Reading Bazin (#5) Bazin as TV critic

"Just as we stand equal before death, all men are equal before television."

This week I have read Dudley Andrew's new collection of articles by Bazin, André Bazin's New Media (2014), about TV, radio and recent (i.e. early 1950s) technical developments within cinema. It is as always very inspiring material and here are some brief observations about Bazin's thoughts on TV, the fifth instalment in my "Reading Bazin" series.

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Bazin looks at TV from several different angles. He talks about technical issues, ethical problems, artistic innovations, censorship and medium specificity. But mostly he writes about French television, as this is primarily what he was able to watch. And he seems to like it. Except for serials, especially those aimed for children.

"TV poses a problem of household psychology, indeed of psychology period. Most serious is not so much the serial in itself as the fact that it is addressed foremost to children, just by the choice of films shown." he says. "They confuse the spirit of childhood with sociological cretinism." (p. 134)

But on the whole he is positive, even if a bit backhanded. "We shouldn't expect only marvels from [TV]. In fact, the amount of rubbish will have to be proportionally greater than in commercial cinema, but the sheer quantity of production ought to allow for a good number of successes." (p. 181)

What he likes is primarily the immediacy and intimacy of TV, and how it brings ordinary people into focus. He writes a lot about a program in which farmers are interviewed about their lives for example. ("The cinema will never film a biography of my concierge or my grocer, but on my TV set they can be admirable and astounding." (p. 46)). TVs approach to live drama is something he finds interesting too and here he thinks that TV has something to teach cinema.

Television reminds cinema of something it has long forgotten: the advantages of semi-improvisation, of working off the cuff. Between television and cinema there can be more than mere collaboration; there can be genuine symbiosis. In not selfishly trying to take any more from cinema than may be useful to it, television could inject new lifeblood back into cinema. (p. 173) 

He wrote that in 1951, and he felt the same way in 1958: "With TV, cinema can be rejuvenated."(p. 178), although, since this was seven years after his first such proclamation you might have expected this rejuvenation to have happened so that he could write that cinema "is being rejuvenated" rather than "can be rejuvenated". I think though that he was right, and that especially in the 1960s this is what had happened.

At one point he brings the theatre into the equation. "We have often opposed cinema to theater on the notion of the physical and temporal presence of the actor. But television is the presence of theater with the ubiquity of cinema." (p. 80) For Bazin, films like Marty (Delbert Mann 1955), 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet 1957) and The Bachelor Party (Delbert Mann 1957), are examples of how TV has enriched cinema, although he finds Marty to be too sentimental. The Bachelor Party on the other hand he think is "extremely rich" and "brilliantly directed". (p. 169) Both Marty and The Bachelor Party were written by Paddy Chayefsky and first done live on TV, in 1953 and 1954, and 12 Angry Men as well, written by Reginald Rose. (An earlier example of the same kind of "new social realism" which Bazin might have mentioned is Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann 1952), which was based on William Inge's play although not done for TV.)

Bazin also talks about directors and directing, and there is a long interview with Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini, two of Bazin's favourites who were then both directing for TV. ("[I]f you and I, Roberto, are turning toward television, it is because television is in a technically primitive state that may restore to artists that fighting spirit of the early cinema, when everything that was made was good." Renoir says at the end of the discussion. (p. 203)). Bazin also writes about Hitchcock's TV productions and he wonders why so many American filmmakers are making films for TV whereas hardly any French directors are doing it. Why John Ford and Leo McCarey but not Marcel Carné and Jacques Becker?

So what interests Bazin in cinema is also what interests him in TV, and reading this collection with his more famous work, such as the two collections of What is Cinema?, is to be recommended.

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This was my fifth post about Bazin. The earlier ones are here:
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/01/reading-bazin-1.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/04/reading-bazin-2.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/10/reading-bazin-3.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2013/11/reading-bazin-4.html

This intimacy can even become troubling, to the point of implying reciprocity. As for me, each time I meet one of the presenters of the TV news or even a TV actor in the street, I have to suppress a spontaneous urge to shake their hand, as though they knew me from having seen me daily in front of my screen. (p. 40)

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

This is an unscheduled post, part of a number of posts published today about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Links to the other posts to be found at the end. My next post will be Friday next week as usual.

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On occasion I watched the TV-series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. when I was a kid, as it was often broadcast at odd hours. I was never much of a fan, but it did have some appeal to me. I have at times tried to watch again, now, as an adult, with limited success. It has been hard to come by, not even YouTube is forthcoming. I think my main interest in it back then was that Ian Fleming was involved in its creation. But it was also a twist to see an American agent, Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), and a Russian agent, Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), working together under the United Nation's flag (sort of) at the height of the cold war. (It is called The Man from U.N.C.L.E. instead of The Men from U.N.C.L.E. because originally it was only meant to be about Solo. But Kuryakin became so popular with the TV-audience that the part was expanded to become equal to Solo.)

The new film, directed, and co-produced and co-written, by Guy Ritchie has none of the topicality of the original series, and it is rather silly and shallow, but fortunately it also has oodles of laid-back wit and it is rather cool at times. There were some action sequences that had plenty of panache, but I especially enjoyed the scene in a fashionable clothes store where the two male agents have a debate about whether this particular belt go with that particular dress, and whether colours match on the outfits to be worn by the female agent. With the name dropping of fashion labels and the confidence with which they speak of such matters, they would not be out of place in a 1963 version of Sex and the City. Both Henry Cavill (as Solo) and Armie Hammer (as Kuryakin) seemed to have a good time, and they had chemistry. Hugh Grant was also a treat, in the part played by Leo G. Carroll in the series. Elizabeth Debicki as the master villain was also great. But for some reason Alicia Vikander did not seem to fit in. It was not that she was bad and she did manage to look as stylish as Audrey Hepburn at times, one especially fun scene was when she was dancing in pyjamas and sun classes, but while all the other worked well together, and had a connection, she seemed to be at a distance. Participating in the activities but not really being there, perhaps thinking about something else. Aloof.

The dynamic duo and Ms. Vikander.

So I did have fun will watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. but I was also annoyed at times. For example the last car chase, on an island, was overblown and weird, with no sense of spatial awareness. The film varied from sequence to sequence, and from the delightful and inspired to the awkward and off-putting.

