 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.
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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. 2/22/2021 0 Comments Profile- John Williams If any one composer’s name is synonymous with film music of the last quarter of the 20th century and arguably, the last 50 years, it would be John Williams. I had the fortune of meeting him at a rehearsal at Tanglewood when I was 16. For someone that captures such a large sound, he was very calm and soft spoken. Williams got his start as a jazz pianist and played on several of Henry Mancini’s recordings while studying composition. What many do not know is that Williams earned his first Academy Award 4 years before Jaws by adapting music for the film version of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Williams had critical and commercial success following that with several disaster movies--The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), and the Towering Inferno (1974). Many film music fans seem to forget about any of Williams’ work before Jaws, but these scores are worth seeking out. Initially director Irwin Allen did not want any music during the opening titles of Towering Inferno, but Williams convinced him with an exciting piece as the helicopter approaches the tower. Williams’ second Academy award was for his score for Jaws, which I discussed in an earlier post.  The film that made Williams a household name and earned him his third Academy award may also be one of the most influential films in film history and film music history--Star Wars (1977). At the time, the style of music used for the film seemed like an enigma. The Academy award winner the previous year was Bill Conti’s disco-inspired score for Rocky (1976). The top selling soundtrack of 1977 was Saturday Night Fever, so you can see the context from which Star Wars emerges. From the beginning George Lucas wanted a symphonic score not only reminiscent of large Classical works but of the music that accompanied the science fiction action serials of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired Star Wars and later Indiana Jones. Williams showed not only his talent for creating memorable themes but also an incredible knowledge of harmonies and styles that had worked for classical composers in the past and when to use certain techniques. One could spend years studying just his composition and orchestration technique. The same year as Star Wars, Williams collaborated again with Steven Spielberg to score Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The memorable note sequence used to communicate with the aliens was so iconic that many assumed it was a legitimate alien signal that the filmmakers had borrowed. I have read that Williams tried multiple arrangements of notes before hitting the perfect combination. That shows part of the craft and mathematical aspect of music.  The year right after Star Wars, Williams composed my personal favorite of his scores, Superman (1978). It is difficult to say (and hopefully not controversial), but Superman’s main title may be slightly more exciting than the opening of Star Wars. The insistent rhythms and glorious themes never let up for the full 5 and half minutes of the titles. In the film, Williams music brings realism and humanity to the larger than life superhero. He captures the grandeur of flight, the tenderness of Lois and Clark, and the simplicity of Clark’s life in Smallville. This score definitely should have received the Academy Award that year instead of Giorgio Moroder’s experimental synthesizer score to Midnight Express. Williams returned to the Star Wars universe in 1980 with Empire Strikes Back, not only expanding on themes from the original film but adding many more memorable character ideas like the Imperial March, Yoda’s Theme and the love theme for Han and Leia. The end title suite for Empire Strikes Back is absolutely thrilling as it blends the three new themes for the film. 1981 and 1982 presented two back-to-back hits with director Spielberg. The action packed theme for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was initially difficult for Williams. He had already written the first part of the theme, but was struggling to figure out a second theme. Once again returning to the mathematical side of his talent, he inverted the first theme, and the second theme is actually the result of that. Beyond the main theme, Williams’ mysterious theme for the power of the ark is haunting.  In 1982, Williams earned another Academy Award for ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Looking back, we can forget just how much of a gamble that Spielberg took on a film that presented a friendship between a lost alien and a human boy. With just too much sappiness or too much cold science fiction, the film could have failed miserably. One great reason for its success was the music of Williams. In the recording of almost every film score, the movie is completely edited and the composer has to synchronize the timing of the music to hit certain important points in the film. After trying over and over, the ending sequence of ET just was not what Williams wanted. Spielberg trusted Williams so much that he let Williams conduct the music without the picture and then re-edited the ending sequence of the film to match the music. There is so little dialogue in the sequence that it almost becomes a science fiction ballet. The ending music of the film is one of the most epic in film history, in which the awe of extraterrestrial space travel and the boundlessness of friendship is expressed in music. It is similar in meaning to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from five years earlier, but I believe more effective in ET.
