1 00:00:14,500 --> 00:00:17,300 DAVID THORBURN: One of the things I aim for in the course, 2 00:00:17,300 --> 00:00:23,810 is to try to show students, in ways as concrete and rich as I 3 00:00:23,810 --> 00:00:28,440 can, what the authority, or power, of movies 4 00:00:28,440 --> 00:00:30,700 in a cultural moment might be. 5 00:00:30,700 --> 00:00:32,759 And I try to give them some examples of that. 6 00:00:32,759 --> 00:00:35,500 In my first lecture, I sometimes read to them 7 00:00:35,500 --> 00:00:39,834 from a passage from James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family. 8 00:00:39,834 --> 00:00:41,250 In the very beginning of the novel 9 00:00:41,250 --> 00:00:44,520 he describes, beautifully, an excursion between a father 10 00:00:44,520 --> 00:00:49,020 and son, going to see a Chaplin comedy in 1915 11 00:00:49,020 --> 00:00:50,450 in some southern city. 12 00:00:50,450 --> 00:00:52,800 And what he describes is what a social occasion 13 00:00:52,800 --> 00:00:56,250 it was, what a moment of bonding it was for father and son, 14 00:00:56,250 --> 00:00:58,290 what a cultural moment it was more 15 00:00:58,290 --> 00:01:00,700 broadly for the whole of the population that 16 00:01:00,700 --> 00:01:03,090 went into the theater to laugh uproariously 17 00:01:03,090 --> 00:01:06,530 at Charlie's shenanigans. 18 00:01:06,530 --> 00:01:09,160 "And then the screen was filled with a city, 19 00:01:09,160 --> 00:01:11,540 and with a sidewalk of a side street of a city, 20 00:01:11,540 --> 00:01:12,930 and a long line of palms. 21 00:01:12,930 --> 00:01:15,260 And there was Charlie. 22 00:01:15,260 --> 00:01:17,950 Everyone laughed the minute they saw him squattily walking, 23 00:01:17,950 --> 00:01:21,450 with his toes out and his knees apart, as if he were chafed. 24 00:01:21,450 --> 00:01:24,880 Rufus's father laughed, and Rufus laughed, too. 25 00:01:24,880 --> 00:01:27,210 This time, Charlie stole a whole bag." 26 00:01:27,210 --> 00:01:28,510 This time. 27 00:01:28,510 --> 00:01:30,230 What does that imply about the audience? 28 00:01:30,230 --> 00:01:33,120 An intimate familiarity with the previous adventures 29 00:01:33,120 --> 00:01:34,880 of this character, right? 30 00:01:34,880 --> 00:01:37,170 An ongoing, routine connection. 31 00:01:37,170 --> 00:01:40,000 "This time he caught a sight of-- this time Charlie 32 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:41,497 stole a whole bag of eggs. 33 00:01:41,497 --> 00:01:43,080 And when a cop came along, he hid them 34 00:01:43,080 --> 00:01:44,810 in the seat of his pants." 35 00:01:44,810 --> 00:01:47,840 What it showed was the cultural embeddedness of movies, 36 00:01:47,840 --> 00:01:50,075 even in their earliest days, in the society, 37 00:01:50,075 --> 00:01:52,470 and in the life of individuals. 38 00:01:52,470 --> 00:01:54,680 So, part of what I mean by the power of movies, 39 00:01:54,680 --> 00:01:56,960 and what I try to encourage the students to see, 40 00:01:56,960 --> 00:02:00,500 is something of this anthropological energy, 41 00:02:00,500 --> 00:02:03,760 as well as its artistic power as a representation 42 00:02:03,760 --> 00:02:05,330 of human experience. 43 00:02:05,330 --> 00:02:08,380 That the way these kinds of stories permeated the society 44 00:02:08,380 --> 00:02:12,100 helped to shape America's-- Americans understanding 45 00:02:12,100 --> 00:02:12,940 of their natures. 46 00:02:12,940 --> 00:02:15,500 Of what the social fabric was like. 47 00:02:15,500 --> 00:02:16,900 Of what masculinity was. 48 00:02:16,900 --> 00:02:18,230 Of what femininity was. 49 00:02:18,230 --> 00:02:19,375 Of what families were. 50 00:02:19,375 --> 00:02:21,740 Of what the relations among the races were. 51 00:02:21,740 --> 00:02:23,920 Of what American history was. 52 00:02:23,920 --> 00:02:26,680 About what the founding story of America is. 53 00:02:26,680 --> 00:02:29,850 About what the central, organizing values 54 00:02:29,850 --> 00:02:30,740 of our culture are. 55 00:02:30,740 --> 00:02:33,900 All of those things are dramatized, either explicitly 56 00:02:33,900 --> 00:02:36,290 or implicitly, in movies. 