One way of thinking about obsolescence is as a condition, a final state in which some thing, most often technological, is on the precipice of disappearing—if not already long gone. A related and more productive way of thinking about obsolescence is not as a state or condition, but rather as a process. We might think of this process as one in which more and more stuff appears, accumulating here, there: actually, everywhere. We might also think of this process as a negative version of historical change, more specifically, an economic dynamic of technological transition in which, say, cinema shifts from occupying a historically dominant location to a residual position in the mediascape as a result of the rise of a competitor (television, for instance). This is, of course, precisely what happened in the United States between 1945 and 1970.
During this twenty-five year period, cinema, especially Hollywood cinema, can be said to have entered a period of obsolescence that had not only economic and technological dimensions, but also aesthetic effects. This period gave rise to what we might think of as a transitional mode in movies. My working examples of this transitional mode are Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Last Picture Show (1971), films that bookend the period of cinematic obsolescence I have in mind here. In Singin’ in the Rain, cinematic obsolescence seems to act as a material force on the film, a technoeconomic “unconscious” that underwrites the narrative, generic, and visual choices the filmmakers made. In The Last Picture Show, cinematic obsolescence seems to be more of a resource for the filmmakers, providing them with a metaphor, a narrative mode, and a visual style. The former responds to cinematic obsolescence by updating the medium of film, the other by distressing it.
Interesting in and of itself, cinematic obsolescence also warrants our attention because it may just give us a historically-informed means of reflecting on the digital transition to “new media” that has preoccupied scholarly and commercial publics alike for the past twenty years. Singin’ in the Rain and The Last Picture Show provide us with something like a parallax view on the digital transition. In opening up that view here I hope to allow the “new media” form of the blog to enrich a longer work-in-progress on the topic of cinematic obsolescence of which this piece is an early version through dialogue at Arcade.
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The period of cinematic obsolescence that the U.S. film industry underwent in the postwar era was correlated heavily with the rise of television. There are, so to speak, “symptoms” of this rise in a number of films from the period itself: the figuration of the television in both Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) is hardly positive, a critical figuration that will animate Hollywood cinema all the way to the present (think of The Truman Show [1998] or The Ring [2002]). More striking—or at least more empirical—evidence for the postwar period of cinematic obsolescence comes from the U.S. Bureau of Census, which in 1963 reported that 12 percent of households in 1950 owned one or more television sets, but by 1960 87 percent owned one or more television sets. While television ownership was exploding in the U.S., moviegoing was undergoing a significant decline. In the fifteen years after the end of World War II, admissions at movie theaters fell from 82 million per week in 1946 to 40 million per week in 1960 (Kindem 322; Belton 70).
Nor did things really look up between 1960 and the early 1970s. Suburbanization continued to contribute to a downward spiral for the film industry, in large part because the studios were barred from owning theaters due to federal antitrust decisions; these decisions meant that the construction of new theaters in the suburbs, where television was popular already, hinged on other entrepreneurs, while old theaters were located in urban areas increasingly abandoned by suburbanites at night (Monaco 42). The film industry faced a vanishing audience in the postwar period, an audience on which Hollywood could not depend to consume a regular flow of movies as it once had during the height of the studio era in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The invention of the “blockbuster” in the 1970s would solve the problem of audience by turning film into an event—but not before a particularly powerful industry recession between 1969 and 1971: “For the American film industry, the 1970s began in a state of dislocation matched only by the coming of sound….By October 1969, the industry had declared a production moratorium and stood on the brink of a four-year period of retrenchment….and during 1969-1970 the number of feature films released by the majors dropped by nearly 34 percent, causing widespread unemployment” (Cook 9).
No matter how many classic films may have been released between 1945 and 1970, then, it seems to me quite reasonable to think of this period as one of cinematic obsolescence. Not only did the film industry, if not film as such, feel like it was on the brink of collapse. But as Hollywood in particular faced that abyss, the industry also kept producing more and more cinematic stuff, especially just prior to the 1969-1970 recession, which witnessed the overproduction of any number of flops and losses (Cook 9). Most clear, however, is that cinema had lost its predominance in the U.S. mediascape as a result of an economic dynamic of technological transition in which television played a major role. The steady flow of programming on television in the home had supplanted the steady flow of movies in the theater, effectively superannuating the studio-era production model such that a new kind of film was called for. By the early 1970s, Hollywood looked like a dinosaur lumbering along in the postwar U.S. mediascape.
