At The Picture Show

When one thinks of the USA, one thinks of the large cities, but also of the small towns that make up so much of our culture. This is why the first chapter of At the Picture Show was so interesting. The emphasis on small town America’s relationship with the movies at the turn of the century is an extremely important one not only in understanding the way movies have progressed, but also in understanding small towns’ relationships with the world. Living in Middlebury, we see the focus on local business and production that is rampant in small New England towns. The town’s petition against the building of a Starbucks because it would be competition to local shops is a great example. This concentration on local businesses is what made people like Bert and Fannie Cook, as described in the first chapter of Kathryn Fuller’s book, successful in their endeavors to bring the movies to the smaller audiences of non-urban America. They used their personal connections with the people, as well as their support for small town societies, to get a leg up on their competition.

This is a clear indicator of how different it is to start a business like a movie theater in a small town and a big city. Still, movies are an interesting case because of how quickly the phenomenon spread in rural and urban areas alike. Within a year of the introduction of motion pictures on the big screen, it was becoming a popular form of entertainment that was in demand all over the country. Even small towns, that had typically been considered conservative or less open to the arts, were introducing film into their dialogue. Though it didn’t originally appeal to the upper and middle classes in small towns, it still gained a huge audience as both a commodity and just a medium of entertainment. I find this incredible because it shows us just how much film has influenced us into thinking differently, and Fuller’s stories give us an idea how a medium so popular today started off in the eyes of Americans more than 100 years ago.

Boundaries of Participation

I would have loved to have been alive during the days of musical performances during film screenings. When I was about 10 years old, I went to a screening of two Charlie Chaplin films at the Walter Reade Theater in NYC, and there was a live trio playing ragtime music as well as music choreographed by Chaplin himself. This added a more personal connection to the film that I cannot explain. Then again, it probably wasn’t as intense at the time because it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence and the audiences were accustomed to the music being played on the stage in front of the screen.

It’s interesting how everyone bought into screenwriting as a “get rich quick” scheme. People always think that they can easily find their way into the movie business. Many young people today are convinced that they will be superstars or famous directors in a couple of years. The media is such a lucrative business with so much mass appeal that it is easy for people to be sucked into the idea that they can make it big in Hollywood. People are still moving there by the thousands every year to see if they can make it on the screen or on set. Though some people do make it, as Fuller points out in the case of Ida Damon, it’s very interesting to actually read how many scripts were sent in and how few are chosen to be on the screen. Sometimes, the media gives false hope of the possibility of stardom which captivates audiences into being more interactive with the industry, despite the difficulty of making it.

Cinema of Attraction (Gunning)

Though I had read this article before, re-reading it after having taken a Film Theory course was extremely interesting. Early cinema seems so different and foreign to us, yet Gunning points out a lot of interesting similarities to more modern cinema at the end of his article. He goes as far as to say that “the system of attraction remains an essential part of popular filmmaking.” I think a great example of this is with the action film genre. In this genre, we are shown quick cuts without much interest in more than just flashy special effects. There is a conscious effort not to further the story line if it means taking away a five minute long “bad-ass” fight scene. While they are feature length movies with plot arcs and a fourth wall separating the audience from what is happening on the screen, there is still the emphasis on aesthetic appeal that often overrides the necessity for intricacies in the narrative.

Gunning mentions the “Lumière tradition of ‘placing the world within one’s reach’.” This is shown a lot in today’s television series. The MTV reality show I was working on this summer was one such show that had a lot of references to the audience to try to gain empathy or a connection with the girl the show follows around. There were many points in the first season where she would reference the camera, and they had many clips of her in front of a white screen explaining her inner monologue to the audience while looking directly at the camera. This acknowledgement of the audience as part of the show is something that is tied to the “cinema of attractions” and its ability to “solicit the attention of the spectator.”

Aesthetic of Astonishment (Gunning)

I love this article because it shows how jaded we have become with effects and visual shocks. Through new technology and greater access to technological media, it is harder to create a shock effect in an audience nowadays than it was when special effects were in the distant future and film had just become a popularized medium. Throughout the years, moviegoers have become more and more desensitized to scenes with war, blood, gore, magic, illusion, dinosaurs, and other things they may not see every day. A scene where a pig flies is no longer only possible in the cartoon world. This means that we have also become less easy to shock and more accustomed to expecting the unexpected or something out of the ordinary. Even if a movie is supposed to take place in the real world, we tend to take it with a grain of salt.

During the times of early cinema, before narrative film became the norm, what was on the screen tended toward the real but exotic, and was there to produce shock effect. There were very limited means to mangle or play with the film to change it from the original reel to something different. This means that people were unaccustomed to seeing things that were out of the ordinary because something that was on the screen was something that was almost surely directly filmed from reality. We never think in these terms today, during the age of computer animation and 3D graphics, but it’s nice to look back at the days when people were more likely to be shocked by film.

The Pickford Paradox (Jenkins)

This article was a stroke of pure genius. It takes a smart man to make a connection between the flashy and two dimensional visuals of video games and the movies of the silent era. Feature films back then still held a lot of remnants of “cinema of attractions” in that they were more theatrical and had a different aesthetic quality to them than that which we are accustomed to today. Video games today have the same two dimensional quality as a set created for one of the old films, and they are also full of a great amount of physical movement. When one plays video game, there tends to be a hero that’s running, jumping, ducking, and attacking. The old school video games compared to old movies in this article are no exception. When one thinks of 1920’s movies, one thinks of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character, but also of chase scenes and a lot of running around.

I liked what Jenkins said about the use of the frame. Video games have a tight frame to work with because we need to see all of the obstacles we are dealing with. In old movies, humans were limited within the frame, and there needed to be just as much spatial awareness in order to create a world for the audience. In the “cinema of attractions” a circus act or exotic trick could take up the entire frame, but to fit it in without moving the heavy, hard to handle cameras of the time, it was necessary to fit everything into the screen, which Jenkins compares to a Tetris game. This is an extremely interesting observation I would never have thought of myself.