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  • 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

  • are available to the medium.

  • What begins then to develop are forms of storytelling

  • that rely on the audience's prior memory of other shows.

  • So that one thing that emerges very quickly

  • is what we might call a star system.

  • In which particular actors become identified

  • with particular kinds of roles.

  • And audiences want to come back to see those stars again

  • and again.

  • What also begins to happen is the establishment

  • of a very rigorous kind of genre system.

  • What's a genre?

  • A category of story.

  • The Western is a genre.

  • The detective story is a genre.

  • The elegy is a poetic genre.

  • And the typical, the fundamental movie genres

  • begin to emerge relatively early.

  • There's a Western adventure story.

  • There's a historical spectacle.

  • There are certain forms of urban, crime narrative that

  • became our detective and crime films at a later stage.

  • And there emerge especially certain forms

  • of satire and comedy.

  • So what genre system begins to emerge as well?

  • And there are reasons of course why this kind of thing

  • is useful to a mass production system,

  • to an assembly line system.

  • If the same movie studio makes seven Westerns,

  • they can use the same horses again and again.

  • They can use the same set.

  • They can use the same hats.

  • And this in fact happened, they might eve

  • be able to use the same clip of film that shows a cattle

  • stampede in seven different movies,

  • because nobody would actually see it.

  • So economies of scale become possible as the system

  • begins to regularize itself.

  • Once it stabilizes after that period of imitation and patent

  • warfare.

  • And there's nothing noble, or artistic,

  • or conscious about this development.

  • That's part of what makes it so remarkable.

  • And it puts out in touch with the paradox that's

  • at the very heart of what I hope to make

  • you aware of in this course.

  • It's a paradox that-- I guess it animates my transition

  • many years ago now, from a traditional literary scholar

  • into someone interested in film and media.

  • And it's this paradox.

  • Based on what I've been telling you

  • about this evolution, this evolution of the medium,

  • of the film medium.

  • It's the paradox that capitalist greed-- the crassest

  • of alliances between commerce and modern technology--

  • might be the enabling conditions of a complex narrative art.

  • Where does art come from?

  • It's not just about art though, eve about sort of social.

  • Even if we forget the question of art, and just

  • talk about the social and cultural importance

  • of movie-going in modern societies.

  • Leave out the question of whether it's an aesthetically

  • valuable experience.

  • It's so central to human experience,

  • remains so central to human experience,

  • that there's a tremendous paradox in this, that

  • the crassest of alliances between commerce

  • and technology.

  • Nothing noble or admirable about it.

  • Nobody's sitting down thinking, I

  • want to make a new, great medium for art.

  • Nonetheless this alliance becomes the enabling conditions

  • for a complex form of social experience

  • and of narrative art.

  • Well, that paradox at the heart of a lot of what we'll

  • be looking at in this course.

  • I hope you'll keep in mind as we go on.

  • I'd like to say a couple of words, not too many,

  • a couple of words about The Great Train Robbery.

  • The very first film that you've seen.

  • The Great Train Robbery is discussed

  • in some helpful detail in David Cook's History of Narrative

  • Film.

  • And I urge you to look closely at his account of it.

  • But I want to remind you about a couple of highlights.

  • One is that although The Great Train Robbery seems

  • very primitive to us, it's important to realize that even

  • The Great Train Robbery is already a refined text.

  • Most of the most fundamental principles

  • of what we might call the syntax or grammar of the movies

  • is already embedded in The Great Train Robbery.

  • And what that means is that the five or six year

  • period before that, when there was

  • all this practicing with non-narrative forms,

  • lies behind The Great Train Robbery.

  • And what also lies behind The Great Train Robbery

  • is this experience of audiences going in first to the penny

  • arcades, then to the Nickelodeons that

  • begin to open up by the turn of the 20th century.

  • And becoming impatient with repeated scenes that simply

  • show jokes, hoses going off in people's faces, or trains

  • coming into a [INAUDIBLE].

  • After a while the novelty wears off.

  • But of course, the people who are making films

  • are also interested in what they're doing.

  • You can feel especially, if you look at D.W. Griffith's shorts,

  • and you will have looked at two of them

  • in this course-- A Beast at Bay, from last time,

  • and The Lonedale Operator, which you'll see tonight before we

  • turn to the Keaton films.

  • And you'll see these are just a sampling of his early work.

  • But if you look closely at those where

  • you can feel Griffith's own excitement

  • at discovering the possibilities of the cinema.

  • In many cases Griffith is doing some things with the camera,

  • doing some things with the shaping of narrative

  • in cinema that had never been done before.

  • And you can feel his own excitement

  • at the possibilities of this astonishing technology.

  • Well, the most important discovery that The Great Train

  • Robbery shows us-- and again it seems

  • so obvious and so embedded that we wouldn't even

  • think about it today.

  • We absorb these principles so deeply into our DNA

  • that we don't even think.

  • We learn how to watch movies in this way from the cradle,

  • in some ways.

  • Because by the time most people today

  • are five or six years old, they've

  • been subjected probably to more audio/visual images than anyone

  • alive in 1900.

