This is the clip we ran out of time for during Wednesday’s discussion section.  As we move into our week on New Hollywood, I wanted to give you a taste of an incredibly awkward transitional period for Hollywood that Tom Schatz makes some mention of in this past week’s reading.  Following is a clip from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was released in 1969 (the same year as Hello Dolly!).  I think it’s a nice example of Hollywood trying desperately to be “hip” and appeal to the young, edgy generation as Schatz writes about and the slightly awkward period before the “Hollywood Renaissance.”

The film tells the story of Bob and Carol (featured in the clip below), an extremely hip California couple who, after having their minds opened at a relationship retreat, decide to pursue a new openness about sex and relationships in their marriage.  They soon drag their good friends, married couple Ted and Alice, into this new outlook as well and the latter part of the film focuses on the question of whether Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice will decide to have an orgy in Las Vegas.  In the clip below, Bob and Carol work through some adjustments in their marriage as they try to stick to their new “modern” rules.

Last Wednesday Alan stumped me on a question about some of the technologies that allowed for much on-the-go filmmaking in the 1960s.  I’ve since come across a good source that explains the technical aspects of sync-sound recording with these new light-weight cameras that allowed for that period’s boom in amateur/experimental filmmaking, documentary filmmaking and revolutionary filmmaking.  The book, for those who are interested, is DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish by Ian David Aronson (O’Reilly Media, 2006).  It’s just a technical manual, but the particular section I came across gives a good thumbnail description of the technologies in this period.  The excerpt covering this material can be found courtesy of Google Books here.

On the topic of these new portable technologies and the accompanying boom in documentary filmmaking, one of the films I mentioned in section was Don’t Look Back (released 1967, filmed in 1965), D.A. Pennebaker’s cinema verite/direct cinema documentary about then-rising star Bob Dylan.  It’s a really great film worth checking out and a good example of this kind of documentary filmmaking that really broke from the styles that had come before and would become practically the dominant mode for some time to come.

The whole film appears to be available on youtube and is easily accessible through netflix, Askwith or the Donald Hall Collection.  This clip, however, gives you a good sense of the free-flowing “cinema of life” documentary style (and also a good glimpse of the film and sound crew on the move with Dylan, toting some of these new recording technologies with them):

And this clip below is probably the most famous segment of the film, often credited as the first music video.  That claim is fairly suspect, but it’s still captivating in its simplicity and has probably been parodied several dozen times by this point.  As a bonus for Beat nerds, that’s Allen Ginsberg  hanging around behind Dylan for the duration of the song.

Random aside: I once had the privilege to sit beside D.A. Pennebaker through a film screening.  He is a lovely man.

Flurry of updates in progress.  First up, I wanted to give you an example of the kind of filmmaking Solanas and Getino were arguing for in their manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema.”  Below is the opening of their 1968 film La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), now considered one of the best examples of Third Cinema/Revolutionary Filmmaking:

An interesting essay about La Hora de Los Hornos can be found at the online cinema studies journal, Senses of Cinema, here.

Hi, All.

Welcome to the blog for Winter 2010 SAC 353, Discussion sections 003 and 005.  Below you may see some entries from the previous course I GSI-ed for last term, but hopefully we’ll get some stuff relevant to our class up here soon.  I have lots of fun stuff planned.

I would have included all of the following films.  (This is also assuming I suddenly had complete power to dictate the syllabus) As it is, I thought I’d throw these out there in case anyone was looking to beef up their Netflix queue.

1. Sunset Blvd.

(Billy Wilder, 1950)

2. Some Like It Hot

(Billy Wilder, 1959)

3. Tokyo Story

(Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

4. The Bigamist

(Ida Lupino, 1953)

5. Pick-Up on South Street

(Sam Fuller, 1953)

6. The Third Man

(Carol Reed, 1949)

7. Jules et Jim

(Francois Truffaut, 1962)

8. The Quiet Man

(John Ford, 1952)

9. My Man Godfrey

(Gregory LaCava, 1936)

10. The Tingler

(William Castle, 1959)

11. The Apartment

(Billy Wilder, 1960)

12. The Thing From Another World

(Christian Nyby (credited), Howard Hawks (uncredited), 1951 )

13. All That Heaven Allows

(Douglas Sirk, 1955)

14. Scorpio Rising

(Kenneth Anger, 1964)

15. The Searchers

(John Ford, 1956)

16. The Women

(George Cukor, 1939)

17. All About Eve

(Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

18. Johnny Guitar

(Nicholas Ray, 1954)

19. The Fallen Idol

(Carol Reed, 1948)

20. The Thin Man

(W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)

If you manage to catch even one of these films over break, you’ll be a happier person for it.

Thanks again, guys, for a great term!

Hi, All.

I hope you are all off having fun and not reading anything school-related for the day.  If you are here, however, I thought I would include a clip to the Bollywood remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” I mentioned to some of you in class on Tuesday.  This is just the opening to the film, but you may be able to find the whole thing on youtube if you search longer.  If anyone does find the whole film, please do let us know if there are any musical numbers–I’d love to see those.

I’m going to give a passionate plug for the following book in our discussion sections today:

A Short Guide to Writing About Film

That links to the newest edition of the book on Amazon.  Older (cheaper) editions should do you fine as well.  If you want to improve your grade on the second paper, I highly recommend you at least check this out from the library and give it a good read-through.  And if you plan to continue taking film courses in which you’ll be expected to do writing assignments, BUY IT NOW.  Own it, read it, love it, use it.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this book, this publisher, or this author.  I’ve just found it to be the most useful book a film student could own.

