Benshi, Japanese Silent Film narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei

Read first chapter of Benshi, Japanese Silent Film narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: a history of Japanese silent film narration by Jeffery A. Dym.

"Benshi" = narrator of silent film, began as translator and explainer of foreign films but continued with domestic Japanese films once their industry formed.
Setsumei = the narration text

Page 15, Benshi compared to sports announcers on tv; that they may not be necessary but they help and we are accustomed to them.
Page 16, "The predominant complaint ... has been that benshi prevented Japanese silent movies from advancing beyond the 'primitive' stage"
Page 17, "Noel Burch ... praises the benshi [who] ... protected Japanese cinema from being colonized by western codes of cinema"

This narration only took place with Japanese cinema, not with any others. So while this seems like good book that I might return to later, I won't read the remaining chapters now. 

American Silent Film

American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices, edited by Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. (from Archer Library)

Movies at the Margins: the distribution of films to theaters in small-town America, 1895-1919 by George Potamianos
Historical: low density rural centres got second run films, months after cities because of shipping costs and the loss of revenue during transit. Towns paid cheaper rates but booked up to four months in advance and still didn't always get what they asked for.

Charlie Steiner's Houston Hippodrome: moviegoing on New York's Lower East Side, 1909-1913 by Judith Thissen
Yiddish theatre and nickelodeon entrepreneur Steiner in New York, a historical review.
Page 42, in 1912, Hebrew Variety Actors's Unions declared that performances be limited to five per night. This created a shift towards more film and less live performance.
"shmuts" = filth

"Have You the Power?": the Palmer photoplay corporation and the film viewer/author in the 1920s by Anne Morey
Page 50, "The [Palmer] school worked to promote a notion of self-expression that was simultaniously standardized and individual"

The Fiery Gaze: a modest proposal for better seeing by Jean Chateauvert
"prefilic address" to talking to the director or crew
"postfilmic address" is talking to the audience
Page 72, "The distinction of the object of the look ... permits the identification of no fewer than four distinct styles: (1) a look whose object is the camera; (2) a look of prefilmic address whose object is the an audience present at the filmed show; (3) a look of postfilmic address whose object is the group of film spectators; and (4) a look staged in a face-to-face encounter in a subjective shot, the object of which is another character, whose point of view the subjective shot represents."
Page 89, "The look of individuated prefilmic address has been prohibited only in fiction film ... it crosses the line between documentary and fiction"
Interesting background for Mr. Saul and Professor Delusia

John Randolph Bray: animation pioneer by Mark Langer
Page 94, intro talks about reading the names in the animation credits then looking up the animators in the New York phone book and calling them, creating his own area of research.
Page 99, Hurd's patent for cels is discussed.
Page 107-114, Bray interviewed in 1975, age 96. He died in 1978.

Sound and the Silent Film by Maureen Furniss
Page 115-116, "a rough projection is, in some ways, just as valid as a perfect one, and probably more so. Audiences of the early days very well may have seen deteriorated prints in the advanced stages of use."
Page 116, Research has shown that music and other sounds affect body rhythms such as breathing, the heart beat, blood flow, and brain functions" (AN)
Page 123, Photoplayer or "pit organ", an autmatic device for music which grew in populatiry for large theatres. Later became the Wurlitzer. 

Sex and Snow: landscape and identity in the God's Country films of Nell ShipmanS by Kay Armatage
Page 126; Paragraph describes why woman who directed popular films are not studied. "How do we account for this? Feminist film theory has developed out of studies of the classic realist text, and it has remained embedded in the classic realist text. Needless to say, like anything else considered classical, that model was created and is largely perpetuated by men. And since feminist film theory has developed as a critique of the classic realist text, demonstrating the mechanisms of its complicity in the nurturing of the patriarchal unconscious, feminist film theoreticians, rather than studying the work of women filmmakers, have contributed to the body of scholarship supporting canonical figures and the many genres directors involved in the production of melodrama, film noir, musicals, and porn films."
Page 127-8, Nell Shipman ... her films were always set in Canada -- 'God's Country' -- as the heroine she defeated the villains and rescued the heroes".
Page 129, "Regionality then functioned as an adjunct to teh founding mythology of a hegemonic nation"
Page 130-131, Canada key words in searching for films: "Alaska Highway, Arctic, bank robbers, Canadian Pacific Railway, criminals, dance halls, doctors, dogs, escape, French Canadians, fur trade, gold horses, Indians, Inuit, Klondike, lumber trade, miners, mounted police, murder, Northwest , outlaws, pioneers, prospectors, Rocky Mountains, ships, smuggling, thieves, trading posts, trappers, Yukon.".