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If a new kind of film was called for, then the blockbuster was to be it in the mid-1970s, offering studios a new model of aesthetic production with which we are now entirely familiar. But what about the time prior to this new model? Were there other aesthetic responses to the period of cinematic obsolescence? Singin’ in the Rain and The Last Picture Show, which stand at the beginning and end of this period of cinematic obsolescence for the U.S. film industry, suggest the answer is yes. In aesthetically responding to the conditions of their time and place, they both develop a transitional mode.
This mode is most immediately obvious in the stories of transition that the two films tell. Singin’ in the Rain narrates the transition from silent to sound film, a story with a happy ending. In this the film optimistically embraces historical allegory, a generic choice the “unconscious” of which is arguably anxieties about the arrival of television. Put differently, Singin’ in the Rain narrates the shift to talking pictures as a means of negotiating fears about a newer and nower medium. But it is debatable how true a claim about anxiety is, in part since the songs in Singin’ in the Rain were written in the 1920s and 1930s, though the film’s story was not concocted until the postwar period. More important, however, is the comic energy of the film, the way in which it constantly makes fun of the gap between reality and fantasy in Hollywood itself. One of the major gaps is in fact the story of the main character’s rise to cinematic stardom: the story he tells is all about how illustrious his road to stardom was, which the film counterpoints with images of how lowly and even vaguely desperate his path to fame was. Similarly, the film pokes fun of how studios and stars initially dismiss talkies as a vulgar fad. Singin’ in the Rain is a comedy of historical change, one that almost seems to be saying that whatever anxieties were beginning to percolate in the 1950s about TV ought to be laughed off as so much Hollywood self-importance about its dominant position in the U.S. mediascape. Anxious, funny, or both, the film still feels like an allegory of its own moment, a story of transition figuratively about the changes the film industry was facing in the early 1950s.
The Last Picture Show is also a story of transition, though one far more melancholic than the comically upbeat one that Singin’ in the Rain tells. Set in the early 1950s, the film is about three teenagers—Duane, Sonny, and Jacy—coming of age in a small Texas town, a setting that the film figures as a dead end, a place without a future. The movie opens and closes with shots of the titular movie theater, which in the course of the film shuts down as a result of the rise of television. As a visual framing device, the “last picture show” functions as a metaphor for both the experience of bildung that the teenagers are undergoing, and the slow death that the town is suffering. It is a transitional figure for the (at best, it would seem) uncertain futures of youth and town alike. But it seems also to be a transitional figure for the film industry, a metaphor born of the period of cinematic obsolescence in much the way historical allegory was, perhaps, “unconsciously” motivated in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s hard not to see the figure of the closing movie theater as a figuration of the crisis Hollywood was undergoing in the two years prior to The Last Picture Show’s release, itself part of the more extended crisis that I have been calling the period of cinematic obsolescence in which, much like the futures of Duane, Sonny, and Jacy, the future of film looked at best uncertain, at worst a death sentence.
In fact, the stories of Duane, Sonny, and Jacy actually seem like an extended narrative figuration of the immediate cinematic moment of the film and the more extended cinematic period of 1945-1970. The causal logic of the film is key here. As film scholar Patrick Keating once said to me, the causal logic of classical Hollywood cinema can be, especially for heuristic purposes, boiled down to narratives in which someone wants something badly and is having trouble getting it. This lends a futurity to the narrative model of classical Hollywood cinema, a model in which cause-and-effect leads inexorably towards the goal of some protagonist. The Last Picture Show troubles but does not abandon this mode of narrative causality. Duane and Sonny, for instance, both want Jacy, but in getting her, little is resolved in the film’s story itself; instead, it moves on to some other causal sequence. The movie is episodic, if that is the right word—a series of moments, each of which possesses a causal logic in and of itself, but just what the future horizon of those moments is never fully materializes. We might call this postclassical causality: still using the old models of narration, but unsure of their direction in the new historical situation in which film finds itself. And given that the film ends with the image of the now closed movie theater in this dead-end Texas town, it’s almost as if the causal logic is a narrative figuration of the transitional moment of cinematic obsolescence that Hollywood and the film industry were undergoing in the early 1970s.
