Your Local Nickelodeon Culture

If nickelodeon theaters and the screen experiences of the first two decades of the twentieth century seem distant to us in time, the traces and legacies of early cinema are as close as the town or city in which you live. As the movie exhibition business exploded in popularity after 1908, virtually every community, urban or rural, whether in the US or around the world, featured their own version of a “nickelodeon”-type theater (whether they were actually called nickelodeons or not). As we learned in Chapter 2, some of these theaters were large and expensively appointed; others were little more than converted storefronts. Some were airy and comfortable; some were dark, poorly ventilated fire hazards. All played a part in the development of what we have come to know as “movie culture,” both nationally and as part of their local communities.

What was the early movie experience like in the community in which you grew up or in which you are going to school now? The proliferation of digitized online databases, especially archives of local newspapers, along with web-based collections of early movie trade magazines at places like the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject.org/) provide us with powerful and fascinating research tools to play movie history detective and identify some of the local theaters and nickelodeons where movie culture was born.

This Case Study invites you to see what you can find out about the nickelodeon and other early cinema theaters around the year 1910 in the area in which you live now. In some cases, you may find a continuous history of a particular building or space being used as a movie theater, as an early nickelodeon may have been converted into a larger movie house, which may have given way to a later multiplex. In other cases, these early theaters may have appeared and then just as quickly disappeared with the turn toward feature films and sound movies later in the century. You may discover an existing community of early movie historians who have carefully researched and preserved the story of your local movie history, or you may be the first to pursue this project in your locale.

How to find these early theaters? Sometimes a simple Google search may provide a quick clue, but a more likely strategy may involve searching the archives of your local newspapers. Keep in mind there may have been several local newspapers in existence at the time which have since folded; this is especially the case in larger cities, which would typically have supported several daily newspapers in 1910. Locate the sections of those newspapers that feature entertainment listings or advertisements, and start looking for movies. Many of these archives can be accessed online through databases such as Newspaper Source, which your college library may subscribe to. “Analog” searching is also still a valuable tool. Your local libraries—including your college library—may maintain hard copy collections of historical newspapers. It can be both a fascinating and fun experience to leaf through the actual pages of a local newspaper from 1910, skimming the articles, the photos, and the ads, all of which create a rich impression of the popular culture of the time, including nickelodeon culture.

Trade journals such as The Moving Picture World, available through the Media History Digital Library and the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/index.php) are also good sources. Magazines like The Moving Picture World provided information and news to movie exhibitors and distributors and are full of advertisements listing new films and identifying local developments in the movie business. A quick search for mentions of Cincinnati, Ohio in The Moving Picture World for 1910, for example, produced this intriguing notice: “Cincinnati, Ohio—A new moving picture theater is being erected on the east side of Carthage Pike, north of Canal Bridge. It will be able to seat about 400 patrons and will be under the proprietorship of McMann & Jackson.” Further searching revealed that the name of Carthage Pike has been changed, and that the Canal Bridge no longer exists, but I was still able to locate the current neighborhood where this as yet unnamed theater was to be built.

The website Cinema Treasures, which contains information about thousands of movie theaters across the United States, including over 100 former movie houses in the Cincinnati area alone, led to the possibility that this was the Americus Theatre, opened in 1911 in the same area (http://cinematreasures.org/). Is this the same theater? Historical research is as much about refining questions as it is locating definite answers. This early find will lead to further questions: How sure can we get about the name of this theater? How long did it exist? Is it mentioned in local histories?

As you pursue early cinema in your area, consider posting your final results to the Screen Ages website. You can also contact local historical societies with your information, as well as history professors at your or other area colleges who specialize in local history. They may not only be able to help you with your own research but may very well value the contribution your work makes to an understanding of local cinema history.

