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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Bad Films Aren't Worth Scholars' Time

Did you know that most of the March 2007 volume of College English is devoted to the 2004 film Crash? The opening essay by David G. Holmes notes that the film was “critically acclaimed,” receiving not only Academy Awards, but also the NAACP Image Award and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Hubert Humphrey Civil Rights Award.

Holmes also remarks upon “much to criticize as well, including plot contrivances and witty dialogue that quickly wanes to redundant one-liners.” That goes along with my impression of the film, and I found the characters to be loaded caricatures and the race presentations highly manipulative, enough to walk away after 45 minutes. Holmes asserts that “the movie engages what audiences of nearly every racial and ethnic hue feel, in part because the joke is on all of us, but largely because the movie dares to express the prejudicial sentiments we harbor in our hearts.” Yes, and therein is the problem: Not that the movie really succeeds in doing so, but that it takes such relentless and self-important aim at doing so. The film strives to reveal our inner racism, labors so ponderously to expose prejudice across colors that, for all its sobriety and directness, one can’t take it seriously. Officer Ryan’s molestation of Christine is excruciating, but does the film have to focus at length on his fingers climbing her thighs?

Still, six more scholars in College English weigh in on the film. They form an example of intelligent academics spending time analyzing something that isn’t worth it. The appeal, of course, is the racial tension in the film, which can be taken as representing (or not representing) racial realities in our society. But when a work fails several aesthetic tests of plot, characters, etc., those drawbacks should outweigh the topicality.

Film is a seductive medium, however, and several smart friends have been taken in. Here are a few more bad films that have evoked their critical respect:

1. American Beauty (only good scene: the boy’s monologue while filming the bag blowing in the alley)
2. The Silence of the Lambs (all-time stupid moment: lady-agent fumbling in the darkness of killer’s lair, at his mercy, and she still manages to win)
3. L.A. Confidential (all-time stupid ending: angry cop and high-class prostitute leave L.A. for the suburbs to begin middle-class life)
4. Pulp Fiction (snappy guy-dialogue from scene to scene, a looping time frame for the plot, and lots of guns, and “the Gimp” may please the hipster 20-something sensibility, but these don’t add up to a good film)

Posted at 03:31:53 AM on April 21, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. Oh yeah? How about that part in Thelma & Louise where Simone de Beauvoir pulls out a pistol and shoots Michael Dunn in the A-word because he was French-kissing her bud, Goldie Hawn? I have to admit that I didn’t allow myself to enjoy it until I saw the (microscopic) notice in the credits: “No little people were harmed in the making of this film.”

    Or the scene in An Inconvenient Truth when Igor finally admits that he flunked science in school but then takes a flamethrower to Ice-T, whose CIA-funded Hummer was filling the air with hothouse gas? “Who Gives a F-word?” Igor asks as T melts to the ground? “Me — this hombre! I give a G-word D-word F-word!” he shouts. If the rest of the movie had that kind of Norman Mailer/Jack Abbott intensity, I might have moved to Belle Meade and carboned-up for winter with the other squirrels!

    (P.S. Good column, Mark!)

    — S. Britchky · Apr 21, 06:06 AM · #

  2. You forgot:

    Citizen Kane: all-time stupid motivation—some stupid sled.

    The Bicycle Thief: yeah, like you could get your kid to waste his whole day looking for a bike.

    Battleship Potemkin: all-time lucky shot—right in the eyeglasses. never happen.

    The Blue Angel: a real professor would just hit on one of his students

    Rashomon: got a hole in your plot? just have a ghost testify!

    As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of really bad films out there that those artsy-fartsy critics overrate. You go, Mark!

    — LuckyJim · Apr 21, 07:22 AM · #

  3. Mark, it all depends on whether you think the job of the critic is to attend only to works of the highest aesthetic standards, or to understand those works that, through their appeal to the popular consciousness of their time, might tell us something about that spirit.

    A good critic should, of course, be able and willing to perform both functions. A cultural critic of the 1980s would want to study Language Poetry, but she’d also want to know something about Tom Clancy. In 100 years, Susan Howe will be acknowledged as an important poet, while the popularity of Clancy will tell us something about the people of the 80s.

    — Luther Blissett · Apr 21, 09:43 AM · #

  4. Agreed, Luther, and studying pop culture artifacts, however hackneyed and conventional, can be quite illuminating of “popular consciousness.” The thing is, scholars sometimes group works whose historical value lies only in their representative-ness with those that have superior aesthetic value, and this comes out in their approach. Great works such as those mentioned by Lucky Jim merit repeated interpretation and theorizing. Popular works (which aren’t great) merit a different approach. The study of works for their representational value (that is, how they display popular social attitudes, anxieties, interests, etc.) requires a lot of social science labor, for instance, data on their popularity and profits, on which demographics consume them, on their immediate reception, etc. In other words, we need more than just “readings.” Works such as Crash very quickly are exhausted of meaning and mystery. What counts for them is, precisely, their popularity, the uses and abuses of them in society.