Both films also feel transitional in the visual styles that they adopt. Singin’ in the Rain, for example, relies heavily on mise-en-abyme in a variety of forms, almost all of which draw the 1950s audience into the transition from silent to sound films within the terms of postwar cinema. Perhaps the key “term” here is color. Thus when the newly enabled genre of musical takes off within Singin’ in the Rain’s fictional world, the novelty of that shift is telegraphed to the viewer through vividly saturated colors, brilliantly bedecked women in a musical number organized around a fashion show (which actually, and significantly, evokes George Cukor’s 1939 film The Women). Color comes to be a means of “updating” film visually, providing Hollywood with a technological innovation that distinguished it from television. Where Singin’ in the Rain updates, The Last Picture Show distresses the medium by shooting in black-and-white, for all intents and purposes an obsolete mode of cinematography in Hollywood by the 1970s. Visually dating, rather than updating, film in the process, The Last Picture Show also relies on Orson Welles-influenced strategies of deep focus. This dated style often produces the effect of tarnished glamour, especially in shots of Cybill Sheppard, who plays the town coquette, Jacy. More broadly, it contributes to an overall aesthetics of transition—to borrow a term from David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins—in the film, visually reinforcing the feeling that the future is uncertain here for cinema.
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So in what sense does all of this add up to a parallax view on the digital transition we are currently undergoing? In beginning to explore the transitional mode I am suggesting both Singin’ in the Rain and The Last Picture Show develop in response to the postwar period of cinematic obsolescence, the parallax view emerges in considering the contemporary from the perspective of the historical—in looking at the digital transition not from the angle of the present, but from the angle of the past. What is arguably strange about such an angle is that it takes as its line of sight a transition in which a medium, or at least an industry, was fading out rather than taking over. The latter, of course, is what the digital transition is supposedly all about. To use some grandiose language, I am glancing at a digital revolution from the perspective of a cinematic devolution.
This disanalogous perspective is what is so productively parallax here, I think. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins have persuasively argued that media transitions are hardly ever revolutionary, but “gradual, accretive process[es]” in which “established and infant systems may co-exist for an extended period or in which older media may develop new functions and find new audiences as the emerging technology begins to occupy the cultural space of its ancestors” (2). This view is part of a larger corrective ongoing in media studies that historicizes “new media,” and discusses how “old media” find a place within the "new" mediascape, coming to creative compromises in what Henry Jenkins calls a “convergence culture.” What emerges far more fully in looking at the digital transition with the postwar period of cinematic obsolescence in mind is precisely the old. Too often, media studies moves from the new to the old. After all, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun puts it, "to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old" (148). But in calling so many things new--even in talking about how old media were once new--we let newness be the driving force of whatever transition is at stake, the ever-shifting (because always aging) agent that engenders technological transformations, cultural sea-changes, and aesthetic innovations.
What I have been experimenting with in the above is how the old--or, rather, how obsolescence--is a driving force in postwar cinema, a dynamic of historical change shaping cinematic production. This is not the only story we could tell, nor is it the sole dynamic by which we might periodize film between 1945 and 1970. Indeed, nor is it the only way we could talk about obsolescence. Elsewhere, I talk about the appearance and the accumulation of obsolete stuff in the contemporary period from 1945 to the present as a way in which late twentieth and early twenty-first century novelists and filmmakers mark the passage of historical time, accessing pasts that embody forgotten futures and alternative modernities. Here I am talking about obsolescence in the sense of a medium and an industry that experiences a negative process of historical change that gives rise to an aesthetics of transition, that in losing economic ground to a technological descendant cinema gains something like a residual poetics in the postwar U.S. mediascape. Thus what the postwar period of cinematic obsolescence shows within media studies today, especially for those trying to work comparatively (across media, across time), is that the old can be generative--not in some entirely autonomous way from the new, but in a manner that is less caught up with newness than the binary old/new invites. We ultimately get a parallax view on the digital transition by looking at it from the angle of Singin' in the Rain and The Last Picture Show because those films remind us of all the stuff that is currently being left behind in the digital transition--and, as a result, becoming the site of enormous creativity, creativity rooted within the very obsolescence (which is, remember, a process, not a condition) that "new media" have engendered for all the media we now call old.
