CINEMA.

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a swift decline in the popularity and significance of cinemagoing in the West, associated with suburbanization and the rise of competitor media like rock and roll and television. From the 1990s, cinema release was repositioned as a cornerstone of multimedia-themed product lines, including alternative forms of distribution and exhibition (in-flight entertainment, video, broadcast, DVD, and Webstreaming) and spin-offs such as sound-track albums, novelizations, comic books, franchised toys, board and computer games, and fast-food branding. Moribund profit centers like celebrity gossip magazines were revivified, and new ones like product placement inaugurated. Integration of print, TV, theme parks, and Internet companies into massive corporations allowed for an increasing cross-marketing of products in cycles of which film was only one instance. In this transition from mass spectacle to integrated media product, it might have been difficult to retain respect for cinema as "the seventh art." Nonetheless, during this period and into the early twenty-first century, there has been vigorous interest in the medium of film.

The Language of Cinema

As a broad generalization, the development of cinema studies since 1970 has been shaped by a debate between the search for a medium-specific "language" of cinema and inquiries into the ways cinema reflects, reproduces, or otherwise expresses

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson, New Line/Wingnut, New Zealand/USA, 2001, 178 mins.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, directed by Peter Jackson, New Line/Wingnut, New Zealand/USA, 2002, 179 mins.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, directed by Peter Jackson, New Line/Wingnut, New Zealand/USA, 2003, 201 mins.

Based on the best-selling novel of the twentieth century, the first major blockbuster of the twenty-first could base its innovations on a significant preexisting fan base. The trilogy format, already opened up as a possibility by the highly successful 1999 release of The Matrix, differed from the better established "franchise" model of comic-book superhero and horror cycles in the 1980s and 1990s by promising to tell a complete narrative, rather than an open-ended series of discrete tales. Though large, the production budget was comparable to similarly ambitious block-buster films of the period. The risk of spending such budgets on fantasy, a genre notoriously difficult to sell to mass audiences, was spread across the fame of the original "property," J. R. R. Tolkien's novel, the use of overseas labor, and an innovative marketing campaign.

The Lord of the Rings, though frequently marketed as a triumph of the New Zealand film industry, is an example of a "runaway" production—that is, a Hollywood project filmed in a foreign territory to benefit not only from location scenery but from tax breaks offered by national governments to entice high-spending studio productions, cheaper labor costs than the highly unionized U.S. industry, and flexible working arrangements often unavailable in the United States. Unusually for a big-budget production, the film employed relatively unknown actors at cheaper rates, concentrating spending instead on props, stunts, locations, and digital effects. Without a star, the film then needed to be sold on its look and its story. (The 1977 block-buster Star Wars is a comparable example.)

During the 1990s, a low-budget student film achieved significant box-office success through judicious use of word-of-mouth advertising on the then-new Worldwide Web. The marketing of The Lord of the Rings, while also using the familiar channels for preselling blockbusters, used carefully leaked and later carefully timed releases of teasers, interviews, backstage footage, trailers, stills, and production details to fan sites, even inviting fan Webmasters to attend significant film festivals and to report on them. In contrast to the Disney Company, which had set lawyers onto fans running Harry Potter sites, New Line, the AOL–Time-Warner branch company responsible for the film, used the fans as a medium for publicity before, during, and after the release of the films.

The trilogy extended and systematized a number of developments in the blockbuster film that may now be referred to as event movies. The theatrical release of the film is the trigger for a raft of related products including books, toys, computer games, soundtrack albums, and, very significantly, DVD release. Unusually, The Lord of the Rings could not benefit from the lucrative market in "product placement" (the sale of screen time within the film to automobile, computer, hotel and food companies, among others). Instead it capitalized on the very authenticity of a fantastic world without commercial products. The international touring exhibition of props from the films helped build this aura of authenticity. The planning and filming of substantial extra scenes so that the theatrical release of the film could be supplemented with up to an hour of extra storytime on the extended DVD release allowed an innovative release pattern for the films stretching over a five-to six-year period. This in turn required a loyal fan base, whose interest could be maintained over the extended period of the release strategy.

The films' budget also required that the movies, like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), should be especially palatable to East Asian audiences. Action sequences quoting both Hong Kong fight films and Japanese anime graphic style have become key components in large-budget films destined for a cosmopolitan marketplace. Cinema theory now needs to undertake explorations of such global cultural phenomena, their relationship with both the United States and the country of production, and the future status of cultural specificity in the global circulation of audiovisual materials.

the cultures it derives from or seeks to change. Initial work of the later 1960s emphasized the linguistic structures that appeared to govern cinema. In the later 1970s, two backlashes came in the form first of a film-specific criticism antipathetic to the idea that "bourgeois" forms like the novel and the feature film shared similar structures, and second, of a move away from "theory" toward more traditional forms of humanistic and sociological scholarship. The 1980s witnessed a powerful burst of interest in the cultural dimensions of cinema as an expression of macro-and microcultures—African-American, queer, and third cinema theories privileging the role of cinema as communicator of distinct and differentiated cultural values. In the 1990s, additional emphases were placed on ostensibly marginalized techniques like sound and animation, while the struggle over theory was renewed in the arrival of new theoretical paradigms, notably from phenomenology and the philosophy of desire.

Earlier criticism (commonly referred to as "classical film theory") often celebrated cinema's capacity for realism (see Andrew, 1976). After 1968 the French journal Cahiers du cinéma, in common with much of French culture, was rapidly and radically politicized and began to critique the illusion of reality in cinema. In the person of Christian Metz, the new criticism articulated an influential mix of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, the "science of signs." In the 1970s, critics associated with the U.K. journal Screen began to translate much of this work, and to develop an indigenous theoretical practice, today often referred to as Screen theory. The addition of a powerful strand of feminist criticism was the most significant new development, especially as presented in Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and in the work of Stephen Heath, while Paul Willemen added political commitment and polemic. Rejecting the realist proposals of André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, the Screen critics proposed that cinema acted as an ideological apparatus, a term borrowed in part from the French Communist Party's leading philosopher of the day, Louis Althusser. Rather than transmitting ideological messages, as earlier political critics had assumed, cinema's technical apparatus of camera and projector lenses and screens recreated a model in which the audience member was constructed as the subject of ideology. Interpellated (or "hailed") by the apparatus and positioned by it, the cinematic subject became a willing participant in the construction of illusion. (It is interesting to note that the two leading political theorists of working-class collusion in their own oppression, Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, were both translated by editors of Screen. )

In Mulvey's version, this process recapitulated the mirror phase of early childhood development proposed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, the child's first recognition of itself in the mirror was both a traumatic discovery of separation from the maternal body and the first identification with an ideal version of itself—more distinct, more capable than it feels itself to be. This dialectic between the loss and idealization of the self Mulvey holds to be the origin of identification with human figures on screen, a fundamental identification that is then articulated with the differing representations of men and women (the one typically looking, the other typically being looked at) to produce the effect of gendered subjectivity in the cinema apparatus. Screen critics prized especially the works

Princess Mononoke

Princess Mononoke, directed by Hayao Miyazake, Tokuma Shoten/Nippon Television Network/Dentsu/Studio Ghibli/Miramax, Japan, 1999 (U.S. version), 128 mins.

Hayao Miyazake's Mononoke-hime (1997; released in the United States in 1999 as Princess Mononoke ), the sixth feature film for his Studio Ghibli, built on the success of his child-oriented anime, extending back more than a decade. The Japanese animation industry, powered in part by its close relations with the export of television shows for children and the toys and games crazes of the 1980s, had turned in the late 1980s to themes more suited to young adults. The international success of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira in 1988 and Mamoru Oshii and Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell of 1995 had paved the way for higher production values, the assimilation of digital technologies into traditional hand-painted cel animation, and increasingly convoluted narrative lines.

Immensely successful in Japan, where it was only outgrossed by Titanic, the film raises special challenges for the theory of cinema. The animation form has traditionally been seen as childish and has received proportionately little critical attention, while Japanese product aimed at television sales had acquired a reputation for shoddy technique, often due to the practice of farming large proportions of the handcraft out to overseas animation factories, notably in Thailand. Miyazake's film is extremely well crafted throughout, essential if the film was to succeed on the big screen. Several innovations helped, including the use of specially-written software to make three-dimensional digital animation look more like traditional cartoons.

Princess Mononoke 's themes of struggle between environmental and mechanistic forces at a formative moment in Japanese history seem not only to have chimed with audiences, but to have echoed in the cartoon form the dialectics of technology and nature. Evoking the environmental ethics of first peoples, the film seeks to reconcile technological progress with a mystical understanding of the forest as stronghold of nature. The very unnaturalness of the medium, including the necessity to invent sounds for the various cartoon creatures that inhabit the film, give the movie a greater depth and deeper conflicts than the wishful ending would suggest. And the success of the film challenges cinema theory to address two of its major weaknesses: the first being the audio component of audiovisual media and its articulation with the visual; the second, the distance between photographic and graphic depiction.

Digital theorist Lev Manovich observes that the rise of digital cinema makes contemporary audiences aware that cinematography is a brief excursion in the history of animated pictures. From such specialized formal analyses, cinema studies can hope to derive new paradigms for understanding relations between recording, inventing, representing, and communicating in an increasingly global media society.

of the avant-garde, deploying the semiotic theory of signs to advance the theory that avant-garde cinema freed signifiers (the materials of light and shade for example) from their bondage to the signified (to the illusory representation of an always already ideological reality). At the same time, they sought out more popular films that exemplified the contradictory and dialectical tendencies within the dominant ideology, such as the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk with their clash of wealthy lifestyles and emotional catastrophe. Technical work in film semiotics continues with the work of Warren Buckland, and Screen theory has retained its position since the 1970s, especially among feminist critics like Kaja Silverman, but it has never been uncontroversial.

