Cinema
WHAT ARE FILM STUDIES?
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation. In this sense the film studies discipline exists as one in which the teacher does not always assume the primary educator role; the featured film itself serves that function.
For students who graduate from film studies courses possible careers include critic or production. Usually, though, film studies is just part of a general arts degree and the variety of programs can be googled for interested readers here. Film theory often includes the study of conflicts between the aesthetics of visual Hollywood and the textual analysis of screenplay. Overall the study of film continues to grow, as does the industry on which it focuses. Academic journals publishing film studies work include Screen, Cinema Journal, and the Journal of Film and Video. Readers are encouraged to read about the subjects of film or cinema studies, media studies and several associated topics to widen their knowledge if these subjects interest them.
INTRODUCTION TO MY FILM STUDIES NOTES
The only years I had much to do with the formal study of film, what is now called by several names: film studies, cinema studies, the history of film, inter alia--was when this formal study was part of a media studies course that I taught at the Thornlie College of Technical and Further Education(Tafe) in Perth Western Australia on three occasions in the early 1990s. I drew on films, video and television in my teaching career all the way back to the 1960s. But it was not until I retired from teaching, both FT and PT, as the new millennium turned its corner, that most of the content of the several volumes of the notes I now possess emerged. They had begun, they had their aetiology as the medical world calls beginnings, with some notes, notes I had taken for that course I taught in Tafe in those early 1990s.
The material on the Internet was absolutely burgeoning in the field of film studies and impossible to cover in any systematic way because of: (a) the wide ranging nature of my academic interests and (b) the limitations of time and circumstance. By September 2011 I had notes on dozens of films and, like everyone else with computer facilities and the Interest, access to summaries and discusisons of 1000s of films, as well as notes on many actors and film genres, producers and directors. I have only just begun my formal study of the field of film studies after watching films for over 60 years: 1950-2011. The many aspects of film and its history was clearly an interdisciplinary-academic field and I had just made a beginning to its investigation in the last two decades: 1991 to 2011.
Ron Price
19 May 2007 to 5 September 2011
MY WRITING ABOUT FILMS
I have written about many films, attempting as I do, an integration of each film into society in general and my life in particular. Three samples are found below. Readers can click on the links below these three prose-poems, if they want to read some of my efforts at integration of other films, several hundred now in cyberspace.
THE GODFATHER PART III
And Our Ordinary Ordinariness
By some time in the late 1990s I had seen all three of the Godfather films. After I retired from FT(1999), PT(2003) and volunteer/casual teaching(2005), I wrote two prose-poems on each of the first two films in this trilogy. This prose-poem offers another personal perspective on these films, on the mafia and on the religion, the system of thought, I have been associated with now for some six decades, juxtaposed in a strange and bewildering synchronicity which surprised me as I investigated their parallel developments. It was impossible to fully understand either of these movements, except in part and through a glass-darkly, unless one was prepared to subject either of them to some degree of serious study. In our bewildering and complex world, at this climacteric of history, most people did not have the time or, more importantly, the interest.
The script for The Godfather Part III begins in 1979, the year I returned to Tasmania in the midst of yet another episode of bipolar disorder and more than fifteen years into my pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community. This last film in the trilogy began with a brief flashback on the life and family of the chief godfather in the film, Michael Corleone, a life going back to before WW2 in the entre deux guerres years with Corleone’s Sicilian connections; the film ends with the death of Michael Corleone who dies alone, an old man who has paid a high price for his sins. Some time not specified, but in the late 1990s, just before I retired from my work as a full-time teacher, the trilogy comes to a close. The story, the history, of the Sicilian mafia and its American, its international connections, of course, goes on(1) but, for the time being, no more godfather films are planned. -Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 7 April 2008; and (1) “The Modern Mafia In Italy,” Wikipedia, 7 April 2008.
