Harmony in the South West: Blue Juice (1995)

Blue Juice (Carl Prechezer, 1995) is set in Cornwall in the South West of England, and though it follows a group of surfers, the characters and the action are not located in an exclusive insider culture, as Karen Lury (2000: 101) has suggested. Rather, that subculture is open to outsiders who are capable of recognising its value, and is located within the United Kingdom. The narrative follows local hero, JC, who is about travel around the world with his girlfriend Chloe, but finds his life disrupted by the arrival of his childhood friends from London. The Londoners abuse and resist the regional culture of the South West, but are eventually won round and, along with JC, find their lives changed by their experience of the region. The focus of the film is on the characters, and it is through looking at their development that I argue that Blue Juice makes a case for the protection of regional subcultures in the UK.

In Blue Juice, the South West is represented as an organic and natural place, with an emphasis on the landscape, the coast, and the sea. The film divides sequences through shots of the waves breaking or of the landscape and at numerous points the surfers comment on the build of the swell out to sea, so that the environment is a constant presence in the film. The local community demonstrates an intimate awareness of the environment – for example, JC is able to perfectly predict Terry’s route along the coast; and the environment is also represented as being the guarantor of authenticity, as is evident in the sequence where JC and Chloe at the blowhole, which ‘knows’ when they are lying. Though the film is set in the South West of England some of the surfing sequences were filmed in Lanzarote, and as a consequence of this there is a break in the continuity between the overcast climate of Cornwall and the bright sunshine of the wave sequences. This break in continuity has an impact on how we perceive the region: JC’s description of the swell at the Boneyard shows him and his friends against the dark cliffs and grey skies of England, but as he looks out to sea the point of view shot associated with him shows the waves in bright sunshine giving the surf an aura of fantasy. The unreal nature of the sea is also evident in JC’s nightmares of being dashed against the rocks. The South West is not simply an objective and material space – it is also a state of mind. In contrast to Cornwall, London is an urban jumble that is marked by the static skyscrapers and congested roads that lack the energy and fantasy of the surf. The capital is first shown in a shot of the Thames, but unlike the open waters of Cornwall, the river is hemmed in on either side by the city, and represents the attitudes of Londoners to the South West, which are shown to be narrow-minded and stereotypical. Cornwall is represented as being far from London: the phones are unreliable and Terry is unable to call his fiancée, while the trains only run on certain days out of the tourist season. However, this does not mean that Cornwall is cut off from the rest of the nation, and though there is a vocal Cornish nationalist movement, the film clearly places the South West within the UK. At a number of points in the film the local radio station, Smuggler FM, breaks up the action with the strong Cornish accents of its presenters who point out that though the county is on the edge of the UK, far from being the last county in England it is, in fact, the first. The relationship between Cornwall and London is thus a matter of perspective. For example, the radio presenters counter the claim that the climate of the South West is ‘bleak’ by arguing that it is ‘fresh.’ The attitude of those from the capital is that the South West is of peripheral significance to the nation, but the film shows that in experiencing the regional the Londoners are able to adjust their perspectives on life.

The South West has a transformative effect on those from outside the region, in this case JC’s three friends from London – Terry, Josh, and Dean. Terry is a neurotic pub landlord, who spends the first third of the film complaining about his sinuses and migraines. He is so reserved that in order to get him out of the capital it is necessary for Dean and Josh to drug and kidnap him. He is resistant to anything that might force him to experience something new telling his friends that, ‘You can’t make me enjoy myself.’ He is engaged but lacks anything in common with his fiancée, Sarah, beyond watching television and videos, and is content to lead his uninteresting life in London having never experienced any of the alternatives. Terry’s new experiences come via his first attempt at surfing and Ecstasy, and he leaves behind his boring persona to act out his fantasies. At the rave he appears as the Silver Surfer, with his body sprayed in silver paint, and, having bumped into an actress who played Guinevere in a television show from his childhood, he arrives at a country hotel dressed as a knight and tries to carry her off. Finally he is reunited with Sarah but no longer wants to return to his life in London, and at the end of the film we see Terry and Sarah sitting on an Australian beach waiting for the sun to rise before a days surfing. Though the South West is distant from London, it is thus not the surfer community of Cornwall who are portrayed as being provincial but those from the capital who have lost contact with the rest of the country, and by going beyond the limits of London Terry is able to overcome his closed and neurotic personality to explore the world.

As a top London record producer, Josh is too ‘cool’ to get involved in life in Cornwall. His refusal to participate is evident in his manner of dress, and his hats and sunglasses allow him to remain removed within the group, and his overriding concern for his image is evident when he states that he does not want to look like an ‘agricultural worker.’ Somewhat incongruously for a film set in the South West, Blue Juice features a Northern Soul night at a local hall, and it is here that Josh is confronted over his appropriation of a Northern Soul record, Ossie Sands’ ‘The Price of Pain,’ and his abuse of the song in remixing it as a dance track. In his defence he claims that he was only servicing the market, but the point is made that the London culture is parasitical in its relationship to the other regions, and that regional subcultures serve as the source for commercial exploitation in the capital. Earlier Josh has made a point of establishing his presence at the home of the Northern Soul scene, the Wigan Casino, in order to impress Junior, a female DJ, and he is happy to draw on the cultural cachet this gives him even if he does not respect the scene itself. It is later revealed that Junior is Ossie Sands’ daughter. At the Soul night he is able to rediscover the joys of the scene, and sheds his cool persona to dance awkwardly with the others. At the end of the film, Josh is shown producing a record for Ossie indicating his return to authenticity, but alongside him sits Junior who prompts him to do a remix because they ‘gotta pay the bills.’ The film does not argue that contemporary culture is inherently inferior to older cultural forms, or that regional subcultures should be regarded as pure, untouchable, and closed to other cultural forms, but that the appropriation of a subculture by the mainstream without respect needs to be countered.