Local Movie Palaces and Small Town Theaters

If most of the early nickelodeons and other movie exhibition houses of the early years of cinema no longer exist, we can often still experience the physical presence of the movie palaces and downtown theaters of the later silent era. While many of the theaters built during the 1920s have also disappeared, there are still surviving examples of the movie theater culture of the heyday of silent movie features. Some, like the legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California (now called the TCL Chinese Theatre), have survived as active first-run movie theaters. Others, especially the downtown movie houses that were a fixture of smaller towns throughout the United States, have been turned into restaurants, clothing stores, yoga studios, almost anything, really, but they often still feature a marquee or elaborately lighted name that reminds us of a time when they were the center of the community’s movie screen experiences.

This Case Study is an extension of the online case study for Chapter 2 that asked you to investigate the local theater history of the nickelodeon era. Continue your exploration of your local cinema history and its connections to the larger trends and developments in American cinema history by locating and learning about your community’s silent movie palaces and central theaters. As with the nickelodeons, newspaper archives and the movie magazines accessible through the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject.org/) are great places to start, as is the Cinema Treasures website, a resource containing information about thousands of theaters across the United States (http://cinematreasures.org/).

As you learn about these theaters, find collections and examples of the posters, advertisements, and other promotional materials that the theaters used as part of their marketing strategies. One research goal might be to recreate what a night at a movie palace was like in the 1920s, at the height of the silent era. While the 1920s was almost one hundred years ago, many of the theaters built in the late teens and twenties carried on as movie theaters for decades. Look for opportunities to interview older movie fans, such as grandparents and seniors in your community, about their memories of the theater you are investigating from the 1940s and 1950s. What did “going to the movies” mean to them? How did the screen experience of the movies function as part of their day-to-day lives and how they connected to the larger culture around them?

Exploitation Movies: Sex, Drugs, and Reefer Madness

“The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you.” So goes the warning that preceded Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier 1936), maybe the most famous of the hundreds of screen experiences known as exploitation movies, movies that existed outside the world of mainstream Hollywood cinema in the studios age but were still seen by millions of American moviegoers across the country. These were movies that focused on, to borrow the title of Eric Schaefer’s landmark study of exploitation cinema (https://www.dukeupress.edu/Bold-Daring-Shocking-True), the “bold, daring, shocking, and true!” Reefer Madness claimed to serve as a warning against the “scourge” of marijuana, but in making this warning the movie indulged in scenes of the wild sexual activity and violence that supposedly accompanied marijuana smoking.

Exploitation movies serve as a fascinating, startling, and often dumbfounding area of American cinema history and as examples of the social processes by which the screen experiences of the movies are divided into the mainstream and the underground, the respectable and the illicit, those that deserve critical scrutiny and those that are seen as easily ignored. From the beginnings of American cinema, the cultural reputation of the movies has been a recurring question, one having to do with censorship, with the different audiences for different screen experiences, and with the fundamental reasons we go to the movies in the first place. The bold, the daring, the shocking, and the (supposedly) true have always been a part of the attractions of the cinematic screen experience, and to this day we continue to argue about what we find most important and valuable about the movies:  Is it the moral significance of the stories they tell? The psychological insights they provide into the characters represented? The emotional power of the images we see?

Growing out of a series of “sex hygiene” movies made in the teens warning about the consequences of sexually transmitted infections, exploitation movies really began to flourish with the imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s and its prohibitions against the portrayal of a range of “controversial” subject matter in mainstream Hollywood movies, from drug abuse to sexuality to nudity to graphic crime and violence, all of which became fodder for exploitation movies like Reefer Madness, Child Bride (Harry J. Revier 1938), and Mom and Dad (William Beaudine 1945). These movies were made on the (very) cheap, outside of the Hollywood studio structure, including the B-movie structure of “Poverty Row,” and thus they were not subject to the Production Code. Exhibitors would take these movies from town to town, renting theater space and advertising the movies locally, usually with restrictions that the movies were for adults or that men and women attend gender segregated screenings. They tried to avoid local censorship laws by presenting themselves as “educational,” sometimes with so-called “expert” lecturers appearing along with the movies.

