 In honor of the upcoming April Fools Day and my new restoration of the classic 1936 3 Stooges short Disorder in the Court, I wanted to share my thoughts on the film. Disorder in the Court was my first introduction to the 3 Stooges when I was about 6 years old. My Dad and I had visited the local video rental store (yes I am that old...) and found a VHS with 4 Three Stooges shorts on it (really old…). I was instantly hooked. I was delighted by how the Stooges made even simple tasks like swearing in as a witness so complicated and therefore hilarious. They take all of the audience’s expectations of how a courtroom works and go against it. Part of the appeal of the Three Stooges is that they are outsiders. Often their adventures involve them representing the working class with little control over their situations and contrasts with upper class characters.  I would assume that most viewers have been involved in a trial as often as the Three Stooges. I am only familiar with courtroom procedures because of other movies and TV shows that I have seen. The “take the stand” confusion is great because if Curly had never been in a courtroom before, how would he know what it means to “take the stand”?
The Stooges’ confusion with courtroom procedures is what makes this short so terrific. I hope that you enjoy watching it.
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 By the time he made Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks was already one of the leading creators of parody in the world. Brooks understood how audiences came to parodies with numerous expectations, which some of his most successful gags would purposely go against to achieve their success. Mel Brooks is perhaps the most prolific filmmaker-parodist of the Twentieth Century, exploring various subjects like the Old West (Blazing Saddles, 1974), silent film (Silent Movie, 1976), Alfred Hitchcock thrillers (High Anxiety, 1977), world history (History of the World: Part I, 1981), science fiction (Spaceballs, 1987), the Middle Ages (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993), and vampires (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995). Brooks was at his peak in 1974, releasing two of the most popular and critically acclaimed parodies, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Brooks feels that Young Frankenstein is his best film, but he gives all the credit to the power of Mary Shelley’s novel. With Young Frankenstein, Brooks achieved a new level of sophistication for parody. Few films are as fine a parody as this one. It lampoons the conventions of previous, dramatic film adaptations of Shelley’s novel—and yet at the same time, it approaches her novel in a reverent way. His film reveals the necessity of the borrowing of the conventions of tragedy in order for comedy to succeed. Many scholars argue that Brook’s comedy is far closer to the spirit and themes of Shelley’s original work than the earlier, “serious” pictures. In an unintentionally backwards way, I viewed this film years before James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which resulted in me feeling horribly underwhelmed when I finally saw the latter film. I can say in all honesty that Young Frankenstein is truly a superior film, for it simply has a tighter narrative, more carefully crafted tension and release, and is a more genuine portrayal of Shelley’s characters, particularly The Creature. The plot points and character motivations of Young Frankenstein are clear and succinct, no matter how absurd they may be. On the contrary, Frankenstein (1931), just ends with Henry Frankenstein’s father celebrating with young women after the monster is apparently gone forever. It presents the denouement necessary to a non-comic film, yet it feels tacked on—almost an attempt to distract the viewer from the real tragedy of The Creature. Though not necessary to a comedy, Young Frankenstein does present a resolution for The Creature, as he becomes the intellectual of Shelley’s novel—however, the primal instincts that The Creature had displayed now seem to have been brought out in Victor—perhaps arguing that those instincts were always within him, but repressed. I find the creation scene of Young Frankenstein as much of an aesthetic experience as when Sir Laurence Olivier recites a Shakespearean soliloquy. It is here in the film that the line between the conventions of comedy and the borrowed ones of drama blurs the most. The platform slowly raises as Frederick’s enormous shadow covers the wall. As I stated above, Young Frankenstein comes closest to the intellectual Creature of Shelley that reads frequently and is quite eloquent. Brooks presents a bourgeois Creature that reads the Wall Street Journal, while Karloff’s portrayal presents a stiff-limbed mute who merely stumbles around.  