Category: School Page 3 of 10

Film Anthologies

On April 20, 2007

You know, I wonder if there are any textbook-like film anthologies. Not anthologies of writing about film, but of actual film. Like, if you take a literature survey class, you usually get a Norton Anthology or a Longman Anthology or some such that has a collection of important poems and short stories and sections of novels. But if you take a film class, either the films are all watched in class from the teacher’s copy, or you’re pretty much on your own to get hold of them to see. Granted, it’s easier in literature because you can build an anthology out of short works, while most of the films you would want to see in a film class are full-length. But in a survey class, you’re probably better off showing clips from films that illustrate what you’re talking about rather than the whole film anyway, so why not anthologize those? Put together a DVD of all the clips.

Of course, you can’t actually do that, because we don’t have copyright laws that allow for taking clips from films. Virtually all films are still under copyright protection and the fair use laws that are generally well-understood regarding the use of written works in the classroom are completely NOT understood when it comes to film and digital media. And I can’t see the MPAA being too keen on granting permission for films to be edited for anthologies–obviously the book publishers figure out some way to do it though, because not everything in literary anthologies is public domain. Which leads me back to wondering if anyone’s ever tried, or if it’s not seen as valuable to film professors. Seems like if you could package a good text, like Film Art: An Introduction or Understanding Movies or How to Read a Film with a DVD with the relevant film clips to illustrate what’s being talked about in text…that’d be a good thing, and worth paying extra. Like, you can get the paperback How to Read a Film for $25. Pay $50 and get the DVD too. It’s a textbook; $50 is not exorbitant. I think I spelled “exorbitant” wrong, but I got Firefox’s spellchecker to stop underlining it, so maybe not.

I’ll leave this as a fragmentary thought for now. I was just going through a Longman Anthology I got at a conference last year (seriously, publishing companies are DYING to give these things away to people they think might be teachers someday–totally worth going to conferences for), and it hit me how cool it would be to have a DVD that had all the most iconic film scenes on it.

edit – I take this back. Both Film Art and another McGraw-Hill text, Film, Form, and Culture, come with accompanying CD/DVD-ROMs in their latest editions. Presumably other companies are doing or will do the same thing. I guess I just missed the digital revolution by a few years when I was taking these classes in college. Although, DVD-ROMs aren’t as helpful as regular DVDs, because you can’t play them on your TV, just your computer. So there’s still room for improvement. And of course, the next step is an authorized web repository. Good luck getting the MPAA to agree to that.

Literary Criticism (rant warning)

By Jandy

On April 19, 2007

In Books and Reading, Film, School

Literary criticism ruins books. It tears them apart and glues them together again with the critic’s pet theory. It reduces character to symbol and narrative to trope. It increases cynicism and decreases enjoyment. It makes every book about something else. It creates a divide between “critical readers” and ordinary ones and dismisses the latter as naive and therefore worthless. It overanalyzes and deconstructs until there’s nothing left. You would expect literary critics to like literature. But they don’t seem to. They seem to hate it so much that they destroy it and put their theoretical/political agenda in its place.

Clearly I’m not a literary critic. I love literature, and the goal of all of my writing is to encourage people to read more, watch more, understand more, and enjoy more. This doesn’t mean I encourage reading without discretion, but you can read discerningly without reading cynically. I do like understanding, but sometimes I wonder if Claude Monet doesn’t have a point: “People discuss my art and pretend to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”

My film criticism hero is Andrew Sarris, who championed the auteur theory in American in the 1960s, getting into a much-publicized critical war with more populist film critic Pauline Kael. He still writes for the Observer, I believe, though he’s no longer the vanguard of film criticism. In 1990, there was a less-publicized critical spat in Film Comment between Richard Corliss (now of Time) and Roger Ebert (of the Chicago Sun-Times and Ebert and Roeper), in which Corliss denounced the reduction of film criticism to thumbs up-thumbs down and watered down reviews and Ebert largely agreed with him, but denied that film criticism was in as bad a state as Corliss thought, or that his television program (then Siskel and Ebert) was such a huge part of the problem. (Interestingly, the same general debate about the state of film criticism is still going on now.) Both Corliss and Ebert mentioned the halcyon days of the film criticism in the 1960s, when the Sarris-Kael debate was Important in a way that neither Corliss nor Ebert saw film criticism being important in the 1990s. So Sarris jumped into the fray in his well-mannered and thoughtful way. That’s all probably unimportant background for the quote I’m about to give, which applies directly to film criticism, but more broadly to criticism in general. (All of this can be found in Alone in the Dark, a collection of Ebert’s writings–he includes the Corliss and Sarris portions of the debate as well as his own.)

