1. The five conditions include: a new generation of directors (the movie brats; Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, etc.), new marketing strategies (wider massive advertising campaigns), new media ownership and management styles (MCA with Universal, etc.), new technology of sound and image reproduction (SFX, Dolby Sound, etc.), and new delivery systems.
Question: What does he mean new delivery systems? Like VCR’s and at home devices?
2. I believe, New Hollywood being defined as “the different as same” refers to this new age of
3. Elsaesser is talking about the horror genre in particular; rupturing realism by disrupting cause and effect patterns (often leaving out the cause of killers/monsters motivation until the end? I think), disrupting shot/countershot, continuity and reverse field editing in order to create a sense of mystery, suspense, and horror, as well as deliberately misleading the viewer and with holding information, especially with sound.
Question: Could you explain reverse field editing just a little?
4. The sound and image relationship within horror films deliberately is not synchronized in terms of cause and effect, question and answer; thus preventing viewers from answering the question of the sounds source and in turn creating suspense and when used effectively with score, inducing fear.
5. Paintings, films, technology of the past are alluded to, but only at a secondary level, hidden in subtext, underneath the story of Dracula being played out, thus it is like these older texts are still visible in the story of Dracula which is layered on top.
6. It is a prototypical because the vampire film is nothing new, but the allusions to the predecessors are. The self-reflection draws attention to the form which is constantly being reused to tell the same story but with different plots.
13. My monitor is a collage of competing realities, countering Bazin’s notion of the screen being a window into reality, the screen in this multimedia world functions as a glass house which is barraged by images, which mesh and juxtapose to create a pseudo reality which calls into question the very notion of the true function of film as an art form and maybe propels it into nothing more than stimuli for the senses.
Question: I’ve been thinking this over for sometime, wouldn’t the music industry be the first industry to promote multimedia, and merchandise? I’ve been thinking about A Hard Day’s Night (1964) from United Artists, and the cross promotion that helped propel The Beatles, which in turn television saw as the future and created The Monkees for television but incorporating music in order to fully capitalize on merchandise.
2 comments:
First, I would take your CHC copy back to the bookstore, if you got it there, and get a different copy. It is way too expensive to have a misprint like that.
#1: Yes, new delivery systems would be home video and cable, eventually DVD, and more recently the internet, etc.
#2: Yes, you have the basic distinction. It might help you to trace the examples given in that paragraph. But in a nutshell you have it.
#3: Reverse field: Basically another way of describing shot / reverse shot.
#5: Another way of looking at it is that the allusions are so dense that they start commenting on each other and on the Dracula story. The effect is like standing between two mirrors, and seeing the reflections into infinite regress.
#6: You describe allusionism well here, but then there is the question of post-modernity. To what degree are there conflicting modes of representation in the film, just as there were conflicting modes in 1897?
#13: Another way of looking at it is that the "windows" now become a metaphor for information access, and you pick and choose between these pieces of information through the interface. The question then becomes: Is watching parts of Dracula like this? (This is debatable, and we will discuss in detail on Thursday.)
Multi-media / merchandise: Disney merchandising would pre-date the Hard Days Night example, but your question and point is still relevant. It's not that such merchandising never existed before 1975, the question is what function it now serves in the search for "synergy" within a media conglomerate. Is film the cart or the horse, so to speak.
Re: In class exercise: You start to describe the parallel between shifts in 1897 and 1992, but you could be more specific to make the parallel (and the argument) clear.
I'd recommend trying the last question for Week 10 to get more practice putting Elsasser in your own words.
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