RESEARCH PROJECTModule name: FLM 2902FILM HISTORYStudent number: M00050110Name: CHOI,HEA-KENG (VIVIAN)Lecturer: PATRICK PHILLIPSProposalSubject; The director Ernst Lubitsh and Fritz LangTopic area; Despite their similarly high standing during the 1910s and 20s up to 30s, both directors have come to occupy very different places in national film histories. How and which of both directors’ films convey the ‘Germanness’ in the Weimar years? How did they deal with transatlantic careers between Germany and America? What role did they play as transatlantic film directors?CatalogueJoel Finler, THE HOLLYWOOD STORY (LONDON;OCTOPUS,1988), This list is ‘delivered from the MOTION PICTURE ALMANAC and information provided by the individual companies’. Ibid., p276~278Joel Finler, THE HOLLYWOOD STORY (LONDON;OCTOPUS,1988), This list is ‘delivered from the MOTION PICTURE ALMANAC and information provided by the individual companies’. Ibid., p280BookRichard Koszarski, AN EVEING’S ENTERTAINMENT; THE AGE OFc and national stereotypes. The over-determined status of Weimar cinema has profoundly influenced its most famous directors and their changing association with aesthetic sensibilities identifiable in the broadest sense as ‘German’. Iwas interested in finding out more about director Ernst Lubitsh and Fritz Lang, situatedtheir films productively between ‘Europe’ and ‘America’. I wanted to concentrate ontwo director’s films in 1910s and 20s up to early 30s; specifically item 13 -19, andresearch about how differently they made their own way of ‘Germanness films’. Andfurthermore about what role did they play as transatlantic film directors. All theresources I have found allowed me to understand more about the director Ernst Lubitshand Fritz Lang’s processes of cultural adaptation and transformation informed theirdirectorial styles, from generic preferences and thematic concerns to various aspects ofcamerawork, editing and mise-en-scene that took international market-place defined byincreasi’(imaginary central European) settings. And I found out that in the mid-1920s Ernst Lubitsh as probably the highest paid director in Hollywood. (item 3) Nonetheless, the move from Berlin to Hollywood resulted in a fundamental realignment within the European- American opposition. Informed by such patterns of adaptation, Lubitsh’s deceptive play with national stereotypes, namely as a performance of identity , ended up promoting old-fashioned notions of gender and class as stabilizing elements in middle-class society.Fritz Lang(item10) Lang was born on 5 december 1890 in Vienna and served in the first world-war. In 1918 he moved to Berlin, the centre of the European film industry, and began to work for Erich Pommer’s Decla-Bioscop Beginning with May’s Das Inische Grabmal( The Indian tomb), Lang repeatedly worked with Thea von Harbou, successful writer and his second wife. Their collaboration trained his talent for forging incompatible thematic and stylistic elements into uniquely modern c of individualism seemingly unaffected by social pressures and constraints. With very different intention, Lang displaces the crisis of identity into aesthetic constellations but also critically reconstructs its constituent elements. Lang’s fantasies and medieval epics bear witness to a remarkable ability to forge the most diverse elements of Wilhelmine aesthetics into convincing simulacra of authenticity. Yet his urban thrillers enlist the same visual strategies in an analysis of Weimar modernity that, through their formal qualities, comments critically on the political situation in the late 1920s and early 30s.(item 11, 12)From what I have discovered ,making productive use of their status as exiles and émigrés, fully committed to a Hollywood fantasy, Lubitsch ended up recreating ‘Europe’ in the conventional terms established by operetta and boulevard theatre. Lang, on the other hand, uses the attributes that contributes director to become a detached observer of contemporary American n a one-way journey.(item7,p367) In the journey, the director Lubitsch and Lang made their attribution to the film history by experiencing their failure.I realised one thing that identity always was an important elements in making films for both of the directors. By changing their role of identities, Lubitsch and Lang succeed in German and Hollywood. Although it was very much of tough work for me to read all the materials and find the right resources, this research has provided me loads of information and historical background knowledge about Weimar years up to Hollywood cinema when Lubitsch and Lang were existed. My intention was to know about more of Lubitsch and Lang, as a legendary film director in history. More about their work in Hollywood and how did they deal with their transatlantic career.This research project was the hardest project ever but it was very interesting somehow. However, I managed to provide resources and analyses my discoveries. I basically lived in the school l
