Week 4 Questions

Week 4 Questions

What is meant by ³modernist² in the passage: ³Critics engaged with a
self-declared ŒNew American Cinema¹ exemplified by the work of writers and
directors such as Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and John Cassavetes, certain
aspects of which constituted, according to David Bordwell, a conscious
Œmodernist¹ break with Hollywood classicism²? [The answer is not in the
passage; I¹m asking you to look up ³modernism² and ³modernist² if you are
not familiar with the term as you should be doing for any unfamiliar terms.


I really like this question because it isn't straight out of the reading.
You do the reading a formulate your own opinion and then look for
information to support it.  Modernism is a term used when describing a
cultural change in Western society primarily in the issues of art.  It is a
constant reform of the ideas of what is impossible.  It is built upon the
idea that man can create, improve, and reshape art.  Cassavetes believed in
this reform and found a way to make beautiful movies without conforming to
the traditional system.  He knew that the time is always now and you have to
keep trying to knew things and attacking the common practice as old and
boring.  Kenneth Anger attacked the traditional medium by shocking America
with his controversial movies.

What was Kael¹s critique of art cinema and the New American Cinema, and why
was Bonnie and Clyde ³the most excitingly American American movie² at the
time?

Kael describes the difference between art cinema as taking a story and
making it beautiful versus a documentary style narrative that tells the
story as it was remembered.  "He now focused his attention on the issue of
historical accuracy as well.  Any errors, he said, might exist in the small
details, but not in the big ones."  Critics loved the movie and started
comparing it to John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.  Some believed in summed up
the 1930s in desperate America.  Other critics wanted to smash the movie.
It made two people look like superstars while going around murdering people
and robbing banks.  It scarred the critics and their perception of the two
bandits.  Kael states, "that when a movie so clearly conceived as a new
version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it's because it
shakes people a little."  And, "only food movies..provoke attacks."


p. 32-34: What were some of the causes and consequences of the shift from
the Production Code to the Ratings System?

The decision was made in November 1968 to change to a rating system.  It was
provoked by two Supreme Court decisions upholding the rights of local
governments to prevent children being exposed to books or movies considered
suitable only for adults, the MPA introduced ratings in an attempt to
circumvent a flood of state and municipal legislation establishing local
schemes for film classification. As a consequence, independent distributors
were briefly able to gain wider access to the domestic exhibition market,
taking a 30 per cent share of it in 1970.  Exhibitors declared that they
would not play X rated movies and some newspapers refused to advertise them.
"The constraints were, however, different in nature,  Designed as a means of
labeling movies according to the degree of explicitness in their
representation of sex, violence or language, the rating system became a
marketing device, inciting such representations up to the limits of the
permissible."