Introducing the Extra Terrestrial

E.T. the Extraterrestrial is a movie about a boy, Elliott, who meets and befriends an alien who has been abandoned here on earth. In the beginning sequence, in which we are introduced to E.T. before he meets Elliott, we witness E.T.’s childlike fascination with our world. He wanders away from his spaceship as the aliens survey a forest. As E.T. explores our planet, he has a keen sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. The other aliens, his family, are forced to leave him there with the sudden introduction of human scientists into the area. The scientists, like most of the adults in the film, are faceless. They represent adult maturity, rationality, science, and the loss of magic and wonder in our lives. The themes of the movie are set up in this beginning sequence, namely the duel of childlike innocence and belief in magic versus adult rationality and belief in science.

The storytelling structure of the beginning is in the visuals, showing us how E.T. became separated, and is being hunted by adult humans. We see a rabbit coming out to watch E.T. The rabbit’s presence makes us feel calm. Allen Daviau, the film’s cinematographer, gives a beautiful and magical look to this sequence. The story of E.T. is an incredible story that is hard to sell to an audience. John Simon wrote in his article “E.T. Etc.” in the National Review, “Allen Daviau’s cinematography looks opulent without turning too gorgeous or cute, and most of the special effects work in an understated manner.” By not having overly dramatic cinematography we are more accepting of the film world, and of the creature E.T. Joseph McBride quotes Daviau in “Stephen Spielberg: A Biography, “‘I remember saying from the very beginning when I read the script ‘It’s got to be so real. The whole world around has got to be absolutely realistic, so that the magic that happens isn’t hokey, so that the whole thing isn’t intentionally magical. The magic comes out of this incredible situation.” (331) Before we even are allowed to see E.T. fully-lit Spielberg and Daviau are able to sell us E.T. as a credible creature. 

The cinematography isn’t the only element building us up to E.T. John W. Wright in his article “Levinsian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language” writes, “Here, Spielberg only postpones the face-to-face encounter with the alien other for the briefest of times. He uses extreme close-ups to show hands, feet, and oblique parts of the alien E.T. as he wanders in the forest in search of plants to sample. When the ship leaves, Spielberg uses fast-paced editing to "humanize" the still faceless E.T. as he tries to make it back to the ship. The alien E.T. may be "unknowable," but Spielberg allows us this time to presage our engagement with its face through cinematic actions that seem familiar: a sense of helplessness, the ability to lose track of time and place, and the immediacy of the alien's loneliness at being isolated from that which it knows and is familiar with.” Spielberg builds us up to the reveal of E.T. later on by establishing him as an individual first. Despite E.T.’s foreign nature we are given the impression that he experiences wonder, fear, and loneliness, like a human being.

The beginning sequence is presented without dialogue, like a silent film. However, there are sound effects of E.T. walking, nature, and humans, as well as a lush soundtrack provided by John Williams. We hear E.T. walking through the forest, breathing heavily, making an “ooh” sound in wonder, and his shriek as the adults pull up. E.T. cannot speak at this point, but can communicate vocally like a baby, allowing us to know what he is experiencing without reading his face. The forest comes alive through the use of sound design here as well, presumably provided by the supervising sound editor Charles L. Campbell. We can hear birds, wind, and other subtle elements of a nighttime forest. As the scientists pull up, we are first introduced to the character simply known as “Keys,” played by Peter Coyote. We hear the jingling of his keys by his side, which throughout the film becomes the indicator of his presence, much as the theme music in Jaws alerts us of the presence of the shark. Sound is used to create the wonder of youth as well as the threat of adult maturity.

Another element of sound is John William’s colorful score which heightens the emotional elements of the movie for the viewer. Jack Sullivan quotes Williams in his article Conversations with John Williams, "For better or worse, the audience for film music, even in an unconscious way, is multinational and enormous. If there is such a thing as global music, it's probably coming from film, where it's less attached to one particular vernacular. As a unified art form, a successful film, if it has a score that people will embrace, really can, in the atmosphere we live in today, reach across those boundaries.” There is no dialogue spoken, and Williams’s score carries us through the scene with its own musical dialect. At first, as E.T. walks through the forest looking up at the redwood trees, the music gives us the sense of wonder that E.T. is having upon experiencing the gigantic redwoods. With the arrival of the scientists, the music becomes more suspenseful, making us believe that if the adults actually apprehend E.T., he would be in danger. The music imposes this dichotomy upon the viewer—of childlike magic and adult rationality.

