The Frame

The Chronological Looney Tunes: 1930

On February 13, 2015

I’ve been a big fan of Looney Tunes for as long as I can remember, and although I’m sure the anti-violent cartoon league will get all up in my face, I’ve started letting Karina watch them and she loves them, too. Thanks to the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, I have a wide range of Looney Tunes (and Merrie Melodies, if you want to be specific) available, and since I’ve tended to stick to a few dozen favorites, I decide I’d like to watch through all the cartoons I have in chronological order and get a better sense of the development of the styles and characters over time.

And OF COURSE I’ll document all this here, year by year. The Golden Collection doesn’t contain every Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies short, and I may supplement from YouTube when they’re available, but I don’t promise to do that both because I may not have time and because YouTube is pretty iffy on Looney Tunes. I do promise to watch all of the ones released on disc, and I’ll be picking some favorite things about each one, and highlighting yearly trends and stuff like that. I am NOT doing a lot of background reading on this – I have a couple of books by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald that I’ll likely be referencing, but if you really want in-depth looks at specific cartoons, I recommend Brandie Ashe’s Saturday Morning Cartoon series at The Black Maria.

The Birth of Looney Tunes

After Windsor McCay introduced his animated dinosaur Gertie to the screen in 1914, silent cartoons became quite popular in the form of The Katzenjammer Kids, Bobby Bumps, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Dinky Doodle, and many other series from Bray Studios, International Film Service, Van Buren Studios, etc. Disney came on the scene in a big way with Mickey Mouse in 1928, and Warner Bros. wanted something to compete, using their vast music collection and Vitaphone sound technology. They contracted with Leon Schlesinger to produce a series of animated musical shorts. He remained head of Warner’s animation unit until 1944, setting up many of the quintessential Warner Bros. characters and animation directors.

Schlesinger’s animation team was headed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, with animation done by future great director Friz Freleng (among others), and their first character was Bosko, who is modeled on a young black boy but whose characterization as an African-American is spotty. There’s definitely an element of blackface minstrel show feel to his character that’s a bit troubling, which could be one reason he’s largely forgotten today. In large part, this manifests in his genial broad smile and innate ability to make music out of literally everything, so the cartoons tend to be joyful and visually inventive and almost wholly plotless.

Buckle up, because we have a whole lot of Bosko (and some other early, mostly forgotten characters) before we get to the Porky Pigs, the Daffy Ducks, and the Bugs Bunnys we know and love.

American Movie Critics: Gilbert Seldes

By Jandy

On February 5, 2015

In American Movie Critics, Film

[Ryan McNeil of The Matinee and I are reading through the American Movie Critics anthology and discussing each chapter as we go, crossposting on each of our blogs.]

This essay gave us so much to talk about that we barely knew where to start…or stop! Gilbert Seldes was best known for his 1923 work of cultural criticism The Seven Lively Arts, which was one of the first critical books to celebrate popular art such as the Keystone Kops, the comic Krazy Kat, and jazz (he would later host NBC’s The Subject is Jazz in the 1950s). Here he’s writing at the shift to sound, looking back over the things that made the 1920s great and looking forward to what sound will bring.

Our discussion ranges with him from Chaplin to the role of the critic in guiding film production, with plenty of our usual excursus into vulgar auteurism, the evolution of slapstick, and the ways cinemagoing has changed since the 1920s.

RYAN McNEIL
The ten pages of this book dedicated to Gilbert Seldes might have given me more to think about than anything we’ve come across yet.

JANDY HARDESTY
Heâ€™s extraordinarily thought-provoking! In fact, his piece sounds as though it could’ve been written now – a historian/critic looking back over decades and coming up with extremely salient thoughts about silent comedy, the role of escapism in film, and the relationship between critic, producer and audience. Only in the last section does it sort of peek through that he’s not of our time, mostly because the economics and dominance of the movie industry has shifted somewhat. I think his thoughts on Chaplin, for example, are remarkable for someone writing in the midst of Chaplin’s career. Note that even his list of accomplishments of the silent cinema are strikingly similar to what a modern writer would cite:

The Keystone comedies, the work of Charles Chaplin, The Birth of a Nation, certain other technical achievements of D.W. Griffith, Caligari, The Big Parade, the direction of Ernst Lubitsch and the playing of Emil Jannings, a handful of scenes in the work of a few American directors, The Last Laugh, the cinematic technique of the Russians, Nanook and Chang, the contemporary newsreel, recent trick photography, some abstract films. [57]

RYAN
The note I made when Seldes rhymed off all those accomplishments was that film had already done so much in such a short amount of time. It must have been so bloody exciting to see a medium take shape like that and do so many things in such a short window. In a way, I count myself lucky because I realize that our generation got to see that same sort of evolution with the dawn of the internet and how much it changed things in such a short amount of time. Wow, do we ever take being part of such things for granted…

Rewatching the Filmography: Sabrina

By Jandy

On February 3, 2015

In Film

Part of my filmography completion goals for this year is rewatching films that I either don’t remember that well or didn’t care for the first time and want to give another chance. I decided I’d go ahead and post some reactions to those as well.