Two often overlooked main themes from the 1980s both have to do with flight. The first from Empire of the Sun (1987), called “Cadillac of the Skies” literally holds the film together. The second, from Always (1989) is probably the most memorable part of the film besides Audrey Hepburn’s final film appearance as an angel. Gather these with the themes from ET and Superman and Williams is a master of flight. Another of Williams’ most celebrated scores comes from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Who thought that a film about humans exploiting nature for profit and people getting eaten by dinosaurs could have such a beautiful main theme? The theme itself speaks to the imagined feeling of a lifelong paleontologist seeing a living dinosaur for the first time. Thirty years after winning his first Academy Award, Williams took on the challenge of creating the sound of the Harry Potter universe. Consider that this sound would have been developing in readers’ minds for quite a few years before the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) film. Williams music does not disappoint. He returns to familiar ideas of flight, wonder, and friendship. His score is similar enough to his previous work to be comfortable but new enough to stand on its own. By the time of writing this post, Williams has been nominated for 52 Academy Awards, winning 5, nominated for 25 Golden Globe awards, winning 4, and nominated for 71 Grammy Awards, winning 25. Beyond those accomplishments, Williams’ influence on film music will live forever.  (Europe: 500~1400 AD) Although popular accounts of the general mood of Europe in the Middle Ages is rather morose, focused on plagues, wars, and poverty, comedy had a vital place in those societies. Out of this era, we not only find a great number of comedies, but a great variety of comedy as well, The comedies of this time appear in the vernacular, contrasted with “serious” writing in Latin. Of course, this trait affected how widespread a comedy’s influence may be as only one who can understand the language may appreciate the comedy without the aid of a translation—physical comedy excluded, of course. The early Medieval definition of comedy was actually quite free and many works could qualify as a comedy as long as it included a happy ending. Often this idea has been confused with the Classical definitions of comedy, which were actually much more detailed and explicit in what qualified as comedy. This Medieval definition is possibly one of the reasons why today there is so much debate over what qualities make something a comedy. It is important to remember that only the wealthiest in the Middle Ages had the luxury of even knowing about Classical Comedy through reading it. The majority of the population was illiterate and therefore we see examples of characters like devils and vice figures. As I said above, the wealthy, educated members of the societies would have access to the Classical comedy of Menander, Plautus, Terence and others, but the majority of society would not have had this experience. Without knowing the existing conventions of written comedy, crafters of comedy in the Middle Ages had to determine their own ideas of what made a comedy, with the aid of their experience of comedies that would have been handed down orally across cultures. Medieval carnivals became the showcase for comic performers. For a brief time, commoners and royalty alike could escape the reality of the world around them by means of comedy. This sense of Carnival returns in later comedies, including the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and of course, Monty Python. As I have stated in earlier posts, comedy is a group activity, and we can clearly see its roots in the Medieval Carnival. However, in this same atmosphere of the Carnival, one can see a reinforcement of the notion of comedy as being a lesser art. For indeed, comedy in the Middle Ages came from the lowly Court Jester, not the royalty. Once again, we find the comic hero coming from a low social order, as he will continue to do throughout Shakespeare, Mozart, Chaplin, and more. Note how the comic hero in any era is quite different from the contemporary tragedies and their heroic figures.  Dante Many examples of Medieval comedy demonstrate an appreciation of crude humor. It does not need to be argued that crude humor still exists today, regardless of how low it resides on the comic spectrum. Crude humor was a large part of the early Greek comedies as well, continuing in Dante’s Divine Comedy, considered not only one of the greatest vernacular Italian works but one of the greatest works in any language. Consider that writing in the vernacular gave Dante (ca. 1265-1321 AD) the opportunity to experiment with crude humor, as crude humor would not have been as acceptable in a work written in the “high” language of Latin. Scholars praise Dante not only for his comedy but for the depth of his allegorical and theological sense as well. This endurance marks the power of comedy, even when it is seemingly at its most profane. Dante’s comedy works as a foil to his serious nature of his journey through Hell. As a Twentieth Century analogy to Dante’s exploration of the profane, consider the reaction to nudity in motion pictures throughout the Twentieth Century. Nudity was understood as an artistic exploration in pre-Code American motion pictures that mostly appeared in art museums and the like. However, once the Hays Code was established and