1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:02,500 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,500 --> 00:00:04,030 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,030 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,730 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,730 --> 00:00:13,340 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,340 --> 00:00:17,212 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,212 --> 00:00:17,837 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:26,520 --> 00:00:29,210 PROFESSOR: I wanted to use this final time-- 9 00:00:29,210 --> 00:00:35,530 hour we have together to summarize a few of what I take 10 00:00:35,530 --> 00:00:38,920 to be the central themes of course, the organizing 11 00:00:38,920 --> 00:00:42,080 ideas that, at least have seemed to me, 12 00:00:42,080 --> 00:00:45,550 to structure our argument and our progress 13 00:00:45,550 --> 00:00:52,110 through these, through this almost 100 years of movies. 14 00:00:52,110 --> 00:00:54,680 The first idea, one that we've come back to, I think, 15 00:00:54,680 --> 00:00:56,510 again and again, has to do with what 16 00:00:56,510 --> 00:01:01,360 we might call film in its anthropological or sociological 17 00:01:01,360 --> 00:01:02,240 aspect. 18 00:01:02,240 --> 00:01:05,970 Film as a cultural form, as an expression of a culture, 19 00:01:05,970 --> 00:01:08,060 as something that grows out of a culture, 20 00:01:08,060 --> 00:01:11,280 that expresses the values and prejudices and well 21 00:01:11,280 --> 00:01:12,910 weirdness of a culture. 22 00:01:12,910 --> 00:01:17,770 From this angle, questions of aesthetic value, 23 00:01:17,770 --> 00:01:19,710 questions of artistic excellence, 24 00:01:19,710 --> 00:01:22,460 are irrelevant in some sense. 25 00:01:22,460 --> 00:01:24,660 From this angle, we're thinking about film 26 00:01:24,660 --> 00:01:30,540 simply as a central expression, as a central habit our culture. 27 00:01:30,540 --> 00:01:37,010 Itself and we might recognize that in the 20th century, where 28 00:01:37,010 --> 00:01:41,850 film was the dominant narrative form, 29 00:01:41,850 --> 00:01:45,330 the film performed functions in the 20th century 30 00:01:45,330 --> 00:01:48,030 that earlier forms of storytelling, of narrative end 31 00:01:48,030 --> 00:01:50,800 drama, had played in earlier cultures. 32 00:01:50,800 --> 00:01:53,510 And one of my deep desires in the course, 33 00:01:53,510 --> 00:01:56,510 one of my implicit ambitions all the way through, 34 00:01:56,510 --> 00:02:02,630 was to encourage you to think about movies in this way, 35 00:02:02,630 --> 00:02:09,340 as an expression of the values and assumptions 36 00:02:09,340 --> 00:02:14,160 on the 20th century cultures, which might be in earlier times 37 00:02:14,160 --> 00:02:16,130 have been expressed in other media. 38 00:02:16,130 --> 00:02:18,710 And it was important for me to have 39 00:02:18,710 --> 00:02:23,160 you recognize that our 20th and 21st century, although it's 40 00:02:23,160 --> 00:02:25,180 somewhat different in the 21st century, 41 00:02:25,180 --> 00:02:27,470 because films are-- film is undergoing 42 00:02:27,470 --> 00:02:32,000 such a profound transformation in the digital age. 43 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:34,790 Nonetheless, in the 20th and 21st century, 44 00:02:34,790 --> 00:02:37,920 audio, visual narrative is a dominant experience 45 00:02:37,920 --> 00:02:41,600 for virtually everyone in the world. 46 00:02:41,600 --> 00:02:44,440 In earlier societies, we didn't have this option, 47 00:02:44,440 --> 00:02:47,870 but it didn't mean that the functions played by the movies 48 00:02:47,870 --> 00:02:49,680 weren't played by earlier forms. 49 00:02:49,680 --> 00:02:52,670 So that's been one of the deep assumptions, one 50 00:02:52,670 --> 00:02:55,830 of the recurring principles to which I've 51 00:02:55,830 --> 00:02:59,020 recurred through the course. 52 00:02:59,020 --> 00:03:03,850 And another aspect of this idea, something I've come back to, 53 00:03:03,850 --> 00:03:06,970 I think several times, has been the relationship 54 00:03:06,970 --> 00:03:09,710 between storytelling and culture. 55 00:03:09,710 --> 00:03:14,830 And drawing especially on certain anthropological and 56 00:03:14,830 --> 00:03:18,600 historical sources, I've tried to suggest to you 57 00:03:18,600 --> 00:03:20,540 that one way of understanding culture 58 00:03:20,540 --> 00:03:24,190 itself, is to understand culture through its stories, 59 00:03:24,190 --> 00:03:27,010 is to understand that the stories a culture tells 60 00:03:27,010 --> 00:03:29,040 reveal the culture in basic ways. 61 00:03:29,040 --> 00:03:31,630 Not necessarily reveal the culture at its best, 62 00:03:31,630 --> 00:03:33,280 although sometimes they may do so, 63 00:03:33,280 --> 00:03:36,760 but they reveal the culture in powerful and central ways. 64 00:03:36,760 --> 00:03:38,310 And some of our work in this course, 65 00:03:38,310 --> 00:03:41,360 as I hope you recognize, has been attempt in some ways 66 00:03:41,360 --> 00:03:44,590 to recover what might be called the cultural, 67 00:03:44,590 --> 00:03:48,010 or the anthropological, or the sociological assumptions 68 00:03:48,010 --> 00:03:51,650 and beliefs that are embedded in our movies. 69 00:03:51,650 --> 00:03:53,520 One of the most important aspects 70 00:03:53,520 --> 00:03:57,130 of this principle of storytelling as intimately 71 00:03:57,130 --> 00:03:59,250 connected to the progress of culture 72 00:03:59,250 --> 00:04:01,920 has to do with an idea I suggested early 73 00:04:01,920 --> 00:04:04,936 in the term, the idea that culture itself-- and this 74 00:04:04,936 --> 00:04:08,020 is what I think, one of the great insights of 20th century 75 00:04:08,020 --> 00:04:12,420 cultural history, cultural analysis-- 76 00:04:12,420 --> 00:04:17,269 is the recognition the culture itself is a completely 77 00:04:17,269 --> 00:04:21,790 unfinished thing, that it's never a single fixed item. 78 00:04:21,790 --> 00:04:25,400 That culture itself is, society itself is always 79 00:04:25,400 --> 00:04:28,070 in the process of evolving and changing. 80 00:04:28,070 --> 00:04:32,050 That it's idea of itself is always in flux. 81 00:04:32,050 --> 00:04:33,880 This is an immensely productive way 82 00:04:33,880 --> 00:04:36,980 of understanding what society is, because what it allows 83 00:04:36,980 --> 00:04:41,890 us to do is recognize that the various expressive and other-- 84 00:04:41,890 --> 00:04:44,280 especially the expressive forms of a culture, 85 00:04:44,280 --> 00:04:46,690 play a central role in what we might call 86 00:04:46,690 --> 00:04:50,820 this ongoing attempt of a society to define 87 00:04:50,820 --> 00:04:54,790 and renew itself according to various values and assumptions, 88 00:04:54,790 --> 00:04:57,100 and historical inheritances. 89 00:04:57,100 --> 00:04:59,910 But also that the culture uses these stories 90 00:04:59,910 --> 00:05:03,840 as a way to react to disturbances and challenges 91 00:05:03,840 --> 00:05:05,290 to the social fabric. 92 00:05:05,290 --> 00:05:08,690 And remember, borrowing on the great English cultural 93 00:05:08,690 --> 00:05:12,550 historian Raymond Williams, I suggested in an earlier course, 94 00:05:12,550 --> 00:05:14,580 in earlier class, that one of the ways 95 00:05:14,580 --> 00:05:18,550 to think about this process is to imagine 96 00:05:18,550 --> 00:05:21,070 culture itself as consisting of sort 97 00:05:21,070 --> 00:05:23,410 of three strands or voices. 98 00:05:23,410 --> 00:05:26,250 An emerging voice, which represents 99 00:05:26,250 --> 00:05:28,160 new ideas, the future, right? 100 00:05:28,160 --> 00:05:29,840 Emergent voices. 