Conversation between Jarvis Cocker and David Thompson - on Youtube - effect of movies on us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCxEG2NQv7c&t=3942s


What did Hollywood do to us? It turned us into spectators. And the TV made it worse as people spent hours a day watching it. It made us feel that participation in politics is futile. People in the sixties took to the streets and marched against nuclear weapons - they don't do that anymore. TV has an enormous appetite for disaster and crisis and we will watch the end of the world on TV.

The entertainment that came from the movies was fantastic, inspirational. Now movies come to us, closer and closer (beamed into our heads?) As children we think - "that's what it will be like when I grow up". Movies are always for young people. They teach you, when you are young, how to look, how to walk across a room, how to look at someone of the opposite sex.

Hollywood films were like advertisements for life. From the beginning people in high places were alarmed about the movies. They were feeding poor people dreams that cannot be realised. That's dangerous, politically, and those in authority are still afraid of the movies.

They were made by people who had shaky backgrounds and made fortunes [like Charlie Chaplin] giving themselves the means to behave badly, which behaviour attracted a lot of publicity. The Code came into effect to stop films showing moral lapses so that Hollywood, by policing itself, could avoid being censored by the state. But in the long term it didn't really matter. In the 1960s the code broke down. Crime was shown as well as sex - censorship was abandoned.

For a long time America was the model for movies. Films expressed the belief that if you came to America everything will be alright. You will be fulfilled and happy. This cannot be possible, mathematically. People went to the movies to see futures for themselves. These futures were realised by very few ordinary people - but in Hollywood dreams were made possible - Louis Meyer, Clarke Cable were two examples. This mass medium ensured a certain kind of order and aspiration.

Buster Keaton made a film called "Sherlock Junior" where he is a projectionist and he enters into the screen. It tells the audience that it knows that's what they want to do - be up there in the film. Purple Rose of Cairo, too, is a very interesting film showing how people's lives interact with film.

But now people are having to face the fact that their desires are not going to be fulfilled. Were they idiots ever to think it? People have distanced reality through the screen. The reason we go to the movies is to see wonderful people and imagine you are them. The kitchens in movies (and on TV in America)  are large, the clothes are smart, the people are good-looking.

 Religious faiths had said to people: "God is watching and at the end of your life of mundanity and suffering you will get what you truly deserve." While this view of the world was fading away movies came along as a popular fiction that everyone could relate to. Everyone in the world. It was in the medium. It was a myth that replaced religious faith. But now the myths have been blown apart. What happens next?

Some people believe that now the world will end. We have so many problems that it's difficult to believe that we can solve them.

The way the vocabulary of film developed - the techniques - happened very quickly. Close ups - all over the world people learned that you can vary the position of the camera. Then you are into two cameras and editing the film. In Russia there was great experimentation to see how meaning was effected by making different shots. People discovered that you can play with the order of the stories - and the audience makes the meaning. When the film is finally shown to the audience is when you know whether your film is any good. Film is an interactive medium.

In the early days of the 20th century the Nickleodeon showed U.S. audiences things they didn't know about - like the pyramids in Egypt, a tiger walking through a jungle. A flood, a disaster. The basic visual information was wonderful for people. But now people are blasé, and take the motion they can see for granted.

If you show people wilder and wilder things - faster and greater than life  - through CGI - and other special effects people will perhaps attend less to the human face, although this is still the most powerful communicator.

Film is in our blood but TV is more so.  We absorb what we watch and how it is constructed. TV may give us 5 hours a day to absorb. Using the remote gives us something like jazz - as we move from one programme to another. TV is anti-concentration. But TV is over - as it was. Using the internet is not as passive as TV.

As TV develops there are more and more invitations to people to come on down, or participate in shows. Young people film themselves and each other all the time. They want to be in films. Some achieve fame by making suicide films.

When you go to the cinema, there in the dark, you don't know what horror you are going to be shown. Kids love to be frightened. You can't forget some of the frightening moments you see on screen - such as the scene in Alien when the creature bursts out of John Hurt's chest.

When a character in Hitchcock climbs a staircase - they're vulnerable. Playing with fear is a part of the nature of movies. The audience is helpless. Films are like dreams, at a different level. Dreams are also out of our control.

Now people are watching movies or TV content more and more on their own - something which Edison foresaw. This changes society. At rock festivals people do things in crowds - this is now a rare experience.

