Instructor: Walter Metz

Introduction to the Course: Entertainment vs. Critical Pleasure

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Film Studies But Were Afraid to Ask (In Socratic Form)

The Participants

Ingmar, the Fickle Student

Walter, the Impeccably Strict Professor

The Socratic Dialogue

Ingmar, the Fickle Student (IFS): Why is there an academic discipline devoted to studying movies? Who would bother wasting their time in Film Studies when there are businesses to be run, people’s lives to be saved with medicine, legal cases to be won, etc.?

Walter, the Impeccably Strict Professor (WISP): As an intellectual interested in understanding contemporary American culture, I believe that, in our media saturated environment, to know about popular entertainment is to know a lot about who we, as a people, are. This is important to me to better understand myself and how I relate to the civilization around me.

IFS: That answer sounded very stuffy to me. Is this course going to suck the fun I have in watching movies right out of me?

WISP: Yes! And No! As an intellectual, I believe there are two very distinct kinds of pleasure in our lives. The kind of pleasure we are most familiar with (because we live in a consumer-oriented society) is visceral pleasure, the kind we get from riding a roller-coaster, going to a Spice Girls concert, or watching a special-effects blockbuster film (anybody see Armageddon?). This first kind of pleasure does not encourage serious reflection, but instead a highly emotional, yet fleeting response (i.e., "that was cool, let’s do it again!").

The second kind of pleasure, which I like to call "intellectual pleasure," refers to the feeling you get when you solve a complex puzzle, make a profound philosophical breakthrough about yourself, or learn something moving about the world from reading a novel. My course intends to teach you how to experience this second kind of pleasure while watching movies.

To do so, we need to learn about the history of cinema, the social and cultural history of America in the 20th Century, and various critical methods for responding to movies. Since we live in a culture committed to getting you to work hard at a productive job, and distracting you from critical thought when you are not doing so with frivolous entertainments, this second kind of pleasure is very difficult to cultivate. In my estimation, it is one of the prime requirements of a university liberal-arts curriculum to cultivate this other pleasure, since it is encouraged in so few other sectors of our culture.

Let me emphasize that these two sorts of pleasure are by no means mutually exclusive. Much of the work I do as a film historian, critic, and theorist is concerned with popular, Hollywood films. When I went to see Jurassic Park, I enjoyed the special-effects very much. However, I also was intellectually stimulated by the film’s neo-colonialist politics and its essentialist position with regard to gender and mothering.

IFS: Hmm. I’m not sure I appreciated the back-handed swipe at Jurassic Park, even in the midst of supposedly defending an interest in popular cinema. Don’t you just hate popular movies and the people that like them?

WISP: No! Many times, my method is focused on "rescuing" for positive critical attention a popular film that is otherwise maligned. For example, I recently wrote an essay on Mission: Impossible, a film which most would decry as a terrible atttempt at a summer blockbuster. I, however, think it is the best film adaptation of a television show because it kills off its intertext (the TV show) at its first turning point, and then continues by interrogating the demise of the Cold War. And this, you must know, comes from someone who absolutely detests Brian DePalma films ordinarily.

IFS: OK. So maybe there is some use value in "Film Studies." But why should I care about "Film History." What do those old films have to do with me, someone who wants to learn how to do film production in the here-and-now.

WISP: I appreciate the fact that, unlike myself, most students in college ARE interested in a practical vocation like being a businessperson, a doctor, or a lawyer, or in this case, a filmmaker. Many to most successful filmmakers have not had courses at university in the history of cinema. This does not mean, however, that they are necessarily GOOD filmmakers. I propose that an understanding of history, culture, aesthetics, and other humanities disciplines is vital for being a good filmmaker, and a good human being, for that matter. Young filmmakers should know the history, theory, and critical traditions of the medium in which they plan to work.

To not know this tradition can often result in the permanent documentation of one’s ignorance onto celluloid. Consider the case of one of the most financially successful popular filmmakers in the history of the medium: George Lucas. The last scene of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), one of the most profitable films in the history of the movies, replicates imagery from Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934), a documentary which celebrates Naziism. {A discussion of the two CLIPS ensues}. Did Lucas know this when he made the movie? Certainly, he would not consciously make an homage to Naziism. However, he did go to film school, and probably did see Riefenstahl’s work. I am left to conclude then, that Lucas used the imagery at some unconscious level because of its aesthetic value, without adequately interrogating the historical significance of that imagery.

IFS: What do you mean, "as some unconscious level?" How can you say the Star Wars sequence references the Riefenstahl material when the director did not intend this? How do you know?

WIPS: The cornerstone of my historical method is that authorial intent is not the best way to write history. Thomas Jefferson may or may not have intended to include peoples of African heritage in the "all men" part of "all men are created equal." Regardless of his intent, the founding documents of our nation were read by a racist culture in such a way as to not even for a moment consider the possibility that people of African heritage were as worthy as people of European heritage to be given rights and freedoms. Such is my way of thinking when it comes to film history. Films enter into a complex cultural terrain, and as such, their historical importance lies far outside of the control of individuals. Most of this course will be devoted to the exploration of an array of potential meanings that films can have historically.

IFS: Well then, what framework for understanding filmic meaning can there be beside authorial intent. I mean, how can we speak about films besides in terms of what the director meant to say in making the film?

WIPS: In Film History: An Introduction, Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery suggest there are four general areas of film history, each one asking different questions, raising different sets of films to prominence, offering different standards for the interpretation of meaning. The four kinds of film history are: aesthetic, technological, institutional (i.e., economic), and social (i.e., cultural).

1. Aesthetic film history studies the way the language of film has developed historically. For example, such an approach would bring the work of D.W. Griffith to the forefront because of his experimentation with styles of editing shots and sequences together. The middle section of this course, from October 7 until October 15, offers an aesthetic film historical approach to the Classical Hollywood period.

2. Technological film history studies how advances in the equipment for making movies has affected the kinds of movies that get made. The coming of sound in the late 1920s would be an important area of concern here, thus raising a film like The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) to prominence, whereas the film’s listless stylistic practices would be of little interest from the aesthetic film historian’s point of view.

3. Institutional film history studies how the economic base behind the making of movies influences the kind of films that get made. For example, the differences between American and Soviet film history has primarily to do with the differences between Hollywood as a capitalist industry and state-funded Soviet filmmaking. Much of institutional American film history looks at the significance of the studio system. This could mean an otherwise "minor" film made at Republic studios may rise in importance within a economic study of how the lesser Hollywood studios did their work.

4. Social film history studies the linkages between films and the larger world around them. Since I am a cultural film historian, this course will largely be concerned with this area of film history. For example, we will learn about how films in the 1920s negotiated the changes in ideas about gender occurring in the culture at large, how films after World War II depicted a bleaker view of the world in the wake of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and how 1970s slasher films served as a referendum on the Women’s Movement.

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman