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DAVID THORBURN: I want to begin by asking

what seems an obvious question, what is film?

I used to sometimes present it by saying, film as, dot, dot,

dot.

Film as what?

And it may be surprising to you, but one way

we could think about film is as chemistry.

Now how could that make sense?

Why would it make sense to think of film as a form of chemistry?

What this film got to do with chemistry?

In fact it's a very fundamental relation.

This is also true of still photography, as well as movies.

But what's the process by which they're made?

Yes.

AUDIENCE: Film really comes together from a--

DAVID THORBURN: Speak loudly so everybody can.

AUDIENCE: Film is made up of a lot of different components.

You have your lighting, your scene, your character.

And that all has to come together to make film.

Without even on component of it, you're

losing part of the experience.

DAVID THORBURN: You're right about that.

But that's a more general answer than I wanted.

There's something much more dramatically

fundamental about the way, about the connection

between chemistry and movies.

What is it?

AUDIENCE: The interaction between the audience and.

DAVID THORBURN: It doesn't have to do

with the experience of movies.

Come on.

It's technical.

AUDIENCE: Chemistry had to be developed

before you could have it.

DAVID THORBURN: It depends on chemistry.

Film is a form of applied chemistry.

Why?

Of course you're right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID THORBURN: Yes.

What is a film?

There are certain emulsions that are put on piece of celluloid.

Light actually has to normally-- it can be any light,

but sunlight is best-- act, interacting

with those emulsions, causes the image to appear.

The actual, fundamental process by which film

is physically created is a chemical process.

And if you reflect on for a moment,

one of the things this suggests is

that then when we think about film in a much larger sense,

in the film as we experience in theaters, film,

as an engine of economic development,

as a provider of jobs, and careers, and so forth.

What we could say is that it is a form of applied chemistry

that is among the most profound uses of chemistry

that humankind has ever found.

Because if you think about the impact of movies on human life,

it is now a global phenomenon.

Is there any culture that is free of movies?

Maybe there are Taliban cultures that

dream of being free of movies.

But to my knowledge there's no culture in the world now

that's completely oblivious to film.

It's become a global phenomenon.

And it's more than a century old.

It is the distinctive, narrative form

of the 20th century, the signature form of storytelling

for the 20th century.

All of it derives from this chemical reaction, when

the emulsions are subjected to light,

the image appears on the celluloid.

There are even theoreticians of movies who have suggested

that there's a fundamental break of a kind that is subliminal,

unless obvious to many people.

But it's fundamental to our experience of text

when we moved from real film to digital forms of filmmaking.

Because nature is eliminated in digital form.

There's something natural, and in fact slow,

about the way when light works on those

emulsions to bring the images up.

And those of you who are amateur photographers

will know that you can control the clarity or the blurriness

of the image, the darkest of the lightness of the image, by how

long you leave the film paper in the emulsions.

You can control it, and still photographers

and creative movie directors actually

use those use that chemical principle in order

to create certain kinds of effects.

So one way to think about movies is

to think of it as a form of applied chemistry.

And one of the most profound uses of chemistry

that we could imagine in terms of its impact

on society, in terms of the vast number of people

who have been affected, and continue to be

affected by this invention.

So film is a form of chemistry.

What I'm suggesting, these different framings of what film

is, these different frameworks for understanding film.

One thing I'm trying to do is to suggest

some of the ways in which we might understand film

apart from what we're going to be doing in this course.

Now I don't know if one could justify

persuading a professor of chemistry

to teach a course in film.

That might be going too far.

But certain broad principles of photography,

and how they are linked to other photochemical processes,

might very well make a quite exciting and complicated course

in the chemistry department.

One can also think of film simply in a historical sense,

certainly, as a kind of novelty.

When film first appeared in the world,

and especially in the United States,

it was seen as a novelty that caused its first appearance

to take place in places like penny arcades.

Where people went to experience other kinds of public novelties

as well.

there would be machines in these penny arcades

that would guess you're weight.

And you put a penny in, if the machine

was right it kept your penny, if the machine was wrong would

give your penny back.

There were fortune telling machines

in these penny arcades.

