Of God, Film, and Men.

Best of Film: 2012 Part 1

2013-01-06T02:29:00.002-08:00

1.) Silver Linings Playbook

Adapted and directed by David O. Russel, Starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, and Chris Tucker.

I found Silver Linings Playbook to be a profoundly personal and touching film. Marketing for the film failed in that it did not know quite how to label it; is it a Rom-Com, or a film about mental health, dancing, or football? Really it follows Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, as he attempts to adjst to life after a mental breakdown following finding his wife having an affair with another man. Pat is under the process of being diagnost with Bi-Polar disorder and has violent panic attacks. He is obsessed with getting his wife back, which leads him to reading all of her classes syllabus in an effort to understand her. (This causes one of the funniest moments in the film in which he throws A Farewell to Arms out of the window and rants at his unforgiving parents about Hemingway at three in the morning.) His family is worried about him, but are rather awkward about it, as is he; we get a real sense of who this family is. Enter Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who is also dealing with her own loss and issues. The two of them are a couple of stray dogs in life, and bond whilst learning a dance routine together.

While dealing with all the serious subject matter, however, director David O. Russell is able to entertain and make us laugh. Russell is good at that, look at the Gulf War in Three Kings as another example. The characters are real, flawed, but lovable in their uniqueness.

Silver Linings, however, felt imbalanced at times, the first half concentrating on more of the mental health elements, then it devolves into more Rom-Com fair at the end. I also felt like the Chris Tucker character, and especially the Police/Parole officer, didn’t have a big payoff in the film. Those are my only major criticisms of the film, and it is definitely unique and touching so easily forgivable.

Watching Pat and Tiffany's interactions are the most enjoyable parts of the film. They have chemistry, but they are awkward; or we could say authentic. They are awkward with everyone they are around, but in the beginning they are extremely awkward with each other. They have ideological debates, albeit subtly, that stem from their characters. Pat former relationship had a lot of repressed sexuality, whereas Tiffany deals with her husband’s death by sleeping around. Pat and Tiffany would seemingly not be an ideal match, but they are. They need each other, because they are not only so different from each other, but they are different from other people as well. It is also how they overcome their differences, shown largely in the movie through them learning a “dance” routine, they grow together, learn to communicate with each other, and respect/love one another. Pat sticks up for Tiffany by driving away people Tiffany has slept with, so she can heal. Tiffany gives Pat structure he needs and also lies to him about contacting his estranged wife, thereby giving incentive so he can willingly be apart of the dance routine and thus the structure.

Pat’s father, played wonderfully by Robert DeNiro has OCD and is obsessed with football. His mother is an enabler, helping to get Pat out of the hospital he was in, even though the Doctor’s feeling he wasn’t yet ready. Pat and his father don’t know how to interact with each other, but they try, mostly in the form of football and lucky charms. Some of the most heartbreaking scenes are with Pat’s family. They genuinely care for Pat, and Pat loves them back, but they are on different frequencies and don’t fully understand nor communicate with each other.

Literally, I cried more throughout this film than I did Les Miserables. Not that the two compare, but for me, it has more to do with striking close to home. Pat has a certain kind of helplessness, in inability to communicate properly, or get too hyped up emotionally which estranges his self from those around him. But the movie is happy, there is hope for Pat. He is a good person, and he tries. He makes a playbook to follow, and tries to find the silver linings in his life.

2.) The Dark Knight Rises

Written by Christopher and Jonathon Nolan. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Michael Cane, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, and Marion Cottilard.

It really is a story about moving on. Bruce Wayne is stuck on his dead ex-girlfriend living holed up in his manor busy not being Batman, but wishing he was. Bruce Wayne is built on the idea of not getting over his parents death. This leads into very Film Noirish ideas of the past, that the best times are behind us and not being able to enjoy the moment or move on. This, of course, a very bleak world view. I found it very disturbing of our times/culture that so many people wanted Bruce Wayne to die in this movie before it’s release, and so happy that they were let down. While I belong to the Christian denomination, it seems terribly wrong that we demand the death of our heroes.

With the entrance of Bane Bruce has an excuse to be Batman once more, but he quickly finds he is not match for Bane. Alfred pleads with him that he cannot stand against Bane, that he is not strong enough, stating he buried Bruce’s parents and he won’t stand idly by and watch Bruce be buried as well. Alfred sets in motion the direction that Bruce will ultimately have to undergo- that he needs to let go of the past, and Batman, and find a reason to live.

The ending has surrounded some controversy for some, but I believe it is simple and straightforward. After Batman has regained his strength and defeated Bane he is left with the ticking bomb that will decimate Gotham, so he ties it to his helicopter like “Bat.” We watch Bruce fly off and with him in it as the bomb goes off in the ocean. Earlier we are told that the Bat has a guidance system that can fly itself but it is faulty and cannot be used. Then a mechanic tells us that it was indeed fixed and operable, before Alfred sees Bruce in a Café in France. The major problem of the film was Nolan’s over usage of “Montage”- by that I mean the cutting of footage in away that does not resemble continuous time. If Bruce had indeed jumped out and swam back at the last second the radiation fallout would’ve killed him. Obviously he jumped out beforehand, but the cutting of footage would lead us to believe it would be later. For suspense film often changes space and time to have an emotional build up.