Thanks for giving us an update on your work, Joel! As always, I think your approach gives us a very productive way to think about obsolescence as a process -- rather than a condition -- and a useful framework for linking concerns about obsolescence to questions of film and narrative theory. Your account marks the 70s blockbuster as something like the solution to the problem of obsolescence, but I wonder if it might not instead be the logical outcome of the film industry's declining monopoly on cultural prestige/influence in the 60s. To what degree is the event film -- most recently, Avatar -- built around a sort of technological arms race with other media (that is: to what degree is the event film still an anxious genre)? To what degree does the anxiety of obsolescence relate to the rise of auteur cinema in the 70s -- Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, (early) Lucas and Spielberg? Relatedly, do you have a sense of the relationship between art and event cinema? Why the radical shift? Is this a neoliberalization of the cinema? To what degree did concerns about obsolescence drive these transformations? What sort of relays exist between technosocial conditions and formal innovations or evolutions? You mention allegory as one relay, with obsolescence operating on the model of the unconscious of certain movies. Are there other relations/causal links you've found? Lots of questions, probably too many to address seriously in the comments section of a blog post, but these are the questions that came to mind after reading your piece.
1) Initially I thought, "yes, the 1970s, the blockbuster," but then I remembered that Ben Hur came out in late 1959 in an unusually wide format, and was so long that it had an intermission. It was certainly marketed as an event film. And it was certainly not the only film in that period that was marketed on the basis of its film advanced technology a vast cinematic scope. But such 'spectacle' films go back to the silent era as well. So I'm not so sure that the blockbuster was invented in the 1970s. I mean, I know the story, or at any rate, a story — Jaws, 1975, the blockbuster — but I'm not sure just what's salient about that story. Maybe it's the proportion of resources devoted to such blockbusters in the overall mix, and the creation of sequels. Jaws became a franchise, as did Star Wars, and so forth. Of course, we do have the James Bond films going back into the 1960s, but perhaps that's not the same thing.
2) And science fiction, from Forbidden Planet to 2001. That seems to be in a different world from your two examples. If it's a 'response' to anything, it's a response to Cold War anxieties, the space race, and the increasing visibility of high tech. People didn't have PCs back then, but the so-called IBM card was a potent symbol of dehumanizing technology: "Do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate."
3) The people who ran Hollywood were obviously aware of the decline of cinema attendance. But I'm not sure just how aware the movie-going public would have been of that. So I'm not sure that your readings of Singin' In the Rain of The Last Picture Show would have had much force with most of the people who saw those films.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the comments.
On the first one, yes, I do think that event films predate the 1970s, and not just spectacle films. As I was writing, I was thinking about Psycho as well, which according to Linda Williams was something of an event upon its release, if not exactly in the way we tend to think of event films now. But yes, the periodizing point here is that event films grow in predominance after the 1970s, not that they never existed before.
I actually think that FB and 2001 would make interesting films to think about within the periodizing frame I am setting up, which, by the way, is not meant as the only possible periodizing frame we could offer. In fact, part of the point of posting this piece was to start thinking through what it means to speak of a period of obsolescence for the film industry, in which another technological medium seemed to be superannuating it, and how that produced particular effects--sometimes innovations, sometimes not--in the aesthetic modes of films. 2001 in particular seems to resonate with some of these periodizing questions, even as it responds to the Cold War. Must it be either one or the other?
I find your last comment, however, strange. I'd need to do some rooting around in audience responses to media in this period, but why wouldn't audiences notice the parallels between a contemporary transition and a historical transition, or the blatant metaphor of a "last picture show"? We hear today about shifts in media, from old to new, all the time, and capitalist cultures in general are highly cognizant of both the new and the old, of what is being marked as outmoded and what is falling into obsolescence. So while I'd want to do more research, here I would have to part ways with you: the sheer dips in numbers, the shift to the suburbs, the rise of television, and in fact large amounts of reporting on not only television but problems in the film industry would have put all of this in the postwar air. Not to mention that even if not every viewer actually was aware, though I still think many probably were, this does not mean the reading of the films fails. Placing things in historical context, trying to make sense of the past in both speculative and normative ways, is part of what we do as critics and scholars--or so it seems to me. The meanings, purposes, reasons of and for films (or novels or TV shows) may not alway be legible in a moment in a way they are later.
This may mean that you take issue with the entire reading, or the account of the period--both potentially valid claims, but either way, all three of your points are enabling for me in thinking through the longer piece I am currently working on. So, thank you for that....
