Subtitles section Play video
-
The following content is provided under a Creative
-
Commons license.
-
Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare
-
continue to offer high quality educational resources for free.
-
To make a donation, or view additional materials
-
from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare
-
at ocw.mit.edu.
-
DAVID THORBURN: In this evening lecture what
-
I'd like to do is continue a bit to expand on and complicate
-
and maybe also deepen this idea I've
-
been suggesting to you that I'm labeling the Fred Ott
-
principle.
-
Really a shorthand way of describing
-
the immensely complex-- and from an intellectual standpoint,
-
a historical standpoint-- immensely
-
exciting and astonishing process whereby
-
film went in an incredibly short time
-
from being a mere novelty to being
-
an embedded social formation in the United States
-
and in other industrialized societies.
-
And not just only a embedded social formation,
-
becoming by the end of the 1920s one
-
of the central media for the expression of art,
-
and an artistic medium.
-
So that he went from being a mere novelty,
-
from Fred Ott's Sneeze in 20 years or so, 25 years,
-
to being a medium of astonishingly rich and complex
-
narrative art.
-
That progress is part of what I mean by the Fred Ott principle.
-
And it might be helpful if I concretize that a little bit
-
more by mentioning a bit more about what I mean about what
-
I was implying or referring to when I spoke
-
about that moment of imitation.
-
Remember I said that there were essentially--
-
that the silent film-- and incidentally,
-
I take it as a model for the way in which most new media
-
systems develop in culture.
-
You can apply this same basic schema
-
to other forms of popular entertainment,
-
including-- shocking as it may seem--
-
Shakespeare's public theater.
-
And I'll come back to the implications of that analogy.
-
The idea that Shakespeare was the movie of his time.
-
That Shakespeare's theater was the Hollywood studio system
-
of the Elizabethan era.
-
It's a very complicated one.
-
It's a very inspiring one.
-
And it's complicated because it makes us reassess our inherited
-
notions about what art is, and where art comes from.
-
One of the subtexts in this course
-
is precisely that, it has to do with what I call
-
the enabling conditions of art.
-
And I'll come back to that again as a theme, again and again
-
in the course.
-
So part of what I mean by the Fred Ott principle
-
is this roiling complex, partly unpredictable process,
-
whereby an enlarging population incredibly
-
hungry for the novelties being produced by this new technology
-
create a kind of symbiotic relationship
-
between the audience and the emerging medium.
-
So that as the medium grows more complicated, in part
-
because the audience-- OK, after 5, or 10, or 15
-
visits to the Nickelodeon, or-- after the movies moved out
-
of the penny arcades, and began to take their own space as some
-
of you know, and as it's recounted
-
in our reading for these early weeks,
-
the movies first moved out into what were called Nickelodeons.
-
They were storefronts for the most part.
-
And admission was a nickel, that's
-
where they were called Nickelodeons.
-
And you sat in many of these on benches
-
without backs, next to strangers.
-
You didn't have private seats.
-
And you would sit in there and see a series of short films.
-
But the fact that the Nickelodeons emerged so quickly
-
is a mark of how popular a film became, eve in its relatively
-
primitive early form.
-
And then, of course, within a few years of the Nickelodeons
-
appearing, what else began to happen?
-
Theaters made specially for the showing of motion pictures
-
that were longer than the early shorts,
-
because film began to expand its length all through the period
-
from 1910 through 1920.
-
What's the great moment when the feature film
-
is born in the United States?
-
1915.
-
Who's the director?
-
D.W. Griffith.
-
What's the film?
-
Birth of a Nation.
-
Birth of a Nation.
-
A very complicated example, because it's content
-
is disturbing in some ways.
-
It's a very reactionary, and in some respects racist film.
-
It absorbs and carries forward what
-
we might think of as the racial prejudices that
-
were very widespread in American society
-
at the turn of the century, and especially in the South.
-
From which Griffith himself was a southerner,
-
he was born in the South.
-
And his film was deeply influenced by a bestselling
-
novel called The Clansman, which was a celebration of the Ku
-
Klux Klan.
-
So the content of Birth of a Nation
-
is very unsettling and disturbing.
-
And even when it was first released
-
to the public-- to great acclaim because it
-
expanded the possibilities of movies in all kinds of ways.
-
From a technical standpoint it is an astonishingly important
-
film.
-
And from a content standpoint it's a very disturbing film.
-
It's a wonderful reminder of the fact
-
that this progress I'm describing to you
-
is not an unalloyed triumphal story.
-
Even as the movies became more technically complicated,
-
and more demanding, and longer, and more interested
-
in character, they also nonetheless carried
-
the lies, and prejudices, and hierarchical assumptions
-
that were embedded in the society from which they arose.
-
How could it be otherwise?
-
Every media form does this.
-
But it's important to make this point as a way of reminding us
-
that the story we're telling is not, in some simple sense,
-
just a kind of progress myth in which we're celebrating
-
development and genius.
