Announcing a new series: 21st Century Film Essentials

Donna Kornhaber, Series Editor

Cinema has a storied history, but its story is far from over. 21st Century Film Essentials offers a lively chronicle of cinema’s second century, examining the landmark films of our ever-changing moment. Each book makes a case for the importance of a particular contemporary film for artistic, historical, or commercial reasons. The twenty-first century has already been a time of tremendous change in filmmaking the world over, from the rise of digital production and the ascent of the multinational blockbuster to increased vitality in independent filmmaking and the emergence of new voices and talents both on screen and off. The films examined here are the ones that embody and exemplify these changes, crystallizing emerging trends or pointing in new directions. At the same time, they are films that are informed by and help refigure the cinematic legacy of the previous century, showing how film’s past is constantly reimagined and rewritten by its present. These are films both familiar and obscure, foreign and domestic; they are new but of lasting value. This series is a study of film history in the making. It is meant to provide a different kind of approach to cinema’s story--one written in the present tense.

Forthcoming Books

• The LEGO Movie by Dana Polan (Fall 2020)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by Patrick Keating (Spring 2021)
• The Florida Project by J.J. Murphy (Fall 2021)
• Black Panther by Scott Bukatman (Spring 2022)

About The LEGO Movie by Dana Polan

What happens when we set out to understand LEGO not just as a physical object but as an idea, an icon of modernity, an image—maybe even a moving image? To what extent can the LEGO brick fit into the multimedia landscape of popular culture, especially film culture, today? Launching from these questions, Dana Polan traces LEGO from thing to film and asserts that The LEGO Movie is an exemplar of key directions in mainstream cinema, combining the visceral impact of effects and spectacle with ironic self-awareness and savvy critique of mass culture as it reaches for new heights of creativity.

Incorporating insights from conversations with producer Dan Lin and writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Polan examines the production and reception of The LEGO Movie and closely analyzes the film within popular culture at large and in relation to LEGO as a toy and commodity. He identifies the film’s particular stylistic and narrative qualities, its grasp of and response to the culture industry, and what makes it a distinctive work of animation among the seeming omnipresence of animation in Hollywood, and reveals why the blockbuster film, in all its silliness and seriousness, stands apart as a divergent cultural work.

Dana Polan is a professor of cinema studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and former president of the Society for Cinema Studies. He is the author of eight books in film and media studies, including The Sopranos and Pulp Fiction, and approximately two hundred essays and reviews.

Q&A with Jan Baetens about the Forgotten Art of Film Photonovels

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Jan Baetens' book The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations is the first study devoted to the hybrid genre of the film photonovel. Baetens applies a comparative textual media framework to a previously overlooked aspect of the history of film and literary adaptation.

Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post–World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications.

Watch the author speak about his work in the book trailer video below, and dig deeper into his personal collection of this forgotten medium in this Q&A.

Could you give us the elevator pitch of your book? 

I have worked largely in the field of adaptation studies as applied to cinema, and I have always defended the idea that film is both a screen- and a print-based medium. Film circulates via all kind of printed formats and related products, and historically speaking, the film photonovel was probably the most intriguing of these print adaptations—most intriguing but, paradoxically, also the most forgotten, for the film photonovel, which was immensely popular in the late 1950s, has fallen into complete oblivion, mainly though the lack of any archive (film photonovels were not kept in university libraries, and the private archives have nearly all disappeared). My book I draws on research based on my private collection of film photonovel magazines—I currently have some 1,400 items—and aims at reconstructing the history of the film photonovel not just as a particular genre, but also as a social medium, that is, a social practice and everything that accompanies it. By doing so, I try to rewrite the history of cinema itself, for the film photonovel is a wonderful tool for showing how films were received and appropriated by popular audiences.

How do you define the film photonovel?

The photonovel is essentially a form of graphic narrative in magazine format, one very popular in pretelevision Europe, that combines sequentially organized photographs, generally six per page, and speech balloons as well as captions to tell a story—a romance in the case of the photonovel and the story line of a film in the case of the film photonovel. Film photonovels are thus a special type of novelization, a type that relies on two major features, both inspired by the photonovel model: first, the priority given to images (at the expense of the text); second, the attempt to reframe all adapted movies, whatever their genre or specific tone, as melodramas, the typical genre of the photonovel. The result is often stunning, for even if a film photonovel does not present “new” images, the selection and layout, the narrative reframing of the stories, and the invented narrative voice in the captions all serve to re-create the adapted movie in surprising and visually very attractive ways.

Why was the photonovel deemed “lowbrow”?

