Screening 4: More Thoughts on The Searchers

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifAs promised, below are some links to arguments made about the film that in some way address the significance of race in the film. Feel free to comment here on your thoughts regarding this issue.

1) Roger Ebert's review
2) The Wikipedia entry on the film's "Themes" section
3) A piece by a film critic entitled "They ain’t white. Not any more. They’re Comanch’": Race, Racism and the Fear of Miscegenation in The Searchers"
4) Another review from a writer on blogcritics.com

What these pieces have in common is an interest in contextualizing the kind of racism found in the film in a way that makes sense given the cultural, social, and industrial context in which the film was produced and consumed. These authors do not agree on the meaning of the film or the role of racism in it, but they do all start by separating the racism portrayed by the characters in the diegesis from any sense of the film as a whole as racist.

This is an important element for budding film scholars to address and be aware of: the characters represented in a work do not always (perhaps even rarely) present an ideology consistent with the film as a whole. Instead, films as narratives present all kinds of characters in specific circumstances so their behavior can be understood by the viewer within a broader context. This kind of approach to film study is an important perspective to begin understanding now as your careers as critics and theorists are beginning.

(As an aside, collapsing the distance between the text's ideology and the ideology of one of its characters--even the protagonist--is the mistake many detractors of media violence make all the time: that because the protagonist is very violent, that the film as a whole text condones or encourages such violence. This is often not the case.)

Nonetheless, these distinctions are quite subtle and open to interpretation as any set of symbols is, which is why we see the four authors above struggling with the precise way to contextualize the block of symbols we call The Searchers.

Having read these four pieces and watched the film, what do you think?

His Girl Friday and copyright

Here's an interesting post by our text authors on their film studies blog about His Girl Friday and the way its lack of copyright protection allowed early film scholars access to it.

There is also a response to it here on Jason Mittell's blog. Jason argues that the word "piracy" is not really appropriate since no laws were apparently broken. He also reinforces the idea that
"the film’s lack of scarcity has made it worth enough to pony up for a
high-quality authorized copy."
I would quibble that it seems to have been that and an apparent collective agreement that it is an excellent film. I add this because there are certainly lots of satisfactory and/or mediocre films that would be unlikely to become lauded classics even if they were freely circulated on Bittorrent. But for those films by which a contemporary audience would be engaged, access to them via the public domain does seem to increase their social and cultural value over time.

Screening 2: His Girl Friday

Production Notes: As mentioned, this film was directed by Howard Hawks. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) has it as released in 1940, but the copyright date at the start of the film was 1939. Also, as your reading indicates, Hawks made it while working at Columbia, one of the Little Three, though he didn't stay there very long.

Hays Code Slides

You ca also link directly to the Google Doc at this link.

Screening 1: Early Cinema and Beyond

In case you were wondering, here are the names of the films we watched on Tuesday the 5th of February:

Edison Kinetoscopes (1894-1896)
The Kiss
Serpentine Dances
Seminary Girls

Lumiere Shorts (1895-1897)
Exiting the Factory
Train Arriving at La Ciotat
Baby's Lunch

M (1931, directed by Fritz Lang)

Welcome!

Hello all. Welcome to the class blog, a place for us to store information about our course and continue the discussion outside of the strictures of the classroom. Visit back often to learn more about film culture.