101 00:05:29,840 --> 00:05:31,700 Dominant or central voices, where 102 00:05:31,700 --> 00:05:35,636 the central values of a society are embedded and articulated. 103 00:05:35,636 --> 00:05:37,010 And on the other side, what might 104 00:05:37,010 --> 00:05:39,900 be quote traditional or vestigial voices. 105 00:05:39,900 --> 00:05:44,510 The voices or energies that are losing force, losing power, 106 00:05:44,510 --> 00:05:47,370 as society changes, that belong to a past, 107 00:05:47,370 --> 00:05:49,020 but are still part of the mix. 108 00:05:49,020 --> 00:05:50,980 And once we understand that culture 109 00:05:50,980 --> 00:05:55,410 is this constant sort of our ongoing, mixed conversation 110 00:05:55,410 --> 00:06:00,590 amongst traditional, dominant, and emerging voices, 111 00:06:00,590 --> 00:06:03,770 we begin to understand much more about the complexity of how 112 00:06:03,770 --> 00:06:05,910 a culture proceeds. 113 00:06:05,910 --> 00:06:07,770 And of course, what this also does, 114 00:06:07,770 --> 00:06:11,360 once we make the link between the stories a culture tells 115 00:06:11,360 --> 00:06:12,940 and the cultures' idea of itself, 116 00:06:12,940 --> 00:06:15,940 we can recognize that this same process can 117 00:06:15,940 --> 00:06:17,810 work for understanding stories. 118 00:06:17,810 --> 00:06:19,830 It's immensely liberating, immensely 119 00:06:19,830 --> 00:06:23,570 illuminating, to recognize that of course films, 120 00:06:23,570 --> 00:06:25,620 like other forms of narrative, are going 121 00:06:25,620 --> 00:06:30,600 to do contain elements that are not completely coherent, not 122 00:06:30,600 --> 00:06:31,980 completely in agreement. 123 00:06:31,980 --> 00:06:35,790 That they actually may sustain contradictions. 124 00:06:35,790 --> 00:06:38,970 That films, like other forms of narrative, 125 00:06:38,970 --> 00:06:41,460 may very well articulate both emergent 126 00:06:41,460 --> 00:06:45,210 and traditional voices, and those two voices 127 00:06:45,210 --> 00:06:48,420 may be in conflict, or at least not in perfect coherence 128 00:06:48,420 --> 00:06:49,630 in a particular text. 129 00:06:49,630 --> 00:06:52,310 So, one of the advantages of this perspective 130 00:06:52,310 --> 00:06:54,740 is to allow us to recognize something 131 00:06:54,740 --> 00:06:58,420 of the complexity, even the dynamic and potentially partly 132 00:06:58,420 --> 00:07:03,070 contradictory elements that we may find in particular films. 133 00:07:03,070 --> 00:07:06,180 So the idea that culture is always unfinished, never 134 00:07:06,180 --> 00:07:09,420 a fixed or finished thing, and that the stories a culture 135 00:07:09,420 --> 00:07:14,520 tells are a part of this ongoing conversation, this dynamic, 136 00:07:14,520 --> 00:07:18,000 always unfinished conversation about the value he was 137 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:20,440 and assumptions the society lives by. 138 00:07:20,440 --> 00:07:23,960 I suggested a number of times that one way 139 00:07:23,960 --> 00:07:26,570 to think about the central or the dominant narrative 140 00:07:26,570 --> 00:07:30,610 forms in particular cultures, film in the 20th century, 141 00:07:30,610 --> 00:07:34,060 the novel in the 18th and 19th century in certain European 142 00:07:34,060 --> 00:07:38,250 and in American society, the public theater of Shakespeare's 143 00:07:38,250 --> 00:07:41,150 day, the oral formulaic narrative 144 00:07:41,150 --> 00:07:43,870 in the ancient world of Homer. 145 00:07:43,870 --> 00:07:47,620 And what I've suggested is that these narrative forms might 146 00:07:47,620 --> 00:07:51,600 be labeled, can usefully be labeled as consensus forms, 147 00:07:51,600 --> 00:07:54,500 because they understand themselves to occupy 148 00:07:54,500 --> 00:07:56,380 a central space in the society. 149 00:07:56,380 --> 00:07:58,350 That they recognize, not necessarily 150 00:07:58,350 --> 00:08:00,540 that they're expressing a true consensus, 151 00:08:00,540 --> 00:08:02,910 no society has a perfect consensus, 152 00:08:02,910 --> 00:08:05,290 but that what they recognize is that they're 153 00:08:05,290 --> 00:08:08,310 expressing what is the imagined, or the accepted, 154 00:08:08,310 --> 00:08:12,140 or the presumed consensus of the culture. 155 00:08:12,140 --> 00:08:15,750 That consensus of values may not be bought into by everyone, 156 00:08:15,750 --> 00:08:17,330 certainly won't be. 157 00:08:17,330 --> 00:08:20,590 Nonetheless, even the people who don't accept the consensus 158 00:08:20,590 --> 00:08:24,060 values recognize what the dominant values of the culture 159 00:08:24,060 --> 00:08:28,060 are, and recognize those sites, like the movies 160 00:08:28,060 --> 00:08:30,990 in the 20th century, that are the carriers of what 161 00:08:30,990 --> 00:08:35,010 we might call that official or consensus meaning. 162 00:08:35,010 --> 00:08:36,600 And one of things I tried to suggest 163 00:08:36,600 --> 00:08:39,630 to you in the course of our discussions 164 00:08:39,630 --> 00:08:43,610 is the way in which, in the 20th century form 165 00:08:43,610 --> 00:08:47,390 of film, the central role that genre forms 166 00:08:47,390 --> 00:08:49,640 play in this process. 167 00:08:49,640 --> 00:08:51,600 And can you see why that would be true? 168 00:08:51,600 --> 00:08:55,440 One reason is that there's an implicit principle 169 00:08:55,440 --> 00:08:59,050 of repetition within variation in genre forms, 170 00:08:59,050 --> 00:09:01,260 because they're so familiar. 171 00:09:01,260 --> 00:09:05,170 Different as a late Western and an early Western might be, 172 00:09:05,170 --> 00:09:07,960 they're still Westerns and they share a great deal. 173 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:10,440 They share certain fundamental qualities 174 00:09:10,440 --> 00:09:12,670 that every viewer recognizes. 175 00:09:12,670 --> 00:09:14,920 The more literate the viewer or the reader 176 00:09:14,920 --> 00:09:18,230 is in the conventions of a particular genre, 177 00:09:18,230 --> 00:09:20,270 the richer the uses of that genre 178 00:09:20,270 --> 00:09:24,397 become, especially as the genre elaborates itself over time. 179 00:09:24,397 --> 00:09:26,730 And one of the things I've tried to show you by talking, 180 00:09:26,730 --> 00:09:30,110 especially about the Western in American society, 181 00:09:30,110 --> 00:09:31,750 was to suggest that we can actually 182 00:09:31,750 --> 00:09:33,440 understand some of these genre forms 183 00:09:33,440 --> 00:09:37,170 as in some sense mirroring the debate a society 184 00:09:37,170 --> 00:09:40,430 may very well be having about its own nature. 185 00:09:40,430 --> 00:09:43,550 And that the way the Western changes over time 186 00:09:43,550 --> 00:09:48,790 in the history of film is a kind of distillation this process, 187 00:09:48,790 --> 00:09:51,920 whereby the stories of a culture help the story, 188 00:09:51,920 --> 00:09:54,970 help the culture to accommodate itself to changes, 189 00:09:54,970 --> 00:09:57,220 help the help of culture figure out how 190 00:09:57,220 --> 00:10:00,080 its past and its present can be brought 191 00:10:00,080 --> 00:10:04,180 into some kind of relation, help but help the society 192 00:10:04,180 --> 00:10:10,080 get used to change and dynamic challenges to its coherence. 193 00:10:13,670 --> 00:10:16,660 One implication of the kind of argument 194 00:10:16,660 --> 00:10:18,780 I've been making about consensus narrative, 195 00:10:18,780 --> 00:10:20,610 as I've suggested a number of times, 196 00:10:20,610 --> 00:10:23,029 is that a consensus narrative always-- 197 00:10:23,029 --> 00:10:24,570 what I'm calling consensus narrative. 198 00:10:24,570 --> 00:10:28,220 We might use a simpler and less aggressive term, 199 00:10:28,220 --> 00:10:31,240 we might say various forms of popular culture 200 00:10:31,240 --> 00:10:34,270 share the same qualities with the particular form 201 00:10:34,270 --> 00:10:37,330 of popular culture I'm calling consensus narrative. 