The idea of a duel between the innocent nature of childhood and adult maturity, of magic versus science, is set up subtly here, at the beginning of the film. It is not presented as a grand gesture, nor is it stated explicitly. Instead Spielberg and his collaborators use film art to guide us into the world of E.T. allowing us to understand the creature and his character, making him believable. At the same time, they help us to understand that maturity and adulthood are around the corner. Later in the film, we understand that the adults are not villains, but people who no longer look at the world the way Elliott and E.T. do.

Bibliography:

McBride, Joseph, Steven Spielberg A Biography, Second ed., Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2010.

Scheurer, Timothy E., "John Williams and film music since 1971." Popular Music & Society 21, no. 1: 59. Music Index, EBSCOhost (accessed October 8, 2012), 1997

Simon, John, "E.T. ETC.," National Review 34, no. 14: 908-910, Film & Television Literature Index, EBSCOhost (accessed October 1, 2012) 1982.

Wright, John W., "Levinasian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language," Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book. Ed. Dean A. Kowalski. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2008.

Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness

Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is about the world’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson rose to prominence during the early 20th century and created controversy by winning the championship title. At the same time that many African Americans were persecuted and limited in their position in society, Johnson went out and did what he wanted, disregarding social trends that were based entirely on race and social mores. Ultimately it was his lifestyle that proved his undoing. He provoked the political powers of the time. The film’s director Ken Burns makes documentaries about people he feels embodies aspects of America. Here Burns presents us Jack Johnson, a man who embodies the American idea: Stanley Crouch states in the film, “Johnson embodied the American idea of being able to go where you want to go on the basis of your ability.” However, despite Johnson fighting for this American idea, Burns also presents us a story wherein he is opposed by America. Johnson represents the fact that America has opposed the American dream out of bigotry and intolerance. He was a fighter for the heavyweight title, racial equality, and freedom.

Gary R. Edgerton writes in Ken Burns’s America about Burns’s biographies being “majoritarian rather than marginalized.” Meaning that they are larger than life people who show the majority of views and movement of America. Edgerton says Burns’s reasoning is to ask, “‘Who are we Americans as a people?’ This preoccupation with the elemental question--‘Who are we as Americans”’--could not be more relevant in an era when multiculturalism has become the source of sweeping and fundamental reappraisals of almost every aspect of national life.” Edgerton wrote this concerning the film Thomas Jefferson, but this line of questioning ourselves as Americans can be applied toward Unforgivable Blackness as well. J.B. Lewis writes in the forward of Johnson’s autobiography In the Ring and Out, “In the story of Jack’s life, there is an abundance of thrill and adventure, but there is also the ripened wisdom of years of experience.” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in the book Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, “He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing--no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female--could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men.” He embodied the American spirit, his actions are what we aspire to be. However those that opposed him show America as it was and as it is.

Two schools of thought existed amongst the African Americans of the time, that of the militant black man, and that of Booker T. Washington. Geoffrey C. Ward quotes a critic of both movements who explains, “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and depredations, it deprecates political action and preaches the doctrine of industrial development and the acquisition of property.... The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place. It believes in money and property, but it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.” In the time of Jack Johnson, many of those in the African American community followed Washington’s school of thought, and were outraged as well as white Americans with Johnson’s behavior. White America had become used to Washington’s school of thought, and having submissive black Americans under them.

