I’m not sure that Clash is a pure event film, you’re right, and I certainly don’t put it together with Jaws and what have you. I watched the medusa segment just now and agree that, due to Harryhausen’s work, it seems to be from another era. Also, the shot selection, angles, composition and editing are top rate in that sequence.

I also don’t feel comfortable thinking of his work as good but outdated so to speak – compared to other films around 1981. It brings me around to the John Carpenter movies we talked about. Not only do they still hold up when I watch them now, but I find them more engaging than most CGI. Not only for the superior narrative and imagery but the effects themselves. Visually, Escape from New York has a much more compelling and meanigful visual future than The Phantom Menace, for example.

So I guess I agree with you that his work stands up by itself as art. I’m a big fan, myself.

And while we sneaked back to post-apoc. future movies, may I name drop The Ultimate Warrior, starring Yul Brynner?

Also, I’m not completely writing off Star Wars or LotR, but it’s definitely important to be aware of all the text’s sides. I think that we draw lines in this area depending on our own principles too. I would never big-up Gone with the Wind as I find its whitewashing of history too offensive, the book especially. LotR is 50-50 for me, although the Jackson films unintentionally brought it out in part two. When a group of us were watching the Battle of Helms Deep play out on screen, even a not particularly critical friend of mine dropped his jaw and blurted “It’s the battle of Rourke’s Drift”.

I don’t want to lay down any unrealistic black and white classifications for all these movies and I think I’m going to run with your style on this one

I knew you would share the love of Clash of the Titans with me. We have talked about this one a few times, and I am going to have to check out D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, for it looks amazing. Perhaps one day we can catch Clash of the Titans at the BAM together, for I saw it there, along with Jason and the Argonauts in 2003 or 2004 and it was awesome!

@Andy,

Couldn’t agree with you more about D&D, and your comment here is inspiring yet another post about my experiences with the Monster Manual, a work of art in every sense of that word.

As to your distinctions between the event movie and the Cinema of Attractions, you are absolutely right, and it was sloppy of me to conflate the two. But I will offer up a meager defense of my pillaging of the term. Harryhausen’s animations seem to be a unique and somehow outside of film’s chronology even in 1963 with his work in Jason in the Argonauts, no less in 1981 with Clash of the Titans. In the wake of Star Wars (which you do a great job of problematizing and will return to in yet another post -damn your giving me work ), Clash of the Titans seems to bring you back to the origins of film history. Of the crat of creation, rather than the spectacle of magic. Clash of th Titans looks like it could have been made in 1906. So, given the fact that this is really the last episode in a moment of special effects of this kind, I liken it to a transitional moment in cinema that hearkens back to the beginning, for Clash of the Titans seems somehow more akin to Méliès A Trip to the Moon from 1903 than just about anything we can find in the 70s and 80s, as well as beyond.

This is gross overstatement and historical conflation, yet I think it is sound and beautiful in its erroneous reasoning That said, I also know your definition is right, but calling Clash of the Titans an event film somehow cheapens it for me, and I prefer the reactionary route of colonizing my visions of nostalgia for the youth of tomorrow along a manipulated logic of history, a la Tolkein and Jackson

I would say that there is a clear distinction between the cinema of attractions at the dawn of cinema and the ‘event movie’ that became the main stuido pic model by the turn of the 80’s.

In the cinema of attraction, I belive it wasn’t really the contents but the fact of watching ‘moving pictures’ that was an attraction in the same way as watching an escape artist or magician was.

The event movie … starting with Star Wars and Jaws, and perfected by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, is where the movie is based around an event/attraction within the film – like certain special effects or the performance of a single star who does their unique ‘act’ … then what made this unlike similar examples you could undoubtably find in earlier movies, was the total submission of all other elements in the film to this principle.

So the event movie starts with the event or attraction then builds the narrative, characters or other pesky stuff around it and indeed leaves it largely undeveloped.