 

Also wanted to show those who hadn’t already seen it a different side of Luis Bunel.  As requested, please enjoy Un Chien Andalou (Bunel/Dali, 1928), the surrealist classic. (click the film title to watch, as embedding of the film does not seem to work with WordPress)

So I thought you all might enjoy a little pick-me after tonight’s screening.  Not everything must be about impoverished people leading miserable lives and shooting poor little adorable piglets.  Since she was mentioned in one of our readings this week, please enojoy a little compilation of Carmen Miranda:

Also, as a super-bonus, here is a wee Carmen Miranda tribute from one of my all-time favorite Tom & Jerry cartoons, in which Tom and some other neighborhood cats perform one of Miranda’s signature songs, “Mama Eu Quero”:

A good place to start is the Screen Arts and Cultures Research Guide.  This is certainly not an exhaustive selection of the resources available at UM, but it’s a nice selection of materials particularly useful for research in our field and provides a good organization of what resources to use depending on what kind of materials you’re hoping to find (retrospective, general, popular press vs. academic, etc).

For books, of course, use the Mirlyn catalogue to find out what is available at the UM libraries.  Much of what you’ll be looking for will be available at Shapiro or Hatcher, but I would recommend not limiting your search to just these, as there are often useful resources in the many specialty libraries on campus.  When searching for books, a simple but important thing to keep in mind is that you should try a number of different keyword searches.  For instance, if a search for “1930s Film” does not yield many relevant hits, try “1930s Cinema” or “1930s Hollywood” or “Classical Hollywood,” etc.  Each one of these searches will likely yield a number of different sources, improving your chances of finding those which will be most useful to you.

Be creative and don’t limit your search to just your film title or era.  A search for books on your film’s genre (“melodrama,” “film noir,” “musicals,” etc) may lead you to in-depth analyses of your particular film you might not have found otherwise or can offer you a useful cinematic/historical context in which to place your film.  Similarly, searches on your film’s director, producers, even stars may lead you to materials that cover your film.  If you start your search with Wikipedia or IMDB, pay attention to important names or topics in these write-ups and add those to your list of research terms.  You want to spread your net as wide as possible to begin with and then to worry about cutting down from there.  Keep this same idea in mind when researching your era/region/historical period and so on.  In some cases, historical era and such will be addressed in discussions of films from the period, but they may not be written about adequately for your purposes and you will likely need to search for non-film-related history sources as well.

This keyword/search term strategy should also be applied to searches for academic articles.  Part of your research should be based on academic, “peer-reviewed” articles. These are also called “refereed” articles.  What this means, basically, is that these are articles that have been reviewed and fact-checked by a panel of experts prior to publication.  These will mostly be found in academic journals, not popular press. The Screen Arts research page linked above includes a number 0f  databases for finding these articles through the UM library, such as Academic One File or MLA.  There are also links to film-specific academic search engines, such as FIAF or the Film and Literature Index.  A number of additional search databases are available on the library website and different databases will often contain different materials.  It is important to keep in mind that, while some of these databases will provide you with a pdf of the specific article on the spot, many of them will not.  Instead you will have to write down the citation and see if that journal and specific issue are available at the UM library, whether in hard copy or on microfilm/microfiche.  If it is, you will need to physically go to the library to retrieve it.  Plan ahead for this and make sure that you leave yourself enough time.

You also may be working from popular press sources.  Note that these will not count as “peer-reviewed” sources. Examples of popular press journals would be Variety, The New York Times, Life Magazine and others that the public at large would be able to purchase a copy of on a newstand.  These can be useful for your research, but most likely if you are using these sources they should be part of your historical research.  This means that if you want to use an article about The Wizard of Oz from Variety, you should use one from 1939, not one from 2009.  You will use this article to support your claims about how this film was received in the popular press or by the public during the time of its release.  An article on the film from Variety in 2009 will not be able to give you this same information.

To find film reviews from the period in which your film was released, some of your best sources will be the historical newspapers available on Proquest Historical.  This database is linked on the Screen Arts Research Guide under the “retrospective articles” section.  On this search engine you will be able to choose a number of newspapers (or individual newspapers) and a time range to search.  Again, be flexible about your keywords and search terms.  You may have to play with a few different things but you should be able to find at least a review or two (most likely a lot more) of these films.  If you are getting too many irrelevant resources, narrow your search by putting your film title into quotes.  “The Wizard of Oz” rather than wizard of oz.  Additional popular journals/magazines/newspapers can be found in bound copies at the library or on micofilm/microfiche.  A good resource for searching out specific citations within these sources is the Reader’s Guide Retrospective database.  You can find this linked under the same “retrospective” tab on the Screen Arts Research page as the Proquest Historical database.

Microfilm/microfiche may be another useful resource in your research.  As mentioned above, many popular press sources from your time period are only available on microfilm.  Additionally, if you are interested in researching industry periodicals or exhibitors’ trade journals (if you are interested in seeing how the film was talked about by/sold to people who worked in the film or movie theater industry), most of these sources are on microfilm.  A listing of relevant materials and their microfilm call numbers can be found on the Screen Arts Research Guide under the “industry periodicals” tab.  Microfilm and microfilm readers are located in the space between Hatcher and Shapiro.  If you enter Hatcher library and go to the second floor and head toward the connector to the third floor of Shapiro library, you will pass through the microfilm area.  There are library assistants at the desk who should be able to assist you in setting up the film on the reader, printing from the film, etc.  Please keep in mind that some of the readers will require a copy card to print from the film (I believe the cost is 25 cents a page).  Also keep in mind that working with microfilm can require some extra time for scrolling through the reels to find the section you’re interested in, as well as time to set up the film and to wind the film back onto the wheel after you are finished.

I hope this is helpful to you in your research.  I look forward to reading all of your projects and seeing what you come up with.  Happy hunting!