I think expertise is a good thing. Sharing it with other people gives them the option of having a more robust aesthetic response.
> Give me any random text from Shelley or Wordsworth and I
will be able to distinguish the two, but nobody I know personally
has this ability.
I cannot tell the difference between a Brahms symphony and a Beethoven symphony. When it comes to classical music I am a know-nothing. But that does not mean it is impossible to tell the difference -- a person just needs to have a level of experience, education and sophistication that I lack.
> My point is that 500 years from now the movies made in the
sound era between 1935 and 1960 will be almost indistinguishable.
I think you are jumping to a false conclusion. Why do you think that the ability to distinguish among the films made during that period will fade? Since there are recognizable differences in terms of use of space, the way scenes were lit, camera movement, editing rhythms, etc, why should future generation be unable to recognize such variations?
> What we take as individual distinctions are products of time and
place our own rootedness in that time place.
But there is a material difference between a long take and a short one, just as there is between a whole note and a half-note.
> Because already it takes a certain amount of expertise to tell
these two apart. It may seem obvious to me and you but it doesn't
seem obvious to everybody.
Okay. So if it is possible to tell them apart, then the quotation marks are unneeded. The difference is genuine. That not everyone notices it does not change the fact that it exists. Not everyone thinks about gravity everday, but it exists, as does the equation explaining it which even fewer people are aware of or understand.
> And if one were to ask people to tell the difference between Howard
Hawks of "His Girl Friday" and Capra of "Arsenic and Old Lace", most
would say that as far as style they were both "Cary Grant" movies.
And they would be correct, even if you and I have the expertise to see
the difference in directorial style.
Because they are enaging the film on a rudimentary level and we are engaging it on a more complex level: they are seeing the movies as Cary Grant vehicles. We are seeing them as Cary Grant vehicles as well as films by Hawks and Capra, and maybe some other iterations as well. If the only level they chose to work on is "Cary Grant vehicle" -- fine. But that does not negate the fact that there is a more complex way of watching those two movies.
> The non-expert judgment that these movies are Cary Grant comedies
is closer to the truth of things than the judgment that these movies were
made by Hawks or Capra.
Why is the non-expert judgement closer to the truth. Is the non-expert opinion of a lay person closer to the truth than that of a heart specialist regarding a cardiac event? The question is whether or not there is a discernible difference between a film directed by Hawks and one made by Capra.
> Again I don't think that these judgments are necessarily the final word, but
I believe the "star system" of commodity production had more to do with the
"feeling" of aesthetic distinction in classical Hollywood films than any single
author.
But how did the star system create Otto Preminger's camera movements? Or Ford's approach to framing and the horizon line? Or Hawks' way of handling actors and gesture?
> The fact that being able to "tell" the difference between Hawks and
Hitchcock is now an expertise, and being able to tell the difference
between a hawk and a handsaw is only a matter of sanity, should make
you think about what this expertise is and why it exists. It is "now"
an expertise, but at the time when the movies were made it was not.
It was an expertise even then. There were people who could tell the difference between a Hawks shot and a Ford shot, just as people can tell the difference between the note of c and the note of b flat.
> Studies I have read showed that audiences at the time could tell the
differences between these movies, even if they had never heard of
Hawks and Hitchcock.
They could tell the differences between genres I bet, and some probably could distinguish between the work of an auteur and that of a metteur en scene.
> Still, the audiences could also tell the difference between a Cary Grant
movie and a Hitchcock movie. "His Girl Friday" was a Cary Grant movie
and "Suspicion," staring Cary Grant, was a Hitchcock film.
Because one was a comedy and one was a suspense film.
> One of my points here is that the popular suspicion about classical
Hollywood, shows more insight into how Hollywood movies were made
than the idea that movies have "authors".
I disagree.
> Which is the problem with auteur theories of all types.
Why is that a problem?
> My larger point is that what ever we recognize as the individual distinction,
difference or "signature" of any given Hollywood film had more to do with the
"star system" than with any other factor and the star system at this time was
integrated into the production processes of studio and unit.