The movies were often shown under different titles, and different versions would be cobbled together to show in different parts of the country. Even crediting many of these movies to a single “director” is difficult, as the moviemakers would regularly reuse stock footage or recombine earlier movies into “new” movies. These screen experiences also resist the conventions of narrative and character continuity that came to define conventional moviemaking, one reason that a movie like Reefer Madness found new popularity beginning in the 1970s for its camp qualities, including what now seems like its ridiculous depiction of the effects of marijuana, but also for its feeble acting and apparent disregard for maintaining a consistent story line. And Reefer Madness can seem like a model of clarity and logic compared to others from the period. A movie like Mom and Dad, ostensibly a warning against teen pregnancy and in favor of sex education, includes long sequences taken from medical movies of actual childbirth, presented to provide both instruction and illicit excitement at watching something usually forbidden from the screen.

In this Case Study, explore the world of the exploitation movies of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s by watching Reefer Madness, available at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/reefer_madness1938), and doing further research into how a movie like this would have operated within the movie culture of the 1930s. Begin with your own reactions to the movie. What did you find laughable? Confusing? Most and least like a “conventional” movie? Move on to speculate about why you think audiences would have been attracted to a movie such as Reefer Madness. Begin to read in the literature surrounding the movie, from any contemporary notices you can find from the archives of a trade publication such as Variety.

Continue your research with the work of contemporary scholars such as Eric Schafer, who suggests that these movies are better understood in terms of their supplying audiences with sensational images than as simply poor imitations of Hollywood movies. Finally, consider the symbiotic relationship between the mainstream movie business and the exploitation movies. How does each depend on each other for their identities and in terms of attracting audiences? What about those film experiences, such as “hard core” pornography, that exist apart from either mainstream or exploitation movies? Can we see examples of how exploitation has influenced mainstream moviemaking?

Post-War Avant-Garde Movies

It’s a movie titled, simply but in all capital letters, A MOVIE. It’s about twelve minutes long, and it can be found online easily. You can watch it here, but you should know ahead of time that it contains images you may find disturbing (http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/). What was your screen experience of A MOVIE like? What other kinds of screen experiences did it remind you of? What seemed most unusual? Most intriguing? Was your overall experience frustrating? Fascinating? Were you eager to see more “movies” like this?

A MOVIE was made in 1958 by the American artist Bruce Conner and is now considered a key example of American avant-garde or experimental moviemaking. Conner created A MOVIE by combining clips from many other films, from Hollywood features to documentaries to newsreels, including parts of movies conventionally seen as “outside” the “real” movie, like countdown numbers, title cards, and the announcement of “The End.” In making a movie called A MOVIE, Conner offers a screen experience that causes us to think about just what it means to watch a movie, about what our expectations are for watching a movie, and in what ways we have learned—or been conditioned—to experience movies in particular ways and for particular reasons. This Case Study asks you to explore examples of the burst of experimental avant-garde American filmmaking in the post-World War II era, a series of diverse, exciting, baffling, and challenging screen experiences that took place largely away from conventional movie theaters and apart from the mainstream Hollywood tradition but that had a major impact and influence on American movie culture.

Experimental filmmaking has always been a part of movie culture, both in the US and around the world. In a very real sense, all early filmmaking was experimental, as moviemakers, audiences, and studio owners developed what came to be seen as “conventional” movies, creating categories of the “normal” and the “strange.” The post World War II period, in particular, saw a resurgence of experimental, revolutionary, and avant-garde art across a range of mediums, from the Beat movement and the New York school in literature to Abstract Expressionism in visual art to bebop and free form jazz in music, and film was no different. These movements drew their energies from many factors, including the freedom and mobility of car culture, an increasingly affluent consumer culture that inspired a reaction against suburban conformity, the expanding civil rights movements, and the growing influence and impact of mass media.

The roots of this experimental tradition can be found in the work of filmmakers like Maya Deren, whose Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 helped demonstrate the possibilities of do-it-yourself sixteen-millimeter filmmaking, and Kenneth Anger, who made the experimental and groundbreaking example of gay-influenced cinema Fireworks in 1947 when he was only twenty. In New York City, a group of filmmakers centered around Jonas Mekas, who along with his brother Adolfas had started the magazine Film Culture dedicated to experimental movies and the idea of cinema as art. On the west coast, San Francisco, home to a flourishing Beat counter culture, became another center of experimental film. Wherever they were located, artists like Conner, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Baillie, Shirley Clarke, and others challenged and played with almost every aspect of screen experiences, from the compilation/collage style of Conner to Brakhage’s scratching the surface of the film itself to Clarke’s focus on gritty depictions of urban culture.

