Art and Craft
Film: the convergence of art and craft in old Hollywood movies.
Sweeping the audience away with a make-believe world that’s as familiar as everyday life and yet also darker, bgger, brghter, more poetic and spectacular than everyday life.
The tension betwen our olives and our dreams (rather than product placement, directors ego, camera trick) is what moves us in picturesd, how, at iyts finest, this public art becomes a private communication (Dargis, LA Times, June 3, 2004).
Experiemtial
Art (film) opens our experience, arranges our ways of perceiving experience, amd changes the space within whic experience mat be represented and perceived.
Art s a form of discovery and creator of the conditions of experience.
Art can beco,me a testing groumd, a realm of experientialprobing, in which art may receive its informal impulses from respurces other than itself.
Art as a way of appraising experience, it’;s a kimd of praxis (Allan Thiher, p. 143).
Pubic Space
Changng the relationship between the private and public sphere.
How cinema in the US was part of the emergence of a new kind of pubic sphere, shaped by the imnstittes of consumerism.
The most mysteriously great of all art forms. No other art is as inclusive or expanisve or diverse. No other art has such sensual fullness. No other art firm is as democratic; movies are for everyne (Kael).
Motion pictures are nothing but a succession of still pictures. Once you understand that, you can unlock all kinds of mysteries.
Our mass culture has always been responsive to the instincts and needs of the public. Though it exploits those needs without satisfying them, it does nevertheess throw up images that dictate social tensions and undercurrents. Without this responsiveness, mass culture would sink of its iwn weight, but it does not sink–there’s vitality in it (Kael).
The wish tom treat film as any other business does not work, becaise of the natire of the product (symbolic, political, personal), though the volatility of audiences’ ytastyes, the context, the marketplace may be similar other business
You can sell movies as the new detergent or pair jeans.
Various factors make the film business more volatile, less predictable.
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Historical accuracy
Assessment of each film’s historical accuracy vs, entertainment factors.
There’s historical flattening, politically based movies, factual distortions (by intent or not).
Some reflect blatant disdain for solid, relatable history, occasionally outright lies.
“You make a movie for moments, and you need an excuse to put those moments in–you need structure”–Ang Lee
Films are magical, because the pre-c0nscious, subconscious and unconscious motives of the creator slip between even the most cntrolled images.
What determines the film’s meaning, ideological signification?
Auteur: Ots creator (usually director)
Internal features of the text
Expectations of viewers
Context–socio-political seeing in which it is released
Giannetti, p. 494)
Film is a more comlex medium than the other traditional arts, because its synthesizes many systems (languages) sumultaneously (not all of them used to their fullest).
In every sequence or scene, there’s hierarchical subordination of elements.
The combinations are in flux, like coulings and regroupings of dancers.