The quality of economic activity to the region is also a significant element of the film, and is manifested in Dean’s attempts to find a career for himself. The environment of the South West sustains the local community – economic activity is related to the environment with the land is used for farming, and the sea for fishing and surfing; while London, lacking any natural resources, exists as a cultural parasite exploiting the regions. Dean is, in his own words, a ‘professional fuck up,’ and in contrast to the supportive community of the surfers, the Londoners are constantly sniping at and trying to undermine others: he sells fake drugs to the locals while claming to live in the area, sells out Josh to a tabloid newspaper, and is prepared to sacrifice JC on the rocks of the Boneyard in order to secure a job for himself. Mike, the newspaper editor from London, tries to manipulate the surfing of the Boneyard for his own ends, adding to the damning view the film projects of London as exploiting the regions. Mike provokes a dramatic reaction from Shaper, who gives up twenty years of non-violence to punch him in the face. Though he adopts the style of a surfer and attempts to ingratiate himself into the subculture by using the slang of the surfers, Dean is disrespectful to others around him and when he goes surfing crashes through other surfers in the sea. Style has been identified as a key element of subcultures (Hebdige 1979), but in Blue Juice membership of a particular subculture requires more than the adoption of the surface elements of style – it demands commitment and respect. Though he pretends to be a surfer, Dean learns this lesson the hard way when he knocks himself unconscious whilst trying to surf the deadly Boneyard. Terry, by contrast, does acquire the style of a surfer (or at least he gets a tan and grows a goatee), but only once he has made a conscious decision to broaden his experience. At the film’s end, Dean has discovered his place in the world and chooses to remain in the South West working as a surfboard maker apprenticed to Shaper. (This choice recalls Renton’s decision in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) to choose life, and Ewan McGregor plays both roles). As Dean’s example demonstrates, economic activity is related to the everyday life of the surfers and affords them the opportunity to work in the production of their leisure time.

This focus on economic activity that is appropriate to the lives of the surfers is also a feature Chloe’s determination to buy the local café that is the hangout for the surfers. If the metonymic image of banal regionalism is the ‘flag hanging unnoticed on the public building,’ in Blue Juice this is literally the case as in one shot a flag depicting an ice cream with the word ‘Cornish’ emblazoned upon it hangs limply on the local café. Chloe seeks to preserve the café from being taken over by an outsider and turned into a ‘Captain Ahab’s theme bar,’ and her efforts to buy the lease are a form of resistance to the homogenisation of culture that threatens to erode the distinctiveness of regional cultures. In order to raise the money to buy the lease, she organises a rave on a local beach, again emphasising the close relationship between the community and the landscape: the cliffs prove a natural amphitheatre and the beach functions as a dance floor. As JC has to surf the Boneyard in order to rescue Dean he is unable to get Chloe the money she needs to buy the café. To make up for this he purchases a broken down shack that he and the other surfers renovate, abandoning the old place because it no longer represents the authenticity of South West.

JC, the local hero who surfed the Boneyard, is approaching his thirtieth birthday has decided to travel round the world surfing and is trying to persuade his girlfriend Chloe to join him. His decision to move on is articulated by his fear that in settling down in one place he will end up like Terry – boring, neurotic, and miserable. Though he has been in Cornwall for a number of years, JC is caught between his friends from London and his life in the South West, and tries to please everyone all the time but ends up pleasing no one, and this is derived from the fact that he has yet to resolve for himself which regional identity (London or South West) he should choose. His exasperation with his friends from London shows that JC has moved beyond their provincialism and exploitation of the regions, while his willingness to leave the South West indicates that he has not fully accepted his own place within the community. As a consequence of this he finds himself placeless, an outsider in both regions. This is represented spatially when Chloe kicks him out of their home, and he is forced to share with his friends in a run down caravan that is removed from the town. His failure to commit leaves him increasingly marginalised from the surfers (one even asks if he can date Chloe once JC has left), but does not reconcile him to his London friends who cause him nothing but trouble. Ironically it is Dean who resolves this conflict of identities for him: recalling the first time they came to Cornwall fresh out of school, Dean remembers that JC stood up on his first attempt at surfing and that he was a ‘natural.’ Unlike Dean, JC’s regional identity is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of destiny: though he is a Londoner by birth he his decision to support Chloe and remain in the region reflects his own recognition that he has found his natural place in the world.

Ben Thompson argues that: ‘For all its multiple happy-endings, Blue Juice’s final message is that the search for cultural validation and meaningful career development in post-industrial Britain is by no means an easy one’ (1995: 44). Though it may prove to be difficult, Blue Juice’s final message is that such cultural validation is possible: the ageing hippie surfer, Shaper, wonders whether he will be able to levitate if all things were in harmony, and at the close of the film he does indeed rise above the ground because the problems of the surfers and the Londoners are resolved by establishing a harmony between the region and the capital. As Lury writes, the ‘representation of a particular community by the film is therefore designed to construct a somewhat idealised local culture as a place outwith, and literally distant from, the commercial taint and inauthenticity represented by London’ (2000: 101); but this idealised community is located within the nation and makes the claim for the importance of regional subcultures to the life of the nation. It is the distance of the community from London, the very fact that it is ‘outwith,’ which gives the South West its uniqueness and establishes its relevance within the UK.

References

Lury, K. (2000) Here and then: space, place, and nostalgia in British youth cinema of the 1990s, in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI: 100-108.

Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.

Thompson, B. (1995) Blue Juice, Sight and Sound 5 (9): 44.

