Film Genres and Auteurs

• Dr. Mark Nicholls• Dr. Athena Bellas• Ann Turner (Guest Lecturer)

“All models are wrong, some are useful”

• Subject Focus 2015:• To achieve fullest understanding of 13+ ‘must

see’ films and their makers• Ann Turner (writer/director) Case Study• Further understand Genre and Auteurism as

critical paradigms• Problematise these and explain the

productive/destructive tension between them

Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) & Modern Times (1936)

• Lecture Overview:• 1. Close Analysis (1- to 18.00 mins)• 2. The Tramp and The Show Folk Reading • 3. Gesamtkunstwerk and Critiques of

Modernity• 4. Sound, Chaplin and the Modernisation of

Industry• 5. Comments/Questions

1. Close Analysis (1- to 18.00 mins)

• Film shoot/cutting Oct. 1934 - Aug. 1935• Chaplin early 30s world tour• Script use of “Note: Tramp Business”• Plagiarism claim A Nous La Liberte (Rene Clair)• Factory worker/Tramp ?• Parody of Newsreel style• Metropolis (Lang, 1927)

1. Close Analysis (1- to 18.00 mins)

• 16, 18, 24 frames per second• Soviet Historical Montage (Eisenstein)• Diegetic Sound• Efficiency and time/motion study• Bee and clichés of Nature• Compartmentalisation / Interpellation• Surrealist Reading of Chaplin: Mad Love

1. Close Analysis (1- to 18.00 mins)

• Factory trauma and shell shock• Chaplin’s own childhood poverty• Obsessive compulsive/ hysteria• Editing strategies/film speed (f/p/s)• Vaslav Nijinksy and the Ballets Russes

2. The Tramp and The Show Folk Reading

• Tramp and Modernity incompatible?• Chaplin and personal creative renewal?• The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)• All about show business?• Paulette Godard (1910-1990)• Sound film c. 1927• Factory – Department Store – Domestic bliss

2. The Tramp and The Show Folk Reading

• Show business and modern mechanisation incompatible ?

• Tramp only has prison or the road?

3. Gesamtkunstwerk and Critiques of Modernity

• Chaplin as Wagner’s Total Artist• Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909-1929)• Compartmentalistion of Labor• Relationship between the collective and the

genius individual in the total art work• How do Genre and the Auteur map onto this

paradigm ?

4. Sound, Chaplin and the Modernisation of Industry

• Chaplin’s Romantic Scandals• Chaplin as Communist • Chaplin as industrial threat to Studio System and

standardisation• Vertical Integration of

production/distribution/exhibition• Cinema as pantomime ?• Tramps’s song as critique of sound/System• Buster Keaton, The General (1926)

Floor Comments/Questions

• “Did Chaplin speak about his process ?”• “Was Chaplin’s fame an impediment to being

taken seriously as an artist ?”• Chaplin as exile from USA.

Suggested Bibliography/Filmography

• Metropolis (Lang, 1927)• Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein,1925)• Strike (Eisenstein, 1925)• The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)• Thomson, D. The Whole Equation: A History of

Hollywood, Little Brown, 2007.• Cooke, A. Alistair Cooke at the Movies, Penuin,

2011