Film history, con't

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• The Golden Year: 1939
  • Films reflected advanced production techniques (eg. Technicolor)
    • The Wizard of Oz
    • Gone With the Wind
    • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
    • Of Mice and Men
  • Followed introduction of major Hollywood studios, economic depression
    • Columbia (Mr. Smith), Universal, RKO, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., MGM (Oz, Gone With the Wind)
• WWII and after
  • Threat of fascism unites Americans, including filmmakers
    • Within one year after Pearl Harbor, 1/3 feature films were war-related
    • Full employment brought peak cinema attendance
  • Propaganda
  • Earlier established during WWI, especially in Russia
    • Lenin employed during Russian Revolution as means to "educate" population, including the illiterate
    • Kino-Pravda
  • During WWII, employed by Germans, British, Americans
    • Purposes included the diversionary, informative, morale-boosting
    • Examples
      • Der Fuehrers Face (1943)
      • Treasury Dept. propaganda film (1945)
      • Others: I Married a Communist, The Red Menace
  • Non-propaganda films also introduced: Casablanca (1942), wartime film, valued for both entertainment and historical context
  • Following the war, the second red scare was initiated
    • First red scare, following WWI
    • During 1930s, CPUSA membership at its height (50k)
    • After war, communism seen as threat; HUAC established
    • Hollywood divided:
      • Friendly witnesses -- Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, etc. -- testified that Hollywood was threatened by communists
      • Unfriendly witnesses -- later known as the "Hollywood Ten" -- took the Fifth Amendment
        • "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
        • Ten individuals who refused to testify; each sentenced to one-year prison terms
      • Screen Actors Guild requires oath of loyalty
    • More than 300 filmmakers, actors and technicians were blacklisted and contracts terminated
      • For refusing to comply with HUAC
      • Some frightened, "named names"
    • Film scholars consider blacklist to have hampered Hollywood creativity through the 1950s
• The demise of the Production Code
  • Recall from earlier lecture: Established during 1920s-30s to ensure morality, righteousness, innocuous content in film
    • Prevented release of films with nudity, sympathy for criminals, sex, sin, flag desecration
  • Abandoned in 1968 for MPAA's ratings system:
    • Following Roth v. United States, where Supreme Court the Congress could ban material, "utterly without redeeming social importance," or in other words, "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest."
    • General Audiences, Suggested for mature audiences, Restricted, X
    • Allowed greater flexibility with material
    • Sex (The Graduate) and violence (The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie and Clyde) became more common
    • X rating applied to more shocking material
      • Midnight Cowboy (bare breasts, buttocks, gang rape)
      • Clockwork Orange (bare breasts, gang rape)

Documentary film

• Idea: attempt to document reality
  • Raymond Williams' concept in film
  • Broad application
  • Versus studio production
• First documentary filmmaker: Robert Flaherty
  • Nanook of the North
    • Accurate?
    • Filmed during 1920-1921 along Hudson Bay
  • Clip (1921)
    • Considered example of salvage ethnography
• Cinema Verite & Direct Cinema
  • Both are types of documentaries that use simple production, little editing, often through the combination of separate recordings of audio & motion pictures.
  • Cinema Verite, or "Cinema of truth" (Kino-Pravda), involves provoking subjects with presence of camera
  • Direct Cinema is truer to the documentary idea: it intends to record events without awareness of camera's presence
    • Eg: D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967)
    • Follows Dylan during tour of England in '65, his last as a solo acoustic performer
• Propaganda as documentary
  • When a filmmaker intends to influence the audience's ideological or political views, while introducing the concept as factually accurate
    • Documentary as means of deception
  • Modern example: Michael Moore
    • Leftist ideologue: reflected in documentaries
      • General subject matter: Failures of auto industry, George W. Bush, gun ownership policies, 2008 Democratic campaign
    • Intended to shape public opinion
    • Recent self-promotional documentary: Capitalism: A Love Story
    • Previous work: Roger and Me (1989)
      • About the closing of auto factories and subsequent economic fallout in Flint, Mich.

 

Material

The first documentary film

 

Don't Look Back, a seminal rock 'n' roll documentary

 

Michael Moore, like other ideologues in free society, is often mocked by opponents