Normalizing Stars: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Hollywood Consolidation by Sam Stoloff
Page 150, List of sources of tension and strife in USA 1919-1922 including strikes, race riots, KKK, red scare, flu, suffrage, -- suggests Hays office colludes with studios against Arbuckle to "crack down on workers".
Page 157, "By 1913, when Arbuckle began his film career, fat bodies no longer signified power or status. Instead, they were more and more a source of shame"
Shift is from the importance of excess (money, weight, etc) to importance of control of that excess or of the body.
Page 162, "Masculinity is ... an expression of bodily control while ... the fat bod is presumed to be out of control"

The Fictionalized Ethinic Biography: Nita Naldi and the Crisis of Assimilation by Diane Negra
Page 177, Niter Naldi, vamp actress deemed "the female Valintino" was New York born Irish Donna Dooley.
Page 180, Eastern Europeans seen as inferior, not as "white" as western.

June Mathis: a woman who spoke through silents by Thomas J. Slater

Page 204, note 28, refers to "Blueprints for feature films" by Staiger and Loughrey regarding silent screenwriting. 

Page 205, "June Mathis's ideas stemmed from her belief in a strict but benevolent social hierarchy ... carrying forward the values of the nineteenth century".
Page 210, Spiritual powers brought not by adversity.
"These 'feminine' qualities defined in the 19th century as 'the cult of true womanhood'
Page 213, Mathis wrote "The Red lantern" (1919) about the boxer rebellion.

"Abstract and Brief Chronicles": The early history of MGM revisioned by Joanne E. Rapf
no notes. Reconsidered history by daughter of mogul who is now retired film academic. 

Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein in New Contexts by Christina Stojanova
Read this aloud to William following a few months of Godard as well as watching the film "Wittgenstein" by Derek Jarman that we watched together on Mubi. 

Screenwriting for the Early Silent Films

Article found online: Screenwriting for the Early Silent Films: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897-1911 by Edward Azlant, from Film History, vol.9, no.3, 1997, pp. 228-256, Indiana University Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815179

A historical overview of early important screenwriters, often coming out of journalism backgrounds.

Page 238, Colonel Selig buys book rights for film to creat vluable library of Zan Gray, Winston Churchill, and others.
Page 240: "The Photoplay Author: a journal for all who produce photoplays".  a magazine of the day - does it still exist online? There is an old book for sale. This is also promising:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15383/15383-h/15383-h.htm
Or especially this one:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17903/17903-h/17903-h.htm

Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema

Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, 2015, EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam University Press.Intro by Martin Scorsese

Applying Color, creating fantasy of cinema by Tom Gunning
Page 21, "in this new ear, 'lithographic culture' became a code word for cheap, vulgarity, aimed at the sensational tastes of the masses rather than the educated tastes of the elite"
Page 22, "But the superimposition of nonphotographic colours over photographic images also creates a collision of modes that has an uncanny dimension. Even when the coloring-in of objects has been carefully done, so that the edges of colours and objects match, an impression persists that the colour hovers over the object rather than inheres in it."
Page 25, "one of the first projected colored films, Edison's Umbrella Dance shown at Koster and Bial's in March of 1896, not only presented the dancers with hand-painted costumes, but that these costumes actually changed colours as the film progressed. This effect may have been intended to replicate the ever-transforming coloured lights projected onto Loie Fuller and other performers."

Techniques of the Fantastic by Joshua Yumibe
Page 29, Anidine dye history from 1830 and impact discussed.
Page 32-34, stencil cutting practice described, from fully manual to device aided.
Page 36, in the 1910s, filmstock companies began to distribute pre-tinted positive filmstocks that were coloured at the factory ... this removed the need to tint the films in post production. Follow up with Yumibe in "Film and Media Technologies: the film archive as a research laboratory" from 2010.

The Archival Life of Early Color Films, restoration and presentation by Giovanna Fossati
Discusses issues around archiving, of how purists declared black and white to be the art of early cinema and colour being dismissed as a sideline. How the original, even when preserved, could not be shown like a restored painting was and how digital technologies allow the public to see the archival preserved colours for the first time.