Sabrina is one of a few films that continue to benefit from Audrey Hepburn’s ongoing popularity. There are a few “classes” of classic film – ones that everyone knows like The Wizard of Oz, ones that are loved by die-hard classic aficionados, and ones like Sabrina that find an appreciative modern audience of people who are open to classic films but aren’t necessarily big film buffs in general. These people gravitate toward Audrey Hepburn as a style icon, and certain films of hers (especially this one, Roman Holiday, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade and My Fair Lady) stay perennially popular because they highlight her effortless style, effervescent screen presence, and ineffable wide-eyed innocence.

Perhaps my own struggles with loving Sabrina stem in part as a personal backlash against its popularity, the assumption of this particular group of classic film watchers that it’s a great and classic film. I want to express kinship with these nascent classic film fans, but sometimes, as in this case, the films that apparently speak to them simply don’t to me, and I find that both baffling and fascinating. (I do have a whole post percolating around in my head on this topic, but as you can see, I find it very difficult to avoid generalizing a whole group of people in ways that probably aren’t accurate while still making the point I want to make.)

Completing the Filmography: Fedora

By Jandy

On February 2, 2015

In Film

In 1950, Billy Wilder made what is probably the definitive film on Hollywood and aging with Sunset Boulevard, but it seems he wasn’t quite done with the topic, returning to it in 1978’s Fedora, a film about an iconic actress from the 1940s (very Garbo-esque in accent and distancing demeanor) who has retired to the Greek isles under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

After a long series of films with Jack Lemmon, Wilder returns to his previous favorite male actor, William Holden – who also not coincidentally played the male lead in Sunset Boulevard, the first of many echoes from that film to this. Here he’s a movie producer (perhaps a few steps up from Joe Gilles’ desperate screenwriter, though he’s still desperate) hoping to find the reclusive Mme. Fedora and convince her to come back and star in a film for him. The first half of Fedora plays like a mystery, a “where is Fedora” and “why won’t the people at this island villa she’s supposedly staying with let me in or talk to me” situation that’s reminiscent of The Third Man.

American Movie Critics: Harry Alan Potamkin

By Jandy

On January 21, 2015

In American Movie Critics, Film

After something of a long hiatus over the holidays, Ryan McNeil and I are getting back into the swing of our historical criticism series. And truth be told, we very nearly skipped Harry Alan Potamkin, unsure how to respond to his take on American cinema, which is informed by an appreciation for a Soviet cinema neither Ryan nor I are particularly familiar with. But we decided to give it the old college try, and ended up having a pretty good conversation around the edges of Potamkin, discussing regional cinemas and doing thought experiments about directors if they’d had different national backgrounds. Ryan’s version of the post is here.

Featured image: Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal, which Potamkin quite admires

JANDY HARDESTY
I donâ€™t know that I have much to say in response to these two excerpts from Harry Alan Potamkin – he’s a bit esoteric and obsessed with Russian directors that I frankly don’t know enough about to even respond to his points.

RYAN McNEIL
Potamkin’s writing is really heady. It’s more a meditation than a reaction, which is good since I don’t think we’ve come across that yet in the writing we’ve seen so far (poetic views, philosophic views, yes – meditative, not so much). Once again, it stands apart from what we see as film criticism in our mind’s eye: “This is good…this is bad…here’s why.”

JANDY
In the first excerpt we have from him, Potamkin calls out for more visionary artists to make good on the promise of cinema – he suggests that Hollywood is “uninspired competence” at best (the idea that Hollywood is artistically bankrupt has been around for a long time!) and looks to New York for help.

Hollywood is uninspired competence – at its best. Hollywood is empty facility. A critical mind is needed. New York is the concentration center of the critical mind. Even in the use of the instruments (putting aside for the moment philosophy), I look to the director who has not imbibed Hollywood. [48]

This isn’t the first or last time that New York has been seen as an “antidote” to Hollywood – indie pioneers like John Cassavetes from the ’60s have a New York sensibility as well. Why do you think this is? The bulk of Potamkin’s piece looks at Rouben Mamoulian, a stage director at the time though he’d soon make his mark on film; is looking to New York a call for an influx of stage talent, or something else? Can we square this with the other critics we’ve read pointing out the inherent disconnect between stage and screen?