Ch 5 Cinema

Paul Henried, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in the cinema classic, Casablanca.

Cinema clobbers the senses, influencing the way people perceive each other and their environment like no other medium. From the Lumière brothers to the Cohn brothers, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival, the story of cinema parallels the social revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Cinema on this site

• Early experiments
• The silent era
• Animation
• The Golden Age of Hollywood
• European Cinema
• WWII Era
• 1960s and 70s
• Blockbusters

Discussion questions

1. Hot or not?  Is cinema considered a hot medium, according to McLuhan? Why or why not?
2. Racism in the movies:  Compare the overt racism of Birth of a Nation to the  racism in Jazz Singer.  Are there differences?  Consider the context of the times as well as the modern perspective.
3. Anti-heroes:  What is an anti-hero? Why did the simpler portrayals of heroes before World War II give way to more nuanced and often grittier depictions of people in heroic roles in the 1960s and 70s?
4. Anti-Trust and lack of trust: What broke up the Hollywood studio system? What was HUAC?
5.  Curves in the road: How did Hollywood studios miss the curve in the digital road in terms of special effects?

People and events

Thomas Edison, George Eastman, Auguste & Louis Lumiere, George Melies,  D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Orson Wells, Walt Disney, Leni Riefenstahl, Frank Capra, Clark Gable, Dalton Trumbo

Early film censorship, Edison Trust, MPAA code, silent film era, “talkies,” animation, Golden Age, Propaganda, Citizen Kane, HUAC hearings, special effects blockbusters, end of the mass audience

Documentary videos 

• Small Steps, Big Strides — A terrific and often overlooked video about African American actors from the early days of silent film to the 1980s.  Features incredible dance scenes with the Nicholas Brothers and Bill Bojangles Robinson, the quest for respect with films like Island in the Sun and Lilies of the Field.
• The Battle Over Citizen Kane   Highly recommended documentary about the battle between newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and radio producer Orson Wells, especially over the 1941 Hollywood movie  Citizen Kane. The documentary describes the heyday of Yellow Journalism of the 1890s, the radio scare of Oct 31, 1938 when Wells broadcast the War of the Worlds, and the tight-knit studio system of Hollywood in its “golden age.”
• Trumbo – Documentary about the life and times of blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. The video is adapted from his son Christopher’s 2003 play, and is based on letters Trumbo wrote during the devastation wrought by the ‘Red Scare’ in mid-20th century.

Interesting links

History and top 100 lists

1. Roger Ebert’s Top 100 Great Movies
2. One hundred most influential people in the films and Hollywood 101
3. Brief history of cinema
4. Smithsonian salute to cinema
5. Robert Yahnke’s Cinema History outline and Film Teaching Resources
6. Newsreels of the 1930s (list of topics at U.Va).
7. Tim Dirks Classic American Films website
8. Yahoo Greatest Films websites
9. Academic Info Film History

Cinema and conflict

1. Charlie Chaplin goes to war 
2. How I filmed the war, by Geoffrey Malins, 1920. (E-book)
3. The greatest speech ever made — a take on Chaplin from The Great Dictator
4. Images that rally: Why We Fight (US, 1942)
5. Images that injure: Birth of a nation (US, 1915) and the black protest
6. Images that injure: The Eternal Jew (Germany,1940)
7. Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film: “The Great Dictator”   — BBC Witness program

Cinema and politics

1. Battle over Citizen Kane Also the unofficial Geocities Battle over Citizen Kane site, Also a site about Orson Wells
2. Jacques Cousteau’s Silent World — BBC Witness program
3. William L. Shirer from Ghandi: A Memoir — The book that inspired the 1982 movie Ghandi.
4. Hollywood and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee
5. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin
6. Bollywood (wikipedia article)
7. Ghostbusters, Animal House, Groundhog Day, Caddy Shack and more — the story behind the comic classics of the late 20th century.
   “Comedy First,“  — a New Yorker article by Tad Friend.