Hi dear tutor, I got 57/100 in this paper so I really need help. I have so much work going on so I can't spend too much time on this. It's a film analysis and the film is Hedwig and the angry Inch, please be SPECIFIC about scenes you pick. I think I n

Movie List

The Band Wagon (1953), dir. Stanley Donen

The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), dir. Mervyn LeRoy

Top Hat (1935), dir. Mark Sandrich

Cabaret (1972), dir. Bob Fosse

The Wizard of Oz (1939), dir. Victor Fleming, King Vidor, George Cukor, Norman Taurog

My Fair Lady (1964), dir. George Cukor

Cabin in the Sky (1943), dir. Vincente Minelli

Nashville (1975), dir. Robert Altman

Dancer in the Dark (2000), dir. Lars von Trier

Moulin Rouge! (2001) dir. Baz Luhrman

Presence:

The argument about “flesh n’ blood” spectacle: seeing live performers VS THEMATIC presence: where everything is repeatable, people can do more than in real life, you can use angle/perspective and the manipulation of the camera.

ex: the hand dance

Spectacle

I think it's got to do with how the spectacle is not just the film, but also includes the audience as well.

Or, Spectacle is a event or a scene that is memorable to the audience. Some film scenes show things that people would rarely see on the daily basis (ex. train coming directly to the viewers) that is considered as a spectacle.

Also, spectacle is is not just about the individual, but the group as well

Camp

According to Sontag, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques”. [2] The essay moves between examples and comparisons to reflect on the changes in camp over time, from a phenomenon of which no one speaks, otherwise it would be betrayed, and of which little is said “apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel the World in the Evening (1954)” [3] ; to a shared mode paraded in art and cultural artifacts produced by Western post-human society. In order to define camp in 1964, Sontag had to make 57 points. In summary, camp sensitivity “is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. (It is) not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.” It is decorative art, which favors “style at the expense of content [5] “, a concept emphasized several times to conclude that “Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy [6] .” In fact, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More PRECISELY, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious” [11] .

The Mass

Mass society as its own ornament was how the German social critic Siegfried Kracauer understood the street life of the dying years of the Weimar Republic. Kracauer began his essay by observing that you can understand an era better by looking at its superficial ways of self-expression than by examining its considered judgements upon itself (which have a tendency to elevate and justify). ‘The mass is forced to contemplate itself (mass meetings, mass demonstrations). The mass is always present to itself and often in the aesthetically seductive form of an ornament or an emotionally moving image.’ The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability; it is only as a tiny piece of the mass that the individual can clamber up charts and can service machines without any friction. A system oblivious to differences in form leads on its own to the blurring of national characteristics and to the production of worker masses that can be employed equally well at any point on the globe…The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires. ..No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments in obsolete forms—even if it means nothing more than that.

The Tiller girls are indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics. One need only glance at the screen to learn that the ornaments are composed of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies in bathing suits. The regularity of their patterns is cheered by the masses, themselves arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier. These extravagant spectacles, which are staged by many sorts of people and not just girls and stadium crowds, have long since become an established form. Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in thinking it through. As linear as it may be, there is no line that extends from the small sections of the mass to the entire figure. But despite what they think, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate.

The “Dissolve” (Altman)

My notes on this aren’t great but I’ll post em here so we have a starting point.

The dissolve

Somewhat seamless from real to Performance

Dissolve: the transition in the dance part. for example: where they start walking in sync to the beat ...etc

Audio : Music and dance, diegetic sound, diegetic music → music track, everyday movement or rhythmic movement or dance

Audio Dissolve:

Till The Clouds Roll By (1946), dir. Vincente Minelli, et al

Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Video: thematic, ideal, visual bridge blur “reality” and dream. (Relationship between YOU and the main characters and the entertainment and film frames. How we should respond to entertainment. -> ideology of the musical: it's fine to just have fun and enjoy and like it. )

Video Dissolve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWVd_nko9Jw&ab_channel=TheManThatGetsAway

Personality: Paired characters represent each others’ repressed selvesSurface component-“Make Believe”-Submerged component. The two main characters are foils and in the fantasy space, we can be who we really are. Common ground is Music and Dance.