Probably the most famous experimental filmmaker of the 1960s was also one of the most famous and significant visual artists as well, Andy Warhol. The experimental movies produced by his “Factory” studio during the decade achieved widespread notice, both positive and negative, especially Empire (1964), an eight-hour-long slow motion film of the Empire State Building at night, and Sleep (1963), a five-and-a-half-hour movie of a man sleeping. These were just two of the many films Warhol and his company produced, films that played with ideas of celebrity, challenged conventions of sexual and gender identity, and experimented with film style and narrative form. For many Americans, Warhol’s films came to define the idea of avant-garde film, both arousing curiosity and provoking anxiety and even hostility.

The reality is that the blanket terms “avant-garde film” or “experimental film” cover an astonishing diversity of screen experiences, from the extremely brief to the punishingly long, from abstract, formal compositions to openly political and subversive films. The only real common denominator may be the conscious desire to try something new and different, to expand the idea of movies beyond the conventions of Hollywood. For your Case Study, watch one of the five experimental movies below and explore the questions of what makes them experimental and how they make you think about the screen experience of the movies. After recording your initial reactions to the movie, watch them again to see how a new experience builds on your initial impressions. Then, find out more about the filmmaker and the context in which the movie was made. Read artistic manifestoes about avant-garde filmmaking from the post-war period such as the statement by the New American Cinema group in 1962, available at the New American Cinema Group/Film Maker’s Collective website (http://film-makerscoop.com/about/history).

How does your reading about the philosophies and purposes behind these filmmakers affect your experience of the movie you watched? Expand your search to read critics and scholars writing about the film you are studying and include this input in your findings. Some overall questions to consider:

• Based on your Case Study, how would you define the meaning and significance of experimental or avant-garde cinema?
• What are the main challenges the movie you are experiencing presents to “conventional” moviemaking? How does the movie make you more aware of what these conventions are (such as an emphasis on logical, linear continuity in narrative structure) and the effect they have on the expectations and experiences of viewers?
• What influence can you see of these post-war experimental films on the evolution and development of Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s? Can you find evidence of “mainstream” directors and filmmakers citing the impact of experimental films on their work?
• Finally, use your historical research to provide a basis for exploring contemporary avant-garde and experimental cinema.

The Movies

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid 1943).

One of the most significant avant-garde American films and one that influenced many post-war experimental filmmakers. Meshes of the Afternoon experiments with how to tell a story in film and plays with the boundaries between dream worlds and reality.

Fireworks (Kenneth Anger 1947).

Made by the twenty-year-old Anger in his parents’ Beverly Hills home, Anger’s film mixes surrealism with homoerotic themes and imagery that definitely challenged Production-Code-era representations of sexuality (http://vimeo.com/73727414).

A MOVIE (Bruce Conner 1958).

See link above.

Mothlight (Stan Brakhage 1963).

Brakhage’s short experimental film was constructed without the use of a camera. Brakhage embedded different thin objects—including moth wings—between two clear strips of film and had them processed into a movie (http://youtu.be/XaGh0D2NXCA).

Castro Street (Bruce Baillie 1966).

Baillie uses a wide range of visual effects in this film, shot near an oil refinery on the San Francisco street of the movie’s title (http://youtu.be/UPhu7Qdp3pQ).

The Movie Ratings System

In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America officially replaced the Production Code Authority system of movie censorship, in place since 1930, with a film-rating system. Rather than a single standard that every movie must meet in order to gain MPAA approval, the rating system assigns each submitted movie a rating based on an age-based system of evaluation. When the MPAA switched to a rating system, it was reacting to a Production Code system that had been gradually falling apart since the end of World War II. But how did the new ratings system work in practice in its first decade of existence? What can the early history of the ratings system tell us about how screen experiences were changing in the 1960s and 1970s and what the flashpoints were in the evolution of contemporary movie culture?