In some of the more sleazy ones there were live peep shows.

Strip shows of various moderate kinds.

And of course, even at the very early stages,

film begin to replicate those live performances.

There were very trivial forms of burlesque

began to-- women stripping-- I don't think

there were any male strippers in this late Victorian era-- began

to appear in the penny arcades as well.

So one could say that film in its earliest stages

was also just a kind of novelty item, like a PEZ dispenser

or some equivalent kind of silly thing,

or baseball cards, or football cards, that kind of thing.

More profoundly of course, we could think of film

from another [INAUDIBLE], a manufactured object.

And this identity of film is incredibly important.

It's again, easy for us to forget,

because when we go to the movies today,

we see these complex and overwhelming--

we have these complex and overwhelming audiovisual

experiences.

And we might tend to forget what in fact is

the sort of industrial base on which movies were made

at a relatively early stage.

Part of what we want at least to be aware of in our course,

even though we won't study it systematically,

is the fact that the movies, the film,

is one of the first significant commodities

to become a mass-produced item.

And in fact, the same principles that

led to another manufacturing miracle

that we associate with the late 19th and early 20th century--

the automobile-- the same principles that

went to the production of the automobile

also worked in the production of film.

And in fact, both film and the automobile

could be seen as prototypical instances of this fundamentally

defining industrial capitalist behavior, capitalist activity,

which is mass production.

And especially, what does mass production depend upon?

The specialization of labor.

The rationalizing of the production

process into smaller, and smaller units.

So that particular people can do it quickly,

and you can create essentially an assembly line production.

You can create mass production.

I still find it very inspiring and important, significant,

the notion that film was created on an assembly line,

just like toasters or automobiles.

Seems a shocking and important insight.

Because they're still in some fundamental way

produced like this.

I don't mean that the same movie studios are churning out

500 movies a year, which is what was churned out

during the great era of the Hollywood Studios,

from around 1930 through the end of the 1940s.

But the fact is the production of movies,

the manufacture of movies still depends on these principles

of the specialization of labor.

And I'm not simply talking about the way in which we

have actors, and directors, and cinematographers, and grips,

and best boys, and set dressers, and makeup people, and script

writers, and so forth.

All are relevant to this.

But I'm also talking about the way in which movies, still

to this day, are divided in their production principles

in three stages, a pre-production phase,

a production phase, and a post-production phase.

And there are specialists at each level, on each phase.

And a vast army of specialist is hired

to handle the problems that are connected

to the production of every single film.

So we can think of films as a really distinctive, signature,

instance of what mass production is capable of.

OK.

So we can say that the film is a manufactured object.

And not just a manufactured object,

but a product of mass production,

a product of essentially, assembly line principles.

And what makes this so remarkable to me,

still an idea that I have trouble fully absorbing

is that the mass-produced item that we're

talking about, unlike a toaster or even an automobile,

managed so fully to permeate our society and our world,

that it's infiltrated ourselves even into our dreams

and our fantasy life.

And finally, another way to think about film,

and I'm going to sort of enlarge in that.

And this is a way we'll be talking

about quite a lot in the course of our discussions

in this semester.

We can say that film, after it's elaborated, and established

itself in culture, it becomes a fundamental social form,

a fundamental social formation.

And experienced, widely practiced,

widely indulged in by a vast number of people

in the society.

So that one could say for example,

toasters are important, but they don't

generate the kind of social rituals

that are involved in going to the movies,

and of identifying with movie stars,

and of generating fans surround movies,

and ancillary, complex activities that we associate

with movie going.

And in fact, one might say that the great era of movie going

is already gone.

That it was really in the era of the Hollywood Studios

when they were before the internet and before television.

So we could also think of the film as a social form.

Not when it first appears, when it's just a novelty,

but after it goes through various phases.

When it embeds itself into the society the way the movies did,

it becomes a kind of social form.

And one might almost argue that it

becomes one of the most important social forms

in the society because it's so widely shared.

Most social activities in the society

are relatively limited in the circle of people they involve.

Even the number of automobile drivers

is controlled in a way that is contained or demarcated