It is not immediately obvious why there is a film based on this particular series. Back then it had some impact but that was a long time ago, and unlike Mission Impossible, which first came out as a series around the same time as U.N.C.L.E., it has not left any well-known quotes or famous music behind. I suspect that the kids these days have not even heard of it. Perhaps this is why it has been kicked around for quite a while, with several different directors attached to it and then un-attached. One of them was Steven Soderbergh and I can see why he might have been attracted to it, and, actually, the finished film did remind me at times of Soderbergh. While Ritchie is nowhere near as good, or as important, as a filmmaker he is in some ways similar, but less nimble and intelligent. He is more draught beer and Soderbergh more vintage wine. (Soderbergh also has a more serious edge and capable of making films with a depth which Ritchie does not seem to have any interest in.) But with U.N.C.L.E. Ritchie comes closer to Soderbergh than before in the feel of the film. And like Soderbergh's Oceans 11, 12 and 13, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is primarily interested in digressions. It is not that they have lost the plot; there was never any interest in actually having a plot.

After Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), the only one of Ritchie's films I have really liked is Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows (2011). The U.N.C.L.E.-film made me wonder if he wants to make a Bond movie (Henry Cavill played Solo in a way that might have pleased Ian Fleming) but I hope he never does. Although I suppose he would not do a worse job than Lewis Gilbert did.



The other bloggers who have written (in Swedish only) about the film: Rörliga bilder och tryckta ord, Fiffi, Jojjenito, Fripps filmrevyer, Har du inte sett den?

David Attenborough

I have written before about my debt to filmmakers like Hitchcock, Ford, Truffaut, Hawks, Kurosawa, Bergman, Ekman and others for making me first a film enthusiast and then a film scholar. But David Attenborough also deserves to be mentioned among them because he has had an equally large impact upon me since at least 1984, when The Living Planet came out both as a TV-series and a book. I was actually using him even as an inspiration for the structure of my thesis. For its narrative drive to be more specific. Many filmmakers could learn a thing or two from him about structure and pacing, and so could scholars. This is not something I was conscious of back then as a precocious pre-teen, when it was the images and the fun of learning new things about animals and plants and Earth itself that were the reasons I was hooked. They contain enough thrills, sadness, humour and beauty to last a lifetime, and they are more satisfying than much of fictive narrative art. But later on, when re-watching for example Life on Earth (1979) and The Living Planet as an adult, I was struck by how carefully and skilfully they were told. The individual episodes in themselves and also how all of the episodes together form a whole, that they are not freestanding but intricately linked. The episodes tell a story that has a beginning and an end, and the sum total of each series becomes bigger than the individual episodes. So I had that in the back of my head when writing the thesis. (I should probably have mentioned him on the acknowledgement page.) Watching several series in a row is also a special experience, not least to see how the things one can do, both ethically and technically, change rapidly over the years.

Attenborough was (still is) a major player at BBC not least since he combined an academic and scientific foundation with a background as network controller and manager at BBC. He more or less created BBC Two, and among other things he brought colour, snooker and Monty Python's Flying Circus to British television. But as important as all of that was, it is in bringing the wildlife and the science of it into the homes and offices of people all over the world that is his unique importance in the history of television. Of course Attenborough was not alone in making these films and series; there were producers, directors and camera men, as well as the BBC. You need to distinguish between the series which he just narrated and the ones that were his own projects. Those are the ones that really matters, the Life series. All of those series mentioned in this post are part of that major undertaking, which has now been going on for some 35 years. 

The series teach the viewers many things, such as how evolution works, the mating habits of crickets or the survival tactics of a giant bush in the desert. They also teach us how fragile the world is, how humans are threatening it through poaching, waste-dumping, deforestation and simply be becoming more and more plentiful for every year. They also remind us that we are one species among many, just another animal. We should not sentimentalize other animals, humans are not alone in our capacity for warfare and cruelty, but neither are we alone in being capable of feelings such as sorrow, affection, curiosity and joy. That is not a question of anthropomorphism, I would rather suggest that it is arrogant to assume that such feelings are uniquely human. But that is another discussion.

Attenborough is now 87 years old but he is still hard at work, and I am looking forward to his next series. Here are some clips from earlier years. The first one is from The Trials of Life (1990).



Here are some sea cows, from The Life of Mammals (2002):



And this extraordinary sequence with Attenborough and mountain gorillas from Life on Earth (1979):



These scenes emphasis the everyday life of animals, and Attenborough himself. The many wordless sequences of astonishing beauty and awe (or horror) you will have to find for yourself. 

Hill Street Blues

"When does it stop Francis?"
"I wish I knew that."

When I grew up my favourite television series was Hill Street Blues, about a police precinct in a non-specified town in the U.S. It was an MTM production which ran from 1981 to 1987 and I do not know what it was like in other countries but in Sweden it was a huge hit. The actors became rather famous, especially Michael Warren (I still remember how excited the media was when he visited Stockholm). Steven Bochco, who created it and wrote it together with Michael Kozoll, also became rather well-known, much like Michael Mann became known after Miami Vice. (Anthony Yerkovich, who was a major force behind Miami Vice, was also part of the creative team of Hill Street Blues for a few years, as was David Milch, now famous for Deadwood, among other series.)

As I have written before, Hill Street Blues was a key development in the history of television, and its impact of subsequent TV and cinema has been substantial. TV critics in general have remarkably short memories, but still occasionally Hill Street Blues is mentioned in passing. My own memory is rather long, but I decided to look at it today and see what I would think of it. It is hard to come by but I have been able to watch all of season 1 and a substantial part of season 2 (there are seven seasons), and it is just as good as I remembered it to be.

The Wire (2002-2008) is usually held up as being about as good as television gets, and there is no denying the power and quality of it. It is often said that it is like a snapshot of society, an anthropological study. This is exactly what Hill Street Blues feels like, and this is one of the things that make it so good, and so fascinating. It is as if the creators wanted to capture the conflicts in the underbelly of an unjust society, some kind of Marxist exposé of Reagan's America. It is not a pretty picture that is painted here, where the role of the police is not necessarily to combat crime but rather to control the lid on a pressure cooker, just making sure that too much steam is not let out at once. The police force is not pretty either, riddled with abuse, racism, sexism, corruption, alcoholism and violence. But it is not all bleak (it would not be as interesting if it was), there are also good men and women trying to do the best they can, even if it means negotiating a truce with a gang rather than locking them up for whatever crimes they have committed.

One remarkable thing about Hill Street Blues is that there are hardly any beginnings or endings. Things happen constantly, but nothing ever settles or comes to rest. Each episode is filled with a number of stories, some which lasts a whole season, some that lasts for a few minutes, but often they are somewhat opaque, and unpredictable. Things that seem unimportant suddenly escalate, things that were important suddenly fizzles out. A sequence might be funny but ends with an unexpected and tragic death, or a scene that begins dramatic ends with black humour. And you never know who might get shot. There is a real sense of urgency and desperation in the episodes, which is sometimes close to unbearable.