202 00:10:37,330 --> 00:10:39,210 And remember, one of the exciting things 203 00:10:39,210 --> 00:10:43,580 about this concept is that it shifts from culture 204 00:10:43,580 --> 00:10:45,970 to culture, or from era to era. 205 00:10:45,970 --> 00:10:48,650 The consensus narrative system of one society 206 00:10:48,650 --> 00:10:51,000 won't be the same as that of another society, 207 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:53,737 but the systems will share certain-- 208 00:10:53,737 --> 00:10:55,820 in one case it might be the novel, in another case 209 00:10:55,820 --> 00:10:57,850 it might be the film, but both system will-- 210 00:10:57,850 --> 00:11:00,950 both of these forms, when there are 211 00:11:00,950 --> 00:11:03,360 consensus system, consensus forms, 212 00:11:03,360 --> 00:11:05,040 will share certain qualities. 213 00:11:05,040 --> 00:11:08,570 And I've suggested that the central qualities they share 214 00:11:08,570 --> 00:11:12,230 are that they are always in some deep way conservative, right? 215 00:11:12,230 --> 00:11:14,190 They're both morally conservative, 216 00:11:14,190 --> 00:11:16,667 or conservative in terms of content, 217 00:11:16,667 --> 00:11:19,000 because they're trying to reach the whole of the society 218 00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:20,890 and they have to be careful about that, 219 00:11:20,890 --> 00:11:23,570 they can't be as advanced or as radical 220 00:11:23,570 --> 00:11:27,240 as the most radical, or avant garde parts of the culture, 221 00:11:27,240 --> 00:11:29,180 because certain elements of the culture 222 00:11:29,180 --> 00:11:30,990 would be alienated by it, and it's 223 00:11:30,990 --> 00:11:33,960 the cultural work of consensus narrative 224 00:11:33,960 --> 00:11:36,510 to address the center of society. 225 00:11:36,510 --> 00:11:40,140 So they're conservative in content and the moral values. 226 00:11:40,140 --> 00:11:42,080 And there are also conservative artistically. 227 00:11:42,080 --> 00:11:44,360 That is to say, they don't do a lot 228 00:11:44,360 --> 00:11:49,630 of sort of daring and shocking, technical or structural 229 00:11:49,630 --> 00:11:50,680 experiments. 230 00:11:50,680 --> 00:11:52,970 Again, because they want to be, because they 231 00:11:52,970 --> 00:11:57,550 aim to be understood by a large proportion of the population. 232 00:11:57,550 --> 00:12:01,140 They aim to be readable by everyone. 233 00:12:01,140 --> 00:12:04,570 And that brings us to do a second item that's 234 00:12:04,570 --> 00:12:08,230 an aspect of, always a fundamental aspect of consensus 235 00:12:08,230 --> 00:12:10,110 narrative, they're accessible. 236 00:12:10,110 --> 00:12:13,930 That they are written or created in a language 237 00:12:13,930 --> 00:12:21,620 according to archetypes, or stereotypes, or shared tropes 238 00:12:21,620 --> 00:12:24,230 and conventions that are accessible, 239 00:12:24,230 --> 00:12:26,810 readable to the whole of the society. 240 00:12:26,810 --> 00:12:30,330 And a final feature that these texts always have 241 00:12:30,330 --> 00:12:33,150 is that they are collaborative. 242 00:12:33,150 --> 00:12:35,220 And I've suggested earlier in the course 243 00:12:35,220 --> 00:12:38,110 that one way to think about how collaborative the movies are 244 00:12:38,110 --> 00:12:41,790 is to recognize in every movie is itself a collaboration. 245 00:12:41,790 --> 00:12:43,872 That you can't make a movie-- one person 246 00:12:43,872 --> 00:12:44,830 can never make a movie. 247 00:12:44,830 --> 00:12:48,200 That a movie is always a collaborative form. 248 00:12:48,200 --> 00:12:51,010 But, I mean this idea of collaboration 249 00:12:51,010 --> 00:12:52,190 in a deeper way as well. 250 00:12:52,190 --> 00:12:57,010 Not only is the text, are the text of movies 251 00:12:57,010 --> 00:13:03,420 literally collaboratively created by many, many creators, 252 00:13:03,420 --> 00:13:06,302 but they're collaborative it another way, in a deep way. 253 00:13:06,302 --> 00:13:08,010 Of course the most obvious one is the way 254 00:13:08,010 --> 00:13:11,100 in which you all genre forms collaborate with themselves, 255 00:13:11,100 --> 00:13:13,120 the way they're in a kind of conversation 256 00:13:13,120 --> 00:13:16,410 with all prior instances of the genre. 257 00:13:16,410 --> 00:13:19,290 And what that means is the genre forms are collaborating 258 00:13:19,290 --> 00:13:21,580 with their history, their collaborating with their-- 259 00:13:21,580 --> 00:13:23,890 and they're also implicitly collaborating 260 00:13:23,890 --> 00:13:26,370 with the audience's literate knowledge of what 261 00:13:26,370 --> 00:13:29,990 these genre forms are like, how they behave, what 262 00:13:29,990 --> 00:13:31,780 the expectations in them are. 263 00:13:31,780 --> 00:13:38,440 And their collaborative in yet another way, and this aspect 264 00:13:38,440 --> 00:13:41,900 of their collaborative characters 265 00:13:41,900 --> 00:13:44,130 is one that I haven't emphasized too much, 266 00:13:44,130 --> 00:13:49,390 and I want to do it today in our final, in our farewell lecture. 267 00:13:49,390 --> 00:13:51,850 They're collaborative also because these text, 268 00:13:51,850 --> 00:13:54,050 in some deep way, are collaborating 269 00:13:54,050 --> 00:13:57,160 with what we might call the collective wisdom or values 270 00:13:57,160 --> 00:13:58,440 of the culture. 271 00:13:58,440 --> 00:14:00,000 And this is implicit in what I've 272 00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:02,505 been saying about the way these story forms draw 273 00:14:02,505 --> 00:14:06,540 on the histories, and stories, and conventions that are most 274 00:14:06,540 --> 00:14:08,510 widely shared in a culture. 275 00:14:08,510 --> 00:14:10,230 But I want to clarify what I mean 276 00:14:10,230 --> 00:14:13,070 by-- so there's that kind of collaboration, in which they're 277 00:14:13,070 --> 00:14:16,210 constantly borrowing forms, and arguments, and principles, 278 00:14:16,210 --> 00:14:19,740 and symbols from the vast body of shared knowledge 279 00:14:19,740 --> 00:14:21,160 that a culture might have. 280 00:14:25,000 --> 00:14:29,010 But what this might actually lead to-- one thing 281 00:14:29,010 --> 00:14:33,540 this leads to is the recognition that these cultural forms 282 00:14:33,540 --> 00:14:36,000 are not always noble or wonderful, 283 00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:38,970 that they carry prejudices, that they carry racism, 284 00:14:38,970 --> 00:14:43,120 that they carry misogyny, that they're going to embody, 285 00:14:43,120 --> 00:14:47,380 that the study of these texts is not necessarily, 286 00:14:47,380 --> 00:14:50,390 never should be a totally celebratory experience, even 287 00:14:50,390 --> 00:14:55,310 though many of these texts are what valuable, and lasting, 288 00:14:55,310 --> 00:14:59,600 and speak to us in deep and powerful and useful ways. 289 00:14:59,600 --> 00:15:02,989 It's also true that these text carried the lies and prejudices 290 00:15:02,989 --> 00:15:04,530 of the cultures from which they come, 291 00:15:04,530 --> 00:15:06,830 as I've said a number of times in the course. 292 00:15:06,830 --> 00:15:10,270 Perhaps too many times. 293 00:15:10,270 --> 00:15:13,480 But I mentioned again in this last lecture, 294 00:15:13,480 --> 00:15:16,310 because I want to also mention that there's a way in which, 295 00:15:16,310 --> 00:15:20,900 not just the evils and the limitations of a society that 296 00:15:20,900 --> 00:15:26,200 get expressed in the collaborative consensus 297 00:15:26,200 --> 00:15:28,070 forms that emerge from them, but also 298 00:15:28,070 --> 00:15:30,607 sometimes the wisdom of society does too. 299 00:15:30,607 --> 00:15:32,190 In other words, what I want to suggest 300 00:15:32,190 --> 00:15:34,010 to you is that the collaboration has 301 00:15:34,010 --> 00:15:39,700 to do not only with inherited values, and inherited beliefs, 302 00:15:39,700 --> 00:15:41,580 and inherited story forms, they also 303 00:15:41,580 --> 00:15:47,110 have also have to do with the kind of inheritance of wisdom. 