Hollywood Flatland last chapter

Hollywood Flatland, last chapter:
Page 290, origin of UPA
Page 292, "inconsistency has no logic, indeed is in itself an offense against logic."
Page 296, "middlebrow culture, pleasure without pain".
Page 299, "in 1939, Greenberg had defined kitsch as yesterday's avant-garde diluted. But this was not yesterday's avant-garde. Cartooning was the place where research into flatness and illusion and abstraction was most conscientiously carried out."

Hollywood Flatlands 3 chapters

Page 201, "For Kracauer ... the usual order is trivialized and the apparently trivial is pushed centre-stage"
Page 202 (also Kracauer) "The function of cartoons is to mock photographic reality. .... [Dumbo] is the rationalization of the irrational".
Page 204, "Kracauer notes how colour ... in fact intensifies the bad artifice of film".
Page 206, "Familiar everyday images need to be exploded so that images can be montages from their fragments. It is in the fragments that meaning resides."
"Montage .. is the opposite of an ... imitation of nature".
Page 215, "Like Chaplin, Disney avoids bringing fairy tales into alignment with the conventional everyday, electing instead to reveal everyday stories as fairy-tales".
Page 223, Vertov manifesto.
 page 224, "Cinemas that show full length films are the most conservative" (Vertov)
Page 227, "The Post Office" film by Mikhail Tsekharsovsky, 1929
Page 230, Eisenstein vs Adorno regarding Disney and nostalgia.
Page 234, "Freedom from logic's fetters and political subjugation can be secured only after having united with the fantastic the alogical, the sensuous order".
Page 242, Berger on pets.
Page 246, Eisenstein lectured the film students on how to make colour break free from the task of representation, in order to express meaning, independent emotional values in connection with precise ideas"
Page 250, The trouble with fantasia and Bambi ... begins when they attempt to be mature, serious, worthy.".
Page 252, Edwin Land (Polaroid) on colour and Goethe colour theory (page 252-257, perhaps have Geremy Logue test this?).
Page 257, "Goethe's science called for a critique of the senses. It was an aesthetic science".
Page 267-8, "Green against red is a fundamental colour pairing ... red is the real ... green the fantastic ... together they evoke desire."
Page 268, "Green and red-polarites of colour, are the colours of myth, memory and desire revamped in modern guise."
Page 271, Goethe:"We must think of science as art".
Page 272, mimisis; I yawn,  you yawn.
Page 275-6, rubbing eyes, drug visions, and synaesthesia.
Page 282, Ruttmann; "it seems that for [Ruttmann] nature is unaesthetic, its colours random. The colours in film need to be ordered. They need Gestaultung.
Page 283-4, various colour inventions.
Page 285, Technicolor code/motto or naturalism and keeping colour subordinate to narrative.

Hollywood Flatlands Eye Candy chapter

Hollywood Flatlands, Chapter "Eye Candy"
Page 159; Disney art school and comments about Fantasia.
Page 161, Disney "quintessentially middlebrow"
Page 166, "Bold, brash, colourful and affirmative, modernism had become spectacle, its critical edge blunted."
Page 169, "Free to own, which means free to owe, and certainly not free to think, for popular judgement is directed from above"
Page 171, "all [cartoons] do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth".
"Cartoons teach ... the inevitability of violence if the subject acquiesces too slowly to submission"
page 173-174, Adorno quote regarding his preferences for Betty Boop over Mickey Mouse and how people follow restrictive rules willingly "they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."
Page 177, "To insist that film linger in the supernatural so that it may bcome art, is a double crime, fetishizing the ..."
Page 178, Adorno against laughter, "worst bourgeois sadism".
Page 180, "Hollywood film sound had brought about vulgarization and enchantment through sound. Music was the vanguard of this process of making audiences immature and dependent".
"Through mass music's technique of the 'hook', its lulling into deconcentated listening, and its ubiquity, because of an extensive machinery of distribution, listeners are remoulded as acquiescent purchasers, and kept retarded as children. The vicious circle spins, like a long-playing record. These easy listeners demand again and again the same dish, the one they have forgotten might be exertable. In Composing for the Films, Adorno and Eisler suggest that this effect is redoubled in film music soundtracks. The recording procedures 'neutralize' the music, flattening it out, losing its colour intensity and spacial depth.. ... and even the most advanced music is 'divested' of its aggressiveness".
Page 181, notes to discuss with Eric Hill regarding wasteful nature of cultural products. "in this advance industrial age the masses are compelled to seek relaxation and rest, in order to restore the labor power that has been spent inthe alienated process of labor; and this need is the mass basis of mass culture. On it there has arisen the powerful amusement industry, whichconstantly produces, satisfies, and reproduces new needs"
"All art, as a means of filling out leisure time, has become entertainment, although it absorbs materials and forms of traditional autonomous art as part of the so-called 'cultural heritage'".
Page 182, "music is a transmission belt of standardization"
Page 184, re synaesthetics (matching picture and sound), Eisenstein writes "even if they exist in nature, that does not make them in themselves worthy elements of 'art'"
Page 187-192, Fischinger's history from Germany to the USA.
Page 194, Adorno on silliness, "Silliness in art is set against organized fun".
Page 195-196, Chaplin and Hitler compared.

