Thursday, April 22, 2010

Neil Harris's term "operational aesthetics" covers much, if not all, of my interests in cinema. Harris develops the term in his book Humbug on P.T. Barnum. Noting that audiences flocked to Barnum's productions, even though they were known to be hoaxes and the ways Barnum's advertising invited audiences to "decide for themselves" - Harris elaborates a particularly American attitude, skeptical and information-seeking, that seeks to know how things look and how they work. It refers to the capacity of productions to appeal to the analystic,investigative, and problem-solving faculties. To elucidate his point, Harris even discusses Poe's invention of the detective story and its popularity. Yet operational aesthetics in cinema perhaps stretch beyond American borders. Early documentary forms, especially something like Basil Wright's Night Mail can be seen to be constructed around a desire to show --just as much as poeticize -- Britain's rail mail. Additionally, Eisenstein discusses something very much like the operational aesthetic (in a quote contained in Annette Michelson's essay "Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair") when he talks about the school film, and the ability of cinema to show pupils "how a power station, a newspaper, a book, a glass factory, a colored illustration is produced.."(paraphrase - from Conversations with Eisenstein trans. harry brose, 1970) . Urban cinema -- film which shows "how a city works" is one mode of operational aesthetics (and Eisenstein alludes to the urban nature of the school film earlier in this quote.)

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Robert Zecker's book Metropolis covers urban representations in American mass culture. His chapter on the 1960s and 1970s covers various cop programs including The Streets of San Francisco, NYPD, Mannix, and some others.
What happened to Juanita Neilsen? A Sydney journalist who, in the 1970s opposed a real estate development and was then murdered. Two films document these events Heatwave (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981) -- the latter especially is supposed to be worth watching. A genre film about real estate and society a la Over the Edge?


An off the cuff quote from Edward Buscombe's entry on The House on 92nd Street in the BFI Companion to Crime: "Almost any issue that Hollywood wanted to make a film about could be refracted through the generic conventions of the crime film." (175)

Paired with this quote from Will Straw on Leftist involvment in the social documentary genre: "At the heart of the semi-documentary was the tension between its restricted institutional frame and teh rich possibilities offered by narrative worlds outside the studio backlot." (in "Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left," 'Un-American Hollywood," 141.)

Important also to look at is Parker Tyler's relation of narratives of investigation to documentary in American Quarterly 1 (1949), 99-115 [See notes to Straw's essay] AND Kracauer's review of Boomerang! in an article called "Those Movies with a Message" in Harper's 196 no. 1176 (May 1948): 568.
Sabine Haenni has a recent article in the Journal of Film and Video (Spring/Summer 2010), "Geographies of Desire: Postsocial Urban Space and Historical Revision in the Films of Martin Scorsese." Interesting, as far as I have read, relevant to my topic, should be included at some point.