304 00:15:47,110 --> 00:15:49,140 And I have a particularly exciting way 305 00:15:49,140 --> 00:15:50,880 of distilling this for you. 306 00:15:50,880 --> 00:15:53,560 There's a passage, one of my favorite passages, 307 00:15:53,560 --> 00:15:57,120 from Shakespeare, from his from his great late play Cymbeline. 308 00:15:57,120 --> 00:16:00,250 From Act four, scene two, in which a group of characters 309 00:16:00,250 --> 00:16:01,820 gather around a body. 310 00:16:01,820 --> 00:16:04,520 They think the body actually comes alive later in the play, 311 00:16:04,520 --> 00:16:06,930 because there's a lot of wonderful magic in the play, 312 00:16:06,930 --> 00:16:09,130 it's a play about redemption and rebirth. 313 00:16:09,130 --> 00:16:12,130 But at this moment in the play, they think this person is dead, 314 00:16:12,130 --> 00:16:13,550 and they single dirge. 315 00:16:13,550 --> 00:16:18,830 It's one of the most-- a dirge, a song, a funeral song, a song 316 00:16:18,830 --> 00:16:22,190 or a poem to be sung or recited at a graveside. 317 00:16:22,190 --> 00:16:25,610 And there's, maybe the greatest of all such dirges 318 00:16:25,610 --> 00:16:28,400 is in English, is in Cymbeline. 319 00:16:28,400 --> 00:16:31,690 And this is the first stanza and the greatest stanza, 320 00:16:31,690 --> 00:16:33,730 fear no more-- right there, people 321 00:16:33,730 --> 00:16:36,120 are standing over corpse. 322 00:16:36,120 --> 00:16:38,730 Fear no more the heat of the sun; 323 00:16:38,730 --> 00:16:44,720 Nor the furious winter's rages, Thou thy worldly task 324 00:16:44,720 --> 00:16:49,990 hath done, Home art gone and taken thy wages. 325 00:16:49,990 --> 00:16:56,000 Very interesting to image, to embrace a metaphor of working, 326 00:16:56,000 --> 00:16:58,090 a working class metaphor. 327 00:16:58,090 --> 00:17:01,440 You're dying, and the metaphor is, 328 00:17:01,440 --> 00:17:05,369 you've taken your last wages, you finished your work. 329 00:17:05,369 --> 00:17:07,400 Home art gone and taken they wages. 330 00:17:07,400 --> 00:17:10,540 And here comes the couplet that I think is most powerful. 331 00:17:10,540 --> 00:17:17,040 Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, 332 00:17:17,040 --> 00:17:18,599 come to dust. 333 00:17:18,599 --> 00:17:20,930 Let me say it again so you get the whole stanza, 334 00:17:20,930 --> 00:17:22,400 it's quite beautiful, I think. 335 00:17:22,400 --> 00:17:24,550 Fear no more the heat of the sun; 336 00:17:24,550 --> 00:17:29,800 Nor the furious winters' rages, Thou thy worldly task 337 00:17:29,800 --> 00:17:35,210 hath done, Home art gone and taken thy wages. 338 00:17:35,210 --> 00:17:42,040 Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers 339 00:17:42,040 --> 00:17:44,624 come to dust. 340 00:17:44,624 --> 00:17:46,540 Now think about those last lines for a minute. 341 00:17:46,540 --> 00:17:49,660 They're very powerful, even if you don't exactly get them. 342 00:17:49,660 --> 00:17:53,880 Golden lads and girls, the implication is high born, 343 00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:59,240 wealthy, golden in their youth, and in their energy 344 00:17:59,240 --> 00:18:02,380 and in their vitality. 345 00:18:02,380 --> 00:18:04,440 No matter how golden, whether in wealth, 346 00:18:04,440 --> 00:18:11,040 or a vitality, even golden lads and girls 347 00:18:11,040 --> 00:18:13,700 end up in the grave like all of us. 348 00:18:13,700 --> 00:18:15,330 And there's, the implication of course, 349 00:18:15,330 --> 00:18:17,454 is there's a kind of constellation in the fact that 350 00:18:17,454 --> 00:18:19,980 it's-- deaths is our shared fate. 351 00:18:19,980 --> 00:18:22,320 It's a consoling, an attempt to console us. 352 00:18:22,320 --> 00:18:25,800 Although the older I get, the less consolation 353 00:18:25,800 --> 00:18:28,830 I find myself taking from this insight. 354 00:18:28,830 --> 00:18:31,960 Nonetheless, it is a great poem, and this stanza 355 00:18:31,960 --> 00:18:33,520 is a particularly remarkable poem 356 00:18:33,520 --> 00:18:37,790 because of one element in it, the phrase, golden lads. 357 00:18:37,790 --> 00:18:42,070 For those of you know-- very few Americans know this, 358 00:18:42,070 --> 00:18:44,430 but some Brits know this. 359 00:18:44,430 --> 00:18:47,720 In Shakespeare's native Warwick shire, 360 00:18:47,720 --> 00:18:52,530 the phrase golden lad referred to something very specific. 361 00:18:52,530 --> 00:18:57,150 It referred to the condition of the common ordinary flower 362 00:18:57,150 --> 00:19:00,340 that we call the dandelion. 363 00:19:00,340 --> 00:19:06,580 And it's a flower that has a gold cup when it's young, 364 00:19:06,580 --> 00:19:08,590 and then when it goes to seed, and you've all 365 00:19:08,590 --> 00:19:11,006 seen them, because they're native to North America as well 366 00:19:11,006 --> 00:19:12,820 as England. 367 00:19:12,820 --> 00:19:16,710 The top of the cap turns into a kind 368 00:19:16,710 --> 00:19:21,747 of rounded series of filaments, a beautiful round cap and when 369 00:19:21,747 --> 00:19:23,830 you-- a lot that children pick them and blow them, 370 00:19:23,830 --> 00:19:25,860 and the seeds blow all over. 371 00:19:25,860 --> 00:19:31,070 One of the reasons that these common weedy flowers are 372 00:19:31,070 --> 00:19:34,330 so common, is that they're so brilliantly designed by nature 373 00:19:34,330 --> 00:19:36,770 to propagate, because the wind blows 374 00:19:36,770 --> 00:19:38,470 their seeds all over the place. 375 00:19:38,470 --> 00:19:40,630 Do you all have an image of this? 376 00:19:40,630 --> 00:19:43,550 So when you're young, the flowers have these golden caps, 377 00:19:43,550 --> 00:19:46,600 and then when they go to seed, they become these, 378 00:19:46,600 --> 00:19:48,770 they have these rounded filaments on the top. 379 00:19:48,770 --> 00:19:51,800 And these rounded filaments, in Shakespeare's day, 380 00:19:51,800 --> 00:19:55,530 were called golden lads when they-- were actually called, 381 00:19:55,530 --> 00:19:59,050 these flowers were called golden lads when they were in bloom, 382 00:19:59,050 --> 00:20:01,850 and they were called chimney sweeps 383 00:20:01,850 --> 00:20:06,480 when they went to seed, because they looked exactly 384 00:20:06,480 --> 00:20:09,300 like a chimney sweepers broom. 385 00:20:09,300 --> 00:20:11,200 Chimney sweepers we take these rounded brooms 386 00:20:11,200 --> 00:20:13,560 and put them up in chimneys to clean them. 387 00:20:13,560 --> 00:20:15,710 So when Shakespeare writes in the end there, 388 00:20:15,710 --> 00:20:19,970 he says, golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, 389 00:20:19,970 --> 00:20:20,850 come to dust. 390 00:20:20,850 --> 00:20:25,960 He's describing literally the phases of life in a flower. 391 00:20:25,960 --> 00:20:27,130 Why is that wonderful? 392 00:20:27,130 --> 00:20:29,270 Can you see why that's wonderful? 393 00:20:29,270 --> 00:20:31,500 Why that's what art is? 394 00:20:31,500 --> 00:20:33,380 Because of course, what's happened 395 00:20:33,380 --> 00:20:36,005 is that, what Shakespeare did was 396 00:20:36,005 --> 00:20:38,130 create a brilliant metaphor out of something that's 397 00:20:38,130 --> 00:20:38,980 profoundly concrete. 398 00:20:41,670 --> 00:20:44,160 So the phrase golden lad and chimney sweeper 399 00:20:44,160 --> 00:20:47,700 actually refers to the life cycle of a flower. 