Hello! Welcome to the Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color.

I am Scott Higgins, Associate Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is an experiment so thanks for joining me. It is an online version of a class that I teach here at Wesleyan. and I've never done an on-line course, so let's hope that it all works. There are plenty of things I don't know, about how this whole thing, of often works, so bear with me, Hopefully that, eh, we can learn. From what I know, this is the first film class, that Coursera has offered. So, It's uncharted territory, but I think it can be done and it can be interesting. What I'm going to do today is pretty easy. I'm going to introduce the class and some of the key concepts and also say a few things about how it's all setup on, on Coursera. so let's try that. again. This is class a couple key terms to, to begin to the define this classum, and there in the title; the language of Hollywood, story telling, sound and, and, and color. and its all you know. Fairly straightforward, I guess. The first term is language, and by that I really mean just a way of newing and doing things, knowing and doing things shared by filmmakers and audiences. Not like a written language, not with the same sort of formality and rules. Some people would call this a paradigm. If you wanted to be all academicy about it. and that's fine all these called a language way that we know and do cinema and the important thing is that film makers and audiences shares these ideas about, about cinema. but this is not just language of cinema, this is about Hollywood not all film but American the film industry, which does mainly one thing from about 1912, 1915 onwards, what it does is tell feature length stories. One story 90 minutes and an experience that the viewer follows from beginning to end all the way through. I say that Hollywood had the mandate to tell stories that emotionally engage audiences. Basically, that means, that's how they made money. If, if a film company was going to sur vive, it had to bring a viewer into the theater, and give them an emotional experience, an emotional fix. That's the money that you get. You get it, not by showing somebody a stunning picture, or by demonstrating the abstract qualities of cinema. You get ''em by telling a story, getting them to relate to a character and, and have feelings.

there's an economic rationale for this, it all comes down to the money. Early on Hollywood found, Hollywood producers found that if they wanted to keep people coming back into the theater, again and again, they had to deliver an emotional nugget. They had to give them an experience that they would tell others about and want to repeat. Well, what was that experience? Well it's interesting, I think Hollywood, it gives you a very personal experience. You feel directly related to the characters. You feel in some sense the emotions that they feel. These films speak to us individually. There about our deepest desires. But we experience them communally with other people in the audience. And it's this mixture of the personal and the communal that makes Hollywood film unique and powerful, I think, from the nineteen teens onward. it's still, still like that today. So we're talking about Hollywood and we're talking about the viewer. Not just the films upon screen, but what they do to you and me when, when, when we watch them. so here's a I guess, a manifesto for Hollywood. feel it first, think about it later. A successful Hollywood film from there. I'm talking about the studio era. Was one that was meant to be felt and enjoyed and I guess, viscerally received and engaged with by the audience; but not necessarily thought about. You could always think about it later on if you want, in the lobby. But at the moment, you're not thinking about, you know, the story, and if the story makes sense. You're not thinking about the uses of cinema as you watch it. You're just feeling it and in this class we're looking beneath that process. How are these films designed to be felt. so each movie promises an emo tional experience to each viewer and what we're doing is studying the means of achieving that goal. How is it that these Hollywood films. Allow themselves to, you know, get under our skin how do we allow them to get under our skin. What, what are the mechanisms for, for making films that we can, we can feel. so it's Hollywood film, it's story telling and it's about the film and the viewer. and a lot of my efforts to this, this class we're going to be spent on talking about film style film form which is you know a way of just saying how films employ images and sounds because that's what a movie is. It's a collection of sounds and images up there on, on a screen. Before

its big ideas, before its characters we can empathize with and feel. It is first just pictures and sound. A couple ways of talking about style, and I'll be using both of them, one of the ways is the very broad and general definition of film style, which is called classical Hollywood cinema, the classical Hollywood style. And that is a kind of way that Hollywood made films from I guess, what 1917 to 1960, those are my dates. I think of it as studio era-cinema, these are the big feature films made by the major studios Paramont, Fox, Warner Bros., MGM. And all of these films follow some very similar stylistic or formal rules. you know, they, they tend to have continuous time and space within scenes. They, they skip over time in between scenes. They tell stories about heroes who meet obstacles and overcome those obstacles to reach their goals. Very broadly, all filmmakers working in the studio era, are playing the same game. They all pretty much know how to shoot a scene, how to stage an action how to edit shots together. And the idea that they're playing by the same rules is you know One way of talking about a style in general, a very general Hollywood style that all filmmakers engage in. But, I'm aslo talking about the style of specific filmmakers. every filmmaker working within this style, creates a distinctive world. And in this class, I'm trying to lo okay at distinctive and interesting filmmakers. So there's a style of the whole, but each of these filmmakers has their own thing going on, creating their own particular world Will be interested in that, you know what makes a Frank Borzage film, a Frank Borzage film as opposed to say a Howard Hawks film. This class will ask that question and try to get try to get closer to the choices that film makers make, the specific choices film makers make. And storytelling is, of course, an important term, and I've, I've mentioned this before already. Man, this film, class is about how film makers tell stories. You know, and it's not about, look at screenplays. It's not really about analyzing plots. it's about film storytelling which is a kind of storytelling created out of space and time that directly engages the audience. It absorbs the audience into the creation of the story. That's Hollywood storytelling and that's the way we're going to talk about it. There's a relationship between you and the film. And most Hollywood filmmakers, most really