57 00:02:36,290 --> 00:02:38,230 And because the movies were so central 58 00:02:38,230 --> 00:02:39,940 through the 20th century, they were 59 00:02:39,940 --> 00:02:43,760 one of the central ways in which the belief system, the values, 60 00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:48,870 of American society were promulgated, dramatized, 61 00:02:48,870 --> 00:02:52,220 rehearsed, and in some ways, altered and changed. 62 00:02:58,820 --> 00:03:02,210 A related matter that connected again to film, 63 00:03:02,210 --> 00:03:06,320 in part as an anthropological or sociological phenomenon, not 64 00:03:06,320 --> 00:03:10,630 simply an artistic one, as a social practice in a way, 65 00:03:10,630 --> 00:03:12,780 has to do with the power and role of genre 66 00:03:12,780 --> 00:03:16,710 in movies, which is a recurring theme in my course. 67 00:03:16,710 --> 00:03:19,980 Because we use genre in American society. 68 00:03:19,980 --> 00:03:21,640 I think all cultures do this, but we've 69 00:03:21,640 --> 00:03:24,630 made particularly rich and cunning use of genre 70 00:03:24,630 --> 00:03:26,220 in American society. 71 00:03:26,220 --> 00:03:28,310 In many media, but especially in film. 72 00:03:28,310 --> 00:03:30,550 And if you look at particular long live genre, 73 00:03:30,550 --> 00:03:33,060 like the Western, or the detective story, 74 00:03:33,060 --> 00:03:36,870 or the domestic melodrama, over time what you of course 75 00:03:36,870 --> 00:03:40,760 can recognize are changing cultural and social attitudes. 76 00:03:40,760 --> 00:03:42,490 So, the Western has become a screen 77 00:03:42,490 --> 00:03:45,820 on which America's anxieties about the Vietnam War 78 00:03:45,820 --> 00:03:46,900 have been projected. 79 00:03:46,900 --> 00:03:49,160 Why would the Western work so well for this? 80 00:03:49,160 --> 00:03:50,810 One answer is what I've been saying 81 00:03:50,810 --> 00:03:52,570 all along about the power of genre, 82 00:03:52,570 --> 00:03:53,740 and the power of repetition. 83 00:03:53,740 --> 00:03:55,780 Look if a thing is repeated again, and again, 84 00:03:55,780 --> 00:03:57,065 and again, it looks familiar. 85 00:03:57,065 --> 00:03:58,565 When it's so familiar, what happens? 86 00:03:58,565 --> 00:04:03,650 It licenses something disturbing Because the genre, 87 00:04:03,650 --> 00:04:07,010 it seems on the surface, to contain so many familiar, 88 00:04:07,010 --> 00:04:10,390 reassuring elements, those very elements of reassurance 89 00:04:10,390 --> 00:04:13,820 enable the exploration of disturbing, or uncertain, 90 00:04:13,820 --> 00:04:17,240 or problematic materials. 91 00:04:17,240 --> 00:04:21,540 And of course, because-- not any one of these films 92 00:04:21,540 --> 00:04:22,940 would have nothing like the power 93 00:04:22,940 --> 00:04:26,570 they actually have if they existed individually. 94 00:04:26,570 --> 00:04:29,560 But it's because they're part of this long conversation that 95 00:04:29,560 --> 00:04:32,524 goes back to the earliest days of movies, 96 00:04:32,524 --> 00:04:34,190 that they have the power that they have. 97 00:04:34,190 --> 00:04:38,580 One of the functions of genre is one of the deep subjects 98 00:04:38,580 --> 00:04:39,690 of my course. 99 00:04:39,690 --> 00:04:44,400 And I want students to see how centrally variations 100 00:04:44,400 --> 00:04:48,010 in genre forms can reflect social and historical 101 00:04:48,010 --> 00:04:49,690 realities. 