    — Mark Bauerlein · Apr 21, 11:49 AM · #

  5. Agreed as well. The kind of sociological work on literature we see Franco Moretti and his group performing currently is exactly the model that seems right to me.

    — Luther Blissett · Apr 21, 02:24 PM · #

  6. Here’s a sincere, non-smartass, genuinely seeking question for Prof. Bauerlein: How do you tell the difference between genuinely good films and those that are valuable merely for being DNA samples of the “popular consciousness of their time”?

    One of the complicating factors in film is technology. Some great films, such as Buster Keaton’s “The General,” are mechanically fairly primitive, if nevertheless very complicated, but still hold up today. Other great movies, however, show their age and, in spite of have been wonderful and startling in their day, seem to us slow, hokey, histrionic, obvious, gimmicky, etc., now. Although they might be, in terms of “The Battle of the Books” (wasn’t it?), “midgets standing on the shoulders of giants,” a lot of contemporary films are nevertheless taller—that is, better on an absolute scale—than their allegedly great predecessors. “Michael Clayton,” for instance, is not nearly the pioneering intriguer that, say, “The Lady Vanishes” was, but it’s a lot smarter, more subtle, and more cleverly woven together than the Hitchcock.

    (“Technology,” incidentally, can refer to more than hardware. The great art historian, E.H. Gombrich talked about the West’s “visual technology”—linear perspective, chiaroscuro, atmospheric perspective, etc.—peaking during the Renaissance, and a professor on one of those DVD courses in the English novel spoke of Jane Austen’s inventing the practice of the author’s shifting from peaking from within and without a character’s head without such indicators as, “He thought,” etc. Modern art rather upset the applecart about which Gombrich wrote, but practically any decent contemporary crime novel now does Austen’s inside/outside thing much more cleverly than she did. Yes, I know she was a giant, giant, but the work of the shortest midget standing on her shoulders can be, you know, “taller.”)

    On the other hand, some studio products from half a century ago that one might think are good for telling “us something about the people of the” 50s and not a whole lot more, turn out to be artistically rock-solid. I watched John Sturges’s “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955) again the other night and it’s just about a masterpiece that tells today’s audience a whole lot more than “something about the people of the” 50s. Personally, I’d submit that “L.A. Confidential” will likewise be seen, in fifteen or twenty years, as telling us a whole lot more than “something about the people of the” ‘90s. (An improbable ending is hardly the litmus test separating good films from bad, by the way.)

    Anyway, what’s your answer? (And thanks)

    — LuckyJim · Apr 21, 03:50 PM · #

  7. Unfortunately, while it may be true that Crash is an “inferior” film “technically” or “aesthetically”, the problem is that our blog host is not in a position to know; he admitted to having only watched 45 minutes of it.

    Granted, much for what passes as “film criticism” in college and university classrooms is simply the pablum of thematic analysis at best. The discipline, however, is far more complex than that, although the simple rhetoric of grammar and narrativity is all too often the fallback position.

    Not having seen the volume of College English referred to in the posting, I cannot comment on the quality of the essays.

    However, we must remember that responsible criticism requires at least that one read the book or see the film in its entirety.

    When our students skip that all important first step, we call that “cutting corners”, do we not?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 21, 06:27 PM · #

  8. Fiar enough, A-h-a, but I can’t help thinking that 45 minutes of Crash was quite enough to form a judgment. LuckyJim raises the serious question, and it’s one that humanities scholars have a duty to address. And it’s hard to do so. What will hold up 30 years from now, and what will fade away? The track record shows too many misevaluations, too many unpredictable rises and falls of reputation. Some things stick and others don’t, and for all our certainties the only reliable judgment is the test of time. (I’m sure that The General will survive—it MUST survive.) But we have to keep trying, and I wish that humanities scholars applied the traditions of the past more often to the works of the present, and didn’t give the present over so much to popular commentators who often hype the momentary and overlook the longstanding. They said LA Confidential was a great entry in the noir mode. But what about the good-guy cop raping the prostitute? And what about the bad-guy cop attacking him until they realize they have a common enemy, and all is forgotten? And what about the bad-guy cop’s background story, which turned into high silliness half-way through his remembrance?

