このレッスンの実行方法

レッスン14は6本のビデオレクチャー（レクチャーのテキストがビデオレクチャーの下に記載されています）と4本の動画で構成されています。
このレッスンは、ページをスクロールダウンしながら最初から順番に動画を見たりテキストを読んでください。

Part One – Frankenstein is the first film in this class which we have screened in its entirety. This is because there is no way to study just part of the film. That would be a terrible injustice. It would be like looking at only one corner of a great painting or listening to only part of a symphony. We have seen only excerpts from other films but Frankenstein deserved a complete and uninterrupted screening. It really is that good. Most of you or all of you had never seen this film before even though you know the name and might even be familiar with what the monster looked like. This makes me jealous because the first time one sees a great film is always special. I have seen this film many times. Students sometimes ask me how many times and I suppose that by now it must be about two hundred times. That may shock you, but this is my work. Let me tell you something even more amazing. I will watch it for the 201st time in order to teach this class and I will not be bored. Moreover, I will probably see something new in the film I never noticed before. Or I will have a new idea about the film. It is not perfect film. No film is. But it is an endlessly interesting one.

Part Two – Frankenstein begins in a most unusual way. Edward van Sloane, the actor who plays Dr. Waldman in the film, greets the audience in the “movie theater”. Of course, it isn’t a real movie theater, it is a set that looks like a movie theater. This breaks a “taboo” that existed in both the theater and in film. It is called “breaking the fourth wall”. There are said to be three real walls on the stage that contain the set, but the fourth is an imaginary one between the actors and the audience. We are allowed to see what happens on stage (or in front of the camera) because we can see through the fourth wall. However, the actors are supposed to pretend that they cannot see us. They pretend that the fourth wall is solid and cannot be seen through, otherwise the illusion that what is happening on the stage or in the film is real would be broken.

Within the first two minutes of his film, James Whale included a visual image more memorable and interesting than anything we see in Tod Browning’s Dracula. No wonder Carl Laemmle Jr. gave this film to this new director at Universal rather than letting Browning try again. Tod Browning, as we know, would return to M.G.M. (he seemed to be the proverbial cat with nine lives) where he would make the film Freaks in 1932, which almost completely ended his film career. I will compare Frankenstein and Freaks in a later lecture.

It is an extraordinary bit of playfulness by James Whale. But this is not a ghostly apparition, it seems to be standing there almost like a statue. It has “corporeal” substance. But statues don’t wear clothes. Can anyone else see it? The mourners soon depart and after the gravedigger finishes burying the body Frankenstein and Fritz come out of hiding and begin the dig. Recall that in White Zombie the people of Haiti buried their dead in the middle of the road to prevent the bodies from being stolen by grave robbers.

Here are Dr. Frankenstein and Fritz preparing to do exactly that, rob a dead body from its grave. You already know that it is a universal taboo to leave dead bodies unattended.

Similarly, it is also a universal taboo to disturb the dead once their bodies have been attended to. Leaving the dead unattended was dangerous according to legends and myths because to do so was to risk having the dead person rise from the dead and harm the living, often through cannibalism.

Similarly, to take the dead from their resting places was to risk the dead taking their revenge on those who disturb them.

But it is clear that Dr. Frankenstein does not fear Death or the taboos he is breaking as he carelessly shovels dirt into the face of Death…and steals the bodies he needs for his experiements.

Part Four – Dr. Waldman thinks Frankenstein’s intention is to bring a dead person back to life. If this were what Frankenstein was doing we would just have another vampire or zombie movie and we would expect that it would be magic, not science, which would make the dead walk once again. But Frankenstein is doing something quite different. Frankenstein claims that he is not bringing the dead back to life. His creation is not nosferatu, not a zombie or vampire, not the walking dead. He has made a new body by putting together old parts. Let me ask you to consider this question: is he really creating something new? Is his creation a new life?

“That body is not dead. It has never lived”!

Part Five – One of my students many years ago said that what Frankenstein was really doing was “recycling”. But when we think about it, all life is recycled. Our bodies are more than 70% water and in the course of days or weeks every water molecule in our bodies is replaced. The same is true with the rest of our molecules and one day they will all simply be recycled when we die. Nothing is truly new, is it? What does it matter if it is old molecules or old arms and legs that are being reused? In any case, it is not assembling the parts of a body, which is Frankenstein’s great achievement, it is bringing the assembled parts to life. He is right when he says “it has never lived” and by bringing it to life he really is creating a new life. But how can he do this? This is similar to the question how did Dracula become a vampire? It took seventy years and another film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to answer that question about Dracula, but Frankenstein explains it all quite simply to Dr Waldman.

Part 6 – Frankenstein has discovered “the great ray which first brought life into the world”. This was not actually in the novel by Mary Shelley; James Whale and his team of writers, especially John L. Balderston, were responsible for these fascinating additions. Balderston’s play of Dracula formed the basis of the 1931 film Dracula directed by Tod Browning. Universal then bought his American adaptation of Peggy Webling‘s 1927 play Frankenstein, and used it as the basis for the 1931 film Frankenstein. Balderston is responsible for many of the brilliant intellectual additions to the story.

According to the dictionary a “ray” is a thin line or narrow beam of light or other radiant energy. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God creates the Universe by speaking (or thinking or imagining) the word “light” . We also recall that angels (like Lucifer) are beings made of pure “spirit” or light, (in scientific terms we might think of them as pure energy). The human soul is composed of this same “spirit” or energy.