  • And we're just cognitively different in terms

  • of our capacity to process audio/visual information.

  • But imagine an audience that's completely

  • illiterate in these things, that has

  • to learn this system as the system itself is evolving.

  • That's part of the excitement of looking at these early films.

  • And the most important discovery in The Great Train Robbery

  • is the discovery that the shot, the single uncut shot of film,

  • however long it lasts, and it's dependent on the decision

  • you make about when to edit it.

  • So it can go on for a long time, or it can be very short.

  • And the length or the shortness of cuts

  • also affects sort of the rhythm of your experience in the film.

  • And this is something that you can

  • see Griffith practicing with, even as early as

  • A Beast at Bay.

  • If you think about the great climax of the Beast at Bay

  • where you have the woman being threatened,

  • but you also have this race in the automobile

  • to try to get there on time.

  • And then the race to rescue her by a variety of people.

  • What Griffith does is he cuts back and forth.

  • He creates the principle of parallel action.

  • And what he realized, what he discovered

  • was that the audience will recognize this kind of cutting

  • as showing you simultaneity.

  • Showing you things that are going on at the same time.

  • What he discovered were in a certain sense

  • how we would cognitively process certain kinds of gestures

  • on film.

  • And what he discovered of course,

  • is that if he cuts, if he edits more quickly, if he creates

  • a fast rhythm he creates excitement.

  • And what he began to discover was something

  • that-- in later, directors like Hitchcock

  • would carry, to an almost evil pitch--

  • a capacity to manipulate and control the audience's reaction

  • by the speed with which particular images appear

  • or disappear.

  • So even at this early stage, you could see Griffith discovering

  • important principles.

  • The most fundamental principle in a Great Train Robbery,

  • which is not a Griffith film, it proceeds Griffith,

  • is the discovery that the shot is the basic unit of action.

  • Why is that a great discovery?

  • Well, if you think of the movies as a device

  • or as a medium that grows out of especially

  • a theatrical dispensation, grows out of other things

  • as well, novels feed into it, visual art

  • feeds into the movies.

  • But it's certainly true that most of the major ways in which

  • directors first conceive how to think

  • about the experience of what the camera is looking at,

  • they would have been influenced by their own experience

  • of theater.

  • And if you think about it for a moment,

  • what you can see, even in The Great Train Robbery, an impulse

  • to treat the camera as a stable thing.

  • There are panning shots in which the camera will go like this.

  • But the camera will not track.

  • It will not move back and forth, or sideways, off,

  • in The Great Train Robbery.

  • That's a discovery that Griffith is going to make

  • and will exploit.

  • And you can see it in A Beast at Bay.

  • But in The Great Train Robbery, we haven't got that far yet,

  • but what Edwin Porter did discover was that the shot is

  • the basic unit of action.

  • And what this means is it's not simply

  • what the camera sees, but then how the shots are edited

  • afterwards that is so crucial.

  • So what he came to understand was

  • that the making of any movie is always a two-stage process.

  • There's the shooting of the film,

  • and then there's the editing the film.

  • And that itself is a fundamental discovery.

  • But the idea that the shot is the unit

  • of action instead of the scene was hard for movie makers

  • to get.

  • What they would do, they would set the camera up,

  • and then actors would walk in front of the camera,

  • they would do what they had to do, and they would walk off.

  • What's going on there?

  • They're conceiving of cinematic space in theatrical terms.

  • As soon as the camera is liberated,

  • taken off its tripod, moved around

  • in some way, allowed to backup or come close,

  • even allowed to move laterally.

  • What we're beginning to do was to explore more systematically

  • what the camera's unique features are.

  • How the theater is different from the movies.

  • How certain effects are possible in the movies

  • that would not be possible in the theater.

  • When you watch the Keaton films that you're

  • going to see tonight, watch for the ways in which Keaton

  • repeatedly sets up situations such that when

  • you see a particular gag of his, a joke, what you realize

  • is that the joke could not have happened in the theater.

  • It could not have been told to you verbally.

  • The joke is visual.

  • The joke involves motion.

  • The joke involves a recognition of the powers

  • of cinematic representation to tell stories.

  • You'll see many examples of this in the Keaton materials

  • that you'll be looking at tonight.

  • So one of the very first discoveries that's made

  • is the discovery that the shot is the basic unit of action.

  • A second discovery is the recognition

  • that you have to cut between scenes.

  • You do you're editing between shots.

  • Mostly what you do is you let scenes play out,

  • even though you might abruptly cut a scene

  • before the action is completed.

  • That's another discovery that was

  • made, if you cut the scene-- a person starts

  • to walk toward the door-- the first, earliest films,

  • they would show the person walking all the way to the end,

  • walking out of the door.

  • Then, filmmakers discovered, wait a minute.

  • There's a way of creating a kind of quickness here.

  • Because if I show Thorburn walking toward the door,

  • starting, and I cut.

  • And he knocks his glasses off.

  • And then I cut, and I wait till he gets to the door,

  • and we see him leaving the door.

