the filmmaker – and the inner lives of audience members – can be expressed. As Carroll argues, this proposition partly rests on the claim that a filmmaker can leave a trace of their inner personality or unconscious desire in the filmed material. This proposition is problematic because it assumes that expressive qualities within art works are always, on some level, symptomatic of the personality and attitude of the artist. However, as Carroll says, it is possible for an art work to express particular qualities which are not necessarily reflective of an artist’s inner self.
What I would like to do is take up one issue with Carroll’s characterisation of Balázs film philosophy. Carroll fails to note that Balázs concept of expression in cinema is characterised by a dialectical interrelationship between, on the one hand, individual expression and, on the other hand, historical and social determination. What this means is that, for Balázs, the expressive qualities that an image projects should, ideally, involve both a subjective component i.e. what a film represents as the particular, individual experiences of a character, and an objective component i.e. what within a film is presented as the historical and social reality that shapes and restricts these individual experiences. For Balázs, it is the ways such subjective and objective components interact and synthesise that produces expression in film (or, as he often prefers to say, produces physiognomy). As such, Balázs advocates that films should disclose the individual, psychological realities of characters vis-à-vis such things as ideology and class tradition.
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| Greta Garbo (5) |
In critical and popular film literature, the work of Balázs is routinely associated with silent cinema, physiognomy and the close-up. While these are key areas of his film philosophy rarely has enough attention been paid to what Balázs actually means by the term physiognomy. By film physiognomy or what he sometimes refers to as film's 'visible spirit' Balázs basically means the following: spectators are able to read a soul from objects, characters and other entities on screen. In a very general sense, Balázs means by soul qualities pertaining to both the interior world of the human psyche, such as different thoughts and feelings, and innate, inner conditions of human perception. What is meant by these latter qualities includes the different human experiences of space and time that film can show. One of the presumptions in books such as The Visible Man and Theory of the Film is that pro-filmic material always potentially has emotional content and always potentially contains psychological and perceptual meaning, even if the camera is recording a world emptied of human characters. In other words, within every filmic image there is a humanised reality in the waiting, no matter how dormant or hidden this reality might be and how much exaggeration and distortion might be needed to draw this reality out.
In order to appreciate Balázs’ notion of film physiognomy, however, it is also necessary to consider what Balázs means by human. Jerome Stolnitz has argued that for Balázs the human is comprised of the complex characteristics of an individual soul or interior, psychological reality. Quoting from Theory of the Film Stolnitz says that these characteristics consist of “emotions, moods, intentions, and thoughts”. (6) Stolnitz argues that what matters for Balázs is the “quality, impulses, interaction” of these characteristics, which are varied and contradictory and which modulate over time. (7) Without clearly stating it, Stolnitz is referring to what Balázs calls in Theory of the Film the “‘polyphonic’ play of features”, which he defines as “a sort of physiognomic chord” which consists of “a variety of feelings, passions, and thoughts...synthesised in the play of the features as an adequate expression of the multiplicity of the human soul”.(8) Stolnitz suggests that it is the dynamic interplay between thoughts, intentions and feelings that is central to Balázs idea of film physiognomy. Moreover, Stolnitz argues that the reason this interplay is important is because it is only when film discloses the complexities and intricate changes of the individual soul that film is elevated to a genuinely humanistic art.
Stolnitz is assuming here that Balázs is a humanist; specifically a humanist who believes that art is only art if it deals with individual reality. Moreover, Stolnitz says that Balázs’ humanism is based on Aristotelian principles and that, therefore, Balázs is a classical humanist. As is common practice, Stolnitz uses the term Aristotelian as a short-hand way to encapsulate the humanism of classical antiquity. This is a problematic practice for a number of reasons, including the fact that insofar as humanistic elements can be said to have existed in ancient Greek society, not every thinker from that society who had humanistic values can simply be subsumed under the name of Aristotle. For such reasons, I take Stolnitz to simply mean that Balázs believes in the proposition that art is only art if it deals with individual, human reality; this is a proposition that, broadly speaking, can be taken as humanistic. I am not saying that concepts central to Balázs’ notion of what is human, such as physiognomy, cannot on some level be traced back to ancient Greek thought. Rather, I am suggesting that to whatever extent Balázs is a humanist his humanism cannot be simply labeled classical. For one thing, his ideas about what is human also come from German Idealist philosophy and German Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (9)
I would also argue that Stolnitz is overplaying the degree to which individualism is foundational to Balázs’ notion of what is human. For example, in Theory of the Film Balázs at one point discusses the history of what he says are two dominant styles in Western art: the ‘epic’ and the ‘intimate’. By the ‘epic’ Balázs means art that makes general claims about human existence and which represents the world in terms of things like social tradition and class ideology. By the ‘intimate’ Balázs means art that focuses on the psychology of individual characters and which represents the world in terms of what is private and personal. Balázs says that up until the beginning of the nineteenth century these two dominant styles were combined and interrelated within individual art works. However, he claims that these two styles started to become distinct with the rise of the middle classes: "In former times art knew nothing of the contrast between the epic and the intimate, the great and the small, the universally valid and the merely private. Such differentiation between private experience and socially significant event in the mode of presentation is a phenomenon specific to bourgeois art. This brought about on the one hand the purely introspective ‘chamber’ art devoid of all social connections and on the other the decorative generalizations of the epic form which glosses over all individual traits."(10)
