Creativity and commerce: Michael Klinger and new film history

The crisis in film studies and history concerning their legitimacy and objectives has provoked a reinvigoration of scholarly energy in historical enquiry. 'New film history' attempts to address the concerns of historians and film scholars by working self-reflexively with an expanded range of sources and a wider conception of 'film' as a dynamic set of processes rather than a series of texts. The practice of new film history is here exemplified through a detailed case study of the independent British producer Michael Klinger (active 1961-87) with a specific focus on his unsuccessful attempt to produce a war film, Green Beach, based on a memoir of the Dieppe raid (August 1942). This case study demonstrates the importance of analysing the producer's role in understanding the complexities of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter - an undercover raid and a Jewish hero - disturbed the dominant myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be intractable ideological as well as financial problems. The paper concludes that the concerns of film historians need to engage with broader cultural and social histories. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture on 02 Aug 2016 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1199322

Encantamento do rosto: poses e retratos de cinema

The purpose of this article is to describe a set of photographs of Eliane Lage (1928-), a movie actress featured in Caiçara, Ângela, Sinhá Moça and Ravina - the first three produced by Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz (1950-1954), and the fourth by Cinematográfica Brasil Filmes. Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz aspired to be one of the largest film producers in Brazil and, accordingly, its Advertising Department set out to establish Eliane Lage as a great movie star, like those in the world's dominant movie industries. This paper brings to light some photographs which, coupled with information published in the press, were intended to tell the public at large who Eliane Lage was by exploring extensively certain aspects of her "biography", such as her privileged background, her denial of stardom, her detachment, her passion for her husband, and her love of nature. The picture selection includes: a photo essay by the architect Gregori Warcharchik; studio marketing photographs; snapshots taken by photographers at the time; and pictures that are part of the actress's personal collection

"Common People with Common Feelings:" Pauline Kael, James Agee, and the Public Sphere of Popular Film Criticism

Cet article traite des écritures de Pauline Kael et James Agee comme exemples conducteurs de la rhétorique de la critique du film populaire états-unien, caractérisées par trois éléments : l’effort pour se distancier des autres critiques et de l’industrie du spectacle; la volonté de mettre l’accent sur la nature personnelle et subjective de leur perception de chacun des films; et l’utilisation de l’écriture comme catalyseur pour une sphère publique de réaction au film.This essay focuses on the writings of Pauline Kael and James Agee as the leading examples of the rhetoric of American popular film criticism, which the author suggests is chatacterized by three elements: the critic's effort to distance him / herself from both other critics and the entertainment industry; to emphasize the personal and subjective nature of his / her responses; and to use his / her writing as the catalyst for a public sphere of film response

Cinema and the invention of modern life

Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums

The Emergence of the Museum in the `Spectacular' Nineteenth Century

this paper I want to demonstrate the possible value of this approach with a discussion of a specific case: the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands. I use the Teyler case as an example, to argue that the museum, as it emerged in the early nineteenth century, belongs to the same, spectacular realm as the popular and commercial media of the nineteenth century. Following Jonathan Crary's thesis on the emergence of a new type of observer in the early nineteenth century, I argue that the nineteenth-century museum should be understood as part of a new, visual regime, in which the arrangement and display of objects functioned as a novel way of acquiring and disseminating knowledg

The Ephemeral as Transcultural Aesthetic: a Contextualization of the Early Films of Ozu Yasujiro

This paper argues that through the privileging functions of camera lenses both fragmenting and highlighting, and through the formal processes of camera movement and editing, cinema is the material manifestation of an aesthetics of the ephemeral of modernity par excellence, being characterized by the time-space separation of modernity, and the accompanying reflexive ‘ordering and reordering’ of knowledge. Therefore, following Anthony Giddens’ sociological understanding of the ‘consequences of modernity’, this paper seeks to theorize the emergent technology of cinema, the techniques of its use, and the resultant aesthetic of the ‘ephemeral’ at the historical juncture when it was exported from the US and Europe to the non-western world with particular reference to Japan and the serious shōshimingeki (lower middle-classes) films directed by Ozu Yasujirō in the mid-1930s