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The 1930s: Modernizing Production

Melanie Bell

in Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema

This chapter discusses how the key features of the British film industry impacted women's labor. It sets women's work in the context of a production boom in the British film industry in the 1930s, a ... More

This chapter discusses how the key features of the British film industry impacted women's labor. It sets women's work in the context of a production boom in the British film industry in the 1930s, a time when the sector was modernizing after the introduction of sound, and film studios were keen to create a new image of themselves. The chapter shows how they achieved this by linking the modernization narrative to masculinity in fan and trade publications and sidelining women and their labor in the process. It then moves on to examine women's labor in costume, continuity, and editing/negative cutting — jobs that have come to define popular understanding of women's contribution to sound-era cinema. The chapter recounts some of the skills required to succeed in these roles and the processes through which they were assigned secondary status in film production hierarchies.Less

Paraconsistent Fictions and Discontinuous Logic

John Ó Maoilearca

in All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy

This chapter examines the relationship between paraconsistent logic and Laruelle’s apparently anarchic approach to epistemology and thought, utilizing the idea of the rate of cuts (film edits) to ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between paraconsistent logic and Laruelle’s apparently anarchic approach to epistemology and thought, utilizing the idea of the rate of cuts (film edits) to show how various speeds of thought are possible, some of them nonhuman.Less

The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

David Bordwell

in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies

This chapter traces the history of how filmmakers, critics, and theorists have conceived the viewer’s psychological activity. Throughout, these conceptions are treated as responses to changing trends ... More

This chapter traces the history of how filmmakers, critics, and theorists have conceived the viewer’s psychological activity. Throughout, these conceptions are treated as responses to changing trends in filmmaking across the history of cinema. For most creators, a common-sense or folk psychology has governed their creative decisions, but a few filmmakers developed more explicit appeals to schools of scientific psychology. The chapter considers how psychoanalysis has provided critics and filmmakers both an interpretive tool and a basis for assessing the viewer’s response. In particular, the chapter considers how American critics of the 1940s blended psychoanalysis with social psychology and how French theorists of the 1960s-1980s adapted ideas of Jacques Lacan to explain the role of cinema in reinforcing social constructs of identity. Other schools of scientific or philosophical psychology are considered: Hugo Münsterberg’s neo-Kantian view that cinema manifests essential processes of mind, the influence of Gestalt theory on Rudolf Arnheim, and the materialist reflexology of Eisenstein. The chapter concludes with a survey of the emergence of film theory that draws from the cognitive sciences in an effort to mount naturalistic explanations of film art and viewer response.Less

Doors Open …

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines the entry of Hal Ashby to the field of film editing. During the 1955 shooting of the film The Naked Hills, his friend Bill Otto took him along to watch. Determined to make the ... More

This chapter examines the entry of Hal Ashby to the field of film editing. During the 1955 shooting of the film The Naked Hills, his friend Bill Otto took him along to watch. Determined to make the most of the opportunity, Ashby volunteered to carry cans of film and soon was hired as an assistant editor. Ashby's entry into the editing world marked the start of a period when work took precedence over everything else. After this first editing job, Ashby applied to the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors (SMPFE) in order to join the union. His first film editing mentor was Bob Swink.Less

Originality and Convention: The Wild Bunch as a Western

Paul Seydor

in A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

Paul Seydor’s essay highlights how Peckinpah drew upon classic forms of cinematic representation while at the same time reconceiving them. By also concentrating on the innovative editing of The Wild ... More

Paul Seydor’s essay highlights how Peckinpah drew upon classic forms of cinematic representation while at the same time reconceiving them. By also concentrating on the innovative editing of The Wild Bunch, Seydor helps us appreciate how the film exemplifies both tradition and Peckinpah’s unique talent.Less

Getting Out

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines the problems associated with Hal Ashby's decision to do the film editing for the films Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out. It discusses Lorimar's complaint about the cost ... More

This chapter examines the problems associated with Hal Ashby's decision to do the film editing for the films Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out. It discusses Lorimar's complaint about the cost of the films which went way over the budget and the producers' disappointment over the final product which they deemed unfit for release. It discusses Ashby's editing of Let's Spend the Night Together which did not impress the band members except for Mick Jagger.Less

The Harsh Dialogue

in The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema

This chapter focuses on Jean Rouch's views about editing. Rouch had relatively little to say about the process of editing, and, from what little he did say, seems to have had distinctly contradictory ... More

This chapter focuses on Jean Rouch's views about editing. Rouch had relatively little to say about the process of editing, and, from what little he did say, seems to have had distinctly contradictory attitudes about this phase of the filmmaking process. On the one hand, he would often assert the great importance of editing and that the editing of a film should always be performed by someone who has had no involvement in the actual shooting. On the other, despite these assertions about the great importance of working with an editor, Rouch seems to have worked hard to keep it to a minimum, be it by his practices on location or back in the edit suite.Less

