Rush 3: a second helping of rind

Your task in rush three is to gain a bit more practice with the same technique we began experimenting with in rush two--but this time in relation to William Wyler's film Ben-Hur. 
 
Consequently, it may help to re-read the rush two assignment description--but in short, here's how to proceed:  

1. Recall what you can about the object you chose from the beginning of Ben-Hur, including its immediate contexts at the point in the film where you found it.  If you weren't in class for the first half of the film, you can find this material on Youtube. Choose a detail from the film's first ten minutes.
   
   
2. Do a bit of associative thinking. Where else does your object(or equivalent objects) crop up in the film? (Remain attentive to entirely different settings and contexts.) Also, what kinds of meanings are associated with your chosen object (or even with the word or sound that signifies your object)?
   
   
3. How might one or more of these associative meanings be folded back into the movie's material contents and used to open up new lines of inquiry?  
        
4. For full credit, post your response on your blog by 11:59pm Monday, Feb. 27. E-mail if you have questions.
   
   
   CS
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Three dimensions of epic

It'll be helpful this semester to remember that we're concerned with at least three different aspects or connotations of "epic": one to do with the relation of poetics to contemporary every-day life, one to do with the evolving status and structure of the narrative hero, and one to do with the ever-changing relationships between marketing, technology, and identity.

1. Poetics: If we're going to compare movies to a form of literature, it's the novel that likely comes to mind (ordinary prose, more-or-less linear plots, etc.).  But one of our chief concerns this semester is the surprising set of parallels between epic poetry (as a distinctly preliterate mode of storytelling) and cinematic production (a technological mode of storytelling that's still evolving today)--parallels which include the poet's and the filmmaker's respective attentiveness to "semiotic rind" or "husk" (the linking of meanings on the basis of the most extraneous sounds or images).
   
   
2. Heroics: Classical Greek heroes were fashioned in very particular ways. Epic heroes (Odysseus, for instance) are inevitably flesh-and-blood mortals--yet they're mortals of a special type: Epic heroes embody all the qualities most essential to their home community--yet typically the story begins with the hero's estrangement from home.  One of our tasks is to trace the continuing presence of this type of protagonist across a surprisingly varied body of films--and in the face of the current decline of the national community (or "homeland") as the modern arbiter of identity, policy, and commerce. 
   
   
3. Economics: As we know, the film industry concocted the great blockbuster epics of the fifties (Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) in part in order to avoid loosing audiences to network television programming. Following up on this insight, another of our tasks this semester is to place the epic hero's on-going appearances within its various cultural, ideological, and industrial contexts. What does it mean, for instance, that many people around the world experienced their first narrative account of the Viet Nam War not through the perspective of the victorious North Vietnamese, but through the American-made film Apocalypse Now? 

CS

Rush 2: cinematic "rind"

In class yesterday I asked you to select some particular detail from one of the frames in John Ford's The Searchers.  The example I chose for myself was the chair that appears in the foreground of the shot shown below. 

I didn't read any particular significance into the chair when I made this selection--and that's very much the point here: Grab yourself some incidental item from a corner of the frame (rather than an image possessing obvious meaning, whether directly or symbolically).  Don't worry about why you might choose a given object--just choose one. What we're after is a piece of cinematic "rind" or "husk": some part of the shot that could just as easily be thrown away (not because it's a mistake, but simply because the detail in question is not particularly central to the scene--the action and/or dialogue in the script could have been shot without the detail in question).      

Your task in this week's rush is to use whatever detail you selected for yourself from The Searchers as a means of prompting new lines of inquiry into the overall movie (including the movie's surprisingly complex handlings of racial and sexual identity).  The result might be a connection of some sort, but it could just as easily be a new question or problem (a "line of inquiry," as I say).  

Think of this as a game or a thought experiment--there's no "right answer" here. The point is to simply use an arbitrary object or detail (the chair, in my case) to surprise or trick yourself into noticing aspects of the film that would otherwise fail to register--not because these aspects are "hidden," but but because there's always more going on in a piece of film than we can take in at one time.


How to proceed:  

1. Recall what you can about your chosen object, including its immediate contexts at the point in the film where you found it.  If you weren't in class yesterday and you wish to do this week's rush, select your object from the above frame. 
   
   Here's an example of the kind of contextual circumstances that might be noted: I'm noticing now that my object is actually a rocking chair, and thus linked to the character Mose (as we now know). I'm also noticing that the chair is shot facing the hearth, its back to the camera.  
   
   
   
2. Do a bit of associative thinking. Where else does your object (or equivalent objects) crop up in the film? (Remain attentive to entirely different settings and contexts.) Also, what kinds of meanings are associated with your chosen object (or even with the word or sound that signifies your object)?
   
   In my case it would be overwhelming to start cataloging the recurrences of my object across the entire film. (Let's just say we see a lot of chairs....)  And the link to Mose is too obvious to prompt any interesting connections at this point. (We know the chair functions for Mose as a symbol of security and acceptance--he pretty much tells us this himself.) 
   
   So I find myself thinking about the various connotations bound up with the word "chair." And what comes to mind is the question of whose in charge (of the family, the situation, etc.)  A "chair" can be the head of a committee or organization (like the corporate equivalent of a head of family); the word "chair" has multiple connotations in English. And because the question of "whose in charge" does in fact turn out to be relevant to the movie at many levels, I've got a new line of inquiry. So my response to this rush topic might look like this:
   
   I took as my object the chair sitting in front of the family hearth about five minutes into the film. By way of homology (or pun), this detail prompts questions about the family relationships depicted in The Searchers (including the question of whose actually "chairing" the family). Aaron Edwards is Martha's husband, and the family dynamic generally appears solid--but the longing looks that Martha sometimes gives Aaron's brother Ethan (John Wayne) suggest a different story (a story that "keeps its back" to the family at large). 
   
        
3. For full credit, post your response on your blog by 11:59pm Monday, Feb. 13. E-mail if you have questions.
   
   
   
   CS