NOTES FOR A FILM HISTORY
The Lumiére Brothers, unlike Edison who used his camera for recording staged performances, took the camera  into the streets of Paris where they filmed scenes from daily life. In 1895, they produced more than 20 subjects including Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory and Arrival of a Train in the Station. By 1897, Lumiére brother films were being shown on five continents. By 1900 their catalog included 750 titles and the equipment produced at their factory was being used around the world. At the Grand International Exposition of 1900, they projected their films on a screen measuring 99 feet by 79 feet.
 
Georges Méliès began making films in 1896. His stories, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), provided a thread for the special effects that most interested him.
Méliès work provides an early example of film technique that uses spectacle and special effects to produce visual pleasure. His scenarios inscribe popular fantasies concerning science, industrialization, sexuality, and cultural diversity, uncritically and sometimes to comic effect. In the work of Georges Méliès, as in the case with most popular entertainment's or spectacles, ideology serves as limit to discourse. Popular culture saturates us with images that confirm our sense of ourselves. To do otherwise would ruin our "fun." You should learn to distinguish between films that allow you to ask questions and films that tease your senses and toy with your desires.

In class discussions, we situated the work of the Lumiére brothers at the documentary pole of continuum that runs from filming of everyday life to highly plastic extremes that use lighting and dressed sets for purposes of enhancing visual pleasure. In the films of the Lumiére brothers the subject of the camera becomes the subject of our interest. Movement through the frame provides the primary means of visual pleasure.

Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz produced the original script for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The story is based on a combination of their experiences in the years before World War I, including newspaper accounts of a murder and rape in a suburb of Hamburg. The film language is "expressionistic," using painted sets and other forms of distortion to suggest the interior moods and tensions of the leading characters. According to Siegfried Kracauer (in From Caligary to Hitler), under the direction of Robert Weine, a film that may have taken a carnivalesque approach to the exploration of the human psyche became one that inscribed the middle class need for authority.


HYPOTHESIS:
 
A film (or any other cultural production) that runs the risk of raising uneasy questions will most often answer those questions within the frame work of an unexamined moral authority. Consider the application of this 'rule' to commercial ads or of rock videos. The button will take you to a page devoted to examining the ways in which some commercial advertisements tease us by evoking a desire to punish those who have strayed beyond the envelope of gender expectations. 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari makes extensive use of film plastics to produce visual pleasure, pleasures that often tap directly into the unconscious field of desires that have been mapped by Freud. Most people experience the desire to tell a story that makes some sense of crucial or traumatic events that they have experienced. In the film, the narrator relates events that led to the silence and withdrawal of the leading female actor. The point of view represents the healthy masculinity of the leading male who has been witness to her trauma among other events attributed to Caligary. The narrator speaks from a position of understanding and moral authority. Weine's direction undercuts individual authority and places it instead at the institutional level of the mental hospital. In the final scenes, the viewer comes to realize that the narrator like the female lead is a resident of an asylum under Caligari's care. Where Caligary had been presented by the narrator as evil, he now becomes a kindly physician who (placing the original narration within a frame narration) explains the delusions that have beset the consciousness that we have been sharing throughout the film. The use of such twists of the plot line, using special effects and narration, to hold the viewer's attention, pitting evil against moral authority, originally developed in the expressionistic films of pre-Hitler Germany, have become typical of Hollywood films, especially those by Alfred Hitchcock.
Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the sequence shot on the Odessa Steps, provides the classic example of film montage. Rapid cuts, shot and counter-shot, sustaining the narrative action and adding a dimension of emotional excitation that is itself a source of visual pleasure. Eisenstein's film is a fictionalized recreation of episodes from the 1905 Revolution in Russia. In the tradition of D.W. Griffith's epics like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Griffith's films established the genre of the historical drama and like most such films inscribes contemporary ideologies (including in Griffith's case an embrace of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation). Extending the power of the history film through his use of montage, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, inscribes a moment crucial to the founding ideology of Russia during the first years of Stalin's dictatorship. The riveting effects of montage, produced in the cutting room and the seemingly authentic recreation of history in Battleship Potemkin return us our initial set of analytical parameters, those between documentary footage shot in the camera and those constructed effects that derive from editing and film plastics. Seeming authenticity is not disturbed and is often enhanced by shot/counter-shot editing. Visual pleasure we will see even normalizes itself to the hybrid effects of the jump cuts used by Jean-Luc Godard in Breathless (1959).

In class we will conclude our examination of both documentary and hybrid effects by viewing out-takes from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vsevolod Pudovkin's The Mother (1926), Leni Riefenstahl's, Triumph of the Will (1934) (all of which have a propagandistic dimension) and some examples of rock videos and commercial advertisements. 
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