102 00:04:49,690 --> 00:04:51,940 And you can feel this in every film. 103 00:04:51,940 --> 00:04:54,110 You can feel this in every television program. 104 00:04:54,110 --> 00:04:57,000 If you look at American television from the 1950s 105 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:00,860 to the 1990s, let's say you've restricted yourself 106 00:05:00,860 --> 00:05:03,820 to situation comedy, what do you think you would see? 107 00:05:03,820 --> 00:05:07,250 You would see a drama in which the American family undergoes 108 00:05:07,250 --> 00:05:08,770 profound change. 109 00:05:08,770 --> 00:05:09,760 What happens? 110 00:05:09,760 --> 00:05:12,260 Women become more important. 111 00:05:12,260 --> 00:05:15,610 Patriarchal values become less, and less powerful. 112 00:05:15,610 --> 00:05:18,550 Children become more respected-- are 113 00:05:18,550 --> 00:05:23,070 treated less like appendages to the family. 114 00:05:23,070 --> 00:05:24,560 And in some-- by the '80s and '90s, 115 00:05:24,560 --> 00:05:27,420 sometimes the children have more dominant roles than the adults, 116 00:05:27,420 --> 00:05:30,090 and are often even shown to be wiser than their parents. 117 00:05:30,090 --> 00:05:31,142 Right? 118 00:05:31,142 --> 00:05:32,850 Something that would have been impossible 119 00:05:32,850 --> 00:05:35,730 in the early 1950s, a more patriarchal era, 120 00:05:35,730 --> 00:05:37,940 when the classic television program about families 121 00:05:37,940 --> 00:05:40,425 was called, Father Knows Best. 122 00:05:47,470 --> 00:05:50,695 Another spine question, or organizing key question 123 00:05:50,695 --> 00:05:53,650 in the course, is deeply literary for me. 124 00:05:53,650 --> 00:05:55,650 In other words, what I try to do here, 125 00:05:55,650 --> 00:05:58,650 is encourage the students to develop what 126 00:05:58,650 --> 00:06:00,010 I'll call an aesthetic sense. 127 00:06:00,010 --> 00:06:01,940 To begin to have confidence when they say, 128 00:06:01,940 --> 00:06:04,510 that's a good film, or that's a bad film. 129 00:06:04,510 --> 00:06:05,950 I think that's a good movie. 130 00:06:05,950 --> 00:06:07,130 I think that's a bad movie. 131 00:06:07,130 --> 00:06:08,546 I think that's a good-- and what I 132 00:06:08,546 --> 00:06:11,290 try to tell them is that that judgment, good or bad, 133 00:06:11,290 --> 00:06:12,480 isn't merely subjective. 134 00:06:12,480 --> 00:06:14,990 It isn't just what you feel, right? 135 00:06:14,990 --> 00:06:18,210 That there may be potentially objective standards, 136 00:06:18,210 --> 00:06:21,170 by which we can judge the excellence of texts. 137 00:06:21,170 --> 00:06:23,200 Part of it may remain subjective, 138 00:06:23,200 --> 00:06:26,190 but we can still judge excellence when we see acting. 139 00:06:26,190 --> 00:06:28,110 We can judge excellence when we ask 140 00:06:28,110 --> 00:06:29,290 how well the film is edited. 141 00:06:29,290 --> 00:06:34,380 We can judge the excellence of various aspects of the film. 142 00:06:34,380 --> 00:06:36,690 And teaching students how to do that, 143 00:06:36,690 --> 00:06:40,280 and to distinguish between effective and ineffective uses 144 00:06:40,280 --> 00:06:43,600 of the medium, turns out to be not simply a skill 145 00:06:43,600 --> 00:06:46,510 that you give to students who are watching movies, 146 00:06:46,510 --> 00:06:49,150 it's a skill you can give to students who read poems, who 147 00:06:49,150 --> 00:06:50,930 read books, who go to plays. 148 00:06:50,930 --> 00:06:53,000 So one of the central principles I 149 00:06:53,000 --> 00:06:56,570 try to teach them about this, how they can distinguish what 150 00:06:56,570 --> 00:06:59,090 I call a work of art from a mere entertainment, 151 00:06:59,090 --> 00:07:01,550 is what I call the multiplicity principle. 