The movie would have been worthless had Bruce of died. This is, in my opinion, the most hope filled movie in Nolan’s canon. Most of his movies are about the obsessive male chasing after something to such an extreme that it destroys him to some level. Inception is the next closest movie, but it is so ambiguous in the end that it is subjective as to whether Inception a hopeful movie. Bruce is told earlier in the film that not fearing death is one thing, but he has to find a reason to live to defeat Bane. While saving Gotham is certainly a noble and Batman reason to live on, I believe that Bruce wants to make his parents happy, and thus Alfred. Another way he moves on is forgetting about his dead ex, who was a horrible match for him. Selina Kyle is a better match, and seeing Bruce with her definitely, I believe is another growth for Bruce.

There is a lot more I would like to say about Rises, but will constrain myself for now to why I have placed it on my top ten list. Hopefully I can write a greater review, and refute the claims of others of "flaws" of the film, and why it should not be perceived as a work of art.

3.) Lincoln

Adapted by Tony Kushner. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and James Spader.

Rather than tell a full story of the life of Abraham Lincoln, Steven Spielberg instead chose to tell the story of passing of the 13^th amendment. The movie is much more enthralling than it sounds, if you give it a chance. Those of us that have studied history know that the 13^th amendment was, indeed, passed. Yet the political intrigue that we are given in the movie is so wonderfully told that he becomes suspenseful. In the climax of the film, as Congress is voting to pass the amendment, I became worried if enough members would support the amendment; and then I thought to myself why am I worried, it obviously passes. Yet, I was afraid, it was enough for me to doubt my memory of the studies of the amendment; perhaps it did not pass then but at another time.

Daniel Day Lewis was Lincoln, it is hard to think of him as Lewis in the film, but only as his character. His posture, composure, and those wonderful stories, he tells at the most appropriate-sometimes odd- moments, are all so wonderful. He brings a wonderful intensity at the right moments when he is trying to convince members of his cabinet to side with him on the issue of the amendment. Then there is the supporting cast. I have to question the worth of having Joseph Gordon Levitt, while I appreciate him as an actor, did not bring much to the film. Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader, however, made their characters as well. This maybe perhaps one of Jones’s greatest roles in his career-which already has a fine resume. His role as Thaddeus Stevens, the radical republican, shows how this country works through compromise. He wants absolute rights for African-Americans, which is noble and true, but Lincoln has to reason with him that it should just be freedom for the time, and that the amendment cannot be as fleshed out as much as Stevens would like.

Otherwise Congress would have voted it down, and there would have been no 13^th amendment. Watching the growth of the two characters for me was the highlight of the film, as they try to reason with each other. It is a good lesson for anybody with more radical tendencies to learn to be more mature and understand the virtue of compromise, for without it, the United States would never have been made, (although that is a history lesson for another time.)

Spader plays a lobbyist trying to buy and bribe votes from Congressmen, which brings humor to the film. A great scene is when in the middle of a talk with one Congressman at a table the representative pulls a gun out and means to aim it at Spader who throws his portfolio at him to get away causing the representative to misfire, getting away and then coming back for his papers. He has seriousness for his work, but a detachment all at the same time, like a slacker who cares only when things get truly grim and his meal ticket maybe threatened.

Spielberg has shown time and time again that he is fully capable of more mature fare, and hopefully Lincoln will allow him to continue to make more films like this, instead of rehashing past films and formulas. He has been criticized for The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, and Amistad. While they have been held in a certain revere in most circles, they still lack the critical and popular attention that they should have received because Spielberg receives unwarranted bias for being a blockbuster and popular filmmaker.

4.) Moonrise Kindgom

My greatest regret for Moonrise Kingdom was that I never saw it twice in the theatre. Wes Anderson's tale of childhood love is wonderful and magical. Two children, Sam and Suzy, who decide to runaway together, both from broken homes, camp out and "love" each other the way that they understand it. Of course they do not have realistic or mature understanding about it, and it is for them mostly about mimicking what they know from other adults and entertainment. They are able to send an entire community on the lookout for them. Anderson's characters have a lot of heart to them.

Most critics have felt Bruce Willis steals the show as the communities Police Officer, but I felt that it was Edward Norton who steals it, as the Scout Master in charge of young Sam as he escapes. He has a real, well, boy scout persona that is genuine and funny.

The underground world of this Scouting troop on the cluster of islands in New England also helped to make this hilarious world. Normally I dislike the cliche of children acting as grown adults, but watching the children here act out melodramtically was definitely the best parts of the film. Jason Schwartzman's role as a black market dealer at the massive Scout rally made me like him finally. That such a shady adult would be dealing with children is so hilarious because of its somewhat disturbing nature.

5.) Argo

- I used to hate Ben Affleck because I was jealous of what I perceived of being undue attention from Hollywood and all the pretty ladies I knew. Now I hate him because of his due attention. For there being little action, or gunfire, Affleck is able to create a wonderful historically set thriller. Like Lincoln, you may know the outcome of the end of the film but Affleck's direction will live you worried of the ending.