-
We're identifying and locating something
-
more complicated than that-- the process
-
whereby these cultural myths, and these stories that
-
are drawn from inherited older stories,
-
and from the lore of the society more broadly, more generally,
-
are transformed into this new medium.
-
And they have a tremendous technical interest.
-
But very often they also have a kind
-
of cultural or sociological interest
-
of a negative kind in the sense that what they reveal
-
are the prejudices, the lies, the limitations of the society,
-
the mythologies that sustain the society.
-
Again this is a matter to which we'll return.
-
One of the deep cultural functions of American movies,
-
especially, was to promulgate a kind of mythology of America.
-
And we'll talk more about this when
-
we reach certain genre forms in the second segment
-
of the course.
-
I said something earlier this morning
-
that I want to make explicit, because I
-
think another way of qualifying this triumphal story.
-
It's hard because I'm enthusiastic about what
-
I'm looking at.
-
And there is some material that's so exciting here.
-
In a way, what we're watching is we're
-
watching the birth of the movies.
-
We're watching the discovery of the language
-
of cinema in these early films.
-
And that's why even though from an artistic standpoint,
-
some of these shorts are not very rich,
-
I hope they're interesting enough--
-
that I've made them interesting to you
-
from a historical standpoint.
-
If you look at them closely, you can see the movies being born.
-
You can see a language, a syntax for speaking in pictures,
-
for new visual language, this new visual medium being
-
developed.
-
And if I have time this evening, I'll
-
give you a few more concrete examples of that.
-
But another way in which one can qualify this apparently
-
triumphal story, it's not a triumphal story
-
even though it is a story of refinement, development,
-
and evolution of a kind that involves
-
increasing complexity and technical perfection,
-
technical mastery.
-
It's not merely that, or not even primarily that.
-
It's very important to recognize among other things,
-
as I implied this afternoon, that not
-
all the possibilities that are inherent in the nascent medium
-
are necessarily exploited in a particular cultural moment.
-
Or maybe ever exploited, depending
-
on how things develop.
-
That is to say.
-
I mentioned this afternoon how for instance, when Edison first
-
conceive the apparatus before it was actually invented,
-
of the motion picture projector, and the motion picture camera.
-
His first idea was that he would create
-
an item that would be a consumer item-- what we would today
-
call a consumer item-- that would
-
be sold to individual families.
-
And the field would become an equivalent
-
or a kind of a photo album, although it
-
would have motion it.
-
And as I suggested this afternoon,
-
there's no reason why given the nature of the technology
-
itself, that that vision of how film might develop
-
was impossible.
-
In fact, it wasn't impossible, it
-
was just incredibly ahead of its time.
-
It took half a century before something
-
like that actually became available in society.
-
But there was no reason in terms of the possibilities
-
of the technology that that needed to happen.
-
What I'm calling your attention to
-
is what is a very widespread myth.
-
It's especially pernicious and widespread at MIT.
-
For reasons that are obvious and understandable we at MIT
-
love to believe the technology will solve all problems.
-
The primary thing I'm suggesting to you
-
is that the evolution of the movies
-
that I want you to be aware of, this process
-
of increasing complexity and compression in which
-
the movies become a more and more independent
-
form of expression.
-
In which the movies begin to discover
-
the unique characteristics of the motion picture camera
-
and of the environment of the movie theater, that the movies
-
begin to explore.
-
Those qualities in this new medium
-
that are unique and special.
-
That process is important, and I want you to be aware of it.
-
But I don't want you to embrace that principle to uncritically.
-
Because I want you to recognize that the technology
-
itself does not explain this process.
-
The processes explained by cultural factors,
-
and social factors.
-
And even sometimes individual's psychological factors.
-
What we're talking about here is the myth
-
of technological determinism.
-
The myth that technology drives culture.
-
The myth that a new invention obliterates old inventions.
-
The truth is much more complicated than that.
-
One of the most remarkable things
-
about this evolutionary process I've
-
been describing, as I said earlier, is how swift it is.
-
How fast it is.
-
How we go from being a mere novelty,
-
to becoming a significant social form by 1910 or so.
-
And to becoming a virtually universal aesthetic
-
and entertainment experience for the majority of the population
-
in the country by 1920.
-
So when something like 20 or 25 years
-
the movies go from being an absolutely unknown or trivial
-
novelty, sharing space with fortune tellers,
-
and strip shows in the penny arcades,
-
to becoming not just an embedded social form, but one
-
of the dominant economic engines of the society,
-
employing tens of thousands of people
-
in various direct and ancillary positions.
-
And mobilizing virtually the entire population
-
of the country in a regular routine,
-
a habitual experience to which they return again and again.
-
And because the audience is returning again and again--
-
remember I said there's a kind of symbiotic relation
-
between the audience and the-- because the audience is
-
returning again and again, what happens?
-
That's also one aspect of the resources that