    — Mark Bauerlein · Apr 21, 09:45 PM · #

  9. Excellent points from both Lucky Jim and MkB.

    Now, to take them all and roll them into that that grand-daddy of all debated film studies questions (with echoes from the preoccupations of an earlier thread or two):

    What makes both Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will “masterpieces” despite the horrific historical and human casualties for which their “messages” successfully proselytized?

    That’s one that has kept me up nights — and given me chills up the spine as well.

    I have not seen Birth of a Nation in its entirety, so I will not discuss it; but I am very familiar with the intricacies of Triumph of the Will.

    Everything that is theorized about the powerful effects of the expert choice of camera angles and lighting and mise en scene and editing is in that film. And everything “archetypal” about the “master race” rising up from the land to form a nation and conquer the world is portrayed in its “storyline” as well.

    Is it precisely the knowledge that we bring to the film of its profound evil effects in history which fuels the fascination?

    Has its “Rezeptionsgeschichte” become the motor of its perennial fascination or is it the result of an “absolute” technical excellence? Can technical excellence be divorced from the abhorrent ideological premises to which it is wedded and from which it draws its overwhelming power? “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”

    Na ja. Tell the concentration camp victim or the slave reparations proponent that the “content” doesn’t undermine the “esthetic and techncial quality” of these “masterpieces”. Tell them that the viewing of those films does not perpetuate their experiences of personal oppression.

    I dare you…anyone.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 21, 11:33 PM · #

  10. While I do agree that Crash should have been titled “Racism for Dummies: The Movie about Racism,” I’m not entirely sure I buy Professor Bauerlein’s reasons for disliking the other films he lists. For instance, why should we find it unbelievable that Clarice succeeds after being so vulnerable? Isn’t that a classic turn in fiction, when the enemy is undone by his own sense of superiority (or hubris)?

    With respect to A-H-A’s very serious question, I wonder if we should avoid making an absolute statement that works are necessarily complicit in the conditions of their creation. If that’s the case, then we should just set fire to every piece of poetry ever written, because most of it was written by an opulent class. I haven’t seen either film in question, but the attitude A-H-A has taken seems to demand an all-or-nothing response, and I don’t know if that’s a productive approach to works that will nevertheless exist, despite how they were produced.

    — NefariousCarrot · Apr 22, 12:29 AM · #

  11. Comment 10 misunderstands comment 9.

    The question is not “all or nothing” but rather “Why is it NOT all or nothing”?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 06:15 AM · #

  12. I really think you are mistaken regarding the film CRASH, Mr. Bauerline. The film is not manipulative nor does it seek to preach. Rather than dipict sterotypes, the film delineates, multi-demensional characters that reveal their demons, and the better angles of their nature. Moreover, CRASH realistically portrays the acute stresses individuals endure in their stuggles to cope in a harsh world, regardless of race or class. Abraham Lincoln once said, “The true role in determining to embrace or reject anything…is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more evil than good…There are few things wholly evil or wholly good.”

    Although CRASH has its flaws, it is truly, a thought-provoking, realisitic, and remarkable film.

    — Keith Thomas Leonard · Apr 22, 06:32 AM · #

  13. My question about Hollywood feature films, and how do you separate the really good ones from merely interesting fodder for sociologists or cultural historians, is a fairly mild—albeit broad—one, and I meant it more aesthetically than morally. But then Prof. Bauerlein brings up “the good guy cop raping the prostitute” in “L.A. Confidential” and we’re off to the morality races (probably unintentionally for Prof. Bauerlein, for whom I gather the rape is more of a character/plot improbability than a moral lapse on the part of the filmmakers).

    “Triumph of the Will” was made in 1935, I think, four years before the Nazis started WW2 in Europe and seven years before the decision to undertake the Final Solution. So its offensiveness is because of what it—a recruiting film for Naziism—led to. If that’s the case, then you have to reconsider all the great films of the Russian revolution: “Battleship Potemkin,” “October,” “Ten Days that Shook the World,” etc. After all, they were propaganda films for an ideology and regime that lead to even greater mass murder than the Nazis’. And what about all the pro-Mao Chinese films, touting the virtues of the greatest mass murderer in human history?

    Then we have the problem of certain kinds of potential viewers as special victims of a film’s offensiveness. A Holocaust survivor and “Triumph of the Will” is an obvious example. Would I tell such a person that “Triumph of the Will” is a great film? I’d try to avoid the subject and the unpleasant social situation, but if pressed, yes. Would I demand that a Holocaust survivor see the film? Of course not. Would I exempt a student who’s, say, devoted to grandparents who are Holocaust survivors, from a classroom showing (for a legit pedagogical purpose) of “Triumph of the Will”? Certainly.