  • I don't have to watch him take those 17 steps.

  • So what's been discovered is a basic principle

  • of cinematic syntax.

  • It seems so obvious to us, but of course it's

  • really a great discovery.

  • The properties of the medium have

  • to be understood before you can really begin to explain them.

  • And that's why I've asked you to look

  • at some of these short films.

  • None of the short films I've shown you

  • are completely without some technical interest.

  • And even though of course they're the only films

  • I'm showing you that I wouldn't sort of make arguments

  • to defend them as works of art.

  • But I certainly would make arguments for them

  • as technically fascinating documents.

  • And I hope you'll look at them in that light.

  • So the shot is a basic unit of action cutting between scenes.

  • And a couple of other things that I think

  • are important in The Great Train Robbery.

  • One is that you can see in The Great Train Robbery,

  • they're beginning to discover the value of camera placement.

  • What happens when you place the camera

  • in a particular position.

  • Especially if action's coming toward the camera,

  • that you might not want to place the camera directly

  • in front of the action that's coming towards you,

  • that something happens if you place it slightly forward it,

  • so it could see it at a slight angle.

  • It creates a greater illusion of depth in the image,

  • for example.

  • And it does other kinds of things.

  • It let's the action get closer to you

  • before the scene has to be cut.

  • So camera placement is something that you

  • can see is beginning to be learned,

  • beginning to be mastered in the great trick in The Great Train

  • Robbery, or camera position.

  • And finally, one might mention one other thing

  • that a again establishes a principle that

  • then is continuous being useful 50 or 75 years.

  • And that's the principle of the process shot.

  • You can see in The Great Train Robbery

  • that some effects have been created by tricks.

  • That there's back projection used in that.

  • It looks crude to us, we can see through it.

  • But the early audiences would not have recognized that.

  • We're so used to location filming that we can pick out--

  • we today can see through the process shots of earlier films.

  • This in fact damages some of Hitchcock's films

  • very badly today.

  • Because Hitchcock used a lot of process

  • shot effects in his films.

  • When he made them the audiences were used to it.

  • There was a convention of film going.

  • Today because cameras are so much more mobile and light,

  • and so much has been learned about how

  • to-- even about filming in low light and so forth.

  • That there's much less use of process shots.

  • A new kind of process shot, I suppose,

  • is emerging with digital animation.

  • And one could say it's sort of a return

  • to the idea of manipulating the image in illegitimate ways.

  • But in The Great Train Robbery we

  • can even see the beginnings of the use of process shots.

  • Of recognizing that you can create effects in the movies

  • that are unique and special, that no other medium

  • would allow you to do.

  • And what's embedded there is science fiction.

  • What's embedded they are all the kinds

  • of imaginative, not just science fictional.

  • All the kinds of imaginative movies

  • that have been made that maybe take you

  • inside people's nightmares or dreams.

  • Where what the film is showing you now--

  • what is embedded in that process shot?

  • Even more fully embedded in Melies', the French director's

  • films, like Trip to the Moon, where he explicitly

  • goes into a realm of fantasy.

  • It's not only that the film is the most profoundly realistic

  • medium that was ever invented.

  • It may also be the most expressive medium

  • for the rendering of non-realistic states

  • of dream, of nightmare, of fantasy.

  • Because of the freedom that the film medium allows.

  • And even these implications are at least

  • embedded in the use of the process shots in Porter's The

  • Great Train Robbery.

  • The other short that you're going

  • to see tonight that is not by Keaton

  • is called The Lonedale Operator.

  • It was made in 1911.

  • In a way it's the most advanced film of its time.

  • And what I hope when you look at it,

  • you'll watch especially for how much more complex

  • it is than, let's say, The Great Train Robbery.

  • And there'll be a kind of small measure of this Fred Ott

  • principle that I've been talking about.

  • Let me mention a couple of things about The Lonedale

  • Operator.

  • Between 1907 and 1911, most films

  • consisted of no more than 24 separate shots.

  • Between 1908 and 1913, led by D.W. Griffith

  • and his company, The Biograph Company,

  • many more shots were introduced into a single reel of film.

  • And in The Lonedale Operator, there

  • are 98 shots, six intertitles, one main title,

  • and two written inserts.

  • All within a 17 minutely length.

  • But think of just the access of complexity

  • that has occurred just in less than 10 years.

  • It's such a complicated film that one

  • of the things we realized, even looking at it if we look

  • closely is that it actually required

  • a kind of attentiveness that earlier films did not.

  • As filmmakers began to make these things,

  • and began to make them longer, and began

  • to make them more complicated.

  • They realized that they couldn't just

  • bring the camera out and start shooting.

  • They began to develop the formal rationalizing

  • strategies that led to the making of movies

  • as we understand them.

  • There was a four day shooting schedule created

  • for The Lonedale Operator.

  • It was one of the first films to have this format.

  • And of course it's the format that

  • is followed today with virtually every film

  • in different aspects.

  • And this also required a preplanned shooting script.

  • They had to preplan all of their shooting, all of their shots,

  • all of their camera angles.

