In Tuesday’s History of Cinema class, I discussed some ways that Hollywood franchises spawn entertainment vehicles beyond movies. One such vehicle is the Broadway musical, such as the 2008 Shrek: The Musical Broadway production. In an off-the-cuff remark, I said, “At least, there hasn’t been a Star Wars musical.” One student proved me wrong.
Although Star Wars: The Musical is not a Broadway show, produced in conjunction with George Lucas, LucasFilm, or 20th Century-Fox. It is a work produced by fans of the franchise, available for free download.
As much as Samsung and others have promoted “Smart TVs,” the reality is that consumers with tablets think their tablets are even smarter, and at least some of the time prefer to watch the content from their small device on the big screen.
If I’m going to watch something alone, I’ve been choosing the iPad apps, especially Hulu Plus, over the TV. Call me a miser, but I’m trying to save electricity!
Earlier today in my History of Cinema III, I screened one of my favorite films from last spring’s version of the same class: Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. I remember sensing that last year’s students enjoyed the spatial and temporal puzzle of the film. This year, I don’t think they enjoyed it as much.
The film is indeed challenging. It lacks any substantial screen time for the protagonist. Instead, we only hear a disembodied voice. However, we see Margarita Terekhova for the majority of the film. And, if I may spoil the film a bit, she plays the roles of the protagonist’s wife Natalya and mother Maroussia. This is a common strategy in the film, and it certainly was not done due to budgetary concerns.
There are many big themes in the film, including mortality, family, history, and even Russian society. The protagonist’s relationships with his mother and wife are perhaps the most important as they are both embodied by the same person in most of his memories. However, the two themes that struck me when I first saw the film and continue to inform my interpretation are memory and imagination. As the protagonist dies, he reflects on his life and the important people and events. As spectators, we see all of the events from his perspective. This is why we see actors playing multiple roles, as his association between them is so close that his subjective consciousness can’t distinguish them.
We also see how certain motifs recur throughout the film, such as the 1935 fire, the departure of his father, the red-headed girl he adored when he was a boy, and the Leonardo da Vinci monograph. All of these recur throughout the film in strategic places as he tries to make sense of his life. In each of them, he is able to explain them against his own memory of them and his grasping with what it means now that he’s approaching the end of his life. We can see his concern with legacy when he considers his son in nearly all of his memories, as he remembers himself through his son’s body.
The students either seem confused, bored, or underwhelmed by this representation. It’s also possible that I oversold the film, when I compared it to Persona. I screened the Bergman film earlier this semester, and it was a hit.
This evening Brooklyn’s Light Industry screened a rare Cuban film, Sara Gomez’s De Cierta Manera [One Way or Another] (1974). I had seen this film back as an undergraduate at UCSB, in Donna Cunnigham’s Film History: 1960 – Present class, well over a decade ago. Earlier this semester, I had wanted to screen this film for my own film history class, but a couple of factors made that difficult. First, I could only find a worn out VHS copy, which it lacked the image sharpness that I so vividly associate with seeing first this film. Second, I had booked two films for the day: this and the celebrated Memories of Underdevelopment. There simply wouldn’t have been time to screen both. I gave students the opportunity to see the film tonight for extra credit. One student took me up on the offer.
One Way or Another blends documentary footage with a narrative sequences. This was one of the most common stylistic qualities of post-Revolutionary Cuban cinema. Filmmakers utilized this strategy to locate the personal impact of the Revolution on ordinary Cubans. As the title suggests, the Revolution was going to change everyone’s lives…one way or another.
In this particular film, we see the social challenges of the Revolution through two institutions: organized labor and the schools. In the opening sequence of the film, we see a tribunal for Humberto. We learn later in the film that he is being judged for loafing, as this scene is repeated. Loafing in Revolutionary Cuba has consequences since it threatens productivity and also solidarity.
We also see the social impact of the Revolution in the schools. A few delinquent students, who are unaccustomed to formal education, complicate the educational mission of the Revolution. Moreover, their parents are also uneducated and ill-equipped to supervise their children’s education. Without education, the Revolution cannot adequately lift children out of poverty.