    But a lot of oppressing-the-viewer questions don’t have obvious answers. What about the same Holocaust survivor having to watch “The Producers”? (I saw it again not that long ago, and it’s really pretty terrible, even without the moral queasiness. Unless you think that two scenery-chewers constantly screaming at each other is inherently funny.) What about a Palestinian watching a buddy film about Israeli soldiers? What about an Israeli relative of a bomb victim watching a pro-Intifada feature? What about feminists watching Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara up the stairs? Indeed, what about somebody who was abused by a Catholic priest (and we know there are quite a lot of them) having to sit through “Going My Way”? Or somebody with a kid in the army in Afghanistan having to watch “Charlie Wilson’s War” play it all for laughs? In the end, one probably does have to try mightily to separate “the dancer from the dance.” (Although, I must admit, I was jarred a bit by a placard at a pro-Tibet demonstration reading, “We wouldn’t let Nazi Germany host the Olympics, would we?”)

    Heavy-duty stuff, and I can’t author a position paper that arrives at a blanket answer. All I was trying to say is this: a) Hollywood feature films made for almost purely commercial purposes are often very good films for more than just sociological reasons, and often not in spite of, but because of their intent (which leads to clearly drawn characters, efficient directing, clear camera angles, economic dialogue, nice pacing, etc.), and b) improbable endings are not a good measure of whether a film is any good or not. You can almost say the nature of feature films—like the nature of grand opera—requires improbable endings.

    — LuckyJim · Apr 22, 06:52 AM · #

  14. For the historical record (from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website, http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/wannsee.htm):

    “On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting. They met in a wealthy section of Berlin at a villa by a lake known as Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich, who was SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe” with key non-SS government leaders, including the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry and Justice, whose cooperation was needed.
    […]
    The Wannsee Conference, as it became known to history, did not mark the beginning of the “Final Solution.” The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the “final solution” was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated “extermination” camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.”

    And as for Hitler and the 1936 Olympics, the Museum has a special exhibit which features the story of the black American Jesse Owens — who, to the consternation of Hitler and the Nazis, won those gold medals.

    “Deconstruction” at its best.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 07:17 AM · #

  15. This may be somewhat tangential to Prof. Bauerlein’s blog, but I find the intrusion of films into many college classes questionable. At my child’s college, one of the most admired small New England liberal arts colleges, a recent tempest over the tenure case of a women’s and gender studies professor revealed that one of the tenure candidate’s classes, attended by a gushing evaluator, involved film viewing and discussion of “Walt Disney and the sociology of heterosexuality.” In my child’s first year seminar on Russian history and literature, the class viewed several films. When my child went to the professor to complain about the amount of film-viewing and ask for more book-related class discussion, the professor was sympathetic but said most students “like the films.” I am sorry, but this kind of pandering and these kinds of classes do not comport with my idea of a fine liberal arts education.

    — Parent · Apr 22, 08:02 AM · #

  16. By the way, the Nuremberg denaturalization laws of 1935 which were “racially” based and used to discriminate against the Jews still had/have vestiges in modern German civil service laws.

    A professor of my acquaintance described her shock at having to list her “ancestry” for the government once she was “called” to a C-3 professorship in the mid-80’s.

    Kind of gives you a whole new perspective on just what is “history” and what is “current content” in Triumph of the Will — or any film, for that matter.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 08:18 AM · #

  17. Direct question for AHA:

    Did the United States’ participating in the 1936 Berlin Olympics ultimately a) do more harm because it gave legitimacy to the Nazi regime, or b) more good because Jesse Owens’s winning those gold medals put the lie to the Nazis’ theory of Aryan racial superiority?

    I’d go with (a). Somehow, I suspect that AHA’s answer is going to be a lot longer, and include extensive quotations and links.

    — LuckyJim · Apr 22, 08:42 AM · #

  18. Mark advises us to use “the test of time” to determine what work will endure. At worst, that is a tautology: what endures endures.

    At best, it confesses to a naturalization of the social process by which works come to be valued. It’s not like Father Time puts a novel or a film through some test. Instead, all canonization has always involved active persuasion by interested parties.

    Shakespeare’s plays have come and gone through fashion. Romantic poetry suffered a similar fate. Today, eighteenth century poetry is far less enduring than Baroque, Romantic, Victorian, or Modernist poetry. Tomorrow, I hope to see Pope over Wordsworth. But that will only happen through a concerted effort on the part of readers, reviewers, editors, writers, teachers, scholars, etc.