Aesthetics of Digital cinema:Contemporary visual cultureModule name: FLM3315Cinema in the New MediascapeStudent number: M00050110Name: CHOI,HEA-KENG(VIVIAN)Lecturer: Dr. Sharon Lin TayIf the visual subsystem exists today, it’d folly to assume that the computing hardware won’t exist tomorrow. The notion of ‘reality’ will be utterly and finally obscured when we reach that point…(of generating) totally convincing reality within the information processing system… we’re entering a Mythic age of electronic realities that exist only on a metaphysical plane.(Youngblood 1970: 206)The rise of mainstream digital cinema, computer animation and certain significant and related sub-genres of both music video and advertising are intimately tied to the development of computer imaging. The expressions of visual digital culture at issue here are exemplary instances of this proclivity to form and spectacle. In the following essay, I will explore the actual role of the computer in the production of the vis algorithms for the production and manipulation of still, line-based figurative images (Darley 2000: 14). In the early 1970s the enthusiasm of certain of the ‘hard’ computer engineers for the possibilities that had been awakened in the previous decade begins to coincide with those of art critics and some of the artists themselves. At least this is so with respect to what were vied as being most likely aspects of future development in the filed. Thus, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, having extended his initial research on real-time interactive computer graphic into the realm of the simulated experience of three-dimensional space, claimed that through his computer displays he had, ‘landed an airplane on the deck of a moving carrier, observed a nuclear particle hit a potential wall and flown a rocket at the speed of light’(cited in Davis 1973:103). One can already discern in this statement a fascination with two key concerns : simulation and interaction (Darley 2000: 15). It is from t, in the sphere of mass visual culture – the domain of entertainment cinema – the support of realism was part of a more general ideal, indeed , it comprised the predominant aesthetic regime. Work in both software and programme and hard ware development was angled towards techniques of animation, image manipulation and processing, image generation. At various moments in the early years of this process such research fed into the production of particular films. Thus Westworld(1973), futureworld(1976), tron(1982), star Trek: The Wrath of Khan(1982) and The Last Starfighter(1985) are now viewed as milestones in the history of digital cinema (Darley 2000: 17). When addressing questions of digital imaging and their associated forms ‘realism’, as we have talked about, is never far away. Realism is connected to these visual digital form in ways that are frequently both complicated and novel, nowhere more so than in the realm of computer animated films.‘Computer animation’ has two senses: it refes that has transformed the production processes of audio-visual media, and has expanded the methods of distribution and the access to different media in domestic and public spheres (Spielmann 1999: 131). With regard to digital aesthetics in the arts we may acknowledge that the basic requirements of the digital allow for the simulation of exactly those transformation processes that have occurred in analogue media arts. Media theoretician Freidirch Kittler uses the term simulation to characterize the digital that in contrast to the analogue allows for negation. Only with the emergence of the digital it is possible to manipulate negation in such ways that what is non-factual can be asserted. This means simulation that affirms negation, and this defines the specific quality of manipulation in the digital (Spielmann 1999: 143).Jean Baudrillard who concentrated on those influential aspects of his work that relate to visual culture (images), in the twenty years that it takes for the full dev which he terms ‘hyperreality’ or ‘the more real than the real’. Representation is no longer distinguishable from that which it represents, a new modality emerges: the hyperreal, which is itself pre-coded, programmed (Baudrillard 1987:24). The mass media is producing a new form of generalized narcissism, a withdrawal of the individual into an ever more isolated and isolating private world of the all-too-visible, a world to which we have unlimited access via our screens and the networks into which they are plugged. The implication Baudrillard wishes to draw from such definitive capture, is the dissolution of the subject/object distinction: the individual is conceived of as terminal point or nexus of media networks, the point of the collapse of the former distinction between public and private, interior and exterior spheres as these become more and more blurred in our heads, and are substituted with the media-produce hyperreal.A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to tho
