A game for 2019?

[greennui]

How does these cups work? I'm game if it involves watching shorts.

[Curtis, baby]

Part of it is watching others' picks, but the other thing, what we're trying to gauge interest in now, is how many people would be willing to pick a year/director/whatever to pick movies from. They would go up against other people's picks, and people who watched both would vote for their favourite. Just a friendly completion. It's more about sharing old favourites and discovering new works

[Lencho of the Apes]

Does anybody want it? If you adhere to last years model, it doesn't take much organizing.

If people want a Movie Club, I'll encourage anybody else to take responsibility for stage-managing it... and if no one else cares to, I probably could do it myself.

[Curtis, baby]

according to a 4-3-2-1 voting:

YS 15
DS 10
Y 14
D 11

although 2dm and mesnalty voted 7 total points worth for "shorts by unmentioned criteria" and "shorts"... is there another possibility, shorts by _____, that someone wants to suggest? or else maybe it's time for a vote between shorts by year and year?

[Curtis, baby]

Btw, what are people thinking for whom and when they'd pick? I was thinking 2000 and Bill Brown for shorts, and 1976 and Kaurismaki if we go with not-shorts

[Curtis, baby]

Does anybody want it? If you adhere to last years model, it doesn't take much organizing.

If people want a Movie Club, I'll encourage anybody else to take responsibility for stage-managing it... and if no one else cares to, I probably could do it myself.

I definitely am up for it. Psyched to watch SCFZ's picks. But I don't want to organize it. Pretty busy these days... maybe someone else is interested in organizing this? As Lencho says, it's not a ton to do

[Lencho of the Apes]

I feel like if we have a cup running, Movie Club is superfluous, it would just be duplicating the same dynamic of "one person chooses a movie, a group of people watch it."

[Curtis, baby]

Fair enough. Cup should finish by July with only 8 managers this time around... maybe start it up after that to fill the void?

[Lencho of the Apes]

Sounds good.

[Lencho of the Apes]

One thing Bure didn't mention when outlining the game-plan … and that no-one mentioned when talking about manager's strategies for choosing films... is that the less well-liked movie in any pair-up recives a black mark that contributes toward that manager being eliminated rom the game. So it's "important" to select movies that are going to poll high and earn the beeg approval ratings.

[Curtis, baby]

No, there are no eliminations this year (there weren't last time either). Everybody has five matches no matter what

[Wulff]

Year is irrelevant. Apart from being released in the same year there is nothing that makes films from any given year unique. If you disagree list some films released in the same year and explain what makes them unique to that year.

[...]

In a strict sense of calendar dating that may be largely true, but in an approximate sense of a period of time it certainly isn't the case. The look and subject matter of movies are heavily year dependent, one need only look to all the many times movie industries duplicate near subject matter in competition with rival studios or how often one can recognize an approximate time frame for a movie simply by seeing a few stills from it and knowing what the dominant aesthetic was for the era.

That doesn't suggest year controls quality exactly, but given certain genres are more popular than others and those genres are tied to eras it does still factor in. There wouldn't be a huge amount of variation were people to look at a few consecutive years perhaps, depending on which years and what kind of movies one might be looking at, but the larger the gap the more noticeable the timeframe becomes in what story is being told and how it is being approached and visualized. Values themselves change over time after all.

[flip]

your average film from 1930 is almost nothing like your average film from 1925, or from 1961

[Wulff]

But can you produce a list of films released in the same year and explain how they're unique to that year?

[...]

If you search, for example, for "westerns" by year and look to the seventies you'll be able to see both how the genre as a whole changed and how it declined. In 1972 there were, according to Letterboxd, 101 westerns made, in '72 78, in '73 52. A decline by half in two years. If you go back a little further you can clearly see the influence of the "spaghetti western" on the genre and how it caused a temporary uptick in western productions and how the political climate of the late sixties/early seventies changed the themes westerns dealt with. That latter influence went far beyond the western to affecting film production overall during that time, with far more movies having "unhappy endings" for just one example, and having a stronger "auteur" bent to the years that shortly thereafter would decline in the face of Jaws, Rocky and Star Wars providing a new focus for the industry. Just check Sci Fi films in the years before and after Star Wars for more examples.

[pabs]

.
Some decidedly kooky stuff and slightly bizarre characters and situations crept into many independent (and even a few mainstream) American movies from roughly the mid 80s to the late 80s and the first few years of the 90s. I'm a big fan of them and consider them almost a mini genre unto themselves. Repo Man is a prime example, Bagdad Cafe, Siesta (Lambert, 1987) - even Raising Arizona - are others. They kinda blended into David Lynch territory, or sensibilities (or rather, "nonsense-ibilities"). Some (like Siesta) are a complete mess, but I still like them, because they're odd or off-kilter.

