Week 10: Mise-en-abyme

What are the five conditions that gave rise to the New Hollywood (here defined as post-1975)?

1. A new generation of filmmakers "Movie Brats"
2. new marketing strategies
3. new media ownership and management styles
4. new technologies of sound and image reproduction
5. new delivery systems

What does Elsaesser mean by New Hollywood being defined either as “the different as same” or “the same as different.”

Elsaesser writes, "The 'New Hollywood' of Coppola, Scorses and Altman: is 'new' in opposition to 'old' Hollywood (the different as same: Coppola playing at being a reclusive mogul like Howard Hughes and an 'auteur maudit' like Orson Welles), or is it 'new' in relation to Hollywood assimilating its own opposite (the same as different): Arthure Penn borrowing from Truffaut, Altman from Godard, and so on.

Elsaesser is illustrating a way to compare old and new Hollywood. Was this new breed of filmmakers simply a reflection or those from the past or were they really doing something different only to be assimilated into the Hollywood system.

Elsaesser argues that unlike in Europe, where ruptures in realism were found in art-cinema, in Hollywood ruptures in realism were found in “minor genres and debased modes.” What genre in particular is he talking about? In what ways do you find ruptures in realism in this genre?

Elsaesser is referring to 'B-movies' like the sci-fi film, the 'creature-feature' or monster film, and the many other variations on the horror film. The horror film especially permitted deviations and transgressions of the representational norm. In contrast to maintaining a coherent diegetic world and the rule of narrative causality, horror films almost by definition disrupt the cause and effect patterns of such classical devices as shot/reverse shot, continuity and reverse field editing in order to create a sense of mystery, of the unexpected, of surprise, inconruity and horror, misleading the viewer by withholding information or keeping the causal agent, the monster, offscreen for as long as possible.

How is the sound/image relationship in horror films fundamentally different than other classical genres?

Elsaesser explains the use of sound and image as synchronized in classical hollywood perfectly reproduces the question /answer pattern of linear narrative. The horror film emphasizes the presence of sound in order that the absence of its source becomes localized by the min more vividly and more like a fantasm.

How do allusions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula function like a mise-en-abyme?

Elsaesser cites the commentary on commentary found in Coppola's pulp fiction of story telling. No less than sixty titles are referenced, thirty plus Dracula films and a dense intertextuality of others like Lumiere's Arrival of a Train (1985), Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete (1945), Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1928), and the list goes on. The layering of interpretation of Stoker's Dracula through each of these intertextual references creates a sort of infinite reflection of the original text.