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DAVID THORBURN: This afternoon, by welcoming

our virtual audience, the audience that's

looking at this lecture on MIT'S OpenCourseWare, some of you

attentive viewers may notice what the students here

would not notice-- that seven years have elapsed.

There's no podium-- some of you may have gotten that--

and a much older professor.

I hope that our completion of these lectures seven years

later will not result in a reduced or less energetic

performance.

I'll do my best.

We come now to the end of our first segment

in the course on silent film.

And I thought it would be helpful to use

today's lecture in part to create some perspectives

on both the silent film, the idea of the silent film--

not just the particular films we've

looked at, but more generally the phenomenon of silent film,

the whole phenomenon-- and some perspectives that will also

help us look forward to what will follow,

to the sound films that will follow this week.

I'd like in a certain way to do this

by complicating an idea I've already

suggested to you about the notion

of the film as a cultural form.

What does it actually mean to say

that a film is a cultural form?

What, in a concrete sense, does this phrase signify?

Well, one answer I think I can offer by drawing

on your own experience.

My guess is that all of you have watched older films, films

from 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, and immediately

been struck as soon as you began to watch

the film by certain kinds of differences

that the original filmmakers would have been oblivious to.

And I'm talking about things like the hairdos of people,

the clothing that they wear, the way automobiles look, or even

a world in which there are no automobiles,

the physical environment that is shown.

One of the things that this reminds us of

is that always, even the most surreal

and imaginative and science-fictiony

films, always inevitably in some deep way,

in some essential ways, reflect the society

from which they come.

They may reflect more than that, and they

may be influenced by other factors as well,

but they are expressions of the culture that

gave rise to them in certain really essential ways.

And one of the things this means,

among other significance, one of the most interesting aspects

of this recognition is the fact that films

get richer over time.

They become artifacts of immense anthropological interest,

even if they're terrible films, because they show us

what the world of 50 or 25 or 30 years ago actually looked like

and how people walked and how people combed their hair

and what kind of makeup they wore,

all of the things, many of the things, which

in many respects, the people making the original film

would simply have taken for granted as part of the reality

they were trying to dramatize.

So one way of thinking about film as a cultural form

is to recognize that as films grow older,

they create meaning.

They become more interesting.

They become richer, and a corollary implication

of this idea that films become richer

is that the meaning of any individual artifact,

cultural artifact, especially cultural artifacts as complex

as films, is always in process.

But the meaning is never fully fixed or finished,

that new significance and new meanings emerge

from these texts with the passage of time,

as if the texts themselves undergo

a kind of transformation.

One final point about this, just to sort of tweak

your broader understanding of these kinds of questions--

one of the kinds of transitions that

occurs with particular artifacts is they sometimes move or make

a kind of transition from being recognized

as merely ordinary and uninteresting parts

of the society from which they grow, from which they emerge,

simply ordinary routine aspects of the experience of society.

Later ages may value these routine objects

as profoundly valuable works of art.

And in a certain sense, one could

say that the film in the United States

underwent a transition of that kind,

that at a certain point in the history of our understanding

of movies, American culture began to recognize that movies

were actually works of art, that they deserved comparison

with novels and plays and poems and so forth, probably

an idea that all of you folks take for granted.

Many of members of your generation

admire movie directors more than they do novelists and poets--

a radical mistake it seems to me,

but that's my literary bias showing through.

I certainly admire great directors certainly as much

as I do good novelists.

But the fact is that this is really not the case.

This recognition of the film as an artistic object,

as I've suggested earlier in the course,

is not some fixed or stable identity

that the film has had from the beginning.

It's an identity that the film has garnered,

that has been laid on the film later

as cultural changes have occurred

and as other forms of expression have emerged

that have put the film in a kind of different position

hierarchically from other kinds of imaginative expressions.

And as I've already suggested many times in this course,

we'll come back to this principle, because it's

such a central historical fact about the nature, the content

of American movies especially.

It's the advent of television that

is partly responsible for the transformation,

although it takes some time for the transformation

in American attitudes toward what movies are,

because television became the throwaway item,

the routine item, the thing Americans

experienced every day.