400 00:20:47,700 --> 00:20:49,630 Well think of how much more consoling, 401 00:20:49,630 --> 00:20:52,150 how profoundly brilliant the lines become, 402 00:20:52,150 --> 00:20:54,670 when actually Shakespeare's metaphor is literally 403 00:20:54,670 --> 00:20:56,760 linked to the passages of nature, 404 00:20:56,760 --> 00:20:58,830 to the progress of nature. 405 00:20:58,830 --> 00:21:00,760 So what I'm calling your attention to 406 00:21:00,760 --> 00:21:03,190 is a brilliant piece of poetry, a piece of poetry that 407 00:21:03,190 --> 00:21:06,450 has a kind of richness and complexity 408 00:21:06,450 --> 00:21:08,870 that almost couldn't be better. 409 00:21:08,870 --> 00:21:11,210 And even when we don't know that about the flower, 410 00:21:11,210 --> 00:21:13,360 we get the meaning of the lines, but think 411 00:21:13,360 --> 00:21:16,480 how the lines come alive once we recognize 412 00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:19,010 that the progress of human life in those couplets 413 00:21:19,010 --> 00:21:22,540 is being explicitly associated with the life 414 00:21:22,540 --> 00:21:25,720 cycle of a natural object of a flower. 415 00:21:25,720 --> 00:21:29,240 Now this is a great act of poetic geniuses, isn't it? 416 00:21:29,240 --> 00:21:32,260 But where does the genius lie? 417 00:21:32,260 --> 00:21:35,230 Where does it come-- Shakespeare is collaborating 418 00:21:35,230 --> 00:21:37,920 with the wisdom of his culture. 419 00:21:37,920 --> 00:21:39,560 It takes Shakespeare to figure it out, 420 00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:41,750 I mean I'm not saying that it is an act of genius 421 00:21:41,750 --> 00:21:44,850 for Shakespeare to realize the metaphoric implications 422 00:21:44,850 --> 00:21:48,720 of this, he did, but the metaphor is embedded in the way 423 00:21:48,720 --> 00:21:51,135 ordinary people named that flower for hundreds 424 00:21:51,135 --> 00:21:53,220 and perhaps thousands of years. 425 00:21:53,220 --> 00:21:55,510 Shakespeare is collaborating there 426 00:21:55,510 --> 00:21:58,850 with the wisdom of his culture, with the shared understanding 427 00:21:58,850 --> 00:22:02,760 of his society, in order to make that brilliant line of poetry. 428 00:22:02,760 --> 00:22:06,980 So we can take that idea that, the notion of golden lads, 429 00:22:06,980 --> 00:22:12,280 as a kind of emblem for the collaborative energies that 430 00:22:12,280 --> 00:22:16,790 are sometimes released when artists collaborate 431 00:22:16,790 --> 00:22:19,800 with the traditions of their culture, 432 00:22:19,800 --> 00:22:21,930 with the traditions of naming, with the traditions 433 00:22:21,930 --> 00:22:24,050 of understanding, that are embedded-- 434 00:22:24,050 --> 00:22:26,840 and so therefore the collaboration is a deep one. 435 00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:30,290 It's an intellectual, and an expressive, 436 00:22:30,290 --> 00:22:33,360 and a creative collaboration between the societies 437 00:22:33,360 --> 00:22:37,470 understanding of things, the cultures understanding 438 00:22:37,470 --> 00:22:41,370 of things, and the artists interaction with those. 439 00:22:41,370 --> 00:22:44,060 And that's an aspect of, an even deeper aspect 440 00:22:44,060 --> 00:22:46,850 of what I mean when I say, that consensus narrative, 441 00:22:46,850 --> 00:22:49,900 and that movies are a collaborative art form. 442 00:22:52,860 --> 00:22:55,850 I've also tried to suggest, again and again in the course, 443 00:22:55,850 --> 00:22:58,600 that there are films and many of, most of the films 444 00:22:58,600 --> 00:23:03,770 we've seen in the semester, also deserve the designation art. 445 00:23:03,770 --> 00:23:05,370 And I don't want, I've not really 446 00:23:05,370 --> 00:23:13,860 wanted to turn the term art into a kind of elitist category 447 00:23:13,860 --> 00:23:17,600 from which we must sort of retreat in awe, 448 00:23:17,600 --> 00:23:19,410 and sort of before it. 449 00:23:19,410 --> 00:23:21,760 I want us to think of art in a simpler 450 00:23:21,760 --> 00:23:23,740 and, I think more useful way, as a form 451 00:23:23,740 --> 00:23:26,510 of intelligence and competence. 452 00:23:26,510 --> 00:23:30,120 In other words, when things are done well in a work of art, 453 00:23:30,120 --> 00:23:33,100 when a movie as well made, when a poem is well made, 454 00:23:33,100 --> 00:23:35,270 we admire it and we respect it, and we 455 00:23:35,270 --> 00:23:38,170 don't have to get mystical about the qualities of art 456 00:23:38,170 --> 00:23:43,340 in order to recognize that intelligence and competence are 457 00:23:43,340 --> 00:23:47,650 qualities that we value in other aspects of experience, 458 00:23:47,650 --> 00:23:51,290 as well as an art itself. 459 00:23:51,290 --> 00:23:54,340 What do I mean specifically by intelligence incompetence? 460 00:23:54,340 --> 00:23:58,330 The most profound way of understanding this argument 461 00:23:58,330 --> 00:24:01,080 has to do with what I've spoken about a number of times 462 00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:04,320 in the course, I've sometimes used the phrase organic form 463 00:24:04,320 --> 00:24:08,270 to explain what I meant in this regard. 464 00:24:08,270 --> 00:24:11,380 But essentially the idea has to do with the sense, 465 00:24:11,380 --> 00:24:14,580 with a recognition that a serious artist will 466 00:24:14,580 --> 00:24:20,160 use instruments that further his or her intentions 467 00:24:20,160 --> 00:24:21,350 effectively and fully. 468 00:24:21,350 --> 00:24:23,660 That is to say, that there's a connection 469 00:24:23,660 --> 00:24:28,390 between the formal or stylistic choices that an artist makes, 470 00:24:28,390 --> 00:24:31,500 and the content that is part of the art work. 471 00:24:31,500 --> 00:24:36,080 That is to say that there's a link or a connection 472 00:24:36,080 --> 00:24:39,580 between the formal choices that a writer or a filmmaker 473 00:24:39,580 --> 00:24:44,260 makes and the content intended to be communicated. 474 00:24:46,810 --> 00:24:50,560 And we can think of the term competence 475 00:24:50,560 --> 00:24:54,480 as having to do simply with the idea of technical mastery. 476 00:24:54,480 --> 00:24:58,160 In other words, a competent poet is a master of language, 477 00:24:58,160 --> 00:25:02,100 is a master of metaphor, is a master of grammar. 478 00:25:02,100 --> 00:25:04,780 You can't be a great poet if you have no understanding 479 00:25:04,780 --> 00:25:08,010 of grammar whatever, because you be you'd be throwing away 480 00:25:08,010 --> 00:25:09,820 one of the great technical resources 481 00:25:09,820 --> 00:25:13,590 of the language, which is the complexity that grows out 482 00:25:13,590 --> 00:25:15,640 of a mastery of grammar. 483 00:25:15,640 --> 00:25:18,400 By the same token, you couldn't have a serious filmmaker 484 00:25:18,400 --> 00:25:21,220 who didn't have a deep profound sense of what 485 00:25:21,220 --> 00:25:25,790 it meant to create a visual story, what 486 00:25:25,790 --> 00:25:30,490 it meant to try to embody meaning in audio, visual ways. 487 00:25:30,490 --> 00:25:32,210 You couldn't have a great filmmaker 488 00:25:32,210 --> 00:25:35,600 who is oblivious entirely to the visual nature 489 00:25:35,600 --> 00:25:38,060 of his experience. 490 00:25:38,060 --> 00:25:42,460 The filmmaker would-- any serious filmmaker 491 00:25:42,460 --> 00:25:49,380 has to be always aware of the special qualities 492 00:25:49,380 --> 00:25:53,580 and properties of the medium in which he or she is working. 