The Specificity of Cinema

The most influential critic of the Screen agenda has been David Bordwell. Accusing the Screen critics of blindness to the specificity of film, Bordwell and his co-author Kristin Thompson developed a "neoformalist" analysis. Combining inspiration from Russian formalism with cognitive psychology, they proposed a rigorous film scholarship grounded in archive work and extensive as well as intensive film viewing. They also argued for what appeared to be a more commonsense approach to audience activity. Using cognitive theories, Bordwell argued that audiences were actively engaged in constructing meaning, guessing what will happen next, forming hypotheses and mental maps, and piecing together the action of the plot from the fragments of edited film narration. Criticized for their normative and apolitical account of the cinema experience, and despite the sometimes strident protestations of their later work, Thompson and Bordwell have been influential in establishing close analysis of filmic technique and high levels of historical scholarship as necessary prerequisites of film study.

New historicism (rather confusingly referred to as "revisionist" in some accounts) has been especially effective in the renewal of film studies, focusing attention on the specificity of film's evolution as technology, industry, and culture. In the 1980s and 1990s scholars such as Barry Salt, Tom Gunning, Roberta Pearson, Janet Staiger, Miriam Hansen, Kevin Brownlow, and Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery on U.S. cinema; Michael Chanan, Pam Cook, Andrew Higson, John Hill, and Robert Murphy on the United Kingdom; Thomas Elsaesser on Germany; Richard Abel on France; Yuri Tsivian on Russia; and others have radically rewritten the glib accounts of journalistic film history. The new cinema historicism diminishes the importance of individuals and denies the apparent linear progress from silent to sound, monochrome to color. Instead the new historicists emphasize the importance of institutional forces and economic trends in the innovation and dissemination of technologies and techniques, seeking reasons why certain promising technologies are delayed or abandoned, assessing the reactions of audiences and exhibitors to emerging technologies, focusing on the institutional histories of studios and government agencies, and tracing links between cinema and cognate industries. In the process some key beliefs of even recent film criticism have been undermined, as when Rick Altman argued, on evidence from D. W. Griffith's involvement with the stage, that melodrama was a formative component of classical Hollywood, thus critiquing both the belief that U.S. cinema was realist in essence and that melodrama was an effective antidote to its dominance.

Since the 1990s film historians have turned to oral history and documentary accounts of audience activity in the cinema. A major element of television studies throughout its life, audience studies have had a weaker position in film studies, perhaps because of the relative difficulty and social impropriety of staring at audience members in the dark. Early accounts from the 1930s by participants in the British Mass Observation project, even Hugo Münsterberg's pioneering psychological study of 1916, failed to establish a strong tradition of reception studies. Distinguishing themselves from market

The Rules of the Game

La Règle du jeu, directed by Jean Renoir, Nouvelle Editions Françaises, France, 1939, 110 mins.

Hated or ignored on its release in 1939, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu is one of the most consistently admired of all films. An ensemble cast in an upstairs-downstairs country weekend enact the rituals of a dying civilization on the brink of war. With its deep staging and deep-focus cinematography, its long takes, and a fluid camera that seems to track the actors (rather than construct the action for the camera), the film became a touchstone of realist criticism.

In a widely read essay, "S/Z and Rules of the Game " (in the film journal Jump Cut, nos. 12–13, winter 1976–1977, pp. 45–51), Julia Lesage argued that in fact the film was constructed through the types of code identified by Roland Barthes and that its realism was merely the effect of cinematic and narrative technique. This formalist analysis would also inspire readings by, among others, Kristin Thompson, for whom the film is an elaborately constructed artifice. That Renoir appears in the film as the character Octave, caught between the aristocrats and the servants, inspired a number of auteur critics to single out the film as an account of the artist's role in society and in cinema. In his 1990s His toire du cinéma, the cinéaste Jean-Luc Godard returns many times to The Rules of the Game as if to an exemplary combination of formal innovation and political commitment.

Phenomenological and psychoanalytic critics have focused on the role of illusion in the film, the series of mistaken identities that propel the plot, and the ethos of "keeping up appearances" that leads to the final tragedy. Still baffling for textual analysts is the charm and the comedy that have kept the film popular not only with critics but with film buffs for more than sixty years. Compellingly humanist in outlook—Renoir's direction rarely if ever seems to dislike his characters—the film's narrative nonetheless enacts a damning satire on a rigidly stratified society that prides itself on the appearances through which it lies to itself. This paradox of a realist cinema portraying an unreal society maintains the film's interest long after that society has faded away.

research by their interest in emotional, inventive, ironic, and resistant attitudes, and in the extremities of fan culture, such studies of necessity emphasize the depth rather than the breadth of their findings, giving more attention to highly specific audiences than to the standard aggregate measure of film audience, box-office returns. At least one international project attempted to do both deep and broad research, investigating cross-cultural meanings of fantasy though an Internet-based survey of responses to the twenty-first century blockbuster The Lord of the Rings. Both historical and contemporary reception studies focus on the cultural construction of audiences, the determinations of race, class, gender, and other formations on the ways audiences read and react to movies, disputing both the Screen concept of an apparatus that determines response, and Bordwell's idea of the audience's work of textual reconstruction.

Cultures and Economies of Cinema

Cross-cultural dimensions of cinema, initially discussed mostly in terms of the textual properties and ideological concerns of national cinemas, are now the object of much work in reception, political economy, and postcolonial research. Summed up in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's 1994 title "Unthinking Eurocentrism," cross-cultural studies result in several kinds of work that dispute the normative tendency of neoformalism and the blindness to cultural difference of the apparatus theory espoused by the Screen critics. Some scholars have been at pains to emphasize the creativity or political significance of previously marginalized cinemas and directors. Others apply rigorous theoretical critique to such art house favorites as the Chinese fifth-generation filmmakers. Still more radical was the movement in filmmaking and film theory known as third cinema, after an influential 1976 essay by Cuban cinéastes Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, which argued that the first and second cinemas—mass entertainment and bourgeois psychodramas, respectively—had failed the revolution and that a third cinema based in popular forms and addressing popular struggles was the best way forward. This spirit was echoed across the world, in the films of Haile Gerima in Ethiopa, Sembene Ousmane in Senegal, and Anand Patwardhan in India, and in the critical writings of Teshome Gabriel, Trinh Minh-Ha, and others (for example, Jim Pines, Paul Willemen, Coco Fusco, and John Downing). Since a central tenet of third cinema was that cultural specificity was integral to a cinema that was genuinely popular in the sense of belonging to and acting with the people, the term acted as an umbrella for a wide range of practice. Another early Cuban proponent, Julio Garcia Espinoza, called for an imperfect cinema; in Brazil, Glauber Rocha called for a cinema of hunger. For some proponents, the third cinema demanded a break with the technical wealth as well as the techniques of the first and second cinemas, while for others the resultant formally challenging films were merely reversions to the self-important antics of art house cinema and of no interest or use to the oppressed. This debate became especially vibrant in North America and in Europe where a new and intensely articulate generation of filmmakers and critics from African-and Hispanic-American, black British, and British-Asian backgrounds began to give voice to their artistic and political demands.

A second effect of this global consciousness has been a reappraisal of the old Marxist political economy espoused by Screen theory, updating the analysis to take account of globalization on the film business, its working practices, and its use of international free trade agreements to maintain and develop monopolistic corporate cartels. Janet Wasko, Andrew Higson, and Richard Maltby, among others, have addressed the impact of information technologies and the increasing integration of entertainment industries in guiding the development of new industrial practices as well as strategic policy on global media flows, intellectual property rights legislation, and the potential impacts of North American dominance of film distribution on the cultural lives of smaller nations. Increasingly, studies of auteurs are articulating the creative process with the industrial, and the best of them are also informed by theoretical paradigms that explain the dependence of creation in film on industrial and technical processes over which an individual director has little control.

Such studies of the development of film industries merge with analytical concerns in the study of cinema's relationships with modernity. A number of scholars, among them Anne Friedberg and Friedrich Kittler, trace cinema's roots back to related developments of the late nineteenth century such as department stores, electric streetlights, railways, and advertising, and argue forward to the digital era that cinema has always integrated with a range of other media into a broad process of modernization. In this context the study of entertainment has developed rapidly, with increasing awareness of the cross-media appeal of stardom, movie soundtracks, and animation. Film sound has benefited especially from the work of Michel Chion, Rick Altman, and Philip Brophy, who listen not only to music but to sound effects, to the construction of off-screen space, thematic constructions of gender and race, and the shifting hierarchy of recorded sound and recorded image. Like stardom, which is governed by a dialectical relation between on-screen presence and real absence, the study of film sound reveals complex interactions of space and time, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes undermining the coherence of a film's imaginary world. The sense of modernity as a complex process of homogenization and fragmentation is also common to studies of popular genres like horror, action movies, and science fiction, genres that frequently evoke both utopian and dystopian alternatives to dominant conceptions of embodiment, agency, and the necessity of current social arrangements.

Technologies of Cinema

The arrival of digital technologies in cinema has provoked debate over the degree of continuity between this process of modernization in the predigital cinema and the potential postmodernity of digital film. Critics like Lev Manovich believe in the continuity of the two, and in cinema's powerful determination of such key factors of digital media as the use of screens. Others derive from digital media new paradigms for reviewing the historical data, rediscovering such typically digital techniques as motion capture in the pre-cinematic chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, or digital compositing of layers in the trompe-l'oeil sets of Georges Méliès' early fantasy films. Scholars of special effects, such as Vivian Sobchack, Scott Bukatman, and Timothy Murray, have begun to analyze the diminishing dependence of cinema on what can be enacted in front of a camera, tracing, in Michelle Pearson's work, a transition from spectacle for its own sake to a more embedded expectation of near-photographic illusion seamlessly wedded to cinematographic imagery, as in James Cameron's Titanic (1997), a case argued by Angela Ndalianis, for whom spectacle is, if anything, a more significant element of contemporary entertainment than at any time since the Baroque.