  • They need a shooting script, a written script.

  • Films didn't have written scripts at first,

  • but Lonedale did.

  • And it also required in order for them

  • to make their schedule, out of order shooting.

  • That is to say they had to shoot certain things not

  • in the sequential order.

  • And that's one of the most basic principles of filmmaking.

  • Because once you set up the camera

  • for a shot of a particular environment,

  • if that environment shows up later in the film,

  • it's unbelievably more expensive and time consuming

  • to reconstitute that whole set.

  • So almost all films to this very day

  • are still shot out of sequence in order

  • to maximize the time you have, in order to work at your most

  • efficient.

  • It's not an efficient way to make a movie

  • to shoot it sequentially, to follow

  • the to follow the script in its chronological sequence.

  • And The Lonedale Operator is maybe

  • the first film have to have all of these features

  • that we would associate with a modern or contemporary film.

  • You might notice in it's an immensely complex films, even

  • in terms of its content.

  • And I won't talk about that much now except to say this,

  • watch the way in which the film tries

  • to deal with what we might call hierarchies of gender.

  • The film is partly about how a woman takes on a man's job.

  • I think it's guess it's her father, isn't it?

  • Her father is ill.

  • And she has to take over running the train station.

  • And so there's a certain sense in which

  • one of the things that's dramatized socially

  • is a woman moving into a masculine realm.

  • Taking on a role that's more aggressive than

  • is appropriate for the gender ideologies that

  • are dominant at the end of the 19th century in the United

  • States.

  • But the film was pretty clever about this,

  • like many such popular texts.

  • Because although it does grant this woman a certain kind

  • of masculine authority and competence,

  • it also has other things in the film that balance that.

  • That remind us that she is still nonetheless a weak vessel.

  • That she is still a damsel in stress

  • like the typical Victorian construction of women.

  • And what you can see is that the movie exhibits

  • an anxiety about gender roles that's also an anxiety that's

  • resident in the society itself.

  • And I won't talk more about this now.

  • We will develop this aspect of the movies

  • as a reflection of social anxieties and social problems

  • as the course goes on.

  • But I do want to call your attention

  • to certain technical things that you can watch for, to at least

  • one technical item in the film.

  • It contains what might be called rhyming scenes.

  • In which at one point in the film

  • you'll see a sequence of scenes in a particular shot.

  • And then, later in the film, almost exactly the same shot

  • will reappear.

  • And the effect of this, of course,

  • is to create a sense of coherence

  • and a sense of familiarity in the audience.

  • It's actually a very subtle and careful strategy

  • that Griffith himself devised.

  • It creates a kind of continuity and clarity to the whole film.

  • Watch, for example, how the doorway to the Lonedale station

  • is photographed when you first see it.

  • How this image anchors the film's spatial relationships.

  • And how the film has a certain trajectory of movement that is

  • repeated as the film goes on.

  • So that for example, early in the film,

  • we see the heroine go from the exterior

  • to the interior of the ticket office,

  • and then to the inner office of the telegraph operator.

  • We see her do this.

  • And then, this sets up a basic location and basic action

  • for the entire film.

  • It's as if what happens in that moment sets up,

  • creates a familiarity for the audience with it,

  • the geography of the movie.

  • Because a lot of the action then will

  • depend on our understanding about geography.

  • And then there at least four different times that Griffith

  • repeats that basic three-shot trajectory, from the exterior

  • to the interior of the ticket office,

  • and then to the inner office of the telegraph operator.

  • It happens four times in the film.

  • So the film has a kind of visual coherence.

  • By the time you come to it the third or fourth time,

  • it's as if you were intimate with the physical geography

  • of the movie.

  • This is actually a structural feature

  • that is easy to miss it, but it's actually very artful.

  • And we can see it's a mark of how far film has come, even

  • by 1911, that this level of attentiveness

  • is available to us in the film.

  • There's much more that could be said about The Lonedale

  • Operator, but I will leave it to your intelligence

  • and your attentiveness to try to pick out more things.

  • And again we're only talking about a 17-minute film.

  • Well, Buster Keaton's career could be said, in some degree,

  • to enact in small the larger processes I've been describing.

  • He comes into film late.

  • And in fact, if we were working perfectly chronologically

  • in terms of when Chaplin became a director,

  • he would precede Keaton.

  • But I've organized the film according

  • to the dates of the feature films,

  • and the general is much of a decade earlier

  • than modern times.

  • Which is the last, quote, "silent film."

  • It's not really a silent film, but it's

  • the last silent film in a deep sense that was ever made.

  • It was made in the sound era, in 1936.

  • And next week we'll talk more about the implications of that,

  • and why that was a very daring thing for Chaplin to do.

  • Something like almost a decade after the advent of sound

  • he made a movie that essentially had no dialogue in it.

  • So Keaton came a little later.

  • Keaton comes into movie making a little few years after Chaplin.

  • But his career has a similar trajectory.

  • He began his career in legitimate theater,

  • in vaudeville and on the performance circuit.