As I watched these three godfather films
again in this new millennium and read
about the mafia which had always been
on the periphery, the far edges, of the
knowledge that I held in my personal
data-bank of memory for recall, I realized
that I belonged to an organization that had
a history more bloody than the one I had
just witnessed and viewed for my sensory
pleasure on a cool Tasmanian evening.
It was one whose mystic fane that went
back to a routinization of charisma and
origins in another blood-stained story
that was as obscure and tragic, indeed
as intensely dramatic, and as secretive,
with poems inadequate to the murder of
so many, as full of dire convulsions and
very real terror and of debauchery and
shame, extremes of a commitment that
fell into history’s chaos with an anguish
as incomprehensible as Auschwitz.....so
...often nameless & blood-soaked bodies,
only their image left to streak across our
vision in this cinematic trilogy and tumble
endlessly before history's cocky jaywalker
which succumbs to bullets, knives & fists
on our screen with a careless technicolour
ease as our own lives pass by but always
emerging in their unscripted, flawed, and
plausible celluloid safety and their always
immensely ordinary, humanly, ordinariness.
Ron Price
7 April 2008 to 5 September 2011
MIA FARROW AND THE OMEN: 666
I saw The Omen(2006) in mid-January 2011 on Australian TV. The movie did not start until 1 in the morning. I was too tired to watch the whole movie. Not having a taping facility I went to bed about 2 a.m. and missed the last half of the movie. I read the story of The Omen on Wikipedia out of curiosity the next day. I also read a digest of the other Omen films which have been available for film buffs in the 30 years from 1976 to 2006. The Omen, Damien: Omen II, Omen III: The Final Conflict and Omen IV: The Awakening as well as The Omen:666. Now you can watch replays on TV. You can watch them on DVD and, if you are into the new technology, on your iPod or iPad. I’m happy to wait until movies come onto TV as The Omen:666 did, as I say, in January 2011.
Mia Farrow appeared as Mrs. Baylock, the Satanic nanny, in the remake of The Omen:666. Though the film itself received a lukewarm critical reception, Farrow's performance was widely praised, with the Associated Press(AP) declaring "thank heaven for Mia Farrow." Her performance resulted in, as the AP put it: "a rare instance of this new Omen improving on the old one." Filmcritic.com added: "it is Farrow who steals the show", and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer described her performance as "a truly delicious comeback from her role as Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. Mia Farrow is chillingly believable as a sweet-talking nanny from hell." -Ron Price, Wikipedia, 17 January 2011.
As I surveyed all these Omens(1)
I became more interested in Mia
Farrow......All this 666 stuff, this
Book of Revelation playing is a
very old game going away-back
to the 1st century with this piece
of apocalyptic literature. And it is
a game anyone can play with just
a little keen interest in the biblical
symbolism of.............this 666!!(2)
(1) Wikipedia and several other internet sites provided me with excellent overviews of the entire set of Omen films.
(2) I have come to favour ‘Abdul-Baha’s explanation that 666 applies to the first Umayyad Caliph who came to power in the year 666 of the Christian era. I have yet to come across a Christian sect or denomination who shares this interpretation. Most people I have known in my travels through the secular wilderness have little interest in prophecy. Ali, it should be noted, was the true successor according to the Shi'ah branch of Islam. Muhammad publicly named him “Leader” or “Imam” a few months before his death. (See: M. Gail, Six Lessons on Islam 6.29)
After the assassination of Ali in AD 661, Muawiya seized power over the expanding Muslim world, proclaiming himself the first Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty and Empire in the notorious year of AD 666. Muawiya’s destructive edicts crippled Islam spiritually. He made the Muslim capital unholy Damascus instead of holy Mecca, and for good measure desecrated the Mecca birthplace and the Medina tomb of Muhammad. His Umayyad Caliphate carved out the world’s biggest Empire at the time. See: (1) Robert F. Riggs, “The Rise of the Caliphate,” in The Apocalypse Unsealed, Philosophical Library, NY, 1981, pp. 165-175; and (2) The Revelation History of Muslim Militarism | Apocalypse Secrets. The Umayyad Caliphate of Muawiya (CE 666–749).