At certain points, this discussion of the transition from photo-mechanical to electronic cinema replicates the long-running debate between culturalist and medium-specific accounts of film. If such vast currents as modernity or globalization run through the transition to digital, then there will be continuity. But if the deep-seated alterations to cinematic technique take precedence, then the experience of cinema, and to some extent of cultural activity at large, can be expected to change equally. This hypothesis has been tested especially by a generation of phenomenological critics like Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, for whom the object of inquiry is the physical embodiment of the spectator and the ways this relates to the richness of the felt experience of cinema. This type of work, instigated by Dudley Andrew, is extended in Marks's work into a consideration of the emulation of touching in certain modes of cinema practice. The theme of embodiment also runs through the rapid rise of interest in Gilles Deleuze's two-volume analysis of cinema, remarkable for its espousal of a philosophy of desire grounded in Henri Bergson (rather than the ubiquitous Heideggerianism, in themes of loss, lack, and the fading of reality, of poststructural criticism) and for its meticulous readings of individual films. Deleuze envisages a shift from the "movement-image" pre-1945 toward a "direct time image" in postwar cinema. Informed by the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, Deleuze deploys an idiosyncratic vocabulary to argue for cinema's gradual liberation from a mechanistic dependence on the image of the human body toward a more metaphysical engagement with the pure dimensionality of time and its flows.

Challenges of Cinema

The tumultuous history of cinema studies since the mid twentieth century has concentrated several core debates in the history of ideas. Should the study of film deploy traditional hermeneutic and humanistic techniques, or should it abandon them for a more rigorous analysis grounded in linguistics? Or was such grappling with continental theory an alibi for a failure to address the realities of political economy, actual rather than textually determined readers, and the operations of oppression and exploitation disguised or denied by filmic representations? Or was cinema in any case an entirely symbolic activity, a simulacrum with no relation to any reality, physical or social? In institutions where cinema has been taught, there have been the additional claims that the analysis of film is mere carping, all too often negative and destructive, and of no use to those who wish to move into filmmaking as a career. Such claims have led to the rise of major literatures in script analysis and structure, in the technical aspects of filmmaking, and in elements of creative industries literature devoted to film financing, marketing, and policy, many of which have been subsumed into the canon of cinema studies teaching.

Looking to cinema's specific contributions to the history of ideas, among the most significant has been its meticulous attention to the specificities of cultural difference and the contemporaneous splitting and differentiation of subjectivity, in the admission of transcultural cinemas and in queer cinema, for example. At its best, the affirmation of camp, for example in Richard Dyer's work on queer cinema, is valuable not only for film studies but for better understanding of the rich emotional life of the culture.

Indeed, if anything distinguishes the cinema theory among media studies, it is its readiness to engage with the emotional life. Alongside the cool analysis of finance, technique, and box office, it is difficult to sidestep the intense emotive power of film, from haunting abstraction to political passion, and in physiological reactions of tears, shrieks, and laughter. While some advances have been made in the study of the erotic (by Linda Williams) and the horrific (by Barbara Creed), both comedy and tearjerkers have resisted analysis and remain in many ways the most difficult emotional technologies to account for, partially because they are among the least esteemed in intellectual circles.

There is too the contradictory fascination of cinema captured in the phrase the dream factory. Flagship of the consciousness industries, cinema figures as both escape and utopia, flight from oppression or flight toward its alternative. It is both a device for replenishing the exhausted with meaningless entertainment and a technology for demanding the impossible. Its illusions may be seen as lies and ideology, or as evocations of emotional and spiritual satisfactions denied and destroyed by consumerism. Its darkness, serried ranks of seating, and clockwork rhythms of projection can appear as both a continuation of factory discipline into leisure time and as an expression of solidarity, community, and sociability.

Meanwhile, despite (and, in some resistant political sense, perhaps because of) the dominance of Hollywood on world screens, cinema has proved remarkably successful at translating cultural difference across the world: one thinks of the mix of kung fu, spaghetti western, and U.S. gangster in Perry Henzell's Jamaican The Harder They Come (1973). The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray have reached far more people than equivalent literary or even musical creations. Nonetheless, there remain huge difficulties in securing distribution for non-Hollywood films, a challenge that film studies shows signs of addressing in the early twenty-first century, along with the issues of cross-cultural transmission, emotion, and identification, and the utopian as well as the industrial capabilities of the medium.

See also Media, History of ; Third Cinema ; Visual Culture .

bibliography

Andrew, J. Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

——. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

——. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

——. Language and Cinema. Translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Seboek. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Miller, Toby, and Robert Stam, eds. A Companion to Film Theory. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16, no. 3 (autumn 1975): 6–18. Reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Nichols, Bill, ed. Movies and Methods. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976–1985.

Shohat, Ella. and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multi-culturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema." In Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Revised translation in 25 Years of Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael Chanan. London: BFI/Channel 4, 1984.

Stam, Robert, and Toby Miller, eds. Film and Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Sean Cubitt

CINEMA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

As contemporaries, cinema and psychoanalysis both reveal, in their own way, mankind's complex personality. The interior dramas that psychoanalysis brings to light can be experienced within the "other scene" of cinematic fiction. The similarity of certain terms and the occasional apparent resemblances between the two techniques encourage spontaneous comparisons: During psychoanalysis the subject is confronted with fantasized "representations" and can identity with "projected" characters. And we often speak of "dream screens."

Psychoanalysis as perceived by the cinema, especially by Hollywood, has not escaped a degree of confusion. For, while engaging in one sense with the "question of lay analysis," American psychoanalytic practice is related to psychiatry. Therefore, in American film productions as well as in critical analyses of those films, there has not always been a clear distinction between psychiatry and psychoanalytic practice. To bring the relation into sharper focus, I will not consider films that depict the world of psychiatry, such as Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963), Lilith (R. Rossen, 1964), or One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975). This article will avoid discussion of the serial killer films of the nineteen eighties (Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer by J. McNaughton, 1985, released in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme, 1991, Seven by D. Fincher, 1995, and others).

The term "psychoanalysis" appeared for the first time in Sigmund Freud's Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses (1896). Almost simultaneously, on December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers, inventors of the cinematograph, organized the first paid movie in Paris. The show, twenty minutes long, contained the famous Arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat and La Sortie de l 'usine Lumièreà Lyon.

It took the cinema more than twenty years to present psychoanalytic imagery, even in a rudimentary form. In 1919, R. Wiene filmed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which a mad doctor—at least that's what he claims to be—uses hypnosis for evil purposes, just as the diabolical Dr. Mabuse in the film of the same name (Fritz Lang, 1922), released three years later, made use of his hypnotic powers for criminal purposes.

On the other hand it took psychoanalysis a number of years before it approached cinema. Münsterberg did write a 1916 essay, Le Cinéma: étude psychologique, but it was only in 1970 that, for the first time, film analysis made use of the tools of psychoanalysis (Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 223). The authors dissected Young Abe Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) and analyzed the importance of the Law (personified by Henry Fonda as Lincoln) and the Oedipus complex it implied.

The history of the relation between psychoanalysis and cinema can be subdivided into three major periods. In its earliest manifestations (Caligari and Mabuse ), psychoanalysis became, during the thirties, a familiar figure to cinema, although it often assumed the form of caricatured archetypes, which revealed a complete misunderstanding of psychoanalytic reality. It was superficial and incompetent (Carefree, M. Sandrich, 1938, Bringing up Baby, Howard Hawks, 1938), disturbing and ambitious (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Frank Capra, 1936), or provided effective, although simpleminded, advice (Blind Alley, King Vidor, 1939). It still had little to do with the behavior of ordinary people.

After the Second World War, the references to psychoanalysis (psychiatrists treating shell-shocked soldiers, for example)—at least in terms of explanatory material—made psychoanalysis seem more serious and sympathetic. Its cinematic representation followed this positive evolution. It was the seductive Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) who enabled Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) to remember the traumatic childhood scene that, having been repressed, had led him to believe he was guilty of murder (Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock, 1945). It is Moss, the G.I. in Home of the Brave (S. Kramer, 1949), who, returning home after the war, is healed of the paralysis that resulted from his inferiority complex. Psychoanalysis, although not yet fully understood, is here better integrated in social life and becomes a "serious" reference.

More recently we have seen a return to a more critical position. Dressed to Kill (Brian de Palma, 1980) involves an analyst who is a serial killer of women. The grasping psychoanalyst in Passageà l 'acte (F. Girod, 1997), manipulated by his patient, becomes his assassin with few second thoughts. The psychoanalysts portrayed by Woody Allen are frequently among the funniest characters in his films. Psychoanalysis, neither caricature nor definitive "knowledge," becomes a subject for the cinema that can be treated objectively and even ridiculed.

Even though he allowed himself to be filmed by his close friends (Marie Bonaparte, Mark Brunswick, René Laforgue, Philip Lehrman, see Mijolla, A. de, 1994), Freud was never very interested in the cinema. Arguing that "he didn't feel that a plastic representation of our abstractions worthy of the name could be made," he disavowed his disciples, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, for their collaboration on the script of The Mysteries of a Soul (G. W. Pabst, 1925). He also refused a considerable sum of money offered by Samuel Goldwyn to develop a script on "famous love affairs." This suspicion of the filmic representation of psychoanalysis continued after the death of its founder. It was primarily Freud's daughter who opposed any attempt to make a film about Freud. Fearing Anna Freud's hostility, John Huston abandoned the idea of using Marilyn Monroe to play the part of Cecily in Freud, the Secret Passion (1962).