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
No problem, Joel.
What I was reacting against is a sense that you're trying to read 25 years of film as an allegory of obsolescence and using two readings as a vehicle for doing that. So I pushed back a bit — (BTW, just when did "push back" become an idiom, anyone know?).
And one thing I did was to think back to how I remembered that period; I was 10 when Forbidden Planet came out and, in the wake of that film, spent a lot of time drawing pictures of robots and flying saucers. I'm only one person, one source of anecdotes, but I'm not old enough to have any memories of the immediate post-war period. But I do remember the first family TV and then the first color TV. And I vaguely remember when one of the theaters in town got boarded up, and one of the drive-ins no longer opened in summer. So, yes, by 1971 you're right, a lot of people would know about theaters shutting down and would see a connection between The Last Picture Show and what happened in their area (FWIW, I didn't see the film at that time).
What other things would people notice? There was a time when you saw, not only previews, but a newsreel, a short subject, and a cartoon or two? When did that die out? I don't really recall, but that may have happened in the 60s some time.
But 1952 was a bit different, no? Hollywood might have been feeling a pinch at the box office, but it was not obvious what TV would do and the Paramount anti-trust case was still in the future. It's one thing to be aware of a new medium, TV, but that doesn't imply that people will immediately start worrying about movie obsolescence. And Singin' in the Rain was certainly not the first time Hollywood took a cinematic look at its past. That is, it's not obvious that it's anything other than a standard-issue film about show-biz.
Finally, some contextualized notes about Forbidden Planet and 2001.
Yes, of course, two films do not demonstrate a periodizing claim, though can such a claim ever be fully demonstrated? But obviously, more arguing and examples would be needed.
I concur about Singin', and would need more space to argue out why it might be relevant to media-in-transition.
Thanks for pushing back!
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
But that's more general than obsolescence.
In a way it seems to me that Hollywood and its audience have always been aware of transitions of one sort or another. And technical transitions have been important all along. The most important, of course, was sound. After that, color. Just when did color finally become the unquestioned norm? Young Man with a Horn was made in 1951, and it was B&W. Was it an anomaly at the time? The Japanese shot Gojira (1954) in B&W. I'm guessing that B&W lingered on into the 50s.
Of course, early TV was B&W, so color would have been one way movies could differentiate itself from TV.
As for periodization, a casual thought: why not overlapping waves of this and that, with several strands of change and evolution going on simultaneously?
Yes--though obsolescence is an interest of mine as a mode of transition.
Yes--B & W in Hollywood through the 1950s, and the norm question is good, especially how much and when color was consciously seen as a way to differentiate from TV.
Yes--several strands of change going on at once is what I am after ultimately.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
I wonder what kind of discussions they had about color. I know there were several rival color processes.
The thing about color is that it presents a nasty problem, especially to any cinema that aspires to realism, namely: color itself. There is no way a color image can match the color that was before the camera when the film was shot. It's not physically possible. So the film-maker has to consciously decide how to develop the color, and the decisions have to be consistent throughout the film. If you want the color to look 'natural,' well, which of a thousand compromises do you choose? And if you aren't particularly concerned about having it look natural, well, just how do you want it to look?
That problem doesn't exist with B&W. And that's a pretty good reason for sticking with it.
In The Last Picture Show at least, black and white seems to have been a direct result of conversations with Orson Welles, linked to the desire for deep focus cinematography, which is not used in all black and white films--so there are of course visual--tonal rather than chromatic--choices generated by sticking with black and white.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Hi, Lee,
Indeed, too many questions to answer in anything but provisional ways here (and I should note that I added some revisions to my conclusion above to clarify the notion of obsolescence operative in this strand of my scholarship). So:
1. Event films: First off, as Bill Benzon notes above, the event film is not totally new to the 1970s, but, we might say, emergent much earlier. He mentions Ben Hur. What springs to mind for me is Psycho, which Linda Williams argues not only belongs to a more fully postmodern cinema of attractions, but also the screening of which involved a policy in some cases of not letting anyone into the theater after the film had begun. This turned what had been for much of the century the casual act of moviegoing into an event, a disciplined event in Williams's account, but also one in which the time (or timing) and space of moviegoing was far more controlled. Second, in suggesting that event films were a solution to the problem of obsolescence, I would not exclude cultural factors from functioning as an active part of that problem. Declines in cultural prestige matter to whether or not some X is considered economically or technologically obsolete. So I don't see any opposition, just nuancing, between your suggestion and mine. Third, I'm intrigued by the notion of the event film as an "arms race," and the role of the Star Wars trilogy in making event films a norm would help to support this theory (not to mention link back, potentially, to Bill's questions about sci-fi films). As for whether the event film is always already, or at least in the latter third of the twentieth century, an anxious genre struggling to defend film's turf---hmmmm. Maybe, maybe not, especially since the digital is moving more and more into moviemaking. I'll have to turn that one over a bit. Overall, then, maybe the point is not radical shift, but the breaking out of a tendency in film already; indeed, Singin' in the Rain has all the trappings of postclassical event films in which unmotivated spectacle is at least as significant as causal narration.