But how did the star system create the signatures of Ford, Leisen, Wilder, etc. I think the system actually created the (non)signatures of Woody Van Dyke, Henry Hathaway, Henry King, etc who were decent journeymen directors, but not greatly inventive artists.
> Are you telling me that you are able to tell the difference between one
director and another in junk like "Charlie's Angels" circa 1978?!
No, but I can recognize a Sam Peckinpah episode of "The Westerner" or a Sam Fuller episode of "The Iron Horse."
> You certainly have a better eye than I have!
No, it is just trained by over 30 years of disciplined film viewing.
> This I would say is an expertise, that has little to do with what makes the
show distinct.
But there is a difference between an entire show being distinct and a particular episode. There are Freed musicals and then there are Freed musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli.
> The individual signature of the show has more to do with the producers (and
the time in which it was made, by the way) than with anything that a director will
ever do.
The show as a whole - yes. But certain directors can inflect the episodes they are given to direct. In the 1950's, Universal made a lot of melodramas, but the ones directed by Douglas Sirk are visually distinct and often as both melodrama and critique of melodrama. Same for Universal horror movies in the 1930's. The ones by James Whale are distinguishable from the ones made by lesser directors.
> In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", I can tell, with out aid of credits, when Joss
Whedon directs and writes. His direction takes a lot of care and uses a minimal
amount of shot/reverse shot, more long takes, more tracking shots, interesting
ways to establish the space of a scene, etc.
That's expertise.
> But the show itself, in the popular imagination, was not distinguished by
Whedon's directorial signature but by his production signature.
Okay, but the fact that the popular imagination does not recognize Whedon's signature does not mean it is not there.
> . . . the audience knew Whedon's name or not (or Stephen J. Cannell from an
earlier time) it seems to me that they often recognized the producers signature.
Producers can be auteurs as well as directors. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY has the fascinating collision of Mankiewicz (producer/uncredited screenplay) as auteur colliding with Cukor (director) as auteur and both reckoning with Hepburn (star) as auteur.
> Well some Selznick productions were Hitchcock films, in the same
way that a Capra movie could actually be a Cary Grant film.
But Selznick's signature disappears in a Hitchcock film in a way it did not in GWTW.
> He was first of all sold to the trades and then to the urban audiences in
New York, Philadelphia, Chicago.
Sold as the genre "Frank Capra movie." But there is also the aesthetic work of art "Frank Capra movie" that has paticular and repreated formal elements that go beyond genre.
> The first step is that the Hollywood director markets his personal style
to studios and producers, (along with the ability to come in on time and
under the budget)
They market the genre/style of his films -- not his aesthetic signature.
> The fact that nobody discusses "mise en scene", etc., in the way
that we might today doesn't mean that a "style" was not sold to various
audience/consumer sectors.
I think genre was sold more than style. Sirk's movies were sold as melodramas, not as fascinating explorations of cinematic space.
Hitchcock films were sold as thrillers or suspense movies, not as films with superb editing, camera movement and mise en scene.
>In effect all Hollywood directors who became "stars" of any kind were
marketed this way to the initial audience of the trade magazines and
the newspapers and sometimes to the managers of the various movie
house owners, when the studio had not already guaranteed distribution.
I agree. But with the genres films they made (and agreeing to make these genre films allowed them to work), some of them created distinct, complex, visually ravishing works of art.
> But marketing wouldn't matter at all if it was did not in fact motivate,
change, feedback on how these movies were made.
How did this marketing change the way Minnelli used the crane shot? It is there in his melodramas, his comedies and his musicals.
No matter what studio Hawks worked for or the genre he was working in, the camera was always in the same place. I can count on one hand the number of canted angles that exist in his films.
> And again I must emphasize that I think it is empirically true that the
"star system", and how it developed in Hollywood, and how it came to be
used, had more to do with how movies were made and the distinction of
those movies from each to each than anything to do with auteurs, directors,
or any individual category of artist.
I know you believe this to be true, but I still do not see how the star system demanded the creation of Preminger's long takes or Ophuls tracking shots (which he brought with him from Europe when he came to Hollywood).
Brian