  • He was an Acrobat from a very young age,

  • from the age of two or three was in his parents stage act.

  • And in fact, he learned a lot of his acrobatic feats

  • on his parents stage act.

  • One very famous passage in his-- his father used to take him,

  • he was just a young kid, three or four years

  • old, five years old, he would take him by his legs

  • and swing him back and forth, like this.

  • He had very long hair.

  • And he would sweep the floor with his hair.

  • And then, swing him two or three times--

  • this would happen life-- he would swing it like this

  • and let him go.

  • And the kid, five years old, would fly against the wall

  • and fall down.

  • It would look terrible.

  • And later in his life, Keaton talked about this.

  • There were actually some cities in which

  • the societies the prevention of cruelty to children came in,

  • shut down the act, wouldn't allow the act to go on.

  • Not stupid, because his father was a drunkard

  • and sometimes performed drunk.

  • And Keaton was sometimes injured.

  • He was also injured when he made his own movies, because he

  • was such a daring acrobat.

  • And Keaton recounts that when he first began to perform in this,

  • he would make faces, faces that indicated pain, or happiness,

  • or relief, when his father was manipulating this way.

  • But he found that the audience responded much more comically,

  • much more immediately, if he just

  • kept his face expressionless.

  • And that's where they're developed,

  • the probably mistaken label for Keaton, of the great stone

  • face.

  • And in his films very often you'll

  • see this young man facing monumental catastrophe.

  • His face would look out at things

  • without ever changing expression,

  • and there is something kind of comical about that.

  • You'll see some examples of this in the general.

  • Well, you'll see in the two short films

  • that Keaton began to make that he enters film

  • at already a relatively sophisticated time.

  • And the shorts I'm asking you to look at

  • are very interesting, remarkable films in their own way.

  • And one of the things they teach us,

  • and one of the reasons I want you look closely at Keaton

  • is they show us yet again another aspect of what

  • I mean when I talk about the Fred Ott

  • principle, this development of evolution and increasing

  • complexity.

  • Because if you look at Cops, or if you look at One Week,

  • what you will see Keaton doing in those films

  • is learning how to link jokes together

  • in some sort of a coherent way.

  • And there are wonderful coherent sequences in these films.

  • But still one doesn't feel that there's

  • a real character in them, that there's

  • a sustained, coherent, fictional universe being dramatized.

  • Maybe in Cops one does feel this.

  • This much more sort of textual coherence in Cops.

  • But what we can see Keaton doing is

  • beginning to move from the idea of a single joke

  • to a sequence of jokes.

  • And then, by the time we get to the general,

  • moving from a single joke to a sequence of jokes

  • to a sustained narrative, which incorporates

  • within it various kinds of comical jokes,

  • and also sequence jokes.

  • Because Keaton's best jokes are not single jokes at all,

  • they're one liners, but the joke will be told again and again.

  • Or really, what will happen is he will do something,

  • and you'll think how could.

  • And then, the next step will top what he's done before.

  • Then, the next step will top.

  • You think that he got to a point where

  • it'd be impossible to add another comic complication

  • to what he's done when he, of course, does it.

  • And this becomes one of the deep principles of Keaton's comedy.

  • There are numerous examples of it in both the two shorts,

  • and in the longer film The General.

  • But let me mention an example from The General.

  • Very early in The General, there's

  • a sequence-- it's probably the quintessential Keaton sequence,

  • and I won't go into such detail as to spoil the film for you.

  • But let me just say, it involves a cannon,

  • and it involves Keaton.

  • Keaton plays the engineer of a locomotive, a locomotive

  • engineer.

  • The general of the title is not a military general,

  • it's a locomotive, the locomotive

  • is called the General.

  • And the film recounts a historically true story

  • of a time when the Union Army came

  • into Confederate territory, and stole a locomotive belonging

  • to the Confederacy.

  • And Keaton, in a comic vein retells this story.

  • When you watch this cannon sequence,

  • you'll see exactly what I mean.

  • And this sequences at the heart of James Agee's essay

  • on the silent film comedy.

  • When you read that essay, you'll see even more clearly

  • what I mean by a trajectory joke or a sequence joke.

  • Which builds, and builds, and builds,

  • and keeps topping itself.

  • Well, this cannon sequence is a perfect example of that.

  • And it's a perfect example of it not only

  • because we see the joke getting more complicated as it goes on,

  • but as the joke becomes more complicated something else

  • happens.

  • The joke becomes more than a joke,

  • it becomes a kind of comment on experience.

  • It becomes a kind of comment on what life is like.

  • That is to say, we move from something

  • that simply makes us smile to something that

  • makes us think about the world, that

  • comments on the world, that imagines

  • the world in a coherent way.

  • I'll try to be more explicit about this in a moment.

  • So in Keaton's career, we see him doing astonishing things

  • as an Acrobat.

  • And we would admire him just for his acrobatic performances

  • in these films.

  • In The General for example, the way

  • in which when he's piloting his locomotive, chasing

  • the people who have stolen his original locomotive, how

  • he's the only one on the train.

  • And he crawls all over the train.

