Henry King

When I first saw The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King 1952) a couple of years ago I was so bewitched, so enchanted, by a scene at a jazz club in Paris where Harry Street (played by Gregory Peck) and Cynthia Green (played by Ava Gardner) meet for the first time that I had to stop the film and watch the scene again, immediately. It is so wonderful; soft, tender, slow, musical, attentive to atmosphere and nuance, carefully staged and artistically lit; the room, the space is as vivid and as important as the characters in it. That is where King’s greatest strength as a filmmaker lied.

In an interview with King in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977) Scott Eyman complains that while "such obviously marginal talents as Douglas Sirk and Budd Boetticher" are being celebrated by the critics, Henry King is not. To call Sirk and Boetticher "obviously marginal" is perhaps petty rather than accurate, but Sirk and King do have something in common; the incredibly rich and meticulous mise en scène; where sets, props, scale, colours, actor movements, combined with sound, music and camera movements, are done with the out-most care and artistry. It is also something that is frequently mentioned in reviews of King's films (in her review of The Gunfighter (1950), in the Observer, C. A. Lejeune spent a lot of time describing the mise en scène - without using that word - because it has impressed her so much), and despite what Eyman may have felt, King seems to been treated rather well by the critics, and he does not seem to have had any enemies. In the 1920s he was even regarded by many as one of the best filmmakers overall, on the strength of, among others, Tol'able David (1921) and Stella Dallas (1925). They are both fine films, and Tol'able David in particular is interesting because it is close to King's own childhood. But a lot of King's silent films have been lost, and I have seen very few. Of the over 100 films King made I have about 20, and they are primarily from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and it is especially the period from 1943 to 1958 that is extraordinary. That is when he made, among others,  others, The Song of Bernadette (1943), Margie (1946), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Bravados (1958), all powerful, emotional and warm, made with total conviction. These are films that take their time, and the shots can go on for minutes and minutes, without very much, or even anything, happening on a surface level. King seems more interested in the inner lives of his characters, their spiritual lives, than what they do. And the mise en scène, as mentioned above, is there and the cinematography (frequently by Leon Shamroy) also glows; embedding the characters in both light and darkness, creating sophisticated depth and texture. King favoured medium shots; he wanted the whole space to be part of the images, that the background of a shot was as important as the characters. He once said that "a camera must talk", he wanted to convey the themes and the feelings visually and use everything within the frame for that purpose (so naturally he began using deep focus and low visible ceilings early in his career). This sentence from Bosley Crowther's review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro is also a rather apt summary of much of King's work "the overall production in wonderful color is full of brilliant detail and surprise and the mood of nostalgia and wistful sadness that is built up in the story has its spell". Even a completely unknown film such as Lloyd's of London (1936) has extraordinary richness, depth and tracking shots.

So the mise en scène is one central aspect of his films. Two other aspects are history and religion. All of the films mentioned so far, except Stella Dallas, are set in the past, and that is true for most of his sound films. He was perhaps a man most comfortable in the past, even though he was an aviator who flew his own plane well into his 70s. About religion he once said that "I have often explored religious themes in my pictures but I’ve never tried to be preachy or holier-than-thou." although the last part is debatable, especially in a film like I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), about a priest in a countryside parish. It is a lovely and humane film but, well, preachy at times. Much better is The Song of Bernadette, a film of uncommon power and strength, with Jennifer Jones as the young French girl who believes she has seen the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is a sickly daughter in a poor family (there is a shocking scene in which her father has to dispose of contagious, bloody rags from the hospital as it is the only job he can find, the kind of job nobody else would take), and neither the authorities not the church approve of her stories and her visions. It is a sometimes cruel film. I am not religious but this film moved me, all 150 minutes of it, more than I would like to admit, and seeing it again did not diminish it. It has all of King's strengths discussed above.

Someone else who liked The Song of Bernadette was James Agee. After qualifying his appreciation by mentioning the limits on artistry he felt Hollywood provided, he had this to say in his review in The Nation:

I have seldom seen so tender and exact an attention to mood, to over-all tone, to cutting, to the edging of emotion, and to giving vitality, sometimes radiance, in terms of the image and the sound more than of the character, the story, the line, the music. Jennifer Jones especially, as Bernadette, whether through Henry King's direction or her own ability, impossibly combines the waxen circumspections of a convent school with abrupt salients of emotion of which Dostoevski himself need not have been ashamed.