Jonathon Rosen is an artist who has designed the book. 

Expressionism in Germany and France

Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky edited by Timothy Benson.

Expressionism in Germany and France by Timothy Benson
Page 52, "For German artists, "the decorative" was a complex and contradictory term with deep philosophical and historical roots that prevented them from embracing it directly"

Harry Graf Kessler's Path to Expressionism by Laird M. Easton
Page 146, "Kessler elaborated an aesthetic theory that had much in common with the goals of Expressionism. In particular, he stressed the importance of three phenomena - the role of feelings, the religious roots of art, and the uses of ornament"
Page 147, "Expressionism oscillates dramatically between moods of darkest despair and of chiliastic ecstasy"
Page 150, "Expressionist theatre in its effort to go beyond naturalism and uncover a deeper reality"
Page 152, Kessler commissions Herzfelde brothers to make an animated propaganda film in the expressionist style. Mocking the arrival of American troops in France"

Henri Matisse as Herr Professor: the academic Matisse and the Internationalization of the Avant-Garde, 1905-1914 by Claudine Grammont
Page 155, "In 1912, the terms Wilden (wild animal - another term for the Fauves) and Expressionism were essentially interchangeable"
"... before World War I when artistic internationalism could still be conceived not as a utopia but as a collective project"
Page 158, re: internationalism in art in 1908-1910: "The notion of achieving a sort of pictorial Esperanto is perhaps not alien to Matisse's ambition; during those years he simplified his pictorial vocabulary to an extreme, returning to the very roots of the language of forms."
Page 160 "art boche ('Kraut' art)"

Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves: Exhibitions of French Modernism in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, 1904-1909 by Peter Kropmanns
Page 167, "The art critic was able to support or weaken an artistic impression through his interpretation; his reading, which was also understood as an articulation of the understanding of the general public, was also the basis for the value judgment on which depended the public success and ultimately the existence of the work of art. If the critic believed himself obliged to conclude that a work lacked impact, in other words, lacked points of contact with the interests of the time, then he could in a way 'neutralize' such a work by denying it journalistic support or even not mentioning it at all." (quoting Bringmann)
Page 176, "The long standing dispute important to consider the broader context when taking a closer look at exhibitions of French modernism in Germany between 1904 and 1909. These events were not only part of a moment in European history and art history on the even of World War I but also part of a continuum of German-French relations spanning many centuries and having experienced many fluctuations, characterized by some peaks and many depths -- by exchange, inspirations, and osmosis at some points and by rejection, distancing, and demarcation at others. "

The Brucke and the Fauves by Magdalena M. Moeller
Page 239, "The Fauves painted in order to express something, not to depict something. That was their revolutionary approach"
"Fauves" = wild beasts.
Brucke formed in Dresden in 1905. Both groups highly influenced by early exhibitions of Van Gogh - Fauves, Paris 1901 and Brucke, Dresden, 1905.
Page 247-248, "[The Brucke] wanted to give the impression that their art had evolved autonomously and without the existence of French models. That is why Kirchner predated his drawings and pastels of 1909 in particular, in which his work is closest to that of Matisse"
"We rejected the ingratiating or salon-like taste that still clung to academicism, which was undoubtedly still present tin the work of others'' painting at the time. That was refined painting, but the refined was not our goal" (Heckel in 1958 interview)
"The artist of the Brucke are usually lumped in with Expressionism, without recognizing that there were two stages of Brucke art. ...[Dresden] colorful and cheerful qualities .... [Berlin] distortion and exaggeration bordering on the hysterical, a shattering of traditional forms".

Expanding the Boundaries of Modern Art: the Blaue Reiter, Parisian Modernism, and Henri Rousseau by Katherine Kuenzli
Page 251, "By introducing Impressionistic aesthetic in Germany, both men [critic Julius Meier-Graefe and museum curator Hugo von Tschudi] sought to change the course of German art away from the allegorical and mythological subjects towards a concentration on optical sensation and the material properties of the medium, including line, colour, and surface."
"[later] contributors to the almanac, especially Marc and Kandinsky, focused less on modern art's formal qualities  and more on underlying spiritual affinities that they believed  united artworks from all cultures and historical ages."
Page 253, "Macke ... insists ... that modern art originated in individual sensation"
Page 257, "The complement of the great realism is the great abstraction, according to Kandinsky"

A Byway for Sure: Cubism's reception and impact on the Brucke, 1910-1914 by Sherwwin Simmons
Page 263, "The Cubists" a poem in magazing Lustige Blatter:
"This is a new direction,
Ideally Partisian
This is an artistic school,
That paints three-dimensionally.
The crude poem ended by ridicculing the "Kubik" idiot who would buy such art."

