Week 1 Screening Prompts: Purple Rose of Cairo

How does Purple Rose of Cairo represent/imagine:

1) the medium of film
2) the act of moviegoing
3) the audience as a group
4) the individual experience of spectatorship

How does the film address you as an audience (collectively) and spectator (individually)?

Post your responses in the comments.

12 thoughts on “Week 1 Screening Prompts: Purple Rose of Cairo

  1. Joshua Aichenbaum

    Starting off with the more obvious, hopefully moving onto deeper complexities, the entire film is based upon the belief that the medium of film is definable and therefore well suited for parody. It depicts audience members with expectations, who enter a cinema with an understanding of film as a medium. These audience members view film as a group of genres, each genre with its own genre standards, and are willing to voice their displeasure when these expectations are not met. The resulting effect is comic. It is a continuous intellectual mind-game. The actual-real-blood-and-flesh audience, in my circumstance being me, in your circumstance being you, is constantly aware of the film’s reflexivity, how it is commenting upon its own existence and creation, and said audience derives its pleasure and its laughs from possessing this privileged knowledge. We are all in on the game. We all know the secret to the magic trick. And yet, we still find ourselves being members of the audience, watching a film with a plot and a drama whose ending we are anticipating but are yet unaware of. We probably do not foresee that the film is going to end with Cecilia returning to her old miseries and with Baxter reentering the silver screen, but if we were to pause the film, literally, and contemplate the plot’s direction and the dramatic questions it proposes we would realize the following: firstly, that the film’s genre although slippery and difficult to get a hold of, could most likely be defined as a Romantic Comedy inverted and flipped on its end. That is to say, instead of being about an unlikely couple meeting each other, disliking each other and then inevitably falling in and out of love until we end happily-ever-ever-after, the pattern is reversed. We begin with love-at-first-sight— with two people hopelessly desiring the other— instead of with loathing and conflict, and therefore the film must also end with the opposite. The pattern is reversed. The reversion to a degenerated and depressed life is predictable and makes sense considering the trajectory of the story’s arc. Secondly and along the same lines, a crucial dramatic question is whether and when Tom Baxter will reenter the silver screen. To have a satisfying resolution, the film must answer this question and have Tom choose and make a permanent decision—i.e., to live in the real world or to solely exist fictionally. From there, we must ask what is most satisfying for the viewer’s experience. I would conclude as the film’s writers did, that it is more interesting visually and dramatically if Tom is able and forced to re-traverse the silver plane. But such a response is subjective. The point being is that The Purple Rose of Cairo recognizes that the medium of film is reflexive and that it has an audience that is willing to question and analyze the medium of a film as a medium while taking part on its adventure and thrills. That is the secret to the beauty and humor of the film.

  2. Mary-Caitlin Hentz

    The Purple Rose of Cairo is a filmic dissection of the lines and levels between and within the concepts entertainment and reality. The movie blurs perception and experience by playing off of the preconceived norms of the medium, movie going and the nature of the American film audience.
    Beginning at the most basic, The Purple Rose of Cairo manipulates the factual composition of the medium by creating a fantastical world in which film actors can walk off screen and into the real world. Drawing further on this is the subsequent idea that film characters exist on a separate theater like plane where the movie is performed over and over in real time while the projector is running; in this way the filmic becomes a type of magical theater.
    This twisting of the realities and scientific certainties of the silver screen is surrounded however, by the unchanging expectations of traditional movie going. Set in the Great Depression, a time where escapist picture palace attendance shot through the roof, the audience expected to be served a three act spectacle. Disillusioned by poverty, monotony and a failing and abusive marriage, Cecilia clearly goes to the movies in order to daydream, to transport herself into the unattainable over glamorized life of the fantastical. These concepts of movie-going however, are shattered when Tom Baxter walks out of the picture and whisks Cecelia away for a romantic love affair. At first, the audience is terrified, much like the myths of the early train picture shows, then some audience members are briefly intrigued, but in the end the film going audience is just downright annoyed that they aren’t getting what they paid for: structured narrative escapism.
    What struck me most however was the film’s applicability to the versatile and complicated nature of reality, both within and without the filmic world. In a way, The Purple Rose of Cairo reminded me a great deal of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where both viewer and character is immersed and confounded by the dissolution of the possible and the probable. This manipulation of expectations, both filmically and within the confines of the larger artistic and social mediums is both an internal questioning of the norms of our cultural existence and a push to extend them, a process that is as old as art itself, and in my opinion the very reason for creating… needless to say, I enjoyed the film.

