Name: 5. Film as Global & Cultural Form; Montage, Mise en Scène
Uploaded: 2016-11-24T09:39:53.000Z
Duration: 48 min 2 s
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Basic passive voice

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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--

I hope that our completion of these lectures seven years

later will not result in a reduced or less energetic

We come now to the end of our first segment

today's lecture in part to create some perspectives

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

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.

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

Well, one answer I think I can offer by drawing

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

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,

One of the things that this reminds us of

films, always inevitably in some deep way,

in some essential ways, reflect the society

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.

among other significance, one of the most interesting aspects

of this recognition is the fact that films

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

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

So one way of thinking about film as a cultural form

is to recognize that as films grow older,

They become richer, and a corollary implication

is that the meaning of any individual artifact,

cultural artifact, especially cultural artifacts as complex

But the meaning is never fully fixed or finished,

that new significance and new meanings emerge

from these texts with the passage of time,

One final point about this, just to sort of tweak

your broader understanding of these kinds of questions--

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

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

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5. Film as Global & Cultural Form; Montage, Mise en Scène

crucial

sort

rhythm

recognize