'Classical Hollywood Cinema': history, poetics, narratology, and beyond

Image from Bande à part/Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

Maybe it's that back-to-school feeling in the air, but Film Studies For Free's attentions turn today to one of the most important topics in its discipline: the film-historical and film-theoretical behemoth that is 'Classical Hollywood Cinema'.

Below are direct links to online studies of Hollywood and other comparable cinematic classicisms -- together with related explorations -- ranging from the foundational (Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger, plus Hansen) through to the new and challenging (Cagle, Galt, Paneva, Thanouli). FSFF reckons you should also take in what one might call that most early-classical of relevant studies, online in its entirety: Aristotle's Poetics, written 350 B.C.E, Translated by S. H. Butcher.

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• John Belton, 'Preface', American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 2/e)
• John Belton, 'The Mode of Production', American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 2/e)
• David Bordwell, 'Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures', Philip Rosen (ed). In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia U P, 1986. 17-34
• David Bordwell interviewed by Erlend Lavik, 'The Way Bordwell tells it on classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema', University of Bergen, Norway, June (Year unknown)
• David Bordwell, 'Anatomy of the Action Picture', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2007
• David Bordwell, 'The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2008
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part I)', Image & Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part II)', Image & Narrative, Issue 9, October 2004
• Chris Cagle, 'More thoughts on Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 14, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 15, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'More on Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Self-Reflexivity in Classical Cinema', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, September 2, 2007
• Susan Courtney, 'Introduction: What Happened in the Tunnel and Other Open American Secrets', Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, Princeton University Press, 2004
• Jacobia Dahm, 'Lollywood Adventures: On Robert Blanchet's Blockbuster', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 24, May 2005
• Fred Davies, 'Review of Bernardoni, James, The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did with the New Freedoms of the Seventies', H-USA, H-Net Reviews. June, 2003
• Lucy Fife, 'Review: Joe McElhaney (2006) The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli State University of New York Press: New York', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, December 2007
• Brian Gallagher, 'Greta Garbo is sad: Some Historical Reflections on the Paradoxes of Stardom in the American Film Industry, 1910-1960', Images Journal, Issue 3
• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture Journal, Issue 2, Autumn 2008
  
• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism-Modernity, Vol. 6.2, 1999
• Tim Henderson, 'Classic Film Narrative and Flying with Pigs: What Have we been Missing?', Nausicaa.net, May 2005
• Curt Hersey, 'Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Volume 1, 2002
• Kevin Howley, Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope, May 2004
• Annamarie Jagose, Interview with Patricia White about her book, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability [Indiana University Press, 1999]', Genders 32 2000 Limited preview of book from Google Books HERE
• Hermann Kappelhoff, 'Narrative Space – Plot Space – Image Space', trans. by Brian Currid, Herman Kappelhof Articles Online, 2005
• Michelle Langford, '[Reflections on and syllabus for the teaching of] The Hollywood Sytem', The Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, July 2007
• Richard Maltby, 'Taking Hollywood Seriously', Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 2nd ed.)
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Architectures of Vision: Neo-Baroque Optical Regimes and Contemporary Entertainment Media', MIT Communications Forum, December 19, 1999
• Steve Neale, 'Review of Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique by Kristin Thompson, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999', Scope, November 2000
• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 40, 2006
• Iva Paneva,“Chapter 1: Monster versus mainstream: classical narrative structure and the representation of women”, A study of female aggression as represented in Patty Jenkins' fiction film Monster, e--PhD Thesis, December 2008 (rest of thesis on Monster HERE)
• Janet Staiger, 'Self-Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema', Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1991
• Eleftheria Thanouli, '"Art Cinema" Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009
• Kristin Thompson, 'Classical cinema lives! New evidence for old norms!', Observations on film art and FILM ART, February 12, 2007
• David Trotter, 'Virginia Woolf and Cinema', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Yigit Yuksel, 'Classical Narration And Art Narration. Or: Hollywood vs Western Europe in 1950s' , The Long Take, September 21, 2008

Follow Film Studies For Free on Twitter

Capturing in film criticism: Digital Poetics on frame grabs

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): A Classic 'Frame Capture Film'?