Like most Cuban films of the time, there was a mix of personal narratives in the film, which were fictional. As the film documents the tribunal and the challenges of the labor union, we see it through the character of Mario. Mario accuses Humberto of loafing at the hearing. When the tribunal scene is repeated towards the end of the film, we don’t understand why Mario testifies against Humberto, as we see that they are friends throughout the film. However, we learn in the moments following the second instance of the tribunal that Mario struggled with the decision to “rat out” his friend but ultimately decided to do so for the sake of the Revolution. Mario’s internal conflict makes for a more nuanced view of the Revolution. While Humberto’s decision to loaf, by staying with a young woman, hurt worker productivity and solidarity, it required Mario to betray his friend.
Throughout the film, Mario courts Yolanda, a young, educated and independent school teacher. It is through her character that we see the challenges in the schools. Her education gave her the opportunity to teach children, but she is constantly frustrated by the inability of her students to learn and behave appropriately in the classroom. (Believe me, I can appreciate her frustration.) In perhaps one of the most touching moments, she admits her frustration when she describes the cycle of a young girl going through school until the sixth grade, who then marries and has her own daughter who will go to the same school for her own sixth-grade education. Her soliloquy is punctuated by a scene of young black girls in short white dresses dancing provocatively in the village. This image contrasts with Yolanda’s own dress and gestures that, by comparison, characterize her as a schoolmarm.
The most direct consequence of the Revolution in this film is the urban redevelopment projects, which were common not only in post-Revolutionary Cuba but throughout Latin America and even some cities in the United States. A recurring image is the razing of the slums, which were being replaced by shiny, modern housing units. The wrecking ball that demolishes the old blighted housing reminds us of the immediate change that the Revolution brings. However, it is the rapid pace of change that the film takes most issue. It is clear that some Cubans were unprepared for the Revolution. This is despite the seemingly good intentions of the Revolution’s architects, who were curiously never represented in the film.
Generally speaking: a solution introduces a new problem requiring a workaround that not only negates the goals of the solution but actually serves to exacerbate the initial problem.
Today, I went to a shared office space and found a note reading “Do Not Turn Off” covering the light switch. The note is there because we have temporarily disabled the motion sensor for the overhead lights. Before today, if the motion sensor did not detect any movement after five minutes, or so I’ve calculated, the lights will go off. The goal is to conserve energy, which is obviously a worthwhile goal. However, the motion sensor rarely detects our very subtle movements. It has made working difficult because we have to stop what we’re doing to get up and move about the room every few minutes.
As a workaround, the facilities managers disabled the motion sensor, but it will only remain off if we do not turn off the light switch, hence the handwritten note. The problem is that now the lights won’t actually turn off. It would have been better if we simply reminded the last person in the office to turn off the lights each night, which we were doing anyway. We now have to keep the lights on for the sixteen hours each day (and forty-eight each weekend) when no one is here. It seems like a waste, right?
This reminded me of the CW and Fox television networks each implemented embargoes on streaming new episodes through their own sites or through Hulu. The CW, for example, had implemented a three-day embargo on streaming its own TV shows to boost the Nielsen Live + 3 day ratings, which is how the network calculates what to charge for advertising against its programs. The thinking was that it would encourage viewers to either watch a program live or within three days on their DVR to boost advertising revenue.
However, enterprising viewers who hadn’t recorded the program or watched it live decided to turn to the Internet to get their CW fix. And since they couldn’t find the program on cw.com or Hulu, they would turn to unauthorized sources, such as torrents.
Now, not only are CW viewers skipping the live broadcasts or DVR viewing, they are even skipping the ads that come with online streams on cw.com or Hulu, hence reducing the overall impressions and advertising revenue.
Earlier today, news broke that This American Life had retracted the episode “Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory,” because Daisey had fabricated crucial parts of his report on working conditions in the Chinese factories that manufacture Apple products. The immediate reaction on the Mac Rumors message board, for example, has been almost unanimous outrage against Daisey for making false claims. I too am upset but for an entirely different reason: he didn’t break character.
Having studied documentary film at various points in my academic life, you learn that you can communicate truth with fiction. For most of film history, filmmakers such as Robert Flaherty, Chris Marker, and Errol Morris, have played fast and loose with facts to communicate a larger truth to an audience. I think Daisey, who is an essayist and not a journalist, is working in a similar vein. His monologue and performance, which I saw in November at the Public Theater, is absolutely compelling. After hearing The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, you leave with a very simple message about how our electronic stuff comes at a human cost.
