| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Play through this century |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Rick Prelinger |
I've brought you 12 illusions from New York today. When I show films at events like this I quite often feel myself functioning as an eye-opener. Someone that smoothes the way for other more difficult ways to follow. And sometimes I feel as if I've been hired to provide comic relief… Not today. Both of these functions are of course components of play in its best sense. Relaxation and humour. But I also hope this film show will help us to build a common sense of references and ideas about play. I'm going to show some historical images of play that go beyond the view of people playing. Rather I hope that they function as images or windows into human consciousness and social activity and help us understand play both its utopian potential and its very real imitations. I hope that these images remain in your minds throughout these three days and I'm also hoping that they will be contextualised by some of the other speakers. Let's roll the tape… Here's Coney Island in the ‘Teens. This film was shot by the Ford motor company, whose products altered the nature of leisure recreation and play perhaps more than any others in this century. This is an early incarnation of the theme park. A place where people come to flirt, drink, eat and play their bodies off against machines. And we have the ghost in the machine. It's immersive like today's theme parks, but it's not as highly co-ordinated, and it allows for unexpected, sometimes unsettling experiences. And the ocean washes it all away in the end. My next clip is from a film called The All-American Soapbox Derby, released in 1936. It’s about boys’ play. Boys’ play is pictured here as leading naturally to innovation, invention, creativity: these aren't just gear-heads but they're engineers in training. In all fairness this clip is also about conserving and nurturing kids resources at a time when one of adults’ great fears was losing kids to the road - having children run away, because there was often little to keep them at home during the Depression. However it's still very much a boy's world. Let's play the video… We'll stay in the backyard, but now we're going to meet Jean with a friend of hers and her brother. This is a film made in 1951 made to teach reading to children in primary schools. Jean's play is everything that a girl's play is supposed to be. She is mother, caretaker, nurturer, and her brother is the trickster. This was life in the Fifties and it hasn't changed very much. Let's play the clip… I'm going to show you a piece of a remarkable film on what we now call 'parenting'. It was made by a film maker named George Stoney in 1957 with the co-operation of residents of Palmer Street in Gainesville, Georgia, U.S.A. It shows a youngster beginning to master the complexities of his environment, gaining self confidence and learning to articulate a relationship to others, through tasks and through work. I think this film is an attempt to reconcile adults to the necessity of play and its different realms. It's trying to naturalise play in the minds of adults who might otherwise be too busy and distracted to deal with the changes that they see in their children. Let's take a look at a little bit from Palmer Street... My next clip is from a wonderful film made in the Thirties called Park Conscience. It was made to promote awareness of parks and their value to society. But for me the value of this film lies in the way it evokes strong metaphors of passivity, of floating, gliding and being nourished. And it expresses a meditative attitude towards nature, the so-called natural environment, a concept which of course we question. The simplicity of Now functions like medicine, and to play in the wilderness is to be part of the therapeutic process, to be healed and to be fed. Let's take a look… The next film comes from quite a different environment: New York City in 1959. It was shot on the streets and then sound was added later with kids fantasies and their hopes and dreams. It's also a meditative film, but in this case it shows kids actively transforming their environment. Unlike the country, there's an implicit critique of the city as a bad place, or a place that's unfriendly for kids. But the film shows that it's also a vehicle for fantasy, that's directed both inward and outward. This is from a film called My Own Yard to Play In, made around 1959. Let's play it… I might just as well have shown this next clip at the Speed conference (ed: Doors 4), two years ago, and actually, maybe I did. But it's an ecstatic vision, it represents a compelling kind of play for teenagers. Activity that involves fast cars, racing, the open sky, a country road and pressing the pedal to the floor. For this, of course, they'll get punished with the ultimate punishment. Here driving is treated as an activity in which people test themselves against their environment. A sport without teams and without rules. They engage in a kind of self-discovery, that comes out of tailing risks. It's hard to imagine an on-screen game that's this much fun or that's this dangerous. Let's look at something that comes very close to the end of a film called The Last Clear Chance, made by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1960. I'd like to show you two American television commercials which belong to a time when fewer toys needed batteries to work. But these toys still testify to the marriage of play and mechanisation, though this partnership does probably become inevitable, at least in the developed world, it isn't always an easy one. These films also represent play as a form of consumption. And to enable this, to enable play as consuming, toys and activities need to be marketed to kids. And this necessity has excused a good deal of ways of trickery and manipulation. And it's also things like this that sometimes make me think that it may cause a backlash that's traditional. That some of these films that seem old-fashioned, may in a way be predictive. That we're heading towards a simpler and less commercial time, if that's at all possible. Let's look at these two TV commercials, I think from the mid-Sixties. It's always that the commercials are the best thing on TV. This talk isn't just about children, it's also about adults. Putting this show together, I realised how much play is a form of consumption, and consumption a form of play. The marketplace has converged with adult's play's face for a long time now, and the shopping-mall is one of the places where this convergence is most in evidence. Shopping's fun, and it's been portrayed as fun since at least the year of the great department stores, back at the turn of the century. But here's a clip from the mid-Fifties when shopping-malls began to spring up all over the suburban United States. It's one of my favourite films because of the elegance with which it connects consumption and landscape. It's called In the Suburbs and it's made for Redbook magazine, in 1957, to promote the new suburban audience to advertisers. Today's extreme sports merge from a tradition of daring and stunts. But before this became a mass phenomenon it was entertainment, structured around the spectacle of stunt people making preposterous and often severe bets with their bodies and physical well-being. It's no longer a spectacle because a somewhat tamer form has become mainstream. But it's still playing with the boundaries of possibility. Here's what I think is the background of today's extreme sports. For my last clip I should say that Michael Schwarz asked me to end this presentation on a contemporary note. This is hard for me to do as you might imagine because I collect historical film. He suggested I deal with theme parks and I've actually, unfortunately, never been to one. So I don't have any footage that could substitute for that direct experience. Therefore I decided to show what many people have called a new form of theme park, the late 20th century city. This film, which was sponsored by the Corn Producers Association, is called RFD Greenwich Village and it shows urban sophisticates who've made the city into their playground, although the city itself is not structured as a place to play. These people are pleasure seekers or perhaps yuppies living the Bohemian life, and they ask more of the city than those who simply seek jobs, housing and friends. I wonder how the cityscape might be altered if everyone had a sense of entitlement equal to that of these fun loving New Yorkers in 1969… |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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