Film Genres and Auteurs

Dr. Mark Nicholls

Dr. Athena Bellas
Ann Turner (Guest Lecturer)

All models are wrong, some are

useful
Subject Focus 2015:
To achieve fullest understanding of 13+
must see films and their makers
Ann Turner (writer/director) Case Study
Further understand Genre and
Auteurism as critical paradigms
Problematise these and explain the
productive/destructive tension between
them

Charles Spencer Chaplin (18891977) & Modern Times (1936)

Lecture Overview:
1. Close Analysis (1- to 18.00 mins)
2. The Tramp and The Show Folk
Reading
3. Gesamtkunstwerk and Critiques of
Modernity
4. Sound, Chaplin and the
Modernisation of Industry
5. Comments/Questions

1. Close Analysis (1- to

18.00 mins)
Film shoot/cutting Oct. 1934 - Aug.
1935
Chaplin early 30s world tour
Script use of Note: Tramp Business
Plagiarism claim A Nous La Liberte
(Rene Clair)
Factory worker/Tramp ?
Parody of Newsreel style
Metropolis (Lang, 1927)

1. Close Analysis (1- to

18.00 mins)
16, 18, 24 frames per second
Soviet Historical Montage
(Eisenstein)
Diegetic Sound
Efficiency and time/motion study
Bee and clichs of Nature
Compartmentalisation / Interpellation
Surrealist Reading of Chaplin: Mad
Love

1. Close Analysis (1- to

18.00 mins)

Factory trauma and shell shock

Chaplins own childhood poverty
Obsessive compulsive/ hysteria
Editing strategies/film speed (f/p/s)
Vaslav Nijinksy and the Ballets
Russes

2. The Tramp and The Show Folk Reading

Tramp and Modernity incompatible?

Chaplin and personal creative
renewal?
The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)
All about show business?
Paulette Godard (1910-1990)
Sound film c. 1927
Factory Department Store
Domestic bliss

2. The Tramp and The Show Folk

Reading
Show business and modern
mechanisation incompatible ?
Tramp only has prison or the road?

3. Gesamtkunstwerk and Critiques of Modernity

Chaplin as Wagners Total Artist

Sergei Diaghilevs Ballets Russes
(1909-1929)
Compartmentalistion of Labor
Relationship between the collective
and the genius individual in the total
art work
How do Genre and the Auteur map
onto this paradigm ?

4. Sound, Chaplin and the

Modernisation of Industry
Chaplins Romantic Scandals
Chaplin as Communist
Chaplin as industrial threat to Studio
System and standardisation
Vertical Integration of
production/distribution/exhibition
Cinema as pantomime ?
Trampss song as critique of sound/System
Buster Keaton, The General (1926)

Floor Comments/Questions
Did Chaplin speak about his process
?
Was Chaplins fame an impediment
to being taken seriously as an
artist ?
Chaplin as exile from USA.

Suggested
Bibliography/Filmography
Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
Battleship Potemkin
(Eisenstein,1925)
Strike (Eisenstein, 1925)
The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)
Thomson, D. The Whole Equation: A
History of Hollywood, Little Brown,
2007.
Cooke, A. Alistair Cooke at the
Movies, Penuin, 2011