2. Auteur cinema: I guess my initial response is that auteur cinema and event films seem pretty linked, up to today. So "Avatar" is as much about James Cameron's effort to make Avatar as it is about the story the film tells, and many maverick filmmakers from the 1970s were formative to the event as a new production model for Hollywood. Just think George Lucas. By the way, Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show, is sort of the opposite of Lucas here: he makes a low-budget film that propels him into fame and a screwball comedy that increases his cache, but then basically goes into decline as a filmmaker. The point is that the auteur and the event were commercially intertwined in the 1970s (and this is a relatively standard notion--see David A. Cook's Lost Illusions). As to how obsolescence is related to the auteurist phenomenon, that's a good question to which I will need to devote more sustained thought. On the fly, I'm wondering if the instability of Hollywood in the 1945-1970 period essentially created an opening for a rising generation of filmmakers trained to think of themselves as auteurs; in fact, as Cook points out, during the 1969-1971 recession, recruiting at USC, UCLA, and NYU was one response to the crisis that could be said to close out the period of cinematic obsolescence that interested me. (I'm going to leave the neoliberal question aside for the moment, though based on what you have said to me at other times, yes, perhaps there is a "neoliberalization" going on. I'd just want that stated more specifically.)
3. Mid-level relays: This is a great question. Asking me about relays is important because it asks me to identify how we get from the more abstract process of cinematic obsolescence to the concrete instances of films themselves. Were filmmakers talking about obsolescence, or is this my name for what they were talking about? Either way, we'd need some sense of how they were talking--of an institutional discourse in which filmmakers describe the conditions in which they were working and the things they are trying to do with films. This discourse need not use the word "obsolescence," but it would help to clarify how a residual position in the mediascape related to still ongoing technological progress and formal evolutions in film as an apparatus and aesthetic alike. This is why I actually hesitated before the word "unconscious," which I think is primarily a metaphor that begs the question of the relay, a question that allegory answers better--but that still requires some research, even if I argue that "unconscious" things happen in the mediations between a base and a superstructure. One "relay" in the case of The Last Picture Show was Orson Welles himself: so when I say he influenced the film, I mean he suggested directly to Bogdanovich that he return to an earlier mode of black-and-white cinematography that would allow him to get the depth of field that he wanted; given how outdated this mode seemed, and that color films were the current state of the art, it was a gamble on Bogdanovich's part, especially since it seems to foreground cinematic obsolescence visually. While I have not yet come across a statement of intent along these lines, it does seem to point--you can tell me--in the direction of the kind of mid-level relays that I know interest you (and that engender at least one form of argumentative good faith).
At any rate, these are some responses, and thinking through the relays overall in this period for a discussion of "cinematic obsolescence" seems like an especially rich direction. Thanks.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Thanks for these thoughtful responses, Joel. I am pretty much on board with your claims here, especially your claim that the art and event film are deeply linked through the figure of the "maverick" filmmaker. Indeed, there is a discourse of defiance common to many major event films, and it seems to me that the maverick filmmaker might be the central figure in mainstream narratives of cinematic obsolescence. "No one in Hollywood would dare risk making Lord of the Rings, but a visionary rebel maverick arthouse director, Peter Jackson, bucked the odds! When the world doubted him, he doubled down on his own genius! Did we mention he had a vision?" This recalls for me another allegory of obsolescence: the eternal war between entrepreneurs and corporate functionaries/executives. As this narrative would have it, the bureaucratic corporate establishment lumbers along like a dinosaur, ossified and risk-averse, whereas the upstart visionaries creatively disrupt the Established order with their hip and radical innovations. Which of course returns to some of the core thematics driving your larger project.