Jean Harlow - seemed trashy, sexually ready, didn't seem to be wearing underwear. In the thirties she seemed to be the rawest star in Hollywood, and she often appeared with Clark Gable. She lived dangerously, recklessly, and she didn't take care of herself. Health had little place in the culture. Now movie stars try to preserve their health and their youth - they didn't used to.

Howard Hughes - he is an example of the rich kid who wanted to get into the moves, screw movie stars. His father made a fortune out of inventing a drilling head for the oil industry. As a young man he was charming and personable, but he went crazy. He had everything he could possibly want, and he lived and died alone.

David Thompson sums up: We know we need to dream - it's vital to sleep. Sometimes people are disturbed by their dreams. Freud could tell people what their dreams meant but he didn't say he could make them change or stop. We dream helplessly, randomly. Don't worry about casting the dream out. Probably the truth is that you're going to die and you want to be alive, and you live with an intellectual struggle between those things. For 100 years moving film has had a profound effect on that conflict, sometimes terrifying, sometimes like heaven. You probably can't have one without the other.

Charles Dickens - a life by Claire Tomalin

I took up this book after watching "The Invisible Woman" which I found a really terrible film. There is hardly any dialogue and lots of shots of women staring miserably out of the window, or at each other. It's by Abi Morgan, but it is no good at all. But it did make me curious about Dickens (who was played in the film by Ralph Fiennes (very good)).

This is a terrific life of Dickens which goes some way to evaluating his works as well as telling the story of what he did. His childhood was blighted by having vey irresponsible parents. But he took to journalism and then to writing stories that would sell magazines. He was a very adventurous traveller.  He loved putting on plays and he loved the theatre and the people of the theatre. He loved excursions, booze and parties, and had some great friends whom he loved. He had a great need to walk for 8 miles or so around London every day, or further - sometimes much further. And he was a great worker. When he really needed to work, he worked extremely hard.

Some of this endless action must have come from great sexual energy, and he kept his wife pregnant most of the time. She had 10 children who lived, and one baby died in infancy. Dickens seems not to have loved these children very much. He sent the boys to France to school all except the eldest, who was educated at Eton, where he didn't shine. Dickens could see the need for education but he couldn't find the kind that would be useful to his sons and daughters. Only one son seemed bright, and that was the youngest, called Henry, who went to Oxford, and became a lawyer. Dickens was really proud of him, and taught him shorthand, which he thought would be useful to him at lectures. The rest of his family was a flock of dependents. He had dependent parents, (his father was a scoundrel). dependent brothers and sisters, and a dependent wife and sister-in-law, and a huge brood of non-earning children.

On top of these, Dickens took on the care of fallen women, in a fallen women's home. He did this with a rich friend of his, Miss Coutts, and there was always a manager of the home too. The aim of the enterprise was to reform the fallen women, and teach them wifely skills and habits, so that they could go out to the colonies (including South Africa) and marry men who needed them. Claire Tomalin estimates that this was a very successful enterprise. Not all the women stayed to be reformed, and if they broke the rules they were forced to go, but the attempt at reform succeeded in many cases and the home did very useful work.

All this ended when Dickens was a rich and famous man in his fifties. Suddenly, he wanted more out of his sex life than his habitual life with Catherine. When he met the Ternan sisters - an acting family - but respectable - he changed his whole life. He left his wife. He risked becoming an outcast, and indeed, by the standards of the day he should have become an outcast. He blamed his wife for the ending of the marriage and he was very secretive about the exact nature of his relationship with Nelly Ternan.

The poor girl! She was 18 when she met the great man and clearly she wanted very much to say "No" to him. But he was so persistent and got the whole family so much in his debt by doing them all favours (especially having her sister's voice trained) that I suppose she felt that she must say Yes. So Dickens hid her away in France for a while (he loved France) and then he set her up in a house in Peckham. And she was his mistress for a few days a week until he died.

(She was then 32. Luckily she looked much younger, So she pretended she was much younger, and that she had known Dickens when she was a child (I suppose the whole family had to join in this deception) and she married a man 12 years younger than herself who didn't know her history of consorting with Dickens. He was a clergyman. )

So, Dickens. He was a great man. He was an extraordinary man. But at some point he decided he could have whatever he wanted, and therefore he behaved abominably to a young girl who had no man to defend her. Yes, in later years they must have had some happiness. But it involved him being intensely cruel to a wife who had done nothing whatever wrong, except bore him and grow quite fat. He made his cruel reasons for leaving her very public. He was also very heartless to his sons.

Fascinating man, and in many ways a very good one.