HUMA 2740

Lecture 8

The Immigrant (by Charlie Chaplin 1917)

- Charlie Chaplin grew up in poverty in England in a performing family

- Came to America with his brother and became popular and able to
negotiate with companies and eventually created his own company –
multimillionaire in five years
- The little tramp – replayed the same type of character
o Character popular to Victorian audiences in England
o By 19th century England was full of factories so English theatre
developed image of a worker who hated everyone in charge of
society, is the underdog, hated his boss, anyone who made his
life miserable, fighting against authority and succeeds
- This film deals with the immigrant experience and turns into comedy
Case Study 1

- The Spanish-American War (1898)

- Ended with the US acquiring control over Cuba, The Philippines,
Guam, and Puerto Ricco from a defeated Spain – Spanish colonies
become American colonies
- War was one sided in favour of US
- Cuba wanted to become independent from Spain and US supported
(*check)
- US sent ships to Cuba to protect American citizens
- One ship blew up in Havana Harbour – not clear if Spain bombed it or
some other mistake
 - America blamed Spain for this and declared war on Spain a few
weeks later through newspaper industry
- Filmmakers went to Cuba to take film (war films)
- The first “media war”
- The first war to appear in the movies
- People began making pro-war films (in some cases re-enacting
scenes using models and actors to make it appear real)
- Edison Company one of the first to send a filmmaker
- Political economy contextualizes the objects and practices under
study within the larger industrial systems that originate them
- Political economy helps understand how media conglomerates,
media companies and media buying corps work, how they produce
the menu of media artifacts, and how we get what get from the media
From Audience to Commodity Audience

- Dallas Smythe essay – TV networks used programming to attract

viewers to sell them to advertisers that ran their commercials during
the programs – watching TV instructed viewers, teaching them what
to want and what brands to buy
o Viewing was a form of work because viewers produced
revenues for the watched network and after viewers purchased
advertised goods, for the advertiser
o Made viewing economically productive and thus a form of
labour
- Smythe ignored the fact that most audiences neither experience nor
analyses of such a market