Remainder of YouTube

The Carnival of the New Screen: from hegemony to isonomy by Bernard Stiegler
Page 40, "I ascribed a philosophical virtue to be the power of repetition".
Page 42, "Grammatization is what allows ... individuals and groups to individuate themselves ... through utterances ... gestures, perceptions"
What is "dailymotion"?

YouTube at the End of New Media by Richard Grusin
Page 61-62, Remediation - Youtube is a medium that remediates tv.
Page 64, end of new media
Page 66, "dividuated"

Videos of Affinity on Youtube by Patricia G. Lange
Page 72, problem of "face to face"
Page 74, "how movies ... were often recorded by fathers and focuses on ... Christmas, birthday and weddings"
Page 77, Patricia Zimmerman on father-based home movies.
Page 81-82, Phatic meaningless introduction with apologies containing communication without critical information.

The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: participatory culture beyond the profssional-amateur divide by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
Page 95, "The possibilities of inauthentic authenticity are now a part of the cultureal repertoire of Youtube", re: vlogger Lonelygirl15 (Bree).

Where Quality Matters: discourses on the art of making a Youtube video by Eggo Muller
Page 127, Jenkins lists 3 challenges participation gap (access), transparency problem (conventions and protocols), ethics challenge (knowledge). Article discuses online video production advice/training videos.

Breaking the Age Barrier in the Internet AGe: the story of Geriatric 1927 by Bjorn Sorenssen
Geriatric 1927: an 80 year old vlogger learned tools during process through comments to his videos.

Digital Attractions: reloading early cinema in online video collections by Joost Broeren
Page 154-156, summarizes Gunning and others on "attractions" and narrative/documentary split in early cinema.
Page 158, "Kessler notes three characteristics of the cinema of attractions (and thus the cinema of attractional display) which "appear to be directly linked to this general orientation towards the spectator", namely "the gaze and gestures of actors directed towards the camera, the temporality, the frontality".
Page 158, The short length of films in early cinema and on YouTube compared.
Page 164, compares producer/exhibitor control of order of audience exhibition - early cinema to Youtube.

Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: around the worlds in eighty clicks by Thomas Elsaesser
Page 168, "If you cannot find it on Google or Youtube, many people now seem to believe that it either doesn't exist, or not worth knowing or having".
Page 168, post-human condition
Page 169, "post human 'human-machine symbiosis'" and automatic writing experiment.
Page 174, "... very traditional in the ideology of its creation: in the making-of video one recognizes all the cliches of commercial filmmaking as well as of auteurism.
Page 178, Tim Fort, who spends his time devising Rube Goldberg hybrids which turn out to be little allegories of cinema itself.

Home Dance: mediacy and aesthetics of the self on YouTube by Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier
Page 187, "Whatever we know about ourselves we know through and from the media"
Page 195 "[the word] talent is used as a basically empty signifier wherever the writer is in a loss for words. .. series of exclamation points or the repetition of a single letter often also point to the void of not having anything substantial to say"

'Hey Man, Nice Shot': setting the Iraq war to music on Youtube by Christian Christansen
Page 214, "When the occupation ends ... the music video will remain in suspended online animation as cyber-relics: then novelty value gone, but their personal, subjective testimonies to history intact".

YouTube Commemoration: private grief and communal consolation by Malin Wahlberg
Page 221, "The presence of absence enacted by photographs, and the contrast between the happiness suggested by family footage and the irrevocable fact of death, repreent the universal content of the memorial tribute video."
Page 222, "The memorial is a place where rituaal acts meet with the politics of preservation and historical represention."
MONUMENT (victory) vs MEMORIAL (defeat)
Page 225, "The crucial function of family photography ... is to construct a unified image of the past"
Page 231, "On youtube, the perverse voyeurism implied in the suicide memorial is emphasized by the archival logic of sorting videos into a cluster according to a specific theme. As a result, tributes to victims of suicide appear side by side with videos promising spectacular suicides in realtime".