Personality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FznWwWrOIQ&ab_channel=felipefebex

“Everyday movement”

Marilyn Monroe’s distinctive walk is an example of “movement beyond utility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbQqnJw7xL0&ab_channel=JAMESKai

Fosse & “Vertical Film Format”

Watch for examples of “dancerly excess” throughout Minelli’s performance in Cabaret.

“The dissolve” Excessive movement --? The duration is increasing more and more. -> The transition becomes the entire film?

Cabaret - Bob Fosse -> CHICAGO

Some characters live in the musical world in the entire film - always extra. Dance and film narrative structure parallel each other and reflect each other.

Spectatorship: “Transferred into the film itself, the opposition between the audience and the projected image sets up a fundamental tension between a world given as real and another realm portrayed as ideal.” (60)

_______ _________________________

Chion’s Three Modes of Listening

Causal: What it comes from Where is the “laughter” coming from? Why is sound happening?

Listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause(or source).

Causal listening, the most common, consists of listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source). When the cause is visible, sound can provide supplementary information about it

Reduced: Focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.

Pierre Schaeffer gave the name reduced listening to the listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning. However, reduced listening has the enormous advantage of opening up our ears and sharpening our power of listening. Film and video makers, scholars, and technicians can get to know their medium better as a result of this experience and gain mastery over it. The emotional, physical, and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration.

Semantic: A code. For example language: the meaning in the words. Defined by culture codes and assumptions.

Refers to a code or a language to interpret a message: spoken language, morse code, etc.

This mode of listening, which functions in an extremely complex way, has been the object of linguistic research and has been the most widely studied. One crucial finding is that it is purely differential. A phoneme is listened to not strictly for its acoustical properties but as part of an entire system of oppositions and differences. In a sense, causal listening to a voice is to listening to it semantically as perception of the handwriting of a written text is to reading it.

Tools for causal listening and diegetic versus non- diegetic sounds

Reduced listening

Texture:

- Monophony - are melody

-Polyphony -multiple melodies.

They can create HARMONY (Multiple melodies harmonize or NOT).

Tonality, Texture, Meter, & Timbre (in music, be prepared to link to examples)

Tonality: the relationship of a melody and its harmony to a central tone (DO) as in DO-RE-ME-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO./ Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the individual pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic.

Texture: the way sound is layered together in music. (Example: monophony: melody and polyphony: multiple melodies, Little Fugue in G Minor - Bach is polyphonic)

Meter: the grouping of beats into units of twos, threes, fours or more by accenting the first beat of each unit, creating a repetitive pattern of strong (accented) and weak beats. (Example: Duple or Triple).

Timbre: the tone quality of the sound being produced

Examples that can be used with these terms: Opera-Summertime , Jazz (Ella-Summertime), Leona Lewis- popular music (these different styles have different textures, tonality, etc.)

Vertical Film Format

Screen taller than wide - shown in cabaret, bib black bars.

Short Answer Questions:

What are the typical features of the film musical genre? What are some of the problems in defining the genre of the musical?

Film musical genre: Film in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate "production numbers". There is a lot more associated with genre in terms of tropes and expectations.

However, It is hard to sum up information on genre because it is nearly impossible to separate intertext from genre discourse. When we are discussing genre we are discussing the expectation brought forth by a milieu of many other films. In this class, we are not interested in using genre solely as a form of classification. Rather, we use genre as an interpretive framework. “So, we want to watch for and analyze the ways that a film marks itself as belonging to the genre, the musical. And yet...borders are never pure, if only because the generic mark is itself outside genre. Furthermore the genre of “Film Musical,” is nearly always full of meta-referentiality.”

What is the “dual focus narrative”? Be prepared to provide film examples and use Altman’s theory in your analysis.

Altman: The musical doesn’t care about the story or story structure. It has a DUAL-FOCUS NARRATIVE:

-2 characters (male and female) are opposing in parallel arcs, often have to resolve conflict by end of film. In actuality the musical is the opportunity to showcase the STARS and their talents.