493 00:25:53,580 --> 00:25:59,050 So if we think or art then, not as a mystical category, 494 00:25:59,050 --> 00:26:03,170 but as an expression of intelligence and mastery, 495 00:26:03,170 --> 00:26:06,050 intelligence and competence, perhaps we've 496 00:26:06,050 --> 00:26:07,990 demystified it a bit, and given us 497 00:26:07,990 --> 00:26:10,100 grounds for actually making judgments 498 00:26:10,100 --> 00:26:12,800 about particular films, and particular passages, 499 00:26:12,800 --> 00:26:14,350 and moments in film. 500 00:26:14,350 --> 00:26:17,970 And let me remind you again, that a second version 501 00:26:17,970 --> 00:26:20,990 of this argument about the relationship, at least 502 00:26:20,990 --> 00:26:24,260 in part about the relationship between art 503 00:26:24,260 --> 00:26:27,950 and what I had sometimes called entertainment, 504 00:26:27,950 --> 00:26:30,430 the greater complexity or richness of art, 505 00:26:30,430 --> 00:26:33,210 can be embodied also, not only in this first principle 506 00:26:33,210 --> 00:26:36,440 of a connection between the stylistic and formal choices 507 00:26:36,440 --> 00:26:37,470 and the content. 508 00:26:37,470 --> 00:26:39,890 But in this second way, in the second category 509 00:26:39,890 --> 00:26:42,150 or second perspective as well, in terms of what 510 00:26:42,150 --> 00:26:44,880 I've called texture or multiplicity. 511 00:26:44,880 --> 00:26:46,460 The multiplicity principles. 512 00:26:46,460 --> 00:26:49,230 Let me just quickly remind you of a couple of examples 513 00:26:49,230 --> 00:26:52,720 we've looked at in the course, just as a way of giving you 514 00:26:52,720 --> 00:26:58,700 some instances from which you can-- 515 00:26:58,700 --> 00:27:02,470 from which you can extrapolate your own responses 516 00:27:02,470 --> 00:27:03,980 to other texts. 517 00:27:03,980 --> 00:27:05,890 Do you remember for example the scene 518 00:27:05,890 --> 00:27:08,260 of that, that we looked at fairly closely, 519 00:27:08,260 --> 00:27:11,820 in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, that disturbing ironic shoot out 520 00:27:11,820 --> 00:27:13,120 on the bridge? 521 00:27:13,120 --> 00:27:18,166 In which had me murderous young killer goads a young former 522 00:27:18,166 --> 00:27:19,790 into taking the gun out of his holster, 523 00:27:19,790 --> 00:27:24,070 and shoots him down in cold blood, right? 524 00:27:24,070 --> 00:27:26,730 Let me simply remind you about the way in which, 525 00:27:26,730 --> 00:27:28,784 part of what gave that scene it's power 526 00:27:28,784 --> 00:27:30,200 had to do with the fact that there 527 00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:32,470 was a psychological dimension to it. 528 00:27:32,470 --> 00:27:35,050 The young murderer who was committing the murder 529 00:27:35,050 --> 00:27:37,790 had been frustrated because he tried to show off earlier 530 00:27:37,790 --> 00:27:39,590 and not succeeded. 531 00:27:39,590 --> 00:27:43,130 And that imparted a terrible, horrible irony to the scene, 532 00:27:43,130 --> 00:27:45,530 because you realize that this murder is 533 00:27:45,530 --> 00:27:48,600 completely fortuitous, it's completely accidental. 534 00:27:48,600 --> 00:27:51,730 If that little murderer had succeeded earlier 535 00:27:51,730 --> 00:27:55,690 in shooting the bottle that was floating around 536 00:27:55,690 --> 00:27:58,550 on the frozen pond, he probably would not have challenged, 537 00:27:58,550 --> 00:28:01,100 he definitely would not have challenged this young farmer 538 00:28:01,100 --> 00:28:03,130 to try to get back his mojo and show 539 00:28:03,130 --> 00:28:05,970 the people around him that he knew how to handle a gun. 540 00:28:05,970 --> 00:28:09,920 So what made this-- and of course, and then 541 00:28:09,920 --> 00:28:13,230 that already created a kind of complexity and texture. 542 00:28:13,230 --> 00:28:15,650 But then, when we add in the fact 543 00:28:15,650 --> 00:28:18,930 that this scene itself is one of the central iconic scenes 544 00:28:18,930 --> 00:28:25,000 in all Westerns, two males facing off against each other, 545 00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:26,830 ready to shoot we, come to realize 546 00:28:26,830 --> 00:28:32,780 that the various anti-heroic and ironic ways in which this shoot 547 00:28:32,780 --> 00:28:36,170 out is handled, throws a profoundly 548 00:28:36,170 --> 00:28:41,150 critical and disturbing light on dozens, and perhaps hundreds 549 00:28:41,150 --> 00:28:43,980 of earlier such scenes that have occurred in Westerns. 550 00:28:43,980 --> 00:28:47,960 That the very basis of the Western's embrace of violence, 551 00:28:47,960 --> 00:28:51,050 it's notion that you could achieve regeneration 552 00:28:51,050 --> 00:28:54,160 through violence, is put in question by that scene. 553 00:28:54,160 --> 00:28:56,910 So there's a texture or multiplicity the scene. 554 00:28:56,910 --> 00:29:00,430 It forwards the story, it shows a violent act, 555 00:29:00,430 --> 00:29:03,560 it tells us something about the psychology of the murderer, 556 00:29:03,560 --> 00:29:05,580 but even more than that, it resonates 557 00:29:05,580 --> 00:29:07,470 through the whole history of the Western, 558 00:29:07,470 --> 00:29:09,840 because the shoot out itself has been 559 00:29:09,840 --> 00:29:14,470 shown in such an anti-heroic, such an ironic light. 560 00:29:14,470 --> 00:29:16,370 Texture, multiplicity. 561 00:29:16,370 --> 00:29:18,820 Remember the moment in Cabaret where 562 00:29:18,820 --> 00:29:26,530 the Joel Gray character, the interlocutor, at one point 563 00:29:26,530 --> 00:29:30,010 kneels down while he's talking during the mud wrestling scene, 564 00:29:30,010 --> 00:29:32,040 picks up a piece of mud on his finger, 565 00:29:32,040 --> 00:29:35,560 rubs it on his face like this, and gives himself 566 00:29:35,560 --> 00:29:37,140 with Hitler mustache. 567 00:29:37,140 --> 00:29:39,490 I mean it's a rich comic moment, but is 568 00:29:39,490 --> 00:29:41,850 more than that, especially in the context of, 569 00:29:41,850 --> 00:29:43,340 as the film proceeds. 570 00:29:43,340 --> 00:29:45,640 We understand from that moment that the Nazis 571 00:29:45,640 --> 00:29:47,990 are objects of fun and mockery. 572 00:29:47,990 --> 00:29:49,800 Not that dangerous, it would seem, 573 00:29:49,800 --> 00:29:52,910 at least at that the cabaret feels superior to it. 574 00:29:52,910 --> 00:29:56,000 And of course, when we think about the course of the film, 575 00:29:56,000 --> 00:29:58,450 when we think about how the Nazis moved from the periphery 576 00:29:58,450 --> 00:30:00,870 to the center of the movie, we come 577 00:30:00,870 --> 00:30:04,160 to recognize that that moment, especially in retrospect, 578 00:30:04,160 --> 00:30:05,970 that moment has a particular kind 579 00:30:05,970 --> 00:30:08,490 of ironic original richness, that's partly 580 00:30:08,490 --> 00:30:11,320 a function of the obliviousness that everyone 581 00:30:11,320 --> 00:30:14,190 in the cabaret, and even the Joel Gray character, 582 00:30:14,190 --> 00:30:16,900 despite his apparent cynicism and worldliness 583 00:30:16,900 --> 00:30:18,945 seems to have about-- they're innocent, 584 00:30:18,945 --> 00:30:22,110 they're naive about the power and danger 585 00:30:22,110 --> 00:30:24,680 of the rise of the Nazis. 586 00:30:24,680 --> 00:30:28,451 And let me give you one last example, although there are 587 00:30:28,451 --> 00:30:29,700 many others that we mentioned. 588 00:30:29,700 --> 00:30:32,690 Do you remember the moment in the passage 589 00:30:32,690 --> 00:30:37,850 I showed you from the De Sica movie, Umberto D? 590 00:30:37,850 --> 00:30:42,730 That very brief moment where we see a man get on a tram, a bus, 591 00:30:42,730 --> 00:30:45,220 and sit next to someone on the bus, and the bus moves. 592 00:30:45,220 --> 00:30:47,244 It's a completely wordless sequence, 593 00:30:47,244 --> 00:30:49,410 and there's a character we've never seen in the film 594 00:30:49,410 --> 00:30:52,380 before who sits down next to the protagonist, 595 00:30:52,380 --> 00:30:53,910 no words exchanged. 