good Hollywood filmmakers, know this, that if you want the audience to get involved in the story, you don't just tell them the story. You get them involved in the telling of the story. You leave at least half of the story untold. The viewer fills it in. You give them just enough. To complete the picture. How films get us to do that and the kinds of things they ask us to complete, that's an important part of this class. a film story isn't words on a page, it is a world and a path to enter and follow. That's what each of these film makers do. They show a path, they ask you, do you want enter this world and then they help you follow that path through the film. So the audience is part of the creation of, of the story. right, so it's Hollywood storytelling and it's divided into two units, this class, sound. And color. And that's just a good way to break this up, and make this a historical class, as where, well as a an abstract story telling class. because film is, is a technological enterp rise. And in America films always cost a lot of money, because the equipment is expensive, and large corporations. Are the folks who make this possible. They create this structure that artists can use. so because film's technological, as the machines change, you could expect the art to change too. The choices that filmmakers make, will change depending on what kind of machines they have available. and every new technology then, presents new tools to an artist. But also new challenges. So, we're looking at the coming of sound and the coming of color. Two new things given to artists working in the film industry, but they're not just gifts. They're also challenges because as soon as you have this new thing, this new. Piece of the medium to handle. As a film maker you have to make choices. You have to decide what to keep of the old style and what to, to change. the test of any new technology in Hollywood is can it tell stories and move audiences. That's how Hollywood is selling tickets and making monies. That's what it's giving to the audience. So, Can the new technology do that? Well we're going to watch that play out twice. First how film makers figure out if sound can tell stories, how can I make sound move and audience. And then we'll watch it happen again with color. we're looking at these tension points, these moments of transition from one. Set of technologies. one standard way of doing things to a new

set of technlogies. and this is something that we'll see about Hollywood storytelling in general, and Hollywood filmmaking. this class will tell us something about the nature of technological change in Hollywood. often, and we'll see it twice here. A burst of creativity and new problem solving. As soon as the technology comes on. Things get real interesting for artists. they, they find you know, new things to do with the technology, and ways to make that technology do the things that they're used to doing. like I said, these are, these are pressure points, and when you look at a pressure point like this, you get insight into film. And to film artists. In between technological changes we have some stability, artists figure out ways to do things and they can get comfortable with the conventions but when sound comes and then when color comes it forces artists to be creative and it gives us a chance to see deeper into the art itself. And also let's just talk about the continuities. And changes before and after technological change, both for the artist and for the viewer. You know, how does your experience of film change when you have sound as oppose to when it was all silent or when it is in color as oppose it was black and white. What does it tells us about how we relate to cinema? So, as a history class and it gets you to watch cinema with new eyes because we're looking at these moments when cinema itself had to grow new eyes. When the filmmakers had to figure out, what are we going to do with this you know, technology that we've been suddenly handed, or, or saddled with, or given. That's the class. That's the material we're, we're going to be covering and we'll do it in five weeks, and this is the class sturcture. roughly it'll work this way, I will give an introduction to a film and a topic, you'll watch that like a, like a regular lecture And then you'll be assigned to go and watch a movie. all these movies are available on DVD. All of them are available for rental but some of them are more expensive than others and many of them are available on the internet. streaming to in one way or another. So I designed a class that I hope should be easy for you to watch. You should be able to block these films fairly easily. The one film that might be little hard to find is Street Angel which is our first movie because it's available on a rather expensive DVD. Box set. So, if

you're buying the movies, that's the one that's going to set you back, but it is available through, through rental and other places. if you miss a film, it's probably okay. A Street Angel, you might not be able to see, but you should still come back for the lec ture. So I introduce the film, you watch this film on your own and then you come back and I will give you a lecture analysis discussion of the film. and, introduce, introduce the next film and we'll be doing that, for the next five weeks. I do recommend you try to see these films with other people whether they're enrolled in the class or not. but watching them on your own is fine too. These are films that were made for audiences and they play differently with an audience. You know, comedies especially are less fun Funny, when you're sitting alone staring at a computer screen, than they are, when you're with an audience watching it in a, in a proper space. So try to watch these things together, if you can. you might be able to get in contact with another, one another, using the course Sarah forum, which is set up for this class and allows you to make connections and see who else is taking this class. I recommend using the, the forum, I will not be able to do some things I usually do in a class. obviously, I can't answer questions when they come up. I'm, your, talking to a camera and trying to get my ideas across. But I can't answer your emails either, directly However, you can ask questions on the forum and we'll use that as some sort, I haven't figured it out yet. We'll figure out a way of using that as some sort of conduit, for you asking the important questions and, and me, trying to answer them. So that's that. That's the class. welcome to it. I hope you stick around. I hope you enjoy these films and, I will see you in a moment for our first lecture, which is an introduction to silent film.