No longer can we point to the musical’s conventional plot and call it gauche and episodic and walk away satisfied. Once we have understood the dual focus approach we can easily grasp the importance of the many set pieces of production numbers which some see as cluttering the musical’s program and interrupting the plot. The plot, we now recognize has little importance to begin with. The oppositions developed in the seemingly gratuitous song-and-dance number, however, are instrumental in establishing the structure and meaning of the film. Only when we identify the film’s constructive dualities can we discover the film’s function. Seen as a cultural problem-solving device, the musical takes on a new and fascinating identity. Society is defined by a fundamental paradox, both terms of the oppositions on which it is built (order/liberty, progress/stability, work/entertainment, and so forth) are seen as desirable, yet the terms are perceived as mutually exclusive. Every society possesses texts which obscure this paradox, prevent it from appearing threatening and thus assure the society’s stability. The musical is one of the most important types of text to serve this function in Amercan life. By reconciling terms previously seen as mutually exclusive, the musical succeeds in reducing an unsatisfactory paradox to the more workable configuration, a concordance of opposites. Traditionally, this is the function which society assigns the myth. Indeed we will not be far off the mark if we consider that the musical fashions a myth out of the American courtship ritual.

EXAMPLE. The story concerns Gigi, a free-spirited teenaged girl living in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. She is being groomed as a courtesan in her family's tradition. Before she is deemed ready for her social debut, she encounters the bon vivant bachelor Gaston Lachaille, whom she captivates as she is transformed into a charmingly poised young lady.

The musical is about marrying opposition. Beauty/riches and child/adult both have problematic dichotomies. The same individual gets to enjoy both riches and beauty is to marry. The only way to save both the childlike and adult qualities is through a merger, thus blurring the barrier between the generations and removing the specter of incest.

*How do modernist aesthetics express themselves in early modern dance and film? Im unsure what this is referring to? I have a portion in my notes of: Modernism and Poetics of Movement. But its almost all movement based

From my notes: in modernism , it is believed that you cannot record your exact thoughts, since they are constantly flowing, and can't be fully represented with words. Basically, constant motion, more flowing. This is different than say, ballet, where poses were held. Modernism is more about the movement and transitioning than posing.

Beyond Cartesian Dualism: body as expression

Beyond mimesis and representation: an alternative to realism, excess of the everyday

Movement/change as modernity: evolution, psychology, urban life

Drift: the subjective loss of presence, the experience of vacancy

___

FROM THE BOOK:

The odd snippet of silent film evokes a time when it was possible for choreographers working with the new technology of the cinematopgraph to cross-over with ease in collaborations and experiments.

Loie Fuller or La Loie showcases the changing perception of the body in motion and its function regarding the production of meaning. She began her career as an actress and received acclaim for her serpentine dances- went on to direct her own screen work. Le Lys de La Vie showcases her narrative/dancing film.

She showcases the reclaiming of the body as a major and radical site for producing and expressing meaning and the body’s engagement with the new technologies of twentieth century modernity.

The new poetics of the French Symbolists corporeality affords a model of dance that connects with modern movement and the dissolution of the pose more generally. Dance as an activity of transformation and fluidity that eludes definition and exemplifies the notion of movement-as-flux.

Delsartism represents a moment of conversion within fin de circle body practices from the order of the pose to the principle of uninterrupted flow. From this point, the central figures of Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, traditionally set in opposition to each other in the history of Western theater dance can be brought together via Bergson’s model of modern movement. It will be shown that early modern dance did not simps anticipate cinema in terms of how dance was realizing the dissolution of the pose. Fuellers combination of continuous movement with popular entertainment technologies produced a “moving image” that calls for rechoreographing of the history of the moving image.

*How can “micro-choreography” change the way we understand a dance?

is it the minute movements that we require a close up camera to notice?

(I was thinking about the violin choreography they did in Gold Diggers) ex. https://youtu.be/iN_JXwNudh8?t=5m1s

How did studio system films present utopia? What kind of utopia is it?

DYER - Studio system presents a feeling of utopia.

Take the depression in 1929, a lot of musicals inspired by this, for example Gold Diggers of 1933, who's your audience? The means of production is the ability to make products and commodify. The women don't have access to the means of production, to be the laborers so the solution to these gender problems is to become family.

Online discussion of Dyer reading:

In Richard Dyer’s seminal article ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ he argues that audiences consume media products with a clear set of pleasures to draw from that experience.