Thanks, Lee. I am intrigued by thinking about the maverick filmmaker--though fyi, at this point, the material here, on cinematic obsolescence specifically, is really part of a related project, not the book as such. I've broken off two related meanings of obsolescence that really demand to be thought through in distinct ways. It strikes me that the narrative you suggest is less "make it new!" than "make it maverick!" That is, it seems to instantiate some sort of modernist idea of the independent and industrial filmmaker disrupting the ossified visions of corporate men in grey suits, but on terms that operate within the industrial field somehow. Just a very quick response. All of this has been very helpful to me thinking through my "related" project--likely to be executed as an essay/article at this time--on cinematic obsolescence.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Just my contributions to the dialogue, for what they're worth:
1. Fight Pay TV!
In the late 60s there's no question that the public was aware that the movie industry saw TV as a threat. Movies (including The Last Picture Show, which I think was rated R, and of course Bonnie and Clyde and Midnight Cowboy) could boldly go where TV could not -- could go to M, R and X ratings -- and did so just because you couldn't see these things on TV and so would have to go to the movies. I think it was about this time, too, that continuous showing went out of style, so that movies were more an event than they had been. They were disowning their music-hall or radio or TV or diner background aspects, where you went, saw some cartoons and newsreels, didn't miss anything if you got up for popcorn, hung out, saw the second half first, etc., all of which was part of the larger sense of being at home in the theater. But now you could be at home at home and still have movies playing on TV, so movies went for a scheduled experience -- something you went out to see as a single presentation. They started kicking you out between shows! And on the marquees ginned up anti-cable messages -- "Save Free TV! Fight Pay TV!" with occasional Astroturf picketers (hey, Astroturf had just been invented) carried similar signs. Why? Because non-FCC enforced TV would mean that those M, R, and X movies could be seen at home too, and that would be very bad. So the studios and theaters seemed to support our right to watch TV, but in fact they were supporting only the kind of TV that couldn't move into the niche they were trying to monopolize. (As for blockbusters, etc., Scope was a good blockbuster aspect ratio, and offered something that TV couldn't reproduce.)
2. Classic Hollywood narrative I'd just observe that, as Dan Decker says in his great book Anatomy of the Screenplay (maybe the best book on Shakespeare I've ever read, though it never mentions him), it's not just that the Main wants something and is having trouble getting it. The Main also comes to alter what he or she wants. The moment of alteration is one of the four or five standard crisis points of the classic Hollywood movie. The solution to the difficulty of getting what he or she wants is to widen, deepen, extend, and transmogrify the original desire. E.g.: Rick wants Ilsa. But no, he wants to aid the anti-Nazi effort. Or Hannay wants to clear himself. But no, he wants Pamela. Deckard wants to kill the replicants, but no, he wants to understand what they have to teach him about human transience.
There's always one plot unfolding in an obvious way, but a second, metaplot unfolding surreptitiously. The first plot is an element of the metaplot which tells the happily ended story of how the first plot gets derailed and another plot takes its place. (The metaplot always has a happy ending, even if the new plot is itself sad. The metaplot's ending is happy because an aesthetically better story has defeated an aesthetically less satisfying one.)
William,
Thanks for your contributions to the discussion, especially the concrete details of how the collective experience of film was changing vis-a-vis television in the period that interests me. The shift to timing a movie as an event was, as you suggest, not just a matter of the emergence of the blockbuster, but of a prior development in which moviegoing changed from enter-at-will to watching from start to finish. It's interesting, and pure metaphor, but one might think of this as the "metaplot" of spectatorial history here, in which an older model of moviegoing shifts to another one even as they overlap emergently and residually. More significantly, the details you offer are important: the transactions between Hollywood and TV as industries are more complex than the defensive gesture of Hollywood anxiously differentiating itself from TV--with in the case you describe Hollywood weighing in for certain kinds of TV in some sense, a symbiosis that occurred in numerous other ways as well. I guess all of this transitional activity is part of my point in trying to experiment with the idea that obsolescence is an ongoing catalyst in that activity, a kind of backwards force of historical change that we tend to ignore. We'll see in the end how far this gets me as a way of describing and conceptualizing this period of cinematic history.