Should we attribute to this suspicion the paucity of films about Freud? The few films that do represent Freud show him during the early years of psychoanalysis. The Seven-Percent Solution (H. Ross, 1976) is a comedy in which the founder of psychoanalysis attempts to cure Sherlock Holmes of his cocaine addiction, a wink at Freud's own experience. Sogni d 'oro (Nino Moretti, 1981) involves the making of a film entitled "Freud's Mother," in which the fictional relations of Sigmund and Amalia are treated comically. In a more serious vein, Nineteen-Nineteen (H. Brody, 1984) evokes Freud in flashback psychoanalyzing two celebrated patients, the Wolfman and the young woman described in "a case of female homosexuality" (1920a). John Huston's Freud (1962) is the only film that seriously and directly confronts the theoretical and practical questions of psychoanalysis through a "biographical" fiction.

Like Freud leaving the famous 1921 photograph—cigar in hand, without his glasses—to come to life in Lovesick (M. Brickman, 1983), the image of the fictional psychoanalyst is often a stereotype or caricature: white beard, tiny pince-nez glasses, maybe a strong foreign accent. He becomes the old doctor Brulov in Spellbound (1945) or the disturbing Caligari (1919) or Mabuse (1922), who make use of their knowledge of hypnosis for evil purposes. Nor are they the only ones. The analyst in Nightmare Alley (E. Goulding, 1947) makes use of his patients' confidence to blackmail them.

Even though the psychoanalyst's image in cinema evolves after the Second World War, becoming more reassuring, it still retains an aura of strangeness. The two doctors—even if they are not, strictly speaking, psychoanalysts—who appear in Seventh Heaven (B. Jacquot, 1997), are oddly different from the other characters in the film. The first, and most important, disappears as mysteriously as he appears.

In Hollywood films classical Freudian concepts are used: the neurosis of anxiety, the Oedipus complex, the repression of an infantile trauma. In most cases, the model used, at least implicitly, is based on the Studies on Hysteria ; the spectacular effects of the catharsis can be used for the purposes of dramatization. Bringing back a repressed memory is sufficient for healing. This occurs in Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948), in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), The Snake Pit (Anatol Litvak, 1949), and even, although it is caricatured, in Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964). Dreams have obviously assumed their place as one of the deus ex machina of cinema, beginning with the dream sequence in Spellbound, designed by Salvador Dali. The analysis of a recurrent dream experienced by one of the characters is used to solve the "enigma" at the heart of the script. Nightmares occur in Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1949), Lady in the Dark (M. Leisen, 1944), Secret Beyond the Door (1948), and The Three Faces of Eve (N. Johnson, 1957). Then there are the dreams of Freud himself, taken from the Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), which are used in Freud: The Secret Passion (1962). Unraveling these oneiric obsessions resolves the character's neurosis and the story (the film) comes to an end.

For the purposes of dramaturgy, psychoanalysis is used by cinema to cure patients and especially to reveal the neuroses of psychoanalysts, their entourage, and society. The Cobweb (Vincente Minelli, 1955) is the model for this type of exposition. In the film Richard Widmark, a psychoanalyst working in an institution, is impotent with his wife, with whom he disagrees.

Should we be surprised then that Hollywood's celluloid psychoanalysts, psychiatrists especially, rarely engage in any real psychoanalysis—often confused with hypnosis—and that the framework of the psychoanalytic cure is rarely respected? In Spellbound, Dr. Petersen (Ingmar Bergman) is seated next to her patient, the so-called Dr. Edwards (Gregory Peck); the psychoanalyst in Sex and the Single Girl (R. Quine, 1964), played by Natalie Wood, does the same and, as in so many representations, writes down his remarks. In Lady in the Dark (1944), the analyst's seat is placed behind the couch but the patient is seated. This difficulty in displaying the psychoanalytic frame—the analysand lying on a couch and the psychoanalyst seated behind him in another plane—has been neatly resolved by H. Brody in Nineteen-Nineteen (1984). Here, two of Freud's former patients recall their respective psychoanalysis. When the therapy is shown on screen, the psychoanalyst (Freud), is not in the picture, only his voice is present (Mijolla, A. de, 1994).

Even today it seems that cinema continues to insist that psychoanalysis is hypnosis (the dramatic effects of which are evident on screen) or catharsis (which facilitates explanatory shortcuts). Nonetheless, its representation has become more subtle and it is now fully integrated in the film. In Seventh Heaven, psychoanalysis is not only part of the script but present on screen as well. White surfaces are used by the heroine to project her traumatic memories. Similarly, F. Girod makes psychoanalysis the background for Passageà l 'acte (1997). Psychoanalysis is given the comic treatment in nearly all of Woody Allen's films as well as a few others (A Couch in New York by Chantal Ackerman, 1997). Sometimes the approach is tragicomic, as in Another Woman (Allen, 1988), where a woman begins to question her entire life after eavesdropping on a psychoanalyst at work through a vent in her apartment.

However, there is no need to see an analyst at work or present a formal psychoanalytic situation for psychoanalysis to be presented on screen. A number of films promote a latent psychoanalytic statement without being explicit. This is the case, for example, with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, who presents neurotic characters (Written on the Wind, 1956), with many of Ingmar Bergman's films (The Silence, 1963, Persona, 1966, Cries and Whispers, 1973, Autumn Sonata, 1978), with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and any of Tex Avery's productions, which use comedy to present neurosis.

It is often in films where the elements of psychoanalysis are presented but not spelled out that psychoanalytic concepts appear with the greatest subtlety and relevance. What would Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928), that sprawling ninety-minute dream, have been like if the script had provided a psychoanalytic explanation? Probably a poor film, slow and overbearing.

It was only natural that psychoanalysis should take an interest in film, one of many cultural constructs, as Freud did, for example, with drama, beginning with Hamlet. Nonetheless, the theory of cinema did not make use of the tools of psychoanalysis until the early seventies. With reference to the work of Lacan, Christian Metz provided a careful spectatorial analysis, trying to determine "what contribution Freudian psychoanalysis could . . . provide in the study of the imaginary signifier." Other authors also became interested in the analogy between psychoanalysis and cinema: the importance of sight (Jean-Louis Baudry), the different meanings of the word "screen" (G. Rosolata), the place of the spectator in Persona (N. Brown), fetishism and film noir (M. Ernet).

However, theory shouldn't cause us to overlook the many studies of individual films and directors. Raymond Bellour (1975) provided a psychoanalytic analysis (the murder of the father, the castrating mother) of Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), a film said to be frivolous and entertaining. Minutely dissecting the sequence of the airplane attack, he reveals the importance of sight and its role in the film. Similarly, T. Kuntzel (1975) made use of the Freudian discovery of the presence of the unconscious in dreams to analyze The Most Dangerous Game (E. B. Shoedsack and I. Pichel, 1932). Patrick Lacoste (1990) examines The Mysteries of a Soul (1925) from a strictly psychoanalytical point of view and Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor (1994) analyzes the way the "anxiety of fiction" operates on the spectator of Hitchcock's films.

Throughout the nineteen-eighties American film theory looked at a number of films made between 1945 and 1960 from the point of view of psychoanalysis and feminism. In several analyses that could be described as "feminist psychoanalysis," Laura Mulvey, Janet Walker, and M. A. Doane attempted to show how the role of women in cinema reflected their role in society. The approach taken by E. Ann Kaplan, which was part of this movement—one that was more sociological than psychoanalytical—emphasized issues of race in society, which the cinema reflected.

But making use of psychoanalytic concepts to examine films from a sociological perspective (feminist or antiracist) was bound to be unsatisfactory as long as these readings involved distortion and reduction; the film and its analysis became a pretext to defend, and in a way that was not always rigorous, questionable intellectual ideas. Psychoanalysis is often a pretext in the service of a discourse; once abandoned, it is seen to be an element inessential to the logical structure of the argument. Isn't this the reproach made to cinema whenever it represents psychoanalysis, a filmic representation that is generally incomplete and often a form of caricature?

If film often "fails at" representation of the psychoanalytic situation, it is no doubt because "the unconscious, like the being of philosophers, rarely makes itself visible" (J.-B. Pontalis). Moreover, "the rhythm of analysis is very different from that of film, and it is quite difficult to provide an accurate representation of the sensation" (Mijolla, 1994).

A film cannot be judged on the accuracy of its portrayal of psychoanalytic notions—within certain limits, of course—but on the relevance of the use of those notions for the dramatic presentation of its themes. "From this point of view—[the use of language and the language of images as fundamental Freudian reference points] between psychoanalysis and cinema—is formed a variant of the situation of the analyst as always being between two languages" (Lacoste, 1990).

More work needs to be done on the complex relationships that are created between psychoanalysis and cinema, beyond the application of psychoanalytic concepts to the art of film.

Pierre-Jean Bouyer and Sylvain Bouyer

See also: American Imago ; Cinema (criticism); France; Freud, the Secret Passion ; Secrets of a Soul ; Psyche, revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l 'homme (Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and human sciences); Robertson, James; Surrealism and psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Bellour, Raymond. (1979). The analysis of film (Constance Penley, Ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Communications. (1975). "Psychanalyse et cinéma." 23.

Lacoste, Patrick. (1990). L 'etrange cas du Pr. M. Psychanalyse à l 'écran. Paris: Gallimard.

Metz, Christian. (1979). The imaginary signifier: Psychoanalysis and the cinema (C. Britton et al., Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mijolla, Alain de. (1999). Freud and the psychoanalytic situation on the screen. In J. Bergstrom (Ed.), Endless night. Cinema and psychoanalysis: Parallel histories (p. 188-199). Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (Original work published 1994)

Further Reading

Gabbard, Glen. (2001). The impact of psychoanalysis on the American cinema. Annual of Psychoanalysis, 29, 237-246.

