Week 10

Week Ten Blog

1. New Hollywood, the five conditions:
The Movie Brats
High Concept-The Blockbuster as marketing stratety.
New ownership/management styles of the major studios
New technology of image and sound
New delivery systems

#2: What does Elsaesser mean by New Hollywood being defined either as “the different as same” or “the same as different.” (p. 193)

I think he’s referring to the fact that most filmmakers are influenced by other older filmmakers and who in turn influence filmmakers from new different generations not yet born.


#4: How is the sound/image relationship in horror films fundamentally different than other classical genres?
They don’t maintain a coherent diegetic world in regards to sound or image. This genre tries to keep the monster off screen as long as possible.

#5. How do allusions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula function like a mise-en-abyme?
They function as a time bridge to the present or to a future. As when Dracula and Mina are in the Nickleloden theater. We are in an audience watching a film about characters that are at a theater where film got it’s start but this motif gives us the idea that Dracula himself is timeless and lives forever. The theme of Dracula will be invented anew and filmed by some other filmmaker in the future countless times.

#6: Elsaesser suggests that the film is a palimpsest for 100 years of film history. Why does he also conclude that the vampire film “qualifies as at once prototypical for movie history and for postmodernity.”? [Hint: see my recap of metaphors above.]

It will be made again by another filmmaker in the future in a different style and with a different audience wanting something unknown.