Film, Media and Music
Over fifty feature films have been made either in or about Brighton and they have all contributed to popular understandings of Brighton‘s history and its character. Collectively, they present the city as a site for extreme emotions and conflicts found within narratives that are always set either on the seafront or at the Royal Pavilion. It can be argued that these Brighton films are not about Brighton at all but instead serve as vehicles for the expression of popular anxieties, concerns and desires. As such, they transcend the specificities of place and history and become projections of what could be described as a national unconscious.
Although film renting began in Britain in London, the rapid spread of cinemas after 1910 meant that there was a demand for distribution closer to the sites of exhibition. As a long-established trading centre, Manchester was well placed to become the hub for Northern distribution, and local trade directories list distributors from 1912 onwards. These clustered at first near Victoria Station, but soon moved to Deansgate, as independent distributors began to outnumber branch offices of the major companies. The life-expectancy of these was short, and the First Worlds War affected their business, but they remain an important and under-researched aspect of the early British cinema business.
Before 1906, there were no dedicated venues for the exhibition of film in London. Five years later, cinemas had spread all over the city, and 200,000 people were attending a film show in the city every day. Many in these first cinema audiences were children. Significantly - indeed probably uniquely for the time - cinema was a mass entertainment deliberated aimed at, and priced within the range of, the young. Decades later, some of these children left memoirs (published or unpublished), or were interviewed by oral historians. This body of evidence on the experience of cinema-going before the First World War has been hitherto ignored by film historians. This essay examines this testimony from London audience members, which is constructed around the various stages of the act of going to the cinema. The testimony demonstrates that the experience and the enjoyment of the social space that the cinema provided were at least as important as the entertainment projected on the screen. The early cinema demands greater recognition for its function as a social sphere, and particularly as a welcoming place for children.
This article complicates the notion that Steven Soderbergh‘s films are simply a refashioning of familiar materials, as evidenced by his ongoing appropriation of classical Hollywood and the European art cinema. Through a close analysis of The Limey (1999), this essay argues that Soderbergh‘s film interrogates the idea of familiarity, as such, beginning with the perceptual experience that it generates for viewers. With reference to Victor Shklovsky‘s notion of defamiliarization as well as Martin Heidegger‘s formulation of temporality in Being and Time, this discussion proposes that Soderbergh‘s reiteration of the filmic past can be seen as a meaningful event for film-critical practice that sheds new light upon issues of filmic temporality and film history.
The tendency in most writing on the temporal properties of film music has been to note music‘s ability to establish, quickly and efficiently, a films historical setting. Although acknowledging this important function, this paper seeks to explore a wider range of temporal properties fulfilled by film music. Three aspects of musics temporality are discussed: anachronism (whereby choices of anachronistic music can provide the spectator with ways of making sense of a films subtext or its characters’ state of mind), navigation (the ability of music to help the spectator understand where and when they are in a films narrative) and expansion (musics ability to expand our experience of film time). The paper focuses on Bernard Herrmann, and his score for Taxi Driver (1976), and argues that Herrmann was particularly sensitive to the temporal possibilities of film music.
This article offers an alternative to the predominant and pervasive theoretical approaches to discussing time in film. It adheres to ordinary language, and moves away from a ‘mapping’ of theoretical models or contextual analysis to concentrate on a films specifics. It considers the particular handling of time in a particular film: The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993). Fixing on specific points of style, the article examines the interplay of time and gesture, and the editing techniques of ellipses and dissolves. Both the article and the film hold their attention on the intricacy and intimacy afforded by moments, as they pass. Both explore how the intensity of a lovers relationship over decades is expressed in fleeting passages of shared time. In doing so, the article advances a vocabulary of criticism to match the rhetoric of the film, to appreciate the works handling of time. Detailed consideration of this achievement allows for a greater understanding of the designs and possibilities of time in cinema.