This contention that before the rise of the middle-classes in the nineteenth century art knew nothing of the distinction between the individual and the social rests on Balázs’ reading of history. This historical reading, heavily influenced by his understanding of Marxist ideas as well as his Romantic utopianism, views the nineteenth century as a period which intensified the development of a number of problems inherent within modern capitalism. One of these problems is the fragmentation and atomisation of social groups and communities into agglomerations of isolated individuals. Moreover, these individuals are alienated from each other and from the world around them. For Balázs, this changing social reality is reflected in the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He says that this art presents dichotomies between the individual and the social and the particular and the universal. For various reasons, Balázs feels that, even though cinema is a contemporary art form, it is a medium that has the potential to overcome such fragmentation and alienation, provided films interrelate and synthesise what, under the conditions of capitalism, has become separated. (11)
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| October (1928) |
In terms of cinema, Balázs sees the ‘epic form’ illustrated in certain films from the post-revolutionary, Soviet montage movement of the 1920s. He suggests, for example, that because Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October (1928) focuses on a cross-section of classes and masses rather than on individual characters, it fails to achieve proper universal significance. For Balázs, cinema only really becomes art when it shows how things like history and class are manifested in private human destinies and in the “characteristic physiognomies” of individual expression.(12) Put another way, cinema is only art if it “turn(s) the particular into something universal”.(13) Therefore, while Balázs is interested in the various, contradictory and changing facets of an individual soul that can be revealed through close-ups and other filmic techniques, he is also equally interested in what such internal individualization reveals about ideology and social life. For films which are “purely introspective” and present no “social connections” also equally fail to achieve the revelation of the universal through the individual. (14)
What ultimately produces physiognomy in film for Balázs is the dialectical interaction between the subjective (particular) and the objective (universal). (15) By the universal Balázs means that which is brought about by the objective reality of history and culture; put another way, the universal represents laws of human consciousness. For example, social tradition and class ideology can both be seen as involving what a film represents as the historically created relations and circumstances that define the conditions of a character’s existence. While these universal laws of consciousness are not reducible to what is subjective and personal they are, at the same time, laws which are reflected in the individual subject. What is more they are laws which are given visible and physical form through individual expression and gesture. This again does not mean that such laws are reducible to the visible and physical. Rather, they are laws that are reflected in the visible and physical. The overall point for Balázs is that the particular and the universal can be combined and blended within an individual face and body. He makes this clear in another section that Stolnitz does not refer to: “One of the tasks of the film is to show us, by means of ‘microphysiognomics’,(16) how much of what is in our faces is our own and how much of it is he common property of our family, nation or class. It can show how the individual traits merge with the general, until they are inseparably united and form as it were nuances of one another”.(17)
Endnotes
1. Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, Princeton, New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 1988, pg. 27.
2. This book was originally published in 1952. It contains many sections and passages from The Visible Man as well as another one of Balázs’ earlier works The Spirit of the Film (Der Geist des Films, 1930).
3. Carroll, pg. 176.
4. Carroll, pg. 27.
5. In Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, Balázs says that Greta Garbo's beauty is an elevated beauty. It is a beauty, in other words, that is not only individual but also metaphysical: 'Greta Garbo's beauty is a beauty of suffering; she suffers life and all the surrounding world. And this sadness, this sorrow is a very definite one: the sadness of loneliness, of an estrangement which feels no common tie with other human beings' (286).
6. Jerome Stolnitz, ‘Balázs: The Dilemmas of Humanism in the Movies’ Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 10, Issue 2, April 1976, pg. 27.
7. Stolntiz, pg. 27
8. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone, New York: Dover Publications, 1970, pg. 64.
9. For a discussion about Balázs relationship to German Idealism and Romanticism see Gertrud Koch’s ‘Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things’ New German Critique, trans. Miriam Hansen, Issue 40, Winter 1987, pp. 167-177.
10. Balázs, pg. 267.
11. For an overview of the reasons Balázs believed cinema has utopian potential see Eric Carter 'Introduction' Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
12. Balázs, pg. 160.
13. Balázs, pg. 161.
14. Balázs, pg. 267.
15. Balázs concept of physiognomy also has a number of other dimensions to it; for example, it also involves Balázs' particular phenomenological and psychological understanding of how audiences experience space and time in film. For more information see Eric Carter 'Introduction' Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
16. By ‘microphysiognomics’ Balázs means the subtle features, expressions and different dimensions of being (including unconscious reflex-like reactions) that a face or body can reveal when shot in particular ways i.e. framed through close-ups. Essentially, such devices reveal a hyper-reality, a reality that is not normally apprehended in everyday life.