  • While the train is running he'll crawl up to the front of it.

  • He'll run to the back of it to put more fuel in.

  • And also, you can see this stuff happening, really happening.

  • It's not faked in any way, because there's

  • a camera following the train as it's moving.

  • You can see it's really moving, because you can see it.

  • You can see it moving on the track,

  • and you can see the world behind it.

  • And you can tell that Keaton is not taking these effects.

  • Well, this cannon sequence is a sublimely rich example

  • of this complex process I've been describing.

  • And it has to do in part with what

  • I call the multiplicity principle, Which

  • I will define in a moment.

  • So we see Keaton as an acrobat actor.

  • As a man, much more than Chaplin,

  • interested in the technology of motion pictures, and of cinema.

  • And you'll see a couple of examples

  • in the films you going to look at tonight

  • in which we see Keaton exploring in a somewhat systematic way

  • the nature of the illusion of motion pictures.

  • There's one remarkable comical moment in One Week.

  • In which the heroine gets into a bathtub,

  • and it looks like she's sitting in the bathtub.

  • She's starting to get up, and looks

  • like you're actually about to see some unmentionable parts

  • of her body.

  • And just as that's about to happen,

  • a hand comes in front of the camera and blocks you.

  • And it's actually a very disturbing moment in a way,

  • because it interrupts the narrative flow.

  • It's an intervention from the outside.

  • Whose hand did it?

  • It's not a character in the film.

  • It's the director's.

  • Very bold moment, because what it

  • does is it reminds you of the film as an artifact.

  • It reminds you that the film is an artifact.

  • In other words, it's a moment of self-reflexiveness

  • self-consciousness that you would never seen a Chaplin

  • film, but shows Keaton's astonishing interest

  • in the technology of motion pictures.

  • I had many examples that Greg and I had ready,

  • but I don't have time to show to you.

  • Maybe you could put up, while I'm talking, The Playhouse.

  • One of his most famous examples of this

  • is a film called The Playhouse, in which he ends up playing

  • every role in the movie.

  • And the way he did was incredibly interesting.

  • He would shoot the film, but he put masking tape

  • over the lens of the camera.

  • And only one little, tiny part of the lens of the camera

  • was what would expose the film.

  • And he would shoot that, then he would rewind the film.

  • And then, if he were over in this corner for that shot,

  • then he'd move over, and sit in the other corner.

  • He'd put a new kind of tape on the camera, film it again.

  • And the film you're going to see will show this.

  • And you can see, they're all Buster.

  • Again what it shows is he's a technician.

  • He's interested in the technology of the motion

  • picture camera, and what kinds of manipulations are possible.

  • He's the conductor.

  • As it turns out, he's going to also end up

  • being the only person in the audience.

  • And then finally, what I've already implied

  • is that Keaton's jokes and his technical interest

  • also end up making him a metaphysician, a philosopher,

  • an artist.

  • Now Keaton himself could never articulate his own ambitions

  • in this way.

  • If you said, Mr. Keaton, your vision of the absurd universe

  • is more complex and rich than Jean-Paul Sartre.

  • As in fact, it is incidentally.

  • He would laugh.

  • He wouldn't even understand what you were talking about.

  • Not only because he'd never read Sartre, since he died before.

  • He was alive live when Sartre was alive, actually.

  • But the universe that he projects has a kind of content

  • or a meaning that's a function of how intelligent he

  • is about exploiting his medium, and telling his stories,

  • as if his jokes express a vision of life, a sense of experience.

  • What you're looking at is sort of minor Keaton here,

  • but it shows his technical interest.

  • So let me explain what I mean basically

  • by the multiplicity principle.

  • This process of accretion and complexity

  • I've described-- at a certain point you get to a point

  • where what began as a gag or as a mere entertainment takes

  • on a density or a texture that makes you think, wait

  • a second, the vision of experience that's

  • projected in this text is intrinsically interesting.

  • That is to say, there's an understanding of life

  • that's embedded in the story.

  • When you reach the point where the text itself embodies

  • some sort of understanding of life,

  • and an understanding of life that's coherently presented,

  • powerfully presented, what you're looking at

  • is what I call art.

  • You might just call it more intelligent entertainment.

  • But this is a way of distinguishing

  • between entertainment and art.

  • At which there's a certain point at which

  • entertainment becomes so complicated

  • that it's more than mere entertainment.

  • When does that occur?

  • Well, one way to tell when it occurs

  • is to watch for I call the multiplicity principle.

  • When events in the film play more than one function,

  • do more than one job.

  • When they forward the story, but also declare for character.

  • When they make you laugh, but also express a vision of life.

  • And at the same time are consistent with the character's

  • psychological nature.

  • That multiplicity, that density, that texture

  • is what we associate with works of art.

  • A bad example would be you are familiar,

  • I hope, with the kind of bad soap opera

  • line in which a character comes into something like this,

  • oh, hello, John, my long-lost brother who

  • just got out of the insane asylum

  • after 15 years of unfair misery.

  • What's wrong with that line?