152 00:07:01,550 --> 00:07:03,550 And what I mean by the multiplicity principle 153 00:07:03,550 --> 00:07:04,780 is fairly clear. 154 00:07:04,780 --> 00:07:06,660 And I give many examples in the course. 155 00:07:06,660 --> 00:07:08,580 Essentially, it's the idea that what 156 00:07:08,580 --> 00:07:12,750 happens in a particular moment will have multiple functions. 157 00:07:12,750 --> 00:07:16,000 You won't just look at the scene in order 158 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:18,320 to have the plot extended. 159 00:07:18,320 --> 00:07:20,760 The scene will also dramatize character. 160 00:07:20,760 --> 00:07:23,670 It will also tell you something about the atmosphere 161 00:07:23,670 --> 00:07:25,140 in which the character lives. 162 00:07:25,140 --> 00:07:28,000 Do you remember the moment in the passage 163 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:33,170 I showed you, from the De Sica movie, Umberto D.? 164 00:07:33,170 --> 00:07:38,050 That very brief moment, where we see a man get on a tram, a bus, 165 00:07:38,050 --> 00:07:40,540 and sit next to someone on the bus and the bus moves. 166 00:07:40,540 --> 00:07:42,482 It's a completely wordless sequence. 167 00:07:42,482 --> 00:07:43,940 And there's a character we've never 168 00:07:43,940 --> 00:07:45,640 seen in the field before, who sits 169 00:07:45,640 --> 00:07:47,690 down next to the protagonist. 170 00:07:47,690 --> 00:07:49,230 No words exchanged. 171 00:07:49,230 --> 00:07:52,050 When our protagonist gets up, and gets off the bus, 172 00:07:52,050 --> 00:07:54,840 the camera lingers briefly on the man he left behind. 173 00:07:54,840 --> 00:07:56,530 And we see that men go like this. 174 00:07:56,530 --> 00:07:58,950 And what I suggested to you, again, 175 00:07:58,950 --> 00:08:01,860 I suggested that this was a moment of richness 176 00:08:01,860 --> 00:08:04,670 and complexity of multiplicity, in a way, 177 00:08:04,670 --> 00:08:06,860 because one implication of that scene 178 00:08:06,860 --> 00:08:09,640 was that the man, this stranger that we'll never meet again, 179 00:08:09,640 --> 00:08:12,360 that we only saw for one brief instant 180 00:08:12,360 --> 00:08:15,640 in the course of the film, might have concealed a story as deep, 181 00:08:15,640 --> 00:08:19,420 as rich, and as moving, as that of our hero, Humberto D. 182 00:08:19,420 --> 00:08:22,720 When a text contains-- when a moment contains multiplicity, 183 00:08:22,720 --> 00:08:25,770 when it many things simultaneously, 184 00:08:25,770 --> 00:08:28,620 you're in the presence of a kind of excellence. 185 00:08:28,620 --> 00:08:31,740 That's only one principle, but it's a very valuable principle. 186 00:08:31,740 --> 00:08:34,640 And you can see it's worth if you compare, 187 00:08:34,640 --> 00:08:37,360 let's say, a trivial or relatively banal 188 00:08:37,360 --> 00:08:42,330 form of action entertainment, on the one hand, 189 00:08:42,330 --> 00:08:44,799 with a movie that has complex characters in it. 190 00:08:44,799 --> 00:08:46,840 And you could see the different kinds of demands. 191 00:08:46,840 --> 00:08:49,960 Or, even that a serious action adventure film, 192 00:08:49,960 --> 00:08:53,590 a film that incorporates action adventure elements in it, 193 00:08:53,590 --> 00:08:56,500 but also has a serious subject matter, to ones that don't. 194 00:08:56,500 --> 00:09:00,410 Let's say, Kurosawa's samurai movies, 195 00:09:00,410 --> 00:09:03,260 against the trivial, merely entertaining samurai 196 00:09:03,260 --> 00:09:07,150 movies that weren't interested in history or character. 