films were intended for mass audience appeal, people then understood nudity as pornographic. Later in the century, we see the same discrepancy based on the context in which the nudity is framed when nudity in a 1960s art house picture would be “tasteful” while nudity in a mainstream picture would be “exploitation”. As it has been in the debate of aestheticism of the human body versus pornography for centuries, the actual subject of nudity did not change; the societal reaction to that subject did, based on the contextual framing. In much the same way, a comic work like Dante’s can have the reputation of being licentious in one era while in another era it can have the reputation of being one of the greatest works of Western literature—depending on how one wishes to interpret the nature of his comedy. In the centuries since Dante, many artists like Jonathan Swift, Mozart, and Mel Brooks have followed his example and explored crude humor. Out of this canon of Medieval comedy, we find the origins of farce, When a film attempts to enter the realm of farce, it encounters a type of comedy that has existed for hundreds of years, but one that has never really been critically well recognized.  Boccaccio The next significant comic writer after Dante has to be Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Boccaccio studied Dante extensively and was influenced by his Divine Comedy, but Boccaccio often seems to use humor much more explicitly than his predecessor. Boccaccio’s most significant contribution to the genre of comedy is his Decameron. In The Decameron, a frame narrative occurs across ten days, and each day’s stories feature a different style of humor. The Decameron became popular as soon as Boccaccio wrote it. The fact that the Decameron appeared in translations across Europe meant that it could reach a wide audience and have great influence on writers from many different cultural backgrounds. Although there are litterateurs that question the originality of the stories that Boccaccio includes in his work, it is because of Boccaccio that the stories reached writers from other countries, and even filmmakers have followed Boccaccio’s example of using comedy as a tool for teaching moral lessons.Even more than Dante, Boccaccio demonstrates how crude humor can sometimes be the most effective means of delivering social criticism.  Chaucer Many Medieval scholars argue that no writer was more influenced by Boccaccio than William Chaucer (1343-1400). But just like any great craftsman, Chaucer learned from the style of Boccaccio to create a work distinctly his own. Chaucer continues with Boccaccio’s ability to teach through comedy. Through humor, Chaucer leaves his readers with a memorable experience, but one that will cause them to reflect on their own moral dilemmas.
From the Sixteenth Century theatre of Italy came the stylized Commedia dell’Arte, of zany situations and physical stunts. It is curious that something with the word “Art” in its title so closely resembles the slapstick film comedies, which are not held in so high a regard. The Commedia dell’Arte method of incorporating numerous gags and stock characters influenced many artists, including Shakespeare and Mozart. In addition to the comic routines and stock characters, Commedia dell’arte also exemplified physical comedy. So out of this one style of Italian comedy comes the seed for not only the anarchic slapstick comedies of the 1930s, but the stock characters of the Screwball Comedies as well.  If you remember from an earlier post, rhythm is the way that sound is organized through time. A lot of people get the idea of beat and rhythm confused and often think they are synonyms. Once you get the idea of the difference, they are easy to tell apart. Beat is the strongest pulse in a piece of music. Often, they are felt in groups of 2, 3, or 4. How do we know how many are in a group? If you listen very carefully you will hear one beat that is the strongest and one or more slightly weaker beats. A great example of this is a waltz. Waltzes are in 3 with beat 1 being the strongest and 2 and 3 being weaker. The Viennese style of Waltz especially emphasizes this feeling, as the entire foot only touches the ground on 1 and it is just the toes touching the ground on 2 and 3.  If that is the beat, then what is the rhythm? It is how we organize the beat and the space between the beats. It is very rare for a waltz to only have 3 notes all on the beat over and over. We may have longer notes that last longer than 2 beats or shorter notes that move in between the larger beats. It sounds confusing but looking at rhythms and hearing the difference between the beat and the rhythm makes it a natural process.  Rhythms are completely mathematical. Every way that we organize the rhythms is measured. Splitting the overall beat into rhythms is the work of division. For an example, we will start with music based around 4 beats. If one note takes up all four beats, it is called a whole note. To help students remember its name I remind them that it takes up the whole measure. When we split the whole note in two equal parts, the result is two half notes. Again, we notice that these take up half a measure of 4, each getting 2 beats. Splitting the whole note further into 4 parts or 1 note for each beat, the name is quarter note and notice that it takes up ¼ of the measure. Further dividing the whole note into smaller parts, we end up with 8 eighth notes in a measure, 16 sixteenth notes and so forth.