Take, for example, Blow Up, a 1966 British movie filmed in London by the Italian director Michael Antonioni. The movie tells the story of a hip young photographer in the swinging London of the mid 1960s who comes to believe that he has inadvertently caught the picture of a dead body on film. The film may sound like a simple murder mystery, but Antonioni uses this set-up to play with the viewer’s expectations about reality and fantasy as they relate to both photography and the movies. Blow Up stars some of the most important young British actors of the time (David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles) as well as an appearance by the now legendary sixties rock group The Yardbirds. The movie was a huge popular and critical hit across Europe, and MGM wanted to capitalize on this success by bringing the movie to the US.

There was one problem, however. The movie features nudity involving young women, and the Production Code refused to approve it unless those scenes were cut out, something Antonioni refused to do. Knowing how weakened the Production Code had become and banking on the idea that the controversy over the movie could only help with publicity, MGM released the movie anyway. Their gamble paid off; the movie was a critical and box office hit in America as well, and many film historians point to the Blow Up case as accelerating the replacement of the Production Code with the ratings system.

In this Case Study, choose one of the key movies below to explore further how each played a role in the often fitful development of the movie ratings system. Begin by reading about the history of each movie’s encounters with either the Production Code or the new ratings system. What were contemporary reviewers and others saying about the movie at the time? For example, Bowsley Crowther began his review of Blow Up in the New York Times by directly alluding to the controversy with the Production Code:

It will be a crying shame if the audience that will undoubtedly be attracted to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up because it has been denied a Production Code seal goes looking more for sensual titillation than for the good, solid substance it contains—and therefore will be distracted from recognizing the magnitude of its forest by paying attention to the comparatively few defoliated trees.

As you work on your Case Study, identify what recurring issues, concerns, and arguments about the ratings system persist to this day. How do the stated purposes for the ratings system, as they were articulated in 1968, compare to the rationale for the rating system today? Some key books that deal with the ratings system include Jon Lewis’s Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), Frank Miller’s Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, and Violence on Screen (Atlanta: Turner, 1994), and Gregory Black’s Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated offers a pointed critique and exposé of the rating system.

The Movies

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967).

If Blow Up showed the fatal weakness of the Production Code, many point to Bonnie and Clyde as the movie that finished it off. The movie provoked strong arguments over its graphic depictions of violence—particularly in the slow-motion execution of the title characters that concludes the movie—as well as its sympathetic portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde. This critical debate along with word of mouth gradually turned Bonnie and Clyde into a hit movie and demonstrated to Hollywood the public demand for movies unfettered by the Production Code.

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger 1969).

In terms of its place in the history of Hollywood censorship, Midnight Cowboy is famous both for being the first—and to date only—movie with an X or NC-17 rating to win the Best Picture Academy Award and for baffling many viewers as to why the movie received the MPAA’s most restrictive rating. An emotionally complex character study of two people living on the margins of New York in the late sixties—Joe Buck, a naïve young Texan trying to make a living as a male escort, and Ratso Rizzo, a sickly street person Buck befriends—Midnight Cowboy seems no more explicit in terms of language or nudity than most of the R-rated movies of its time. Many critics suggest that the movie’s references to gay sexuality were enough for the MPAA to react as strongly as it did, making Midnight Cowboy a key film in the representation of sexuality in American movies.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976)

In Screen Ages we discuss the controversial history of Taxi Driver, and its challenge to the ratings system is a significant part of that history. Reacting to warnings from the MPAA that the film would receive an X rating for its scenes of graphic violence, the producers and Scorsese responded not by cutting any material but by “desaturating” the color of the most violent scenes, in effect making the blood less vividly red. These kind of detailed negotiations between filmmakers and the MPAA provide a fascinating window into the vexed history of screen violence, including how we define the term “violence” and what makes some scenes of violence more “graphic” than others.

Note

• Crowther, Bowsley. “Blow-Up.” New York Times, December 19, 1966: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review.

