HUMA 2740

Lecture 1

Why did the movies appear in the late 19th century?

A number of factors came together in 1890s allowing motion pictures to

take off:

1) The Scientific Impulse

a. Captures imagination of society
b. Ability to record world and desire to develop technologies to
understand the world
c. Push for technology (for science)
2) The social Context – industrialization, urbanization and the need for
cheap entertainment for new working class
a. New forms of and mass entertainment
b. People paying money for entertainment (e.g. services, theatres,
amusement parks)
c. Society going under mass industrialization (e.g. cities appear) –
work is long (long hours) and people want to relax
d. Science and tech and need for entertainment come together
- Photographs appear in late 18th century (around 1930) – recording
the world
Auguste and Louis Lumiere

- First to develop a camera able to project images on the wall

- First exhibition of projected motion pictures
- December of 1895 – held first commercial exhibition of films to an
audience in Paris (produced a series of short films)
- Southern France and Paris
 - Became an early model for film industry
- Copied by major film industries in a few months, movies copied and
sold in US for example
Edward Muybrudge (1830-1904)

- The Horse in Motion, 1878

- When a horse is in full gallop does its legs leave the ground at the
same time – wanted to answer this question
- Took a series of photographs (12) and put it together and projected at
speed to create illusion of movement
- Scientific experiment in figuring out how to make moving images
- Showed the way that images could be put together for other scientists
TV Advertising and TV Schedules

- Advertising firms—the primary source of revenue for TV networks—

often shape what TV shows are conceptualized, produced, licensed
and watched by viewers
- Large corps pay TV networks to air advertisements for their goods
and services
- Networks schedule TV shows, organizing their transmission to
viewers into units of time over the course of day, week, or entire
season
- Viewers who watch TV without time-shifting devices or digital video
recorders are bound by TV network’s schedule
- Networks use schedules to attract, capture, sort and delivery an
audience to the ad firms that pay to advertise between TV shows
- TV schedule is where viewer demand for TV shows and advertising
demand for viewer attention converge
 - Advertisers want a particular audience to be exposed to an ad for a
particular kind of product, so a particular kind of TV show is scheduled
by TV network to meet that demand
- TV schedules remain a dominant feature of 21st century
The Late Western Film and American Empire

- Western narratives usually involved the use of traditional male and

heroes whose job was to tame wilderness
- Included pacifying and conquering the Native Americans and making
wilderness save for civilization
- These stories part of America’s mythology
- Attempt to explain and rationalize the colonization of North America
by largely English speaking settlers
- Westerns also imp manifestations of American individualism, imp part
of America’s culture
- Since late 60s and 70s, number of Western films appeared bringing
these myths into question
- Movies like The Wild Bunch¸ McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Heaven’s
Gate cast a negative light on the American west and its heroes
- These late westerns called revisionist Westerns
- Their appearance in this period coincides with rise of various social
movements mentioned earlier
- Michael Cimino’s sin was to make extremely complex , thought-
provoking and challenging films that situates the Johnson County
conflict within a larger appraisal of American society in this period –
film’s unusual form violates many of the conventions of the traditional
 Western which made it unforgivable to many of the critics who first
saw it
- Revisionist Westerns of this period allowed for a renewal of the genre
- Dances With Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992) – critical
successes and recipients of Best Picture Oscars – last time a western
won this was in 1031
- Production of western reduced but haven’t disappeared
HUMA 2740

Lecture 2

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

- Kinetoscope (1893) – close to a film projector

o One major drawback – can only be seen by one person at a
time (couldn’t charge more)
o Look into it and see moving images
o Rearranged it to make it like Lumiere’s – to project images on a
screen
Early Audiences in the US

- The first 10 or 15 years of the movie exhibition characterized by

working class patronage
- Arrival of immigrants from South and Eastern Europe (1920s):
universal language of the silent film
- Relatively inexpensive (compared to operas and others)
- Silent film: people acting out in dramatic fashion (intertitles to
describe next scene or previous scene)
- 1920s – US experienced large immigration
 - Educated middle class and upper class looked down on movies
(nothing like visual arts, the proper Shakespearean theatres, classical
music)
- Movie industry in early phases catered to the largely poor and
working class
Early exhibition