Hill Street Blues is filled with vignettes that can be quite powerful. In one episode a detective, Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano), helps a woman carrying her grocery shopping up a flight of stairs. When he is about to leave, she starts to cry. She is living alone with her mother (after the mother had a stroke), her husband left a year ago, and nobody has hold her since then. So she asks for a hug. Such moving snapshots of broken lives contribute to create a broad canvas of a whole society. The quote that opens this post (said after a pointless shooting) is also an illustration of the tone of the series. Sometimes despair is the only possible feeling.

The style of shooting is connected with the content. It has a rough edge, with jittery and "ugly" camera work, keeping close to the characters but constantly moving, as if trying to capture everything at once. It often misses the action though, as some things seem to happen just before the camera gets there. It has that quality which is often called "documentary", with people and things blocking the camera, dialogue hard to hear, and what we do hear is often just fractions of what is said, as people pass the camera. Sometimes the camera follows characters A and B, and then suddenly starts to follow character C and D instead. Important information is often mentioned in passing, and might not even be taken up by the spectator if she is not paying attention. It is a fair assumption to make that the makers have been influenced by Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet (Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) for example).

Race places an important part of the series, and is a constant source of tension, between white, blacks and Latinos in particular, but East Asians too. The police force itself also consists of a number of different ethnicities. However, it is partly here that the show shows its age, particularly the somewhat shrill acting among some of the Latino gang members.

As I said above, Hill Street Blues does not tell a conventional story and neither do the individual episodes stand on their own. There is hardly ever any kind of closure, and there is a constant sense of confusion and lack of payoff. Yet stories are told. One example in season 1 is the decline and fall of one of the plain clothes policemen, J.D. LaRue (played by Kiel Martin). In the beginning of the first episode he is confident, good-looking and something of a ladies' man. At the end of the season he has become a drunk who gets humiliated and thrown out of bars. This fall from grace is handled very subtle, so that there are small changes from one episode to another, until his unshaven face becomes so pronounced as to be unmissable. Just by watching one episode you will not get it, it comes from watching the whole season. No particular reason is given for his decline; it is a combination of bad habits and stress. Then in the last episode of season 1 he attends an AA meeting, sent there by captain Furillo (the police chief). 

That AA meeting is also an example of what is so good with Hill Street Blues. Because at that meeting is also Furillo. This is good because it is a complete surprise yet makes perfect sense. There has not been any mentioning of the fact that Furillo was a former alcoholic, but there has been scenes sprinkled through the season that now takes on a new meaning (such as a lunch when Furillo had orange juice instead of beer). These scenes though have probably been forgotten by those that saw it on TV, one episode each week. By watching a whole season over a weekend on DVD or online, all these hints, suggestions and connections will be remembered and they add to the impact of the series. It is important to pay attention to all that is going on since you do not know when something happens whether it will be come back in a later episode.

Speaking of Furillo, he is one of the best things about the series, and Daniel J. Travanti's performance. He is soft-spoken, like Lt. Castillo (Edward James Olmos) in Miami Vice, but fearless and filled with integrity. Whereas the rest of the police force is somewhat unruly and frequently do the wrong thing, or even illegal things, Furillo can be seen as the voice of reason and moderation. But the integrity can be a two-edged sword. He is the true hero of the series but his integrity sometimes works against his better interests, or even against the interests of the community. Sometimes he can come across as naive, yet he is also sometimes seen filled with rage (a rage he does his outmost to control). And, of course, he is a recovering alcoholic.

Furillo is not alone, he is having a relationship with a public defender, Joyce Davenport (played by Veronica Hamel) and due to a potential conflict of interests they keep their relationship a secret. But their relationship is a highlight of the series, because it feels real. It has the right combination of tenderness and resentfulness, since it is hard to have a relationship when you are always on call, and when you cannot show your affection in public. Some of the best writing and acting in Hill Street Blues is to be found in their intimate scenes together.

Davenport is a powerful and successful female character, but also is the only major character who is a female, although I think one of the female cops (played by Betty Thomas) develops into a major character as well, at least that seems to be happening in season 2. There is also to ex-wife of Furillo, Fay (played by Barbara Bosson) but she is more of a comic relief, at least in the beginning. Eventually she becomes more forceful.

So Hill Street Blues is a major series of considerable importance and need to be included when the history and development of TV is discussed. I hope all seasons will be released on DVD or online in pristine versions soon. As it is now, the title sequence, with Mike Post's great theme, is perhaps more known than what happens after. But the gloomy weather, the melancholic music and the decidedly unglamorous milieus is a great introduction to the world as it is presented in Hill Street Blues.

What is TV?

If you are sitting at home watching an episode of Frasier (1993-2004) on your flatscreen TV it is reasonable to assume that if somebody asked you what you were doing you would answer "I'm watching TV." Let's say that next in the TV schedule came the film She's the One (Ed Burns 1996), and you continued to watch that. If somebody now asked you what you were doing you might still answer "I'm watching TV." or "I'm watching a film." But imagine instead that you had not being using your TV at all, you might not even have one, but found She's the One on BBC iPlayer and watched it on your computer. If somebody asked you now what you were doing you would in all likelihood not answer "I'm watching TV." Probably not even if you were watching Frasier, despite it being a TV-series. You would not say "I'm watching the computer." either. You would say "I'm watching Fraiser." and potentially add, "on the computer." to clarify.

Now, what is the point of this example? To illustrate that TV is loose term. It can mean the square box in the living room, it can mean all the things that are being shown on that square box, and it can mean a typical kind of moving images. But what they all have in common is that box. If nobody watches anything on a particular device called a TV, if instead all that is being watched is watched on computers or smartphones, then TV will cease to be, and we would no longer call a follow-up to Frasier a TV-series, but something else. Maybe just a series. To some extent, TV is just the tableau in the newspaper or the TV Guide.

This is not just hair-splitting, it raises some interesting questions. Today it is very popular to say that this is the golden age of TV, that TV has never been more important or better. I have never understood this, and it is very tempting to dismiss it as confused hogwash. The way I see it there are two flaws with the argument. One being that those making the argument are often depressingly ignorant of the last 60 years of TV history (see below). The other flaw is that you compare wildly different things. TV today, as has pretty much been the case since its inception, consists of news, documentaries, sports, soap operas, weather forecasts, movies, sitcoms, children's programmes and so on. In effect, this means that in order to say that TV is better today you would have to explain, for example, how children's programmes today is better than documentaries about nuclear waste from the late 1970s. If TV today is better than ever before, does this mean that Jersey Shore (2009-) is better than Scenes From a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap Ingmar Bergman 1973)? It was a silly question yes, but so is the argument.

