Screenwriting, 1930-1940 Interlude - Hearing Versus Seeing
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Item Open Access IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and STAGECOACH(1965) Cameron, Evan Wm.A survey and assessment of the reception and influence of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) and STAGECOACH (1939).Item Open Access On Mathematics, Music and Film(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.An early attempt by the author to comprehend the nature, scope and limits of the constraints on the possibilities of 'colour music'. (Thesis submitted in the Spring of 1968 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.S. in Film, Graduate Programme in Film, Boston University.)Item Open Access Growing Things: the Rural Patience of Robert Flaherty(1970) Cameron, Evan Wm.As Robert Flaherty was making his first documentary with synchronous sound (MAN OF ARAN, released 1934), he discovered that he had never learned to cut smoothly between shots. He had become the most renowned maker of documentary films in the world without having acquired the most rudimentary skills of film editing. Why not? Indeed, how was it possible? Within this essay I address those questions, suggesting that the answers can tell us much about the distinctive nature, scope and limits of Flaherty's achievement and therewith much about filmmaking itself.Item Open Access The Coming of Synchronous Sound to Filmmaking: an Introduction(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.;An introduction to the causes and effects of the 'revolution' that occurred between 1927 and 1930 within the American filmmaking industry when the making of movies with synchronous sound became possible.Item Open Access Misusing Sights as Sounds: The Infringements of Radio Drama on the Making of CITIZEN KANE(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.Many arts have influenced the cinema over extended periods of time. One art – radio drama – is an exception, for we can date the onset of its influence from the coming of synchronous sound to the cinema in 1926 and the culmination of it with the creation of CITIZEN KANE in 1941. Film and radio drama were thereafter to part company, each having learned what it could from the other. What had the cinema learned from radio drama? If we look closely at CITIZEN KANE, we can learn much about the virtues and limitations of radio design, cinematical design and the design of CITIZEN KANE itself.Item Open Access 'In My Mind's Ear': Misconstruing Sounds as Sights – a Philosophical and Cinematical Caution(1999) Cameron, Evan Wm.The notion of 'imaging' music ought to perplex us philosophically, for 'to imagine' is a verb of visualisation. Hearing musical events may cause us to imagine things, and seeing things may cause us to think of hearing musical events, but to speak of visualising how we hear when hearing musically is to echo an innervating confusion. The primary space within which we encounter things is auditory/tactile rather than visual. To think accurately of music, and especially so when composing it, one must retrain oneself to think of it non-visually, avoiding the commonplace 'imaginings' of the formalisations of mathematical structures, for example, that so often reduce what we hear thereafter to mere exemplifications of them lacking any hope of musical fascination.Item Open Access Michelson, Morley and Me: How We See, Hear and Hear Movies(2002) Cameron, Evan Wm.The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 was the watershed in our coming to understand how differently waves propagate. As such, it ought also to have been the watershed in our coming to understand how hearing differs from seeing and how differently we encounter the world and ourselves within it when listening rather than looking. After amplifying these remarks, I suggest in conclusion that philosophers seeking for the 'self' would have been well-advised to listen rather than look for it.