- Amusement parks – set aside a number of buildings for people to

watch films
- Vaudeville theatres – important form or lower/middle class theatre,
live entertainment (comedy and music) – might have a live
performance followed by a film (incorporating films in existing forms)
- Itinerant projectionists – small towns relied on travelling projectionists
– move town to town and set up in Church halls or other community
halls
- Empty store fronts (Nickelodeons)
- 1905 – movie exhibitors wanted to develop business further and
realized there were many empty store fronts that could be rented out
and other forms of commercial property – put up a bunch of chairs
and called Nickelodeons (five cents, first permanent theatres), a
place to go just watch movies and nothing else – Odeon is Latin word
for theatre* check
TV Production Companies and TV Networks

- TV production companies create TV shows and license them to TV

networks which broadcast them to viewers
- A variety of TV networks license TV shows from production
companies and distribute them to viewers
 - Some TV production firms owned by networks and others are affiliated
to them
- TV shows are outcome of collaborative work routines and
standardized production rituals by 100s of waged cultural workers
- In TV industry, creating TV shows involves both repetition and
different, which in turn can discourage taking risks, curing costly
newness with cheap formulae
- Distribution firms usually provide financing to TV production firms if
they can be convinced a TV show will be a hit
- Convincing usually referred to as a pitch
HUMA 2740

Lecture 3

Short Lumiere Brothers Films

- Exiting a factory (1895) – Brothers set up a camera and just filmed

their employees, showing what working life is, mostly women, few
men, unique dresses
- Arrival of a train at La Ciotat (1895) – subject matter of earliest films
were about technology and industry (railroad most important form of
transportation in 19th century)
- Film is volatile – didn’t last long – these were a recreation (found
photographs in copyright archives and historians began to
reconstruct)
- Simple and single shots, no editing
- The apparatus capable of shooting 45 seconds of film (one reel),
hand-cranked
 - Actualities (representation of the real world) – this is what early films
were called and now called documentaries
- Only when editing appeared, filmmakers realized that the film making
process could be planned – will displace non-fictional films in around
1907 (fiction films replacing non-fiction with editing)
Summary

- Early scenes short in length

- Showed life and documentaries
- With editing, filmed in segments that were put together to show
fictional films

The Great Train Robbery

- 1903 made by Edison company

- Ran for around 2 years
- Controversial in the sense that crime was shown
- Debates around censorship began – desire by government,
individuals and religious organizations to protect content
- Used to handpaint white and colour frame to make colour (no colour
film yet, not developed until 1920s and real colour technical process
in 1935)
- Lots of editing – creating a story cutting back and forth between
different scenes
Generic Hybrid—The Conspiracy Film

- Traditional American film detective was often a loner, an outsider who

used his intuition and street smarts to get the job done
- The figure of the private eye, an individual entrepreneur was often
contrasted with the publicly funded detectives of the police force who
were shown to be far less attractive
- Private eye was often an ex-cop who left the force because he
couldn’t stomach the corruption and ineptitude of the force
- 70s – this traditional detective story combined with the political thriller
genre to form a new generic hybrid, the conspiracy film
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – made unavailable for 25 years
as its producer and star, Frank Sinatra, withdrew it from circulation
because of the similarities between its story and the events
surrounding the assassination of US Pres Kennedy a year later
- When conspiracy film reappeared in 70s, it was radically unlike the
two genres from which it draws its conventions
- Doesn’t work to reaffirm American institutions and individual heroism
in way older detective and political films did
- In the traditional detective story, the detective is tasked with
uncovering some truth
- The quest, undertaken by a private eye or a report, is usually small
and local—the identity of a murderer, the location of a statue or an
individual, etc.
- In the end, he is usually successful
- Search for truth in an increasingly complex world becomes next to
impossible in a number of films in mid-70s – bleakest period for
American film narratives
Unlike later conspiracy films like Enemy of the State (1998) that
pushing bad individuals and affirmed American institutions, films like
 The Parallax View suggested that the source of evil was the
institutions themselves
- Film appeared at a time when there was a convergence of a number
of events that led to a general mistrust of govt and business—the
political assassinations of the late 60s, Vietnam, Watergate, a
protracted economic crisis and a number of sensational corporate
scandals
- Jameson – triumph of the collective values of modern capitalism over
old style American individualism
- Generic and formal structures of film narrative can no longer contain
the traditional styles of storytelling
- The result is a crisis of the hero figure
- Only during 80s with the political and cultural triumph of conservative
ideas (especially during the Reagan Administration) that we see a
rehabilitation of the hero figure
- In The Parallax View, there is evidence of the infiltration of capitalist
values into every aspect of social life; even murder and assassination
become a service to be bought or sold
- Faceless Parallax Corporation triumphs over the rebel hero/detective
- Conspiracies don’t happen among criminal individuals or within govt
bureaucracies but are something that has been delegated to the free
market
- Collective power of a capitalist world system greatly over matches the
investigative powers of the hero/individual
- Only see the number of employees whose titles or positions in the
corp are unknown since the structures and workings of the Parallax
Corporation are so opaque
 - Most unsettling aspect of the film is that we never find out who runs
the corp
- The conventional narrative promise of the film, to have everything
explained, is thwarted
- Everything is generic, and even the political parties and politicians
aren’t identified, suggesting there is no difference, that there is
nothing to distinguish them
- This element of facelessness of those in power is reinforced in the
cinematography of the film, particularly
HUMA 2740