King worked at 20th Century Fox for the last 30 years of his career, from the mid-1930s, under stuido boss Darryl F. Zanuck, and they seemed to have got along well. King was supposedly Zanuck’s favourite director at Fox, perhaps because they were so in sync, even though Zanuck was sometimes concerned about the slow pacing of the films and wanted to make them snappier, not least The Gunfighter. A Deleuzian might say that it was a battle between King's time-images and Zanuck's movement-images. But as a rule, King was pleased. "He'll watch the rushes every day and give you his opinion. If he respects you, that's all he'll give you. No dictatorial judgement. Generally he deferred to my judgement." One thing they argued about was the moustache Gregory Peck has in The Gunfighter. It was not good for box office according to Zanuck, but as you can see the moustache stayed. King wanted the film to be realistic, and he wanted it to be a low-key film about alienation and sorrow, and in that he succeeded. (King was less pleased with David O. Selznick, whose interferences destroyed King's last film Tender is the Night (1962), a film which he did not get to cut the way he wanted to.)

King would go off to a secluded location and work on the scripts, even when they had been assigned to him, and he worked on the film all the way through post-production. He was keen on the editing process to, and worked with the same editor, Barbara McLean, on some 30 films. He deeply cared for his films, and his characters, and this is of course partly why they are so good. But Zanuck was also sometimes deeply involved, not least on Wilson (1944), from the beginning to the end. Disentangling what was Zanuck and what was King is not always easy, even though it was King who was master on the set. But my research into King is still a work in progress, and there is much more to say. Suffice to say now that in 1968 Andrew Sarris put him in the category "Subject for further research" and I believe he probably deserves to be in "Far side of paradise".

I will end with a scene from King of the Khyber Rifles (1953). The film is not one of King's best but good enough and on occasion wonderful. It is a tale of adventures in British India, and as such rather colonial, but the main character, played by Tyrone Power, is an outcast among the British. Although his father was English, his mother was an Indian, and a Muslim, and so he does not have it easy. In this scene he is not welcome to participate in the celebrations with the other soldiers, and is sitting by himself, when a woman calls on him. The scene has all the quiet emotions and beauty that King excelled at, and notice the expressive sound of the wind; how there are people moving about in the background, and up in the watchtower, and how the camera keeps its distance from the couple on the porch. "[T]he meditative contemplation of humanity from the middle distance" is how Walter Coppedge described King's style and that is a nice way of putting it.



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The quotes from Henry King are from two sources:
Henry King Director From Silents to 'Scope, edited by Frank Thompson (1995)
Scott Eyman's interview in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977)
The quote from Walter Coppedge is from his book Henry King's America (1986)

The best book about King was published by the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2007, when they did a retrospective of King's films. Among those who contributed to it were Peter Von Bagh, Carlos Losilla and Miguel Marías.

Farran Nehme has a fine article about Margie in Film Comment here.

Both King and Henry Hathaway, whom I have written about earlier on several occasions, were at 20th Century Fox and Zanuck, but they are rather different. For one thing Hathaway frequently made films about violent men seeking revenge, and was often hard and cynical. King was the opposite of that, and disliked revenge. He was more interested in redemption. A character in a Hathaway film is much more likely to punch somebody out than in a film by King. Visually King was less showy, more subdued, whereas Hathaway was more striking and geometrical, using frames within frames for example, and sometimes flirting with surrealism. There was also a third Henry at Fox, Koster (they were known as the three Henry). I suppose I will have to write about him too some day.

Intruder in the Dust (1949)

In the end of Intruder in the Dust (1949) Lucas Beauchamp, an older black man arrested for a murder he did not commit, is asked by the white lawyer why he did not tell what had happened at the scene of the crime. "Would you have believed me?" Lucas asks, to which the lawyer has no reply. It is a remarkably powerful scene, for two special reasons. One is that the white lawyer has been set up as a hero in the film, the other is that Lucas says it with such a matter-of-fact tone of voice, albeit with a flash of anger. Everybody in the town had taken it for granted that Lucas was guilty, and since he is all too aware of the fact that this is the white man's world he refuses to play any games with them. He is a proud man, and he will not let go of his dignity and self-respect. This puts his behaviour at odds with what the white majority can accept, even those that would consider themselves progressive. In films about racism and injustices committed against African-Americans it is usually in the end white characters who are the heroes. But here Lucas Beauchamp is the hero, not for doing heroic acts but for not giving in or giving up, and he is not sentimentalised.