The fact that I have always been too much of a journalist for the academics, and too much of an academic for the journalists, makes me especially sensitive to the deplorable noncommunication among various critical camps now on the scene. In this context, Kael and I at our most contentious at least spoke the same language. Nowadays many film departments dominated by semioticians have virtually excommunicated all mainstream film critics from the sacraments of ‘discourses’ and ‘texts.’

What I want to be is a 1960s film critic, straddling academia and journalism…bringing a knowledge of film/literary history and technique to a discipline which is largely meant to inform ordinary people, not other academic people. You can read Sarris and understand him without knowing a lot of technical language–and you’ll appreciate the films you’re watching more if you do. I don’t know if this form of criticism exists anymore, or if anyone wants to either do it or read it except for me. I don’t fit into the world of theoretically-based criticism (even if I do enjoy learning about the history of theory, which I do), because I ultimately care more about the story than about a work’s endorsement or subversion of gender roles. Or racial identity. Or whatever. I ultimately care more about trying to get more people to read literature than about dissecting literature under a microscope. I accept that other people may feel differently, and may enjoy the dissection process. But I hate that my preferred way of approaching literature is considered naive, and that naive is considered lowly and unworthy. Because I refuse to believe that it is. The goal of criticism for me is to promote reading and appreciation, not to advance an agenda, which is what I see so much criticism doing.

This rant has been brought to you by a frustrating day of trying to read the relevant criticism on Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee before writing on it myself and being unable to get away from readings which depend entirely on the critic’s race-and-gender-centric agenda. (And I’m not talking fringe critics here, I’m talking the ones who are considered must-read authorities on Hurston’s work.) Literary critics are trying their damnedest to make me hate literature, and today, they’re doing an exceptional job of it. It has prompted several pages of writing in my notebook, but they’re pretty much all about how I hate criticism rather than actual productive work on the paper. (Disclaimer – I am frustrated right now, and I do believe pretty much everything I’ve said in this post, but I know that it’s reactionary and extremist. I don’t hate all criticism, and I think that theory does sometimes serve a useful purpose. It’s just not serving one for me at this moment.)

Voltaire on Homer

By Jandy

On March 25, 2007

In School

Notwithstanding the Veneration due, and paid to Homer, it is very strange, yet true, that among the most learn’d, and the greatest Admirers of Antiquity, there is scarce to be found, who ever read the Iliad, with that Eagerness and Rapture, which a Woman feels when she reads the Novel of Zaida¹; and as to the common Mass of Readers, less conversant with letters, but not perhaps endow’d with a less Share of Judgment and Wit, few have been able to go through the whole Iliad, without struggling against a secret Dislike, and some have thrown it aside after the fourth or fifth Book. How does it come to pass, that Homer has so many Admirers and so few Readers? And is at the same Time worshipp’d and neglected? (Voltaire, An Essay on Epick Poetry, 48-49)

The more things change, the more they stay the same…there were fake bibliophiles even back in the 18th century! (I typed that from a fascimile, thus the weird spellings and capitalization. I could’ve modernized it, but why? But I did use a regular “s” everytime he had an “s” that looks like an “f”. That’s the bad thing about fascimile versions.) Anyway. I found that amusing. I can just see some 18th-century schoolboy hurling his Homer across the room.

¹ Apparently a popular novel of the time. I found one Zaida written by Augustus von Kotzebue, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the same, since this essay was published in 1727, and Kotzebue wasn’t born until, like 1760. In any case, novels were new at the time and generally held in contempt and considered only suitable for flighty women, which is the import of what he’s saying here.

Writing Break!