And the consequence of that was to change our understanding

of what the film was.

Now of course, the Europeans had an insight like this long

before the Americans did, and that's

something I'll talk about a bit later today

and also at other times in our course.

So that's one way of thinking about what it means to say

that a film is a cultural form.

It means that it's unstable in the sense

that its meanings are not fixed, and the way

in which a culture categorizes and understands

a particular artifact is also something that's unstable,

that undergoes change over time.

But there are other ways to think

about this problem of film as a cultural formation,

as an expression of society, and I

want to tease out some of those meanings for you as well.

One way to come at this problem is

to think of a kind of tension or even contention

between our recognition that film is a global form-- that

is to say that because the movies are watched

across national boundaries, movies that are made

in the United States can influence movies that are made

in Europe and vice versa.

So in one sense, the film, especially

after film got going within the first 10 years of its life,

it had become an international phenomenon,

and American films were watched in Europe,

and European films influenced American directors, even

at very early stages so that we begin

to get certain kinds of films that certainly appealed

across national boundaries.

And so there is a kind of global dimension

to what film might be.

And there's another way of thinking

about what it means to talk about film

as a global phenomenon, not as a merely national expression.

And that has to do specifically with the way in which

particular directors and films in particular societies

can influence world cinema.

And from the very earliest days of cinema, as I suggested,

this has been a reality.

As David Cook's History of Narrative Film informs you,

and I hope you'll read the assigned chapters

on Russian film closely, because I can only skim

these topics in my lecture.

What you'll discover among other things

is that the great American director, DW Griffith,

had a profound impact on Russian films

and that, in fact, at a certain point

in the history of Russian films, there

was a workshop run by a man named Kuleshov,

who actually took DW Griffith's movies

and disassembled them shot by shot

and studied the editing rhythms in his workshop.

This had a profound impact not only on Russian cinema,

but Griffith's practices had a profound impact

on virtually all filmmakers.

And there's a kind of reverse influence,

because certain Russian directors, Eisenstein

especially, but also Dziga Vertov,

their work had a profound impact on the films

from Western Europe and from the United States.

So it's a two-way process.

It's too simple to say that particular films are only

an expression of French culture or only an expression

of Russian culture or only an expression of American culture.

They are also global phenomena, and they

were global phenomena from almost the earliest stages.

So it's important to recognize this tension or this balance.

There are dimensions of film that reach

across national boundaries.

And as we've already suggested, one

of the explanations for the success of American movies

in the United States was in part a function

of the fact that they did not require language

in nearly the same degree.

They were visual experiences, and an immigrant population

coming into the large cities of the United States

at the turn of the century was one of the primary factors that

helps to explain the phenomenal quick growth of the movies

from a novelty into a profound embedded cultural experience.

So it is a global phenomenon in a certain way

and reaches across national boundaries.

But there's also-- and we need to acknowledge

this side of the equation too-- there's also a profound,

a really deep fundamental sense in which

films, at least until very recently,

are an expression of the individual national cultures

from which they come.

I say until very recently, because some of you

must be aware of the fact that a new kind of film

is being made now by which I mean a film that

seems to appeal across all national boundaries, that

doesn't seem to have a decisive national identity.

At least some films like that.

I think the Bollywood people are making films like this.

Americans are certainly making films like this now.

And sometimes if you think of some of the action

adventure films that will have a cast that

is drawn from different cultures, a sort

of multiethnic and multilingual cast, all of them dubbed

into whatever language the film is being exhibited in,

you'll see an example.

What's begun to emerge now in our 21st century world

is a kind of movie that already conceives of itself

as belonging to a kind of global culture.

So far I'm not sure these movies have as much artistic interest

as one would like, but it's a new phenomenon,

and the globalizing tendencies of digital technology

are certainly encouraging new ways

to think about the origins or the central sources of movies.

But until very recently, it is still the case

that virtually every film made in any society

reflected in deep and fundamental ways

aspects of that society.

And one of the reasons that this is such an important thing

to recognize is it means that, especially

in cultures like the European societies

and those in the United States, the movies are profoundly