The Category of System in David Bordwell’s Concept of Film Aesthetics

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role played by the category of system in the early books of David Bordwell. They have exerted an enormous influence on the understanding of film aesthetics, but little space has been devoted to their methodological background, including the category of system. In Film Art: An Introduction (1979), all elements of film form have a systemic character, which is visible in the chapter titles, such as “Form as System” or “Narration as a Formal System”. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, the film aesthetics is based on systems of narrative logic, time and space. In Narration in the Fiction Film, the systems of syuzhet and style are foregrounded. Bordwell’s fascination with systems is rooted undoubtedly in their popularity in the 1970s. But do Bordwellian notions really fulfil the criteria of system theory, especially in its newer version, with such notions as chaos, feedback loop, self-regulation and others? Perhaps even Bordwell himself is not certain of that, since the word “system” disappears from recent editions of Film Art: An Introduction.

Lesbian Cinephilia and Digital Affordances

This chapter revisits critical work on the challenges and promises of lesbian cinema spectatorship in light of new media technologies that allow for citation of audiovisual images. Analog videos made by lesbians in the 1990s about the homoerotic pleasures of watching classical Hollywood films are compared with contemporary queer fan videos and community practices on the internet as well as with scholarly video essays. Close readings of these works speculate on the connections between the datedness of cinema as a medium in the digital era and uneasiness with the connotations of the term lesbian on the part of contemporary queer women. Carol, the 2016 film adaptation, by Phyllis Nagy and Todd Haynes, of the 1950s lesbian romance by Patricia Highsmith is an example of a work that appeals to contemporary viewers by engaging both lesbian and media history.

Introduction

This introduction historicizes cinema’s relationship to policing and particularizes that relationship beyond familiar questions of regulation and censorship, while also revisiting those very questions in the context of a broader study of police power. How did the institution of law enforcement interact with the studio system? How was classical Hollywood shaped by—and how, in turn, did it shape—specific police activities? To what extent and in what ways did cinema serve the emergent public relations needs of police agencies, and vice versa? Police departments were not passive beneficiaries of Hollywood’s fiscal and ideological investments but active and self-interested contributors to various cinematic projects, many of which they themselves initiated. The relative fragility of police legitimacy—its disputability, particularly in the face of obvious abuses of power—necessitated this constant advocacy in twentieth-century America, as did Hollywood’s generic, formula-driven, reiterative commercial character.

Rewriting Ibsen for the big screen

Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the champion of realist theatre. In the early days of cinema, there were several silent film adaptations of Ibsen’s plays. One would think, given his standing as a playwright, that there would be a continuous interest in Ibsen’s work after the conversion to sound. This article examines how the realist theatre – heralded by Ibsen – relates to classical (Hollywood) cinema and how Ibsen in various ways has been rewritten and has recently re-emerged within contemporary cinema.

BOAZ HAGIN’S PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH AS REFLECTED IN THE HUNGER GAMES TRILOGY FILMS

The Hunger Games is one of Hollywood films that contains deaths and deadly scenes throughout its trilogy. There are plenteous meanings of deaths that can be analyzed from the films, which will develop new meanings and definitions of deaths as an interesting topic to discuss. The researcher employed Boaz Hagin's framework of death because Hagin provides a framework about deaths and how deaths can be meaningful. In his book, he writes a broader range of philosophical description about deaths in Classical Hollywood Cinema which explores the morality and ethical values of mainstream films that portrays death as a meaningful part of life. The research problem is what is the meaning of deaths found in Hunger Games using Hagin’s framework of deaths. This research was conducted using a descriptive qualitative approach aiming at describing the phenomenon and characteristics. The data collected qualitatively by examining them throughout to get relevant issues and ideas and classify them. The findings show that death can bring meanings to characters in the films, such as a death in line where death means as a savior for their beloved ones, death as politic seen from the characters' past life that brings hope for the future, death as the Access, Authority, and Test, can be seen from how the characters use their talent to survive.

Decoding the Movies

This book “decodes” 1930s Hollywood movies and explains why they looked and behaved in the way they did. Organized through a series of related case studies, the book exposes Classical Hollywood movies to a detailed analysis of their historical, industrial and cultural contexts. In the process it utilizes industry data, aesthetic analysis and the insights of New Cinema History to explain why and how these movies assumed their familiar forms. The book represents the summation of Richard Maltby’s four decades of scholarship in the field of Hollywood cinema. The essays presented here share an assumption that has increasingly informed the author’s critical method over the years: that any historical understanding of the films of this period requires a deep contextualization in the social circumstances surrounding both their production and consumption. In this way, the book introduces an innovative, overarching research methodology that synthesizes branches of research that are typically employed in isolation, including production, distribution, reception, film aesthetics, and cultural and historical context. Of the book’s nine chapters, three are presented here for the first time, and four have been substantially revised and extended from their original publication.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music StyleMadison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. [xxvi, 317pp. ISBN: 9780299297343. $124.00 (hardback)]. Illustrations, musical examples, scores, bibliography, index.

Manufacturing “Football Realism” in the Studio Era

Drawing upon material from the Warner Bros. Archives, this article examines the production, marketing and reception of football films released during the classical Hollywood era – specifically focusing on efforts by the studio to create and market “realistic” football action. First, the paper briefly discusses the marketing and reception of two typical football movies from the period, College Coach and Over the Goal, to argue that the public expected football scenes to resemble live games and that the studio acknowledged this desire by attempting to market their football sequences as “realistic.” Then, the paper examines two of the most well-known football movies from the period, Knute Rockne, All American and Jim Thorpe – All-American, and documents how the films’ producers attempted to ensure the movies met these standards for “football realism,” whether that meant casting college football players as extras, enlisting a football-savvy crew, or using newsreel footage during gameplay sequences.