Four elements play a key role in the film photonovel’s cultural disrepute: first, the influence of its model, the photonovel, which was discarded as a kind of silly romance comics with pictures; second, the fact that film photonovels were published only in magazine format, never in book form; third, the association with the world of tearjerkers—in the woman-unfriendly 1950s, certainly not the best way to acquire cultural capital; fourth, the belief that film photonovels adapted only commercial movies, never art-house movies. The rebuilding of the film photonovel archive, however, allows for a completely different reading of the material and the cultural biases that have tended to blind us to its very existence. Today we know that photonovels have a very wide range, that film photonovels sometimes exceed the limits of ephemeral magazine publication, that gendered readings have to be corrected, and that art-house cinema is as well represented in the corpus as is any other type of cinema.

How does your research push the boundaries of adaptation studies?

First, my research discloses a form of adaptation that has been completely ignored, lacking not only prestige but also visibility: no archives, no direct or indirect references, no visual traces. The progressive rediscovery of this material generates a kind of Pompeii experience, for things whose very existence had been ignored suddenly become visible. Moreover, we can now better understand the film photonovel’s importance as a social phenomenon: along with going to the movies (and sometimes instead of doing so!), people read film photonovels, and their ideas on cinema were strongly influenced by their reading. Second, the film photonovel is also an important case in the debate on film adaptation. Adaptation is often seen as a one-way street, going only from book to film. Here and in my previous book on novelization, which has also contributed to this paradigm shift, we can see that this is just half the story and that adaptation does not stop once a book has been turned into a movie. Movies are ceaselessly remade in print format, and the film photonovel is without any doubt the most challenging form of these adaptations (which may also include comics, novels, posters, the “making of” books, games, etc.). At first sight, film photonovels may appear to be the poorest versions of these adaptations, since they cannot produce new images. At second sight, however, the obligation to rely exclusively on existing pictures forces the genre to be extremely inventive, as the many examples and images in the book clearly show.

How did photonovels cross borders and affect audiences in Latin America?

The production of film photonovels started in Italy around 1955 and then moved to France, nut it had also some extensions in other countries, including United Kingdom and, somewhat later, United States. In Latin America, where the photonovel was as popular as in Europe (and where, in certain countries, the medium still thrives), the European models were adapted for and appropriated by local audiences. The publishing world in Argentina was crucial in this regard: many Spanish publishing houses were active there (several companies were created by publishers who had to leave Spain during or after the Spanish Civil War), and European magazines circulated in Argentina as well (even French ones, Argentina being a very Francophile country). Some magazines, such as Secretos. Amiga y confidente de la mujer, published their own film photonovel serializations of European movies, while others, such as Superaventuras, specialized in American blockbusters. All these works were locally produced, in agreement with local distributors, as used to be the case in the film photonovel business in general.

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Spidey, Inc.—Great Power and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

By Matt Yockey, editor of Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe 

Due to corporate machinations—which, from the outside, can seem as arcane as any supervillain plot to take over the world—Spider-Man, one of Marvel Comic’s flagship characters, didn’t make the leap to the Marvel Studios fold when the company took on translating its stable of comic book titles into hugely successful blockbusters beginning with 2007’s Iron Man. Having licensed Spider-Man to Sony in 1999, Marvel’s enduring “web-head” existed in his own universe in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), and Spider-Man 3 (2007), and in yet another spider-verse in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). While these films combined for well over a billion dollars in domestic box office receipts, Marvel itself got only a small percentage as their cut. And while the company was left out of this financial windfall, Marvel fans themselves were deprived of seeing one of the company’s most iconic characters rub shoulders with his super-powered compatriots, as he so often has in the comics. 

       

If a Marvel Cinematic Universe seemed incomplete without Spider-Man (and certainly the introduction of second-string characters such as Ant-Man couldn’t quite fill the gap left by Spidey’s tenure at Sony), Marvel took steps to correct this by reacquiring the film rights to the character and introducing him into their cinematic world in last year’s Captain America: Civil War. As played by Tom Holland (who was 19 when shooting began), this Spider-Man rings truer as an earnest high school geek than a then 27-year old Toby Maguire did in 2002 or the more conventionally handsome Andrew Garfield does in the Webb films. What’s perhaps most fascinating—and different—about this latest movie Spider-Man is how he’s ushered into the MCU. As the Avengers fracture internally, a beleaguered Tony Stark turns, apparently, to YouTube for help and discovers a red and blue-clad super-being caught on cell phone footage fighting crime in New York. Stark corners Peter Parker in the Queens apartment the high-schooler shares with his Aunt May and applies his passive-aggressive shtick (“So, you’re the … Spiderling? Crime-fighting Spider? You’re Spider-Boy?”) to win him over. This meeting between the two is funny in part because the dynamic—like that of a big brother catching his younger brother with a well-worn copy of Playboy—is both embarrassing and flattering to Peter. He has a secret that he desperately doesn’t want his aunt to know about but which also makes him quietly proud of himself (in this case, for actively fighting bad in the world). As he stutters to Stark rather uncertainly, “I’m Spi-Spider-Man.” He is in fact a boy hoping to become a man and the longstanding appeal of Spider-Man has been that, unlike, say, Batman or Superman over at DC, he is always in the process of growing up. Thus, his everyday struggles (he initially rejects Stark’s offer to jet to Germany, incredulously asserting that he has homework) have always distinguished him as one of the most identifiable superheroes ever.