But what people mean in general when they say that TV is better now is only that TV-series are better now. The problem here though is still one of comparisons. First of all, how many TV-series of yesteryears have today's writers actually seen? Secondly, there are a wide variety of TV-series being made, in different genres, and comparing them might be strange. It makes little sense to compare a series like The West Wing (1999-2006) with a show like Kojak (1973-1978) for example. But it would make sense to compare CSI (all of them, 2000-) with Kojak. Which one is the better one would be hard to argue about though, because although CSI is more modern, style-wise, that is not a sign of quality. If it was that would also seem to suggest that, say, This Means War (McG 2012) is automatically a better film than, say, The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940).

So, considering that TV is so much more than just TV-series, and that TV has a long and rich history, I do not think it makes any sense to say that TV is better than it has ever been. However, I think it does make sense to argue that TV is coming to an end, and that one sign of this is that when people talk about this being a "golden age" of TV they do not really mean TV but HBO (and a few other studios). Maybe this is actually a golden age for a studio system while simultaneously being the demise of TV. Since these TV-series are often watched on DVD box sets or downloaded on to a computer they might even help accelerate the fall of TV. I would actually suggest that TV today, in general, is worse than it has been for quite some time. If you turn on the TV on any given day or night, chances are that you will only be able to chose between some game shows, some reality soaps, some talking heads shows and some sport events, regardless of how many channels you have got. If you want to see the good stuff you would not just turn on your TV but only together with your DVD-player, or just your computer.

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In 2010, I wrote a post arguing that TV was a vital area of studies for film scholars and I also said a few words about TV history. To elaborate on TV history I will say this today:

There are many brilliant TV-series today, and some of them are among the best things ever done for TV. But today's TV-series do owe a lot to what came before. A key series is Hill Street Blues, which ran from 1981 to 1987. It had complex characters, it was set in the real, and very gritty, world of an American city, it was unpredictable and it was filled with political themes, it discussed topical issues and it had outbursts of anger and bitterness. It was followed by a number of other law and order shows, especially NYPD Blue (1993-2005), which style of filming has been a major influence on the likes of Lars von Trier. These shows were in contrast, in style, quality and ideology, to the more soapy series such as Dallas (1978-1991), Dynasty (1981-1991) and Falcon Crest (1981-1990), even though they were also influential and had sometimes baffling complexity. A TV-series which was somewhat in-between, but closer to the cop thrillers than the soap operas in its honesty, was L.A. Law (1986-1994). It is worth pointing out that Steven Bochco was co-writer, co-producer and creator of Hill Street Blues (together with Michael Kozoll, and David Milch as co-writer), NYPD Blue (together with David Milch) and L.A. Law (together with Terry Louise Fischer, and David E. Kelley as co-writer). If we look further, it is clear that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, American TV had an extraordinary period, when for example Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Don Siegel made made-for-TV films and live TV-shows, and film was very much influenced by TV. Some of these TV-films were considered so good, or so violent in the case of Siegel, that they were given a cinema release, such as The Killers (1964).

That was just the obvious ones, but there are a number of other series which also have considerable qualities and have been very influential. In addition, so far my examples have been American TV. There are many other TV-producing countries. In the 1970s British and Swedish TV was very exciting, and it continued to be so into the 1980s at least. In the 1970s for example many of Sweden's best filmmakers made TV-series and films directly for TV, including Bergman and Jan Troell.

But still, something has changed in recent years. One thing is obviously HBO (Home Box Offfice) which have managed to produce one fantastic series after another since 1998. (HBO was around before that but beginning with Oz (1997-2003) they entered into a new phase of making high-quality series). Another thing is the status of TV. In the 1980s and early 1990s TV was a place for TV-only stars, or new faces or retiring movie stars, but if you were a proper movie star you would not be in a TV-series, it was undignified. But that eventually changes so that, to take one example, in the second season of Friends (1994-2004) big movie stars were lining up for a guest part, such as Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. But that does of course not make TV better, only its hip factor higher.

I wrote a short piece on CSI in 2010: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2010/08/csi-miami.html
And here is the link to my old piece on TV: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2010/08/tv.html

Reading Bazin (#1)

There are a handful of writers on cinema that I must have within reach at all times. V.F. Perkins is one, David Bordwell another, and critics like James Agee and A.O. Scott. But none more so than André Bazin, critic, theoretician and poet of cinema (a something of a godfather of François Truffaut). Despite sometimes getting it wrong his ideas are almost always interesting and his sentences almost always beautiful. Therefore I have decided to do a series of posts about Bazin, where each post is about one specific essay, article or review by him. (I was inspired to do this by fellow film scholar Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, an avid Bazin fan.)

Today's post is about the article Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry, first published in Esprit 1953, and available in English in the anthology Bazin at Work. It is primarily about the way Hollywood is countering the existential threat from TV but it is also filled with Bazin's (usual) musings on the arts, realism, technology and psychology. It is exactly this scope that makes him such a rewarding person to read. In its discussion about the teleological aspects of film, this article is also closely related to his more famous articles The Ontology of the Photographic Image and The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.

1953 was a time of crisis for the cinema, not least Hollywood cinema, since TV had arrived with force. Bazin begins his essay with saying that even though there is a crisis there are still a couple of months left to consider how best to deal with it. At the moment the Hollywood studios themselves are not as threatened as the actors and technicians are, but Bazin suggests that they can work in TV, or move to Europe. That there has been a dramatic decrease in tickets sold Bazin does attribute to the arrival of TV but he also argues that TV only dramatically speeded up a decreasing interest in cinema in general that was already there. (This though was not the case in Sweden I might add, since the early 50s were the most successful years in Swedish cinema history as far as ticket sales were concerned. The peak was in 1956, exactly the year TV arrived in Sweden. I wonder if Sweden was different from the rest of the world or if Bazin is wrong in his argument.)

Then he goes on to introduce CinemaScope. He writes about it from a technical perspective, from an aesthetic perspective and from the perspective of the cinema owners. (Apparently 80% of France's cinema theatres were not fit to show CinemaScope and had to be re-built.) The discussion then changes to film as art and its relationship to technological changes in general. His argument there is that it is never the filmmakers who are agents of changes but instead the industry, the producers. He says that "The filmmaker can profit from innovation but he never determines it." I think that this view is too limited. To an extent it depends on how he defines innovation and technical changes. He says that there were earlier versions of scope formats in the 1920s but that they never caught on due to a lack of interest from the studios, from the money men, and that sound came about only when it was economically relevant for the studios. But I would argue that many filmmakers invent things whilst making films, and perhaps particularly so cinematographers. A lot of famous cinematographers have been awarded many patents due to invention they have made, not because of financial considerations but because it helped them and the directors to tell the story the way they wanted to. The dolly zoom that was first used in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is one of the more famous examples.