197 00:09:07,150 --> 00:09:09,380 What you try to do is give the students 198 00:09:09,380 --> 00:09:11,450 a greater and greater sensitivity, 199 00:09:11,450 --> 00:09:14,840 not just to the particular text that exhibits such excellence, 200 00:09:14,840 --> 00:09:17,800 but you want to arm them, so that when they encounter things 201 00:09:17,800 --> 00:09:20,485 on their own, they'll be able to make this judgment. 202 00:09:27,120 --> 00:09:31,320 A second aspect of this excellence, 203 00:09:31,320 --> 00:09:35,440 what I call artistic quality, is the quality of organic form. 204 00:09:35,440 --> 00:09:37,690 I talk about this again, and again in the course, 205 00:09:37,690 --> 00:09:40,140 and try to show them instances of it. 206 00:09:40,140 --> 00:09:42,810 At its simplest level, the term, of course, 207 00:09:42,810 --> 00:09:44,590 derives from Coleridge, who borrowed it 208 00:09:44,590 --> 00:09:46,850 from the German romantics. 209 00:09:46,850 --> 00:09:51,400 But essentially, it's the idea that every text 210 00:09:51,400 --> 00:09:54,900 should generate a form that is unique to its needs. 211 00:09:54,900 --> 00:09:56,540 Form should be-- in other words, you 212 00:09:56,540 --> 00:09:58,670 should not have a prior form into which 213 00:09:58,670 --> 00:10:02,060 content is poured, right? 214 00:10:02,060 --> 00:10:04,560 The form of the text, the shape of the text, 215 00:10:04,560 --> 00:10:07,870 should take it nature from the meaning of the text. 216 00:10:07,870 --> 00:10:09,262 From what the text is saying. 217 00:10:09,262 --> 00:10:11,470 And if you think about the structure of modern times, 218 00:10:11,470 --> 00:10:15,140 you'll see that it's a marvelously distilled 219 00:10:15,140 --> 00:10:18,250 instance-- a marvelously clear instance of the principle 220 00:10:18,250 --> 00:10:19,410 of organic form. 221 00:10:19,410 --> 00:10:22,750 What happens to Charlie serially is more meaningful, 222 00:10:22,750 --> 00:10:25,260 in a way, than what happens to him in a single episode. 223 00:10:25,260 --> 00:10:27,960 And the fact that this-- that we have this sense that things 224 00:10:27,960 --> 00:10:29,920 are repeating, that Charlie is on a treadmill, 225 00:10:29,920 --> 00:10:33,010 that he lives a cyclical life, that he'll always have moments 226 00:10:33,010 --> 00:10:36,050 of hope and hopelessness, that he'll have momentary times when 227 00:10:36,050 --> 00:10:39,280 he's free of-- when he finds a place to live, 228 00:10:39,280 --> 00:10:41,710 or finds sufficient food, but that it will always 229 00:10:41,710 --> 00:10:42,410 be temporary. 230 00:10:42,410 --> 00:10:45,300 That his life is always on the road. 231 00:10:45,300 --> 00:10:48,150 That his life is always in process. 232 00:10:48,150 --> 00:10:49,890 And, that at the same time, he never 233 00:10:49,890 --> 00:10:52,100 lets himself completely despair. 234 00:10:52,100 --> 00:10:56,190 There's always a moment where his resilience reasserts 235 00:10:56,190 --> 00:10:56,780 itself. 236 00:10:56,780 --> 00:10:59,150 Well, those elements are embedded, in some sense, 237 00:10:59,150 --> 00:11:02,320 in the very structure, the very organization, of the film. 238 00:11:02,320 --> 00:11:05,430 There should be a symbiotic relationship, a marriage, 239 00:11:05,430 --> 00:11:08,450 a linkage, between form and content. 240 00:11:08,450 --> 00:11:10,980 Between the way, the shape of the text. 241 00:11:10,980 --> 00:11:12,770 Between the strategies and techniques 242 00:11:12,770 --> 00:11:16,370 that are used to embody the story, and what the story says. 243 00:11:16,370 --> 00:11:20,350 There should be a marriage between form and content. 244 00:11:20,350 --> 00:11:22,790 That's what organic form is. 245 00:11:22,790 --> 00:11:25,455 If you can show students moments of organic form, 246 00:11:25,455 --> 00:11:27,490 and if they can really recognize it, 247 00:11:27,490 --> 00:11:31,320 they are proofed for life against banal art.