Average shot lengths in the films of Terence Davies

Cinemetrics is the statistical study of film style, and has primarily been applied in the analysis of shot length distributions. To date, the key statistic used to describe the distribution of shot lengths in a film has been the mean shot length. However, shot length distributions are typically positively skewed with a number of outlying data points; and, as a result, the mean shot length is unlikely to be an informative statistic of film style. While log transformation of shot length presents one solution in dealing with such data, it is not universally applicable as shot length distributions are often neither normally nor log normally distributed (Salt 2006: 389-396). Censoring data is undesirable as outlying shot lengths may be a significant element of a film’s style: removing the opening shot from Touch of Evil (1958) or the traffic jam from Weekend (1967) from our analysis would be to take away arguably the most distinctive (and certainly the most famous) elements of these film’s style. The median shot length is a more reliable statistic when discussing shot length distributions, as it it is unaffected by those factors (skew, outliers) that render the mean suspect. In this post, I demonstrate the difference between the mean and the median shot length.

Methods and statistical analyses

Shot length data for Terence Davies’ trilogy of films Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983) was accessed from the Cinemetrics database (Vasconcelos 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). Shot length data was summarised with descriptive statistics, and the distributions were represented as box plots. The differences between these distributions were analysed using the Kruskal-Wallis test and a Dunn post hoc test.

Results

A statistical summary of Davies’ trilogy of films is presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Statistical summary of three films by Terence Davies

Basing an analysis on the mean shot lengths for these films, we would conclude (1) that Children (14.5s) and Death and Transfiguration (14.9s) have similar distributions, and (2) that these films are both different from Madonna and Child (19.6s). However, it is clear that the distributions of shot lengths in these films are positively skewed; and, as the maximum shot length of each film is substantially grater than the upper quartile, there are a number of outlying data points for each distribution. Consequently, the mean shot length is unlikely to be a reliable statistic of film style due to the asymmetrical nature of the distribution and the influence of outliers, which cause the mean value to be shifted to the higher end of the distribution. As the median is a positional rather than a computational average it is unaffected by the presence of extreme shot lengths, and as such is more reliable when dealing with the skewed distributions we typically find for shot lengths. As we are not required to censor the data by removing extreme shot lengths, the median also has the advantage of allowing us to use the complete data set for a film. Focussing on the median shot lengths, we can see that Children (9.4s) differs from both Madonna and Child (12.8s) and Death and Transformation (13.8s): although it has the greater number of outlying data points and the longest individual shot, with a lower median, lesser lower and upper quartiles, and a narrower interquartile range, Children is cut much quicker than the other two films. The two other films have median shot lengths that are much more similar than their mean shot lengths. A nonparametric analysis of the variance of the shot length distributions of these films (α = 0.05) shows that there is a significant overall difference (H_c = 6.9116, P = 0.0316, Kruskal-Wallis), and applying the Dunn test (Bonferroni corrected α = 0.0333) shows that this difference occurs between Children and Death and Transfiguration (Z = 2.2353, P = 0.0127) and Madonna and Child (Z = 2.0186, P = 0.0218); while there is no significant difference between Death and Transfiguration and Madonna and Child (Z = 0.2702, P = 0.3935). These features of the style of these films can clearly be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 The distribution of shot lengths in three films by Terence Davies

Conclusion

The mean shot length is unreliable as a statistic of film style, and its use may lead researchers to draw erroneous conclusions about the style of a film or group of film films. The median shot length is a superior statistic of the distribution of shot lengths in a film as it is unaffected by the skewed nature of the data and should be used in cinemetric analyses in place of the mean. In the case of the Terence Davies films discussed here, the use of the mean shot length as a statistic of film style would lead us to draw the wrong conclusion that Children and Death and Transfiguration are similar to one another but different from Madonna and Child, when in fact it is Children that is significantly different to the other two films, which show no overall difference.

References

Salt, B. (2006) Moving into Pictures: More on Film History, Style, and Analysis. London: Starwood.

Vasconcelos, C. (2009a) Children (The Terence Davies Trilogy), http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=2869, accessed 10 April 2009.

Vasconcelos, C. (2009b) Madonna and Child (The Terence Davies Trilogy), http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=2871, accessed 10 April 2009.

Vasconcelos, C. (2009c) Death and Transfiguration (The Terence Davies Trilogy), http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=2872, accessed 10 April 2009.

The military metaphor of government in the Cold War western

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner presented perhaps the most influential paper on American history ever written to the American Historical Association. In ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ Turner asserted that a crisis in American development arose from the closing of the “old frontier” and the delay in finding a new one. Turner argued that it is the frontier that defines “America:”

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. … The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. … the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was predominantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across the free lands. … The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier ([1893] 1956: 1-2, 10-11).

During the Cold War, the Western provided a widely known structure for representing the struggle between America and her enemies that was also a popular form of entertainment, and the frontier played a crucial role. For example, Melvin Lanksy, a cultural cold warrior who joined the ranks of the CIA, compared the cold war frontier of post-war Berlin to ‘what a frontier-town must have been like in the middle of the nineteenth century – Indians on the horizon, and you’ve simply got to have that rifle handy or [if] not your scalp is gone’ (quoted in Saunders 1999: 28). In 1953 Herbert L. Jackson identified that with the onset of the cold war the number of Westerns being produced in Hollywood had increased significantly:

It was no accident that the renaissance of the cowboy film took place during and immediately after World War II. And as America girds herself against the possibility of another great struggle, it is not surprising that the frequency of these films which reflect and nourish herself as successful defender of high ideals, has been stepped up (1953: 190).

Richard Slotkin has noted that, ‘the beginning of the Cold War in 1948 inaugurated the Golden Age of the Western: a 25-year period, regularly punctuated by the appearance of remarkable films, that saw the genre achieve its greatest popularity and that ended with its virtual disappearance from the genre map’ (1992: 347). During the Cold War, a number of Westerns took on the Russian threat directly. Edward Ludwig’s The Fabulous Texan (1947) was dedicated to the “war weary and liberty loving people” of Texas who had fought against a corrupt government that was clearly intended to be regard as synonymous with that which threatened the United States. Two Confederate soldiers returning home after the Civil War discover that their town has become a police state under the control of a demagogic attorney general. One citizen describes this state as “the land of your birth is becoming a Siberia.” In The Bells of Coronado (1952) Roy Rogers and Trigger foil a plot to sell the United States’ Uranium supplies to an unnamed foreign power. California Conquest (1952), apparently based on real events, tells of an attempt by Russia to take control of California. Uniquely this film reverses the Western genre by forcing the Americans to feel invaded as they have expanded westward. No longer is the white man taking over the Indian lands, but is fighting to preserve the frontier against the “old” world. Man Behind the Gun (1953) and Pony Express (1953) also deal with attempts to separate California from the Union that are defeated in order to maintain the integrity of the nation. Cripple Creek (1952) has federal agents revealing a conspiracy to hand gold reserves to the Chinese. Significantly in the cold-war Western it is the institutions of American democracy that secure the frontier and the nation. The federal government, so often projected as at odds with the individualistic frontiersman in the Western, is situated as the hero, as what links the west with the east thereby creating the nation.

Figure 1 California against the Russians in the old west: California Conquest (1952)

John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950) takes up the theme of Turner’s thesis and directly concerns itself with the role of institutions in the west. The film presents a discourse on nationalism, on sacrifice and unity, and on the proper authority within the United States to make foreign policy decisions, and asserts that it is at the frontier of the Rio Grande that the family and the U.S. military finds their meaning. The family is integral to Rio Grande and the film asserts that families must make many sacrifices in order for the nation to be victorious. The corporal, for example, is not allowed to mourn for his murdered wife but must carry on with his duties, whilst the success of U.S. military policy comes with the rescue of the children and the reintegration of the family. Even murder is excused in the name of the family, as Tyree justifies killing a man for the honour of his sister. The centrality of the family is played out through the Yorkes, whose reintegration comes with the acceptance of national goals. Colonel Yorke’s estranged wife Kathleen arrives at the fort in order to buy their son out of the U.S. Cavalry. She has already had to pay a heavy price for the nation when as a southern landowner her husband, on General Sheridan’s orders, razed her home and lands to the ground during the civil war. Now she intends to reclaim her son from the Union army but is soon won over by becoming part of the family of the U.S. Cavalry thereby entering into the nation. Arriving at the fort Kathleen is shown to be clinging on to her identity as a provincial, dressing as and demonstrating the manners of a southern belle. She repeatedly declaims “Yankee justice” and blames the army for her predicament. She soon sheds these traits becoming a washerwoman at the fort although she is a colonel’s wife, even taking on the laundry of the junior ranks. At the close of the film Kathleen stands at the entrance to the fort like the other women waiting for the return of her son and her husband from their mission beyond the Rio Grande. In taking the Colonel’s hand and joining the march into the fort she signifies her acceptance of cavalry life and thus the reintegration of the family comes with the acceptance of military needs.

The timeliness of Rio Grande, adapted from an earlier story by James Warner Bellah, is apparent in the attacks on diplomacy and the State Department, which in 1950 were under constant assault during the Korean War. In 1945 Soviet and American troops occupied Korea, dividing control along the 38^th parallel. An arbitrary boundary and originally intended to be temporary, the line became an international frontier in the struggle between Communism and the West. On 24 June 1950 the Soviet backed North Korean army launched a full-scale offensive across the 38^th parallel. President Truman committed American naval, air and ground forces to assist the south that dominated the United Nations force led by General Douglas MacArthur. The Korean War initiated a new type of conflict in the nuclear age: limited warfare. Limited warfare has defined local aims, in this case to drive the Communists out of South Korea, and has no goal of total destruction of the enemy. Truman came under increasing criticism during the Korean War for his use of limited combat, which even his Pacific Commander-in-Chief MacArthur denounced as the ‘appeasement of communism.’ In the face of the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the Communist victory in China, and the Alger Hiss case Truman never looked more than soft on Communism. Limited warfare was hard to swallow for the American people who, in their short experience of global warfare, had achieved little below the total destruction of the enemy, and had developed a taste for the “all-or-nothing” victory. This approach to foreign policy, John W. Spanier states, is ‘nowhere more appropriately revealed than in that uniquely American genre, the Western. … In his consuming passion for justice and morality, the cowboy pursues the outlaw and “shoots him dead.” This is typical of the American approach to war once the nation has been provoked: shoot the enemy dead and thereby solve the problem. Moreover, the enemy is evil and his death is therefore socially beneficial and morally justified’ (1965: 6).

In dramatizing the Korean conflict as a Western Ford replicated the situation of Untied Nation’s forces, overwhelmingly dominated by the U.S. military, of facing a clearly defined enemy (The North Korean Army/the Indians) across a clearly defined frontier (the 38^th Parallel/the Rio Grande). Ford also replicated MacArthur’s frustration with limited warfare through presenting the frustration of Colonel Yorke with the State Department. Rio Grande opens with Yorke returning to the fort having been forced by diplomatic restrictions to halt his pursuit of the Indians at the Rio Grande. Sheridan reminds Yorke that “That’s the policy and soldiers don’t make policy, they merely carry it out.” It is the State Department, the bureaucrats isolated in the East, which ties the hands of the Indian fighters unaware of the nature of the war at the Rio Grande. Ford’s film questions the fitness of such men to make policy decisions whose notion of limited warfare is at once self-defeating as the Indians escape with ease and un-American as it goes against the “all-or-nothing” codes of the Western. Success for the cavalry is forthcoming but only once Sheridan defies his stated orders, criminally overriding the federal government and his own Commander-in-Chief, and orders Yorke to cross the Rio Grande. This extreme act is rationalized with the knowledge that three tribes have united against their common enemy and the siege mentality of the cavalry troop is a figuring of the America’s response to the united nations of international communism. Sheridan’s words reveal his exasperation with Washington: “I want you to cross the Rio Grande, hit the Apache and burn him out; I’m tired of hit and run, I’m sick of diplomatic hide and seek.” The move from limited warfare to the “all-or-nothing” code of the Western is presented as the reason for Yorke’s success and projected into the realm of public debate on the Korean War, which was largely in favour of totally destroying the enemy, it supports MacArthur’s calls for a more aggressive foreign policy. Rio Grande presents Sheridan and Yorke as the proper authority to make policy decisions in times of crisis and here taps into an important post-Civil War strain in progressive ideology was the “military metaphor,” which saw in military organization a possible model for good government. General Ulysses S. Grant was elected to the office of President, and it is a notable feature of American history that in times of crisis a General is made Commander-in-Chief, the clearest examples beside Grant being Washington and Eisenhower. It is this type of demagogic military power that, following Eisenhower’s identification of the “military-industrial complex,” becomes the focus of American cinema as the nation comes to realize the dangers of an all-powerful military bent on victory at any cost.

As a genre and a history familiar to American audiences the Western allowed for a rationalization of events that would otherwise have disturbed the United States. Rio Grande, for example, presented the “military metaphor” of government, necessarily surrendering the principles of democracy, in terms of a war fought and won by the United States, and in doing so attempted to prove the worth of military government. This “military metaphor” is also evident in Springfield Rifle (1952), where the military leadership is frustrated by political considerations in the Union’s war against the south. The film opens in the War Office in Washington where General Halleck explains to Colonel Sharpe that the politicians do not feel that it is proper for a nation’s army to be involved in espionage. Sharpe rebukes this view strongly: “The only answer to their espionage is an espionage system of our own.” Springfield Rifle thus portrays the political leadership of the United States as being unaware of the true threat from an enemy who would undermine the nation. The hero of the film is Gary Cooper, who plays Major Lex Kearny, a spy for the Union who infiltrates a gang that is stealing horses during the Civil War. The future of the nation rests with men like Sharpe and Kearny who are prepared to use subversion and murder in order to destroy the nation. Kearny goes to extreme lengths to fight the covert war against the horse rustlers and in one sequence maneuvers a member of the gang into a position where a fellow agent can kill him. Springfield Rifle rationalizes the need for a counter-espionage program against the Soviets such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) and the un-constitutional lengths to which the nation must be prepared to go through replaying previous victories that are vital in the history of the construction of the nation.

The return of the military metaphor

In films such as Uncommon Valour (1983), Missing in Action (1984), Heated Vengeance (1985), Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) the attempt is made to demonstrate that America did not “lose” Vietnam through depicting a Vietnam War that did not end with the fall of Saigon in 1975 but one that has continued to the present day and which must be fought by men such as Braddock and John Rambo. These films are the descendants of John Ford’s Rio Grande in that they depict men of action disregarding the empty words of diplomats in order to return to South East Asia and ‘win’ the war. In Missing in Action, the narrative concerns the attempts of Braddock, a veteran, in rescuing American prisoners of war from Vietnam. The government in Ho Chi Minh City denies that any American soldiers continue to be held and the American diplomats take this at face value. This is not good enough for the veteran, and Braddock having spent many years in a POW camp himself possesses a realm of knowledge, an experience of having “been there,” that is inaccessible to those who spent the war safely in Washington. Braddock decides to go back to Vietnam in order to release the POWs and his decision to bypass the ineffectual structures of diplomacy, strongly reminiscent of Colonel Yorke’s attitude towards the State Department during the Indian Wars, draws the conclusion from one official that he is the “most undiplomatic man” she has ever met. Braddock’s lack of diplomacy, like Yorke’s, is what allows him to succeed as he refights the war, this time with a much more satisfactory, and perhaps more Hollywood ending.

These same attitudes to authority and winning the war are displayed in the most popular of the revisionist veteran films, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo is no longer the deranged loner of First Blood but is reintroduced into the American military effort and is sent back to Vietnam in order to free POWs. In re-fighting the war Rambo relishes this second chance and asks, ‘Do we get to win this time?’ Like the other Reagan veteran films Rambo sets its hero against the diplomats in Washington who, in the far-right view of this film, prevented America’s initial success in South East Asia through its refusal to sanction an “all-or-nothing” struggle. Rambo’s verdict of the Vietnam War is that “somebody wouldn’t let us win” and in his mission he is constantly frustrated by bureaucrats, a Pentagon that is too concerned with politics, and CIA men such as Murdock, who lies about his own war service. Rambo had such an impact on the American psyche that following the release of 39 hostages held by Lebanese terrorists President Reagan remarked that, ‘I saw Rambo last night. I know what to do next time this happens.’

Figure 2 Decision makers in US foreign policy from Rio Grande to Rambo: First Blood Part II

References

Jackson, H. L. (1953) Cowboy, pioneer and American soldier, Sight and Sound 22 (4): 189-190.

Saunders, F. S. (1999) Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta.

Slotkin, R. (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum.

Spanier, J. W. (1965) The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Turner, F. J. ([1893] 1956) The significance of the frontier in American history, in G. R. Taylor (ed.) The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.: 1-18.

Does the Heftberger Correlation exist?

Cinemetrics is the statistical analysis of film style (Salt 1974), and has the potential to make a significant contribution to film studies in identifying trends in film style (shot length distributions, shot scales) that will allow scholars to explore questions of individual style, genre, studio style, national differences, and changes in style over time. However, the potential of cinemetrics is hamstrung by the poor quality of the statistics practised by film scholars. For example, in a discussion of Salt’s (2006) survey of shot length distributions, Buckland (2008) recently confused the coefficient of determination (R² as a measure of goodness-of-fit of a regression line) with the correlation coefficient (r) – although the two are intimately related. Similarly, O’Brien (2005: 88-93) has argued that the introduction of sound technologies in Hollywood and France in the late-1920s led to an increase in average (mean) shot lengths (ASL) but does not employ any tests (e.g. t-test, one-way ANOVA, chi-square, or their nonparametric equivalents) to determine if changes in ASL are significant, does not provide confidence intervals for estimates of ASL in a particular country or time period, and does not consider the use of the median as a measure of central tendency or data transformations for skewed shot length distributions. Here I discuss a particular mis-application of statistics in the analysis of film style: the so-called Heftberger Correlation between cutting rate and type of motion represented in Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).

The Heftberger Correlation

The herculean effort of a meticulous statistical analysis of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (MWMC) offers the potential for a rich and detailed understanding of this complex film’s intricate style, and has been undertaken by Yuri Tsivian, Adelheid Heftberger, Barbara Wurm, and Gunars Civjans. As a part of this project, data has been produced that covers the distribution of shot lengths for each reel and for the film overall, for the use of point-of-view shots, and for the relationship between shot length and the type of motion represented by the film. It is as a statistic of this last element of film style that the Heftberger Correlation (HC) has been proposed as a measure (Cinemetrics 2008).

The researchers hypothesised that the cutting rate would increase with the intensity of movement within a shot, which was defined as belonging to one of seven categories: black frames (BF), fast motion (camera) (FastC), fast motion (naturally) (FastN), freeze-frame (FF), no motion (NM), normal motion (naturally) (NormalN), and slow motion (camera) (SMC). Once the dataset employed was reduced to exclude the category BF, it was claimed that there is a correlation between cutting speed and intensity of motion. For MWMC, the value for HC including NM is 0.2, and excluding NM it is 0.4. A further step was to remove the category FF, so that only data for shots with movement were included to give the Particular Heftberger Correlation (PHC), and is was claimed that this produced a stronger correlation but no figure was supplied. The conclusion arrived at by the researchers is that (1) the HC exists; (2) the HC for MWMC is weak and nonlinear; and (3) the PHC is MWMC is stronger than the HC and is linear.

It is far from clear what statistical processes have been used in the calculation of the HC and the PHC, and I have been unable to reconstruct the process by which the above quoted values for HC were derived. The researchers themselves acknowledge that the processes involved in producing the plots of shot length and intensity of movement in Figure 1 are not ‘mathematically sound,’ and it is precisely these plots that are employed as justification that the HC exists. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone involved that the lack of mathematical ’soundness’ would present a problem in employing a statistical analysis.

Figure 1 The Heftberger Correlation in Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (Source: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=2311, accessed 9 April 2009)

What is clear is that correlation is not an appropriate statistical method to be employed in this analysis. Correlation is a method of analysing if pairs of variables are related and the strength of that relationship. The pairing of the variable is important: each point on the graph represents a value on the x-axis and a value on the y-axis For example, if we measure the height and weight of ten people, we will have ten pairs of data, with each pair consisting of a measure of height and a measure of weight – it is the relationship between these measures that we call a correlation. The Heftberger Correlation does not exist simply because it is not possible to calculate a correlation for pairs of data when the number of categories of motion intensity is seven and the number of shots in the film is 1729 – there are no pairs of data to correlate. Data does not appear to be ordinal – although order exists for some categories (FastC is quicker that SMC) it does not exist for others (BF) and the distinction between some categories is not ordinal (FastC and FastN). The data labels used in Figure 1 must be considered nominal and a re not tractable. The decision to proceed despite the lack of mathematical ’soundness’ is compounded by a lack of understanding of the mathematics of correlation.

The appropriate statistical approach to be used in analysing the relationship between shot length and motion intensity is to look at the variance of shot lengths in each category. In this case the data does not meet the requirements for a parametric one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and a logarithmic transformation of the data is no help either. The best approach, therefore, is to employ a nonparametric analysis of variance of ranks using a Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U as a post-hoc test (α = 0.05).

Shot length data was sorted by category of motion intensity, and the descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Shot length data for motion intensity in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

In analysing this data I include only four of the motion categories: FastC, FastN, NM, and NormalN. The distribution of shot lengths in these categories are represented in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Distribution of shot lengths in FastC, FastN, NM, and NormalN in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

BF is excluded as the data includes several shot lengths of 0.0 seconds (due to a technical error in data collection); while the number of shot lengths in FF (13) and SMC (32) are too small to be reliable. The results show that there is a statistically significant relationship between shot length and intensity of motion (H_c = 289.7, P = <0.0001); and the post-hoc tests show that each category is significant different from one another (Table 2).

Table 2 Pairwise comparisons of shot length/motion intensity data for Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (Mann Whitney U, P-values only (Bonferroni Corrected α = 0.0083))

These results show that Tsivian, et al. were correct in their hypothesis that there is a relationship between shot length and motion intensity in Man with a Movie Camera; in fact, the results presented here indicate that this relationship is stronger than that identified by the HC. Focussing on the median shot length (see Table 1), we can see that FastC (0.4 seconds) has a quicker cutting rate that FastN (0.9s), while NormalN has a value of 2.8s. Although they were not included in the above test, median shot length increases as motion slows in SMC (3.7s) and FF (4.0s), and this confirms the overall relationship between shot length and motion intensity. Only NM does fit this overall pattern, with a median shot length of 2.2s. Data for BF is unreliable at the low end where shot lengths equal 0.0s.

Conclusion

Ben Goldacre, the GP and journalist who publishes the Bad Science blog (see Goldacre 2008), has made a distinction between scientific medicine and alternative therapies that employ scientific terms inaccurately to sound ’sciency.’ The Heftberger Correlation sounds good, it sounds scientific, it sounds statistical; but it is not based on a sound understanding of statistical methodology. Following Goldacre, I think this use of statistical terminology should be labelled ’sciency’ rather than science and film scholars should be discouraged from declaring the existence and relevance of such ’statistics’. It is incumbent upon film scholars to understand the statistical methods that they wish to employ in cinemetrics and to respect the use statistical terminology. Cinemetrics can make a positive contribution to film studies, but before it can be good film studies it must first be good statistics.

References

Buckland, W. (2008) What does the statistical style analysis of film involve?,
Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (2): 219-30.

Cinemetrics (2008) http://www.cinemetrics.lvmovie.php?movie_ID=2311, accessed 9 April 2009

Goldacre, B. (2008) Bad Science. London: Fourth Estate.

O’Brien, C. (2005) Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Salt, B. (1974) Statistical style analysis of motion pictures, Film Quarterly 28 (1): 13-22.

Salt, B. (2006) Moving into Pictures: More on Film History, Style, and Analysis. London: Starwood.

The distribution of picture halls in Leeds, 1910 to 1939

The Cinematograph Act, 1909, placed the regulation of the exhibition of motion pictures in the hands of local authorities. In Leeds (as in many other British cities), the Watch Committee of the City Council was responsible for licensing and regulating places of exhibition in the city. The proceedings of this committee and the Council in general provide a great deal of information on the development of exhibition in the city, including data on the location of theatres, the licensees. Here, data from the council proceedings is used to map the development of motion picture exhibition in Leeds from 1910 to 1939 (see Preedy 2005 for an overview). By looking at the income from the issuing of cinematograph licenses we can follow how the size of the exhibition market in the city changed over time, and this information is presented in Figure 1. The development of motion picture exhibition after the introduction of the Cinematograph Act, 1909, in Leeds can be divided into three phases: a period of rapid growth from 1910 to 1913; a first wave of expansion from 1913 to the early 1920s; and a stable period from 1921 to the beginning of World War Two. Changes in the distribution of picture halls are examined by looking at four years – 1914, 1922, 1931, 1939 (see Table 1) – that are (roughly) evenly spread across the three decades covered.

Figure 1 Revenue from licenses issued under Cinematograph Act, 1909 (Source: Leeds City Council Accounts)

The first phase in the development of motion picture exhibition in Leeds after 1909 is primarily comprised of the licensing of existing premises. The first picture hall to be licensed was the Coliseum on Cookridge Street. It is interesting to note that an early decision of the Watch Committee was to license premises that had been exhibiting moving pictures prior to the passage of the 1909 Act without requiring them to meet the safety measures specified, particularly the need to isolate the projector from the auditorium. For the most part these premises were the larger theatres in the city (including the Empire, the Hippodrome, City Varieties, and the Queen’s), and so were already subject to licenses for music and dancing. Also among this group were public halls (e.g. Salem Central Hall, Albert Hall).

Although some purpose built theatres were opened prior to 1913, the majority of the licensed premises are converted premises. The Cottage Road Cinema, Headingly, opened in 1912 (and is arguably the oldest continually operating theatre in the world) at the site of a former stable (and later garage) built in 1835. The Palace Cinema at Eyres Avenue, Armley, was opened as a cinema following the decline of the skating rink in the same premises – although the rink did not entirely disappear, and the site appears to have been dual use for a number of years. Early demands of the Watch Committee focus on the safety aspects of the new entertainment, with routine demands for fire extinguishers, panic bolts, improvements to ventilation and lighting, and the clearing of all aisles – all subject to the inspection of the Chief Constable and the City Engineer. Occasionally, licenses were granted on the submission of plans; and the whole business of licensing theatres appears to have taken up a significant amount of the committee’s time: on 22 October 1912, the minutes of the Committee show that nine resolutions were passed, all of which related to the exhibition of motion pictures.

Early cinema proprietors were also converts: the Cottage was operated by Owen Brooks and George R. Smith, the former being a photographer; and Allan Nield, another photographer, ran the Malvern Picture House in Beeston and the Hill Crest in Harehills at one time or another. In fact, Brooks and Nield appear to have lived close to one another in the Beeston/Dewsbury Road area, along with other proprietors such as the confectioner Frederick S. Brier. Another cluster of proprietors develops on the other side of the city in Roundhay (once home to inventor of the cinema, Louis Le Prince), including the lithographic printer Charles Lightowler who opens a theatre in Hunslet near his print works; Arthur Cunningham, a household furnisher; and Harry Bagges Hylton, a builder. Other trades of proprietors include a rag merchant, a ladies’ tailor, Pattern makers, a city councilor and the secretary to the City Council, and a number of estate agents. Typically, then, in this early phase the proprietor of a Leeds cinema was a local businessman with the funds to spend on exhibiting motion pictures. The large theatres in the city centre were already part of existing entertainment chains or already had in place a management structure that could be easily adapted, and the licensees of these shows are more often managers than proprietors.

The boom in picture halls in Leeds takes off in 1913, with a surge in the number of new builds and this is reflected in the increase in license fees collected by the council. That a second increase follows in 1921 suggests that the First World War interrupted the growth of the exhibition market in the city. The distribution of picture halls in Leeds in January 1914 is presented in Figure 2. The high number of licensed premises in the city centre is unsurprising; but it should be noted that this number includes premises used for alternative entertainments (i.e. theatres, public halls, church halls, etc.) and these ‘other use premises’ account for approximately half of the picture halls in this part of the city. The number of licensed premises in the city centre in which the exhibition of motion pictures is the primary purpose of the building is then no greater than in other parts of Leeds. Attending the cinema in the city can be associated with other leisure activities that are not present in the single-use theatres in areas outside the civic centre. It is outside the city centre that purpose-built cinemas are to be found, while in the centre premises are adapted and converted, but these picture halls are distributed unevenly across the city. Hunslet and Holbeck are both densely populated areas comprised primarily of back-to-back housing and industrial premises, but the former has a substantially greater number of theatres. Over time, the distribution becomes more even (see Figures 3-5) and by 1922, Holbeck has gone from three cinemas to six while Hunslet has gone from nine to six.

Clues as to why the distribution of picture halls in the city adopted this pattern shortly after the introduction of the Cinematograph Act in 1909 can be found in the trade directories for Leeds. What this comparison reveals is that the distribution of picture halls is – to a significant extent – a matter of convenience for the proprietors. For example, the Imperial Picture House at 79 Kirkstall Road opened by William Ogden and William Fielding in 1913 is located next door to the workshop (at 77 Kirkstall Road) of William Ogden, tinplate manufacturer. Kelley’s 1911 directory for Leeds lists 10 Alpha Street, Hunslet, as the premises of Harry Rodger, estate agent; while the council minutes reveal that the conversion of this property for the purpose of exhibiting motion pictures under license to Rodger was approved (subject to modifications) on 10 February 1911. Joseph Battersby, a marine store dealer at Place’s Road in Cross Green in 1911 is listed as the licensee of the East End Picture Hall at the same location in 1914. Clifford Lax, owner of a building company and estate agent based on Harehills Lane, opened the Harehills Picture House at the corner of Roundhay Road and Harehills Lane. Lax built a number of cinemas in Leeds, and appears to have entered the picture trade after building theatres for others.

What is also notable comparing the distributions of 1914 to 1939 is the overall consistency in the distribution: the exhibition market in Leeds is remarkably stable, and it is only towards the end of World War Two that closures become common. Even then, most areas of the city continue to have at least one theatre until well into the 1960s. The transition to sound had no impact on the distribution of theatres in the city. The years surrounding the introduction of sound show much less variation in license income (Figure 1), but this appears to be a short-lived phenomenon. The majority of the theatres open in 1922 are open in 1931. The costs of converting to sound may have been high – as many historians of the cinema have noted (see, for example, Jancovich et al. 2003 and Hanson 2008) – but this does appear to have perturbed exhibitors in Leeds: comparing the list of licensed theatres from 1927 and 1931 we see that one site has disappeared from the list while two have been added. In fact, of the fifty seven picture halls in Leeds licensed in 1914, 33 are still operating in 1939. In the latter phase, there is also the spread of motion picture exhibition into areas of the city away from the main metropolitan core (such as Meanwood, Middleton, and Moortown), accompanied by an expansion of the city boundaries that can be seen to contribute to the increase in council revenue from licensing.

Most the cinemas in the city in 1914 are individually controlled, and many cinemas remain independent until well after World War Two. Overtime, the presence of theatre chains becomes more marked. Some are national circuits (Provincial Cinematograph Theatres, Gaumont British), with several smaller, local chains. By 1911, Charles P. Metcalfe and Thomas Thompson own two cinemas – though they soon break up their partnership. Goldstone Cinemas Ltd operate a number of picture houses in the South and East of the city, opening the Victoria in Burmantofts in 1912 (replaced by the Star in 1938), the Wellington Picture House in 1920, and the Regal in Hunslet after 1927. John Robert Sharp runs two picture halls under the name Atlas in Sheepscar and Kirkstall, although he finds himself frustrated by the demands of the Watch Committee in refusing his applications changes to his auditorium (although the precise nature of the requested changes are not made clear). Often, when the decision of the Committee is not to the applicant’s satisfaction, a solicitor is brought in to argue a case, but this appears to have been a largely unsuccessful strategy.

More prosperous areas (e.g. Roundhay) have no theatres, although this should not lead us to assume that there are no middle class patrons. It appears likely that working class audiences attended the cinemas in their area of Leeds, while middle class audiences attended the larger theatres in the city. Parts of modern day Leeds that do not appear here (e.g. Horsforth, Otley, etc) were also well served with cinemas, but did not come under the control of Leeds City Council until much later.

Table 1 Premises licensed by Leeds City Council (Annual licenses) under the Cinematograph Act 1909

Figures 2 to 5 chart the change in distribution of licensed picture halls in Leeds from 1914 to 1939. In each case, data was taken from the annual renewal of licenses list published by the Watch Committee of Leeds City Council in January of each year.

Figure 2 Distribution of premises licensed by Leeds City Council, 7 January 1914

Figure 3 Distribution of premises licensed by Leeds City Council, 4 January 1922

Figure 4 Distribution of premises licensed by Leeds City Council, 7 January 1931

Figure 5 Distribution of premises licensed by Leeds City Council, 4 January 1939

KEY: ARM – Armley; BEE – Beeston; BRA – Bramley; BUR – Burmantofts; BUY – Burley; CHA – Chapel Allerton (including Chapeltown); CRG – Cross Gates; CRN – Cross Green; HAR – Harehills; HEA – Headingly; HOL – Holbeck; HUN – Hunslet; KIR – Kirkstall; LEE – Leeds; MEA – Meanwood; MID – Middleton; MOO – Moortown; SHE – Sheepscar; STA – Stanningley; WOO – Woodhouse; WOR – Wortley.

References

Hanson, S. (2008) From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Jancovich, M., Faire, L., and Stubbings, S. (2003) The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: BFI.

Preedy, R.E. (2005) Leeds Cinemas. Stroud: Tempus Publishing Ltd.