The Last Movie

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines the conflict between Hal Ashby and Producers Sales Organization (PSO) over the film 8 Million Ways to Die. It discusses the PSO's confiscation of the footage from Bob Lawrence ... More

This chapter examines the conflict between Hal Ashby and Producers Sales Organization (PSO) over the film 8 Million Ways to Die. It discusses the PSO's confiscation of the footage from Bob Lawrence and Ashby to have the editing done by new editors. It also describes the legal battle that followed after PSO decided to dismiss Ashby from the editing job. It also highlights some of the misguided editorial choices that could have been improved by Ashby.Less

1968

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines the developments in Hal Ashby's career and personal life during the year 1968. Ashby filed for divorce and give Shirley Citron $100 alimony per week. His collaboration with ... More

This chapter examines the developments in Hal Ashby's career and personal life during the year 1968. Ashby filed for divorce and give Shirley Citron $100 alimony per week. His collaboration with Norman Jewison, In the Heat of the Night was nominated for several Academy Awards. The film won several major awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, and the Best Film Editing for Ashby.Less

Mortal Recoil: Early American Execution Scenesand the Electric Chair

C. Scott Combs

in Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life

This chapter examines the transformation of bodies from “alive” to “dead” in early American films by focusing on the way they pictured execution and emulated the structure and logic of the electric ... More

This chapter examines the transformation of bodies from “alive” to “dead” in early American films by focusing on the way they pictured execution and emulated the structure and logic of the electric chair. Aspiring to shock and titillate with moving images, filmmakers resourced executions for a quick fix. Planned killing appealed as a chance to control time and inspired tricks of the cinematic frame. This chapter first considers the influence of execution on film editing and the importance of timing in editing screen events, as well as the way the electric chair hovers over the cinema of attractions. It then considers the change from “dying” to “dead” in films such as The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), McKinley's Funeral Cortege at Washington, DC (1901), Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). It also discusses human executions in American cinema as an illustration of electricity's theoretical instantaneity.Less

Norman

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines the role of film director/producer Norman Jewison in the career of Hal Ashby as a director. During Ashby's dark hours after he was fired from The Loved One, Jewison offered him ... More

This chapter examines the role of film director/producer Norman Jewison in the career of Hal Ashby as a director. During Ashby's dark hours after he was fired from The Loved One, Jewison offered him to edit The Cincinnati Kid. For the rest of the 1960s, Jewison's presence in Ashby's life guaranteed him not only regular, secure work but also devoted friendship. Jewison became a mentor to Ashby, and working alongside him gave Ashby a master class in how to operate as a director, starting with the way he stamped his authority on The Cincinnati Kid.Less

The Fixing of the Truth

in The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema

This chapter focuses on Jean Rouch's editing praxis. It shows that although Rouch may have been a Napoleon of the edit suite, dedicating himself with great energy to the resolution of technical ... More

This chapter focuses on Jean Rouch's editing praxis. It shows that although Rouch may have been a Napoleon of the edit suite, dedicating himself with great energy to the resolution of technical problems, he only availed himself of a limited range of editorial weapons. Central to his editorial praxis was the superimposition of a poetic commentary that he always performed himself. So although Rouch may have set great store by preserving the objective integrity of the events represented in the images, the viewer's relationship to those images is always heavily mediated through the subjectivity of his oral performance. In effect, this involved what one might call a fixing of the truth in a somewhat different sense, that is, a fixing as in the final stage of a photographic process, in which a definitive form or coloration is imparted to an image.Less

Starting Over

Nick Dawson

in Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

This chapter examines Hal Ashby's decision to start over and make a fresh start. The 1980s had been a challenging decade for Ashby. He had four films taken away from him in the editing room and then ... More

This chapter examines Hal Ashby's decision to start over and make a fresh start. The 1980s had been a challenging decade for Ashby. He had four films taken away from him in the editing room and then flop at the box office, had turbulent business relationships with Ray Stark and the Producers Sales Organization (PSO) and a nightmare partnership with Lorimar that descended into a prolonged legal battle. To start anew, Ashby stopped smoking dope, took greater care in his appearance and took long walks along the beach at Malibu which almost immediately made him look healthier. When his long-time friend Warren Beatty advised him see a doctor he was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas.Less

Parenthood: A Humanistic Close Reading

Wyatt Moss-Wellington

in Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film

Part IV looks at a film text often described as “humanistic” using the analytical methods established throughout the book. This chapter describes how Parenthood’s particular domestic realism offered ... More

Part IV looks at a film text often described as “humanistic” using the analytical methods established throughout the book. This chapter describes how Parenthood’s particular domestic realism offered a precursor to later suburban ensemble pictures, before breaking down the politics, ethics and psychology of the film. The latter half of the chapter goes into more detail on the narrative’s modelling of familial psychology, but also the way the film form itself represents many of its key concerns: Parenthood’s structure provokes the very confounding emotional causality across extended networks that the film speaks to.Less

The Art of Simplifying Events

Stephan Schwan

in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies

Proponents of cognitive film theory posit that by deliberately crafting how the events that make up a story are portrayed, films exert an influence on viewers’ information processing activities. ... More