But Bazin goes on to argue that since film is dependent on the industry, the economy, it is different from the other arts. They are eternal, film is mortal. Film is also, according to Bazin "not an art AND an industry, but instead an industrial art that is likely to vanish into thin air as soon as the industry's profit disappear". This is of course also a debatable point. There seems to me to be films that exist outside any industry, and always have been, such as short films, art films and experimental films. But I will leave that for now and instead, like Bazin, turn to TV. For Bazin there is a real danger that TV will kill the cinema, and he argues that TV is "irremediably cruder than the cinema", that "nothing will persuade me to believe, in the spirit of futuristic optimism, that television will take over from an aesthetic point of view". However, Bazin does acknowledge that TV might actually be beneficial for cinema in one way, as it might be used to show films and that this might actually help keep cinema alive.

And on this note Bazin returns to CinemaScope, and now from an aesthetic, and perhaps even moral, point of view. Here the teleological aspect of Bazin's thinking shows itself, as when he says that "the essence of film from the very start (one might even say as early as its seed took root in the inventor's imagination) has been a quest for the realism of the image". (By realism he here means "the greatest number of characteristics in common with natural perception".) CinemaScope will increase this realism, since it will add more depth and width to the images. These new Scope images will lead to "the stripping away of everything extrinsic to the quintessential meaning of the image, of all the expressionism of time and space".

So for Bazin, CinemaScope is similar to the deep focus as used by his heroes William Wyler, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. It is for him part of the natural evolution of the cinema, of increasing the realism. Cinema will fulfil what for Bazin is its "ultimate aim", which is "not so much to mean as to reveal".

That was Bazin in 1953, looking around in the world, telling the reader what he saw and what he thought it meant. The essay succinctly captures his thinking and is therefore a good introduction, whilst at the same time being a good historical snapshot of cinema at the time of his writing. Next time I will look at another essay, from another year, and see what he saw then, and what he felt it meant.

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The other posts about Bazin are here: #2, #3, #4, #5.

Correction 2012-02-01. The name of Bazin's essay is Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry, not Will CinemaScope Save the Cinema as I had originally written.

Brothers in Arms

For some reason one of the most read blog posts here is the one about the cooperation between Derek Jarman and Pet Shop Boys (found here). I thought I continue along the music track but instead of British electronica it will be British rock this time, in the form of Dire Straits. I am not a huge fan, nothing there like my deep love for Pet Shop Boys, but some of their songs are great, and Brothers in Arms (from 1985) in particular. It is a long, majestic, melancholic piece of music, and it has been used many times in film and TV to accentuate the mood, often when something important and/or sad is about to happen. Here are some examples:

The first is from the second season of The West Wing, the episode Two Cathedrals, one of the best of the series. It is when president Bartlett (Martin Sheen) has to decide whether to run for re-election or not, whether he is a quitter or a fighter.



The next clip is less amazing, but it is still good, and I happen to have a weakness for Spy Game (Tony Scott 2001) in general, so any excuse to include it. Nathan (Robert Redford) tells the story of how he recruited (or tricked rather) Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) into working for the CIA.



But my favourite might be from Miami Vice, the original TV-series, the episode Out Where the Buses Don't Run from the second season. Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) are given a tip and drive of in the black Ferrari through the deserted streets of Miami, street lights flashing. Unfortunately I cannot embed it, but click on the link and you are there

The clip ends with the words "Executive producer Michael Mann" which reminds me that I have yet to write a blog post about Mann, despite him being my favourite filmmaker for the last decades. That love affair began in the late 80s with Miami Vice.

But to end today, here is Dire Straits's own video.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

The previous post about Wendy Hiller included Graduating Class, an episode from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and I thought I continue with some more episodes, some better ones, from it.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents was first broadcast on CBS in 1955 and ran until 1962, in total 270 episodes, each 25 minutes long. They were dark stories with a twist at the end, and that twist was often the point of them. They were not necessarily suspenseful, although some are very much so, and sometimes they were like macabre jokes, so it is no surprise that some were based on short stories by Roald Dahl, or even written directly by him. Although they're all very much stamped by Hitchcock he personally directed only a handful. (Two were directed by Robert Altman.)

Here are some of my favourites:

One of the later ones, Bang! You're Dead, directed by Hitchcock:

Man From the South is one of the more famous, starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre:

But the best is possibly The Case of Mr Pelham, also directed by Hitchcock himself:

After 1962 the format changed, and as a consequence the name, into The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Maybe I'll post something about that later.

SCSMI conference 2011

Two weeks ago I attended the annual SCSMI (Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image) conference, which was held in Budapest this year. There have been some requests for a report and here, belatedly, are my thoughts.

This was my second SCSMI conference, and I had almost as much fun this time as last year in Roanoke, US. The reason it was more fun last year was that we all stayed in the same hotel and Roanoke is much smaller than Budapest so the communal feeling was much stronger, more like a fieldtrip than a conference. This time we were all scattered across the city, making it less intimate and cosy. But that's just the order of things. Let's focus on the papers and presentations instead. I will not dwell on all the things I went to, in some cases I have nothing in particular to say and in some cases I feel I don't know enough to engage critically, but here are the presentations I can and will say something about, presentations all of which I enjoyed. All of these ideas presented here are things I'm interested in and will come back to in later postings, and eventually in a book.

Stanley Kramer is not a filmmaker with a high standing these days, but one of his more tolerable films are The Defiant Ones (1958), a drama about racial intolerance. It is stiff and ponderous but it has one thing going for it that almost makes it great. The use of natural sound. The sounds of rain, wind, grass, mud, birds, insects, voices (and an annoying portable radio) gives the film a life and a richness which isn't in the story, the images or most of the direction. If ever the importance of sound in cinema needed to be proved, this would be a great film to start with. But the list of films to include would be a long one. Luis Rocha Antunes, in his presentation about "The Multisensory Film Experience", didn't mentioned The Defiant Ones, but he gave a lot of sound examples from other films to underline his argument that film is more than just a visual experience. He talked of many things that heightens our experience of a film besides what we see with our eyes but I felt that sound was his main point in this particular presentation, which was a good one. As you may recall from my report from last year's conference I then also applauded the many presentations that discussed sound and the importance of it.

Johannes Riis of University of Copenhagen gave a presentation on Mad Men, and the question of his talk was why we admire and look up to Don Draper even though he is not really a nice guy with his bullying, extramarital affairs and condescending attitude. Why is it that we can admire people on the screen (or in fiction in general) which we might not like at all in real life? This is a common question, that pops up now and then, sometimes with moral undertones ("these films are bad because they make us like bad people") but more often just out of curiosity. There's a lot to be said about this.

