TWENTIETH CENTURY
THE The film stars two legendary actors of the Hollywood cinema, John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Barrymore was more than a film star, and in fact made few movies; he was mainly known as one of the great American stage actors, and belonged to the famous Barrymore family of actors, including siblings, Lionel and Ethel. The family tradition continues today in Barrymore's granddaughter, Drew Barrymore.
The film is also noteworthy for its director, Howard Hawks. Though invisible to film scholars for most of his career, French and, later, American auteur critics revealed him to be a genuine artist with a cinematic vision, point of view, and artistic style.
Hawks's films are characterized by a focus on sexual battles (in the comedies), group solidarity among males engaged in a special action (such as flying airplanes, big-game hunting, or cattle herding), usually fast-paced (often overlapping) dialogue in the comedies, mainly functional editing and eye-level camera angles (editing and angles that don't distract from the drama or call attention to themselves), and a stoic acceptance of life as it is.
The Auteur film theory started among French critics, such as Francois Truffaut, in the 1950s and continued in American auteur critics, such as Andrew Sarris. The main thesis was that films should be treated as an art form and focus should be on directors with a point of view and consistent style in the manner of writers and painters.
Up until then, films were appreciated mainly for their subject matter, stars, screenplays, literary source, or sociological interest. For example, Public Enemy would be discussed in terms of Prohibition and organized crime, not in terms of a film made by director William Wellman and seen in the context of his other films.
The net effect of the Auteur theory was to glorify directors Americans had ignored and dismissed directors previously held in high esteem because of their "serious" films with literary or sociological pretensions. Directors like Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and many others, previously marginalized by serious critics since they rarely made "prestige films" (films based on great novels or with serious social themes) were now lionized by the Auteur critics as masters of the art of cinema.
Nonetheless our primary focus for this week will be on editing in Twentieth Century. For this purpose study pictures are attached.
Even professional editors admit it's difficult to judge film editing, because only the editor and director can know which alternate shots the editor had to choose from, what cuts were written into the script or demanded by the director, etc. Cinematography and production design, for example, are visible to the eye and can be easily judged, whereas judging editing depends, to a large degree, on knowing the editor's alternative choices, if any.
Nonetheless, I believe much of an editor's work can be appreciated from the final cut of the film and students should practice noticing when cuts are made on action, dialogue, a song lyric (as in Breakfast at Tiffany's), reaction shots, the pace of the cutting, parallel editing, intercutting, cross cutting, and the kinds of transitions (fades, wipes, dissolves, etc.).
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