What is Cinema? Lecture 3: distraction

Lecture Outline 1 Attention / Distraction (21st / 20th century concerns) 2 Siegfried Kracauer: a diagnostic approach 3 Film as a medium of the masses 4 Surfaces of distraction 5 The mass ornament: Footlight Parade 6 Reading aesthetics: democracy versus fascism

Attention / Distraction

Attention / Distraction Attention deficit Disorder Multitasking

2 Siegfried Kracauer (1889 – 1966)

‘In order to investigate today’s society, one must listen to the confessions of the products of its film industries’. (‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’, in The Mass Ornament, p294.

3 Film as a medium of the masses

Architecture of Berlin cinemas designates the new as surface (no depth). Design emphasizes sensory effects (colour, light, sound).

4 Distraction Kracauer works through a series of oppositions, emphasizing the value of the new over tradition:

Kracauer’s binary terms: Surface versus depth Sensory experience versus meaning Exterior features versus interior (character) Distraction versus contemplation

‘…distraction exposes disintegration’.   ‘…distraction is meaningful only as improvisation, as a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world’….. ‘…distraction exposes disintegration’.

5 The mass ornament: Footlight Parade Ornamental patterns produced by groups of dancers (and vast stadium spectacles) are ‘the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires’.

Individuals take on specific specialized tasks but these take on meaning only within a system, or what he calls a rationalized totality. In Footlight Parade, we see the manufacture of the system within cinema.

Kracauer inverts the opposition of ornament and use: - Ornament is functionalised - Functionality becomes ornamental

6 Reading aesthetics: democracy versus fascism

Olympia (1938, directed by Leni Riefenstahl) documenting the 1936 Olympics in Germany.

Olympia (following Triumph of the Will in 1935 capturing the Nazi party conference at Nuremberg): Abstraction of the body on display The aesthetic has become fetishized – the surface seduces The relationship of the masses to the event is cemented through identification: the many and the one

Assessment COURSEWORK ESSAY 1   COURSEWORK ESSAY 1 Apply one of the critical approaches studied in Semester A to one of the films we have screened on the module. Your essay should use close analysis of the film to demonstrate an understanding of the key concept of your chosen critical perspective. It should also evaluate the respective merits and limits of your chosen critical approach.

Distraction is a cultural mode that reflects back to us the conditions of mass culture truthfully Distraction is a positive modality for the audience to experience as it draws them towards the surface of culture From the surface of culture we can understand the rationalization of our lives in systems of which we are only a part