week eight - questions

it was not until just now, when i got on to post week nine, did i realize that the blog i (thought i had) posted from week eight was not there.

presumably having to do with the fact that throughout the wedding weekend, my mom's wireless internet service was in and out (therefore unable to save my drafts), and her computer kept recognizing me as spam, regardless of the fact that i was signed in....

oh well.

anyhow, the first time around, my questions centered on bordwell's "the way hollywood tells it" pages 1-18. but now, since our most recent post has to do with the same book, later pages, i'm going to re-do week eight, focusing instead on peter kramers article "post-classical hollywood."


question 1: despite all of these readings, i'm still a bit confused on the amount of views based around these theories. for instance, how many "accepted" theories are there that define and explain the shifts in cinema eras, namely classicism, modernism, and post-moderism (and, is modernism the same thing as "new american cinema"?)

question 2: what type of role does personal interpretation play in defining these eras, and how much credibility does it lend to the explanation, i.e. who is david bordwell, and why does he know so much about movies, and who gave him the final say? and what about pauline kael, and her ability to determine that bonnie and clyde marked the beginning of the new renaissance of american film?

question 3: how much credit should we lend europe and beyond to shaping and re-defining hollywood as we now know it?


proposed answers:

1 - as far as i can tell, there are approximately three different models that kramer notes: the bazinian model, the bordwell/thompson model, and everything else. the bazinian model has classicism running up thru the early 1940s, modernism from then until 1975, and post-modernism starting with the first huge blockbusters and continuing until today. the "everything else" model is similar, except for the fact that the classics period does not end until much later, around 1965 or so. the bordwell model is the least clear to me, although i think that it defines classicism thru about 1960, modernism from 1960-1975, and then post-modernism from 1975 onward. but honestly, i have no idea, and i wish that i had been able to attend class last thursday. oh, and no, i don't think that modernism is the same thing as "new american cinema," although i would have a very hard time distinguishing between the two.

2 - this is a very broad question, and one that i ponder more philosophically than the others. on one hand, we are dealing with subjectivity, based on the opinions of any given critic or theorist or scholar. therefore, unlike other areas of study, such as mathematics or science, there is no "absolute" answer, but only interpretation. at this point, i'm assuming that david bordwell is just who he appears to be, a very knowledgeable and informed man (albeit on his own time frame) who happens to be a writer very capable of educating his audience on a huge range of topics. but like any media source, all of this information is filtered through a person's brain and therefore is limited to a degree. i'm not discrediting bordwell or saying that he isn't good at what he does, but i am saying that for one man (although it is true, he is among many others) to be able to think, then process, then write a timeline of information, which is then read by critics and either accepted or rejected as the "history" of film, is a huge undertaking and responsibility. much like kael saying that bonnie and clyde marked the new renaissance of american film, and in december of 1967, this was reiterated again when Time magazine "officially announced" it as such. it seems a bit dependent, no? also, just a side note, kael's explanation of "audience expectations" and "a TV span of attention" is incredibly interesting to me, and i agree.

perhaps all of this is subjectivity, that you can read, process, and then either decide to agree or to disagree. but doesn't, more often than not, it lead to many people reading it and accepting it as truth, regardless of what they think? (or don't think, in most cases where this happens)

3 - this one i really don't know the answer to, or even have a proposed answer for... although it does seem like the artistic style, and focus on decentralized events, a "loosening of causal connections between narrative events," per se, etc... are all things that were borrowed, if not stolen from the european cinema.