{"id":2381,"date":"2006-02-12T08:11:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-12T08:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again\/"},"modified":"2006-02-12T08:11:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-12T08:11:00","slug":"everything-new-is-old-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html","title":{"rendered":"Everything new is old again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the \u201990s \u2014 when movies were full of references to other movies, and when CGI threatened to replace actual reality with virtual reality, etc. \u2014 but I haven\u2019t heard it come up much in conversation lately.<\/span><\/p>\n

At any rate, one of the things I love about old movies is seeing how the gags and themes and techniques that seem so newfangled nowadays actually go back to the earliest days of the artform. Yesterday I happened to watch three such movies from the 1940s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Two, Road to Zanzibar<\/i> (1941) and Road to Morocco<\/i> (1942), are part of the \u201cRoad\u201d series<\/a> that starred Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, and both films are very conscious of their own movie-ness. In Zanzibar<\/i>, there is a scene where Bing and Dorothy are in a boat, paddling down a river, and Dorothy says she saw a movie once where someone in a similar situation started to sing, and suddenly there was an orchestra on the soundtrack, even though there was clearly no orchestra in the jungle \u2014 and then Bing starts to sing to her. Thus, the film draws our attention to the artificiality of the very scene that we are watching!<\/p>\n

Then there is the scene near the end of Morocco<\/i> in which all sorts of looney mayhem breaks out, and a camel on the sidelines suddenly speaks, saying: \u201cThis is the screwiest picture I was ever in.\u201d The camel is live-action, but his mouth is a cartoon. Two minutes later, a female camel says, \u201cWhen I see how silly people behave, I\u2019m glad I\u2019m a camel.\u201d The male camel replies, \u201cWell I\u2019m glad you\u2019re a camel too, Mabel!\u201d and rolls his eyes suggestively. It\u2019s a wonderfully absurd moment, and the animation in this scene is a direct precursor to all those movies we see nowadays in which otherwise live-action animals talk with CGI mouths.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Then, on a very different note, there was Bedlam<\/a><\/i> (1946), the last of producer Val Lewton\u2019s collaborations with Boris Karloff. The story concerns an asylum in the 18th century, an era which, the opening titles note, was called \u201cthe Age of Reason\u201d; and the film concerns a contest of sorts between the cruel, cynical, legalistic apothecary-general played by Karloff and a Quaker (played by Richard Fraser) who believes that all people, even the insane, are worthy of pity. Anna Lee plays a woman who wants to help the asylum\u2019s inmates, and both Karloff and the Quaker take turns trying to impress their views on her.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s overt criticism of \u201cthe Age of Reason\u201d was enough to get my attention, but I was also surprised by one particularly bizarre moment within the asylum, in which inmate Sidney Long (Ian Wolfe) shows John Gray (Harry Harvey) a flip-it animation that he has drawn in the corners of the pages of one of his books:<\/p>\n

GRAY: But this book you have, those drawings \u2014
LONG: Oh, the pictures. You don\u2019t know half their wonder, Master Gray. If I could only get a light behind these pages, I could throw them large as life upon the wall.
GRAY: Aye, that\u2019s not a bad notion. One could charge admission! You could even tell the story Todd\u2019s writing that way.
LONG: Oh, but you forget, it\u2019s because of these pictures that I\u2019m here. That, and because I\u2019m the best lawyer in England \u2014 aye, the most skilled of them all<\/i>!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Suffice to say that Long is a little too forceful in the way he insists upon his skills as a lawyer; it\u2019s clear that he is<\/i> a little insane. But I was a bit startled to see, in the midst of this mostly serious and occasionally even grim period piece, a discussion of motion pictures<\/i>, a century and then some before their time! This isn\u2019t the sort of film that you\u2019d expect to \u201cwink\u201d at the audience like that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the \u201990s \u2014 when movies were full of references to other movies, and when CGI threatened to replace actual reality with virtual reality, etc. \u2014 but I haven\u2019t heard it come up much in conversation lately. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEverything new is old again<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Everything new is old again\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7991\/933\/400\/roadtomorocco.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. Chattaway\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Peter T. Chattaway\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html\",\"name\":\"Everything new is old again\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/5759ddf28b81af08b29eb15b4e071fde\"},\"description\":\"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Everything new is old again\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/\",\"name\":\"FilmChat\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/5759ddf28b81af08b29eb15b4e071fde\",\"name\":\"Peter T. Chattaway\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/9c4b809df092b410d749a6995bcf4f3e?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/9c4b809df092b410d749a6995bcf4f3e?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Peter T. Chattaway\"},\"description\":\"Peter T. Chattaway was the regular film critic for BC Christian News from 1992 to 2011. In addition to his award-winning film column for that paper, his news and opinion pieces have appeared in such publications as Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Bible Review and the Vancouver Sun. He has also contributed essays to the books Re-Viewing The Passion: Mel Gibson\u2019s Film and Its Critics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Scandalizing Jesus?: Kazantzakis\u2019s The Last Temptation of Christ Fifty Years on (Continuum, 2005) and The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film (De Gruyter, 2016).\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/author\/peterchattaway\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Everything new is old again","description":"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Everything new is old again","og_description":"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html","og_site_name":"FilmChat","article_published_time":"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7991\/933\/400\/roadtomorocco.jpg"}],"author":"Peter T. Chattaway","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Peter T. Chattaway","Est. reading time":"3 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html","name":"Everything new is old again","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00","dateModified":"2006-02-12T08:11:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/5759ddf28b81af08b29eb15b4e071fde"},"description":"Does anyone talk about post-modernism any more? I remember discussing that subject with quite a few people back in the '90s -- when movies were full of","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/everything-new-is-old-again.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Everything new is old again"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/","name":"FilmChat","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/5759ddf28b81af08b29eb15b4e071fde","name":"Peter T. Chattaway","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/9c4b809df092b410d749a6995bcf4f3e?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/9c4b809df092b410d749a6995bcf4f3e?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Peter T. Chattaway"},"description":"Peter T. Chattaway was the regular film critic for BC Christian News from 1992 to 2011. In addition to his award-winning film column for that paper, his news and opinion pieces have appeared in such publications as Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Bible Review and the Vancouver Sun. He has also contributed essays to the books Re-Viewing The Passion: Mel Gibson\u2019s Film and Its Critics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Scandalizing Jesus?: Kazantzakis\u2019s The Last Temptation of Christ Fifty Years on (Continuum, 2005) and The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film (De Gruyter, 2016).","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/author\/peterchattaway"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}