silent movies | New Pop Lit NEWS

Critics and New Art

Posted on April 22, 2019 by newpoplitnews

THOUGHTS ON THE 3–D SHORT STORY

impression sunrise claude monet (“Impression Sunrise” by Claude Monet.)

THE TEST of an artistic critic is how swiftly the person adapts to artistic change. The ability to embrace the NEW and not be left behind.

EXAMPLES from the past include the rise of modernist art, beginning with the 19th century Impressionists. As Robert Hughes and others noted, the inability of art critics to keep up with change became a cliche, until anything new was automatically accepted in fear of being wrong again.

jazz singer

ANOTHER example is the transition in the late 1920’s from silent cinema to sound. Or, in the 50’s and 60’s, from “silver screen” movies to Technicolor and Cinemascope, which even as astute a film critic as Pauline Kael found difficulty dealing with, so enamored was she with smaller films of the 1930’s. Kael’s antipathy to wide screen movies was such that director David Lean once exclaimed to her, “You won’t be happy with any movie I make unless it’s shot on 16 mm in black and white!”

lawrenceof

HOW will literary critics react to the emergence of a new style of short story? One faster, more designed, more exciting than any short story offered now? A story, moreover, which fuses literary and pop elements to create a visibly different work?

Questions, questions. . . .
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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.)