Gabbard, Erin and Gabbard, Glen. (1989). Psychiatry and the cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greenberg, Harvey R. (1993). Screen memories: Hollywood cinema on the psychoanalytic couch. New York: Columbia University Press.

MOVIES

Hollywood in the 1930s

Movie critics are nearly unanimous in declaring the Depression era to be the most important in the history of film. Technical advances, the seemingly limitless amount of available money, and a pool of talent fed by writers and actors from New York, as well as directors and technicians from overseas, all contributed to make the 1930s the golden era in Hollywood cinema. In 1932 the improvement of three-color Technicolor from the two-color process invented in 1926 enabled studios to create "A pictures" that looked markedly different from the B movies churned out in quantity and helped to stratify the production system, though black-and-white movies were still common throughout the 1930s. Many of the decade's most talented writers, including such noted fiction writers as William Faulkner, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and playwrights Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, headed west. As the decade wore on, many of the brightest stars from Europe sought in Hollywood a refuge from fascism. All of these factors, combined with the desperate desire to escape a life that seemed at times insurmountably difficult, drew eighty-five million Americans a week to movie theaters, there to be swept away by glamorous musicals, screwball comedies, and fantastic tales of adventure.

The Studio System

The continued growth and stability of the film industry in a time of economic uncertainty made it attractive to banks and established corporations. Studios ran their own chains of movie theaters, in addition to producing and distributing films. Each studio was guided by production executives such as Jack Warner at Warner Bros. or Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, men who worked with an annual budget dictated by the New York office to create a year's worth of entertainment. These executives were micromanagers: they not only coordinated plant operations and conducted contract negotiations, but they also developed stories and scripts, screened dailies, and supervised editing. Moreover, each studio employed a stable of stars, directors, producers, set designers, and technicians, which insured that their products would have a distinctive stamp. For example, during the 1930s Warner Bros. became known for its socially conscious films, including Heroes For Saie (1932), Wild Boys of the Road (1933), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), and the antilynching films They Wont Forget (1937) and Fury (1936). Paramount was known for its stylish, witty, elegant movies and its beautiful sets and costumes. Cecil B. DeMille directed such lush, sensual films as his 1934 Cleopatra for this studio; Ernst Lubitsch contributed such signature pieces as Design for Living (1933) and the Marlene Dietrich vehicle Angel (1937). Rouben Mamoulian contributed such works as his 1932 version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, If Paramount aimed for a sophisticated audience, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), the richest and most productive of the studios, was known for targeting its films at middle-American audiences. Among M-G-M's successful productions were the Andy Hardy movies, starring Mickey Rooney, and the William Powell-Myrna Loy Thin Man series of six movies, which included The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), and Another Thin Man (1939). Universal was famous for horror, with such productions as James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, and The Invisible Man (1933) with Claude Rains. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) was an example of the terror the Universal artists could evoke.

Molls, Gunslingers, and T-Men

What can account for the incredible popularity of gangster movies during the Depression? In the early 1930s several factors combined to create an atmosphere in which audiences across America flocked to theaters to see the dozens of new gangland pictures. First of all, Prohibition enabled gangsters like Chicago's Al Capone to reap enormous profits by supplying the American public with the alcoholic beverages legally denied them—a service many Americans appreciated. Second, citizens who had become unemployed, or who had lost their property through bank foreclosures, often found themselves admiring the exploits of those 1930s crooks—Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde among them—who fought the system. Although the introduction of the Production Code in 1934 forced studios to pay lip service at least to the notion that crime does not pay, gangsters continued to die in blazes of glory throughout the 1930s, Warner Bros. was the king of the crime flick, with such productions as Doorway to Hell (1930) with Lew Ayres, Little Caesar (1930) with Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Public Enemy (1931) with James Cagney and Jean Harlow, The Finger Points (1931) with Richard Barthelmess and Fay Wray, G-Men (1935) with James Cagney and Ann Dvorak, and Petrified Forest (1936) with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis; M-G-M produced a series of films based on their hit Dead End (1937), featuring Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sidney, including Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), starring Humphrey Bogart and Cagney, Paramount produced City Streets (1931) with Gary Cooper and Sidney; M-G-M's The Last Gangster (1937) with Robinson and James Stewart gave audiences Robinson at his snarling best. United Artists weighed in with such offerings as You Only Live Once (1937) with Henry Fonda and Sidney.

Lavish Musicals

Top Broadway dance director Busby Berkeley, lured by Samuel Goldwyn to Hollywood in 1930, provided Depression audiences with some of the most memorably overblown dance numbers in the history of the movies. Berkeley's dance numbers, seen in such films as Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Stars Over Broadway (1934), and Varsity Show (1937), as well as the movies he directed himself, such as Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) and Stage Struck (1936), were sensuous extravaganzas, in which dozens of dancers moved in rhythmic patterns— snowflakes, expanding stars, and so forth. These numbers were filmed as inventively as they were choreographed—using diagonal angles, rhythmic cutting, and what has become known as the "Berkeley top shot"—from directly above the action. In contrast, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, paired in 1933, created ten films together, all of them notable for their gracefully elegant dance numbers. Flying Down to Rio (1933), Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937) were among the most memorable of these grand productions.

The B Movie

Of course, not all Hollywood movies were star-studded extravaganzas. One feature of the well-stratified studio system was the ability to crank out seemingly endless numbers of B movies, also known as "low-budget" or "cheapie movies." Although some studios released an average of a feature each week, most of these were not top-of-the-line productions. Add in the three hundred or so films made each year by B studios or independents, and it becomes apparent that approximately three-quarters of the films made during the 1930s were B films. B movies, aimed at filling out the double bills that were an established feature of 1930s movie-going, were produced quickly—often in as little as a week—and utilized actors of dubious box-office appeal. These low-budget movies were rented to exhibitors for correspondingly low fees and thus rarely lost money for studios. Occasionally, a B movie would cross over to A-picture status and score an unexpected success—a case in point would be the 1938 medical drama A Man to Remember, which took place at the funeral of a beloved small-town doctor. This, however, was the exception rather than the rule. Some writers and directors seized the chance to make stylistic experiments in a low-pressure, low-stake's venue where there was little to lose. Moreover, B movies could target smaller audiences than A movies.

African American Cinema

"Race movies," as they were known, had their roots in the late 1910s, when black-owned production companies such as the Lincoln Company and the Douglass Film Company created movies whose strong black characters provided a counterbalance to the stereotypes being purveyed by major production companies. The advent of sound film, which few black production companies could afford, and the onset of the Depression changed the way black films were produced: the white director Dudley Murphy, for example, in 1933 directed black actor Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones, based on the Eugene O'Neill play and featuring a prologue by DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy. Many "race movies" of the 1930s were Hollywood studio—produced, white-directed shorts in which jazz music and jazz musicians played a prominent role: among the artists who performed in these shorts were the Mills Brothers, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, and Cab Calloway. Typical of this genre was Barbershop Blues (1932), a movie depicting the camaraderie in a black barbershop and featuring the dancing of the Nicholas Brothers to the music of Claude Hopkins's band. New black stars appeared during the Depression, including Bill Robinson, Clarence Muse, Hattie McDaniel, and Louise Beavers. However, most black roles in white movies were still stereotyped portrayals: the most glaring example of this would be the 1939 hit Gone With the Windy with its eye-rolling slaves. Progress, no matter how minor, could be seen in such films as Mae West's I'm No Angel(1933), in which mistress and servant were seen to have risen together from poverty, and in which the maid, played by Beavers, was seen to have aspirations for success.

The Screwball Comedy

In such pictures as W. S. Dyke's The Thin Man (1934), strong female stars paired off with their male counterparts—in this case, Myrna Loy with William Powell—in relationships that were egalitarian and marked by barbed, witty repartee. With hits such as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934), featuring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, the cycle was firmly launched: studios would for the next four years produce scores of these comedies. With their roots in slapstick, and coated with an urbane gloss, screwball comedies such as Leo McCarey's 1937 The Awful Truth, for which the director won an Oscar, allowed its stars, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, to escape rigid gender roles as they, playing a divorcing and, ultimately, remarrying couple, teased and tormented one another through a range of hilariously uncomfortable situations.

Sources:

Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday (New York: Harper, 1939);

Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930—1939, volume 5 of History of the American Cinema, edited by Charles Harpole (New York: Scribners, 1993);

John Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties (London; 'Tantivy Press, 1968);

Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900—1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977);

Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, revised edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994);

John McCarty, Hollywood Gangland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993);

Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

MOVIES

Pressure from Television

As television became an increasingly popular entertainment medium throughout the 1950s, the movie industry did everything within its power to pull people away from the box in the living room and into the theaters. Bigger became the byword for the movies. Wide-screen techniques such as CinemaScope and Vista Vision were used to add a panoramic effect to spectacles, swashbucklers, musicals, and otherwise splashy movies with big-name stars, big casts, big sets, and big budgets. Although hard-hitting social dramas on both small and large scales had an impact, they were overshadowed at the box office by the melodramatic woman's picture. Science-fiction and horror movies proved more commercially viable than ever, and some were filmed in the short-lived 3-D process.

Spectacle

Historical epics with huge casts were a mainstay of the 1950s. Many of them drew on the Bible: The Robe (1953) was the first movie filmed in the CinemaScope process. David and Bathsheba (1951) and Solomon and Sheba (1959) were big grossers during their respective years of release. Ben-Hur (1959), the most expensive movie up to that time, won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Quo Vadis? (1951), set during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, was one of the largest-scale productions of the decade.