Daisey’s performance is an excellent example of what art can do. After nearly two years of performing in theaters throughout the United States, January’s This American Life broadcast seemed to have an effect in the world outside of the theater. There was the New York Times series on the iEconomy. There were petitions delivered to Apple Stores protesting the working conditions in Foxconn factories in China. And there was the Nightline investigation into one of the Foxconn factories, which I found as too short and too soft. Whether Daisey was making up the facts in his performance seems almost a non-issue because he had pressed the public into action, which is what great political art should do.
However, I’m upset with Daisey because he used his exaggerated, composite, or even fabricated facts, which made for a great story, and took them to journalistic venues. He wrote an impassioned op-Ed in New York Times. He went on CBS Sunday Morning, on MSNBC on The Leonard Lopate Show, and of course This American Life. Once he leaves the theatrical environment, he’s engaging in a different form of performance. Perhaps he thought that by disclosing that many crucial facts were in fact fabricated, he would undermine the argument at the heart of his performance. Once he went to these non-theatrical venues, he must have faced a tough choice: either disclose that his report was based in part on fabrications or to avoid spreading his message beyond the stage.
Instead, he chose not to break character. He continued performing in public. Now that This American Life has retracted his story, it will sadly set back the cause of justice for the workers who make our stuff. But I don’t know how to get people to actually think about all of our electronic stuff, Apple-branded or not, and the means of their production.
As we discussed in class, the framing in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul almost entirely contains the characters in a confined space. One of my favorite instances of this is when Emmi and Ali are waiting for their order to come at the restaurant where “Hitler used to eat.”
After one of the most uncomfortable waiter-and-diner scenes imaginable, the camera framing moves from medium close-up to a long-shot. Emmi and Ali are very small, and they are dwarfed by the dining room’s structure. I see this as a way of expressing the insurmountable social circumstances that Emmi and Ali are going to face after their wedding. This is not going to be a socially sanctioned relationship. The subsequent scene reinforces this. Emmi calls her children to announce her matrimony, to which they react with utter disgust and contempt.
Do you recall any other scenes where the framing or staging expresses the difficulty of Emmi and Ali’s situation?
Today we saw two films: Daisies (1966) and The Red and the White (1967). As we discussed, in both films, the state becomes an important concept that we hadn’t yet seen in our films. More or less, the films of the European New Wave, such as Breathless, Cleo from 5 to 7, and Persona, and the American ones, particularly are more or less about personal experiences. But since the films in Eastern Europe were made under a starkly different political system than Sweden, France, and the United States.
One of the reasons you saw a film as daring as Daises in the 1960s was because of the lead up to the Prague Spring in 1968. There was a degree of liberalization happening in Czechoslovakia that made for a brief period of innovative filmmaking. However, as Thompson and Bordwell explain, the movement was short lived and many of the films made under that regime were banned after the Soviet suppression in 1968. Nevertheless, the state was a subject in each of these films. However, in no time do you see any explicit references to the state in the film, perhaps with the exception of the old men the sisters take to dinner.
As for The Red and the White, we are beginning to see some of the patterns of what makes the film great. You see the cruelty of the armies battling each other. You see the lack of focus on a single character. You see the anticipation of brutality in each scene, as it unfolds and then we pass on to another. And, of course, you see the camera function as an witness to all of the battle between an amalgam of people fighting in the Russian Civil War.
On Tuesday night, ABC News aired its exclusive report on the working conditions at one of the Foxconn factories where almost all of Apple’s products are produced. I was looking forward to the seeing the report because of my enthusiasm for Apple and because I had become more interested in Foxconn’s production methods since seeing Mike Daisey’s monologue The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs last November. To be fair, I was skeptical from the beginning that a commercial television network would broadcast a scathing report against Foxconn and Apple, and I was overall disappointed by the report portraying the Foxconn factories as little worse than mind-numbing labor.