17. Balázs, pg. 83.
Follow the link below to go to a lecture I recently gave for the Channels Australian Video Art Festival (September 18-21 2013). In this lecture I explore some of the characteristics of the video generation. I am using the term generation here in the broad sense of referring to a specific social group or, put another way, a particular cohort made-up of three generational types: Generation Jones, Generation X and Generation Y.(1)
What makes-up the video generation are individuals who grew up as children, teenagers or young adults between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Such individuals had formative years of media exposure that were directly influenced by a number of changes that were occurring within the realm of consumer electronics. For one thing, the video generation went through the transition from an analog based environment to a digital one; in other words, they went from using media technologies like record players and the cassette Walkman to CD players and the CD Walkman (and in the area of visual media the transition was from VHS tape to DVD).(2) The video generation also experienced the last stages of the mass broadcast period. By the late-1970s, early-1980s, mediums like television were transitioning into what is often referred to as the era of narrowcasting.
One of the key things that characterised this transition was the development in cable and satellite network television (or subscription TV) which, at least in the countries like the United States, was being adopted by consumers as early as the late 1970s. The cable-satellite platform had an immediate impact upon the television industry because it represented a new way of addressing audiences. As Patrick Parsons has said (speaking about the US market): "From an industry dominated by three national networks, television evolved into a multichannel environment in which viewers had access to dozens of highly specialised program choices." (3) In other words, the broadcast model of cable was based upon diversity and attracting niche audiences rather than on finding mass appeal for a limited number of shows.
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But, perhaps, the most defining feature of the video generation was the revolution in home entertainment technology that occurred with the introduction of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR), a technology that had a number of impacts upon the home viewing experience. One of the most crucial of these impacts was time-shifting. As I discuss in the lecture, time-shifting can be understood in a number of ways; however, in its simplest sense, time-shifting refers to the act of recording shows broadcast on television and watching them at a time that is more convenient. Among other things, this deceptively simple act of personalising home viewing helped to create a new kind of active audience.
In addition to explaining the various ways VCR technology shifted time, I also explore the role that the VCR had in creating not only another ancillary or secondary market for theatrically realised films, but also a new market for film distribution; namely, the straight-to-video film (which has its contemporary counterpart in the straight-to-DVD film). As I discuss, drawing on the work of Tom O'Regan, the VCR played a significant, indeed indispensable, role in bringing about new market formations for film distribution and consumption, new market formations that continue to shape our current digital revolution. (5)
In order to illustrate my argument I show clips from two documentaries that have recently come out on VHS culture: Rewind This (Josh Johnson, 2013) and Adjust your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector (Dan Kinem & Levi Peretic, 2013).
To listen to the lecture please click on this link:
https://vimeo.com/77479592
Endnotes
(1) The label Generation Jones is generally used to refer to those born between 1955 and 1967. It is used to distinguish a generation of people who, in the words of social commentator Jonathan Pontell (the man credited with coming up with the label), "are neither Boomers or GenXers" but rather a social group with their own particular attitudes and sensibilities. For more information see Jonathan Pontell's article in The Independent: "Clegg's rise is the sound of Generation Jones clearing its throat". Also, visit the website http://www.generationjones.com/ My overall point here is that the video generation was made-up of different cohorts of people and also different age groups.
(2) DVD did not actually enter the retail market for consumer electronics until 1997. However, by the end of the millennium, it had already started to dramatically strip away analog video's market share of film distribution (including rental distribution). For more information see Mark Parker and Deborah Parker's (2011)The DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text.
(3) Patrick Parsons, "The Evolution of the Cable-Satellite Distribution System", Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Vol. 47, Issue 1, March 2003, pg. 1.
(4) First aired in August, 1981, MTV was the most popular and influential 24-hr music video cable channel of the 1980s (and it, and its sister channels like Video Hits One, have continued to cater to large television and online audiences (see "Move Over, MTV" http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-08-21/move-over-mtv). Although it should be pointed out that, since the mid-1980s, the MTV network has also broadcast event based shows, such as "The MTV Video Music Awards", and also non-music programs.
The image above is taken from the first stream of images that were broadcast by MTV at 12.01 am Eastern Time. MTV CEO at the time, Bob Pittman, has explained why imagery from the Apollo 11 space flight was used:
"We were trying to figure out what icon we were going to use to say, 'This is a change in TV.' So we had this idea that we were going to use the words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Those were Neil Armstrong's words, so we sent a letter to Neil Armstrong, saying 'We're going to use this...unless you tell us no.' We had the video already cut. Every hour, it's supposed to say,'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' [then sings top-of-hour music]. Literally, the week before, we get a letter from him, saying, 'No, you can't use it.' Then we have the decision, do we have to scrap this whole iconography? And Fred Seilbert convinced ourselves that it was OK to be more abstract, that we didn't have to say it. We could still just have the video there and the guy jumping around on the moon...And that's the way we went. But the whole idea was to use the space motif, which was very hot at the time. You know, the shuttle was just coming out [Space Shuttle Columbia launch]. To really say, 'We're new, different, cutting edge etc.'" (See MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video, Greg Prato, 2010, pg. 31)
(5) Tom O'Regan, "Remembering Video: Reflections on the First Explosion of Informal Media Markets through the VCR", Television and New Media, Vol. 13, Issue 5, April 2012.