More Spectacle

Lavishly produced costume pictures featuring swashbucklers also flourished. Ivanhoe (1952), Scaramouche (1952), and Beau Brummel (1954) were among the most popular of them. Cecil B. DeMille, the master of cinema spectacle since the 1920s, not only produced and directed The Ten Commandments (1956) but also the circus spectacular The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. At the beginning of the 1950s Gone With the Wind (1939) was the top-grossing movie of all time, and it remained so throughout the decade. The Greatest Show on Earth became the second-top-grossing movie of all time but was replaced in that spot by The Ten Commandments and then Ben-Hur.

Drama

Social commentary persisted in film dramas during the 1950s. It had begun to take root in such post-World War II movies of the 1940s as The Lost Weekend (1945), concerning alcoholism, and The Snake Pit (1948), dealing with mental illness. In the 1950s many movies approached the subjects of teenagers' delinquency, angst, and love, the most famous being Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which explores all three. The Blackboard Jungle (1955), about troubled high-school youths in New York City, was one of the first movies with a rock 'n' roll score. The Wild One (1954) starred Marlon Brando as a motorcycle-gang leader.

Giant.

The epic-proportioned Giant (1956), one of the most famous movies of the 1950s, features three of the decade's biggest stars: Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. Giant is filled with many memorable scenes, but one in particular has become a classic of social commentary. When the American Indian daughterin-law of Hudson's character is refused service in a Texas diner, he starts a brawl with the manager. The two slam into a jukebox, and a recording of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" begins blaring while the fight continues.

TRUMBO BREAKS THE BLACKLIST

Like several of the blacklisted screenwriters during the 1950s, Dalton Trumbo assumed a pseudonym after he was sentenced to jail for contempt of Congress, and continued to write as before. But with the use of his name denied him, he went from being the highest-paid screenwriter in Holly-wood to accepting the pay of a drudge. Then, in 1956, as if to generalize from Anita Loos's observation that the harder she worked, the luckier she got, Trumbo got lucky. His screenplay for The Bold and the Brave, written under the pseudonym. Robert Rich, won an Oscar for the best screenplay of the year.

After enjoying speculation that Robert Flaherty, Orson Welles, Jesse Laskey, Jr., Willis O'Brien, or Paul Tader was the real Robert Rich, Trumbo revealed his identity in 1959, Never one to piss up an opportunity to resist authority, Otto Preminger announced that Trumbo would be asked to write his next movie. But Kirk Douglas got to Trumbo first. Douglas was executive producer and star of the epic Spartacus, and he hired Trumbo to write the screenplay under his own name. The movie won. three Oscars, for cinematography, art direction, and supporting actor (Peter Ustinov). despite Hedda Hopper's opinion that the movie "was one of the worst pictures I've ever seen, and the script was written by Dalton Trurabo," Spartacus was widely acclaimed, and after its success, the blacklist was defeated.

Sources:

Stefan Kanfer, Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973);

Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Ostar (New York: Ballatine, 1986).

Award Winners

Some small-scale, black-and-white dramas, such as Paddy Chayefsky's Marty (1955), about a Bronx butcher, and his The Catered Affair (1956), about a Bronx housewife planning her daughters wedding, did well commercially and gained much critical praise. Marty won three Academy Awards, including one for best picture. Some large-scale, black-and-white dramas enthralled both moviegoers and critics. All About Eve (1950), written and directed by Herman Mankiewicz, offers some of the wittiest dialogue ever written for the screen; it garnered six Academy Awards. From Here to Eternity (1953), concerning servicemen and their loves in Hawaii before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, received eight Academy Awards. On the Waterfront (1954), a gritty portrayal of New York City labor unions, also won eight Academy Awards, including a bestactor Oscar for Brando.

Censorship

Censorship of movies began to lighten by the end of the decade. The romantic comedy The Moon Is Blue (1953) was banned in many cities for its use of the word "virgin". However, in A Summer Place (1959) Sandra Dee is dragged to a doctor by her mother to make sure Dee's virginity is intact after a night on the beach with Troy Donahue.

The Woman's Picture

In Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which features allusions to and scenes from An Affair to Remember (1957), Tom Hanks's character refers to the latter movie as a "chick's picture." In the 1950s such a movie was known as a woman's picture. The melodramatic movie love story reached a pinnacle during the 1950s, rescuing the careers of such 1940s favorites as Lana Turner, Jane Wyman, and June Allyson, who was the top female star of the mid 1950s. Allyson teamed with James Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and Strategic Air Command (1955). Wyman paired with Hudson for Magnificent Obsession (1954) and All That Heaven Allows (1955). Turner followed Peyton Place (1957) with the hugely successful Imitation of Life (1959), a glossy remake of the 1934 movie based on Fannie Hurst's tear-jerking story about an interracial friendship between two women. In the mid 1980s viewers of cable television's superstation Turner Broadcasting Service selected the 1959 Imitation of Life as their favorite movie.

Star Actresses

Marilyn Monroe, Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, and Grace Kelly became popular movie stars of the 1950s because they appealed to a vast audience of women who looked to them as trendsetters. Kelly's movie career spanned the years from 1950 to 1956, when she left Hollywood to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. She starred in such Alfred Hitchcock-directed classics as Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), and Rear Window (1954), which was rereleased theatrically in 1983.

Musicals

A slew of Broadway musicals made it to the big screen during the 1950s. Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Show Boat (1951; the third film version of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein musical), Kiss Me Kate (1953), Call Me Madam (1953), Brigadoon (1954), Oklahoma! (1955), The King and I (1956), and South Pacific (1958) were enormously popular. Monroe and Jane Russell were marvelous in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), also adapted from a Broadway musical. Monroe donned a strapless hot-pink gown with a huge bow for the popular "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number.

M-G-M Musicals

M-G-M produced a new round of its highly popular musicals, including Singin in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). The studio's Gigi (1958)—Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's adaptation of a story by Colette—won nine Academy Awards. Judy Garland, the queen of the M-G-M musical in the 1940s, teamed with James Mason for the 1954 CinemaScope musical remake of the 1937 drama A Star Is Born, The star-studded premiere party was broadcast live on national television. Time magazine (25 October 1954) hailed the movie as "just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history." It was rereleased theatrically in 1983 with restored footage cut soon after the premiere.

Science Fiction and Horror

Although many grade-Z science-fiction and horror movies were released during the 1950s, some superior efforts in these genres were produced. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) are among the stellar examples of the decade's science-fiction movies.

Invaders

Youth-oriented horror movies such as The Blob (1958), starring Steve McQueen, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), starring Michael Landon, have become cult, if not critical, favorites. Horror blends with science fiction in a host of atomic-age movies in which insects and arachnids take on gargantuan proportions after a nuclear nudge. Them! (1954), about giant ants, and Tarantula (1955) are undoubtedly the best of the lot. The Fly (1958), another insect-oriented science-fiction/horror movie, features Vincent Price in one of his best efforts. Price also appeared in the 3-D horror classic House of Wax (1953). // Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) were also filmed in this process, which was soon abandoned because of the nuisance of wearing the special glasses required to view it.

Sex and Technology

As the battle between movies and television raged on into the 1960s, developments in film technology continued, resulting in seventy-millimeter film stock for wide-screen projection. However, movies turned increasingly to controversial subjects, violence, and sex and nudity in order to lure patrons into the theaters. Gone were the days when a film would be banned because one of its characters uttered the word "virgin."

Sources:

Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A to Z (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982);

David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars: The International Years (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972);

Ken Wlaschin, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Great Movie Stars and Their Films (New York: Harmony, 1979).

MOVIES

The Death of the Studio System

During the summer of 1961 20th Century-Fox took its back lot apart, a poignant symbol of the dismantling of the Hollywood studio system that became final later in the 1960s. Rather than creating motion pictures, the studios gradually assumed the role of financing and distributing films made by producers, directors, and actors not on the studio bankroll.

Rising Costs, Shrinking Audiences

Motion pictures entered the 1960s in fairly bad shape in general: fewer movies were being made, and they were attracting smaller audiences. The most common scapegoat was television, but as expenses increased so did the number of admissions required to produce enough revenue to cover them. Such increases were justified by some; after all, Ben-Hur(1959) had cost fifteen million dollars to make yet grossed one hundred million dollars. Not every movie could be Ben-Hur, but to studios it seemed a safer bet to invest in stars and spectacle in hopes of large profits than in low-budget films with unknown actors or stories. Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was released after years of delays and a cost of

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

thirty-seven million dollars. In addition, unions and guilds often insisted on better wages, driving their demands home with strikes that crippled the industry, and aggressive agents arranged increasingly sweeter deals for their clients, enabling actors such as Taylor and Marlon Brando to receive as much as one million dollars per

picture. To cut costs, studios resorted to filming outside the United States: in 1960 half of American studio films were made abroad, and more in 1961.

WEST SIDE STORY

It is common for a hit Broadway show to be adapted into a movie that, though possibly competent and generally entertaining, lacks the punch of the live show. Not so with the 1961 film version of West Side Story, which took a competent Broadway musical (1957) and turned it into a phenomenally popular movie. Set in contemporary New York City, the musical is a love story involving a Puerto Rican girl and an Anglo boy and the tensions their romance creates in their respective communities. Many consider it to be one of the greatest American film musicals of all time.

The same creative talents worked on both the musical and the movie. Leonard Bernstein composed the music, Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and Jerome Robbins provided the choreography. The movie's stars, Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, while adequate in their parts, did not even sing their own songs. What then made the movie so popular?

The market, for one. Whereas the Broadway audience consisted mainly of adults in New York who could afford the price of admission, the movie audience could include adults across the country as well as young people drawn to the Romeo-and-Juliet story about adolescent love. The movie soundtrack, released on record, popularized the music. Moreover, the movie, filmed on location in New York, seemed more real than the stage show, despite the fact that it has young hoodlums periodically breaking into song and dance.