    And sadly, what endures barely endures. I wonder how many readers Pope actually has these days. It’s better to say: what doesn’t endure is great art.

    — Luther Blissett · Apr 22, 08:54 AM · #

  19. Parent (#15) – I agree that films should not replace books in a literature class. That is what Film Studies classes are for. However, films can augment literature courses, such as as was the case in one undergraduate course I took. The course was Science Fiction Literature, and at the end of the class (after reading a number of books), we watched and discussed Alien and Dark City. Part of the discussion was how the movies fir into the thematic evolution of science fiction literature, and how a difference in medium impacted the presentation of such themes.

    — a different Dan · Apr 22, 08:56 AM · #

  20. The didactic Crash is certainly not the same class of film as the propagandistic Triumph of the Will. What I found disturbing about Triumph of the Will when I first saw it in a theater is that it attracts so many neo-Nazis, who cheer all through the film. But I have seen it since in private, as well as Riefenstahl’s Olympia—great films, if you can stand to see Hitler deified. And if I remember correctly, Riefenstahl does show Jesse Owens’ victory (though her protestations that she wasn’t a Nazi seem hollow to me).

    Does Alexander Nevsky glorify communism? The mysticism about the motherland is disturbing (almost Blut und Boden), but not the propagandistic exhortation to the Russian people to fight the Germans.

    Minor note about popular culture: the film Rize has a segment that intercuts footage from a Riefenstahl documentary about Africans dancing. What does that say about the film? What does it say about the director?

    — Saxo · Apr 22, 09:39 AM · #

  21. Every medium has turkeys. Every turkey has media. Just because someone chooses a dud to study does not mean that the chooser is a dud though he or she may be. Discussing duds who choose duds may make the discussers into duds. I am feeling a little dud-dy myself about now.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 22, 10:21 AM · #

  22. First of all, no one should wade into the murky pond of film criticism without hip boots. Arguing about what is and what isn’t a good film is a game for suckers, and there’s nothing worse than a sucker with an MFA or PhD after his/her name. I know a hell of a lot about film—and I consider my opinion as valid as anyone else’s—but I have the good sense to realize that what I think is good and what others think is good is not based on knowledge or special insight. For the record, Pulp Fiction is a brilliant work, but I think Gidget and Journey to the Center of the Earth are brilliant works as well. I think the The Godfather saga doesn’t hold up well. Casablanca and Chinatown are the greatest movies ever made. But you know what? Who cares what I think?

    — first marci · Apr 22, 10:42 AM · #

  23. I can’t agree that “Great works . . . merit repeated interpretation and theorizing. . . .” whereas “Popular works (which aren’t great) merit a different approach.” As pointed out by LuckyJim (#6) above, the problem is, how do we know which films are the great ones that will stand the test of time and which are merely popular ephemera? By sifting them all through the same sieve and weighing them all on the same scale and evaluating the work on the evidence of the film (or book or work of art or music) itself. Agreed, “Crash” is essentially ungreat, unimportant, and unworthy of serious notice: but this value judgment (which is of course what this is really about) has to be based on something as reasonably close to “objective” as possible. The obvious fact that we are conditioned by our time and place doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of doing the best we can, while recognizing our limitations.

    I’d feel unsure about reviewing a movie after only 45 minutes; although I walked out of “Jabberwocky” when it became apparent that silliness was supposed to understudy wit, which had been indisposed while they were filming, I didn’t review the thing. And people have to be willing to risk being wrong in their judgments. Pauline Kael was one hell of a fine reviewer, not least for her reason for leaving “Love Story” (“I’m sorry, but I’m diabetic”), but if I recall correctly she also panned “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on the ground that it was a film about a couple of bank robbers.

    But I do wonder why so much stuff, whether film, book, art, whatever medium, gets so much serious attention that it obviously does not deserve. I think anyone who favorably reviewed “Crash” should have to sit through ten straight screenings of “My Dinner with Andre.” If that didn’t cure a person of pretension, nothing will.

    — Dan · Apr 22, 10:53 AM · #

  24. Is the comment saying that all judgments about good & bad films are relative itself relative? Or is it an absolute?

    — LuckyJim · Apr 22, 10:54 AM · #

  25. I have taught film at the college level and have made some effort to help students distinguish solid film criticism from the usual chi-chat. There are critics who help you watch a film with a more discerning eye (Klawans, Kael) than you otherwise would — and this may be true even if you do not agree with their final assessment. In any event, the real task for the teacher, as I see it, is to persuade students, without being pedantic, that the critical move beyond the star or other grading system can be valuable. The goal is to help viewers be more discursively independent in their spectator role. That’s hard to do given the instant accessibility of film “commentary” on the net. (Film artist-critics are always worth reading, eg. John Sayles etc. and reading them can suggest to students that thinking about film is not murdering to dissect but can be an enriching and creative act.)