All of which makes his tutelage under Tony Stark in the MCU all the more significant. In his previous movie iterations, Spider-Man had a vexed relationship with corporate America. Oscorp was the source of both his powers and his adversaries, marking the corporate enterprise in distinctly ambivalent terms. By recasting Peter Parker as a kind of ward of Tony Stark, the MCU-version of the character is much cozier with corporate power. Stark gets him a new suit and, perhaps more importantly for Peter, a place at the grown-ups’ table. Peter belongs and he immediately has the approval of the coolest guy in the room, who also happens to be the richest. Of course, as a symbol of corporate America, Tony Stark individualizes corporate power, making it both familiar and flawed (his smarmy charm is as much a weakness as it is a strength). Audiences embrace Tony Stark in these films because he seems to be constantly learning the same lesson that Peter is learning: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

As a perpetual teenager haunted by the death of his uncle and tasked with caring for his aunt, Peter Parker balances the taciturn grimness of Batman with the enthusiastic naiveté of Robin and the result is greater than the sum of its parts. He is at once determined and self-doubting, and in that emotional mix of civic and familial devotion with private insecurity, Peter Parker represents the best—and most human—qualities of all of us. His credo “With great power comes great responsibility” is as relevant to a teenage science nerd as it is to a billionaire playboy superhero (or as appropriate to the average movie-goer as it is to a world leader). It’s an ethos that in recent superhero blockbusters has been questioned (Captain America: Civil War ponders the exact nature of that responsibility) or, for a fatal moment, forgotten (in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of the Steel). If Spider-Man’s integration into the MCU seems to require the oversight of that world’s richest but perhaps most emotionally impoverished character, we are being asked to recognize the necessity of the Everyman at the heart of the fantastic world of both superheroes and global corporate power. Just as Stark needs Peter, Marvel needs its fans and our encounter with Spider-Man this summer in Spider-Man: Homecoming reassures us that in the midst of an increasingly polarized economic landscape, it’s the little guy who still counts the most.

Make Ours Marvel is available now from your favorite bookseller, or purchase directly from the University of Texas Press here.

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The Next Generation Multiplex

This weekend, the sequel to an adaptation of a television show that first aired in 1987 starring Johnny Depp will hit theaters nationwide. 22 Jump Street finds the characters from the 2012 iteration of 21 Jump Street now heading to college, which begs the question: why do some movies get produced? In his updated and expanded Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema since 1980, Timothy Shary examines the appeal of boy nerds, nerdy girls, prep school rebels, the emotional male athlete, and other archetypes whose dramas either appeal (or don't appeal) to a primary Hollywood target audience: the young. In addition to the 'school film', Shary explores three other subgenres of the teen film: delinquency, horror, and romance.

So what characters and attitudes make an American teen film bankable and how have they changed in the YouTube era? Read on for an excerpt from Generation Multiplex:

Get Generation Multiplex here.

The Cinematic Image of Youth

The 2012 film 21 Jump Street depicts two rookie cops posing as high school students to break up a drug ring. Much to their surprise and chagrin, popularity among teenagers has changed radically since they graduated in the previous decade: traits that had made students seem square and unattractive—studying for classes, caring for the environment, being politically sensitive—now make them appealing and cool. Such is the nature of adolescence, fluctuating on a continual basis with the various whims of time, which vividly illustrates how difficult understanding youth culture can be because it is so mercurial and fleeting.

These aspects of youth have led American cinema into a curious and often inconsistent fascination with stories about and images of young people, a fascination that became abundantly manifest in the last decades of the twentieth century. Various film trends catering to young audiences had emerged over past generations, but movies since the 1980s have appeared almost fixated on capturing certain youth styles and promoting certain perspectives on the celebration, and survival, of adolescence. Many arguments persist as to why teenagers have been targeted by both Hollywood studios and the American independent movie market: youth have disposable incomes that they like spending on entertainment; today’s children are inculcated by media to be the consumptive parents of tomorrow; filmmakers engage in the vicarious experiences of their own lost youth; and young people make up the largest percentage of the movie-viewing audience. All of these points are valid, yet this book argues not as much for the reasons behind youth representation as for the issues and trends that representation engenders. Evident from the contemporary outpouring of American movies about youth, and the parallel production of teen-oriented television shows, magazines, and multimedia outlets, as well as the cultural attention paid to youth attitudes and behaviors in the wake of various scandals, crimes, and accomplishments, the imaging of youth has become indicative of our deepest social and personal concerns.

