Lecture One
DEAD OF NIGHT
1945
Earilng Studios
Problems of Culture and interpretation of materials from other cultures.
Every culture has its own set of “rules” or “beliefs” or “ethos”. While it is perfectly clear that all individuals in a culture do not act exactly the same way, there are general patterns that can be, and have been seen by social scientists – especially cultural anthropologists.
There is an additional problem involved in language, There are many aspects to language than just simple “this word refers to that”
Consider problems of “register”
The differences do not refer to different things, just perhaps attitudes towards things, speakers – hearer context relationships all of which may vary from culture to culture.
Shift in dialect. What does Brooklynese mean in a film?
What dialect in German would Eliza Doolittle speak (big problem in Norwegian translation as to which dialect is the prestige dialect?
Southern dialect can sound either very “refined” when talking about mint juleps and very dangerous when used as “redneck” speech. How much of this shows us in subtitles?
A question of “emics and etics”.
Kenneth Pile developed the idea based on linguistics that an event and its perception can be rather different when different cultures see the same thing.
So one of the problems we have is that any work of art is an “etic” – the thing itself while each interpretation is a different emic. We can find the same thing even between 2 people with the same event. Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960) a famous anthropologists of the 1930s, 40s and 50’s once said
So there will always be the possibility of interpreting a work of art from the standpoint of the culture that made it and also from the culture of a viewer not from that society. Analysis generally attempts to explain why the viewer made the interpretation it did using rules from the person’s own culture and personal experience.
So when Bride of Frankenstein was released in 1935 it had a number of problems with censorship. Some of it dealt with its religious statements about “god” and the creation of life – which had also plagued the earlier film Frankenstein. Some objections were raised to Else Lanchester’s low cut gown at the start of the Bride of Frankenstein Various states demanded specific cuts. Some European countries banned the Bride altogether. Even Japan got into the act and was upset by certain scenes – but for a non Christian country and one which had little problem with nudity the reason may come as a surprise – they were upset by the improper handling of the miniature King created by Pretorious!
So we can say that different cultures will have different aesthetics and that even the same country may have different aesthetics in the courses of its history. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for example, produced a near riot when it was first performed in 1913, but is not seen as the slightest bit Avant-garde today.
THE DEFINITION OF “HORROR” AND ITS CROSS CULTURAL PROBLEMS
Horror films are difficult to define. Horror films reflect fears of many different things in different cultures and at different times. Films are chosen to reflect similarities and differences between what is horrific in different cultures at different times.
Horror films try to arouse negative emotional reaction from viewers by dealing with audience's primal fears. People like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley inspired early horror films. Horror films have been popular from early time in films and try to produce scenes that wouldscare or startle the viewer. Although weird, macabre and/or supernatural are often found in horror films sucj elements may also be found in fantasy, supernatural fiction and thriller genres.
The term "horror" as used to describe a film genre was not used until the 1930s. This was the time when Universal Pictures released Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), Hollywood dramas often used horror themes.
Horror films often attempt to realize the viewers' nightmares, fears, revulsions and terror of the unknown. They may or may not contain supernatual elements. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho widely regarded as a horror film has no supernatural elements.
SUBTEXTS – eruption of the repressed?
SUBTEXT PROBLEMS