If the number of beats in a measure is constant, then we can use addition or subtraction to figure out which beat we are on. If we are looking at a measure of 4 quarter notes, the third beat is the third quarter note. Either we count to three from the left or we can subtract 1 from the right. In combinations of eighth notes and quarters we simply count each eighth note as half of one beat, so that it takes two eighth notes to fill one beat. It is the opposite for a 2 beat note or half note, there would only be two remaining beats when one half note is present. I’m going to stop here before you get overwhelmed, but be comforted by the fact that rhythms work in an organized system with rules and definite answers. Simple knowledge of fractions and division can go a long way to understanding and organizing rhythms.  A lot of people have a misconception that only singers and players of wind instruments need to concern themselves with a good seated or standing position. But imagining a drummer sitting in a recliner or a cello player laying on the floor dissolves this misconception. Proper playing or singing position is critical for all musicians, not only physically but also psychologically for the performer and audience. I will address the physical first. At its most basic level, singers and wind players do need to be concerned with the breathing mechanism and not obstructing it. The two extremes of a bad position--leaning forward or resting arms on the legs is actually squeezing a little on the lungs and abdominal muscles (depending on the age range of the students, I sometimes describe this as toilet position). The opposite, leaning back into the chair with hips forward means that muscles are working to prevent you from falling backwards (unless you literally are in a recliner) that do not need to be working to produce a sound. To demonstrate this, I do it visually and really exaggerate it. For the leaning forward, I make it hard to breathe and sometimes fall forward out of my chair. For leaning backward, I often moan to demonstrate how much it hurts to hold myself up. To describe proper playing position, I tell the students to sit so that they could stand up right away. Too far back on the chair and this becomes difficult. Leaning forward or backward, and this becomes difficult. When the students ask why they would need to stand up fast, I suggest maybe we would have a fire drill or a surprise ice cream party.  Beyond the air requirement for singers and wind players, we have the other physical requirements of playing an instrument that correct playing position is crucial. This involves different things for different instruments. For woodwind instruments, every key must be accessible to the player. This means that the arms and hands must be positioned not only so the player can reach the keys but so the players hands and arms do not grow tired due to holding them improperly. For orchestral strings, the player must consider the positioning of the hand for changing pitch as well as the bowing arm. For guitar, electric bass, and other fretted strings, one has to consider the position of the hand forming the chords and the hand picking or strumming. For keyboard players, not only the height of the arms, but the curve of the fingers is important for good technique. For any percussionist, the height of their arms to the instrument and distance to the instrument determines success. Beyond demonstration and explanation, how do we convince students of the importance of good playing position? The answer is to let students discover the benefits of a good position for themselves. Let them struggle a little and find out that it is harder to play when they hold their hand a certain way or slouch, etc. Obviously, if a student is just not getting it on their own, prompt them to adjust slightly and once they notice the difference, it is very likely that the student will continue to use the more comfortable and easier (proper) position. Psychologically, having a position that is more “at attention” will encourage students’ minds to focus even better. It will also encourage audience members to pay attention to what they hear because they see performers at the edge of their seats and think “something exciting is about to happen!” Teaching proper playing and singing position not only helps students to sound better, but they will look very sharp when performing :)   During the silent era, comedy was one of, if not the, most popular and critically acclaimed film genres. Criticism of silent comedy remained consistent into the post-sound era, reaching its best clarity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The art of pantomime—the communication of thoughts and emotions solely through the use of gestures and facial expressions—and the art of film were intertwined at this part of the century. Although the Stock Market crash occurred in 1929, the economic situation continued to decline into 1931, the year of City Lights’ release. The character of the Tramp became even more relevant as so many of the film-going public could relate to someone down on his luck. The first feature length, full-sound film was The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland 1927), however throughout 1928 when Chaplin began production on City Lights, the majority of films were still silent. By 1931, when Chaplin released City Lights, sound films had become dominant. As a silent character, the Little Tramp was the most well-known motion picture character in the world. Here we see what I first discussed in an earlier post, the difference between the universal silent humor and the localized verbal humor. If City Lights were to fail commercially and critically, it would mean a sudden fall from the top for Chaplin. Chaplin finally compromised by using synchronous music and sound effects, but still removing any need for dialogue. Although other films at the time used the same method of music and sound effects, Chaplin’s film remains the best example of the technique.  