Brooks’ film is as much another, equally valid, interpretation of Shelley’s novel, as it is a parody of past interpretations. It not only explores the themes of Shelley, but the role of comedy as a direct foil to drama. Comedy reveals the painful truth of The Creature’s longings beneath the surface of his actions more readily than tragedy can. Young Frankenstein works exactly because it gives us better access to Shelley—a direct approach that only the genre of comedy allows. The seminal idea for Young Frankenstein came from the mind of Gene Wilder while he was working with Brooks on Blazing Saddles (1974). Wilder agreed to play the role of the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles if their next collaboration could be his idea about Frankenstein’s grandson. Much of the techniques used in the making of this film actually came from the Universal horror series that it parodies, including the use of green makeup for the creature, and the original sets and laboratory equipment. Brooks took care to remain true to the original films, making his parody work so much better by copying the original conventions so precisely—causing the viewer to realize how one takes the conventions for granted in the original source. The preview audiences hated it, and it appeared to Brooks and company that it was a failure. Wilder and Brooks got together and cut the film down considerably. Both felt that the final cut was far superior to the original cut. The experience of the test audience reminds the reader of the communal nature of comedy. The live feedback of the test audience is the same phenomenon of spectator participation in the Medieval Carnival, the audience reactions to live Vaudeville acts, and the Marx Brothers’ road shows. Brooks’ discussion of the running time of the picture alludes to the episodic nature of comedy—shown so well through Vaudeville. The shorter (than drama) runtime of a feature comedy seems to be an audience expectation, related to the aforementioned audience feedback.  Reception Young Frankenstein was highly profitable. With a budget of $2.8 million (about $13 million today), it ended up grossing $86 million (nearly $400 million today). It reassured the public and film executives of Brooks’ box office appeal that he had established with The Producers (1968) and Blazing Saddles (1974). The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Sound and Best Writing (Adaption), but did not win either. Tim Dirks of American Movie Classics Filmsite remarks that it was odd that Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder were not nominated for their performances and that Gerald Hirschfield was not nominated for his cinematography. If we consider the cinematography of the opening sequence, for example, we see that it serves as a running visual gag that continually mocks the cinematic conventions of dramatic presentation. It is for this reason, I surmise, that no reviewers thought to recognize Hirschfield’s contribution, as critics only saw his work as a parody of cinematographer Gregg Toland’s style .
At the time of its release, the reviews were overwhelmingly favorable. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that “it works on a couple of levels: first as comedy, and then as a weirdly touching story in its own right”, alluding to its unique interpretation of Shelley’s work. Box Office Magazine gave the film a positive review and noted that Brooks “takes on horror movies, a field that has sometimes been funny when the films were done too seriously”, raising the point of how daring Brooks had to be in order to parody a series of pictures that elicit laughter in their own right. Both reviewers talk about the necessity of an original, non-comic source for parody to work. Jay Cocks of Time Magazine liked the film, especially the dance hall sequence, which he called “some sort of deranged high point in contemporary film comedy”. The sequence curiously stands out because of its furthest departure from the novel. The one negative review that I found comes from Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic. In it, he mostly complained about the running time, which he thought was too long, “Brooks is a funny joke-and-gag man, but not 104- minutes funny”. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, focused on the gags as well, “Mel Brooks’s funniest, most cohesive comedy to date…. Some of the gags don’t work, but fewer than in any previous Brooks film that I’ve seen, and when the jokes are meant to be bad, they are riotously poor. What more can one ask of Mel Brooks?” Notice how Canby addresses the narrative structure through the term “cohesive” and describes the gags as “riotous” and also implies that one should not expect more from a comic filmmaker than a few funny gags. I find it interesting that only two of these five reviewers acknowledge the necessity of the conventions of the established Frankenstein lore for the parody to succeed. Quite a few of the more recent reviews of the film have been negative, much more so than when it premiered. I attribute this partly to the fact that so many later comedies, like The Naked Gun series, The Scary Movie series, and even some television comedies, have copied Brook’s manner of parody so closely, that the humor of Young Frankenstein does not seem to be as fresh and original as it genuinely is. As for the less than favorable reviews, in 1999, Donald Liebenson of the Chicago Tribune said, “Viewed from a Marxist (as in Brothers) perspective, Young Frankenstein is Brooks’ Night at the Opera. It is not his purest, funniest film, but it is his most sustained, satisfying, and accessible”. His terms “pure” and “funny” describe the gags, while “sustained”, “satisfying”, and “accessible” describe the narrative—ignoring the necessary balance between them. In 2007, Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews complained that “Most of the gags were juvenile and bombed”, adding that “The best parody of Frankenstein is Whale’s own followup of The Bride of Frankenstein”, echoing early statements of the source series’ (unintended) laughable quality. The majority of reviews are still positive. Unlike the earlier reviewers, almost every Twenty First Century reviewer focuses on the necessity of Shelley’s novel and Whale’s interpretation to the success of Brook’s comedy. In 2006, Ryan Keefer of DVD Verdict said, “If James Whale’s films are the gold standard, then Brooks’ interpretation of the Mary Shelley characters is a more unspoken, yet outstanding sequel to the original”. In 2009, independent critic Cole Smithey, stated that “Mel Brooks caught comic lightning in a bottle” and added that it contains “an atmosphere of reverent delight beneath its bawdy puns and outrageous physical humor”. Bill Gibron of Filmcritic.com, loved the film stating, “No one could have expected the abject brilliance that was his take on the terror genre” adding that there is “something so satisfying about this movie, so likeable and loving that it’s hard to look at the rest of Brooks’s canon in a similar light”. Adam Smith of Empire Magazine called it “a marvelously crafted, beautifully shot comedic homage to James Whale’s 1931 classic”, adding that it is “a perfect example of early Brooks firing on all comic cylinders, and what it demonstrates is that for spoof to work, the spoofers must have deep affection for the material” that they parody. The statements of these reviewers reinforce my argument that Young Frankenstein is one of the finest examples of parody, for they not only acknowledge his faithfulness to Shelley’s novel, but his superior filmmaking sense over that of Whale. Parody’s closeness to its source allows reviewers to clearly evaluate it against the source material. With these few reviews, we see a faint comic blip on the radar of film criticism, in that these critics directly praise a comic filmmaker as having created a work more significant than that of a “serious” filmmaker. The film was an indisputable triumph for Brooks and he took great pride in his work on Young Frankenstein. 3/15/2021 0 Comments Film: Scene vs. Sequence These two ideas may be the most confused terms in filmmaking. Part of the reason for this confusion is that the definition of each term changes depending on context. For simplicity, think of a scene as an event that occurs in one location. It is a smaller unit. A sequence is a series of scenes that when put together create an overarching plot. Now to get to the more complex. In the early stages of making a film, every location change is listed as a new scene. The location does not have to change drastically. The change could be from inside a house to outside the same house, but each change would be listed as a scene. SCENE INT. HOUSE SCENE EXT. HOUSE SCENE INT. HOUSE  While filming the above example, you would film all the dialogue or action inside the house at one time and then all the dialogue or action outside the house at another time. To go back and forth between two locations (no matter how close) would mean wasting a lot of time setting up equipment and taking it down. In this case, the scene would probably be considered everything being filmed at one location at one time even if it does not appear chronologically this way in the finished product. So now that we know how a scene is defined in the script and during filming, how does it change during editing? Most video editing programs have the ability to find enough changes in imported footage to automatically separate shots into different scenes.  Notice I used the term “shot”. What is that? I thought we were talking about scenes and sequences!