PRSENTATIONThe Cinema of KEN LOACHFROM 1960 - 1990Module name: FLM2020BRITISH CINEMAStudent number: M00050110Name: CHOI,HEA-KENG(VIVIAN)Date: 17-NOV-2006Lecturer: CLAIRE PAJACZKOWSKAPROF. BARRY CURTISKen Loach's film: HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Cow" o "Poor Cow" Poor Cow (1967)/ HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kes_%28film%29" o "Kes (film)" Kes (1969) (as Kenneth Loach)/The Save the Children Fund Film (1971)/ Family Life (1971)Black Jack ( HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979" o "1979" 1979)/ The Gamekeeper (1980) HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looks_and_Smiles" o "Looks and Smiles" Looks and Smiles (1981)/Which Side Are You On? ( HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984" o "1984" 1984) HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_%28Ken_Loach%27s_film%29" o "Fatherland (Ken Loach's film)" Fatherland ( HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986" o "1986" 1986) / HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_%281990_fpedia.org/w/index.php?title=These_Times&action=edit" o "These Times" These Times (2007) (Currently in pre-production)The cinema of Ken Loach examines the connection between arts and politics that distinguishes the work of this leading British film director. Descendants of the realist flowering at the BBC in the 1960s, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society about family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that built in it. Looking back, Loach's work seems to reflect the shift from the collectivist mood during the times of war to the individualism of the postwar decades in its very own form. Loach's films went from the improvised long-take naturalism of Poor Cow and Kes (both 1969) to the 'social melodrama' of Raining Stones (1993) and Ladybird Ladybird (1994), wider social issues now explored via emotional and dramatic individual stories.Loach in the 1960’s (Cathy Come Home 1966/ HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Corlier things I’d done that had worked more successfully. In both Cathy and Poor Cow they just look too conscious. I think it was quiet an immature film. There’s a modishness about it, I think, which I tried to rise above afterwards.’3Loach in the 1970’s(The Save the Children Fund Film (1971)/ Family Life (1971) /Black Jack ( HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979" o "1979" 1979))Family life had become a bit of cult in France, Italy, Sweden, and various other places, but in England it did very badly because distributors didn’t know what to make of it. After that, it became near impossible for Loach to raise money for a feature film for a long time. But Tony was always looking for finance and he discovered that if they made a film that was aimed at the children’s market, and could make it a French co-production, they could get back form the National Film Finance Corportation.4Loach consistently uses the strategies of a documentary film-maker in his fiction films. His exploitation and montage-based conventions of earlier documentaries. In the early 80s, he rigorously sustains his method of allowing the flow of a conversation to determine the movement of the camera. Fatherland was the first of Loach’s works to be consciously made with both cinema and television screening in mind. It was jointly funded by German, French and British channel 4 television companies and written by Trevor Griffiths. A new kind of cinema hybirdity which subsequently proved to sit well with Loach’s own preference to work in hybrid forms, and which reflected major and irreversible changes within the organisation of the British media. For a while, in Britain in the 1980s, part of the Thatcherite project seemed to be a forced march back into the past to celebrate ‘Victorian values’ and past imperial glories, it was the case that, within the cultural industries of film, the development of the free market ideologies of Thatcherism coincided with opportunities for expansion in forms of deliverLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses_%28film%29" o "Bread and Roses (film)" Bread and Roses 2000)Reflecting on why the early 1990s seem to have been a much more successful period of his work than the 80s, Loach has noted;“Two things – the effect of the Thatcherite consciousness has eased a bit….also I don’t think I came up with a very good idea in the early 80s.”10The political downfall of Margaret Thatcher in late 90s had been preceded by final collapse in 1989 of the Warsaw Pact militaryalliance. Within Britain, these two events together brought a dramatic end to the political certainties of the 80s. Unemployment began to rise again, as the housing market continued its free fall and the new conservative Prime Minister set about replacing the poll tax. Loach’s early work of 90s such as HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_%281990_film%29" o "Hidden Agenda (1990 film)" Hidden Agenda HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990" o "1990" 1990, HYPERLINK9
