Brooke Jaconbson writes:
"Mike Frank says he finds that students respond mainly to film as
narrative and not as spectacle. Thus, he wonders if there is any point in
getting them into the theater.
 
I too find students tend to discuss film as narrative. The story is a
familiar category of experience, and the aspect most commonly dealt with
in popular writing about film.  Video can provide that narrative, but the
object of getting students into the theater is to open up that other
dimension of the cinematic so that they become conscious of spectacle and find a
language  to articulate its relation to their experience of narrative."
 
The preoccupation with narrative by audiences and critics has been an ongoing
American theme.  During the beginnings of film noir in the late 1940
s, few American reviewers seem to have noticed that interesting things were
happening to the lighting and camerawork in such films as CROSSFIRE and MURDER,
MY SWEET (British reviewers, on the other hand, at least mentioned such things).
It was only in the late 1960s that critics began to shift emphasis--the turning
point might be the issue of TIME magazine that recanted its previous pan of
BONNIE AND CLYDE with a full cover story (and cover by Robert Rauschenberg!).
 
It seems to me that there's something of a shift in emphasis back to narrative
again in the pop press--but it will never be a complete swing back to just a
concentration on narrative.
 
Video may be a symptom of this.  I just rewatched THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE
OF LENI REIFENSTAHL, which I had previously seen in the theater.  In one
scene, she discusses her love of modern art (and thus "demonstrates" why she
couldn't be a Nazi!).  As she does, a big book on Van Gogh is prominently
displayed behind her--surely a stage prop set by this mistress of mise-en-scene.
Yet in the videotape I watched (set on Extended Play, to be sure), the book
was hard to see and the lettering illegible.  I'm not sure if Leni's loss or
ours is greater here!
 
But it *is* a loss.
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
----
To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L
in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]