Later this semester, I'm planning on doing a "Technology in Hollywood" movie session with my students in "Communication and New Technology." The purpose is to show how popular movies have integrated technology into the everyday lives of the movie characters - technology that maybe we have become accustomed to, but that was brand new (and ultimately cool) only two, five, or ten years ago. I am *not* planning on showing a whole movie. Instead, I will show multiple short scenes, followed by in-class discussion. I have collected a few examples (see below), and am looking for more. Can you help? I do not want to include James Bond like movies, or science fiction/special effects type movies. I don't want to show what someone has dreamt up as technology possibly being able to do in some obscure scenario. I want to show "real" scenes with everyday technology. Also, the movies don't have to be Hollywood movies, but they should be fairly familiar to US undergraduates, because their understanding will be greater that way. Thanks for suggestions directly to ulla@ku.edu. I will post a summary to the entire list. ulla Examples: - "Office Space" - any of the fax machine scenes; the dramatic set-up of installing a virus on a computer, which actually only consists of copying a file from a floppy disk - "Pretty Woman" - the very brief scene when Julia Roberts goes shopping in Beverly Hills and a father and son drive by in a car, holding big fat cell phones, and being very proud of them - "Bowfinger" - the scene where Steve Martin is trying to impress someone, and since he doesn't own a cell phone, he just ripped off a regular phone, and while he pretends to talk on it, the cord dangles in the air - "Topsy Turvey" - the scene where the phone is introduced as a new technology, and people scream into the receivers to hear each other, upon which an elderly gentleman remarks one might as well just open the window and scream out of that - "Jumping Jack Flash" - one of the scenes in which Whoopi Goldberg "chats" on her computer (with blue and red underlain lines) with the supposedly lost spy Peter
Hollywood has always incorporated technology in its movies, from the early stage onwards.... take the Buster Keaton films where everything evolves around the use or misuse of technology... velocity and dynamics.....the use of cars as technology in eg. socalled roadmovies.... telephones in the crime and thriller genre, where it is woven into everyday life, but has an outstanding position in the movie (or movies)..... the camera itself becomes a technology used ON screen.... from 'Peeping Tom', to the 'Conversation' to' Sex, Lies and Videotape....', weapon technology always seems to be state of the art..... especiall in police films and beyond..... many comedies play with technology, esp. household technology as a never ending source of chaos.....it might be interesting to view changes over history as to what technology is used in a film to transport the story... nothing is without meaning in a Hollywood movie..... when did videotape recorders and tapes disappear in films as objects ..... and technology....so not so much recommedning movies , but ideas and trends I find important and maybe helpful..... best from Hamburg to you Ulla..... nilz
To some extent, the question would be: which Hollywood films don't address technology, and why? Of course there's verisimilitude in costume dramas (tho look at the anachronistic technologies in Swoon, and compare to the set for Hitchcock's version of the same crime story, Rope). The classic instance is Peckinpah, who is supposed to have said that the only technologies worth a damn were the six-gun and the movie camera. Now Sam P was given to role-playing the california ranchhand, but seems too to have had a genuine fascination and nostalgic commitment to the myth of the old west. To complicate matters, The Wild Bunch reflects on the good old days - and contrasts the cowboys' horses wqith the villain's car, for instance. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is set in the 'good old days' and is equally filled with nostalgia for an even older epoch. One technology in evidece is the contrats between Billy's romantic six-gun and Garrett's corporate rifle. A brief glance at Virilio's War and Cinema is probably not necessary to indicate the relation between the movie camera and the rotary action of the six shooter. I recognise that the object of discussion is the banality of technological devices' presence in Hollywood flicks. All the same, there is a fascinating insight to be gleaned from La Valley, Albert J (1985), 'Traditions of Trickery: The Role of Special Effects in the Science Fiction Film' in George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Shadows of the Magic Lantern: Fantasy and the Science Fiction Film, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 141-58. La valley argues that the narrative business of SF movies is to establish some sort of explanation, or victory or whatever, in the conflict between the photographic (human) and the special effect (alien). The notorious product placement of the Nokia mobile tumbling from the office block early in The Matrix seems to sit between your interest in the banal and La Valley's in the special (and banality, like realism, is also a cinematic 'effect' -- as Metz once said, to some extent all cinema is a special effect) Final note: I'm impressed by two essays of Michele Pearson, one in Screen 40.2, one in WideAngle 21.1, in which she argues for a periodisatioon of digital effects movies, an early era of effects as spectacle for their own sake, and a second she dates from the early-mid 90s where effects are far more bedded into the diegetic world. Pearson has a book on effects forthcoming from I believe California UP. Like Don Ihde's distinction between 'new' technologies of which we are constantly aware and 'old' technologies which, by familiarity, become transparent (like signage in your home language is transparent while signs in another tongue are not), Pearson in common with a lot of digital artists and critics observes the passage of digital comms from new to old status, but she also observes what aestehtic impacts that has, and opens the way to a sociological analysis of what familiarities are breeding among, in this instance, film audiences. best sean Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 seanc@waikato.ac.nz http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html
participants (3)
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Bunz, Ulla K -
Nils Zurawski -
Sean Cubitt