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post. If you are a film studies teacher searching for more good ideas for student assignments, Film Studies For Free would like to recommend a little more weblog reading about classroom applications of film criticism exercises.

Today's gem is the 10/40/70 exercise invented by Nicholas Rombes (Chair and Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy- also see here) at his great weblog Digital Poetics. What is the gen on 10/40/70? According to Rombes, it's

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

Rombes has posted three such experiments of his own to date (10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve); 10 / 40 / 70 (The Conversation); (10 / 40 / 70): The Grudge and The Terror of Determinism). The results really show the benefits of the creative constraints involved: some rich and insightful writing is generated on the three very different films.

It strikes FSFF that this would be a very rewarding exercise to set for students.

For more on the practicalities, legalities, and methodological advantages and disadvantages of using frame captures in published or public work, see the following:

• Capturing Stills From Video, a great tutorial by Jeremy Butler for Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Shot Logger: Frame Captures and Stats (Shot Logger logs shots from DVDs and other digital video sources. It stores a frame capture of each shot and records the time code of the start of the shot in the video. It also processes that time code to determine the length of individual shots, as well as calculating several statistics for those lengths — including average shot length and standard deviation.
  Shot Logger was original intended for film and television students/scholars who wish to analyze visual style in detail, and who might want to do some basic statistical analysis of editing. In the latter regard, it was inspired by CineMetrics. What Shot Logger adds to CineMetrics is the ability to attach images, frame captures, to the statistical data. Shot Logger relies on two other, open-source applications: Videolan VLC media player and Gallery. The VLC media player facilitates the capturing of frames and Gallery, a web-based photo album organizer, handles the uploading and organization of images.)
  
• Frame-Grab Tutorial (using VLC Media Player), also from Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Film Educators No Longer Criminals by Kristin Thompson
  
• And for some deeply thoughtful and enlightening writing about the advantages and disadvantages of 'syntagmatic' and 'paradigmatic' forms of film criticism, a must read is Adrian Martin's remarkable piece Scanning Godard for Screening the Past

Dances with Blogs: Film Criticism Assignments Online

Thanks to David Hudson's Daily blog at IFC.com, Film Studies For Free was alerted to an interesting and worthwhile experiment in the use of blogs for obtaining 'real-world' feedback for undergraduate film studies assignments.

Nick Davis is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of the always good to read Nick's Flick Picks, which expertly does what it says on its blog-tin, and always conducts itself with great verve and wit.

From time to time Nick also generously shares notes on some of his academic research and his teaching projects on this site (see here and here). With regard to the latter, Nick's current seminar course at Northwestern, The Film Review as Genre, has led him to pose publicly the following great questions to his students:

What is a film review? How have reviews evolved as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that critique? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history, considering the ways in which strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the "critical" and "creative" facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Rudolf Arnheim, Carl Sandburg, H.D., James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Stephanie Zacharek) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects committed and ambitious students—but wit, style, and esteem for the "popular" are warmly welcomed.

But Nick also wanted his students to have more responses to their work than just his own, 'especially since they're working in a form that aspires to a large and diverse audience'. So on this occasion he has used his blog to solicit feedback from his numerous readers on well-chosen snippets from the work produced by the course students (including on Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves [1990]). The responses to his request easily reveal the usefulness of this exercise (36 generally serious comments, to date, in just a few days). Film Studies For Free salutes Nick Davis's experiment and very much recommends that other film studies teachers check it out.

Since FSFF has gone all digital-pedagogical today, it's a good time to flag up another rich and purposeful reflection on such matters by Kevin B Lee. Regular FSFF readers will remember that a while back (see here, here, and here) this blog leapt to the e-barricades in angry defence of Lee's YouTube channel which had been temporarily (and very precipitously) suspended because of a query about copyright.

Back in January, Kevin eloquently wrote in summary about his experiences with YouTube: Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account. But, more recently, he has also posted an exploration of the potential of his video essays as educational resources, based on his discoveries about how they are actually being used as classroom and assignment tools (see Video Essays as a teaching tool: a testimonial).

If you are interested in learning more about innovative film studies teaching methods, Lee's reflections make important reading. Also, while you're visiting Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, do please watch his fabulous new video essays - La roue (1922, Abel Gance) and Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont) featuring commentary by Kristin Thompson.