By Jandy

On March 25, 2007

In School

I feel for A.D. Harvey and the research he put into writing the Neo-classical vs. Romantic section of this book Literature and History, especially in hunting down and examining the hundreds of epics written according to the Neo-classical guidelines in the late-18th, early-19th century, hoping to come up with something to rival the ancient Greeks.

I have hunted the early nineteenth-century epic through bibliographies and literary journals, ordering up hundred weights of volumes, some handsome quartos in crumbling calf, others cheap editions with mildewed uncut pages, rare, sometimes unique survivors of the piled-up brand-new volumes which once went forth from the warehouse with the pride of the epic poet and have been long since almost all consumed by the various destructiveness and impatiences of the world; I have turned page after page insistently different yet endlessly the same, like tombstones in a forgotten war cemetery; I have searched through the obscuring medium of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch for a glimmer of hitherto unacknowledged genius, a unique sensibility attempting to liberate itself from the marble blocks of verse, a voice expressing a perception of something that needed to be preserved; and sometimes I have thought that all I was achieving with my growing lists of titles was that for the first time statistical proof was being given of how many boring people there were in the early nineteenth-century (137-138).

It’s rare that a scholarly volume will make me laugh out loud, but that did. Oh, those Neo-classicists and their sameness-inducing rule-bounded-ness.

In other news, I burned my brownies. :( Note to self: when the timer goes off, TAKE THE FOOD OUT. *facepalm*

Study break

By Jandy

On March 23, 2007

In School

Over the past two days, I have read (or skimmed) G.W.F. Hegel, J.G. Herder, David Hume, and Karl Marx (but not much Marx, because I got bored). I have also read about Alexander Pope, Homer, Friedrich Schiller, Montesqieu, neo-classicism, and the philosophy of history. (Being a grad student does wonders for your speed-reading abilities…)

All that to say that I found this passage in Hegel to be rather amusing, but that could be just because I’m going cross-eyed.

Here in Germany, the so-called “higher criticism” has invaded not only the whole realm of literary studies, but also that of historical writing (in which, by abandoning the basic task of history, i.e., judicious historical studies, writers have left the way open for the most arbitrary ideas and combinations). This higher criticism has been the pretext for introducing all the un-historical monstrosities a vain imagination could suggest. It too is a method of bringing a present into the past, namely by substituting subjective fancies for historical data–fancies which are considered the more excellent the bolder they are, that is, the less they have to substantiate them, the scantier the details on which they are based, and the more widely they diverge from the best established facts of history. (Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p 23)

Note that Hegel’s Philosophy of History and his History of Philosophy are two entirely separate works. Yeah, that confused me for a while. Especially since the editions I got from the library are just the introductions, anyway. Because the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History is in the philosophy section, but the actual Lectures on the Philosophy of History is in the history section. Which sort of makes sense, but didn’t really when I didn’t know the intricacies of Hegel’s works as well as I do now. My professor tried to scare me away from Hegel, but I actually enjoyed what I read of him. Not as hard as Kant, and more interesting. (But then, I find history more interesting than philosophy–if I tried to read some of Hegel’s more philosophic stuff, I might have more difficulty. The Phenomenology of Spirit certainly sounds daunting, at least.)

My European Romanticism class has apparently turned into a philosophy class, hasn’t it? At least as far as the topics I keep picking go (the current topic being the differences between neo-classical and Romantic views of history, especially as it relates to their appropriation of/imitation of/admiration for Homer and classical poetry). Oh, well. It’s actually really interesting…these are the kind of philosophers I wanted to learn about in the Intro to Philosophy class I took my senior year of college. Instead I got a whole semester on pre-Platonic Greek philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the definition of worldview, which I already knew, thank you very much. Now if I can just figure out a way to study the existentialists (i.e., tie them into a paper, because without accountability I’ll never study them), I’ll be happy. :) Also, what does it say about me and poetry that I’d rather attempt Kant, Hegel, Hume, and Herder than Shelley and Wordsworth? Hmmmm…..

In other news, if my browser would quit freezing every few seconds, it would be enormously beneficial to my ability to, I don’t know, DO ANYTHING?! Firefox has been hogging resources even more than usual lately, and even restarting everything doesn’t seem to help for very long. I just uninstalled several plugins I don’t use very much…hopefully that will help.