Sports on YouTube by Markus Stauff
Page 239, Mid 19th century shaping of sports and media with telegraph and newspaper lead to leagues and standardizing and serializing.
Page 240, "in contrast to history or science programs on television, the goal of knowledge production in sports is to enable audiences to form their own opinions".

YouTube and the Aesthetics of Political Accountability by Vinzenz Hediger
Page 259, "Youtube create a public sphere or sub-sphere, that is relentlessly unforgiving to those who slip up. It forces a new degree of restraint and self control on politicians"
Page 257, Colbert Report - the McCain speech "green screen challenge".

The Appearance of Archives by Rich Prelinger
Page 268, "[Youtube] problematizes and threatens the canonical mission of established moving image archives throughout the world"
- Library of Congress pre-1915 film in "American Memory Project"
Page 271, I would argue that the low-res appearance of most Youtbe videos map help foster a sense of immunity amoug users, a sense that Youtube viewing doesn't really violate any owners' rights because it's just watching a picture of a video. Youtube places the viewer in permanent preview mode."

Navigating YouTube: constituting a hybrid information management system by Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schafer
Page 283, tagging "a form of deliberate misinformation."
Chapter about how the labels are key to indexing because machings cannot interpret film, only the description.

The Archival Cloud by Pelle Snickars
Page 296, citing Nicolas Carr "The Big Switch": 1901, 50,000 American companies had their own plant for the production of electrical current.

In the Kingdom of Shadows: cinematic movement and its digital ghost by Trond Lundemo
Page 314, pre-cinema films made by inventor Louis LePrince desribed. Short paper images exist and are seen widely for the first time on Youtube.
Page 315, Erik Barmouw wrote of "voices on the ether", "it is also a matter of phantoms".
Page 321, "the return of the loop. As demonstrated by the techniques of the Praxinoscope, the Zoetrope and the Vitascope, as well as the Kinetoscope, the loop was the dominant screening practice in the pre-cinema years".
Page 325, Albert Kahn "Archives of the planet" initiated in 1909.

On the Logic of the Digital Archive by Jens Schroter
Page 341, "Why isn't pornography a central content of YouTube? ... Youtube allows other forms of audiovisual desire to appear".

An Ocean of Sound and Image: Youtube in the context of supermodernity by Gunnar Iversen
Page 347, Marc Auge's non-lieu or non-space applied to Youtube where "you are everyweher and nowhere at the same time"

Economics of Sharing Platforms: what's wrong with the cultural industries? by Joelle Farchy
Page 360, "from an economic standing, Web 2.0 is ... based not on control of access via intellectual property rights but on the abundance of resourses available".
Page 367, "A famous incident resulted from France's 1847 law intended to protect musical composers' performing rights: the successful composer Ernest Bourget categorically refused to settle his bill in a Parisian concert cafe where one of his works was playing, defending his position by pointing out that the cafe was using the music to attract customers without offering him the slightest compensation."

The Political Economy of YouTube by Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson
Page 373, 2006 Time article cited: "Early on Chad and Steve made a crucial good decision: despite pressure for advertising, they would not force users to sit through ads before videos played".
Page 381, "in the fall of 2007, Youtube introduced content-identification technology"
- Mashup contests described.
Page 382, "various techniques adapted by the site ... privilege some videos over others"
"The term 'most viewed' is relative. When video views can be easily manipulated by those who can afford to pay for the privilege".

Digital Discords in the Online Media Economy: advertising versus content versus copyright by Paul McDonald
Page 402, fair use argued.

Exploiting YouTube: contradictions of user-generated labor by Mark Andrejevic
Page 417-418, Marxism, are content creators exploited and forces or freely giving?
Page 420, comparison to women's unpaid domestic labour.

Cybertarians of the World Unite: you have nothing to lose but your tubes! by Toby Miller
Page 424, great writing on this page; a bit of a manifesto.
Page 426, culture and copyright sector employs 12% of the US workforce.
Page 427, debunking the Youtube boon to diversity, showing numbers (in USA) of white male posters versus others (women and non-white).

From YouTube to RuTube or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love All Tubes by Andrei Gornykh
Page 441, Russian Youtube is RuTube.
Page 447, "debloids are teenagers who try to 'express themselves' in bizarre and stupid ways"

YouTube as a Mirror Maze by Giovanna Fossati
Page 458, curating 100 videos from millions on Youtube results in mirror themed set found at www.youtubereader.com