The behavior of Johnson was that he was a celebrity flaunting his wealth, slept with only white women, and moved into white neighborhoods, further enraging white men. Ward states, “While most negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. At a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat--profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.” Johnson’s individualistic personality isolated him from both black and white Americans. Johnson became a threat to white Americans, and their pride. J.B. Lewis writes, “Steeled by a determination that a man of [Johnson] race should not posses laurels so highly prized in the realm of sports, it was easy to marshal against him native prejudices, and back them with charges of deviation from the moral code and violation of certain statues.” They sought to use the Mann Act. Ward describes it in Unforgivable Blackness as having “barred the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes.’” Ward continues that the “language of the act was loosely drawn, and both within and without the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation...there were those who believed that “debauchery” and “other immoral purposes” might be more broadly defined to include what the newspapers called “escapades,” sexual relations between consenting adults.” Ward quotes Congressman Seaborn Roddenberry in the book Unforgivable Blackness, “No... degradation in all the years of southern slavery possessed such villainous character... as the provision of the laws of Illinois which allows the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain....Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit.” This was America’s reaction to the first black man winning the boxing heavyweight championship.

Ken Burns presents us the dramatic story of Johnson through cinematic storytelling. Edgerton writes about Ken Burns’s four plot structures for his epic documentary Civil War in Ken Burns’s America, “To start with, he employs narrative descriptions which primarily move the story along. These sections follow a simple chronology and are designed above all else to provide the audience with the basic historical facts and figures on what is happening and who is involved in the action at any given time.” The movie’s companion book of the same name, shares the writer Geoffrey C. Ward. The film’s narration, read by Keith David, follows the text of the book. It is only when we watch interviews with James Earl Jones, Stanley Crouch and Burt Sugar-- living specialists of Jack Johnson--that the film’s narration veers away from Ward’s original text. Most of the film follows the format given by the book for the narration.

Edgerton continues, “Second, he designs what he calls emotional chapters...which have the ‘ability to float between episodes.’ This category of scene is less bound by chronological demands than by its capacity to affect mood and engage an audience emotionally at strategic moments within the plot.” An effective emotional chapter in the film occurs after Johnson’s death in the film; Stanley Crouch reveals a personal story about Johnson arriving in his father’s gym. Johnson gets inside the ring with the fastest boxer there and wears him out. Johnson then leaves abruptly like a magician. Burns forms a story of Johnson to show his character; this gives the viewer a sense of the emotion of the mystery and legend that was Jack Johnson.

Edgerton explains the third type of scene, “Telegrams in a sense, are a mixture of both the scenes of narrative description, because they are bound to whatever event is transpiring in the story line at the time.” An example of a telegram is when Johnson goes to trial under the Mann Act. It is introduced by the narrator and moves into Belle Schreiber’s testimony against Johnson. We are shown pictures of Belle Schreiber and various shots of court houses, while an actress reads the transcript. This creates an illusion that we are witnessing the actual testimony. Then actor Samuel L. Jackson gives his voice to Johnson, and we hear Johnson say he never met with Belle in a hotel. Burns presents us exterior and interior shots of a hotel, suggesting Johnson is lying, that he did indeed meet her there. It could be any photograph of any hotel Burns is showing us, but Burns creates a situation in which we believe Johnson is lying in court.

Edgerton explains Burns’s fourth technique, “‘editing clusters.’ Burns “constructs editing clusters as his way of critically analyzing the various sides of a theme, question, or controversy that is central to a better overall understanding of his subject.” Burns will cut together relevant images with “a montage of commentators,” who give “conflicting and corroborating opinions, creating a collage of multiple viewpoints.” Burns uses this technique during the trial of Johnson by having Congressman Roddenberry give his opinion of mixing races, W.E.B. DuBois defend Johnson’s actions despite his disapproval of them, and using commentators like Stanley Crouch, James Earl Jones, and Randy Roberts. This conflict of opinions gives the audience a greater understanding of the trial and era from differing viewpoints.

Burns used careful research and storytelling techniques to convey the life and historical worth of Jack Johnson. The plot structure: narrative descriptions, emotional chapters, telegrams, and editing clusters convey the historical and the emotional aspects of Johnson in the film. Johnson becomes more than a boxer in Burns’s film, he becomes a symbol of America. He is an example not just of the American ideal of gaining rewards through hard work; but of the opposition individuals receive when they try. Through him we can better understand racism, bigotry, and intolerance, that has held, and continues to hold, America back from embracing individuals and those that pursue the American ideal.