Hollywood Flatlands chapter 4

Page 132-133, Clement Greenberg on kitsch, especially "Snow White", Nazis, and Soviets.
Page 133, "monopoly turns culture into industry"
 quoting Adorno/Horkheimer "Under monopoly all mass culture is identical ... The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art ... They call themselves industries..."
Page 136, Disney and Riefenstahl ... "not development of technology but is progression in technique".
Page 137, "Manipulated emotion is the currency in Hollywood and at the Reichsfilmkammer alike".
Page 138, Adorno on sports.
Page 139, "the battle over beauty in the 1930s was a battle between the surreal and the ideal"
Page 140, "The cult of the perfect body is a cult of death".
Page 143, "once political dissatisfaction develops, the common man feels able to criticize culture, because he resents it."
page 145, "At the core of revived classicism is the cult of the body.
"Riefenstahl refuses the avant-garde term 'montage' in favour of the seemingly organic term 'forming' (Formung). Film was formed as a total work of art for a totalitarian society."
Page 153, Trying to find Aryan origin for Walt Disney.
German animation to look at: Kurt Stordel.
page 155, "Der Arme Hansi" by Leberecht

Hollywood Flatlands chapter 3

In Hollywood Flatlands, finished chapter 3.
Notes:
Page 97, discussed caricature as art, the discussed Mickey Mouse as caricature.
Page 103: "Fetishized 'collective consciousness' ... specifically dreams about technological and social utopias, is cracked open and grasped only by the proletariat with its distinct relationship to technology and techniques"
Page 106: Benjamin: "Those who are awake share the world, while those asleep each possess a world for themselves".
Page 108, "Despite (Trotsky's) suspicion that photography was a non-dialectical form, a form that stripped things from their interrelationship".
Page 112, Benjamin: "What film needs is a tendency".
Page 114, Disney distribution with the Nazis and changes to the credits.
Page 117, "(Adorno) cautioned Benjamin against using concepts like the collective dream or collective unconscious, which he perceived to be derived from the irrationalist, and fascist-tinged, world of Carl Jung".
Page 118, "Adorno distrusts the laughter of the funnies' audience, finding in it elements of the worst sadism and brutalism."
Page 120, Benjamin removes Mickey Mouse from his 3rd edition of book.
Page 122, re: the evolution of animation into features such as Snow White, "If the narrative drama was a pathetic outcome for filmic possibility, then the drawn version of the same was an even more ridiculous concoction."

Hollywood Flatlands, first 2.5 chapters

On my vacation, I plucked slowly away at the first 90 pages of "Hollywood Flatlands; animation, critical theory and the avant-garde" by Esther Leslie, Verso, New York, 2002.

Notes:
  Chapter 1, Preclusion: experi-mental
Page 3, pre-cinema devices discussed.
page 5: earliest exposures of 1/1000 second.
Page 16, eccentrism art movement
page 29, 1929 screening in Londone of Battleship Potemkin along with Mickey Mouse.

  Chapter 2; Zeros, dots and dashes.
Page 33, endless deletion ... leads not to nothingness but to movement.
Page 36, Hans Richter, "The copy was the original"
Page 37, "While some saw the move of art into film as anit-art, others saw it as art's fulfillment".
Page 47, Ruttmann gels, and Raty.
Page 48-49, Fischinger wax cutter film.
Page 50, Prince Achmed, "What's this got to do with 1923?"

Page 52, Rodchenko on supreme LINE.
Page 53, Radical artists' Group manifesto.
Page 56, Eggeling alphabet or lexicon of visual forms...
Page 61, Frued and magic writing pads
Page 63 (Benjamin) "history ... decays into images, not stories".  
Page 66-69, "WEEKEND" by Ruttman, optical soundtrack with scratched film.
Page 75, "Man with a movie camera" vs "Berlin symphony of a city".
"The animated exchanges between Vertov, Ruttman and all the rest, and the claims and counter-claims took place between members of an artistic community who knew that the modern city could only be represented by harnessing and interrogating its latest technologies, photography, film, montage and the reanimation of reality.".


    Chapter 3: Mickey Mouse, utopia and Walter Benjamin
Page 82, the destructive character.
Page 83, Benjamin on Mickey Mouse and alienation.
Page 86, "(Mickey Mouse) films turn technical invention back into a fact of nature. In doing so they oblige audiences to confront how technology rules over them as a second nature."
 Page 89-90, Man/machine discussion.
Page 91: "(Brecht) thought the with to awaken life in petrified things was the impulse of children. ... a sign of children's proximity to utopia." Also notes on children, detritus, and fairy tales.