Lecture 4

- Camera movement and music incorporated (silent film used to

differentiate synchronized sound)
- Process of movie exhibition was never silent, there was music (live
music so even in Nickelodeons there might have been piano players
playing along the film)
- As movies become more elaborate
- Up until 1997 (check this) movie was single largest employer of
musicians
- Documentary filmmakers began to realize that editing can be used to
tell more complicated stories of the real world so they too used
editing
- By 1906, starting 1904 – a new institution develops, Institution of
Newsreel (made up of segments – found out about real world events
from around the world)
o Seeing a fictional film and a newsreel from 1904 to 1950s
(when television replaces)
San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906)

- Showing devastations around the city

- Tells a story even though not a fiction film
- Only 10 years after Lumiere Brother films
The Black Hand (1906) by American Mutuscope & Biograph

- Shows organized crime (mafia)

- Shot in Manhattan in 1906 – part of it is set on set but most of it shot
outdoors
- Writing the Letter, The Letter Received, The Threat Carried Out, The
Gang’s Headquarters, Levying the Blackmail*(Check), Rescue of
Maria
- How the Movies Became Big Business
- Movie industry went from being wide open to being dominated by a
limited number of companies
MPPC (1908-1915)

- Movie companies began to move and relocated in Southern

California in Hollywood
o Weather’s better – more opportunity to film outside
o Labour cost could be reduced
 By 1907 attempts to unionize in New York increased so
big companies moved to LA where it was more friendly for
companies in terms of union laws
The Movies Come Back I – Revisionist Genre

- American movie industry rebounded in 1970s

- In late 60s, ppl began returning to movie theatres to see films that
they couldn’t see on TV, to see movies that spoke to the issues that
concerned them
- Demographic trend in 50s and 60s was young ppl who kept going to
the movies
- More of them by late 60s as a result of the baby boom
- In the 1970s, the movie-going audience also included older adults as
their child-raising years were coming to an end and they were
rediscovering movie-going experience
- Civil Rights Movement, which began in 50s, was still going strong in
the 60s
o Created the conditions for the emergence of an Afr-Ame
cinema and for a transformation of how they were represented
in all movies
o Inspired a whole series of other social movements including the
Women’s Movement, the Native Rights Movement, the Gay and
Lesbian Liberation Movement, and the Green Movement
- Youth culture emerged in the mid-to-late 60s that helped to inspire a
very large, national peace movement in response to the emerging
debacle in Vietnam
- Hollywood began to turn its attention to this audience and to change
the way it told stories to remain relevant
- Most imp change in way Hollywood told stories was in the
transformation of the genre system
- Film genres were central to the way Hollywood organized the
production and marketing of movies
- Audiences found comfort in the predictability of movie genres since
knew what to expect when they brought their tickets at the box office
- Reassurance further cemented in the way in which film genre films
upheld the social conventions of society, where everyone knew their
proper place
- In times of social turmoil, these rules and conventions tended to
break down
- Just as young ppl were questioning various institutions and calling
into question the honesty of various political, business, and military
leaders, filmmakers attempted to speak to these concerns and this
social upheaval led to crisis within the genre system