art of the film | New Pop Lit NEWS

Do Awards Matter?

Posted on January 16, 2020 by newpoplitnews

THE STEPHEN KING CONTROVERSY

THE LATEST literary news is that author Stephen King is the latest celebrity to have inadvertently generated outrage, with what some view as an outrageous statement. (Made on Twitter, which should never be taken too seriously.) He was discussing the Academy Awards. What he said:

I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.

THE POINT both Stephen King and his critics largely miss is that the Oscars like all such awards have always been political. Awards ceremonies, like hall of fames– sports, music, and otherwise– are in reality highly successful PR appendages to their particular industry. As such, a big part of choosing “winners” is putting the best face possible on the industry, “quality” often pushed to the sidelines.

Case in point: Academy Award winners for the retrograde year of 1961. (A very good year for cinema.) For the Oscars– presented in April 1962– two overtly political message movies dominated the nominations and awards. “West Side Story” and “Judgement at Nuremberg” received eleven nominations each. The former won ten of those categories; the latter, two.

Both are fine movies. Yet in retrospect, one can name five other films from the same year which are artistically better (especially when viewed in a movie theater): El Cid, The Guns of Navarone, The Misfits, One-Eyed Jacks, and The Hustler. All five of these are visually superior, deeper films. The last three have not just better acting, but are virtual master classes of film acting. I’m confident that in the perspective of more time, all five will be ranked higher on any critical list than they are now– this especially true for One-Eyed Jacks, which is psychologically deeper than even the movie currently ranked all time #1 by the prestigious British Film Institute, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. (Which itself was ignored by the Academy Awards when it came out.)

Awards are of the moment, swayed by the ideological currents of the moment. As important as they are for their particular industry as a way to hype products– and for the winners and losers themselves– in the long run their meaning is minimal, and should be recognized by the intelligent observer for what they are, and not more than what they are.

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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS

Gimmicks and Art

Posted on March 27, 2019 by newpoplitnews

THOUGHTS ON THE 3–D SHORT STORY

IS the 3-D Story a gimmick? Yes. Most arts innovations at first are gimmicks.

A classic example was the change from silent movies to sound ones, which began in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. In that Al Jolson flick, sound was used strictly as a gimmick– intended only for the musical numbers. That Al Jolson ad-libbed a few lines of dialogue created (according to this video) a sensation and signaled the upcoming end of silent cinema.

CINEMA in its early years progressed through continual innovation. Most of them when they were tried were considered to be gimmicks. (As movies themselves at the outset were thought to be a gimmick and not art.) Among developments: Technicolor, introduced in the 1930’s and becoming widespread by the 1950’s. The 50’s also saw the rise of wide screen film processes like Cinemascope, Vista-Vision, and Todd-AO, culminating in triple-screen Cinerama, most famously used for 1963’s How the West Was Won. The ultimate movie gimmick of course, in the 1950’s and more recently, was 3-D.

Viewing_3D_IMAX_clips

All of them began as gimmicks, but some were perfected and became standard part of the film art form.

Sound became so dominant, the making of a silent film in 2011, The Artist, was– let’s face it– a gimmick

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GIMMICKS have sustained the world of painting since the late 19th century, beginning with the impressionists–

340px-Claude_Monet,_Impression,_sunrise (Claude Monet, “Impression, Sunrise.”)

–then expressionists, cubists, Dadaists and surrealists. Abstract art, fluxus, op art, pop art. Was not Andy Warhol a genius of gimmicks?

Andy-Warhol-Stockholm-1968

Only recently has the art world run out of new ideas.

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What about music? Rock n’ roll— though it sprung from authentic American roots music– was definitely a gimmick, promoted by carny barker hustlers like Alan Freed, Colonel Tom Parker, and Dick Clark.

rock n rollers (Little Richard and Elvis Presley.)