I get into huge fights with other ‘open thinkers’ over Star Wars. I loved it as a kid and it represents a landmark in movie trends and history. But as for the story and worldview – it’s trashy. Lord of the Rings is the other one with it’s offensive ideology and the open fact that Tolkein set out to vreate a creative and subtle way to transmit his colonial era worldview to the countries youth.

It fine to like these movies as stories etc – but its not fine to fetishize them or worship them.

An example of a vacuous event movie that I personally like to watch is Beverly Hills Cop.

Ha! That was the exact opening line I was going to put in my comment.

I saw Clash in an old style single screen theatre when I was nine years old. I have seen it several times on TV since. The tidal wave scene at the beginning used to crop up in my dreams quite a lot, darn that pesky Kraken.

And by the way, Jim, keep on plugging D&D, that game was solely responsible for getting me to read and develop in the face of school being boring and oppressive.

It’s funny that you talk about the early Cinema of Attractions for two reasons. Firstly, I was just this week talking to an old friend about watching those old shorts during phototography A-level and a bit in my Drama degree too. Although the films that blew me away at that time were the longer features that followed – Battleship Potempkin (Eisenstien) and Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov).

The second reason is that I just found and watched, for the first time, a DVD of the movie that took the American industry firmly OUT OF the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ – Birth of a Nation. And boy what a shocker it is.

I watched Clash of the Titans so many times myself, but it was always on TV — never in a theater. I loved reading your recollections of those early viewing experiences in the Baldwin theater — just great.

I came to the film, by the way, through D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, which was one of my favorite books as a kid — I spent hours and hours looking at those illustrations. . .

Anyway, thanks for the post. “Kinesis in the raw!” is an epic line.

Funny you should comment here because I was just reading and thinking about your religion in films post which is itself epic. This is pretty fun, no?

I couldn’t agree with you more, I can’t talk about Clash of the Titans in terms of it being a good or bad film, it transcends that for me, and while I watched it two nights ago, and felt the hands of time on it, the animation and its very movement is so wrapped up for me with another time and place. A place of my adolescence that captures a sense of wonder with this stuff that is still with me, but hard to recapture through those uncorrected eleven year old eyes.

Film for me is all about memories, it is what makes it the ultimate form in my mind. And while I spend more time than any rationale human being should on the internet, it is still a far third to movies and books. But movies are the pinnacle for me, because the are more than ideas and opinions, they are how I track time. Others use music or pictures or text, I use the magical conflation of all these in God’s highest artform

More seriously, movies of my youth are what I feel most passionate about when it comes to this blog. I really don’t consider this an edtech blog, it is a b-movie blog that has been hijacked by my work in edtech, and the formative 10 is the very thing I always thought this space would be all about. For me, doing this kind of thinking and watching in this blog is like I finally took the advice Sherwood Anderson gave a young William Faulkner:

“You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn,” he told me. “It dont matter where it was, just so you remember it and ain’t ashamed of it. Because one place to start from is just as important as any other. You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from.

I make no pretenses to be William Faulkner, and I can rest assured that my blog makes that painfully evident, but I found this as a space to start from. As a way to write things that I find important with no real ambition beyond the writing and sharing of it. It is a really cool thing to spend hours of my day thinking seriously about moments in my lie that I want to remember, and hold on to and talk about. When I was an undergrad and graduate school student I always felt I needed to do something grand and magical like write something as great as Faulkner (who is America’s greatest master of the written word) or re-invent criticism. But I’m not a writer, but its the form I have been trained to think in, and while I can’t write, I can think through my own little patch up there in Long island where I started. It is fun to do it, and I find it great therapy for my own sense of what this whole thing is about. And it ain’t about being good or bad, or right or wrong, it’s about laying down tracks to a train that you hope will take someone somewhere sometime. Even if no one rides trains anymore.

And that story/novel/epic/masterpiece of fact is transporting me, Brad, to some really wild and thought provoking places. You are just laying it down, and it shows, and its good, and it means. So thanks for that, and thanks for the comment, and thanks for being a film nut.

I have things to say about Star Wars! I’m excited!