596 00:30:53,910 --> 00:30:56,730 When our protagonist gets up and gets off the bus, 597 00:30:56,730 --> 00:30:59,520 the camera lingers briefly on the man he left behind, 598 00:30:59,520 --> 00:31:01,240 and we see that man go like this. 599 00:31:01,240 --> 00:31:03,640 And what I suggested to you, again, 600 00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:05,170 I suggested that this was a moment 601 00:31:05,170 --> 00:31:09,350 of richness and complexity, of multiplicity in a way. 602 00:31:09,350 --> 00:31:11,392 Because one implication of that scene 603 00:31:11,392 --> 00:31:14,330 is that the man, this stranger that we'll never meet again, 604 00:31:14,330 --> 00:31:17,050 that we only saw for one brief instant 605 00:31:17,050 --> 00:31:19,820 in the course of the film, might have concealed the story 606 00:31:19,820 --> 00:31:23,020 as deep as rich and as moving as that of our hero 607 00:31:23,020 --> 00:31:26,060 Umberto D., who is now leaving the tram, 608 00:31:26,060 --> 00:31:29,040 and we will shortly be following him. 609 00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:34,220 Again, a moment of complexity or richness 610 00:31:34,220 --> 00:31:40,190 that embodies central meanings, helps 611 00:31:40,190 --> 00:31:43,080 us to see central meanings in the text. 612 00:31:43,080 --> 00:31:45,690 Well I have a final example of this kind 613 00:31:45,690 --> 00:31:47,590 of texture or multiplicity. 614 00:31:47,590 --> 00:31:49,300 It's an example I had hoped to show you 615 00:31:49,300 --> 00:31:51,430 what we talked about Kurosawa last week, 616 00:31:51,430 --> 00:31:54,810 but I didn't quite make enough time in my lecture, 617 00:31:54,810 --> 00:31:57,950 and I want to show it here, as a kind of final homage 618 00:31:57,950 --> 00:32:01,420 to that great director, and as a way of reminding you 619 00:32:01,420 --> 00:32:05,340 of the variety of performances that the great actor Toshiro 620 00:32:05,340 --> 00:32:11,730 Mifune, who plays the rapist in Rashomon, was capable of. 621 00:32:11,730 --> 00:32:16,290 So here is a scene, a very minor scene, actually, from the film, 622 00:32:16,290 --> 00:32:18,670 from the Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, 623 00:32:18,670 --> 00:32:20,180 which I mentioned last time. 624 00:32:20,180 --> 00:32:22,770 Let me set the context for you, before I show it to you. 625 00:32:22,770 --> 00:32:25,640 It's a very brief scene. 626 00:32:25,640 --> 00:32:28,150 Seven Samurai, which I've sometimes shown in this course, 627 00:32:28,150 --> 00:32:30,060 I actually toyed with the idea of having 628 00:32:30,060 --> 00:32:33,550 to watch both Rashomon and Seven Samurai, 629 00:32:33,550 --> 00:32:36,010 but Seven Samurai is a very long movie, 630 00:32:36,010 --> 00:32:38,424 and I sometimes warn students about it 631 00:32:38,424 --> 00:32:39,590 when I show it in the class. 632 00:32:39,590 --> 00:32:41,230 I decided not to do it, but I hope 633 00:32:41,230 --> 00:32:45,310 all of you over your Christmas break, 634 00:32:45,310 --> 00:32:47,960 soon, will look at Seven Samurai. 635 00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:51,350 It will resonate, especially for you, 636 00:32:51,350 --> 00:32:54,690 since you've just seen an earlier Kurosawa film. 637 00:32:54,690 --> 00:33:00,840 Well, this immensely long film has a wonderful epic amplitude. 638 00:33:00,840 --> 00:33:02,780 And the long first section of the film 639 00:33:02,780 --> 00:33:06,050 involves, essentially, the assembling 640 00:33:06,050 --> 00:33:08,020 of a group of samurai who are going 641 00:33:08,020 --> 00:33:12,260 to go to a village to defend this village of farmers 642 00:33:12,260 --> 00:33:15,190 from the deprivation of bandits. 643 00:33:15,190 --> 00:33:16,940 When the film opens, some farmers 644 00:33:16,940 --> 00:33:22,140 aren't make their way to a great city, trying to find samurai 645 00:33:22,140 --> 00:33:24,010 who will come and defend them. 646 00:33:24,010 --> 00:33:28,890 And the first section of the film 647 00:33:28,890 --> 00:33:34,470 shows this group of samurai slowly coming together, 648 00:33:34,470 --> 00:33:36,940 but only six of them are in the group, because there 649 00:33:36,940 --> 00:33:39,080 was a seventh who tried to join them, 650 00:33:39,080 --> 00:33:40,950 the Toshiro Mifune character, but he 651 00:33:40,950 --> 00:33:44,200 was rejected in the earlier part of the film 652 00:33:44,200 --> 00:33:46,160 that we haven't yet seen. 653 00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:49,030 That we have seen, but when you look at the clip, 654 00:33:49,030 --> 00:33:52,040 you will not seen yet, because he's not really a samurai, 655 00:33:52,040 --> 00:33:54,390 he's is a commoner who was trying 656 00:33:54,390 --> 00:33:56,150 to fake that he was a samurai. 657 00:33:56,150 --> 00:33:58,630 He grew up top knot, he can handle a sword, 658 00:33:58,630 --> 00:34:00,200 but they could tell in various ways, 659 00:34:00,200 --> 00:34:02,090 he didn't know the poetry that samurai 660 00:34:02,090 --> 00:34:04,430 knew, a lot of ways in which they figured out 661 00:34:04,430 --> 00:34:06,730 that the Mifune character really was not a samurai. 662 00:34:06,730 --> 00:34:08,309 So they didn't let them join them. 663 00:34:08,309 --> 00:34:09,850 And in this scene we're going to see, 664 00:34:09,850 --> 00:34:11,580 it's two or two and a half minutes long, 665 00:34:11,580 --> 00:34:13,038 and this is one reason I wanted you 666 00:34:13,038 --> 00:34:15,760 to look at it, because it's so brief, 667 00:34:15,760 --> 00:34:17,810 and its basic function is so simple. 668 00:34:17,810 --> 00:34:21,360 The point of the scene is to get the samurai to the village 669 00:34:21,360 --> 00:34:24,610 where the central aspect, where the central adventure 670 00:34:24,610 --> 00:34:26,300 of the film will take place. 671 00:34:26,300 --> 00:34:29,400 So we could almost think of part one as a kind of prologue, 672 00:34:29,400 --> 00:34:33,052 or at least an introductory preparation, 673 00:34:33,052 --> 00:34:36,889 and the film really isn't going to get going in one sense 674 00:34:36,889 --> 00:34:39,290 until after this transition moment. 675 00:34:39,290 --> 00:34:42,850 So the sequence we're looking at has a very simple narrative 676 00:34:42,850 --> 00:34:44,920 function, it's to get the samurai 677 00:34:44,920 --> 00:34:47,830 from the city to the rural village, 678 00:34:47,830 --> 00:34:50,270 and we see them making this trip. 679 00:34:50,270 --> 00:34:56,150 But as you'll see, the scene has a much greater multiplicity, 680 00:34:56,150 --> 00:35:02,650 a much greater significance than simply this simple narrative 681 00:35:02,650 --> 00:35:06,700 significance of moving the actors to a new location. 682 00:35:06,700 --> 00:35:07,230 Here we go. 683 00:35:10,976 --> 00:35:12,850 And see he's following them in the back there 684 00:35:12,850 --> 00:35:13,860 and they say go away. 685 00:35:13,860 --> 00:35:16,848 [VIDEO PLAYBACK] 686 00:35:16,848 --> 00:35:19,836 [MUSIC PLAYING] 687 00:35:31,788 --> 00:35:34,776 [LAUGHTER] 688 00:36:35,532 --> 00:36:37,026 [WHOOPING] 689 00:36:42,504 --> 00:36:43,998 [WHOOP] 690 00:36:43,998 --> 00:36:44,994 [LAUGHTER] 691 00:37:01,020 --> 00:37:02,978 [SPEAKING JAPANESE] 692 00:37:12,402 --> 00:37:13,890 [LAUGHTER] 693 00:37:16,866 --> 00:37:18,354 [WHOOPING] 694 00:37:18,354 --> 00:37:20,338 [SPEAKING JAPANESE] 695 00:37:24,802 --> 00:37:26,786 [END PLAYBACK] 696 00:37:26,786 --> 00:37:30,100 PROFESSOR: Alright, so a scene of unexpected comedy, 697 00:37:30,100 --> 00:37:30,910 but what else? 698 00:37:30,910 --> 00:37:33,532 Can you see how much is going on there? 