Ron Price 17 January 2011 to 5 September 2011
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
The movie Look Back in Anger was released in New York on 15 September 1959 three weeks before I joined the Baha’i Faith in Ontario at the age of 15. The movie was based on a play written by John Osborne (1929-1994), a play which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956. The play was a strongly autobiographical piece written by a man who had five marriages and many personal battles in his lifetime---and it caused a revolution in British theatre, a revolution which Osborne felt was only on the surface. His work was part of “an unparalleled, mid-century period of dramatic brilliance.”(1)
My interest in Osborne has been due to several factors not the least of which were/are his two volumes of autobiography: A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991). David Hare, English playwright and theatre and film director, said in his 1995 memorial address at Osborne's funeral: “John Osborne devoted his life to trying to forge some sort of connection between the acuteness of his mind and the extraordinary power of his heart.” This connection between heart and mind is critical for any aspiring writer and poet, indeed, any human being.
I was just finishing grade 6 at the time Look Back in Anger hit the stage in London and looking forward to a summer of baseball as the homerun king in the peewee league of the small town of Burlington in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. In the early 1990s, by the time Osborne was finishing his 40 year long career as a playwright, I was setting my eye on finishing my 40 year long working life as a teacher among many other employment roles. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) David Hare, “A lifelong satirist of prigs and puritans,” Memorial Service Speech for John Osborne in June 1995.
I watched this movie this weekend.
I may have been working marquee
at the Roxy theatre in Burlington
when this movie came out in 1959.
I would not have wanted your life,
John, for all your popularity, fame,
and wealth. I had a tough enough
time with my own slings & arrows.
That world of false values depicted
in your plays, John, is still with us.
I’m going to look into those two
autobiographies--especially after
watching this weekend that turning-
point, yours, in that post-war British
theatre. Look Back in Anger and the
portrayal of a generation of angry
young men I did not see back then.
I had my anger later in the early ‘60s,
John, but it was dissipated, reoriented,
and channelled due to my espousal of a
new religion which had begun to grow in
the heart of a deeply conservative country,
a country which had been my home for two
decades by the time that anger came to the
surface and needed working in & through.
Ron Price
23 January 2011 to 5 September 2011
My posts on some movies are found below as well as the responses of others to my posts at various internet sites:
http://www.movieweb.com/u/ronprice
http://www.talk-movies.com/comedy/8368-monty-python-deals-obsolescent-soon-forgotten-doctrines
(click on my photo and then on the words 'Find all posts by RonPrice--86 posts)
http://netflixcommunity.ning.com/profile/RonPrice
http://www.empireonline.com.au/forum/tm.asp?m=129884&mpage=1&key=&NID=0#129887
http://www.filmcrave.com/movie_talk_topics
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread
The First Animated Film: 1937
(click on my photo and then on the words "Find all posts by RonPrice" to read many of my pieces at this site)
Beatrix Potter
(click on my photo, then on the word statistics, & then on the words "Find all posts by RonPrice" to access posts I have written at this site over the years.)
The internet is now brimming with articles about cinema, articles from a host of sources. Here is one:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/variety-movie-experience/
IS FILM ALL WE HAVE?
It’s been sixty years since the French writer and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet(1922-2008) declared the word “literary” a pejorative. He insisted that the surface of things, as in a film, is all we can authentically know; and that presenting the psychology of the characters is somehow meretricious. Instead, what affects us, what persists in our memory are the gestures themselves, the objects, the movements, and the outlines. As for the novel’s characters, they may themselves suggest many possible interpretations; they may, according to the preoccupations of each reader, accommodate all kinds of comment—psychological, psychiatric, religious, or political—yet their indifference to these “potentialities” will soon be apparent.
A FILM SITE THAT WANTS TO LINK WITH THIS SUB-SECTION OF MY WEBSITE
From time to time film sites ask to link with my website. I don't link them all but the site below is the first:
http://www.meltedjoystick.com