Charlie Chaplin One cannot find a text that discusses film comedy that does not mention Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977). It is important for the reader to understand that scholars write of Chaplin as an artist, not as a comedian. Many film historians write about Chaplin as one of the great creative minds. This view of Chaplin’s artistic merit, beyond that of an entertainer, helped shape his recognition as quite possibly the first auteur in the film world. Chaplin handled many of the filmmaking tasks of writing, directing, acting, editing, and composing. Chaplin was an auteur before the impact of the French New Wave of the 1960s popularized the use of the term in film scholarship. Through his filmmaking methods, Chaplin set the standard by which scholars judge later auteurs. Chaplin came from a family of music hall performers, where he developed the physicality of his performances. Chaplin described the rhythm of his physical pantomime as a dance, and few performers have demonstrated such subtle control over their bodies. As the reader will discover shortly, Chaplin understood that the internal motion within a static shot was as significant to the medium of film as was the external motion of the camera in capturing a dynamic shot. Some film historians have criticized Chaplin for what seems to be his lack of knowledge of film conventions. I disagree with these scholars’ assessments of Chaplin’s filmmaking knowledge. Chaplin went against the established conventions of film presentation not because he did not understand the conventions, but because he had already mastered them and could create his own conventions. For example, instead of following the tradition of the wide shot to establish a scene and the closeup to reveal details, Chaplin preferred wide shots for his comic sequences, while he would only use closeups in order to capture the expression on his performers’ faces in moments of sentiment. Other scholars criticize Chaplin for what they see as a lack of editing. However, many critics feel that his lack of cuts is a strength, not a weakness, and I agree. Other filmmakers do not hold shots as long, simply because they cannot. Chaplin alone has the ability as performer and filmmaker to hold the viewer’s attention without having to divert it through a change of angle. The cuts—when he does use them—are a textbook model of invisible editing. Chaplin’s ability as a supreme artist rests partly on the fact that he understood not only exactly what to show the viewer, but also how to show it to the viewer in a way that made the technique unobtrusive. Of all the comic filmmakers and performers, no artist has ever been better at juxtaposing comedy and tragedy without detracting from either. At the end of City Lights, we have experienced an incredible emotional and aesthetic experience, but we do not feel cheated out of a good laugh.  Production As I stated above, Chaplin was the biggest movie star in the world as he began work on City Lights. With his previous succession of films, his audience had high expectations for Chaplin’s next work, and he was not one to disappoint. As for the preproduction stage of City Lights, the writing process was rather brief, with the major themes already chosen, and the story developing as shooting approached. While the narrative of City Lights was an original idea of Chaplin, many of the gags came from earlier sources, including Chaplin shorts. The greatest of artists, Chaplin included, always have the risk of duplicating previous work. As I noted in a previous post, the same gag can successfully return again and again as long as it is still able to elicit laughter. Influencing later filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, Chaplin had a hand in virtually every aspect of production. Everything that Chaplin did involved thorough preparation and practice. When it came to scoring the film, Chaplin had to rely on the assistance and experience of orchestrator Arthur Johnson. While Chaplin may have lacked the knowledge to notate music, he certainly understood how it should function within the film medium.  Reception and Legacy Without Chaplin’s skill and reputation, a silent film during the sound error would not have succeeded. The critics of nearly every major publication in the United States agreed that City Lights was a triumph. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times said that “It is a film worked out with admirable artistry, and while Chaplin stoops to conquer, as he has invariably done, he achieves success”. Box Office Magazine called it Chaplin’s “finest comedy” and praised its story as well as the performances of its cast. Sid Silverman of Variety felt that it was a good film but “not Chaplin’s best picture, because the comedian has sacrificed speed to pathos” and had some doubts as to its “holdover power”, wondering if its initial success was “novelty money”. In 1931, The National Board of Review named it one of the Top Ten Films of the year, adding that it is “a challenge to the talkies, a crucial event in cinema history” but “not Chaplin’s best but far ahead of any other funny man’s best”. Time Magazine predicted “he, whose posterior would probably be recognized by more people throughout the world than would recognize any other man’s face, will be doing business after talkies have been traded in for television”. Notice how each one of these critics speak of the film in terms of Chaplin, and do not address the themes that he explores. They describe the “novelty” of the film and its silent qualities of gesture and expression. The reviewers that criticize it, do so because of the relationship of comedy and pathos within the film.
