American transcendental vision: Emerson to Chaplin

Ralph Waldo Emerson\u27s publication of Nature in 1836 began a process of creating a new condition of American thinking, severed from European cultural and intellectual influences. The subsequent lectures The American Scholar and The Divinity School Address furthered this process, calling for an original American literature. Emerson\u27s writing called consistently for poets with the ability to see past the material, apparent world to the world of eternal forms, which shaped nature in accordance with a divine moral imperative. Through this connection, man-as-poet would discover God in himself. In short, Emerson effectively transferred divinity from Unitarian doctrine to the individual, thereby asserting each individual as the center of his own moral universe. Emerson\u27s prose utilizes visual metaphors to express ideas which escape conventional language usage. The poet, according to Emerson, would have the ability to trace words back to their original associations with things, and thus reveal the true world of facts. His emphasis on seeing (in all aspects of that term) dominates Emerson\u27s writing and determines an aesthetic which is as much visual as it is verbal. Emerson\u27s theories found disciples in Thoreau and Whitman, but the most interesting extension of his aesthetic came with the development of the motion picture. In the early twentieth century, D. W. Griffith singlehandedly changed the status of films from sideshow amusements to narrative art. Griffith\u27s techniques for creating visual narrative were intuitive and inspired from his imagination, an essential quality of the Emersonian poet. Griffith\u27s own moral imperative was similar to Emerson\u27s; he envisioned a medium which could educate more effectively than language. Charles Chaplin was, from 1920 through 1936, the most recognizable figure in the world because of his unique screen comedies. Chaplin\u27s enduring character, the Tramp, evokes much of Emerson\u27s qualities of the poet in that he envisioned the world beyond the apparent, and creatively reconstituted this world in the way Emerson had done with visual metaphor. Chaplin combined the humanism of Emerson with the democratic possibilities of Whitman to create a uniquely American cinema with universal appeal. Chaplin\u27s body of work remains America\u27s most logical extension of Emersonian philosophy

Exploring Computer Vision for Film Analysis: A Case Study for Five Canonical Movies

We present an exploratory study in the context of digital film analysis inspecting and comparing five canonical movies by applying methods of computer vision. We extract one frame per second of each movie which we regard as our sample. As computer vision methods we explore image-based object detection, emotion recognition, gender and age detection with state-of-the-art models. We were able to identify significant differences between the movies for all methods. We present our results and discuss the limitations and benefits of each method. We close by formulating future research questions we plan to answer by applying and optimizing the methods

How To Hit The Ground: Motion And Measurement In Moving Pictures Before The Great Crash

How to Hit the Ground: Motion and Measurement in Moving Pictures before The Great Crash Will Schmenner Karen Redrobe, Advisor On December 21, 1914, the Keystone Film Company released Tillie’s Punctured Romance, directed by Mack Sennett. Roughly seven weeks later, depending on where one lived in North America, D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation (1915). For cinema and media studies, this moment launched the form of the classical Hollywood feature-length narrative—the roughly ninety-minutes to three-hour film that since became ubiquitous. The two movies, despite sharing a longer-than-normal duration, could hardly be more different. The Birth of a Nation purports to be history. President Woodrow Wilson was famously quoted as saying, “It’s like writing history with lightning.” Griffith carefully designed his broad overarching themes about race and gender so that they would drive the narrative. On the other hand, Tillie’s Punctured Romance pieces together a narrative that is often seen as secondary, at best, to the slapstick comedy animating the picture. My dissertation delves into this difference, which cannot be solely contributed to slapsticks desire to burlesque Griffith. By building up an argument from the forms that bodily motion took in the shots, across the edits, and in the narrative structure of Buster Keaton’s 1920s features, I argue that cinema and media studies needs to reconsider how it thinks about so-called non-narrative techniques and passive audiences. In short, Keaton worked with the visual habits of his audiences to create a set of non-narrative techniques that make up the very narrative structure of his movies. By engaging with the bio-politics of bodily motion in the 1920s, Keaton was able to take the well-established visual habits of an industrializing America and tactically alter them to critique how bodies are moved and monitored, who controls the moving of those bodies, and who sets the understanding of efficient, permissible, and effective motions. In the context of The First Red Scare (1920 – 1921) and what John Dos Passos called “the deportations delirium,” Keaton’s comedy offered a more realistic depiction of how disjointed, contingent and chaotic the experience of everyday life could be