The New Queer Cinema 20 Years Later

In 1991, the Sundance Film Festival awarded its highest award, the Grand Jury Prize, to Poison, written and directed by a young filmmaker named Todd Haynes. A low-budget movie shot in 16-millimeter film and inspired by the novels of the legendary gay French writer Jean Genet, Poison interweaves three different stories told in three very different styles, from a cheesy television news documentary (complete with talking heads and cheap-looking graphics) to a black and white exploitation horror movie featuring deliberately bad sound dubbing to a mix of gritty neorealism and the obvious use of a sound stage with fake rocks and trees. The three parts—“Hero,” “Horror,” and “Homo”—deal with a very young boy who murders his abusive father and then apparently flies away, a scientist who turns into a monster after isolating and drinking the human sex drive, and an imprisoned man who falls in love with another inmate. Imaginative, experimental, and well-versed in movie history, Poison also focuses on issues of sexuality, desire, and the cultural taboos and restrictions that govern and try to suppress both of these fundamental aspects of human experience.

The next year, the film scholar B. Ruby Rich cited Poison as a key example of what she called the “New Queer Cinema,” a series of mainly American and British movies that began to appear at film festivals across the country in the late 1980s and early1990s. Like Poison, these movies, including Swoon (Tom Kalin 1992), The Living End (Gregg Araki 1992), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant 1991), and Paris is Burning (Jenny Livingston 1990) not only portrayed the lives of gay and lesbian characters but did so in bold, imaginative, and theoretically informed ways. Taking energy and inspiration from the GLBT liberation movement that gained momentum after the Stonewall demonstrations in 1969 as well as the devastation and political activism that resulted from the AIDS epidemic that began in the early 1980s, the New Queer Cinema challenged cinematic assumptions of a conservative form of heterosexuality as the norm as well as the standard genres and narrative conventions of Hollywood storytelling. Rather than trying to fit in with the mainstream, these movies explored gay sexualities as a potentially revolutionary social force.

Ten years before Poison took the top prize at Sundance, the gay scholar and activist Vito Russo had published The Celluloid Closet, a history of Hollywood’s complicated and repressive representation of queer sexuality from the beginnings of cinema to the book’s present. The young directors of the New Queer Cinema were consciously working to come out of the celluloid closet, and they drew on the work of previous gay and lesbian filmmakers, many, like Dorothy Arzner, James Whale, or George Cukor, who worked as part of mainstream Hollywood, and others, like the avant-garde filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, who more openly challenged the sexual conventions of American movies.

Poison also landed in the middle of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, as right-wing critics denounced the movie (most of whom had not seen it) because Haynes had received some funding from the government-sponsored National Endowment for the Arts. In spite of this opposition, the New Queer Cinema led to a number of gay and lesbian themed movies in the 1990s, including Go Fish (Rose Troche 1994), The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (Maria Maggenti 1995), and further work by Van Sant, Araki, and Haynes. Haynes has gone on to become one of the most influential American independent directors of the last twenty years, with films such as Far From Heaven (2002) and I’m Not There (2007), and Van Sant has moved between mainstream successes such as Good Will Hunting (1997) and more independent fare like Elephant (2003), an exploration of a high school shooting modeled on the Columbine tragedy of 1999.

This Case Study invites you to consider the long-term legacy of the New Queer Cinema. How has the representation of sexuality changed in Hollywood movies over the last twenty years? In the early 2000s, for example, movies like Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are Alright (2010), and Van Sant’s own Milk (2008), based on the life and assassination of the pioneering politician Harvey Milk, won the Best Picture Academy Award for that year, a milestone for a movie featuring an openly gay hero. In what ways do movies like these reflect a greater openness towards a wider expression of human sexuality? In what ways might this mainstream acceptance also involve restraining some of the more radical and innovative impulses of the New Queer Cinema?

In your study, choose a representative movie from the late 1980s or early 1990s, such as Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1986) or Hayne’s own Poison and what you see as a contemporary example of “queer cinema” and compare and contrast how they create their screen experiences as a way of considering issues of sexuality and cinema. Rich’s original article is a great place to start, as is her more recent book-length study, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 2013) which considers some of these same questions regarding the legacy of the nineties generation of queer filmmakers. The 1996 HBO documentary The Celluloid Closet, based on Russo’s work, is another good source.