As for the international critical reaction, Siegfried Kracauer of the Frankfurter Zeitung said that “In it Chaplin demonstrates again his mastery of the language of gesture, a mastery that reduces the spoken word to shame”, however he added “It’s not difficult to find weaknesses in the film” referring to a plot that he felt was not as strong as earlier Chaplin pictures. Note how he echoes the above reviewers’ praises of the silent performance techniques of gesture. Also, consider how Kracauer criticizes what he claims is a lack of plot—showing that Kracauer does not completely understand comedy’s necessary balance of narrative and gag. E.A. Corbett of the Edmonton Journal concluded that “no one else in the world can take the same outline and make it compete successfully with the talkies, because no one else can so fully occupy that delicious, illogical, unreal world which Chaplin’s genius has created for himself alone,” approaching the film in terms of Chaplin. Surprisingly, City Lights did not receive any Academy Award nomination, which seems inconceivable considering its reputation today. Tim Dirks, of the American Movie Classics Filmsite attributed the lack of nominations, “to the pro-talking film Academy members, it must have appeared to be reversing the trend toward talkies that advanced sound films”, which would make sense. The contemporary film industry leaders’ advocacy for the “progress” of sound in 1931, has a parallel with today’s film industry leaders, who seem to favor many pictures because of the perceived revolutionary visual effects that they contain. I have been unable to find any explanation for why Chaplin chose to rerelease the film. I speculate that perhaps newly-formed television networks had begun to program some of Chaplin’s shorts, and this could have brought an audience demand for Chaplin features. Also, his most recent release, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), did not fare well with audiences and reviewers (TCM), perhaps prompting Chaplin to rerelease an earlier, more successful work in order to regain his reputation. In addition to film scholars and critics, many filmmakers have cited City Lights as an inspiration. Both Stanley Kubrick (in 1963, Cinema Magazine) and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (in 1972, Life Magazine) have called it one of their favorite pictures. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert has reviewed the film twice; reviewing it for a second time 35 years after the first review. In 1972, he said, “Chaplin’s films age so well, I think, because his situations grow out of basic human hungers such as lust, greed, avarice”. The reader will learn that this is true of many such film classics. Ebert appears to be the first reviewer who talks about the deeper themes beneath the surface of City Lights—perhaps themes reviewers forty years earlier did not want to acknowledge. Of the seventeen reviews written in the Twenty First century that I have compiled, only one critic, Alan Vanneman of the Bright Lights Film Journal gave it a less than favorable review, citing the “remarkably unfunny beginning”, the “numerous detours” in the plot, and how “Chaplin leaves entirely unresolved how Cherrill will treat the Tramp now that she knows who he is”. Looking at Vanneman’s review, we can infer that his expectations for a comedy were misaligned. The “numerous detours” (gags) and the lack of resolution at the end of the narrative are perfectly acceptable for comedy—in fact, sometimes a lack of resolution is an even more fitting ending for a comedy than the typical deus ex machina found in so many dramas. The remaining sixteen critics praised the film, as dozens of critics had done when it premiered. Four of the reviewers, Collin Souter of eFilmcritic.com, Jules Dassin of The Telegraph, Wes D. Gehring of USA Today, and John Nesbit of Old School Reviews particularly praised the final scene—a scene of pathos and not humor. Several reviewers focused on the historical importance that it is one of the last silent films, and on Chaplin as an artist. Dan Mancini of DVD Verdict called it “Chaplin at his best…. his last—and arguably finest—silent feature”. Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich explained, “Below the surface of City Lights, there is an ache of nostalgia for the lost Eden of the silents that is still palpable today”. James Berardinelli of Reelviews called it “the quintessential silent film”, adding that “sound would have ruined it”. Jay Antani of CinemaWriter.com added, “City Lights is a great gift to all of us by a filmmaker at a latter-day peak of his genius. To see anything by Chaplin is to nourish the soul. Chaplin is good for the world”. Other critics attempt to analyze the deeper meanings behind the narrative and gags of the film. Following Ebert’s example, Dan Jardine of Cinemania noted its “universal themes, such as the intoxicating blindness of love and the rejuvenating power of selflessness”, speaking of the themes that contemporary reviewers