Introduction to Film Studies

Steven Shaviro
August 31, 2011

Introduction to Film Studies

• English 2450/Communications 2010 -- Section 5
• Monday and Wednesday, 12:50 pm - 2:50 pm
• Fall 2011
• Steven Shaviro
• email: shaviro@shaviro.com
• office: Room 9309, 5057 Woodward
• office hours: M & W, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
• shaviro@shaviro.com

Agenda for Today

• Class Outline
• Class Requirements
• Technologies of Film
• Today's film: Buster Keaton, Sherlock Junior (1924)

Class Outline

• Syllabus online at:
  http://www.shaviro.com/Classes/FilmIntroF2011.html
• Mondays:
• Screening of feature film
• Wednesdays:
• Lecture: analysis of the film
• Lecture: analysis of concepts
• Application: use of concepts to analyze another film or video sequence

Class Requirements

• Regular attendance (points will be lost for frequent absence)
• Five short papers (15% of grade each, for a total of 75%)
  • Formal analysis of various elements of film
  • Keyed to film clips available on Blackboard
• Final examination (25% of grade)

Class Reference Material

• Available on Blackboard:
• Concept Guides
• Lecture Slides (posted after each Wednesday lecture)
• Study Questions on individual films
• Textbooks (for optional outside reading):
• The Film Experience: An Introduction, by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White.
• Film Art: An Introduction, by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.

Formal Elements of Film

• Mise-en-scène
  (What's in front of the camera)
• Cinematography
  (What the camera does)
• Editing
  (How the shots of a film are put together)
• Sound
  (Film is more than images)

Buster Keaton and Sherlock Junior

• Silent Film Comedy of the 1920s
• Career of Buster Keaton
• A film about filmviewing: the film-within-a-film
• Filmviewing & detective work
• How are desire and fantasy refracted through filmviewing?

Sherlock Junior: Before

• Significance of money
• Keaton's object-machines
• Sticky paper
• Banana peel
• Detective manual: shadow your suspect, etc.
• Comedy of reducing the human to mechanical duplication (Henri Bergson)

Sherlock Junior: The Film-Within-the-Film

• Film is like a dream
• Projection of everyday reality into the world of the film
• Buster's elegant, and supremely capable, self-image in the film vs. his awkwardness in 'real life'
• But the realm of film has strange rules of its own: a different time and space

Film Space:
The laws of association

• Scenes continually change behind Buster
• Altering the properties of space
• Going through the mirror
• Safe opening onto street
• Chase sequences
• Reaction shots and narration (billiards scene)
• Object-machines (e.g. Buster's motorcycle)

Sherlock Junior: After

• Disconnect of film from reality (the Girl -- and not Buster -- solves the case)
• Filmviewing and self-absorption
• Buster can't see that she loves him all along
• Romantic cliches taken from films

Sherlock Junior: The Ending

• Buster uses the movie for instructions on what to do
• Buster and the girl, seen through the projection room window, themselves seem to be framed like figures on a screen
• Life imitates film, rather that the reverse
• Solving the "mystery" of sexuality

Concepts and Questions (1)

• The thrill of recognition
• Identification with characters
• Enjoyment of situations (comedy, spectacle)
• Narrative: the need for resolution

Concepts and Questions (2)

• Concreteness of the cinematic world
• Dreamlike fluidiy of space, time, and association
• Guiding our attention
• Fantasy fulfillment