Comedy: An Annotated Bibliography of Theory and Criticism

From Plato to Umber-to Eco comedy has been a subject of perennial interest. In the 1980s there have even been two attempts, one scholarly and one fictional, to recreate the "lost" book on comedy by Plato's pupil Aristotle: by Richard Janko in Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II, which also returns us to the ancient "Tractatus Coislinianus"; and by Eco in The Name of the Rose, where murder fails to prevent disclosure of the treatise (see items 216 and 274 below). So the time seemed propitious to gather and annotate the best that has been published about comedy in a bibliography of larger scope than the one by E. H. Mikhail, Comedy and Tragedy: A Bibliography of Critical Studies (Troy: Whitston, 1972), which included only about four hundred items. This book is intended to provide a better guide through the maze of comic theory and criticism than has hitherto existed

Jake Wells Enterprises and the Development of Urban Entertainments in the South, 1890-1925

This dissertation explores the development of commercial entertainments and film exhibition in the urban South around the turn of the last century through the growth and decline of Jake Wells Enterprises. A former professional baseball player, Wells invested in a wide variety of public amusements, with the core of his early business centered on establishing and organizing a string of vaudeville, popularly priced, and legitimate theaters throughout the largest cities in the region, a network he later transitioned to showing exclusively motion pictures. A thorough analysis of period newspapers, trade journals, and some business records covering Wells’ career provides much-needed evidence for film and cultural historians wishing to understand the genesis and evolution of public amusements in the region, and its negotiation of traditional social and cultural institutions. In the 1890s, Wells played and managed several professional baseball teams in the South. The sport educated players and spectators alike to both the values and creed of New South progress, and to rising tensions confronting the intersection of modern and traditional forms of culture. Using his experiences and contacts gained in baseball, Wells helped foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation required for the progress of media industries in the region, establishing social networks of knowledge and improving distribution flows of entertainment. The dissertation explores how race and the genteel emerged as regional characteristics most influential to the success of this conversion in many urban areas. Protestants and evangelical culture served as the bulkhead supporting opposition to new amusements. Wells’ expansion plans and violations of Sabbath day laws evoked a “spatial” battle between commercialism and religion where political, social, and cultural power drawn from place and identity were challenged and reconfigured. Another chapter explores the exhibition and reception of early Civil War films in the region. Wells and other exhibitors were influential in their production and circulation nationwide, and positioned cinema as an alternative shrine to commemorate the Lost Cause in many communities. The last chapter shows how Wells failed to meet local demands and consumer desires in competition with the rise of national chain theaters and Hollywood’s vertical integration

Sexual expression and the romantic ideal explored through an ‘American’ style of dance in dance-led dream ballets within Hollywood film musicals 1935-1956

Dream ballets were a regular feature of Hollywood film musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, especially at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but they have received limited academic study. An understanding and exploration of these dream ballets in the context of meaning created through dance and choreography is largely missing. There has been some critical debate about the nature of dream ballets within integrated film musicals but with limited understanding of dance as an abstract art form and its intention to communicate emotions. Mostly the existing scholarship offers psychoanalytic interpretation adapting ideas from Freud’s dream theory. Focusing on dream ballets, this thesis will explore through primary research in American film archives and textual analysis, the creation of a new style of ‘American’ choreography and musical performance as core syntax within the integrated narrative musical. This research will examine how this new style and creative process impacted on the representation of male and female genders in dance, how it determined the internal dream protagonist’s perspective, and how the complex layering of codes was employed to avoid the Production Code Administration regulations. The first dream ballet identified within the corpus is a ballet featured in the Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) choreographed by Albertina Rasch. The final dream ballet identified within the corpus is ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’ ballet choreographed by Jerome Robbins for The King and I (1956). The corpus includes over twenty musical films that include dream ballets