  3. Mark Whelan

    What I found most interesting about The Purple Rose of Cairo, in terms of our audiences class, was the exact moment when I felt the film and my role as an audience member shift. For the first 15-20 minutes of the film I was a normal audience member, taken in by the story and characters of the film, letting myself be passive in the on-screen world. As soon as the Jeff Daniels character breaks the fourth wall (both in the fictional film, and in part the actual film) it was like I was snapped out of a trance and became very aware that I was in an audience, watching a film, and that this film had a meta message that I was supposed to be paying attention to. In this sense I thought the film did a very good job of making me think about the act of moviegoing and the act of being a member of an audience. Much like the Cecillia in the film who gets engulfed in the world of cinema until a character steps off the screen and turns her life upside down, I too was engulfed in the movie world until his departure from the screen.

    While this was the way in which I felt the film addressed me as an audience member individually, I also thought the film provided some commentary on audiences collectively. The response of the fictional audience in the film to the missing character (some outraged, some very interested) to me represented the spectrum of audiences, some of which do not like to deviate from the structure of classic cinema, while other are very interested in the alternative. I also thought that the character Cecillia represented our culture as one that intently follows all of the stars and films of today. In the end she finds that the real world and the actual actors/characters are way more complicated than the illusions of cinema which is something I think resonates in our media/celebrity fascinated society.

  4. Sofia Zinger

    I really loved the film Purple Rose of Cairo because of how Woody Allen made a cliche love story into something new and innovative, not to mention complex and intricate. It was a stroke of pure genius to put the audience in a position of self-awareness, and despite the boy-meets-girl and falls madly in love part of the story, there was not a single predictable moment in the film. It’s extremely rare, if found at all in any other movie, that a movie feel so interactive to me. Usually, even if a movie makes you think, it doesn’t make you feel like part of the story or an integral part of what is happening on the screen. The Purple Rose of Cairo did this by addressing our audience expectations in multiple scenes.

    People tend to go to the movies in order to see what they expect. The people in the audience were extremely jarred when Tom Baxter appeared off the screen (and understandably so) but this statement can also be taken further. When one goes to see a movie, usually it fits into a particular genre with some unspoken guidelines. If one goes to see a romantic comedy, one tends to know what they’re in for. It is generally expected that the main characters will get together at the end and that love will prevail. When this doesn’t occur, or something goes wrong, the audience feels uncomfortable. Tom Baxter said at one point, “Where I come from, people don’t disappoint. They’re consistent.” Movies are supposed to remain the same and a character only exists in his or her limited world, so there are certain limitations a movie-goer subconsciously places on a movie that seem taboo to break.

    Another expectation that the audience has in the moviegoing experience is that of being completely out of their reality and in that of the movie’s world. An interesting technique that Woody Allen used was the framing of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the film within the film. At the beginning, when Cecilia was completely enthralled by the film and her mind was completely fixated on it, the black and white film took up the entire screen, as if we were watching that film to begin with. Later, when her husband had hit her and her mind wasn’t completely engrossed on the film, the shot of the scenes in the film sometimes showed the curtains on the sides of the screen and we weren’t completely immersed in the black and white movie, just like her. This represents how sometimes we can be paying complete attention to the movie, and be invested in what happens to the characters, and sometimes our mind can wander into our own lives and the reality in which we live. Movies can be a way for people to escape from their real lives, but sometimes it’s impossible to get away completely, which is when the world on the screen becomes foreign to us because we are thinking too much about our own reality.

    In Tim Gunning’s “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde”, he references the willingness of early films during the period of “cinema of attractions” to “rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.” (Gunning; Cinema of Attraction; p. 230) This is exactly what the audience was not expecting in Woody Allen’s film because it disrupted the predictable flow of narrative. It took the movie-goer out of the film and back into reality, which was a jolt and something unexpected. When going to see a film with expectations, particularly when one has already seen the film, it is difficult to accept a tangent from the normal or anticipated. This is how film has strayed from the “cinema of attractions” to narrative films with a fourth wall. Though there is the element of exoticism in the film within our assigned film, it is expected to remain within the confines of the screen, unlike the “Lumiere tradition of ‘placing the world within one’s reach’.” (Gunning; Cinema of Attraction; p. 230)

  5. Brendan Mahoney

    I was particularly drawn to the scenes in which Cecilia explains the movies to her sister while shirking her duties at the diner. Probably because I act very similar to Cecilia after I see a film I enjoyed or found interesting. The Purple Rose of Cairo illustrates how film’s connect with their audiences. This connection that is created between the audience and the film is one that is firmly rooted in the narrative, not the spectacle. The film within a film The Purple Rose of Cairo, is not an example of the Tom Gunning’s “Cinema of Attraction.” Cecilia’s reaction to the film is an example of how quickly the film medium matured.

