Post by Capo on Jan 27, 2007 1:36:33 GMT
What Demoralized the Barber Shop
Unknown 1898 USA
Clients in a barber shop are sent into chaos when two pairs of female legs are spotted up the stairs in the entrance of the shop.
Visually complicated set-up. In one sense some might criticise it for a theatrical composition (head-on, one-take, melodramatic acting), but there is a fine sense of visual composition at work here. For starters, there are many things happening within the same frame - the clients, the women, the barber himself all have their individual frame space - and all are doing their own thing, but you're never sure about which one to watch. It is Cinema before it became a tool of manipulating the attention or perspective or emotion. There are no cuts, as would become the conventional way of revealing information in a shot-to-shot narrative, and so it is very much open to perspective ambiguity: you watch the clients because they're going mad over the women, but you want to watch the women because you're interested as viewers in what the clients themselves are viewing, and at the same time you're laughing at the barber as he excitedly cuts a customer's face to pieces with a razor. Early evidence of cinematic representations of women as objects of desire and the chaos which intrudes open the order of the filmic world. Is Cinema, then, catered towards a male viewer?
Unknown 1898 USA
Clients in a barber shop are sent into chaos when two pairs of female legs are spotted up the stairs in the entrance of the shop.
Visually complicated set-up. In one sense some might criticise it for a theatrical composition (head-on, one-take, melodramatic acting), but there is a fine sense of visual composition at work here. For starters, there are many things happening within the same frame - the clients, the women, the barber himself all have their individual frame space - and all are doing their own thing, but you're never sure about which one to watch. It is Cinema before it became a tool of manipulating the attention or perspective or emotion. There are no cuts, as would become the conventional way of revealing information in a shot-to-shot narrative, and so it is very much open to perspective ambiguity: you watch the clients because they're going mad over the women, but you want to watch the women because you're interested as viewers in what the clients themselves are viewing, and at the same time you're laughing at the barber as he excitedly cuts a customer's face to pieces with a razor. Early evidence of cinematic representations of women as objects of desire and the chaos which intrudes open the order of the filmic world. Is Cinema, then, catered towards a male viewer?