Notes

• B. Ruby Rich. “New Queer Cinema.” Sight & Sound 2.5 (September 1992): 30-34.
• New York: Harper and Row 1981, revised 1987.

Pixar and the Computer Animation Revolution

Take a look at the following two cartoons. The first is Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ 1928 classic that marked the debut of Mickey Mouse, arguably the most famous screen character of the twentieth century: http://youtu.be/BBgghnQF6E4.

Steamboat Willie, the short movie that launched both the Disney Company and led to the development of the feature-length cartoon with Snow White in 1937, was made the old-fashioned way. Ub himself created over 14,000 separate drawings for the cartoon, each one almost an exact duplicate of the one before except for the slight repositioning of the characters and objects that created the illusion of movement. Although Snow White would be made with a multiplane camera, allowing background images to remain the same from drawing to drawing, animation remained a laborious, time-intensive, hand-drawn process for the next half century, whether based on individual drawings or on the “stop-machine” technique involving making small movements in figurines and photographing a few frames at a time.

Now watch another cartoon from about sixty years later in 1986. It’s equally revolutionary in its own way as Steamboat Willie, if much less famous. It’s called Luxo Jr. (http://youtu.be/D4NPQ8mfKU0).

Luxo Jr. is the first experimental animated movie from a computer company called Pixar. Started by George Lucas’s Lucasfilm company and bought by the Apple computer founder Steve Jobs, Pixar initially focused on making computers to be used in animation. Luxo Jr., however, directed by John Lasseter, represented the real future for Pixar: the creation of computer-animated movies, culminating in the company’s first feature film and the first major computer-animated feature, Lasseter’s Toy Story in 1996.

Chances are, if you were born any time after 1985, Pixar movies and computer-animated features have formed a significant part of your early screen experiences. Computer animation also represented the most radical change in the production of cartoons since Winsor McKay’s early silent films featuring Gertie the dinosaur in 1914. No longer reliant on thousands of hand-made drawings, computer animation relies on software to make the millions of changes from image to image that produce the final animated movie. It’s still a painstaking and laborious process, but one that can allow for levels of detail, complexity of motion, and the illusion of depth (both in 2D and 3D versions of computer animation) difficult to achieve with traditional hand-drawn animation. The movies of Pixar and the other major computer animation companies, including DreamWorks (makers of Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen 2001) and other movies) and Walt Disney Studios, now form a major part of contemporary Hollywood and dominate the animation industry.

As with any technological innovation, such as the advent of sound movies or, more recently, the rise of digital movies as opposed to movies on film, the question arises of what happens to the “old” way of doing things. When Toy Story debuted in the mid-1990s, for example, Walt Disney Studios (which distributed Pixar and would later buy the company in 2006) was in the middle of what many call a renaissance of their great tradition of animated features, a string of traditionally hand-drawn animated movies (although using some computer assistance) beginning with The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Muster) in 1989 and continuing with Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise 1991) and The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff 1994) among others, which were international hits. By the turn of the century, however, there were questions about whether the success of computer animation meant the end of the hand-drawn tradition. Disney itself turned to computer animation, winning their first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (an award that only began in 2001) with the computer-animated Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) in 2014.

For your Case Study, compare and contrast two examples of contemporary animation, one computer-generated, the other hand-drawn or stop-motion (including movies like Coraline (Henry Selick 2009) or Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson 2009)). Your question is to speculate on how you think the advent of computer-generated animation has changed the way we experience animation and what these changes might mean for the future of animation.

What, for example, do you see as the relative strengths and weaknesses of each type of animation? Are there differences in how viewers respond to each kind of cartoon or animation? You should also factor in the importance of economics to the equation: studios can produce computer animation more rapidly than hand-drawn cartoons. At the same time, a kind of arms race has developed, as computer animators try to outdo each other in terms of visual spectacle and innovation. Has hand-drawn animation now acquired a new distinguishing and attractive quality as representing a more traditional and authentic form of animation?