I concur with Decker's account, which resembles other descriptions of plot out there (say, those that differentiate between 3 and 4 act structures in Hollywood narrative). It's important for me to say that in reducing classical Hollywood narration the way I did--and this is only a heuristic device--I am not trying to do an end run around the greater aesthetic complexities of narrative development in film. The Last Picture Show is obviously one example of these complexities, if not exactly of the metaplot you describe. I am claiming that Bogdanovich's mode of causality is usefully historicized vis-a-vis the metaplot of media history, its obsolescences and innovations, as they were unfolding between 1945 and 1970. Anyway, now I can say: Someone wants something badly, is having trouble getting it, and realizes he wants something else!
Good stuff! Thanks again.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
I don't know what your scope is, Joel, but cartoons underwent a shift in the post-war period in that they become reconceived as appropriate primarily / only for children. That wasn't the case in the 20s and 30s, where cartoons were simply made for the general movie-going public. Thus when, in the late 30s, Disney decided to go big and produce feature-length animated films, he conceived them for the general audience, not kids, nor even the so-called family audience.
That changed after the war. Just why things changed so that cartoons became kid's fare, that's not really clear to me. But the emergence of TV is a standard part of the story. TV created niche programming for kids, and cartoons (including the existing body of cartoons created in earlier decades) went into the niche. Just why they couldn't also continue as adult fare, that's not obvious. But perhaps that was another aspect of the drive to differentiate movies from TV.
These days, of course, the future of the animation biz seems very much up in the air. Will 3D CGI drive out traditional 2D cel animation? What about motion capture?
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I concur with William's observation about the shift from continuous viewing.
Hi Bill,
It's funny you ask, as I am in the midst of writing about animation. One way that media studies currently talks about developments in film is that, as a result of the digital transition, the ontological basis of film has shifted from the photographic to the pixelated image. This makes cinema a species of animation, rather than animation constituting a species, and a relatively minor one, of film. Provocative as the claim about cinema and the digital transition may be, I'm most interested in the state of the art of stop motion animation. I'm peculiarly interested in a cluster of figures--William Kentridge, Wes Anderson, the Quay Brothers, not to mention Nick Park of Wallace and Gromit fame--as contemporary animators who open up alternative futures for film in its digitally animated moment. I'm especially interested in the relationship of these animators to the European avant-garde: Ladislas Starevitch, whose version of Roman de Renard, the medieval tale of a fox from France, influenced Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I think I have some sense of why Anderson in particular turns back the cinematic clock, though the larger constellation that interests me is clearly not only a response solely to the digital. In fact, I think the digital is so ubiquitous a way of talking about the present these days that I'm not always satisfied with it as an explanation. It's there as an explanatory development for reactions against it, but it's not the only one.
I've been wondering to myself where TV cartoons sit in the history that interests me, but had not yet thought about it from the angle of cinematic obsolescence between 1945 and 1970....your suggestion gives me some traction around that.
As for continuous viewing: it's interesting, one of the dominant models for understanding TV as a cultural form is "flow" (from Raymond Williams)--ie, the constant flow of television programming. It's interesting to consider this, as I was only hinting in my original quasi-essay here, as interrupting cinematic flow at mid-century in two ways: 1) the regular flow of movies coming out of Hollywood; 2) the continuous flow of watching at the theater that alters postwar. This is speculative, at this point, but it has possibilities as a starting point.
Enjoy the long weekend,
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Long ago John Brenkman published a dynamite Marxist piece on tv and the privatization of experience. TV as the undoing of the Benjaminesque praise of cinema.
I'm not sure where best to read. One starting point would be Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America. The final chapter is on Disney and it talks about the way the studio's work changed after WWII. That's probably where I got the TV idea. The discussion is brief (top of p. 175), but you'll find pointers into the literature and the general context may be helpful. You should also check out Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke, Saturday Morning Fever. It's more journalistic than academic (though Tim is an academic). The first chapter is about the origins of Saturday AM cartoon time, locating it at the end of the period you're investigating.
Here's a promotional spot ABC aired about it's Saturday morning line-up of cartoons:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/when-abc-believed-in-cartoons.html
Thanks alot.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Do you know his stuff on animation? It would probably be extremely helpful, both historically and theoretically.
it's been on my office bookshelf: looks like it's time to dive into it. Thanks, yet again.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT