.jpg)
THE popular art of cinema, more than any of the other arts, except literature and music, provides us with the opportunity to stimulate various feelings of happiness, pleasure, and optimism, not only by looking at specific films, but being influenced by their content to find a similar happiness and pleasure in our real lives. This pleasure, of course, is not some sort of twisted interpretation of pleasure, based on refusing to see when and where one is realistically causing pain and harm to others. Neither is this pleasure of a recycled informational or historical sort, which one may feel by looking at violent historical or contemporary film stories of conflicts, where one side is vanquished by the other; even though many such books and films have provided superb stories we can certainly learn many real human truths from.
Examples
The majority of film classics TCM presents take us back to that period of American/Hollywood film studio productions (1920s to 60s) when studio owners, film directors, actors, actresses, and cinematographers were invigorated both by the freshness, possibilities and freedom of the film medium at their disposal, as well as the social chance it offered to mould their society, nation, and even a receptive world towards a more contented, egalitarian, just, and prosperous direction.
This opportunity film offers was once grasped excitedly; this is a direction different from an historical one founded only on prior colonial competition and conflict, violent wild frontier expansions, African slavery and exploitive labour, entrenched racism, civil war, and the worship of financial profit.
Reruns
When we look at most classic films rerun by TCM, we see where, from the 1960s back to the 20s, thousands of such idealistic films were released in which men and women enjoyed both sexual and professional freedom; where lower and higher classes could mix, co-operate, and intermarry; where races could interact rather than segregate; where unorthodox artists could achieve an audience and financial success; where justness and justice could prevail; where characters could reveal their pitfalls, errors, vices, and guidance of conscience; and where unconventionality could be encouraged, tolerated, and supported to produce creative products of liberating influence, such as those very films projecting these ideals.
By placing emphasis on a positive and educationally constructive role to film as art, these classic films serve as a vital buffer, a healing replacement for the negative effects of a new scientific and technologically progressive lifestyle sweeping the world.
There are apparent negative effects to such progress; the world is not a Utopia. Such progress affects the breakup of traditional family structures, and stimulates the desperation of trying not to be poor in a competitive money-driven modern lifestyle.
Because progressive material and rapid communication changes produce entropic effects on old inherited traditional social structures anywhere (but first evident in Europe and North America, then across areas of the world gaining the prerequisites of unstoppable material and communicative advances), the important artists, especially in the narrative arts of literature and film, formulate new social attitudes and lifestyles in their works, which can acknowledge these changes, while reasserting sensitive, caring social values and morals from creative viewpoints which are relevant to these changes and their problems sweeping the world.
Modern European Classics
The permanent value of the best modern European film classics of the 1960s, directed by Italian directors like Antonioni, Fellini, Bellocchio, etc, and French directors like Truffaut, Lelouch, Rohmer, etc, rests on the powerful way they succeed in providing new social values; new conscientious acts of morality which maintain necessary human values in a changing world.
However, one original influence of such modern European films mentioned above is classic American/Hollywood films from the 1930s to the early 60s. Nineteen thirty-three, the year Franklin .D. Roosevelt became America’s president for a decade, was one of the greatest years of early Hollywood upbeat productions, as well as 1939 and throughout the 40s. Roosevelt realized an important point about the Arts in a changing world, that where government policies may fail to be executed as they were intended, the giving of freedom to the cinematic artist especially can reform nations via conscientious appeal.
Roosevelt was very interested in this medium, ushering in uncensored film documentary reports on America, and later as America entered the Second World War, tasking an information agency with guiding zealous, independent Hollywood productions away from slurring or insulting the image of Japanese or Germans in their films, since, as a people, such nations would not always be their enemies, and later should be welcomed back as friends of the Western allies.
Specific film examples
One can perhaps see evidence of this attitude in Greer Garson’s role in ‘MRS MINIVER’ of 1942, directed by American William Wyler, and a classic masterpiece of outstanding social and liberal family values.
Roosevelt encouraged the role of the artist as conscience of society anywhere, and both the social and innovative freedom permitted of American/Hollywood films led to those films which deconstruct or replace the disorienting effect of traditional values being gradually eroded by the influences of material and communicative progress.
Citizens are now compelled by their own desire for understanding and contentment in a changing world to acquaint themselves with these films of social education, as distinct from the limited range of formal school education. Indeed, it is the pre-and-post-World War II generations across the Western world primarily who strengthened themselves to rebuild a war-shattered world by seeing the best films of the 20s to the 60s by American/Hollywood directors like Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, Mitchell Leisen, Edmund Goulding, Gregory La Cava, George Cukor, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Mervyn Le Roy, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, John Sturges, Jack Conway, Raoul Walsh, Delmer Daves, Stanley Kramer, Stanley Donen, Jean Negulesco, Sidney Lumet, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Frank Tashlin, Robert Mulligan, Blake Edwards, Robert Wise, and Richard Quine. The many films of these directors have to be seen to be believed.
Film as social education
What is social education as exemplified by such classic cinema? Take director Mervyn Le Roy’s famous film, ‘RANDOM HARVEST’ of 1942. Ronald Colman and Greer Garson’s relationship is about mental or emotional trauma being repaired by benevolent personal and social acts of social conscience.
In 1966, Le Roy returned to the theme of mental trauma and memory loss in his wonderful film, ‘MOMENT TO MOMENT’, in which two women, Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman, cooperate to conceal the traumatic result of Seberg’s brief affair with a young artistic man while her husband, a psychologist, is delayed away on a lecture tour. This stunning film’s climax, in which every secret is revealed, understood, forgiven, and transcended, is a masterpiece of film’s ability to show the possibility of liberal social attitudes producing mature civilized behaviour and mature moral standards.
Similarly, director Richard Quine’s ‘STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET’ of 1960, brilliantly enacted by Kim Novak, Kirk Douglas, and Ernie Kovacs, shows where two couples, neighbourhood acquaintances — Kim Novak as an art-conscious housewife, and her business oriented husband, Kirk Douglas, an innovative creative architect and his bland family-devoted wife — become jolted out of their routine lifestyle when Novak and Douglas begin to have a passionate love affair.
How was this possible? Both Novak and Douglas were first married to partners who fulfilled their traditional marital roles, but later, when Novak and Douglas meet accidentally, they find a more needed and fulfilling relationship, based on mutual creative interests and appreciation outside their initial marriage ties.
This classic film’s honesty provides lessons in social education which are attached to personal development.
Examples
The majority of film classics TCM presents take us back to that period of American/Hollywood film studio productions (1920s to 60s) when studio owners, film directors, actors, actresses, and cinematographers were invigorated both by the freshness, possibilities and freedom of the film medium at their disposal, as well as the social chance it offered to mould their society, nation, and even a receptive world towards a more contented, egalitarian, just, and prosperous direction.
This opportunity film offers was once grasped excitedly; this is a direction different from an historical one founded only on prior colonial competition and conflict, violent wild frontier expansions, African slavery and exploitive labour, entrenched racism, civil war, and the worship of financial profit.
Reruns
When we look at most classic films rerun by TCM, we see where, from the 1960s back to the 20s, thousands of such idealistic films were released in which men and women enjoyed both sexual and professional freedom; where lower and higher classes could mix, co-operate, and intermarry; where races could interact rather than segregate; where unorthodox artists could achieve an audience and financial success; where justness and justice could prevail; where characters could reveal their pitfalls, errors, vices, and guidance of conscience; and where unconventionality could be encouraged, tolerated, and supported to produce creative products of liberating influence, such as those very films projecting these ideals.
By placing emphasis on a positive and educationally constructive role to film as art, these classic films serve as a vital buffer, a healing replacement for the negative effects of a new scientific and technologically progressive lifestyle sweeping the world.
There are apparent negative effects to such progress; the world is not a Utopia. Such progress affects the breakup of traditional family structures, and stimulates the desperation of trying not to be poor in a competitive money-driven modern lifestyle.
Because progressive material and rapid communication changes produce entropic effects on old inherited traditional social structures anywhere (but first evident in Europe and North America, then across areas of the world gaining the prerequisites of unstoppable material and communicative advances), the important artists, especially in the narrative arts of literature and film, formulate new social attitudes and lifestyles in their works, which can acknowledge these changes, while reasserting sensitive, caring social values and morals from creative viewpoints which are relevant to these changes and their problems sweeping the world.
Modern European Classics
The permanent value of the best modern European film classics of the 1960s, directed by Italian directors like Antonioni, Fellini, Bellocchio, etc, and French directors like Truffaut, Lelouch, Rohmer, etc, rests on the powerful way they succeed in providing new social values; new conscientious acts of morality which maintain necessary human values in a changing world.
However, one original influence of such modern European films mentioned above is classic American/Hollywood films from the 1930s to the early 60s. Nineteen thirty-three, the year Franklin .D. Roosevelt became America’s president for a decade, was one of the greatest years of early Hollywood upbeat productions, as well as 1939 and throughout the 40s. Roosevelt realized an important point about the Arts in a changing world, that where government policies may fail to be executed as they were intended, the giving of freedom to the cinematic artist especially can reform nations via conscientious appeal.
Roosevelt was very interested in this medium, ushering in uncensored film documentary reports on America, and later as America entered the Second World War, tasking an information agency with guiding zealous, independent Hollywood productions away from slurring or insulting the image of Japanese or Germans in their films, since, as a people, such nations would not always be their enemies, and later should be welcomed back as friends of the Western allies.
Specific film examples
One can perhaps see evidence of this attitude in Greer Garson’s role in ‘MRS MINIVER’ of 1942, directed by American William Wyler, and a classic masterpiece of outstanding social and liberal family values.
Roosevelt encouraged the role of the artist as conscience of society anywhere, and both the social and innovative freedom permitted of American/Hollywood films led to those films which deconstruct or replace the disorienting effect of traditional values being gradually eroded by the influences of material and communicative progress.
Citizens are now compelled by their own desire for understanding and contentment in a changing world to acquaint themselves with these films of social education, as distinct from the limited range of formal school education. Indeed, it is the pre-and-post-World War II generations across the Western world primarily who strengthened themselves to rebuild a war-shattered world by seeing the best films of the 20s to the 60s by American/Hollywood directors like Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, Mitchell Leisen, Edmund Goulding, Gregory La Cava, George Cukor, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Mervyn Le Roy, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, John Sturges, Jack Conway, Raoul Walsh, Delmer Daves, Stanley Kramer, Stanley Donen, Jean Negulesco, Sidney Lumet, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Frank Tashlin, Robert Mulligan, Blake Edwards, Robert Wise, and Richard Quine. The many films of these directors have to be seen to be believed.
Film as social education
What is social education as exemplified by such classic cinema? Take director Mervyn Le Roy’s famous film, ‘RANDOM HARVEST’ of 1942. Ronald Colman and Greer Garson’s relationship is about mental or emotional trauma being repaired by benevolent personal and social acts of social conscience.
In 1966, Le Roy returned to the theme of mental trauma and memory loss in his wonderful film, ‘MOMENT TO MOMENT’, in which two women, Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman, cooperate to conceal the traumatic result of Seberg’s brief affair with a young artistic man while her husband, a psychologist, is delayed away on a lecture tour. This stunning film’s climax, in which every secret is revealed, understood, forgiven, and transcended, is a masterpiece of film’s ability to show the possibility of liberal social attitudes producing mature civilized behaviour and mature moral standards.
Similarly, director Richard Quine’s ‘STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET’ of 1960, brilliantly enacted by Kim Novak, Kirk Douglas, and Ernie Kovacs, shows where two couples, neighbourhood acquaintances — Kim Novak as an art-conscious housewife, and her business oriented husband, Kirk Douglas, an innovative creative architect and his bland family-devoted wife — become jolted out of their routine lifestyle when Novak and Douglas begin to have a passionate love affair.
How was this possible? Both Novak and Douglas were first married to partners who fulfilled their traditional marital roles, but later, when Novak and Douglas meet accidentally, they find a more needed and fulfilling relationship, based on mutual creative interests and appreciation outside their initial marriage ties.
This classic film’s honesty provides lessons in social education which are attached to personal development.
