Film History:
Appeal:
• Accessibility (eBay)
• Old films are hypotexts
• Trans-historicity
Basic approaches:
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Biographical history: directors, starts,
photographers
Industrial and economic history: organisation
and business
Aesthetic history: form, style and genre
Technological history: materials and machines
Social/cultural/political history: the context
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> Combinations and dialectics
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Basic filmhistorical questions:
1. How have different ways of using the film
medium become common and
widespread through the times?
Narrative structures and styles with
specific uses of mise-en-scene, light,
locations, costumes, camera, editing,
sound and genres
Basic filmhistorical questions:
2. How have the conditions of the film
industry – production, distribution,
projections – influenced the use of the
medium?
E.g.:
The studio-system with division of labour,
independent filmmakers, delays of
technology and ways of projections
Basic filmhistorical questions:
3. How have international tendencies arisen
and become dominant in the use of the
medium of film in the film market?
E.g.:
The national and the international
The western genre:
samurai films, spaghetti western, potato
western, Klöse western
Periods:
1. Early film:1880s - 1919
2. Late silent period: 1919-1929
3. Development of sound: 1926-1945
4. The periods after WWII : 1946-1960s
5. Contemporary film: 1960s – now
From Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell,
Film History An Introduction
Structures:
Chronology, what becomes before what?
Structures:
Chronology, what becomes before what?
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Causality:
Individuals: methodological individualism (the great man)
Groups: methodological collectivism (institutions, movements, schools)
Structures :
Chronology, what becomes before what?
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Causality:
Individuals: methodological individualism (the great man)
Groups: methodological collectivism (institutions, movements, schools)
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Influence (e.g. from one director to another)
Structures :
Chronology, what becomes before what?
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Causality:
Individuals: methodological individualism (the great man)
Groups: methodological collectivism (institutions, movements, schools)
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Influence (e.g. from one director to another)
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Tendencies and generalizations: hypotheses that are verified, e.g. the spread of colour
film between 1940 and 1960
Structures :
Chronology, what becomes before what?
+
Causality:
Individuals: methodological individualism (the great man)
Groups: methodological collectivism (institutions, movements, schools)
+
Influence (e.g. from one director to another)
+
Tendencies and generalizations: hypotheses that are verified, e.g. the spread of colour
film between 1940 and 1960
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Periods: internal and external, (overlapping)
Structures :
Chronology, what becomes before what?
+
Causality:
Individuals: methodological individualism (the great man)
Groups: methodological collectivism (institutions, movements, schools)
+
Influence (e.g. from one director to another)
+
Tendencies and generalizations: hypotheses that are verified, e.g. the spread of colour
film between 1940 and 1960
+
Periods: internal and external, (overlapping)
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Importance: monuments of film history, based on:
Artistic value
Influence
The typical example
Monstrology
From Carroll, Noël, The Philosophy of Horror, Routledge, London 1990
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Monsters:
challenge human cognition and mode of thinking
come from outside the human world
are disgusting
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Three types of monsters:
Fusion monsters, e.g. a zombie which is fusion of both living and
dead
Fission monsters, e.g. a werewolf, which fusion of human and
wolf, but separated by time: a wolf by full moon only
Magnification monsters: large and many, e.g. giant ants
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