If a scene is the same as a foot and a sequence is a yard, then shots would be inches. A shot is every time there is a different camera setup. So a wide shot of a table would be a different shot than a closeup of an apple on the table and a different shot than an extreme closeup of the stem of the apple. A series of shots make a scene. Now that we have defined shot and scene, let’s look at what happens when we connect scenes together--we create a sequence. Most video editing programs call different tabs of footage sequences. How can we tell when something is a sequence and more than just a scene? A sequence presents a larger plot structure than just a scene. A sequence may be a long journey. The individual scenes could be a character at the airport, boarding a plane, the plane in the sky, and the plane landing on a runway. As you can see, each one of these would be a separate scene (complete with several shots) but all clearly related in one sequence that furthers the plot. By varying the length of shots, the number of shots, the length of scenes, and how many scenes make up a sequence, a filmmaker can change the apparent speed of a movie--the pacing. So, to recap: every different camera setup is a shot, shots combine to make scenes, and scenes combine to make sequences.  The recording of sound is as much an art as it is a technology and as with other media there is often a fine balance between the way the technology works and how the artform is captured through the medium. The technology sets the limits for how the art can be captured, and in turn the way the art is created may change to better fit the technology. Experiments with technology that allowed us to capture sound began in the middle of the 19th century. The oldest sound recording that we still have access to today comes from 1860 France. It is clear that someone is speaking, but no actual words can be made out. The tool used to capture the sound is called a phonoautograph- in a sense “writing sound”. But we see the origins of records in the sense of the phonoautograph scratching the soundwaves out.  Phonoautograph, 1860 In the early 1900s, we find a recording technology that has mostly gone away--player pianos. Like the phonoautograph, the player piano is completely mechanical and not electric. A talented pianist would record a song on the piano and this would punch notches in a paper scroll. Every open notch on the paper scroll would mean that key was pressed. After recording, the scroll would then allow the player piano to function without a person pressing the keys. For many of the earliest ragtime piano pieces, the player piano was how listeners would have heard how the composer would have interpreted their own piece.  Now we move on to electricity. To simplify an explanation of how sound is captured--think of microphones and speakers as doing similar yet opposite things. A microphone has a magnet, an electrical coil, and a spring-loaded, movable diaphragm. When soundwaves (air) hit the diaphragm the microphone captures the movement. The movement, or pulses, is read as electricity. Speakers have a magnet as well with an electrical coil. The coil is attached to a cone that receives the pulses and amplifies the signal. The earliest forms of recordings use physical media--meaning something we can touch. The first records were wax cylinders that would spin similar to the later discs. Eventually, it was discovered that flat disc records could spin faster than cylinders. The needle on a record player follows the grooves in the record and the record player converts the electric pulses into sound. Here we see a technology limitation that I highlighted in the first paragraph. Because of the RPM (revolutions per minute) or speed of the record player and the diameter of the discs, there was a limited amount of music that could fit on each side of a record. Because of this, songs that were created for and recorded on records would have to be short enough to fit on one side. Even older, classical compositions were recorded by orchestras at faster than usual tempos so that they could fit on a record.  Phonograph Cylinder, 1890s I do not think that we can overstate how this technology has influenced music. Even today, about 3 and a half minutes sounds normal for a song. Anything longer than that is often the exception for streaming and radio.
Later sound technologies do not seem to have had the staying power of records. The cassette tape was introduced to consumers in the 1960s. Tapes have the advantage of being more compact than records, but did not last as long. The science behind tapes is that the tape itself is magnetic. Another advantage of cassette tapes beyond the smaller size is that tape recorders allowed amateurs to record themselves without the cost of renting a recording studio. This enabled the creation and sharing of music to become more open. It also led to some of the first cases of music piracy, as people would record songs off the radio to share with others. The last physical media we explore are CDs or compact discs. Instead of electrical signals, the music is digital, meaning the information is saved as 0s and 1s. Another description of CDs is optical media, as a low-powered laser reads the digital information on the disc. CDs became available in the 1980s and were seen as the ultimate solution to music recording and storage. No one could foresee that within a couple decades, owning physical copies of music would become the exception to the rule. By the end of the 1990s, internet users began experimenting with the ability to upload audio files for others to download. Today, we remember sites like Napster and Limewire more for legal reasons instead of technology or music reasons. Within a brief time, large companies like Apple and Microsoft jumped at the chance to offer music downloads--this time with the legal permissions of the artists and/or publishers. iTunes and the iPod totally changed the way listeners consumed and stored recorded music. As I write this post, iPods have been replaced by phones that can serve