  • Why is that a stupid line?

  • Although we hear them all the time.

  • What's wrong with it?

  • AUDIENCE: Sounds excessive, and awkward exposition.

  • DAVID THORBURN: It's very awkward exposition,

  • but why is it so awkward?

  • What makes it so awkward?

  • Its intention is clear.

  • It wants to present information to the audience.

  • But in order to do that, what has it violated?

  • AUDIENCE: It ceases to be something that follows

  • the nature of the character.

  • DAVID THORBURN: It ceases to be something that

  • honors the character's nature.

  • Exactly right.

  • That's a very good answer.

  • What's your name?

  • AUDIENCE: Michael.

  • DAVID THORBURN: Michael.

  • Thanks, Michael.

  • That's very good.

  • I want to give information to the audience.

  • In order to do that I'll compromise the character's

  • basic nature.

  • No sister talking to a brother would recount the brother's

  • history to the brother.

  • That just wouldn't happen.

  • So in order to accomplish one task,

  • the text has compromised itself on another task.

  • But imagine a story in which this information emerges

  • in dramatic ways.

  • Two characters are talking, and Mary says to John,

  • oh, John, my brother's coming back from the asylum.

  • And she says, really?

  • I didn't even know he was in the asylum.

  • And Mary pulls back and says, I don't

  • know if I should tell you.

  • OK.

  • So we have a dramatic scene, in which

  • the information that the audience is supposed to have

  • is presented in a way that maybe tells us

  • something about Mary's nature.

  • And maybe tells us something about John's nature.

  • That is multiplicity.

  • That's what I mean by the multiplicity principle.

  • You will see many, many instances

  • of what I'm calling the multiplicity principle

  • in Keaton's work.

  • And you will especially see it in these astonishing, repeated

  • sequences, and I'm talking now in a way about The General,

  • in which we see the Keaton hero.

  • Who sort of is steadfast but also a muddler.

  • He keeps doing the same things.

  • They're not really likely to help them.

  • And then, he gets help from the outside.

  • Keaton's jokes repeatedly depend upon the idea of accident

  • in a certain way.

  • And I'll come back to that in a second.

  • So think about the multiplicity principle, the difference

  • between entertainment and art.

  • Again this is a principle I'll come back to, and try

  • to illustrate with greater concreteness and greater

  • leisure in later lectures.

  • But I want you to be aware of these issues.

  • So The General can be understood as a kind of culminating text

  • in at least two ways.

  • It's a culmination of Keaton's career.

  • That is to say the jokes and gags that

  • are enacted in the film recall many earlier Keaton films.

  • And the basic character of The General

  • is the basic character of the Keaton hero.

  • A steadfast, unremarkable young man

  • who perseveres in the face of catastrophic difficulties

  • with mostly comic expectations, very small expectations

  • of success.

  • Who often models through almost despite himself.

  • But I say, almost despite himself.

  • And this is where the complexity of Keaton's vision of life

  • comes in.

  • Why I'm saying that Keaton moves from being merely a jokester,

  • or being merely a great entertainer,

  • to being an artist.

  • His jokes embody an idea of what experience is like,

  • and it's a very powerful, mordant, mature idea

  • of experience.

  • Because what happens again, and again in the small jokes,

  • the sequence jokes in Keaton's work,

  • especially in The General, and in the larger film, what

  • happens again, and again, is an adventure

  • in which a steadfast, relentless, young, hero

  • does everything he can to accomplish his goal.

  • And it's obvious that he's up against forces

  • far beyond himself, that he could never--

  • there's an unbelievable miss mismatch

  • between this minuscule, tiny, figure and his powers,

  • and the forces he's fighting against.

  • His one Keaton film called The Navigator,

  • in which the Keaton character-- even more

  • than with the locomotive in The General--

  • has to navigate an ocean liner.

  • And he's alone on the ocean liner.

  • And you see running up and down into the engine room,

  • back up to the bridge, running all over the ocean

  • liner in great difficulties.

  • There's a wonderful film, late film made in 1928,

  • just his last silent film called Steamboat Bill

  • Jr. In which he dramatizes an astonishing hurricane.

  • And a long, extended sequence in which

  • we see him trying to escape the hurricane,

  • trying to contend against this natural force that's

  • so gigantic.

  • So The General is a culmination in the sense

  • that it gives us another version, and the richest

  • version so far of the adventures of this kind of Keaton hero.

  • But what makes it metaphysical or philosophically

  • interesting is that what this joke repeatedly does,

  • and what the structure of the whole film

  • repeatedly says is something like this, we get through,

  • we make it through life.

  • We get through life mostly not because of anything

  • we've done but because of accident.

  • We live in a contingent universe.

  • The idea of contingency is at the heart of Keaton's jokes.

  • We could call them jokes about contingency.

  • The word contingent is interesting.

  • Remember it means libel, but not certain to occur.

  • It means possible.

  • It means dependent upon, subject to, conditioned by.

  • In law you can say that something that is contingent

  • is dependent for its effect on something that may or may not

  • occur.

  • As in a contingent estate or legacy.