    It is also unlikely that Cecilia would have the same emotional reaction to the film if it were an actuality or a Melies film. Cecelia, unlike early audiences, did not watch the film self-consciously. Quite the opposite in fact. She allowed herself to be swept away for those few hours in the dark. This is no more apparent in the final scene, as she watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. Cecelia had just had her heart broken, yet she is still able to peace through the power of film. Had Cecelia been born 30 years prior, while she might have been fascinated by film, she would probably not had the same emotional connection.

    Unlike The Purple Rose of Cairo, however, the Top Hat scene is pure spectacle. Spectacle is practically a requirement for musicals, and Top Hat is no exception. The difference between this spectacle and the early “Cinemas of Attraction” is that in Top Hat, the spectacle is imbedded in the narrative, and the film also lacks the exhibitionist quality of early cinema, as does The Purple Rose of Cairo. These films have a much more voyeuristic quality to them. The dance between Fred and Ginger feels less like a performance, and more like a privileged view of a private moment. The strength of The Purple Rose of Cairo is that the voyeuristic paradigm we appreciate about film is flipped on its head. Perhaps the evolution from exhibitionism to voyeurism is merely a carefully crafted illusion.

  6. Ralph Acevedo

    I liked the Purple Rose of Cairo very much. I very much liked the dichotomy between fantasy and reality, idealism and realism. It was very interesting how the movie constructed life for its audience as unsatisfactory and presented movie watching as a way to “forget your troubles,” pure escapism. The backdrop of the Great Depression combined with period-appropriate cinematic style for the movie within a movie really hammered this home. Our protagonist constantly daydreams; the world of the movie inspires her imagination. She watches it again and again with childlike wonder.
    At the same time, the movie characters have a life of their own and they interact with their audience. In the film, a worried movie executive laments that the fictional people want to be real and the real people want to be fictional. This is certainly true of Cecilia and Tom. Cecilia is miserable with her abusive husband and her dead end waitressing. At the same time, Tom is sick and tired of spitting the same lines over and over again. He sees Cecilia as his ticket to something new. In the end, Cecilia rejects Tom’s idealism and makes the wrong choice. I see this as a possible allegorical statement about the audience’s relationship with the movies. The audience has the power to effect change in the movies (maybe as consumers), but so often, spectators pass up the chance. At the end of the day, Cecilia didn’t have enough faith in her dreams; she settled for the real life that was so often unfulfilling.

  7. Toren Hardee

    The thing that struck me the most about The Purple Rose of Cairo was its conflicted portrayal of Cecelia as the quintessential naïve, starstruck, escapist moviegoer. (And the film being set during the Depression only accentuates this theme of escapism.) Her devotion to movie fandom is so complete and obsessive that it prevents her from functioning normally in her day-to-day tasks; most importantly, her obliviousness eventually gets her fired from her waitressing job.
    In this way, Woody Allen makes the diehard movie fan out to be a bumbling, somewhat ditzy type with little concern for “real life” and an almost druglike addiction to the escape that cinema provides. Still, Allen being a director and obvious lover of movies himself, we know his tongue must be at least partially in his cheek, and we can see this play out in Cecelia’s character. Though we sometimes might want to shake her out of her oblivious daze and force her to stand up for herself, her complete innocence makes her a sweet, loveable, and very sympathetic protagonist.
    Because of the sympathy we have towards her, we are entirely inclined to root for her when a true movie fan’s dream comes true, twice: first, in getting to spend time in the flesh with a beloved character who is instantly and intensely devoted to her, and then getting to meet and flirt with the very actor who created that beloved character. Little do we realize, the devotion of the former is completely genuine, while that of the latter is merely a product of his skilled acting. We’ve spent most of the film seeing Cecelia’s mistakes before she makes them and cursing her for not being savvy enough to see them herself. But we too are tricked by Gil Shepard’s display of affection, and in this way, the true audience (us) and the figurative, representative one (Cecelia) are inextricably linked. It is because of this bond (and because of Mia Farrow’s wonderful performance) that the final moments of the film are so bittersweet and devastating; we know that Cecelia will be forced to return to the drudgery of her old life, but we see the wordless comfort of cinema escapism (perfectly embodied by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) returning to her, and we know that that comfort will always be available to us as well. In a way, The Purple Rose of Cairo both shows the power of escaping into a good movie and then become a great example of that very type of movie, and that’s what makes it such a remarkable achievement.