What I suggested as an explanation to audience appreciation of "bad" characters was two things. First that there might be other characters in the film that are even worse, and that their function is to say "yes, the main character is bad, but not as bad is this guy here." and so the issue becomes relative. Like the character Waingro in Heat (1995). Compared to him Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro's character) isn't so bad. Secondly, a way of making it easier for us to like characters is to not show the consequences of their actions. In Mad Men for example, if every scene of Don Draper behaving badly was followed by a scene when the person he had cheated on, or bullied, was shown quietly sobbing, or accusing Draper for behaving badly, then that might considerably lessen the warm feelings we might have for him. And in Heat; if after the opening sequence, when the security guards are shot by McCauley and his crew, we were shown a sequence of the guards grieving widows and children, then it would be tough to like them. Instead all victims are alone and without (acknowledged) friends or relatives, except the victims of Waingro's crimes.

But we needn't necessarily explain this phenomenon by narrative conventions. We like people in real life even though they might do bad things, it is just that they are not bad to us. Everybody have friends, liars, cheaters, embezzlers, perhaps even mass murderers, and if that is a possibility in real life then of course it can happen with fictional characters as well.

The University of Copenhagen is a major player in cognitive studies of the moving image, and besides Johannes Riis, Casper Tybjerg is another scholar from that school (Luis Rocha Antunes has been there too). Tybjerg's presentation was on the moral aspects of storytelling. He criticised an evolutionary psychology approach that reduces all character behaviour to the essential hunt for food and sex. Tybjerg suggested that one reason for storytelling is that it is a way to "teach" us humans about how to behave, that this is why the good guys win and the bad guys are punished, and that this is as old as storytelling itself. He quoted from William Flesch's book "Comeuppance" (a word which always makes me think of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Orson Welles's narration of it) to substantiate his theory. I suggested though that the audience sometimes prefer the bad characters (or the "immoral" ones), i.e. "rooting for the bad guy", and that what might for one spectator be seen as good behaviour might be seen as the opposite for another spectator. But the idea that storytelling, as part of human evolution, is involved with helping us understand the world and inspire us to behave ethically, is one that I subscribe to. (Here's a review of Flesch's book.)

The last Dane in this report is the man who started it all in Copenhagen, professor Torben Grodal. At the conference last year he spoke about violence and terror in Se7en (1995). Perhaps to compensate for the relentless gloom he this year spoke about comedies and laughter. He was arguing that laughter is related to anger and that it comes from playing, which most mammals do (and some non-mammals as well), as a safe way of doing things similar to what we do when we are angry or genuinely aggressive, such as when hunting. It was a lot more complex than that of course, but this'll do for now. Grodal also emphasised the social aspects of laughter, and suggested that this is a reason why comedies are more popular on a local market, whereas action films and melodramas have a more global reach.

This raises some questions for me. If laughter is a social function, on what level? Social in the sense that it binds two individuals together, or a whole group, by laughing a the "other", somebody else, or another group? Or is it social in the sense that it is a way for humans, all humans, to socialise together, like when we meet strangers we might use laughter as a way of bonding, not at the expense of somebody else but for everybody's benefit? I might for example, to break the ice, make a joke about myself. I would suggest that both uses of laughter are at play, and this might help explain why, contrary to what Grodal seemed to suggest, some comedies are in fact very much popular on a global scale, such as the slapstick humour of Chaplin and Keaton, whereas some other form of humour works only on a local market. The same is true for melodramas I would argue, and possibly action films as well.

One of the bigger stars within the field of cognitive studies is Tim Smith, presently at Birkbeck, University of London (He also also blogs (infrequently) at continuityboy.blogspot.com.) His speciality is tracking eye-movements of spectators, but in his presentation he focused on memory, on what we remember after having seen a scene or a whole film, and why it is that we remember that which we remember. He suggested that we remember the logical continuity of the story and specific plot points, and that verbal details were more important to us than visuals. He highlighted our preference for words by noting the fact that we usually watch the mouth of the person speaking, even though it doesn't make it easier to understand what the person is saying, we might as well look at the eyes (or feet for that matter) since we hear the words, we don't see them, unless we're lip-readers. (I have sometimes consciously tried to look at other parts of the face when somebody is speaking but it is harder than it sounds. The speaker's eyes are fairly easy to focus on though, if you're close to them. But sooner or later the gaze turns towards the mouth again.)

One comment I made is that we often remember things that were not actually in the film, i.e. we don't remember them at all but have made them up. My own favourite example is a scene from Thunderball (1965) that I had very strong memories of, I can even "see" it in my head, still today. Only there is no such scene in the actual film. And neither is it in Ian Fleming's novel the film is based on. My surprise when I re-watched it a couple of years ago and found out that the scene wasn't there hasn't settled yet. To this Smith said that we include scenes in our memory that wasn't there in the film because these imaginary scenes help to make logical continuity. But this was not the case with my scene. It was a whole murder sequence, which didn't have anything to do with the continuity of the film. No, in my case, and most likely in others as well, there's something else going on. The scene/sequence might for example be a composite of several scenes and images, possibly from different films, that have been created by our ever so self-sufficient brains. Or I might have dreamt it, and then in my brain the memory of the dream has merged with the memory of the real.

Another star in these circles is professor James Cutting from Cornell University. His presentations are always immensely enjoyable because he is such a natural speaker and entertainer. His thing is collecting data, data consisting of things like average shot lengths, number of shots, number of sequences, changes of luminance, movement in shots, number of cuts, and so on, in Hollywood films made from 1935 and onwards. He then present this figures to others to do with it what they see fit. There are a lot of things you can do with this figures. One thing is to compare different genres, different filmmakers and different eras. Another is to track changes over time. Another is to analyse the structures of films, and see the striking similarities between wildly different films, and ponder upon how much is intentionally done and how much is unconsciously. The mere avalanche of numbers and figures can feel a bit over-whelming, but if you dig in to them there's no telling what you will find. (The reason why Cutting and his colleagues and students begin with the year 1935 is that before this there were too much inconsistency and randomness. The language of film was still evolving so much that it is difficult to get a handle on it, but from approximately 1935 things began to settle down. This makes for an interesting nuance to the widely held idea that classical storytelling was pretty much established in 1917.)

The presentation I regarded as the best from last year was by Robert Blanchet, and this year he was at it again, but now together with a colleague from Norway, Margarethe Bruun Vaage. Their presentation was about the difference in engaging with TV-series as opposed to engaging with films, more specifically the fictional characters. In short what they argued were that due to the long-time exposure to the characters in TV-series we come to regard them, in a way, as friends, and we are hence reluctant to leave them. Blanchet and Bruun Vaage were drawing from media studies, psychology and economics in a very rich and fruitful way. A concept they used, that comes from social psychology, was the "familiarity principle", which is also called the "mere exposure effect" which means that the more familiar something is, or becomes, the more likely is it that we like it. It is true for a lot of things in life, and they argued that this too is a factor in explaining audience engagement with TV-series as being different from films, at least on part of the characters. The familiarity principle works in films as well though, with actors, filmmakers, genres or film series such as the James Bond films.