The notion of entertainment as in some sense utopian – expressing ideals about how human life could be organized and lived – is implicit in what the most widespread assumption about entertainment, namely, that it provides ‘escape.’ Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to set against the realities of day-to-day existence.

The musical is a focal point of his essay that explores this theory. This is a genre that blossomed during the Great Depression due to it’s appealing simplification the complex problems of the time and offers of utopian solutions for the audience. Dyer makes the point that that entertainment does not present “models of utopian worlds” but rather how utopia feels. The musical is a genre based on feeling as the primary convention of the genre is the inclusion of performance (song and dance). This form allows space for the intensification of feeling: songs and musical numbers heighten the sense of emotion felt during that scene and thus intensify the feeling of the moment.

Two of the taken for granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfillment’, point to its central thrust, namely, utopia. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and may be realised.

Dyer suggests three reasons that reality generates for audiences to consume media:

1. Social tension

2. Inadequacy

3. Absence

The consumption of media provides audiences with utopian solutions. These utopian sensibilities are expressed through a number of means – but it is usually the world of singing and dancing, distinct from the ‘real world’ which presents the social tensions, inadequacies and absences of the time. For backstage musicals like Golddiggers of 1933 or 42nd Street, the song and dance come through rehearsals or performances within the film’s narrative. The ‘real world’ contexts of the films regularly acknowledge the impact of the Great Depression and locate the films clearly within the tensions of the time. The performances are contradictory and express spectacular wealth, excitement and notions of community. The lyrics are representative of utopian sensibilities as well

*How does the backstage musical address the audience of the film itself? Provide multiple examples using close reading. Cant find in my notes. I’m guessing a sense of fourth wall break or something. Take: The Bandwagon and how it is set “backstage.”

How might Gold Diggers of 1933 be interpreted as either feminist or unfeminist? Use close reading and class readings to construct an argument for each side.

Nobody let women be in the position of having the power to sell anything that they are capable of making.

But, they found true love at the end.

The solution to gender problems supplied by the film The gold diggers is the family.

How do Debord and Kracauer each define and use the idea of spectacle? What film examples could you give to explain each?

Speculation -DEBORD

Society

Social relationships mediated by mass media new line spectacle becomes a fundamental part of understanding ourselves and we can't separate reality from spectacle. They're Inseparable as we create our mass media and spectacle

When Debord says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction. Thus, Debord’s fourth thesis is: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images

."

“Against Debord’s negativity, however, Kracauer’s more redemptive vision of mass culture suggests that the spectacle, like the mass ornament, is a multivalent medium with changing social meanings and functions.”

Debord uses spectacles to refer to mass media of all kinds, as well as the way that the media creates mediated relations in society.

According to Ravetto-Biagioli, how did fascist aesthetics construct women, homosexuals, and Jews as “others”? Support your answer with film examples.

A little confused about the overall points Professor Ravetto made and how we can use them to answer this. Here are some notes:

Use realistic and hyper-masculine bodies as symbols of people and nations. Fascism as this Monumental privileged image thats symbolic of a whole. Taking the concept of classism and struggle and making it a national struggle. This unified image of a particular Nation. Sculptured faces and inhuman faces.

The Aesthetics of fascism new line copy from Mussolini and imagery of Roman Empire

Monumental Images

Fascist and communist use same type of aesthetic so there is a recycling of images

Mussolini fashion himself from a cinematic machismo figure

Hitler fashioned himself into film and voice as the speaker of the nation

This lends itself to the question of authenticity and what is real

The swastika itself was an appropriation

Monumental and pure patriotic values scene and Cabaret versus the decadent and subversive values of Liza Minnelli's character.

Nazis determined what good art was and they wanted it to glorify the human body. Mothers were gender roles, neoclassical, athletic male bodies like the Greek and Romans.

There is a fetish of the SS uniform.

Nazi art becomes camp in the late 50s and 70s as the image of the repressed society becomes erotic and there is nazi porn.

Fascism has this connotation of sadomasochistic sexuality

What Nazi saw as degenerate: Female sexuality, queer, cross-dressing became attributed to Nazis and to that degenerate role.