BRITISH CINEMA:Ken Loach as an NaturalistModule name: FLM2020BRITISH CINEMAStudent number: M00050110Name: CHOI,HEA-KENG(VIVIAN)Date:06-01-2007Lecturer: CLAIRE PAJACZKOWSKAPROF. BARRY CURTIS“Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britain’s on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be. While our cinema has experienced all the fluctuations in fortune of Hollywood's first export territory, realism has been Britain's richest gift to world cinema.”(Richard Armstrong, BFI SCREENONLINE, 2003)Narrative naturalism emerges in British literature as a development of 19th-century European Realism. Contemporary cinematic and literary realisms continue to examine many of the key topic, themes and concerns that mark 19th-century Realism. As Nochlin notes, these include: the rejection of beauty as an ideal in artistic representation, the desire to describe and understand contemporaryal environment. Naturalist narratives investigate such factors as an individual’s social position (class), economic situation (comparative wealth or poverty), region of birth, education or lack of it, type of employment or unemployment, ethnicity and gender. Naturalists see these various factors as determining what it is possible for any individual, group or collective to accomplish. The naturalist and filmmakers need only select a set of characters, put it place a familial or working environment, and “watch” how particular conditions within that selected socio-cultural situation produce a predictable set of results for the individuals chosen as the central characters of the study.5 Zola’s experimentalism is tied up to the idea that novel should represent particular social processes so that an audience can come to an understanding of those processes. He said the novelist frames the experiment and “reports” it6. Loach’s work clearly follows this manifesto as it is mentioned from John Co He’s quite a chubby little baby and he cries a lot, most of all in the night.As we hear her voice, Joy sits on a park bench next to two old women. Loach cuts in their chatting voices for a moment, then cuts back to Joy;I‘ve got long hair and green eyes. My legs are a bit skinny, actually. Don’t like me legs. The things I like are plenty of clothes and money. Well, I was born in Fullham. And, er, my mum had quite a few of us. She spent most of her time on the pub. My dad’s scaffold erector and he like the women. Well, I fell in the family way when I was 18. And I got married, to a right bustard. Well, I didn’t think so at the time, but I do now.Joy describes herself to a listener in her own words: her manner is part self-conscious introduction and part interior monologue. And her monologue in the novel reveals hers thoughts as if directly to the reader. The film looks at gender relations in working-class lives in a number of sequences as well. Following Tom’s arrest, Joy and Jonny moveowerful momentary evocation of a place and a time.12 Loach uses unspecified voice-over or athoritive commentaries over montage sequences of observational shots. He uses these conventions to encourage people to recognise his protagonist in films such as an experience of an illegal abortions and homelessness.Protagonists in the tradition of British naturalism are unheroic or anti-heroic protagonists caught up in what is obviously a difficult struggle to make a better lot for themselves. Because, according to Leigh, heroes are capable of great actions. The protagonists of naturalist narratives are seldom able to break free from which they aspire are ones which they cannot realise or, if they realise them even in part, it is at a much greater cost than they had previously imagined. Often the struggles of central are worked out gene rationally in relation to figures of familial authority, and confrontationally in relation to figures of a more general social authority such as social workers,ituation, knowing full well that a satisfactory resolution may be as impossible in life as in naturaliststic art, but that the only place where the attempt to improve matters makes any sense is not in art, but in life. (George Mcknight, 1997)16By the conventions of naturalism, an audience will in all probability be aligned with characters who are, in the Realist sense, “low”, who are anything but heroic, and who might very well be difficult to like. It should be obvious that an audience can relate in a variety of ways to characters and their situations. Loach as a filmmaker, Cathy come Home, the Big Flame, Family life, Ladybird Ladybird and even more generic films such as Hidden Agenda allows us to recognise the rawness as well as the intensity of his films, their blackness, the determinism of their story-lines which is lacking the element of ‘happy’ ending.GRAHAM FULLER: Have you ever felt that you could have perhaps reached a wider audience for the kinds of ideas that you and your wr1