Proponents of cognitive film theory posit that by deliberately crafting how the events that make up a story are portrayed, films exert an influence on viewers’ information processing activities. This may be done for a number of reasons, including suggestion of certain interpretations or evocation of particular affective states. Another reason elaborated by the chapter is to portray events in a manner that makes them more easily understood by the viewers. Accordingly, film editing provides a repertoire of design options for simplifying events, like skipping irrelevant event parts or choosing appropriate camera positions and distances. A number of studies are described that have scrutinized the psychological impact of these editing options more closely. Taking film ellipsis, canonical viewpoints and 180° principle as examples, empirical evidence is presented that demonstrates how careful selection of both temporal and spatial parameters may simplify filmic event depictions, facilitating the viewers’ comprehension in turn.Less

Modern Romance: Albert Brooks’s Anatomy of Love

Enid Stubin

in ReFocus: The Films of Albert Brooks

This chapter traces the ways in which film editing and romance swirl around each other in Modern Romance(1981). Through a close reading of Modern Romance, this chapter tracks the overlaps and ... More

This chapter traces the ways in which film editing and romance swirl around each other in Modern Romance(1981). Through a close reading of Modern Romance, this chapter tracks the overlaps and intersections of love and the perfectibility that movie-making holds out as possible. Modern Romance’s film editing scenes, which show the negotiations required to create a film provide a professional analog for Robert Cole’s personal (but not private) emotional world. For a film professional like Robert, security and stability requires working within and against the hierarchy of a studio that both thwarts and reflects the demands of love. Much the same is true in his relationship with Mary Harvard, showing how a self-reflexive film like Modern Romancedeploys notions of aesthetic control in film making to understand life and love outside of business hours.Less

The White Line Nightmare

Martyn Conterio

in Mad Max

This chapter describes the directing style of George Miller in Mad Max (1979). The Mad Max franchise is known for its epic car chases, and one might say, in general, Australian filmmakers are ... More

This chapter describes the directing style of George Miller in Mad Max (1979). The Mad Max franchise is known for its epic car chases, and one might say, in general, Australian filmmakers are cinema's leading experts of car crashes. Car chases, crashes, and staging furious action is where Miller's creative genius kick in. What sets him apart from other directors is not just his bravura use of practical effects and mounting dangerous-looking stunts for real, but how dangerous they can be in the world of the movie. In other words, unexpected elements are thrown in to liven up proceedings and keep the audience hooked into the virtuosic storytelling. The chapter then considers Miller's visual rock 'n' roll theory. Miller's use of montage merges Classical Hollywood editing with bits borrowed from Soviet-style montage. The marriage between east and west editing principles is made apparent in Mad Max's opening chase, where a series of parallel happenings coincide with the introduction of the hero (teased in disembodied shots or wide shots).Less

‘The Moose’ as Movie: Elizabeth Bishop as Screenwriter

J. T. Welsch

in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter considers the practical influence of film on Elizabeth Bishop’s writing by drawing out cinematic techniques in her narrative poem, ‘The Moose’. In a series of close readings, it analyses ... More

This chapter considers the practical influence of film on Elizabeth Bishop’s writing by drawing out cinematic techniques in her narrative poem, ‘The Moose’. In a series of close readings, it analyses specific splices or film-editing effects produced in the poem, before moving on to suggest that Bishop’s filmic techniques have significant implications for the titular creature’s climatic entrance. The moose’s appearance is related to beastly encounters in Krzysztof Zanussi’s Kontrakt (1980) and Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006) in order to emphasise how Bishop’s poem works against this cinematic trope, which typically marks some epiphany for the human involved. Instead, a crucial inconsistency or ‘trick shot’ used to exaggerate the moose’s height in the poem underscores the constructedness of that expectation.Less

The Birth of an Industry: Setting the Stage for the Screen

Lisa Nanney

in John Dos Passos and Cinema

Film emerged rapidly both as an art and as an industry during the same years Dos Passos was maturing as an artist and absorbing the boundary-breaking creative potentials wrought by modernist ... More

Film emerged rapidly both as an art and as an industry during the same years Dos Passos was maturing as an artist and absorbing the boundary-breaking creative potentials wrought by modernist innovations in all the arts. The process by which film achieved its privileged status as an engine of change was both cultural and aesthetic; as film developed this agency, it was driven by and in turn drove economic systems that were in flux during the decades before the economic Crash of 1929. These systems and this process fashioned film into the kind of potent political force that Dos Passos sought for his own art. The revolutionary interchange among the arts that transformed them in the 1920s galvanized Dos Passos’s practice in each discipline he was undertaking in that period—painting and set design, and writing plays and novels. Critics have long recognized the impact of the visual arts and particularly of moving pictures on the stylistic innovations that characterized his modernist novels. Dos Passos acknowledged that both Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938) were built on montage, and he specifically credited the impact of individual film pioneers such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein on his narrative style.Less