  • In logic, the same thing, dependent upon some condition,

  • or upon the truth of something else.

  • Not true a priori, not necessary.

  • So what Keaton's jokes constantly do

  • is they show us two things.

  • They show us a world in which human agency matters.

  • Because if this should schmendrick

  • didn't keep-- that's a Jewish word for schlemazel,

  • clown-- If this schmendrick did not keep on so steadfastly,

  • he wouldn't survive.

  • But he's keeping on so steadfastly still

  • wouldn't make him survive if there weren't

  • the intervention of mere accidents, stuff

  • he has no control over.

  • This one magnificent moment in One Week, for example,

  • where he's standing at a certain place, and the house behind him

  • falls down.

  • And he's happens, just by accident,

  • to be standing by the open window, and the house falls,

  • so he doesn't get hurt.

  • He used this joke more than once in other films

  • because it's such a great one.

  • But it's a perfect example of what

  • I mean, a partial example of what I mean.

  • Because he is not responsible for the fact that he escaped.

  • On the other hand, because he was

  • trying to get away from difficulties,

  • maybe he was in that particular position

  • because of acts of his own.

  • So what this joke and vision says about the world

  • is something that's true.

  • We all love the idea that we've gotten

  • to where we are by our own acts, by our own conscious control.

  • The truth of the matter is that life is

  • much more contingent than that.

  • It's partly accident, it's partly luck.

  • And something deeper than that.

  • Keaton's vision of the universe is

  • one which suggests that while the universe may screw you up

  • sometimes, it won't always do that.

  • The universe in Keaton's world is not angry at us,

  • it's indifferent to us.

  • It doesn't give a damn about us.

  • It's not aware of us.

  • It's too big for us.

  • You can't come away from Keaton's films

  • without a simultaneous sense on the importance of human action,

  • of human agency.

  • But also of the inadequacy of human agency.

  • Of how contingent every experience, every adventure,

  • every personality is.

  • And that and that meaning, that idea of the world

  • is a profound one, I think.

  • So that even though Keaton is telling a joke,

  • embedded in the joke is a kind of interpretation of life.

  • And embedded in the film is a kind of interpretation of life.

  • When you're looking at The General,

  • I think you will see multiple examples of this kind of thing.

  • Let me say one last thing, I haven't mentioned anything

  • about the structure of the film, I'm a little out of the way

  • there.

  • Watch how the film is structured.

  • It's a much more complex variation

  • on what I said about Lonedale Operator.

  • The film begins with him going up the track.

  • And then, the second half of the film

  • has him going back down the track.

  • You may not be aware of it, but actually

  • the film in a certain sense has its tail its mouth.

  • When he goes up the track, he has a series of adventures.

  • When he comes back down, he has a series

  • of adventures that in a certain sense replicate what's

  • happened before.

  • The film mirrors itself in a way, repeats itself.

  • It's incredibly elegant structure.

  • And the elegance of the structure

  • reminds us also-- its own way, also

  • reminds us of this principle of contingency

  • that's at the heart of Keaton's vision of the world.

  • Let me conclude by reminding you again what I said earlier.

  • When I call Keaton a philosopher,

  • and a metaphysician and a wise person about the world,

  • I do not at all mean to suggest that if ask

  • Keaton to explain how we thought about the world

  • he could do this.

  • That that's the job of professors

  • and literary and film critics.

  • What I'm saying to you is that Keaton,

  • like many great artists, had an intuitive

  • understanding of the world.

  • Which he expressed with greater, and greater complexity

  • in the medium of the cinema.

  • And in The General, we have what is ultimately

  • a culminating instance of that.

  • One last point about the film as a culminating example.

  • It's not just the culmination of Keaton's career.

  • It's a culmination of silent film as a whole.

  • Keaton would have expected his audience

  • to recognize the degree to which this film was

  • a parity or a mockery of famous historical films made

  • by D.W. Griffith.

  • It puts down the pretentiousness and the martial valor

  • that's celebrated in so many of the historical spectacles

  • that Griffith and other serious directors

  • were making at the time.

  • And it also goes back in a certain way

  • to the very roots of film.

  • What was the very first narrative film?

  • Or one of the very first?

  • Also a film about a train robbery,

  • called The Great Train Robbery.

  • Well, this is about a train robbery, too.

  • And who is the central character in this one?

  • Really, a train is the central object,

  • the central-- more interesting in some

  • ways than the character himself.

  • And there are many other ways in which the particular features

  • of the general allude to, and in some sense summarize,

  • the history of silent film.

  • And all of the original audience coming to see The General

  • would have been, of course alert to these connections.

  • Would have been literate in these connections.

  • Wouldn't have needed footnotes or professors

  • to tell them about it.

  • Because they would have lived through the history.

  • They would have been through the history of the previous 20

  • years.

  • They would have seen other Keaton films.

  • They would have seen D.W. Griffith.

  • They would have the history of the medium

  • of movies in their heads when they sat down

  • to watch The General.

  • So that's another way in which The General is

  • a profoundly culminating text.

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