The negative reinvention of cinema: Late Hollywood in the early digital age

Convergence

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 24-50

  Young, Paul ^a  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049433174     PISSN: 13548565     EISSN: 17487382     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/135485659900500204     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Lauren Rabinovitz, 'From Hale's Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real,' iris, no. 25 (1998), pp. 134-35.
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984).
3. Constance Penley has made a similar link between everyday experience of faulty domestic and business machines and full-scale technological disaster in The Terminator: 'The film seems to suggest that if technology can go wrong or be abused, it will be.' Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 124.
4. On the feminisation of this sense of unknowable electronic chaos, see Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 106.
5. See André Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 21,
6. and Jean Baudrillard, 'The Procession of Simulacra,' Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: Godine, 1984), pp. 253-81.
7. Scott Bukatman discusses the resonances of VR and its attendant discourse with Bazin's myth of total cinema; see Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 191.
8. See Doug Stewart, 'Through the Looking Glass into an Artificial World - Via Computer,' Smithsonian, 21, no. 10 (January 1991), pp. 38-39. Bricken worked at the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITL); Walser was head of the Cyberspace Project at Autodesk.
9. According to Michele Hilmes, the studios influenced the development of narrative and variety radio broadcasts by providing stars, formats, scripts, and sponsorship; and Christopher Anderson demonstrates that by the 1940s 'the major studios planned to make radio and television broadcasting an extension of the studio system', and to do so, they had to control production and distribution of programming, which led some studios to consider founding networks of their own. See Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 61,
10. and Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 23.
11. Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 210.
12. Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 97.
13. Fredric Jameson, 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture' (1979), Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 29.
14. For key accounts of the epistemological and political transformations attributed to new technologies from the steam engine to media, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
15. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
16. Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987);
17. and Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
18. The wondrous iron and glass Paris Arcades of the nineteenth century, for example, are for Benjamin 'residues of a dream world. The realisation of dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking. For this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking.' Walter Benjamin, 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,' Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 162.
19. Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (San Francisco: HaperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 42.
20. On such fantasies as they appeared in the writings of Vachel Lindsay, D.W. Griffith, and a host of newspaper critics, trade press writers, and social reformers, see Miriam Hansen, 'Universal Language and Democratic Culture: Myths of Origin in Early American Cinema,' Myth and Enlightenment in American Culture, ed. Dieter Meindl and Friedrich W. Horlacher with Martin Christadler (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1985), pp. 321-51.
21. See Sigmund Freud, 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' (1905 [1901]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), pp. 30-31.
22. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 2, 125.
23. Paul Willemen has warned against eliding the distinction between the Subject of a film - 'its impersonal point of origin, the place where everything coheres' - and historical spectators, who cannot be constructed by or in a text but rather interpret what they see in terms of a broad economy of discourses. However, such elision seems inevitable as long as the concept of a cinematic subject position is used (to paraphrase Willemen's critique) to refer to the single 'vantage point' from which a film can be said to make 'sense'. See Willemen, 'Notes on Subjectivity: On Reading Edward Branigan's "Subjectivity Under Siege",' Screen, 19, no. 1 (1978), pp. 63, 48. In the rest of this essay, I will cast the subject position of classical cinema as an historical entity that the early film industry self-consciously invented and that late Hollywood tries to maintain as a form of universal address. I agree with Friedberg and Bukatman that postmodern modes of textual address must have some profound impact on the Subject as an historical effect of bourgeois textuality, and my argument will reflect this agreement, but many of the classic discussions of cinematic subjectivity (Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry) set history and/or the various fragmentations of spectatorship outside the equation.
24. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia UP, 1985).
25. Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 6.
26. Wired magazine has already published a number of pieces on the impending death of cinema, which it envisions as self-euthanised by lame plots and lack of any user-friendliness commensurate with the expectations of internet users. See in particular Scott Rosenberg, 'The Net Net on Net Films: Crapola,' Wired, 3, no. 7 (July 1995), pp. 117-18.
27. Miriam Hansen has used the appropriately digital term 'matrix' to update Negt and Kluge's 'horizon' of experience to reflect the increasing complexity of both global media and the experience of media publics; see Hansen, 'Early Cinema/Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,' Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 134-52.
28. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, 'Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures,' Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 105.
29. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), ch. 3, and 'Early Cinema/Late Cinema'.
30. in John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 78.
31. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1991), p. 32.
32. On the viscerality of 'body genres', see Linda Williams, 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,' in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 140-58.
33. Siegfried Kracauer, 'Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces' (1926), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, no. 40 (1987), pp. 94-95.
34. Other historians of Hollywood's relationships with broadcasting media echo Wasko's critique. William Boddy well represents the cynical tautology underlying notions of 'service' and 'public interest' in the case of TV when he quotes CBS president Frank Stanton's testimony to the FCC in 1960: 'I suggest that a [television] program in which a large part of the audience is interested is by that very fact a program in the public interest.' Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 237.
35. Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,' Wide Angle, 8, no. 3/4, pp. 64, 66.
36. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 9.
37. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 'Remediation,' Configurations, 3 (1996), p. 313.