[Lencho of the Apes]

It's not necessary for a thing or idea to be objectively quantifiable to have value; generalizations may be inexact, but they still hold inexact, general meaning.

[...]

Well. I mean there are real one year breaks too if not to the precise calendar moment. I mean 1928/1929/1930 or 1939/1940/1941 are pretty drastic and obvious examples.

[Wulff]

Thanks for the thoughtful responses guys.

It's not necessary for a thing or idea to be objectively quantifiable to have value; generalizations may be inexact, but they still hold inexact, general meaning.

Yes. Grouping films based on the year they were released is an inexact way to group them. What got me thinking about it again recently was the opening paragraph to a film review I read:


' There are countless stories one could tell, so why do people choose the ones that they do? Everyone likes to think his or her film is “timeless,” and the best works have universal qualities, but still it would astonish us if a director created a film in 2000 similar in theme and feeling to Intolerance (1916) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), or even The Long Goodbye (1973). For better or worse, contemporary life and historical development must have some impact.'


So what impacts on theme and feeling has contemporary life and historical development had on films, released in specific years, that makes them unique from films released in other years?

[...]

There are a few ways to look at the question I think. The first is to remember that movies are mostly an industry, not just the work of individual artists alone, so as such the wants and needs of a commercial enterprise will have a large effect on what gets made. Look, for just one example, to the "hard" imposition of the production code on US filmmaking for some dramatic differences in what could be shown from 1933 to 1934, changes to film censorship through legal changes in how "free speech" rights applied to movies changed the industry again in the sixties, not least with the introduction of legal pornography, but also more broadly then that. The end of certain studio system practices through legal challenge also changed how movies got made, and through that what they looked like.

More broadly it's impossible to talk about the history of film without connecting it to the real world history going on at the times films were made. Not only are all the major events going to be adapted to film stories, like World War II or the Great Depression, the student rebellion in the sixties and so on for whatever country major events took place, but the nature of political systems also imposes itself on the art, whether in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China under Mao, or in the freeing of formerly constrained systems suddenly blossoming due to new opportunity and/or economic change. Every country has their own history reflected in their film industry in ways that shape what stories are told and how.

Then there are the technical and aesthetic changes that occur over time, where advances or shifts in how movies are made, the addition of sound, new color film processes, CGI, IMAX, 3d, and so on change what can be shown and how we will see it and those changes are tied to specific time periods. In the same way cultural aesthetics change to "fit" each generation, the look, sound, and texture of movies are tied to the aesthetics of the years they were released. Those aesthetics "travel" at different rates and through different genres or types of movies, but they can provide something close to a carbon dating for the film year if the country of origin and some other associated aspects of the production are known. (Assuming the viewer has a deep base of knowledge to pull from of course.) Whether its a style of acting, filming, or production design there are era specific trends that can be read and "felt" in how we experience a film.

I'm sure, for example, that seeing a musical number from a film could often be used to place the movie within a fairly narrow window of time even if one wasn't specifically familiar with the exact song or movie otherwise. Just the look of some films is enough to give them a fairly certain range of time from which they were created, a range that narrows considerably the more one knows about the type of production it was. Like the budget or audience it seemed aimed at and what country produced it would give indication whether it was following a trend or setting one. Just knowing what genre a random movie is without knowing anything else about it can narrow down the likelihood of years it could have been made in many cases. Say Superhero and you've cut out most of film history, musicals, sci fi, westerns "noirs", war movies all have times where they are more and less prevalent and knowing that allows for a good guess on when any given one might have been made just by the numbers. Add in any other info and it gets easier and easier to winnow down to a select few options.

Since most of us haven't really sat down and made a year to year study of changes this process is going to work more intuitively or generally than that level of specificity. Most movies likely could be narrowed to a range of just a handful or even a couple years were we to really focus on that as the important measure, but we mostly just process that info without thinking about it directly and use it as a filter for how we understand the work. Once you've accepted and engaged with movies over their history, then that history acts on our viewing without needing to call it to mind directly in many instances. We just "get" that people in thirties movies act in ways that are of their time and different than our own and see those actions through a contextual perspective. We accept things in movies from other eras we wouldn't as easily accept in movies from our own without there being a clear purpose to it that wasn't necessary in an earlier time. Since we live in an age when we can get movies from all eras and nations and we watch them "out of order" from their original places, we sometimes can lose sight of context in thinking about quality, but it doesn't disappear, it just acts as a more invisible informant to our ideas or, if not, can muddy our view of "quality" for not recognizing cliche from originality, outdated values from progress, or irony from seriousness.

[Lencho of the Apes]

One really good example of how similar movies are clustered together within a year or so's time: Lady In A Cage - The Naked Kiss - Who Killed Teddy Bear. None of them are exactly "indebted" to the others, but it's unimaginable that any of them could exist outside the context that enabled the others also to be made.

[Wulff]

Since most of us haven't really sat down and made a year to year study of changes this process is going to work more intuitively or generally than that level of specificity.