Winning ten Academy Awards, second only to Ben-Hur (1959) with eleven, did not hurt the movie's reputation. In addition to winning for Best Picture, West Side Story took the Oscars for supporting actor, supporting actress, director, color cinematography, color art direction, sound, musical score, editing, and color costume design.

Source:

Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards (New York: Ballentine, 1988).

The Decline of the Production Code

Potential moviegoers who stayed away from the big screens were not necessarily watching the little screen at home: some were staying home in a silent protest against the nature of many of the films available, which became increasingly violent and sexual as the decade progressed. The movie industry had adhered to a self-imposed production code since 1934, but the code itself became less stringent through the 1960s. Consequently, subjects previously kept from the screen, including extramarital affairs, premarital sex, prostitution, homosexuality, and drug addiction, found their way into successful mainstream movies. Nudity also appeared for the first time in Hollywood pictures, most notably in The Carpetbaggers (1964). The code formerly maintained a "law of compensating values," in which characters who defied social conventions paid the price; but Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), in which a call girl ends up happily with a man who has been kept by a married woman, demonstrated clearly that either social conventions or the price paid for defying them had changed dramatically since the code had been adopted. Nor did many theaters limit their showings only to films that followed the production code or that met with the approval of the most energetic watchdog organization, the Catholic Legion of Decency. Such unapproved movies ranged from cheap exploitation flicks to quality foreign films and main-stream domestic offerings. Consequently, many lamented the dearth in "family entertainment." In particular, popular European films, such as I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969), steamed the screens with treatments of sexuality far more open than even the raciest American movie.

Concern over Content

Though the current motion-picture rating system was not inaugurated until the end of the decade, audiences had plenty of guides as to what might or might not be appropriate viewing material for themselves or their children, most noticeably the Catholic Legion of Decency (changed to the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures in 1965). Many Protestants and Catholics, for instance, agreed in their condemnations of films such as Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), to which the Legion of Decency gave its C (condemned) rating. While government censorship of films all but ended in the 1950s, cities and states often initiated attempts at regulation in response to morally outraged citizens.

Targeting Young Audiences

While some films often met with adult disapproval, their appeal to youth was obvious, and studios began to direct more of their efforts to this increasingly prosperous target audience. One such attempt included musicals released in 1965 such as Beach Blanket Bingo, Girl Happy, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. In addition, those who saw these movies were often attracted by stars and subjects they could not see on television. Especially popular were the James Bond films star-ring Sean Connery as Agent 007 of Her Majesty's Secret Service. Made in England, these films combined just enough sex and violence to titillate viewers but not enough to offend most. After the success of Goldfinger in 1964, the earlier Bond films Dr. No (1962) and From Russia, with Love (1963) were rereleased in 1965 and did better than many new films.

The Rebirth of the Industry

Another protest against American studio films was launched by independent filmmakers who advocated a "New American Cinema" as an alternative to what they viewed as the formulaic big-budget picture. However, their films never attracted near the number of moviegoers the studios did even at their lowest point, and by the mid 1960s movies appeared to be on the upswing again, drawing audiences lured by big-budget extravaganzas with exotic settings such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Cleopatra. As domestic films again gained favor, foreign films were offered less frequently to American audiences. By 1965 the American motion-picture industry had rebounded fully, and American pictures filled screens across America. Part of this productivity was fueled, ironically, by the success of television, whose productions were often filmed on studio lots, and by sales of older movies to television networks.

REGIONAL THEATER

Like opera, ballet has generally been considered an elite art in America. It seems surprising, there-fore, that one of the major trends in dance during the 1960s was a proliferation of regional ballet companies featuring young performers; in 1960 there were an estimated 150 such companies in the United States, and by 1968 the number had risen to 200. This development is less surprising, how-ever, given the fact that the country experienced a significant increase in regional theaters, galleries, and performances during the 1960s.

While some critics found the offerings of the New York theaters limited in the early 1960s, others praised the innovations and experiments that regional theaters such as Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., took on. Their sometimes precarious existence, already encouraged by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, was eased after 1965 by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Along with major regional theaters and companies stood more provincial ones with more conservative tastes. Even these were welcome, however, seen by commentators as a necessary part of developing an appreciation for live drama and dance in the general public and as a training ground for young artists and directors.

All of this was part of a general trend in America during the decade to expose more people to the arts and to encourage young talent. Television was seen as an especially pernicious threat, so to counteract its influence regional theaters and companies sought to offer quality entertainment featuring local talent. In addition, much of the social and political activism of the 1960s was translated into community-improvement efforts such as those represented by regional theaters.

Sources:

Tyrone Guthrie, A New Theatre (New York, Toronto & London: McGraw-Hill, 1964);

"Major Regional Theaters," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Part 2: K—Z, edited by John MacNicholas (Detroit: Gale, 1981), pp. 405-453.

Sources:

Richard S. Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass Medium (Madison 6c London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968);

David Shipman and others, The Chronicle of the Movies: A Year-by-Year History from 'The Jazz Singer" to Today (New York: Crescent, 1991);

Robert Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium (New York: Abrams, 1993).

Cinematic Orchestra

Jazz group

Cinematic Orchestra is regarded by many critics and fans as the brainchild of jazz composer, electronics aficionado, and producer Jason Swinscoe. Swinscoe brought together a group of musicians and vocalists to construct album tracks with a contemporary sound, but which also resonate with subtle references to film composers and jazz artists of the 1960s. The group's first album, Motion, prompted critical comparisons to the music of Herbie Hancock's classic album Headhunters, and to late 1960s' Miles Davis. However, Cinematic Orchestra has maintained its British identity by preferring soul influences to funk. The group often relies on the electric piano of co-composer John Ellis for a highly danceable yet cerebral form of dance jazz, recalling the early 1970s British progressive rock-jazz band Soft Machine and the contemporary Irish disc jockey, film soundtrack composer, and recording artist David Holmes.

In 1990 Swinscoe formed his first band, Crabladder, while enrolled as an art student at Cardiff College in Wales. Crabladder blended jazz and punk music forms, displaying Swinscoe's burgeoning interest in electronic sampling. When Crabladder disbanded in the mid-1990s, Swinscoe honed his sampling skills as a disc jockey at dance clubs and on pirate radio stations. His blending of 1960s' and 1970s' jazz with live jazz performances and electronic loops brought him to the attention of Quebec record label Ninja Tunes in 1997, and the label asked him to contribute to an anthology of electronic music. He contributed a recording for the 1997 anthology Ninja Cuts 3, and released remixes of recordings done originally by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut. Swinscoe's subsequent recordings with Cinematic Orchestra, according to All Music Guide critic Heather Phares, "built on this musical blueprint, letting a group of live musicians improvise over sampled percussion or basslines." Swinscoe collaborated on the extended play compact disc singles Channel One Suite and Diabolus with fellow Ninja Tunes artists Phil France on bass, Daniel Howard on drums, and saxophonist and keyboard player Tom Chant. The quartet formed the nexus of Cinematic Orchestra's debut album, Motion.

Motion derived from Swinscoe's solicitation of musical ideas from musicians to whom he had sent tape loops and recording samples. The group united in the studio to jam to the backing recording tracks. London's Independent Sunday critic Laurence Phelan took issue with the band's name: "To call this recording 'orchestral' is pushing it to tenuous extremes, but at least it's derived from live studio sessions." The use of samples and a turntable on the recording prompted Phelan to clarify, "Which is not to say it's an over-indulgent mess of styles (although it occasionally it is). But rather that it's a testament to the ever expanding parameters of dance music and a fascinating, listenable, sometimes danceable debut." Other critics hailed the album's release, and the group earned such accolades as an invitation to perform at the Director's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick in 1999. Motion was also voted album of the year by listeners of Gilles Peterson's Radio One program. Minneapolis Star Tribune critic Rod Smith noted: "British electronica maestro Jason Swinscoe isn't afraid to tackle the big sounds," or to "chop them up and shuffle them around." According to Smith, "The album introduced a welcome blast of vigor and tonal color into a genre too long dominated by the turgid, half-baked minimalism of DJ Shadow and his legions of fully baked imitators."

In 2001 Cinematic Orchestra released Remixes 98-2000, an album of remixes of songs by other artists. The group also released its official follow-up to Motion, the ambitious and critically lauded album Every Day. This sophomore effort marked Swinscoe's full-fledged collaboration with Phil France. For the album, the pair used a string quartet and enlisted the aid of rhythm-and-blues legend Fontella Bass ("Don't Mess Up a Good Thing," "Rescue Me") for the album's opening track, "All That You Give." The song was inspired by Bass's former husband, the late trumpet player Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Bass also sang on the album track "Evolution." The emotional catharsis stemming from singing a song about her deceased ex-husband caused Bass to cry. "Afterward, she said it was the first time she had let herself really grieve for him," Swinscoe told Smith. Every Day also featured British rap artist Roots Manuva on the song "All Things to All Men." The group began performing live to support their catalog, and received a standing ovation at the 2001 Montreux Jazz Festival.

In 2000 the group was invited to the Porto Film Festival in Portugal, where they performed live to a screening of Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent film Man with a Movie Camera. While the title song appeared on Every Day, Cinematic Orchestra also released the entirety of Swinscoe's score for the film in 2003. Toronto Life writer Mike Doherty wrote of the score: "It's captivating to watch Flowers play the kind of complex, rushing rhythms usually delivered by a sequencer but with spontaneity and visual flair. This orchestra has a beat." Asked by reporters what his plans are for the future, Swinscoe reportedly admitted that he is aiming for the cinematic heights, and hopes to work with major film directors in the future.