    I respect my son’s taste in films and he warned me off of CRASH by assuring me that it represents everything I hate in some films: preaching, contrivance, and a puerile and obvious message to make some of us feel virtuous and enlightened. So I’ve avoided this film and I must say that I am surprised how much I agree with many Items on your list, Mark, particularly #‘s 1 and 2.

    We do face the challenge Matthew Arnold once noticed: how to equip students with a more discerning and independent judgment which refuses to be either a slavish follower of the latest marketing hype, or so radically immature as to say “Gosh, who cares about the reviews? I know what I like.” —— an attitude that places one’s critical judgments of the arts in the same category as appetite preferences —- a sort of Wayne’s World view of critical judgment where no one gives reasons for their preferences.

    I believe, finally, that developing this capacity to judge is allied to the practice of political judgment (see Arendt), and that as our capacity to distinguish good art dwindles, our propensity for granting excessive esteem to certain leaders also increases. The elections 0f 2000 and 2004 speak volumes.

    Finally, having chosen certain films regularly in my intro class, I must say that among the many standouts, Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW never has gotten old for me and it will, unlike CRASH or AMERICAN BEAUTY, delite our progeny.

    — George T. Karnezis · Apr 22, 01:38 PM · #

  26. Mark Baeurlein really stepped in it this time. He says he walked out after 45 minutes of a film that is 112 minutes long (in the theatrical version he saw; the director’s cut DVD adds several minutes). And yet he can authoritatively judge the film. Interesting: would he accept someone making an authoritative judgement on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury after reading less than half of it? Or only 6 lines of a Shakespeare sonnet?
    But the real problem is that at the end of the film the ostensibly most racist character seems to change in a moment of crisis. Classic social problem melodrama, sure. But Prof. Bauerlein didn’t stay for that part.
    It’s fine to walk out on a film that you think is wasting your entertainment time (you’ve already wasted your money on the ticket). But to think your judgement of part of a work of art can be authoritative after experiencing less than half of it is pure hubris.

    — Chuck Kleinhans · Apr 22, 04:46 PM · #

  27. The question of the “worth” of scholars’ and students’ time and the use of film in the formal classroom, raised above in comment 15, is an important one.

    A case can be made for the screening of a full-length film in collective “laboratory” time (that is, additional to the “contact hour” time for “credit”) only if the actual millimeter film version of the work is the “medium” and screening is just that: projected on a screen reproducing the conditions of a cinema house.

    If not, i.e., if the versions used are on video or DVD, then, even for film studies, there is no excuse for using any formal “contact hour” time for viewings — excepting, of course, brief “citations” of scenes under intense analysis/discussion, as one might read a page or two from a book.

    “Viewings” can be done by students alone or in groups in a library or a departmental viewing room (with a large screen) and, indeed, the newer technologies permit the re-viewing and the repeated contemplation of scenes or the entire work itself, difficult, if not impossible with film versions themselves — and analogous to the “homework” reading expected of a student in a literature class.

    The showing of feature-length films in classrooms is otherwise akin to the use of television by a baby-sitter — and, by itself, hardly constitutes “education” by any stretch of the imagination.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 22, 11:46 PM · #

  28. AHA:

    Isn’t making a judgment on the showing of feature-length films in class WITHOUT knowing how they’re used (e.g., the prep discussion and reading material, the in-class discussion if the film doesn’t take up an entire class session, the discussion and reading material following the showing) somewhat like Prof. Bauerlein judging “Crash” after seeing only half of it?

    Also, might you please attend to comment #17?

    Humbly, Jimbo

    — LuckyJim · Apr 23, 05:28 AM · #

  29. On 28:

    Part one: Unless meaningful “replacement” contact time is taking place (as in the Pew-funded course redesign project administered by RPI’s Center for Academic Transformation), in-class movie-showings are really only justified if there are physical barriers to access otherwise.

    Yes, I know. It constitutes the old copyright law’s “face to face” exemption for public performance. But library viewings of an individual DVD or video are generally not considered violations of the “home viewing” copyright (or else libraries wouldn’t purchase these materials at all). And the DMCA may even provide for closed server individual access to such materials on campus (I haven’t checked).

    Further, the issue comes down to the classification of the use of classroom time for the Carnegie unit. When credit is computated for “contact time” the nature of the contact time is taken into account for the equation with credit: lecture, discussion, etc.. Thus, for example, often science labs even carry no credit, or multiple hours of “contact” take place for a single additional credit.