This is an angry and sad film, based on the novel by William Faulkner and shot in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi. It was one of the last films made by Clarence Brown, being both its producer and director. Brown was an impressive filmmaker even though few of his films are remembered today. He was perhaps at his best in the 1920s but he is more famous for making films with Greta Garbo (he was her favourite), such as Anna Christie (1930) and Anna Karenina (1935). Other known films are National Velvet (1944), with Elizabeth Taylor on a horse, and the very sweet The Yearling (1946). Considering the kind of films he usually made Intruder in the Dust is something of a departure, but this was a film he wanted to make, and he struggled with MGM to be able to make it. He was from the south (although born in Massachusetts he lived in Tennessee from when he was 11) and he did have personal experiences of events such as those that take place in his film, as had Faulkner.

The adaptation was done by Ben Maddow, one of the more interesting scriptwriters of the 1940s and 50s. He had previously participated, together with Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz, in the making of Native Land (1942), a film about attacks against workers and unions in America in the 1930s, with Paul Robeson as narrator. He also wrote scripts for two films by John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The Unforgiven (1960). In between he was blacklisted for his politics, eventually naming names in the HUAC hearings. During those years he wrote several scripts with Philip Yordan as his front, among them Men at War (1957), directed by Anthony Mann and one of the best war films ever made. Well, one of the best films ever made.

The style of the Intruder in the Dust is one of naturalism, in all aspects. It is shot on location, using deep focus and long takes, and there is no music. The use of natural sound is one of the strengths of the film, where every footstep, every breath, is emphasised, to add atmosphere and tension. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees' black and white cinematography is excellent, with the Southern milieu so evocatively captured you can almost feel the sweat and smell the stench. The combination of direction and cinematography is often magnificent. However, there are a few scenes where the dialogue is didactic, when the only purpose of the words seems to be to hit the audience over the head with the implications of what has taken place, as if we were not intelligent enough to understand what we were seeing. But there is also an irony here, in the occasional discrepancy between the words spoken by the white characters and what Lucas might have said had he been given the chance. Whether this was deliberate is not clear, and I leave that to the individual spectator to guess for themselves.

Lucas is played by Juano Hernandez, of Puerto Rican heritage (he grew up in Brazil). Before Intruder in the Dust he had done two films directed by Oscar Micheaux, Lying Lips (1939) and The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940). Then in 1950 he made three fine films, two by Michael Curtiz. He played the jazz musician Art Hazzard in Curtiz's Young Man With a Horn (1950) and in The Breaking Point, Curtiz's version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, he played Wesley Park, friend and partner of Harry Morgan. Finally he played Uncle Famous Prill, a man threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, in Jacques Tourneur's magnificent Stars in My Crown. Ten years later he played sergeant Skidmore in John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge (1960). There are several similarities between Intruder in the Dust and Sergeant Rutledge, where Woody Strode plays the title character as a sergeant in the 9th cavalry who is accused of rape and murder. He has the same pride and rigour as Lucas. A major difference between the two films is that Rutledge has lines such as "It was all right for Mr Lincoln to say we was free, but we're not. Not yet! Maybe someday!" and at another point he is saying that he is not a "swamp-running nigger", "I ain't that. I'm a man!" Lucas has no such lines, but he does not need them. Just by standing tall and looking the white man in the eye he says the same thing using only his gaze, body and posture.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is another book turned into film that is similar to Intruder in the Dust. It too tells the story about a black man in the south being wrongfully accused of violent crimes. I leave the books out of the equation, but of the two films I prefer Intruder in the Dust. It is the braver and less comforting film, partly because it takes place in the present whereas To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the past. Intruder... also feels less conventional. In both films a simmering mob approaches the jail to kill the black prisoner. The jail is guarded by the white righteous lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. In the similar scene in Intruder in the Dust it is a frail old woman, knitting away, who face down the mob.

In "The Shadow and the Act" a great piece of film criticism from 1949, Ralph Ellison writes about blacks in Hollywood films and among the films he mentions Intruder in the Dust is the only one he cares much for. African-Americans have been abjectly treated by Hollywood for much of its history, much as in society at large, and that is primarily what Ellison's article is about. Even films that were well-meaning (i.e. attempts to criticise racism) are often so in a muddled, confused, cowardly and often patronising way. But not Intruder in the Dust. Ellison suggests that this is the only film that can be "shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter". That is reason enough to celebrate it, besides it being a very fine film aesthetically.

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This post obviously ties in with the previous one, Film as a window to the past.
Ralph Ellison's essay can be found here.

GPO Film Unit

The other day I was watching De hombre a hombre (1949) an early film by Hugo Fregonese, a nomadic filmmaker originally from Argentina. It got me thinking of another South American-born filmmaker who had a nomadic career, the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti. He came to Britain in the 1930s and began working at the GPO Film Unit. GPO stands for General Post Office and the films produce by this remarkable unit were more often than not extraordinary (I still remember how dazzled I was when I first saw Night Mail (1936) in my late teens) so today's blog post will be a celebration of the GPO Film Unit.