For the Record . . .

Members include Patrick Carpenter , turntables; Tom Chant , saxophone; John Ellis , keyboards; Luke Flowers , drums; Phil France , acoustic bass; Dan Howard , drums; Jason Swinscoe , composer and producer.

Group formed in United Kingdom, late 1990s; performed at Director's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony for Stanley Kubrick, 1999; released debut album, Motion, 1999; recorded and released sophomore effort, Every Day, 2002; released 1999 composed film score, Man with a Movie Camera, 2003.

Addresses: Record company—Ninja Tune, 222 Dominion #20, Montreal, Quebec H3J2X1, website: http://www.ninjatune.net. Website—Cinematic Orchestra Official Website: http://www.cinematicorchestra.com.

Selected discography

Motion, Ninja Tune, 1999.

Remixes 98-2000, Ninja Tune, 2001.

Every Day, Ninja Tune, 2002.

The Man with the Movie Camera, Ninja Tune, 2003.

Sources

Periodicals

Independent Sunday (London, England), October 3, 1999, p. 8; May 25, 2003, p. 15.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), June 27, 2003, p. 05E.

Toronto Life, June 2003, p. 52.

Online

"Cinematic Orchestra," All Music Guide,http://www.allmusic.com (October 24, 2004).

Ninja Tune Website, http://www.ninjatune.net (October 24, 2004).

—Bruce Walker

CINEMA CRITICISM

The discipline of psychoanalysis and the art of the cinema evolved in parallel at the beginning of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysts soon began interpreting the appeal and meaning of movies. As early as 1916 Hugo Münsterberg wrote The Film: A Psychological Study, in which he suggested that film transforms the external world into the mechanisms of the mind, including memory, imagination, attention, and emotion.

Although Freud himself had little interest in the cinema, one of his disciples, Hanns Sachs, served as a consultant to George Wilhelm Pabst's 1926 classic, Secrets of a Soul. This German expressionist film was the first serious treatment of psychoanalysis in film history, complete with rather sophisticated use of dream symbolism.

Since these early interdisciplinary efforts, a whole field of psychoanalytic film criticism has evolved. Systematic studies of movies first appeared in the 1950s in the French periodical, Cahiers du Cinèma. The Cahiers theorists subsequently appropriated Italian semiotics as well as the ideas of the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Film scholars influenced by Lacan and Derrida focus on the "deep structures" at work in movies and how meaning is generated in film. Lacan's most important student in the field of film theory has been Christian Metz, whose work has become standard reading in academic cinema studies programs.

The Lacanian approach to film criticism centers on how audiences experience movies. The camera creates a "gaze" or perspective on the events of the film's narrative. A key aspect of the Lacanian discourse is the concept of "lack," both as the phallocentric key to sexual difference and in the symbolic sense of viewing external reality in terms of absence and presence. These ideas have been appropriated by feminist semioticians like Laura Mulvey, who suggested that the woman's body is fetishized because it creates anixiety in men, to whom it represents "lack," i.e., castration. Moreover, the cinema is viewed as historically serving the interests of patriarchy, privileging the gaze of the male hero, while subordinating the female characters as the object of the gaze.

Interpretations of film based on Lacanian ideas have generated a good deal of criticism. Many have objected to the semioticians' methodology as top-heavy with theoretical formulations and too dismissive of the actual content of a film. In addition, a number of critics have pointed out that masculinity is regularly undermined in films and that male viewers often will identify with a female character. Moreover, male bodies are often fetishized in the cinema to the same extent as the female body.

Psychoanalytic film scholars have taken a number of different approaches that part ways with the Lacanian perspective. Bruce Kawin, Marsha Kinder, and Robert Eberwein, for example, have examined films from the perspective of Freudian dreamwork. Robert B. Ray and Krin and Glen Gabbard have taken a pluralistic approach to psychoanalytic film criticism, suggesting that Lacanian interpretations are reductionist and limiting, and that broadening one's theoretical perspective may be more useful when studying film.

Glen O. Gabbard

See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; Mannoni, Dominique-Octave; Psyché, revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l'homme (Psyche, an international review of psychoanalysis and human sciences).

Bibliography

Gabbard, Krin, and Gabbard, Glen O. (1987), Psychiatry and the cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Metz, Christian. (1982). The imaginary signifier. Psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mulvey, Laura. (1977). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In K. Kay, G. Peary (Eds.), Women and the cinema (pp. 412-428). New York: Dutton,.

Ray, Robert B. (1985). A certain tendency of the hollywood cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

MOVIES

Art and Money

Periods of great artistic activity require wealth and leisure. The prosperity of the American 1920s and the rise of new classes provided a public and a market for artistic endeavors. It takes money to buy a theater ticket or concert ticket; it takes time to attend; it takes previous experience or education to understand the performance. During the 1920s the arts became important to classes of Americans who had heretofore been indifferent to them. This awareness of the arts was concomitant with the development of mass media. In previous decades American art was nurtured in certain big-city enclaves mainly in the Northeast, particularly New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Newspapers did not have national distribution; there were no newsmagazines; there was no radio. But arts and letters became national news during the 1920s; artists and writers were newsworthy. Money makes headlines. The publicized record prices for paintings, statues, and rare books impressed people and in some cases stimulated their interest. It was characteristic of the era that genius and materialism were linked. There was a general belief that if something was really important, then it ought to be worth a lot of money.

Pioneers

The most spectacular development occurred in the movies. Nickelodeons became picture palaces as the movies—before and after talkies—became the most popular and most flexible form of culture. The resources of the Hollywood studios far outstripped the capacities of staged drama. The movie epic was established as an American genre. The directors who invented and refined the American motion picture—D. W. Griffith, Erich Von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford—were backed by extraordinary pioneer producers. The movie industry and studio system were nurtured by former garment manufacturers and salesmen, many of them foreign-born, who had the ability to think big and spend big. Often ridiculed by their intellectual hirelings for their mistakes of vocabulary and grammar, the important producers possessed the courage and ambition that made a golden era for American movies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the top studio, was run by a former junkman, Louis B. Mayer, and his frail production genius, Irving Thalberg. The four Warner brothers gambled on sound. Former glove salesman Samuel Goldwyn—whose speech idiosyncrasies became known as Goldwynisms—concentrated on producing movies that satisfied his standards of quality.

Stars

Even before the advent of talkies in 1927, movies achieved a prodigious audience as productions became increasingly lavish. The Hollywood studio system consolidated the power of the big studios that controlled the stars and the movie theaters. Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin were among the most widely recognized figures on earth. Silent-movie comedians were particularly popular: Harold Lloyd and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Source:

Deems Taylor, A Pictorial History of the Movies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943).

cinema Motion pictures as an industry and artistic pursuit. For much of its history, cinema has been commercially dominated by Hollywood. Public showings of silent moving pictures, with live musical accompaniment, began in the 1890s, but speech was not heard in a full-length film until The Jazz Singer (1927). By then cinema was big business with mass appeal. In Germany and Russia, startling technical innovations showed the creative possibilities of the medium. The 1930s saw the widespread introduction of colour. The growth of television in the USA during the 1940s profoundly altered film economics; the decline of Hollywood led to the rise of the independent producer and director. In post-war Europe filmmakers explored social and psychological themes with often disturbing candour. British cinema flourished in the 1950s and early 1960s, but has suffered since from a lack of finance and resources. The 1990s, with the development of computer-generated images, brought a new dimension to film. See also animation; cine camera; cinematography; cinéma vérité; documentary

MOVIES

Movies (short for moving pictures) are also called motion pictures or films. They were introduced in the United States in 1896 at a New York screening made possible by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison's (1847–1931) kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a device for viewing a sequence of pictures on an endless band of film using a projector invented by Thomas Armat. It was not until the early 1900s that the technology was used for entertainment.

In 1903 American director-photographer Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) made The Great Train Robbery, the first motion picture to tell a complete story. (Porter had earlier worked as a cameraman with Edison.) Produced by Edison Studios, the twelve-minute "epic" established a pattern of suspense drama that was followed by subsequent moviemakers. The age of the silent film was launched.

The popularity of movies escalated during the 1920s. Innovations in movie-making technology broadened the audience. In 1927 the first full-length talking picture was released, The Jazz Singer, starring vaudevillian Al Jolson (1886–1950).

The ever-improving technology of motion pictures and the advent of radio combined to spell the demise of vaudeville during the 1930s. By 1930 movie houses were attracting 100 million viewers a week at a time when the total population of the United States was only 120 million and weekly church attendance was less than 60 million. By 1932 all movies were talkies, and by the end of the decade all movies used technicolor, a trademarked method for making motion pictures in color.

With a theater in almost every town people in the United States flocked to the "picture shows." Hollywood images provided an escape from everyday life. As measured in total capital investment, motion pictures became one of the nation's leading industries. Like sports, amusement parks, and radio programs, movies were meant to appeal to everyone.

An increase in leisure time and a willingness by U.S. audiences to spend money on entertainment guaranteed movie houses would be well attended. Entertainment was no longer a singular experience; Hollywood movies shown in theaters throughout the country provided entertainment for a mass consumer audience.

See also: Amusement Parks, Baseball, Thomas Alva Edison, Radio, Vaudeville

by 1930 movie houses were attracting 100 million viewers a week at a time when the total population of the united states was only 120 million and weekly church attendance was less than 60 million.

cin·e·ma / ˈsinəmə/ • n. chiefly Brit. a movie theater. ∎  the production of movies as an art or industry: the history of American cinema.

cinema, see culture section of major powers: see also Hollywood.

cinema see motion pictures .

CINEMA

CINEMA. SeeFilm .

Movies. See Film.

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