    Most of the time, when faculty use a single film in a whole course, they don’t actually jeopardize their course classification. But when it occurs in multiple class periods, it erodes the classification of the course, for the instructor is not primarily“lecturing” when a film is shown in its entirety in silence during multiple classes, nor are the students primarily “discussing”.

    I know that faculty in film studies have been under some pressure by students to relent on this and their administrations have sometimes either acquiesced or supported the students. (More time on campus required when the films are shown in “lab” sessions, etc.) However, the cost of a DVD is less than the price of many books these days, so there’s no reason for the faculty to “cave in” to these pressures any longer.

    Unless, of course, they actually seek to do less work in the classroom!

    Ergo, the parent’s concern that classroom time be “worth” what it’s advertised to be — and what the tuition credit hour has paid for.

    As for Part two, I’m inclined to agree with the Olympics analysis offered in 17 above.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 23, 08:41 AM · #

  30. I’m amused by the presumptions of “English” professors, who feel perfectly qualified to hold forth on film — and television, and hip-hop, and politics, and visual media, etc. etc. — but who are not themselves scholars of or practioners in those fields. Where is the special issue of the Journal of Moving Image Studies or Cinema Journal devoted entirely to a novel? Side note: Nearly all of the books I review for first-year writing programs now include coverage of “visual rhetoric,” but none of the authors have any background at all in graphic design, advertising, fine arts, or any other kind of visual media. I expect the refutation to be something like “everything’s a text” — but, really, aren’t any serious cinema scholars at least a little offended by this presumption? (More likely: nobody cares……)

    — beppolina · Apr 23, 03:53 PM · #

  31. On comment 30:

    The observation concerning deficiency of graphic design/advertising, etc.“background” does not apply to all those who have “held forth” on this thread.

    I personally know of at least one with “background”, anyway…. ;-)

    Seriously, however, the point is well taken. What I call “integrated writing” professors may be in the minority still, but the numbers are growing….

    As for film scholars devoting lots of (Web)page space to a novel, cf. Robert Castle’s “Proust Regained” — on the filmed version of parts of one of the longest, most internationally influential novels of all, Remembrance of Things Past, in the February 2006 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/51/proust.htm

    In light of Comment 30’s concern for “field” and “training”, the Web article is quite a nice piece of work about a film which, it is argued, is perhaps only fully understood by Proust’s readers — an analysis “written” by a writer and film critic who makes a living as a history teacher, at that.

    Oh, and Castle almost “walked out” on the Ruiz film, but thought better of it, stayed with it, despite the jarring jumbles of “time” and continuity, and found — the “involuntary memory” of the novel!

    So, does that wrap all of this up into one big rolling stone gathering no moss…?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 23, 07:00 PM · #

  32. Are there scripts in American feature films? Are they in English? Do the actors in American feature films speak? Do they speak English? Yep, yep, yep and yep. So, English professors can hold forth. (Of course what they say is still to be judged on, well, what they say.)

    One has to be a bit amused at beppolina’s disqualifying English professors and demanding instead a union card in some sort of visual media. Turn that argument around and it means that the visual media people can’t hold forth about movies, either, because they’re not experts on the English in them.

    — LuckyJim · Apr 24, 05:08 AM · #

  33. Well, um, there is this little problem of dubbing and subtitling and “foreign films” whose languages are not English, and “world lit in translation” and all, so the “charges” against English Departments concerning their propensity for “holding forth” aren’t all that off the mark. Perhaps one might better counter the argument with an appeal to the need for “public intellectuals”, for example.

    As I posted on a thread at “The Valve” re: the fate of English Departments, Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas noted with dripping irony the paradoxical arrogance of both the “professing” and the professors of English literature.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 24, 06:50 AM · #

  34. OK, we will, as they say on “Law & Order,” stipulate:

    1. Not all English professors in all English departments are qualified to hold forth on all films.

    2. Translating, via subtitles or dubbing, the language in a foreign-language film can cause inaccuracies in what a viewer who doesn’t speak that language takes away from the film.

    Notes:

    Paul Rotha, in his great book “The Film Till Now,” decried the advent of sound because it would rob film—heretofore silent with title frames doable in any language—of its universality. Indeed, one of the reasons why Charles Bronson was, for a time in the 1970s, the world’s most popular movie star, was that his action films had very little dialogue in the them.

    The high school English teacher who had me read “Madame Bovary” in translation would have taught me more about great literature, I gather, by assigning instead the original of “Kiss Me Deadly” in English.

