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marty norden's
musings provoke two musically oriented observations
1. opera audiences
[and often ballet audiences too] as a matter of course read a plot synopsis
BEFORE going to the performance -- and this because the interest is not
at all in what happens [in “plot”] but in how it’s acted out
or performed . . . and years ago, in the heyday of continuous showing double
features, audiences showed up at the theater when they wanted to and stayed
till the point at which they had entered, thereby often watching the end of one
film before the beginning . . . both of these – the first more powerfully,
i think -- suggest ways of viewing close to the ones marty mentions from 90
years ago . . . and of course these ways are still with us:: we certainly don’t
listebn to songs – or, for that matter watch music videos – to see
how they turn out
2. a much more
trivial point: i’ve been pretty familiar with the music scene in london
for years [despite living in the states] and know of no venue called “philharmonic
hall” . . . the halls in use a century ago also, so far as i know,
did not include a “philharmonic hall” – and indeed the london
philharmonic orchestra was not founded until much later . . . there was,
however, a philharmonic hall in liverpool dating from the mid 19th
century. and it was used both for music and for cinema . . . perhaps that’s
where _Where Are My Children?_ played for three weeks in 1917 . . .
or was there a since destroyed hall by that name in london in 1917?
mike
-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy Salon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Marty Norden
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 5:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: pedagogical query: silent cinema
Quoting "Frank, Michael"
<[log in to unmask]>:
> . . . if my
> purpose in this silent cinema course is to examine
how moving images can
> work to communicate meaning in the absence of spoken
dialogue, and if my
> circumstances [shared, i venture, by most of us] do
not permit me to
> provide a benshi, how honest a representation of a
film like this one
> can i offer? . . . if in some sense the film was
made presupposing a
> benshi, is showing it without one a significant
misrepresentation?
I find this a highly intriguing subject, and I wonder if
I might broaden it
a bit to include other extra-textual sources of narrative
information upon
which silent-era cinema audiences might have drawn...
I am currently working on a project that examines
narrative films made
around 1916 and 1917 that dealt with birth control and/or
abortion. The
productions that I have been focusing on are the Lois
Weber-Phillips Smalley
films _Where Are My Children?_ and _The Hand That Rocks
the Cradle_, as well
as Margaret Sanger's _Birth Control_ and an unrealized
but reasonably well-
documented project developed by Alice Guy-Blache and Rose
Pastor Stokes.
One of my incidental discoveries relates to the issue at
hand; it was not at
all unusual for newspapers to publish press releases that
gave away major
details of the films' stories. These documents are
loaded with what we
today call "spoilers," and I am wondering if
the expectation among movie
companies, theater managers, and audience members back
then was that the
spectators were to have a fairly strong sense of the
films' narratives
before they set foot into the theaters.
Say, for example, that _Where Are My Children?_ was
booked to play in a
given theater for seven days. During each of those
days, the local
newspaper(s) would publish a press release that would
reveal key
developments in the film's story. I speculate that
a typical spectator
about to see this film would know ahead of time that a
young woman dies as a
result of a botched abortion and that the wife of the
film's central
character (played by the redoubtable Tyrone Power) has
had abortions without
informing him. This latter situation is the film's
*main* revelation --
indeed, it prompts the husband to ask the titular
question -- yet it is
"pre-revealed" in the press releases.
Knowing that newspapers were so important as sources of
information back
then, it seems to me that audience members would have
difficulty avoiding
these press releases (if indeed they wanted to avoid
them). These items
were standard fare in the newspapers; in a few cases,
they were published on
the papers' front pages.
I suspect that, in some instances, audiences used these
documents to help
them make sense of movies that had been severely
truncated as a result of
censorship. A city or state censorship board might
demand the excision of
several critical scenes, and the ensuing "cuts"
might render some situations
or character actions as incomprehensible. The press
releases might thus
enable spectators to "fill in the blanks"
created by the removal of certain
key moments.
The widespread presence of spoiler-laden press releases
doesn't seem to have
diminished audience enthusiasm for the filmsin
particular was an incredibly popular film -- it played
for weeks if not
months in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles,
and many other
cities and towns. (In fact, I just learned that it
played at London's
Philharmonic Hall for three solid months in 1917 but
without benefit of a
permit from the British Board of Film Censors.) The
general situation does
make me wonder, though, if audiences entered movie
theaters with something
resembling a fatalistic perspective -- i.e., they would
know that certain
"fixed" situations and events would occur in
the world about to unfold
before them.
Sorry for rambling on so, but this general topic has
given me considerable
pause. It raises some interesting questions for
those of us who teach
silent-era film: Should we prepare and distribute similar
documents to our
students before the screenings? Or would such
narrative summaries distance
the students too much from the films and ruin the sense
of discovery and
engagement that we would want them to have? I would
be grateful for your
thoughts on any of the above; citations for relevant
research or theory
would be especially welcome.
--Marty Norden
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin F. Norden
Communication Dept., 409 Machmer
Hall norden(at)comm.umass.edu
University of
Massachusetts-Amherst fax: 413
545-6399
Amherst, MA 01003
USA
vox: 413 545-0598
Home page: http://people.umass.edu/norden
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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