What response would you make as a film historian to the three fallibilities identified by Gertude Himmelfrab?Module name: FLM 2902FILM HISTORYStudent number: M00050110Name: CHOI,HEA-KENG (VIVIAN)Lecturer: PATRICK PHILLIPSFilm history involves the study of the phenomenon we commonly refer to as “film”(or cinema, the movies, motion pictures…etc). It involves studying film from a particular perspective and with particular goals in mind – perspective and goals that are historical. Every piece of film historical writing, no matter how modest, implicitly is based on a set of assumptions about history. Thus before discussing any particular approach to film history, even before discussing film at all, it is necessary to examine the sort of assumptions historians make (A.Robert & G. Douglas,1985 : 4). Film history traditionally has been thought of as one of the three major branches of films study, along with film theory and film criticism. The boundaries among the three are by no mean fixed. Al7: 159)For the presumption of postmodernism, according to Gertude Himmelfrab, is that all of history is fatally flawed, and because there is no absolute, total truth, there can be no partial, contingent truths. More important still is the presumption that because it is impossible to attain such truths, it is not only futile but positively baneful to aspire to them. In history, postmodernism is a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past. Postmodernist history, one might say, recognizes no reality principle, only the pleasure principle –history at the pleasure of the historian. Modernist history, in contrast, is not positivist in the sense of aspiring to a fixed, total, or absolute truth about the past. Like postmodernist history, it is relativistic, but with a difference, for its relativism is firmly rooted in reality. It is skeptical of absolute truth but not of parti the very attempt to present a coherent account of an often inchoate past, that, therefore, every historical work is necessarily imperfect, tentative, and partial. Historians have also known that they themselves live and act and think in their own form, and are peculiar to, their own culture, that others may reflect the particular race, gender and class to which they belong, and that still others emanate from ideas and beliefs that are unique to themselves as individuals (H. Gertrude, 1997 :159). Then let’s take one postmodernism film for instance. Second World War veterans were in the eye of the hurricane that surrounded the 1998 release of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. And it is the veterans to whom the historians bowed as a ceremonial gesture before doing combat with the film’s historical authenticity: the 22nd SS Panzer division was nowhere near front on June 13.1994: the real key to America’s victory at Normandy was not a scrappy band of men making sticky bombs with theiho was removed from combat after three of his brothers fell in the line of duty), and it features or alludes to real men including General George C.Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. But what do we mean when we say that the landing sequence feels real, that it is the closest thing to being there? According Janet Walker who wrote The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern History Film said, it is a realism which is a red herring with regard to understanding Saving Private Ryan. No amount of discourse on the faithful recreation of troop movements, weaponry, or costume: nor about fidelity to the actual conditions of was: nor even classical Hollywood cinema as a facilitator of spectator identification, can describe adequately what it is about the film’s narrative and style that speaks to viewers’ experiences of war. This effect, Janet Walker argue, comes not from the film’s realism but from its anti-realism, introduced in the gut-churning landing sequence and reprised sporadically e sees them as being unrepresentable in a realist mode. White assert that what makes such film or video communications about historical events what they are, is their ability to “place in abeyance” “the distinction between the real and the imagery” while still aiming at a vanishing point of truth.Theodore Zsldin was one of the first historians ( as distinct from philosophers of history) to launch a serious assault upon traditional history. Traditional, or narrative, history, he argued, is dependant upon such “tyrannical” concepts as causality, chronology, and collectivity. (H. Gertrude, 1997 :161)This is the twofold agenda of postmodernism: to free history from the shackles of an authoritarian ideology, and to release it from the constraints of delusive mythology. The ultimate aim is even more ambitious: to liberate us all from the coercive ideas of reality and truth. From a postmodernist perspective, this is all to the good, for it destroys the “totalizing,” “universalizing,” “logocen902