  8. Rajwinder Kaur

    The opening shot is a look at the poster of the film within a film, also titled The Purple Rose of Cairo, the camera acts as an eye, revealing the poster bit by bit. Over the dream like music, we cut to a shot of Mia Farrow, or Cecelia, looking at the poster, and then something falls. We are pulled out of the moment. For film students, this is a movie about movies and no where is this clearer with Tom Baxter right before he leaves the film, he looks off screen and walks out, directly, almost confrontationally at us.

    Cecelia personifies the romantic escapism associated with the act of movie going in The Purple Rose of Cairo. As a wife of an adulterous out of work, abusive alcoholic, the cinema is her saving grace. Cecelia gets off work and the one thing she can count on is a positive experience at the movies, whether or not her husband beats her is entirely dependent on his mood, she has no control in her life. Not only this, but this escapism permeates every aspect of her life, the way movies affect all viewers. When one watches a movie, they take the experience with them, share it with their friends and family in hopes of reliving the film. Cecelia tells her sister about The Purple Rose and gets so lost in her telling she fails at being a good waitress. And surely, she watches the movie again with her sister, spreading this romantic escapism. This escapism is also ritualistic: going to the cinema, buying popcorn, finding a seat, then filtering out until next time. It is a planned escape that will always be fulfilling, until…well… the characters refuse to continue the film until Tom Baxter returns.

    Woody Allen also acknowledges that movie going is a shared experience—the audience as a group. When we watch the scenes from the movie within a movie, occasionally we can hear moviegoers from Cecelia’s world laughing at the jokes. Furthermore, we can see this possibility of the audience moving towards mob mentality. When the characters refuse to go on with the film, the audience demands their money back and fight with the characters. An audience, as a whole, expects something of a movie, and when the film does not deliver, the failure brings them further away from escapism. This ties back to cinema’s beginnings. Once a cinema of attractions, viewers expected a certain sensation, whether that is a thrill, repulsion or excitement, they sought a particular emotion in each viewing. With the coming of narrative, and in this movie in particular, the emotion is romantic. Films are a perfect hub of emotion because of, “the astonishment derives from a magical metamorphosis rather than a seamless reproduction of reality” (Gunning: 118)

    As individual spectators, we often wish we were a part of the narrative, in today’s world, we see this with fan videos, art and alternate storylines. In this film, the movie literally comes out and joins Cecelia. She tries to make the film part of reality. She embodies this notion of “I know very well but all the same.” Tom Baxter has come out of the screen, he is madly in love with her and treats her in a way no other man has, he is so close to reality, but all the same he is not real. She accepts this harsh reality, because after all, it’s just a movie, and chooses the real actor who plays Baxter instead.

  9. Patricia

    The Purple Rose of Cairo is a very innovative film in the way that it addresses the viewer due to the nature of its plot—a film within a film, and a world within a world of sorts. The way that the narrative is set up, we can relate to Cecile when she is watching The Purple Rose of Cairo—ironically, we too are watching The Purple Rose of Cairo, both the one that Cecile is watching and the one Cecile is in. The film is a very self-referencing one; it mentions moviegoing, it portrays moviegoing, and we are caught up in the act of movie-going. The way the framing works in the film helps to illustrate what world we are in at any given moment—either Cecile’s world or the movie world that Tom Baxter has stepped out of.

    As far as audiences are concerned, sometimes we are the only audience but at other intervals, the characters on the screen are the audience as well so the screen almost becomes a mirror reflecting ourselves. We spectate the act of spectating. The film allows us to oscillate between being an audience when we are watching Cecile’s everyday life but then being a spectator when we are viewing The Purple Rose of Cairo within the film. The seamless shifts between the two worlds of the film give the viewer the opportunity to change their role from watching the characters on screen, to experiencing the same things that the characters on screen are experiencing.

