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SCMS Boston MA 2012

Title and Summary

Title

Art Films and the Politics of Taste

Summary (Max. 2500 characters)

Bibliography (Max 5)

Collins, Jim. Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age. New York NY: Routledge, 1995.

Murphy, Kevin.  “Hell’s Angels: An Interview with Catherine Breillat on Anatomy of Hell."  Senses of Cinema, “Recent Films” Issue 34.  http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/34/breillat_interview/  acc. 8-9-2011.

Williams, Linda.  Screening Sex.  Durham NC and London UK: Duke U P, 2008.

Chair Info

Chair

Participants email

Carr, Steven Alan / Indiana U - Purdue U Fort Wayne (IPFW)

Title: "To Encompass the Unseeable": Foreign Film, Taste Culture, and the American Encounter with the Postwar Holocaust Film

Summary: This paper is a revision and expansion of both "Hollywood, Foreign Films, and the Birth of the Holocaust Film" and "'To Encompass the Unseeable': The Last Stage (Times Film, 1949) and Auschwitz in the Mind of Cold War America."  Here I take a reception-based approach to consider the first fictional feature films screened in the United States to depict the Holocaust, and how these films might have initially shaped audience expectations for subsequent films depicting genocide and Nazi atrocities.  In particular, the paper examines the role of New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther in mediating these expectations for an audience as yet unfamiliar with the emergent conventions of these films.  To do this, I consider Crowther's multiple reviews and mentions of The Last Stage and how he positioned this film both through the lens of Italian neo-realism, as well as against a Hollywood that had failed to adequately "encompass the unseeable."  The paper thus argues that some American audiences were at least aware of cinematic depictions of the Holocaust by the late 1940s, that Italian neo-realism provided a frame of reference for these films, and that early encounters with these films were deeply embedded within taste culture and its appreciation for the foreign.

Bibliography:

Beaver, Frank Eugene.  Bosley Crowther: Social Critic of the Film, 1940-1967.  Arno P Cinema Program-Dissertations on Film.  New York NY: Arno P, 1974.

Loewy, Hanno.  "The Mother of All Holocaust Films?:  Wanda Jakubowska's Auschwitz Trilogy."  Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 24.2 (2004): 179-204.

Schoonover, Karl.  "The Comfort of Carnage: Neorealism and America's World Understanding."  Convergence Media History.  Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake, eds.  New York NY: Routledge, 2009.  127-138.

Author Bio:

Steven Alan Carr is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, a 2002-03 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, a 2010-11 Loewenstein-Wiener Marcus Research Fellow at the American Jewish Archives, and Co-Director of the IPFW Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is the author of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (Cambridge U P, 2001).

Feil, Ken / Emerson University

Title: Never on Sunday, Okay on Primetime, or, The Apartment in America's Living Room: Middlebrow Taste, Cinematic Sex Comedies, and TV Sex Comedy of the Late 1960s

Summary: On September 30, 1967 NBC aired the Greek sex comedy Never on Sunday (Dassin, 1960) during primetime. The story of a prostitute who happily embraces harlotry over middleclass respectability might have seemed too subversive for audiences accustomed to Hogan’s Heroes and The Lawrence Welk Show, that evening’s competition. Nine nights before, CBS had aired another unlikely representative of network “living room protocol,” Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), about a company drone who loans out his flat for his bosses’ extramarital flings. Both broadcasts met with high ratings, low controversy, and preceded an eventual “revolution” (as one TV critic called it) of primetime comedy.

This paper examines the relationships among taste codes and taste publics in film and television of the 1960s through the network broadcasts of Never on Sunday and The Apartment. In TV by Design, Lynn Spigel demonstrates 1960s television’s incorporation of art film aesthetics and how that merger of high and low culture impacted TV taste publics. The Sunday and Apartment broadcasts not only provided further instances of commercial television’s deployments of art and auteur cinema, but also contributed to “the new sexual culture” (as Elana Levine puts it) emerging in network television. Televising these films so successfully identified a “new” television audience that desired deviation from sterile, traditional TV comedy. This new TV audience could rebel against tradition through precedents long established in middlebrow movie culture: the liberal acceptance of potentially “offensive” sexual and political content as contained by the parameters of “legitimate” culture.

The 1960 theatrical reception of Never on Sunday and The Apartment instanced the contradictory pulls of middlebrow taste that network television would ultimately exploit. Middlebrow critics, led by the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, differentiated themselves from petty bourgeois moralists by hailing both films as “sexy,” “tasteful” and “artistic” critiques of hypocritical American mores. These discursive features reemerged in the reception of primetime comedies such as Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Love American Style, and All in the Family. Altogether, the transformation of television comedy in the late 1960s transpired when the networks began addressing TV audiences as middlebrow filmgoers from the early 1960s. This strategy enabled audiences to rebel against TV’s traditional constructions of “good taste” while preserving the patina of decorous legitimate culture.

Bibliography:

Author Bio:

Hawkins, Joan / Indiana University - Bloomington

Title: “The Auteur of Porn”: Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and the Politics of Taste.

Summary: This paper will take up Anatomy of Hell (2004) specifically to discuss the ways in which Breillat’s films engage the politics of hybrid taste culture.  As Kevin Murphy notes, “the narrative set-up is both familiar and unique in the Breillat lexicon: an unnamed woman (Amira Casar) searching for her sexual identity becomes embroiled with an unnamed, misogynistic man (Italian porn star, Rocco Siffredi), striking a contractual deal with him and igniting a psychosexual relationship that proves revelatory, volatile and ultimately explosive” (Murphy 2005).

The film encroaches vigorously on porn through its explicit portrayals of graphic sexuality and erases the privileged “high culture” position that arthouse erotica usually enjoys, through its inclusion of a known porn star.  Not only has Breillat collapsed boundaries between what is still normatively considered to be high and low art-- good and bad taste, but she is one of a handful of directors “engaging in specific transformations across” taste categories to create new hybrid-taste forms (Collins, 131).  In that sense, she joins Todd Haynes and others in doing for taste cultures what Jim Collins argues that films like Thelma and Louise did for genres.

At the same time, however,  Breillat’s film has a politics and a theory that most porn audiences would find off-putting. Linda Williams has dubbed it “philosophy in the bedroom” (Williams 2008).  In that sense, Anatomy of Hell also enacts transformations across intellectual cultures, blurring the bounds between what is generally considered theory and what is considered entertainment or provocation.  Of course, Sade did this in the 18th century as well, but Breillat brings a specific feminist twist to what might otherwise be a misogynistic set piece.  And in so doing, she also raises questions about sexuality and about what it means to be a feminist—even a pro-porn feminist—as we move into the 21st century.

Bibliography:

Collins, Jim. Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age. New York NY: Routledge, 1995.

Murphy, Kevin.  “Hell’s Angels: An Interview with Catherine Breillat on Anatomy of Hell."  Senses of Cinema, “Recent Films” Issue 34.  http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/34/breillat_interview/  acc. 8-9-2011.

Williams, Linda.  Screening Sex.  Durham NC and London UK: Duke U P, 2008.

Author Bio: Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the Dept of Communication and Culture and the Director of Film and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.  She has written extensively on the politics of taste.  She is currently working on two books: an edited anthology, Downtown Film, Video and TV Culture 1975-2001, under contract with Intellect Press, UK; and When Bad Girls Do French Theory, a single author work on the erotics of theory.

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