I can only vouch for the friendship aspect myself. After I had seen the last episode of The West Wing (1999-2006) I felt abandoned and sadden, the sense of loss was palpable after having spent several years with this characters, in a way akin to a feeling of saying goodbye to friends or colleagues. But the familiarity principle is more problematic. It doesn't help explain how we engage with the first episodes of the first season, it only helps to explains why we continue to watch in the fifth season even though we might not think it is as good as it once was. Also, it would seem to suggest that we would like any TV-series were we exposed to it long enough but I'm not so sure about that.

One presentation I was particularly tickled by was professor John Bateman's, especially when he talked about the need for new approaches to genre studies. As I find most of traditional genre studies deeply flawed this is something I will be coming back to in later postings, but what Bateman and his colleagues want to argue is that we need to acknowledge that discourses and genres are much more fluent and dynamic than we give them credit for. (The focus of the presentation though was on the beginnings of films, in particular so called "puzzle films".)

And that concludes my summary. As I said I went to more presentations, for example professor Carl Plantinga's on folk psychology and Monika Suckfüll's on audience participation, but although I enjoyed them I don't have anything in particular to add. I do have a lot to add though to the presentation given by professor Murray Smith of University of Kent, but so much that I will have to save it for another blog post.

My own presentation was about storytelling and prejudices (prejudices scholars and critics have when approaching films). I will eventually explaining my theories and ideas on storytelling in writing but that too will have to wait. The prejudice part might be summed up in this quote from V.F. Perkins: "Our viewpoint is not given solely by the image because what we see is so much a question of what we're looking for." (From "Film as Film").

I'll keep you dangling until August because I'm giving myself a blog vacation now. In July you'll have to settle for some clips and quotes.

Niklasons - Hasse Ekman goes sitcom

One of the most long-lived and prominent of TV-genres is the sitcom. The history of sitcoms go back almost to the beginning of mass media, and was popular on radio before it came to TV. BBC's Pinwright's Progress that came out right after the second world war, the first episode was shown November 29, 1946, is sometimes called the first sitcom for TV. After that there was no stopping it, especially not after the phenomenal success of the American I Love Lucy (1951-1957, which then continued under different names until 1960.) To Sweden, native sitcoms came rather late, but it should come as no surprise that when it finally arrive Hasse Ekman directed the first one, Niklasons (1965). It is remarkable how close to the formula it sticks, while at the same time, already in the first episode, it is full of key Ekman themes.

The sitcom (situation comedy) is often defined as a TV-series based on 25 minutes long sequences and where each episode stands on its own. It is meant to be funny, the humour arising from ordinary day-to-day events. At the centre of the set is often a sofa, and a staircase is lurking in the back. So it is in Niklasons. It is about a middle class family of four; father, mother, daughter and son. The father is a newspaper columnist, the mother a house wife, the daughter a grown-up teenager and the son around 10, with a very mature and self-righteous disposition. It is amiable enough, and probably captures rather well a Swedish middle class outlook in the mid-60s. It was an ambitious undertaking, with two of the greatest stars in Swedish cinema for most of the post-war era, Sickan Carlsson and Karl-Arne Holmsten, playing the parents. It was also a unique co-production between the large, and usually competitive, film production companies SF and Sandrews, working together with SVT, Swedish Television.

What is interesting for me with regard to my thesis is that in the first episode mother Niklason is taking Spanish lessons, because it is a global language and when she can speak it "the whole of South America is open to us, a whole continent." (this of course forgets that they speak Portuguese in Brazil...). She also explains to her children that when they grow old, she and her husband would like to move somewhere warm and pleasant. What is funny about this is that in almost every single film Ekman has done, this is always what the main characters feels. South America is called the promised land over and over again, as they either talk about it, or go there. (Or at least Spain.) That Ekman felt strongly about this himself is obvious, considering he moved to Spain in 1964 and never moved back. That means that he had technically retired from filmmaking when he was asked to do Niklasons, but he came up from Spain, shot it, and then went back again.

Another typical thing about Niklasons from an Ekman perspective is the meta elements. The family is obsessed by a TV-series called Forsman blir överläkare (Forsman becomes ward doctor or something like that), which seems to be awful and pretentious. The star of that series, doctor Forsman, is played by Ekman as the most conceited, pompous and self-righteous man on TV, who gets to kiss every nurse in sight, and performs miraculous deeds, saving Sweden and Swedes from illness and death. It is very funny, and very appealing.

Genre definitions are often problematic, since they generalise and simplify things, sometimes to the extent of making them pointless. This is true for TV as well as for film of course. The definition I gave above of sitcoms is not really relevant, since plenty of sitcoms are not like that. Another more broad definition is that sitcoms are comedies based around the family and the work-place, and by that definition it covers a large variety of shows and series. It might not be particularly interesting to analyse as a general subject, since it covers hundreds of series over several decades. So while Niklasons is unquestionably a sitcom, that is just a starting point. It can be discussed from the perspective of gender, ideology, authorship, finance, industry, sociology, all aspects potentially enlightening and revealing. I will not do that now of course, but an essay on Niklasons is warranted.
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This post was upgraded and corrected on 2015-02-18

CSI: Miami

I'm intrigued by CSI: Miami (2002 - ). I'm not pretending to be any kind of expert on it, but I've seen episodes here and there, and also of the other two versions, CSI: Las Vegas (2000 - ) and CSI: NY (2004 - ). Why intrigued? Because it's so breathtakingly effortless. There's no acting, there's no writing and there's no direction. It's got the most elementary story possible, and the various mysteries the teams have to solve are neither clever nor mysterious. There's no thought involved on the part of the crew members, all they have to do is spray, scratch, look in the microscope, run the DNA found on the crime scene on the computer and there's your suspect. And with so little effort from the makers of the series, there's no effort involved on the part of the audience either. No complexities and no anxieties.

At first I thought that the main appeal for its large audience, well, the only appeal, was the scientific approach. That what the audience wanted to see, and which the makers knew that the audience wanted to see and so provided, was the technical wizardry involved. That this was the very essence of a "cinema of attractions". And that is probably a large part of its broader appeal. But after doing some research, and looking at online CSI-forums, I've realised that a large group of people do have an emotional investment in the show, and its characters. They argue about them, the root for them and they pity them. So for them this show is something it could never be for me, the casual observers. It's like a family member, which you go and visit frequently.