    Capital punishment (buried up to the neck, honey, red ants, etc.) is recommended for anybody who cites his or her posts on some other threads on some other blogs somewhere. Argument by authority ain’t quite that elastic.

    — LuckyJim · Apr 24, 01:29 PM · #

  35. Pursuant to 34 above, I hereby un-recommend to the reader the interesting thread on the fate of English Departments at “The Valve”.

    It’s true. The people at “The Valve” don’t like “outside” visitors that much. Kind of a closed close-knit group (where yours truly dared to “intrude” on occasion). Rather like most if not all English departments….

    Come to think of it, the percentage of English Department faculty, high school/college/university, who partner with their colleagues who are specialists in the languages of the literature they teach (e.g. Madame Bovary) is probably, well, minuscule.

    Thank you again, Virginia Woolf, for Three Guineas — which still rings true after all these years.
    http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 24, 02:02 PM · #

  36. I have to say, I was once one of the offenders. I used to think, in writing courses at least, the content didn’t matter much. Years ago I taught Disney movies as a subject, and while I still think that rain sequence in Bambi is one of the finest in film, I’m mostly disappointed by the rest of what was studied that semester. Yes, the heterosexual conspiracy was a big theme.

    I regret teaching movies in my classes in general. I don’t think I’m any less qualified to discuss films in classrooms, given I studied with some first rate film scholars. Nor do I feel I have a lack of understanding of visual rhetorics – I used to work in advertising. My regret is that I could have been teaching some great books during all that time. Literature happens to be my area of expertise, and it just so happens that’s an area of great need for today’s students. If they don’t become more sophisticated readers in college, when else will they acquire the habit?

    — Nick · Apr 28, 01:16 PM · #

  37. On Comment 36:

    Yes, but then again the title of that classic film studies text sums up the situation: How to Read a Film (question and statement).

    It’s difficult to be in the midst of what appears to be a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Reading is now a multi-media act. And Americans are among the most gifted multimedia “viewers” in the world — they need only be transformed into multimedia “readers”.

    When students learn the vocabulary and the techniques of film criticism, they seem to feel empowered with and by words in a way that was not often the case with only the written word. Why is it wrong to make our students truly literate in the multimedia age?

    A film masterpiece sends the student to reading and more reading and more reading, of literature, film, and criticism — once they know how to read a film and valorize or devalorize the film they are “reading” in terms of “narrative”, “gesture”, “dance”, “balanced composition”, “color and lighting”, etc.

    BTW One major fault I found with “Crash” (I’m MkB’s mirror-image, I saw only the second half of the film on satellite this past weekend) is its hubris in aspiring to classical perfection: the unities of time, place, and action of a Greek tragedy or classical French theater — and it stretched the categories almost as much as Corneille did in Le Cid.

    But no matter. To shift gears, would Dickens not have reveled in the multimedia communications age? Would not his daily multimedia “blog” have been just as much masterpieces as his serialized novels?

    P.S. Congratulate AHA for having just been censored at “The Valve”. Three times, I believe. Yes, AHA will find hypocrisy wherever it may reside….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 30, 12:46 AM · #

  38. Judging by the low levels of sophistication I see among the social networking types, I have to respectfully disagree. I hardly think that today’s students are more literate in their “multimedia reading” abilities. The literacy tests certainly show a drop off in what you would call traditional reading over the last twenty years. I don’t buy that traditional reading has been replaced by more sophisticated viewers of information, either. This is like the myth of the more computer savvy college graduate. The fact is, these have few skills that actually translate well into success in the business world. Whatever they’re savvy at, it doesn’t seem to have much practical value.

    I’m not suggesting, by the way, that film studies is not a worthy and good enterprise. I am saying that just because students view a lot of information from multichannels doesn’t make them necessarily sophisticated viewers of any one of them. Moreover, today’s youth do have more practice at being watchers of things, but less and less as readers. You’re not going to become a better reader by spending more time online or watching television. To my mind, the reading deficit is overcome best by literature. That’s my point. Let the film professors do what they do, but let’s get the English professors back to books.

    — Nick · Apr 30, 12:41 PM · #

  39. Misunderstanding in Comment 38: AHA did not say that students were experts at “multimedia reading” but at “multimedia viewing”.

    Why is it not self-evident that one must master language and literature skills and visual and auditory media skills to become truly “multimedia literate”?

    The challenge before us is a both/and and not an either/or for the English faculty – from whose ranks a large proportion of the film studies program faculty are drawn. And for good reason: the best English professors are best at all of the literacies.

    The problem has been that the majority of English professors have not yet understood this – to the detriment of all literacies overall.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 30, 03:37 PM · #

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