Week 11 Class notes

1. Buster Keaton (1895 - 1966)

Male silent film stars of the 1920s: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon...

Charlie Chaplin as "The Little Tramp"


Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923)


Buster Keaton, the "Great Stone Face," with porkpie hat



Buster Keaton in The General (1927)

Family background in vaudeville


A contemporary "vaudeville" troupe, the New York based Vaudeville Nouveau

2. Formal analysis - Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

* visual aspects
framing, composition, mise en scène ("placing on stage," the arrangement of objects and figures within a unified space)

shots: long shot, medium shot, close up

* narrative aspects
from daguerreotype / photograph to motion picture
Lumière: L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)

* context: theaters and audiences
problem of cinema's availability to an "ethnically diverse, socially unruly, and sexually mixed audience" (M. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 1994)

3. Film as historical document
Selections from student response paragraphs:
While watching Sherlock, Jr. you can see the steady development of film and the creativity brought out by the director and the beginning of special effects in movies. This also shows how entertainment in the 1920’s is progressing and what they found funny, romantic, thrilling, and controversial at that time compared to the present. This film also gives you a feeling of the industrial improvement of that time. Trains, cars, and other equipment shown in the film can lead you to the conclusion of how advanced the 1920’s were.

Movie and action is going on, but on the background, you can find images of single days in early 1900s. This is like documentary, where someone records the life of his period, but literally you get images of how people dressed, how their culture was, their demeanors and values, or for instance when Sherlock, Jr gets on the roof of the building you have opportunity to see how the one single day of a busy city life; how the people and transport moved in the street, how the infrastructure looked like, or the railway and train itself, or the cars, houses and architecture and design

the background of movie was also a theater, which shows how Americans spend their leisure time at that time. leisure time would symbolize how one country was developed and in some extent, gives cultural accounts by what people were doing with what kind of tool. therefore, movie can be used as a cultural and social account of specific countries by showing how people were thinking and how the country was developed.

Another advantage was that people from different countries can equally perceive such kind of film. There is no any language used and for student from different countries it is very easy to understand.

In this movie we saw what people in 1920s found funny. This movie tells us that people laugh when someone makes a fool of himself especially by accidents. For example tripping over anything, or cliche scene with the banana. Also it reflects the relationship between women and men and how they are able to show love, they are shy to express it.

Mass culture and its audiences

Historical "anxieties"

The movie business

artistic influence
surrealists, literary modernists
* Samuel Beckett - En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (1953); BK in Film (1964)
"film-within-a-film" / entering the screen trope
* early film: Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1902; dir. Edwin S. Porter), a remake of a 1901 British film by Robert Paul, The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures
* French nouvelle vague filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut


The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985; dir. Woody Allen)


The Matrix (1999; dirs. L. Wachowski, A. Wachowski)

Adaptation (2002; dir. Spike Jonze; wri. Charlie Kaufmann)

stunts, action films, chase scenes

Jackie Chan (陳港生)


Selections from S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918:

An accurate reconstruction of events up to July 25 requires a temporal precision accurate to the day; after that the hour, sometimes even the minute, becomes crucial. (p. 264)

The telegrams exchanged between the Tsar and the Kaiser constituted a small fraction of the hundreds sent during the negotiations. Because they took place between the two monarchs of rival powers, they highlighted the strength and the weakness of telegraphic communication. The telegraph was unquestionably speedy. As war seemed imminent, both men, within forty-five minutes of one another, independently decided to reach across the vast distances to make a direct and personal appeal to the family ties, the traditions, and the shared values of the two monarchies in order to try and save the peace. And the telegraph made it possible. But the mechanical impersonality of this exchange excluded the expression of human sentiments that could have emerged in a face-to-face meeting. Proust had a vision of death when he first spoke to his grandmother over the telephone; perhaps the Kaiser and the Tsar heard a death rattle of diplomacy in the clicking of the telegraph key. This telegraphic exchange at the highest level dramatized the spectacular failure of diplomacy, to which telegraphy contributed with crossed messages, delays, sudden surprises, and the unpredictable timing. Throughout the crisis there was not just one new faster speed for everyone to adjust to, but a series of new and variable paces that supercharged the masses, confused the diplomats, and unnerved the generals. (p. 268)

Quote on p. 275 from Sir Ernest Satow, author of A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 1917:
The moral qualities - prudence, foresight, intelligence, penetration, wisdom - of statesmen and nations have not kept pace with the development of the means of action at their disposal: armies, ships, guns, explosives, land transport, but, more than all that, of rapidity of communication by telegraph and telephone. These latter leave no time for reflection or consultation, and demand an immediate and often hasty decision on matters of vital importance.

The compacting of events in time was best suited for the one new art form of the period - the cinema - that was able to suggest the multiplicity of occurrences in many distant places in a single moment. (p. 279)

The ability to experience many distant events at the same time, made possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major change in the experience of the present. (pp. 67-68)

As cinematic montage combines distant scenes to create a unified whole, so have I drawn together pieces of the cultural record using the principle of conceptual distance and an expository technique of juxtaposition. My method involves the presentation of diverse sources that are far enough apart to justify broad generalizations about the age without being too far apart to exceed the limits of plausibility. Thus, a parallel presentation of the response to two sinking ships would not tell us much as an identification of the thematic similarity between the reaction to a sinking ship and the musings of a philosopher. It is a long way, conceptually, from the Titanic to Nietzsche, and that is precisely what makes the identification of a common denominator so fruitful. It would be outrageous to link the Titanic and Nietzsche directly, but by following the shorter, intermediate links we see a coherent matrix of thought emerging. The juxtapositions from the Titanic to the wireless and telephone, to simultaneity and the spatially expanded present, to the temporally thickened "specious present," and finally to the positive evaluation of the present in Nietzsche and others outline the distinctive experience of the present in this period. The individual "shots" come from various sources relating to the two focal issues and conclude with a picture of Nietzsche's overman overjoyed at the prospect of eternal recurrence, happily affirming his fate in the here-and-now. (pp. 87 - 88)