did not address. Many scholars have provided varying analyses of the film over the years. Charles Silver of the Museum of Modern Art calls it “Chaplin’s most perfectly accomplished and balanced work”, focusing on the combination of comedy and drama in one film. Chaplin scholar Dan Kamin, on the other hand does criticize it on a structural level, “City Lights may have the best plot, and it certainly packs the biggest emotional wallop, but its comic routines are inconsistent in quality”. The foci of both scholars show opposite ends of the same critical difficulty in approaching comedy. Silver seems to appreciate it for its moments of sentiment, while Kamin seems to grade the value of a comedy by how funny he finds the gags. They insist on comparing a comedy film to something that is not—for Silver, a non-comic film and for Kamin, a comic Vaudeville routine. In 1952, critics at the British Film Institute voted it the second greatest film of all time, behind De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (BFI)—juxtaposing it with one of the quintessential film tragedies (especially during the European recovery from World War II when the BFI vote occurred). In 2002, critics at the British Film Institute voted it one of the greatest films of all time (BFI). In 2008, The American Film Institute declared it the greatest romantic comedy of all time (AFI). In the 1970s, critics began to rethink their opinions on Chaplin, especially since more attention turned to Buster Keaton. I highly recommend City Lights and think you will find it very approachable despite it being 90 years old. 1/18/2021 0 Comments Music- What Are Clefs? If you remember from an earlier post about how to read pitch and rhythm, when the notes move up the page, the pitch gets higher and the letter names go in alphabetical order (A, B, C, D, E, F, G). When the notes move down the page, the pitch gets lower and the letter names go in reverse alphabetical order (G, F, E, D, C, B, A). If you remember, no matter the letter name of the first note, the names of the lines and spaces are constant; they do not change, but what tells us that the lowest line is always E and the top line is always F is the clef symbol.  The most common clef symbol is the treble clef. It is also called the G clef because the line inside the circle part of the symbol is the note G. This clef works best for higher notes. This is the clef read by the right hand of keyboard players, flute, clarinet, oboe, saxophone, trumpet, horn, violin, guitar, xylophone, glockenspiel, and many other higher pitched instruments. When you see this treble clef symbol, the bottom line is always E and the top line is always F. That’s why it is important to check the symbol, but once you do, you know the names of the lines and spaces will not change.  The next most common clef is the bass clef. This clef is also called the F clef because the name of the line between the two dots is F. For bass clef, the name of the lowest line is G and the highest line is A. But the notes going up the page still move in alphabetical order and notes going down move in reverse alphabetical order. As long as there is a bass clef at the beginning of the piece, the names of the lines and spaces stay the same. The lowest instruments read bass clef including bassoon, bass clarinet, trombone, tuba, cello, bass, and timpani. Other instruments go across treble and bass clefs depending on the range of the instrument they are playing. These include many keyboard instruments like piano, organ, harpsichord, and pitched percussion like marimba.  Beyond the two most common clefs, we have the movable C clef. The name comes from the fact that the arrow looking part indicates that line is C. When the middle line is C, it is called the alto clef. This is what viola players read exclusively. Same idea- letters move up alphabetically and down in reverse alphabetically.  If the C clef moves up so that the second line down is C, it is now the Tenor clef. But you guessed it, once you know where C is, the notes move up alphabetically and down reverse alphabetically. I am not aware of any instrument that only reads tenor clef, but if playing for prolonged periods in the upper range cello, bassoon, and trombone will use tenor clef.
The best way to get used to reading in different clefs is just repetition. I recommend getting confident with treble and bass clefs before you explore alto clef, unless you play viola. The reason that we use different clefs is so that instruments of different pitch ranges can most often play notes that fit within the staff and are not always playing notes above or below the staff. It would be difficult for a trombone or an instrument in a similar range to read notes that were all below the treble clef, they would go so far below the staff that they would really not be readable, not to mention that they would be printed over the next staff down on the page. All of this may seem complicated, but be thankful that each instrument doesn’t have it’s own clef! |