I appreciated that Bill Weir, the story’s reporter, acknowledged the relationship between ABC/Disney and Apple at the onset. Not only are both companies heavily financially invested in each other, Disney often is the software to Apple’s new hardware. For example, when Steve Jobs demonstrated the original iPhone’s movie playback capability in his famous 2007 keynote, it was Pirates of the Caribbean on the new screen. Most disclosures seem innocent enough, but this one stuck with me. Out of all the news organizations in the United States, why did the one that is most owned by the Steve Jobs Trust get this scoop?
The abbreviated length of the report hindered the ability to investigate the factory throughly. Nightline only runs for twenty-five minutes, and once you subtract the advertisements, we were left with less than twenty minutes of actual news. Moreover, since the report aired on a major broadcast network, it needed to brief the audience at the expense of covering the details about the factory and its human toll. For example, instead of hearing about how popular these devices are, I would have liked to seen more than one shift of workers on the factory floor and perhaps even the shift change. It would have also been nice to have see how they hire from the nearly 3,000 new applicants each week. Also, could we have seen at least one former employee or did they all move into management and out of poverty?
Weir and his crew must have been challenged by what seemed to be Foxconn showing for the cameras. While it was unprecedented that cameras were given almost full access to the factory floor and its employees, Foxconn knew about the reporters and FLA inspector and the news crew was escorted for their entire visit. The presence of management during an inspection or investigation can be chilling for those being interviewed. What would happen to an employee if she or he spoke candidly to Weir, once the cameras and reporters were gone, other than complain about the wages and the loneliness. What if they spoke about happen what happens to misbehaving or under-performing employees?
I never expected this report to shock anyone or make any real impact, as such is broadcast journalism in the conglomerate era. After all, this was a report aired by a commercial broadcast network, owned by a media conglomerate, that depends on advertising and the approval of its shareholders. However, this might be the perfect opportunity for a competing news operation, such as CBS, NBC or CNN, who have vast resources and no substantial relationship with Apple, to follow up. If only Bob Costas covered technology and labor.
As we saw this week in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), Hollywood began to accept films that took greater risks in favor of the expensive epics it was releasing in the 1960s. As we discussed in class, with the explosive popularity of television in the 1950s, the roadshow film was Hollywood’s most profitable. Thompson and Bordwell note that almost all films released in the 1960s earned less than a million dollars at the box office.1
The drinking and the fighting made Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? a film for mature audiences.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? provided Hollywood that opportunity. It was based on a respected Edward Albee play that opened in 1963. It also drew great criticism from the same Catholic establishment that had pushed for the Production Code thirty years later. Lastly, it also gave Hollywood the opportunity to release films in a different ways.
Many in Hollywood anticipated the film for months before its release in Los Angeles and New York in June 1966. Critics were worried that the language in the film would be too much for movie audiences. However the language did not seem to offend many who saw the film in its early days. One fifteen year-old patron, who attended with his mother, quipped about the language, “I’ve heard worse,” but another patron did take note of “all that drinking, from the very beginning to the very end.”2
Since the beginning of film exhibition in the United States, film censorship was an all or nothing proposition. Either a film was released to all audiences or it was available to no one. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was unique in that it was released for “Mature Audiences” only. In fact, Warner Brothers had added a clause in its contract with exhibitors that it would not admit children under 18 without a parent.3
Hollywood was undergoing a once-in-a-generation change at the time. The Production Code had been one of the most stubborn institutions of the American Film Industry. Former MPAA chief, Eric Johnson, had argued that the Code was necessary to avoid states and localities instituting their own censorship boards. However, the new MPAA head Jack Valenti had taken a different view than his predecessor. He saw the Code as an impediment to the industry’s survival. This was a conflict between old and new. In the film industry trade Moving Picture Daily, Martin Quigley Jr. declared the “Code is dead.”2 It remains one of the great Oedipal ironies in film history as it was his father, Martin Quigley, who co-author the original Code in 1930.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? helped inaugurate a new era in film history. New York Times film reporter and critic Vincent Canby asked, “how can producers make admittedly adult films without alienating a mass audience that includes children?”4 Hollywood’s answer would be to segment its mass audience. The growth of television and the changing American culture forced many media industries to segment their audiences as a way to survive in the new 1960s media landscape. Radio did so by creating music formats, and magazines did so by specializing instead of reaching a mass audience, such as Time and the Saturday Evening Post once did. Hollywood segmented its audience by age, and by doing so, a new sophisticated cinema would emerge in the United States.
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