Part I the Production of Film

PART I THE PRODUCTION OF FILM 2 1 THE HOLLYWOOD STANDARD "Classical Hollywood cinema" has come to mean different things to different people, and above all, it has aroused different emotions from misty-eyed nostalgia for the days of the studio system to frustrated fury at the multiheaded monster that is the Hollywood movie business, forever devouring its competitors and critics. 1 Thomas Elsaesser This book announces itself as an introduction to film. From the outset, however, what is meant by film is problematic. When we speak of film as an object of study, we are speaking of many things. Film is the term we use to describe a particular material and medium of communication that has certain specific properties governed by certain physical laws. Film is also the term we use to describe both a single work and an entire body of works produced through this material and in this medium. Film is not only its material and medium, but also their use to produce particular communicative texts that formulate particular fields of symbolic meaning and effects, and meet particular sets of criteria that give them particular value. The meanings, effects, functions, and cultural value of a film shot from a plane for reconnaissance purposes or by a bank surveillance camera are clearly different from those of an epic narrative like Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985), a feminist documentary like The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980), or a popular blockbuster comedy/thriller like Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984). Thus, the term film can be perceived as variously associated with the communication of information, with personal expression as art, with the argumentative power of rhetoric, and, of course, with the undemanding pleasure of entertainment. 3 We must not forget, however, that film is also a term used to describe a commercial product made in the context of American capitalism. The material, medium, and texts we call film are nearly always produced as commodities whose form, content, and function in our culture are economically determined. When we speak about film, we implicate an industry of mass production dependent upon mass consumption. Like the automobile industry, the film industry is primarily concerned with profit and with the cost-effectiveness of standardizing and regulating not only the modes of film production, distribution, and exhibition, but also the desires, tastes, and habits of film consumers. As a result of this economic emphasis, American film culture has become highly institutionalized. Both in our country and around the world, this standardization, regulation, and institutionalization of the film indutry and film culture has become associated with Hollywood: that place where film production first concentrated itself into a major American industry and expanded its economic influence and aesthetic norms to set what has become a world-wide standard. It is, indeed, in relation to and against this Hollywood standard that alternative and oppositional kinds of cinema have emerged, struggled, and identified their practices. Always marginalized by their alternative forms and functions, and by the economic constraints on their means of production, distribution, and exhibition, American avant-garde films, for example, or Third World films or most documentaries will never make it to our local shopping mall fourplex theaters. On the other hand, whether made in Hollywood or elsewhere, films reproducing the Hollywood standard or not straying too far from it - will. Illusionism It is important to recognize the implications of what we here call the Hollywood standard. Standards or general rules and conventions of visual and aural representation tend, over time, to become normative. That is, standardized film practices (of both production and viewing) can become so dominant and pervasive that they seem not only normal, but soon also natural (Figure 1-1). In the context of these standardized practices, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine or understand alternative practices. Eventually, standard practices are so taken for granted that they become, in a sense, invisible to their practitioners. Rules and conventions become treated as natural law, determining the limits of what a film is and what it might be. Hypothetically, any form of representation can set the standard against which others are understood and judged. We might, for example, imagine a not too distant future in which nonnarrative rock videos have become so culturally dominant 4 1-1 Even with the demise of the studio system, the Hollywood standard exists. The audience understands the terms of the basic illusionism of narrative films. In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984), for example, we accept the actors in make-up and costume as Klingons and the small models as space ships in some far off galaxy as long as the filmmakers have done their part to disguise these illusions by not indicating the technology and labor used in their production. 5 that narrative "story" films seem really strange, "old-fashioned," and possibly even difficult for the general viewer to understand. Whatever we might hypothesize for the future, however, is countered by the present domination of the Hollywood standard - a changing but contained and regulated set of film productionion practices, which emerged around 1917 and lasted until the 1960s. (This is when the monolithiconolithic studio structure broke down, and production processes were reformulated and relocated in response to new economic conditions in a world of multinational capital and corporate coonnttrrooll))..22 NNooww oofftteenn rreeffeerrrreedd ttoo aass ccllaassssiiccaall HHoollllyywwoooodd cciinneemmaa,, tthhee ffiillmmss pprroodduucceedd dduurriinngg tthheessee years have greatly influenced our present expectations of what makes for a satisfying film experience and a good film. Certainly, over the years, the Hollywood standard has stretched to accommodateccommodate a range of technological, technical, and aesthetic innovations. These innovations, however, have been put to the service and maintenance of two constant, intimately related, normative practices: the production of narrative (or story) films, and the rejection from these narrative films of all signs which might indicate the technology and labor used in their production. That is, the Hollywood standard has promoted our engagement with and concentration on the cinematic product, which is the story. And, correlatively, it has diverted our attention away from the cinematic processes and labor involved in producing that story (Figure 1-2). In one sense, this dual aim is not particularly surprising in the context of American industrial and consumer practices. Certainly, we seldom think about the processes and labor involved in the production of our manufactured goods: we concentrate on the final product and how effectively it functions. We want the toaster to work, the car to run well, the dress to be aesthetically pleasing. The manufacturer covers up the toaster’s mechanisms with a bright metal shell, the car body's separate pieces with a unifying paint job, the dress's untidy seams and joinings by specifying them as the inside of the garment. And the consumer, focused on these finished products, does not usually think about who decided to make them; what the properties of their raw materials are; how their production was standardized and regulated not only for quality, but also for profit; how they were assembled, packaged, advertised, wholesaled, and finally retailed. The Hollywood standard, then, seems similar in its general practices and goals to other American industrial standards. In another sense, however, despite its industrial context, film is quite different from a toaster, a car, or a dress. Unlike these products, film is a medium dependent upon a basic illusion, an illusion seen as necessary to its very existence as a motion picture. The car, for example, will still function as transportation even if its engine is exposed, and the dress 6 1-2 This still photo was taken on the set of Silverado (1985); the man with modern spectacles and sweater is the director, Lawrence Kasdan, talking with his actors. Notice the reflector in the background behind his head. Such images of the labor and the cinematic processes required to produce a narrative film are never shown within the film itself in a Hollywood standard movie. It would break our concentration on the story, break the spell of illusion. does not have to hide its cloth, and would still be functional even if its seams were outwardly apparent. From the first, however, the motion picture must cover up its origins to function, to constitute the illusion of apparent motion. The celluloid moving through the camera and the projector moves discontinuously as single frames and still pictures (24 frames per second for normal sound film). Thus, discontinuous and intermittent motion is absolutely necessary to what we perceive and understand as the continuous and smooth motion of moving pictures, and this stop-and-go process must disguise itself in order to produce its product. In other words, it is generally argued that to function as a moving picture, the moving picture must hide its materials and processes of production at its most basic operational level. Films produced according to the Hollywood standard, then, are doubly involved in drawing our attention away from their origins in material, technology, industry, and labor. They do so at their most elemental and technological level and in their further dominant function of showing and telling seamless stories (Figure 1-3). To absorb spectators in the film narratives that are the major commodity produced under the Hollywood standard, most feature films disguise not only the operation of 7 1-3 The illusionism of the Hollywood standard comes in many forms. The obviously posed and romantically lit publicity still of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner released as part of the campaign to sell Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis 1984) creates an aura of glamour for the performers. The image from the film showing them as people in desperate straits in a jungle downpour creates an image of authenticity.

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