  10. Kenneth Grinde

    It’s taken me the last full day to fully digest Purple Rose of Cairo, and it’ll no doubt continue evolving in my memory for a long time to come. I can just tell it was that type of movie.
    And perhaps that’s because it was such an unexpected tragedy for me, both because of Woody Allen’s name in the credits and because of the film’s apparently clear trajectory from the outset of an old whimsical farce was pushed to a suddenly dark and heart-wrenching close. Or perhaps it was just the success of the story: the total loss I felt at Cecilia not leaving doubled by my deep and ferocious desire for Monk to be wrong every time he tells her she’ll be back, and then tripled by my genetic distaste for New Jersey.
    But when I really dug into the feeling of tragedy, it was more a sense of helplessness: more a feeling that the victims here were people and our inherent distrust of perfection. For this reason, Woody Allen and Tom Gunning end up addressing much the same issue when talking about the aesthetic of astonishment: we want to believe that we’ll fall for the illusion. We want to believe that love affairs with our favorite movie stars would be long-lasting and rich, we want to believe that the first moving images of a locomotive made people jump out of their seats in fear, but our downfall is a chained attachment to reality. Though the illusion blows us away, or the story sucks us in, it’s always just a movie, always just the shadow world.
    So the tragedy isn’t Cecilia. It’s that when something perfect comes along, any person would choose real over perfect, any rational thinker would accept the fact that no one ran out of a theatre screaming, but instead appreciated the illusion as illusory. The Purple Rose of Cairo is the first time I have ever seen this rationalism criticized, and the sadness came from my agreement. Why can’t we just jump into the movies and escape? Don’t like it, change it, I know, but what if your life is terrible and it’s not your fault? What if people treat you bad and all you can do is imagine something else? Is that a crime of humanity?
    Endless questions = Great movie.

  11. James Stepney

    I really didn’t enjoy the film, Purple Rose of Cairo, for the simple fact that it felt too intrusive with its “preachy” subtext pertaining to the separation of spectator and spectacle. I understood the direction where the film was going in terms of making a commentary on audience interaction with the film, but it simultaneously satirized the film industry so far that I felt it took away from the overall story. In other words, I thought the characters over-dramatized the plot, which underscored its (apparent) attempt to comment on the “gaze” and spectacle in relation to the audience.
    According to Tom Gunning’s article, The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde, the “cinema of attractions” and narrative cinema where audiences are shown a presentation, as opposed to being dependant on the narrative structure of a film parallels my point. In other words, I feel the illusion of reality within a film becomes more fascinating than the spectacle, which I feel acts as an adjective where the narrative progresses the story forward. For example, Jeff Daniels character walks out of the actual film to meet Cecilia (Mia Farrow), which would classify as a fantastical spectacle, not uncommon from the fantastical works of Georges Méliès. Nonetheless, this does not proactively push the story forward; rather, the ongoing search for love and happiness by Cecilia drives the narrative.
    In reference to the audience as a whole, the story felt really organic at times with its extricable “goofy” comedy. I feel that if I watched this film by myself that I would not stay awake long enough to fully immerse myself within the story. I feel that since the audience is directly addressed throughout the film it would be counter-productive of the theme to only include the individual perspective.

    In sum, the potential of the film has not been fully explored, but yet would be a prime example of how film can depend on a dry narrative and attempt to save the story with a fantastical spectacle driving a failed love story.

  12. Jamal Davis

    The Purple Rose of Cairo addresses the viewers need and reason for going to the movies. This movie calls to attention the interaction that occurs between viewer and characters when watching a movie. People go to the movies to be entertained and in turn the movie fulfills a human need that is not being fulfilled in the viewers life. Gunning describes curiositas flocking to theaters as “a modern loss of fulfilling experience”. I think that this whole movie centers on this idea of humans going to the movies to fulfill an emotional void in their lives. Woody Allen uses Cecilia to demonstrate the aspect of a habitual moviegoer that watches romance movies because the love in her marriage is gone. It is this real life loss of emotional connection that she goes to the movies to feel connected to something even though it’s an illusion. Monk, her husband, mentions to her that times are hard and he’s trying, to which she replies so come to the movies and forget about your troubles. She is directly acknowledging the power that movies have to temporarily create illusions for people, which allow them to be emotionally captivated. This special relationship between real and illusion is very unique and is well shown throughout this movie as we see Cecilia’s dedication to a character cause him to leap off the screen and into her life. In this way we see the movie showing how the movie addresses the viewer individually but it also brings out the collective audience relationship with movies.

    When Tom Baxter jumps off the screen and the movie characters wait on screen for him to come back the audience has different reactions. We start to focus on how different viewers react to this occurrence. Some stay because they are psychologist and want to study these characters. While other audience members are appalled and demand their money back. We start to see that while we are individually watching films, everyone has their different experiences and reasons for coming to the theater to watch any given film. It’s cool to see how the act of movie going is social because you are sharing the experience of watching a movie with friends and or strangers. At the same time it is personal because you are emotionally connecting to it differently than others in the crowd.

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