Consider, for instance, the most successful recent young adult phenomenon, the Twilight books and subsequent movies, which covered the years 2005–2012. The revenue generated from just these two media—not including subsequent products such as clothing, music, and ancillary texts—has been in excess of $5 billion, and while their number of readers and viewers is impossible to determine, their audience is unmistakably enormous. The stories about and images of the teenage characters in Twilight spoke to fantasies of the supernatural as well as romantic destiny, sexual development, and family politics, utilizing native and ancient mythologies, exotic regional locations, brutal violence, and myriad other dramatic elements within an otherwise conventional struggle between right and wrong. Further, the sensation spread beyond teens to adults, and beyond the target demographic of American youth to a global scale that extremely few stories have enjoyed with such speed and success. Through this universalization, the tormented love triangle of a girl with a vampire and a werewolf presented an incredibly satisfying journey that revealed our cultural appreciation of youth itself.

All dramas thrive on conflict, and the process of maturing is a natural conflict familiar to everyone by their teenage years. While many filmgoers freely participate in screen fantasies about the possibilities of life as a secret agent or of saving a loved one from the clutches of death, most of our lives are filled with less spectacular phenomena, such as how we come to be accepted by society, discover romance, have sex, gain employment, make moral decisions, and learn about the world and who we are in it. Most of us first encounter these phenomena in our adolescence, and how we handle them largely determines how we live the rest of our lives. The gravity of adolescence thus makes for compelling drama, even if many of us would rather forget those trying years. Understanding how we learn and grow in our youth is integral to understanding who we become as adults.

Since the 1950s the American movie box office, with varying interests, has been relying on people under thirty to pay for movies about their daily dramas and fantasies. Of course, one of the telling dilemmas of youth films since cinema began is that while they address young people they are not produced by young people, for children and teens are effectively restricted from the filmmaking process. Thus, screen images of youth have always been traditionally filtered through adult perspectives. As a result of these commercial and political conditions, teen films have evolved into a visible and often coherent genre that has thrived for over half a century.

...

Youth in School

Academics and Attitude

"You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal."

—Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) to his principal in The Breakfast Club (1985) 

Kevin Smith, John Pierson on Linklater's Influence

We're knee-deep in South By Southwest here in Austin. With the film festival in full swing, this week's blog features an excerpt from UT film professor John Pierson's classic book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema — back in print this spring! Here, Pierson sits down with Kevin Smith to talk about one of his biggest influences as a filmmaker, Richard Linklater. Linklater screened his film Boyhood at this year's gamut of film festivals, including SXSW, was nominated for an Oscar for Before Midnight, and continues to nourish the Austin film scene through the Austin Film Society.

Read the truncated conversation below to get a sense of Linklater's cultural influence. Get the book to delve even deeper into a pivotal era in indie film.

John Pierson: So you saw Slacker on your twenty-first birthday at the Angelika. That theater opened in late 1989. Was that the first time you went there?

Kevin Smith: No, the first film I've ever seen outside of New Jersey, unless I'm on vacation with my parents somewhere and then it's still a mainstream film, the film I travel to New York to the Angelika to see is—let me back up a minute....

We're on the cutting edge, The Dark Backward, nobody knows about this and he'll be the one to make Planet of the Apes. At the bottom of the Village Voice ad, it said come to the midnight screening and receive free pig newtons-which of course were fig newtons with a sticker on them.

The Dark Backward, which was not good at all, was our first independent movie. That was the first thing we ever went to see outside New Jersey, at the Angelika. The first time we see the Angelika we're like "there's an escalator in this movie place. Look at this, it's hip man, you can get coffee," not that we're coffee drinkers, but we buy like a ham croissant sandwich at the cafe. The lobby's all different from the usual multiplex lobby we go to because they hang up these huge reviews of films and suddenly we feel, "Oh, my God there's a whole different subculture here." We're seeing people who're there. I mean this theater's packed....

The The Dark Backward is just a footnote because it gets me out of Jersey to New York. And then I have enough courage to see Slacker in New York at a midnight screening.

JP: What attracted you since there were no pig newtons?

KS: The Voice review and the image of the Madonna Pap smear girl; it just sounded great. I know it opened in July [1991]. I went on my birthday, August 2nd. And that's the movie that pushed me. It was like "Oh, my God," The whole ride home I'm like "look how simple it is. It's like there's nothing going on, it's dialogue, I can do this." This is the movie because this is approachable. I can do this.