Bibliography:

Edgerton, Gary R., Ken Burns’s America, Palgrave, New York, 2001

Lewis, J.B., Proteus Limited, New York, 1977

Ward, Geoffrey C., Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Vintage, 2006

The Balance of Film Art

Art is a form of expression; a way in which we communicate a story, a thought, emotion, or an idea with highlights to the skill and craft involved. In film persons can craft movies to create stories by shooting footage then cutting, arranging, and pasting it together; in an effort called editing. Shots have to be arranged, like paintings or photographs, in a way to help explain the scene. The shots and editing become different elements of the art, the same way paint and the brushes would be a part of a painting. A film has to be arranged skillfully and in a manner that is original and unique to itself to be called art.

The brush strokes of film would be editing. As a brush delivers and presents its audience with paint; editing takes and arranges footage shot somewhere else and gives them a cohesive story. Hitchcock states that “pure cinema is pieces of film assembled.”

Sergei Eisenstein argues that the intellectual power and emotional weight of a film is in the use of montage. He explains montage, “The old film-makers...regarded montage as a means of producing something by describing it, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks...But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another (the ‘dramatic’ principle.)”

To Eisenstein montage is not just editing pieces of the film together, but rather an emotional segment in a film placed strategically to create a new idea using images by creating conflict through the use of editing. It allows film to become something more, to create something with those pieces that previously did not exist on their own. Those pieces are the shots, composed of the mise-en-scene.

Mise-en-scene could be compared to the paint in a painting; the composition of everything on the screen, the bare elements assembled in editing. Film composition uses techniques found in painting, drawing, and photography. Shots in a well crafted film are composed as skillfully as great music. Arnheim writes that “film art developed only gradually when the movie makers began consciously or unconsciously to cultivate the peculiar possibilities of cinematographic technique and to apply them toward the creation of artistic productions.”

Peter Wollen writes Hitchcock’s, “own menu of ingredients ran as follows: ‘Lighting creates mood, the camera dramatic impact, music stirs the emotions, colour has an aesthetic effect, widescreen provides showmanship and spectacle, all of the elements needed for the machinery of the production.”

All of these add to the visual elements of what the audience sees in a shot. Truly artistic filmmakers make use of changing the camera’s perspectives on recognizable objects, giving fresh takes with “constancy of form,” by shooting common objects in new angles.

Paul Begin writes “Mise-en-scene does in space what montage does in time.”

Therefore if montage creates new ideas that we would otherwise not surmise then so must mise-en-scene.

Arnheim states, “Film resembles painting, music, literature, and the dance in this respect-it is a medium that may, but need not, be used to produce artistic results.”

He says that a post card and military march are not considered art and just as most movies should not be considered art. With the possibility of being art, how should artistic merit of a filmmaker be deciphered? Begin writes that “Often a director’s style depends on his or her attitude toward mise-en-scene versus montage.”

Montage and mise-en-scene should not be viewed as competing elements, but pieces of film used to compose ideas and emotions the filmmakers are trying to convey. An artist knows the tools and techniques needed to convey the message and grasp a balance of montage and mise-en-scene appropriate for the particular film. Many films simply tell a story, when they become art is where the skill and craft excel.

Films have the capability of being art, and they have the ability to not be art. The deciding factors lie in the use of the elements, and how they are composed together, and the manner in which they are arranged. To shoot and assemble is not art, but to skillfully go about it and craft a movie in a way presenting the audience with ideas and ways of seeing things in an original way brings it to be. For film the main components of its art is the mise-en-scene and montage. When skillfully they are composed together they create a film that is every bit as artistically rendered as a well crafted painting.

Bibliography:

Begin, Paul. "Buñuel, Eisenstein, And The 'Montage Of Attractions': An Approach To Film In Theory And Practice." Bulletin Of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 1113-1132. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Rudolf Arnheim. “From Film As Art,” Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford, 2009)

Sergei Eisenstein. “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]” Film Theory and Criticism. (New York: Oxford, 2009.)

Wollen, Peter. "Theory And Practice." Journal Of Media Practice 6.2 (2005): 73-81. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 9 Feb. 2012.