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E-book Tracks from the Crypt

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Penilaian

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Is film a medium of communication? This is a basic question of film studies. It is about as old as the field itself, and the discursive frameworks and underlying assumptions that make the question relevant are about as old as the medium, or the art form, of cinema itself. As John Durham Peters argues, “only since the late nineteenth century have we defined ourselves in terms our ability to communicate with one another,” to the point where “‘[c]ommunication’ is one of the characteristic concepts of the twentieth century” (1999, 1).For most of the twentieth century up until the 1970s, the question of whether film was a medium of communication seemed to have been settled in the affirmative. During the Second World War, Princeton psychologists Carl Hovland, Arthur Lumsdaine, and Fred Sheffield studied the effects of the US Army’s “Why we fight” films, which Frank Capra produced, on the motivations and polit­ical persuasions of US soldiers. As a matter of course, the three researchers assumed that film, like radio or the newspaper, was a form of mass communication. When they published the study as a book in 1949, Princeton University Press chose Experiments on Mass Communication as the title. “Film” does not even appear in the subtitle. With almost continuous reprints since its first pub­lication, it remains one of the founding texts of empirical media research. Incidentally, the study showed that soldiers learned a lot about the reasons and historical contexts of the war, but emerged from contact with the films with their belief structures and political convictions largely unaffected. What Hovland, Lums­daine, and Sheffield found was—at least in part—a failure of film to communicate (2017).One could argue, of course, that this partial failure underscores film’s standing as a modern, twentieth­century medium and art form. Citing the films of Bergman, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky, and “scenes of stammering face­to ­face relations” alongside the dramatic works of Beckett, Sartre, and Ionesco, Peters reminds us that “much twentieth­century drama, art, cinema, and literature examines the impossibility of communication between people” (Peteres 1999, 2). And the preoccupation with the absence of communication extends beyond the arts into the social sciences and social theory. Probably more in the same modernist spirit than is generally acknowledged, Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems is predicated on the improbability, rather than the inevitability of communication (1995).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

791.43 MOW t

Penerbit

Germany : meson press., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

52 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978­3­95796­003­0

Klasifikasi

791.43

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Motion Pictures, Movies

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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