Much is Lost Through this Narrow Focus

March 24, 2023 10:54 AM

Unfortunately, students interested in film usually acquire their critical frameworks and vocabularies first from popular film reviews, which rely heavily on ideas about artistic achievement and make value judgments without clear criteria. It can be very difficult to break students of the habit of evaluating in these terms and to get them to describe and analyze what they see and hear. It can also be challenging to reconcile aesthetic or technical criteria of judgment with the different registers of social significance that connect films to students’ personal and social lives. These introduce other sets of values and selection criteria into teaching. from What Films Should We Teach?: A Conversation About the Canon

With data from the extraordinary Open Syllabus Galaxy

posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

Also from the article:

It’s certainly possible that Man with a Movie Camera’s top spot owes something to the fact that it’s freely available on YouTube. Ease of availability will be a factor on any syllabus.

Bingo.

For the vast majority of the films I've seen for my blog, the only way I could see them was through my Netflix account - but the one with DVDs. I'm one of those weirdos who still gets DVDs from Netflix because there's so much they don't stream.

I'm aware of services like Mubi, Kanopy, Criterion, etc., but - I don't have the budget to sign up for every last streaming service, and that means a poor college student definitely wouldn't. (And I know Kanopy is free, but - your library has to have an account with Kanopy for YOU to access it, and not every library does.)

And it's seeing a broad range of films that really makes a difference. I know I certainly have had my knowledge of films change, and my opinions continue to change to this day; I just saw a Russ Meyer film for the first time, and it blew my expectations to smithereens.

If you want people to have a broader exposure to film, make it easier for them to see stuff. Period.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:20 PM on March 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

If you want people to have a broader exposure to film, make it easier for them to see stuff. Period.

Yep: media that falls "out of print" (for whatever value of "in print" is current) is essentially gone. You can talk about it, but you can't experience it any more.

I took a college music class, for which the professor painfully assembled cassette tapes by hand that were available to listen in the library -- because the stuff just wasn't around. Musicians who had never been recorded were as purely theoretical to us an unpopular ones whose live radio performances or 78s were never preserved.

Goddamn DRM.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:39 PM on March 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

"If you want people to have a broader exposure to film, make it easier for them to see stuff. Period."

For-profit companies like Netflix do not care if people have a broader exposure to film, they care about making money. Companies like MUBI and Criterion also primarily care about making money, but I will give them a little more credit for at least trying to promote good taste. Filmmakers and distribution companies would LOVE to have their films seen by as wide an audience as possible, but it isn't easy to accomplish these days.
posted by cakelite at 1:04 PM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I took a class on film adaptation of Shakespeare back in the 90s, it was surprising how much work it was to see some of the films. Well, now it almost feels like we're going backwards in that regard.
posted by praemunire at 1:10 PM on March 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

The international impact of Rashomon, to take a major example, is inseparable from the contributions of its cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, who experimented with film stock and lighting in ways that profoundly influenced a generation of artists in other countries, such as cinematographer Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane.

He must mean that Miyagawa had a similar impact to Toland, because Miyagawa was definitely not an influence on him. Toland died before Rashomon was made.

When I was an undergraduate, we had to check out DVDs or VHS tapes of films and watch them on tiny monitors in the library with unpleasant library headphones, so I've seen almost everything mentioned in Film Art: An Introduction, masterpieces of cinema, on a 10x6 screen. Good preparation for watching everything on my phone, I guess.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:37 PM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

He must mean that Miyagawa had a similar impact to Toland, because Miyagawa was definitely not an influence on him. Toland died before Rashomon was made.

I raised my eyebrow on that one, too.
posted by praemunire at 3:44 PM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

For-profit companies like Netflix do not care if people have a broader exposure to film, they care about making money. Companies like MUBI and Criterion also primarily care about making money, but I will give them a little more credit for at least trying to promote good taste. Filmmakers and distribution companies would LOVE to have their films seen by as wide an audience as possible, but it isn't easy to accomplish these days.

Well, hell, how much money is the Academy getting every year from the Oscar awards? And now they have this big fancy museum to bring in money throughout the year - maybe they can start a huge streaming service of their own and put that money to some use.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:22 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

…Kazuo Miyagawa, who experimented with film stock and lighting in ways that profoundly influenced a generation of artists in other countries, such as cinematographer Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane.

He must mean that Miyagawa had a similar impact to Toland, because Miyagawa was definitely not an influence on him. Toland died before Rashomon was made.

Miyagawa’s cinematography career started in the 1930s, several years before Toland made Citizen Kane. So it is possible that his (pre-Rashomon) work was an influence on Toland. However, according to Miyagawa himself in this article by Ian Buruma, the influence was the other way around:

Of course, one can take the traditionalist interpretation of Mizoguchi’s style too far. I once asked his favorite cameraman, Kazuo Miyagawa, whether his characteristic depth of focus—in Ugetsu, for example—had anything to do with Japanese art. He smiled. “Not at all,” he said. “My main influence was the camera work of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane.”

posted by mbrubeck at 10:49 AM on March 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

This was really interesting. The biggest eye opener for me (which I guess is obvious when I write it out but.. I hadn't thought about) is how the auteur idea is still so dominant but so often inadequte in how we think about film history. Also the bit about which Japanese (and other International) films were subtitled and distributed in the US and how that biases a US conception of the 'great films' of Japan.
posted by latkes at 10:12 PM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]