True. But it's the specificity I'd like to learn more about. So I'd be interested to read the analysis of someone who has researched the year to year. or even decade to decade, changes that have occurred in films and what makes films unique to the time they were made.

[...]

In what way are you interested in noting or what scope or scale are you thinking of? I mean there's all sorts of ways to approach that, from the smaller scale like the sudden growth in "horror" movies about radiation created monsters and hostile aliens that were made in the mid-fifties, peaking in 1957, but starting shortly before roughly corresponding to the cold war build up and launch of Sputnik, but also tied to the use of the atomic bomb in WWII, the nuclear arms race, and the end of American control or influence of Japan in 1952. That last opened a door Godzilla stepped through in 1954, which, along with Ray Harryhausen's Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in '53, set off a trend that picked up on the nuclear issue while playing with giantism. The causes are intertwined but inextricably linked to a specific period in time.

The current poll, 1989, gives a hint of some other US specific changes that were taking place. Sex, Lies, and Videotape and even more importantly, Do the Right Thing signaled a change in focus for the industry, as both the start of a new "independent" film model was becoming viable, thanks in part of the widespread adoption of VHS for home use leaving a market for more participants to enter and a decline in the Star Wars model of kid oriented blockbusters, decline, not end of course. More content overall and moreadult content was wanted and new financing and distributions models were taken up to fill that gap. Do the Right Thing also heralded a return, but improvement, to financing movies with black casts and, sometimes, directors as black audiences became seen as viable again after the decline from the '70s brief market spike. The failure of Hollywood to "do the right thing" in producing and marketing wasn't remotely solved, but it was at least given some notice, if for the wrong reasons.

[...]

Or even more specifically, along the lines Lencho used, '89 also saw the release of The Abyss, Deep Star Six, and Leviathan. All underwater action thrillers possibly made because one studio got the idea and others copied it to steal their punch or because there was some trigger that got a few different screenwriters all thinking along the same lines that had their movies made because they seemed original takes on teh action genre which was popular at the time. Likely it was a combination of both with possibly the laying of the underwater cable from US to Europe in '88 sparking the idea, but that's just one of many possibilities. The three being made at the same time though is still unusual in the grand scheme of things. But at the time there was a fair bit of that kind of semi-duplication. K-9 and Turner and Hooch were both also released in '89, dog/cop buddy flicks being another example from the same year of the sort of trend that would continue through the nineties like Dante's Peak and Volcano duplicated in '97

[Wulff]

In what way are you interested in noting or what scope or scale are you thinking of? I mean there's all sorts of ways to approach that, from the smaller scale like the sudden growth in "horror" movies about radiation created monsters and hostile aliens that were made in the mid-fifties, peaking in 1957, but starting shortly before roughly corresponding to the cold war build up and launch of Sputnik, but also tied to the use of the atomic bomb in WWII, the nuclear arms race, and the end of American control or influence of Japan in 1952. That last opened a door Godzilla stepped through in 1954, which, along with Ray Harryhausen's Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in '53, set off a trend that picked up on the nuclear issue while playing with giantism. The causes are intertwined but inextricably linked to a specific period in time.

You're on the right track with your description of the films from the mid-fifties.

I'm interested in learning about how contemporary life and historical development impacted the themes and trends in cinema throughout history. It 'd be cool to compare your observations of films from the mid-fifties with similar observations of films from other periods.

[Wulff]

Following on from previous posts, do you guys think that contemporary life and historical development has had a clearly identifiable impact on the cinematic themes of the 2010s? If so what are they?

[Lencho of the Apes]

I think we had this conversation 2-3 years ago, and part of the answer was "it's too soon to identify thematics that only become visible in hindsight." But there are other things so visible, so near the surface, that it's impossible to miss them. Two examples from USA film production are the cycle of movies dramatizing ideas from the Black Lives Matter movement and the many movies that examine -- whether critically or not -- the role USA's military imperialism plays in global affairs. (The earliest of the movies in this historical moment that addressed that 'forever war' ideology that has taken shape seems to have been Romero's Diary Of The Dead, in um 2009? 2010?)

What others have you noticed, wulff?

[Wulff]

LGBTIQ stories have featured fairly heavily in the 2010s which is obviously a reflection of the attention LGBTIQ issues have been getting in the wider community.

Not sure what the deal the is with all the superhero movies though.

Perhaps the 2000s would be easier to analyze?

[...]

Superhero movies are both a response to the culture at large and to changing movie distribution/production dynamics where blockbusters and the reliance on oversea sales make big dumb action the go to for Hollywood. The biggest change in that latter regard is the rise of streaming services and the effect they are having on ticket sales for mid-tier films which are losing audience interest to netflix and other "tv" online. Long form story telling is the new hotness, which can even be seen in the superhero movies themselves with their long story arcs.