Jake Wells Enterprises and the Development of Urban Entertainments in the South, 1890-1925

This dissertation explores the development of commercial entertainments and film exhibition in the urban South around the turn of the last century through the growth and decline of Jake Wells Enterprises. A former professional baseball player, Wells invested in a wide variety of public amusements, with the core of his early business centered on establishing and organizing a string of vaudeville, popularly priced, and legitimate theaters throughout the largest cities in the region, a network he later transitioned to showing exclusively motion pictures. A thorough analysis of period newspapers, trade journals, and some business records covering Wells’ career provides much-needed evidence for film and cultural historians wishing to understand the genesis and evolution of public amusements in the region, and its negotiation of traditional social and cultural institutions. In the 1890s, Wells played and managed several professional baseball teams in the South. The sport educated players and spectators alike to both the values and creed of New South progress, and to rising tensions confronting the intersection of modern and traditional forms of culture. Using his experiences and contacts gained in baseball, Wells helped foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation required for the progress of media industries in the region, establishing social networks of knowledge and improving distribution flows of entertainment. The dissertation explores how race and the genteel emerged as regional characteristics most influential to the success of this conversion in many urban areas. Protestants and evangelical culture served as the bulkhead supporting opposition to new amusements. Wells’ expansion plans and violations of Sabbath day laws evoked a “spatial” battle between commercialism and religion where political, social, and cultural power drawn from place and identity were challenged and reconfigured. Another chapter explores the exhibition and reception of early Civil War films in the region. Wells and other exhibitors were influential in their production and circulation nationwide, and positioned cinema as an alternative shrine to commemorate the Lost Cause in many communities. The last chapter shows how Wells failed to meet local demands and consumer desires in competition with the rise of national chain theaters and Hollywood’s vertical integration

Jean-Luc Godard and the other history of cinema

Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998) is a video work made up of visual and verbal quotations of hundreds of images and sounds from film history. But rather than simply telling (hi)stories of cinema, Godard makes a case for cinema as a tool for performing the work of history. This is partly because the film image, by virtue of always recording more of the real than was anticipated or intended, necessarily has history itself inscribed within its very fabric. It is also because montage, as the art of combining discrete elements in new ways in order to produce original forms, can be seen as a machine for realising historical thought. This thesis examines these ideas by discussing Godard's account of the role of cinema in the Second World War, and by analysing some of his recent work as examples of historical montage which attempt to criticise our current political climate through comparison with earlier eras. After a first chapter which sets out Godard's argument through an extensive commentary of Histoire(s) 1A and B, a second chapter discusses Godard's depiction of the invention of cinema and traces a complex argument about technology and historical responsibility around the key metaphorical figure of the train. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Godard's historical approach to cinema allows him to maintain a critical discourse with regard to the geopolitical realities of late twentieth-century Europe (Germany, the Balkans), but also to the communications and business empires that have developed over the past few decades. A final chapter offers a detailed consideration of the nature of Godard's cinematic quotation and seeks to explicate the apocalyptic rhetoric of his late work. Aside from Histoire(s) du cinema, films discussed include Nouvelle Vague (1990), Allemagne neuf zero (1991), For Ever Mozart (1996) and Eloge de l'amour (2001)

Challenging Fragmentation: Overcoming the Subject-Object Divide through the Integration of Art-Making and Material Culture Studies

