BFI Film Classics/ The Wizard Of Oz by Salman Rushdie 791 .437 Fle
I want to be exploring how people react differently to cult films, making it important in the way that the spectator has walked away from the film with more then just a cinematic experience but something to think about or even learn from.
Salman Rushdie writes-
"I have begun with these personal reminiscences because 'The Wizard Of Oz' is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how weakness of grown-ups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves."
An important part of the success of 'The Wizard Of Oz' is that the story is godless and throughout the film there is only one part where religion is mentioned to create "good old-fashioned plain speaking" at the start of the narrative when Miss Gulch says 'Im a good Christian woman, I can't do so.'
"This absence of higher values greatly increased the film's charm, and is an important aspect of its success in creating a world in which nothing is deemed more important than the lovers, cares and needs of human being (and of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions and dogs)"
This is also another sign of pushing the boundaries of cinema by making the audience learn a valuable lesson of life through a time that was very traditional and strict, I bet a lot of the audience didn't even realize the film didn't contain christian morality.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Genre Paradigms in Cult film
An Introduction to Film Studies 791.43 Nel Page. 128
"The most common-sense approach to genre is through iconography - the props, costumes, and setting. In the terminology of semiotics these are signs, visual signifiers, which can immediately alert us of the generic identity of a film."
So in a way, most films have our thinking done for us with the props, costume, setting, dialogue and musical signifiers connoting towards a genre type which have paradigms that we should recognize. In cult film some of these paradigms are more random and tend to be confusing. This is important as the paradigms in cult film push boundaries of cinematic use of iconography which makes the spectator think more into the narrative and genre of the film.
'Pink Flamingos' - The mother character is dressed as a baby who is in love with eggs.
This film is suppose to make its audience uncomfortable so just by putting the mother into a costume of a baby and her setting as a cot for baby's we are made uncomfortable as these aren't normal paradigms of mainstream film or even our reality.
She also talks a lot about eggs and in these scenes you constantly have this image of eggs that would make anyone sick of them. Although we think of eggs as a normal everyday thing John Waters had the idea of making the audience absolutely sick of them, really its so off putting but as we see here he is messing around with the way we persive props and in a normal film and how we see props in a film like this (which has the stronger reaction). Superbly done.
But the important part of genre in cult film is that these films open up new doors or ways of viewing cinema that not many other directors do to this extent. Without these films the spectator hardly every gets challenged so which director will have the confidence to achieve something that really pushes the boundaries of what we see on screen, and allow other directors to follow in the footsteps of cult films. If know one pushes the boundaries when will anyone learn something new, audience and director.
"The most common-sense approach to genre is through iconography - the props, costumes, and setting. In the terminology of semiotics these are signs, visual signifiers, which can immediately alert us of the generic identity of a film."
So in a way, most films have our thinking done for us with the props, costume, setting, dialogue and musical signifiers connoting towards a genre type which have paradigms that we should recognize. In cult film some of these paradigms are more random and tend to be confusing. This is important as the paradigms in cult film push boundaries of cinematic use of iconography which makes the spectator think more into the narrative and genre of the film.
'Pink Flamingos' - The mother character is dressed as a baby who is in love with eggs.
This film is suppose to make its audience uncomfortable so just by putting the mother into a costume of a baby and her setting as a cot for baby's we are made uncomfortable as these aren't normal paradigms of mainstream film or even our reality.
She also talks a lot about eggs and in these scenes you constantly have this image of eggs that would make anyone sick of them. Although we think of eggs as a normal everyday thing John Waters had the idea of making the audience absolutely sick of them, really its so off putting but as we see here he is messing around with the way we persive props and in a normal film and how we see props in a film like this (which has the stronger reaction). Superbly done.
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