multiple functions and iTunes now focuses on streaming music instead of downloads. Today, streaming is the way that we listen to most music. Streaming really began with YouTube in the 2010s. Music publishers began to notice that most people wanted to listen to music on demand, but did not necessarily want to own a recording of the music. Spotify is now the largest streaming music platform with Apple, Youtube, and Amazon competing for a market share of streaming revenue as well. Right now, streaming is a great deal for the platforms making the music available but a terrible deal for the musicians. Buying recordings directly from artists is still the best way to support artists. Right now Spotify pays an artist between $3 and $5 for 1,000 streams meaning that their music has been played on the platform 1,000 times. We can do the math and realize that if you listen to one song from an artist on Spotify, that artist will be paid between .3 cents and .5 cents for that song, or between ⅓ and ½ of a penny. A Spotify Premium subscription is currently $10/month. Clearly, not all of the membership fee is going to the musicians. Enough about streaming. Hopefully this article gives you a little insight into the development of recording technology and how that technology has shaped, and still shapes the music we listen to.  This is an excellent question that many educators ask. I believe it is a question that we should never stop asking. Having a standard repertoire is wonderful, but we must always reflect on the music we use for teaching to be sure we have not become stagnant. There are several ways that we can group music based on the focus of learning. Several examples are by composer, by era, by style, by culture, by concept (high and low, fast and slow), and by theme of the work. For any of these categories, the teacher has to ask “by creating this category, what music are we including and what music are we excluding?” Let’s say that we decide our unit will focus on Beethoven. So that automatically excludes music from other composers. But clearly we can’t study everything that Beethoven wrote. How do we narrow down which pieces to study? There are several pathways we can go from here. Perhaps, we decide to focus on Beethoven’s works that are most popular. How do we measure that? One great way is to see which pieces are most performed by orchestras and in recitals. You can often find these records from various classical music publications. But perhaps we want to focus on pieces that have been most influential for later composers. In that case, we would study the writings of later composers. As you can see, it is quite a process to select music in this way.  An alternative to this approach is to go in reverse order. Begin with the purpose or end goal of the unit. Are you searching for pieces to be performed at the end of the unit? Will students be creating a project to present? Or, are students going to use the studied music to inform their own creations? With this backwards design, we may have an easier time selecting specific works that will best serve our students. Notice that so far all of the planning process is dependent on the teacher. This situation may be the most common way to select repertoire across the world. However, I wish to present an alternative to this approach. The alternative is learner-centered or student-centered--and that is, we have students select the music that they will study. Many may react to this statement with surprise. After all, our students do not have the years of experience with music and credentials that the teacher may have. However, it is important to remember that the music is for the purpose of our students’ experience, not our own experience. By giving students a say in what we learn, we open to them the possibility of having control over their own learning. In my personal experience, student motivation is greatly improved when students study music familiar to them. Just like the teacher selection process, students can follow many different paths when selecting music. The teacher can present learning goals for a class and then students are tasked with finding music that fits those goals. Or to go a step further in the student-centered direction, the class as a whole determine their learning goals and find appropriate music that will help them reach those goals. After this process of creating learning goals, I will often have students anonymously submit music suggestions that they feel will help the class to meet learning goals. Then, as a class we listen to each selection. Depending on the group, we may verbally discuss the selections--how difficult the piece sounds, what may be challenging, what may come easily, how it would sound after practice, etc. If the group has a difficult time discussing thoughts without risking hurt feelings, I would have students submit thoughts anonymously. I often use Google Forms for this process.  This process can take time and there is nothing wrong with it taking time as long as discussions are productive. By engaging in this process, students come to appreciate all that goes into selecting the right repertoire.
By embracing the student-centered nature of repertoire selection, we also get to learn what our students enjoy. I have learned to never make assumptions about students based on their age. Very rarely does an entire class only wish to focus on current top 40 music. I have been introduced to so many different styles, eras, and cultures of music through this process that I learn as much as the students. Also consider that the process can be a balance in which some selections are student selected and some selections are teacher selected. I argue that allowing for student-selected repertoire not only makes for stronger relationships with students in the spirit of collaboration but also sets up students to become more independent in their interactions with music and making musical decisions. I encourage you to try this process with your students, even if it is just for one selection. I do not think you will be disappointed. |