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This practice-led thesis explores ways in which to integrate art and material culture studies as a manifestation of philosophy’s process thread. In doing so, its goal is to generate a praxis which is able to come to holistic terms with the fragmenting dualism of subject-object binaries. By seizing my own subjectivity in its representation of this problem, the thesis develops a performance-led practice which seeks to overcome the barriers that its divisive ‘I’ presents to process. This interdisciplinary project is an explicit response to the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche; his bearing helps to constitute its methodology and repertoire as his presence is creatively teased from the pages of his own books. Part One of the thesis discusses how the mimetic aims of artistic representation were harnessed to challenge my own subjectivity’s singular sense of authority. Thereafter, Nietzsche’s pre-modern temperament comes to enable a holistic consideration of the perceptual ambiguity within Jacques Lacan’s geometric model of ‘seeing things’. Part Two engages with representation as a method of making difference for the bridging of subject-object divisions. This occurs as subjective experience and is extended to some inorganic others, producing creative outcomes which aim to access a cosmological principle of affect that is identified with Nietzsche’s thesis of will to power. The third part of this thesis aligns the research aim, of making apparent the oneness of the cosmos, with the shamanic dimensions of some vintage slapstick cinema. In its development, it comes to terms with the subjective gaze and identifies process-led strategies for challenging and changing its outlooks. This provides a background for Part Four, which marks the beginning of my attempts to engage the gaze of other people in processes that procure and ideally affect their perspectives. While the first four parts of the thesis demonstrate the progress of the research project through the deployment of art and its affecting capacities, its final two parts put the work of philosophy into aesthetic effects, and represent artworks that constitute elements of the thesis itself. Part Five evidences my art practice re-engaging with the world through a project which holistically involves the outlooks of subjects, whilst nevertheless challenging their perceptual precepts. Part Six discusses a performative experiment that consolidates and tests the research findings in a potentially affective structure, expressed through Laurence Halprin’s RSVP cycle. Finally, as it reflects on the potential healing capacities of my practical research and the possibilities for ‘doing’ philosophy, the thesis details how an art-making that embraces both visual and material cultures through the eventness of performance might be able to overcome the problematic perceptual divides that limit the progress of process logics.AHRC, SCUD

Kodak\u27s worst nightmare Super 8 in the digital age: A cultural history of Super 8 filmmaking in Australia 1965-2003

This project charts the extraordinary history of the Super 8 film medium, a popular amateur home movie format first introduced in 1965 and largely assumed to have disappeared with the advent of home video technologies in the early 1980\u27s. Kodak\u27s Worst Nightmare investigates the cultural history of the Super 8 medium with an emphasis on its (secret) life since 1986. lt asks how (and why) an apparently obsolete consumer technology has survived some 35 years into a digital future despite the emergence of technologically-advanced domestic video formats and Eastman Kodak\u27s sustained attempts since the mid-80s to suppress, what is for it, a patently unprofitable product line. Informed by the work of Heath (1900), Zimmermann (1995), and Carroll (1996), this project takes the unusual step of isolating a specific amateur film medium as its object of study at the centre of a classic \u27nature vs. nurture\u27 debate. Arguing against a popular essentialist position which attributes the longevity of Super 8 to its unique, irreplaceable aesthetic, Kodak\u27s Worst Nightmare proposes that Super 8 film has been a contested site in a social, cultural, political, and economic nexus where different agencies have appropriated the medium through the construction of discourses which have imposed their own meanings on the use and consumption of this cultural product. In an extraordinary cycle of subjugation, resistance and incorporation, this project finds that the meanings and potentials of Super 8 have been progressively colonised by differing institutions - firstly by Eastman Kodak (\u27domestic\u27 Super 8), secondly by the alternative,independent film movement (\u27oppositional\u27 Super 8 and \u27indie\u27 Super 8), and finally by the mainstream film and television industry (\u27professional\u27 Super 8 ). In an amazing contradiction, it is argued that Super 8 in its current incarnation has emerged as the exact opposite of Kodak\u27s original discursive construction of its amateur status - it has become a professional medium for commercial production. Drawing together related work in the histories of domestic photography and communications technologies, and the cultural practice of everyday life, this project contributes to an area which is seriously undertheorised in the literature of film theory and cultural studies- the social, political and cultural role of amateur film technologies