GPO, which began its operations in England in 1660, was a government run agency responsible for the mail, and later also telephone and telegrams, in Britain and across the British Empire. The Film Unit was established in 1933, with the initial aim of explaining to the public what the GPO was all about. John Grierson was put in charge of it, which was a very apt choice. Grierson was a film theorist, a filmmaker, a critic and a progressive intellectual who was concerned about the fate of democracy. He felt that films should be grounded in real life, "the creative treatment of actuality" and that they could and should be used to educate the citizens about the world, and to install a democratic sensibility in them. In the GPO Film Unit his ideas would be realised.

The Film Unit was not an original invention, it was an offspring of the EMB Film Unit (Empire Marketing Board), but it brought something new to British cinema. Grierson had hired an impressive selection of filmmakers, writers and artists (including Norman McLaren, who had always had a special bond with Grierson). Among the more prominent filmmakers on the Unit were Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, Len Lye and the above mentioned Cavalcanti. In addition, the poet W.H. Auden wrote commentary and Benjamin Britten wrote music for several of the films. The writer J.B. Priestley was also involved, writing commentary and also performing in front of the camera. Night Mail is perhaps the greatest film that was made there, and Watt, Wright, Auden, Britten and Cavalcanti were all involved in the making of it. It is both beautiful and expressionistic, and the second half in particular is amazing.

The films made promoted modernity, community and communication. Although they wanted to create a sense of Britain, many of the films can be said to be engaged in some kind of nation-building, there was also a message of internationalism. Sometimes this was made explicit as in We Live in Two Worlds (1937), celebrating a borderless world where trains, planes, letters and telephones would united all the countries and there people. While many of the films were part of integrating the empire into Britain, there was also a Marxist bent to the films, the internationalism is part of that, and some of the practitioners on the Unit were socialists. The films are celebrations of the workers and the farmers, the coal miners and the clerks. There were also many stylistic influences from the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. But also from the US, especially the films of Robert Flaherty, who would also make films for the Film Unit.

But the films made at the GPO Film Unit were much more than educational films and conventional documentaries. The filmmakers were experimenting with sound, images and editing to create something more artistic, in some cases pure avant-garde films, with the GPO logo more as an after-thought. Norman McLaren and Len Lye in particular perhaps, but the German animation artist Lotte Reiniger was also making films for the Unit that were decidedly not traditional or documentary. The reason for this breath and the combination of realism and avant-garde was probably due to the two figureheads, Grierson and Cavalcanti. Whereas Grierson was about social truths, politics and progress, Cavalcanti was interested in art and experimentations, and had even a fourteen point program of how best to make films, which emphasised the combination of "the social, the poetic and the technical" and said that "without experimentation, the documentary ceases to exist".

The GPO Film Unit was active until the war but in 1940 it was abolished and replaced by the Crown Film Unit. The creativity and imagination that was let loose during those six years is pretty astonishing. I wonder if there has ever been anything like it.

Some day I will write more about Humphrey Jennings, one of the giants in British cinema, but now it is time for some film clips:

First comes a film about coalminers, called Coal Face (1935), made by Cavalcanti. It makes for a natural companion piece to feature films such as The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed 1940) and How Green Was My Valley (John Ford 1941). Pay particular attention to the sound and the sound design:



Next comes the surreal N or NW (1938), by Len Lye:



Here is another one by Len Lye, in colour, which he hand-painted directly on the film strip. It is call A Colour Box (1935/1937):

Song of Ceylon (1934) is a very different film. It is an impressionistic account of life on Ceylon (Sri Lanka), co-produced by the Ceylon Tea Board. But the artists kept a critical distance from the imperial project and in subtle ways might be said to critic the politics while celebrating the people and nature of Ceylon. It can perhaps be said to be a Buddhist film.



Those were just a handful of the many films made, but they show the range and scope. Those who want to watch the rest, or the above films in better prints, then BFI have released three DVD-boxes called  Addressing the Nation: The GPO Film Unit Collection Volume 1, We Live in Two Worlds: The GPO Film Unit Collection Volume 2 and If War Should Come: The GPO Film Unit Collection Volume 3. (They can be found on play, amazon or BFI Filmstore.)

For more on films and the British Empire, both critic and contextualisations, have a look at the website for the excellent Colonial Film project: http://colonialfilm.org.uk/

For those interested in John Grierson, here is the link to the Grierson archives at University of Stirling: http://www.is.stir.ac.uk/libraries/collections/spcoll/media/grierson/index.php

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.