699 00:37:33,532 --> 00:37:35,740 If we think about the scene for a moment, we can see, 700 00:37:35,740 --> 00:37:37,480 OK, the first function of the scene 701 00:37:37,480 --> 00:37:39,830 is to get them to the village. 702 00:37:39,830 --> 00:37:44,020 But it's a wonderful example of the multiplicity principle, 703 00:37:44,020 --> 00:37:45,260 it seems to me. 704 00:37:45,260 --> 00:37:47,830 It forwards the story in some simple sense, 705 00:37:47,830 --> 00:37:49,250 but what does it also do? 706 00:37:49,250 --> 00:37:51,890 It defines the samurai in some basic way. 707 00:37:51,890 --> 00:37:55,110 First of all, the legitimate samurai have a sense of humor. 708 00:38:00,270 --> 00:38:03,470 But even more than that, as we're 709 00:38:03,470 --> 00:38:05,870 watching this scene, what do we see, among other things? 710 00:38:05,870 --> 00:38:09,470 A wonderful very brief dramatization of the conflict 711 00:38:09,470 --> 00:38:10,590 between man and nature. 712 00:38:10,590 --> 00:38:14,110 Think of a raw those natural environments 713 00:38:14,110 --> 00:38:16,390 are in that sequence. 714 00:38:16,390 --> 00:38:20,870 And the extent to which we also-- the film 715 00:38:20,870 --> 00:38:25,470 itself is in many ways-- a sub-theme in the film 716 00:38:25,470 --> 00:38:27,750 is the relationship between human beings 717 00:38:27,750 --> 00:38:30,870 and natural forces, this scene implicitly 718 00:38:30,870 --> 00:38:34,410 sets that them up without doing anything fancy 719 00:38:34,410 --> 00:38:35,890 or calling our attention to it. 720 00:38:35,890 --> 00:38:37,220 What else does it do? 721 00:38:37,220 --> 00:38:40,590 It defines the Mifune character really richly and fully. 722 00:38:40,590 --> 00:38:42,440 He's something of a clown, isn't he? 723 00:38:42,440 --> 00:38:46,010 He likes attention, there's something deeply theatrical 724 00:38:46,010 --> 00:38:46,530 about him. 725 00:38:46,530 --> 00:38:50,160 See the way he, he knew the other samurai were watching him 726 00:38:50,160 --> 00:38:52,933 when he caught the-- What else did we learn about him? 727 00:38:52,933 --> 00:38:54,800 He's also unbelievably competent. 728 00:38:54,800 --> 00:38:57,050 He jumps in that freezing water and he catches 729 00:38:57,050 --> 00:38:59,130 a fish with his bare hands. 730 00:38:59,130 --> 00:39:00,985 And one implication of this scene 731 00:39:00,985 --> 00:39:03,485 may very well be that one the things to the Mifune character 732 00:39:03,485 --> 00:39:07,510 is trying to do is show the samurai how competent is. 733 00:39:07,510 --> 00:39:10,379 And you see, he ends up leading them to the village. 734 00:39:10,379 --> 00:39:12,670 And of course, you might guess, do you think he remains 735 00:39:12,670 --> 00:39:14,140 excluded? 736 00:39:14,140 --> 00:39:16,070 No of course not, he ends up joining. 737 00:39:16,070 --> 00:39:20,520 He is the seventh samurai, and becomes the seventh 738 00:39:20,520 --> 00:39:22,270 as the film goes on. 739 00:39:22,270 --> 00:39:28,430 So we, Mifune's nature is defined for us in action 740 00:39:28,430 --> 00:39:32,390 more than in words, we have the theme of nature versus man, 741 00:39:32,390 --> 00:39:35,190 we have the broader definition of the nature of the samurai 742 00:39:35,190 --> 00:39:40,790 group itself, and we get an action that also moves 743 00:39:40,790 --> 00:39:42,250 the story to a new location. 744 00:39:44,810 --> 00:39:48,340 And one reason that I find this example such a powerful one, 745 00:39:48,340 --> 00:39:50,680 is that many people watching this movie never even 746 00:39:50,680 --> 00:39:54,080 remember this scene, because it's hardly-- even though it is 747 00:39:54,080 --> 00:39:55,960 very dramatic scene, isn't it? 748 00:39:55,960 --> 00:39:59,790 The fact is there's so many astonishing, dramatic, visually 749 00:39:59,790 --> 00:40:04,120 memorable scenes in the film, that most viewers who 750 00:40:04,120 --> 00:40:06,760 don't have the advantage of having this scene singled out 751 00:40:06,760 --> 00:40:09,220 for them would never even remember it. 752 00:40:09,220 --> 00:40:11,065 And that's exactly why it's so valuable, 753 00:40:11,065 --> 00:40:14,680 it seems to me, because if it plays a relatively minor role 754 00:40:14,680 --> 00:40:15,420 in the film. 755 00:40:15,420 --> 00:40:18,520 Its role in the film is fairly simple and structural, 756 00:40:18,520 --> 00:40:21,930 but even in that simple two and a half minute sequence, 757 00:40:21,930 --> 00:40:24,730 a great deal is going on. 758 00:40:24,730 --> 00:40:26,280 It's a wonderful instance, it seems 759 00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:29,340 to me, of what we mean by texture or multiplicity. 760 00:40:32,150 --> 00:40:34,370 If you are aware of this principle when 761 00:40:34,370 --> 00:40:37,470 you look at other forms of art, not just films, 762 00:40:37,470 --> 00:40:41,520 I think you'll find your sense of what 763 00:40:41,520 --> 00:40:43,450 is going on in a particular text, 764 00:40:43,450 --> 00:40:46,910 or a particular expressive form, will be immensely enlarged. 765 00:40:46,910 --> 00:40:51,330 And I hope you apply these ideas not just to movies 766 00:40:51,330 --> 00:40:53,480 in the future, but to other but to other forms 767 00:40:53,480 --> 00:40:56,670 of expressive experience as well. 768 00:40:56,670 --> 00:40:58,710 I also, at the end of this course, 769 00:40:58,710 --> 00:41:00,760 as at the end of every semester, am 770 00:41:00,760 --> 00:41:04,370 afflicted by a sense of gratitude 771 00:41:04,370 --> 00:41:06,635 that I can't always fully express to my students. 772 00:41:09,210 --> 00:41:11,480 I've been doing this for a long time, 773 00:41:11,480 --> 00:41:14,320 I was thinking as the class opened this afternoon looking 774 00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:15,903 out at your faces, I realized that one 775 00:41:15,903 --> 00:41:18,310 of the most amazing things about being a professor 776 00:41:18,310 --> 00:41:23,010 is that your basic clients stay young, and they keep you young, 777 00:41:23,010 --> 00:41:25,600 they keep you young, even though they also, in some ways 778 00:41:25,600 --> 00:41:28,040 make you more and more conscious of the gap between you 779 00:41:28,040 --> 00:41:29,745 and your students in some respects. 780 00:41:32,830 --> 00:41:37,100 I have no doubt that part of what 781 00:41:37,100 --> 00:41:40,770 has made my career a satisfying one, 782 00:41:40,770 --> 00:41:43,610 and certainly what has made me a much, much better teacher 783 00:41:43,610 --> 00:41:45,150 than I might otherwise have been, 784 00:41:45,150 --> 00:41:51,230 has been the enthusiasm and welcoming interest 785 00:41:51,230 --> 00:41:54,660 that I've felt from virtually every student I've ever taught. 786 00:41:54,660 --> 00:41:57,300 And that's especially true in this course, 787 00:41:57,300 --> 00:41:59,770 and it's been especially true in the semester. 788 00:41:59,770 --> 00:42:05,010 So I want to end then, by saying thank you. 789 00:42:05,010 --> 00:42:07,470 In a way, symbolically, I'd like to say thank you 790 00:42:07,470 --> 00:42:09,750 to the students I've been teaching 791 00:42:09,750 --> 00:42:13,670 for more than 35 years at MIT, for whom you are stand ins. 792 00:42:13,670 --> 00:42:16,266 But most of all, I want to thank you. 793 00:42:16,266 --> 00:42:21,390 You make me, teaching makes me, feel serious. 794 00:42:21,390 --> 00:42:25,400 Being able to introduce students to these astonishing works 795 00:42:25,400 --> 00:42:30,740 of art has always seemed to me to be a privilege for which I 796 00:42:30,740 --> 00:42:36,500 was unable to express, fully, my gratitude . 797 00:42:36,500 --> 00:42:38,064 So thank you very much. 798 00:42:38,064 --> 00:42:38,980 Have a wonderful life. 799 00:42:38,980 --> 00:42:40,530 [BLANK AUDIO]