What I've also noticed in the series is a rather harsh and conservative attitude to the criminals. This is not a TV-series of forgiveness and repentance. Here the criminals all deserve to die, and are not showing any remorse (and apparently no suspect in this world of CSI has any rights, or needs to be told that they have a right to remain silent and such legal niceties). This almost biblical morality stands in contrast with the very modern and very scientific approach to the actual solving of the crimes. The crew members quotes Newton, calculate with elaborate mathematical equations and use the latest technological equipment. It's a far cry from the poor policemen in The Wire (2002 - 2008) who makes do with just typewriters.

For me though, the greatest appeal, perhaps the only appeal, of CSI: Miami is the visual style. It's all glass and transparency, fluctuating lights and fancy camera movements. It's close to intoxicating, especially all the glass and see-through materials.

But what does it all mean?

TV

When I was young I watched conspicuous amounts of TV. It's fair to say my life was organised around my school schedule and the TV schedule. But at some point, in my late teens, I just stopped. My interest in cinema took over, and if I watched anything on TV it was movies. Also I didn't really feel that TV was dignified enough for someone such as myself. Weirdly enough all that changed in the summer of 1997, because the movie Fools Rush In (1997) opened, and as its male star it had Matthew Perry. When I saw the trailer with a friend she said "Oh, it's the guy from Friends!" I had no idea what she was talking about and suddenly I felt left out, even though it was a movie we were talking about. So I decided that I had to watch TV again. This was at a time when sitcoms ruled the roost, the likes of Friends* (1994-2004), Spin City (1996-2002), Frasier (1993-2004), Dharma and Greg (1997-2002) and important series such as ER (1994-2009) and Ally McBeal (1997-2004). And in 1998 Sex and the City (1998-2004) appeared, followed the next year by The West Wing (1999-2006) and The Sopranos (1999-2007) and many other series. It could be argued that in 1998 we entered a whole new era, the age of HBO (even though HBO had already been around for some time).

But the development of modern TV is to be a subject for further blog posts. The point now is that TV suddenly became culturally acceptable, not only for me but in general, in a way it hadn't really been before. Part of the reason for this is probably that TV got better, in the sense that a lot more complex and intelligent TV-series than was the norm appeared. And another reason is probably a generational thing.

One example of this is that when Friends began no "real" stars wanted to to be seen in it, but in later seasons stars were lining up to appear, either playing themselves or just doing bit parts.

If you want to study cinema properly, you need to study TV as well. They crossbreed and influence one another, and actors, writers and directors move from one media to another. It used to be that directors began doing TV and once they left it for the cinema they didn't move back, or that movie stars ended their careers doing TV-shows. It's not like that any more. Of course, TV has always had a huge influence on TV, not least in the sense that in the 1950s, when TV had its big breakthrough, it took away large parts of the audience from the cinema, and cinema had to develop new technical novelties in order to compete, such as CinemaScope, Cinerama, 3D and Smell-O-Vision (which admittedly never really caught on). TV also lead to changes in narrative patterns and the use of colour. (It also coincided with the "birth" of the teenager, but that's another story.) And cinema has of course influenced TV as well over the years, but I would still say that things are different today. And if you want to understand what's going on in the world of moving images, and perhaps also to understand what's going on in the world in general, studying TV is vital.

However, when people today are writing and talking about TV, they often talk as if good TV was born at the beginning of this century. That's of course bonkers. One of the most important TV-series ever is Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), created by Steven Bochco, who in the 1980s had a standing similar to HBO's today, as a source of brilliance. And there are a number of other great and ground breaking shows and series, and of course not only from the US. Britain for example also has a long tradition of doing good, solid and challenging TV. Z-Cars (1962-1978) is an example of a cop show, and there's also the many adapted books, such as Brideshead Revisited (1981) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979). And of course the magnificent Fawlty Towers (1975-1979). Other countries with which I'm less familiar probably did good work as well.

But, as I said, the development of TV history will be discussed later, this post was only meant as a rallying cry for giving the study of TV and TV-history an equal footing with cinema studies in the academic world, and as a starting point for writing about TV here, at Fredrik on Film.

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*It's debatable whether Friends qualifies as a sitcom, or if it should be regarded as something else, a cross between a soap and a sitcom, a soapcom perhaps. But now, enjoy this classic scene from Fawlty Towers.

SCSMI-conference report

So I'm back in Scotland after the conference and the additional visits to Washington and New York. It was most refreshing to get away and exchange ideas with a wide selection of film scholars, and I've now got an idea for a book about cinema. But more on that later.

For those of you who don't know what SCSMI stands for, it's the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, which aims to be a interdisciplinary society for the studies of films and TV, bringing together film history, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, with perhaps a special interest in audience reception. The many papers presented at the conference covered most aspects of cinema and as is often the case, some of the papers were rather bad, but more often than not, good and interesting ideas and discoveries were presented.

It's always been my opinion that the more varied background you have, and the more angles you use when discussing cinema, the better and more enlightening the research and the interpretations will be. However, the vital thing is that you have a good command of film history. One of the most common fallacies in film criticism and film theory is the "novelty fallacy", i.e. the mistaken belief that what you have discovered is something new that hasn't been there before. I don't mean new in the sense that nobody has written about it before, because that might very well be the case, but new in the sense that this is something that filmmakers haven't done before. Because in 9 cases out of 10, it has been done before. Now, I've written about this before, but since this lack of historical perspective and knowledge is so agonizingly common I'm constantly reminded of it, and feel the urge to mention it yet again.

The other thing that struck me at the conference was how common it was, as, again, is so often the case, to state the obvious.

But this criticism of mine sometimes seems to be mostly due to my demand of perhaps unreasonably high standards. And I mustn't dwell on it too much.

What I did really like was, as alluded to in the beginning, the wide scale of topics being covered, and that for example sound was discussed in a very good and penetrating way, as was music. Sound and music are two fields that I feel is still not getting enough attention. Another thing I liked was that both film and TV were discussed, and I made me decide that from now on I will no longer hold back on writing about TV, which I've previously done, for reasons that are obscure even to myself. TV and cinema go hand in hand, and to understand the one you need to understand the other.

Among other things I really liked was a paper by Lars-Martin Sorensen about Yasujiro Ozu and the meanings of Ozu's repetitive patterns. It gave me some useful ideas for my own thoughts about authorship, and hence for my thesis. But the highlight of the conference was, I believe, a paper on embarrassment by Robert Blanchet. It was more about psychology and emotions than about films, but very interesting and informative, and for some perhaps thought-provoking.

So, to sum up, by bringing together people from various disciplines, the combined effect was one of constant stimulation and interest, and by beginning with looking at the films and then draw conclusions from them, rather than taking some theory and trying to apply it to a film, it brought a lot more food for thought and came to more relevant conclusions than is the case with so many other presentations, essays and books I've endured over the years.