6.) Skyfall

- Never have I wanted to see a Bond film because I thought it was pretty until Skyfall. It is gorgeous. There is something terribly lonely about it too. You never think Auteur/artistic cinema and Bond in the same sentence, but with Sam Mendes direction now we do.

Now while I have seen several other standout films: Prometheus, Cabin in the Woods, Avengers, the Master, the Life of Pi; I feel the need to end my list here. Perhaps I will add the Master or Pi as I continue to reflect on them, and I may add more as I continue to watch more films, but for the time being I feel a need to end the list here with six. Hopefully Zero Dark Thirty will prove worthy enough to be added into the slots.

Introducing the Extra Terrestrial

2012-10-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

E.T. the Extraterrestrial is a movie about a boy, Elliott, who meets and befriends an alien who has been abandoned here on earth. In the beginning sequence, in which we are introduced to E.T. before he meets Elliott, we witness E.T.’s childlike fascination with our world. He wanders away from his spaceship as the aliens survey a forest. As E.T. explores our planet, he has a keen sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. The other aliens, his family, are forced to leave him there with the sudden introduction of human scientists into the area. The scientists, like most of the adults in the film, are faceless. They represent adult maturity, rationality, science, and the loss of magic and wonder in our lives. The themes of the movie are set up in this beginning sequence, namely the duel of childlike innocence and belief in magic versus adult rationality and belief in science.

The storytelling structure of the beginning is in the visuals, showing us how E.T. became separated, and is being hunted by adult humans. We see a rabbit coming out to watch E.T. The rabbit’s presence makes us feel calm. Allen Daviau, the film’s cinematographer, gives a beautiful and magical look to this sequence. The story of E.T. is an incredible story that is hard to sell to an audience. John Simon wrote in his article “E.T. Etc.” in the National Review, “Allen Daviau’s cinematography looks opulent without turning too gorgeous or cute, and most of the special effects work in an understated manner.” By not having overly dramatic cinematography we are more accepting of the film world, and of the creature E.T. Joseph McBride quotes Daviau in “Stephen Spielberg: A Biography, “‘I remember saying from the very beginning when I read the script ‘It’s got to be so real. The whole world around has got to be absolutely realistic, so that the magic that happens isn’t hokey, so that the whole thing isn’t intentionally magical. The magic comes out of this incredible situation.” (331) Before we even are allowed to see E.T. fully-lit Spielberg and Daviau are able to sell us E.T. as a credible creature.

The cinematography isn’t the only element building us up to E.T. John W. Wright in his article “Levinsian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language” writes, “Here, Spielberg only postpones the face-to-face encounter with the alien other for the briefest of times. He uses extreme close-ups to show hands, feet, and oblique parts of the alien E.T. as he wanders in the forest in search of plants to sample. When the ship leaves, Spielberg uses fast-paced editing to "humanize" the still faceless E.T. as he tries to make it back to the ship. The alien E.T. may be "unknowable," but Spielberg allows us this time to presage our engagement with its face through cinematic actions that seem familiar: a sense of helplessness, the ability to lose track of time and place, and the immediacy of the alien's loneliness at being isolated from that which it knows and is familiar with.” Spielberg builds us up to the reveal of E.T. later on by establishing him as an individual first. Despite E.T.’s foreign nature we are given the impression that he experiences wonder, fear, and loneliness, like a human being.

The beginning sequence is presented without dialogue, like a silent film. However, there are sound effects of E.T. walking, nature, and humans, as well as a lush soundtrack provided by John Williams. We hear E.T. walking through the forest, breathing heavily, making an “ooh” sound in wonder, and his shriek as the adults pull up. E.T. cannot speak at this point, but can communicate vocally like a baby, allowing us to know what he is experiencing without reading his face. The forest comes alive through the use of sound design here as well, presumably provided by the supervising sound editor Charles L. Campbell. We can hear birds, wind, and other subtle elements of a nighttime forest. As the scientists pull up, we are first introduced to the character simply known as “Keys,” played by Peter Coyote. We hear the jingling of his keys by his side, which throughout the film becomes the indicator of his presence, much as the theme music in Jaws alerts us of the presence of the shark. Sound is used to create the wonder of youth as well as the threat of adult maturity.

Another element of sound is John William’s colorful score which heightens the emotional elements of the movie for the viewer. Jack Sullivan quotes Williams in his article Conversations with John Williams, "For better or worse, the audience for film music, even in an unconscious way, is multinational and enormous. If there is such a thing as global music, it's probably coming from film, where it's less attached to one particular vernacular. As a unified art form, a successful film, if it has a score that people will embrace, really can, in the atmosphere we live in today, reach across those boundaries.” There is no dialogue spoken, and Williams’s score carries us through the scene with its own musical dialect. At first, as E.T. walks through the forest looking up at the redwood trees, the music gives us the sense of wonder that E.T. is having upon experiencing the gigantic redwoods. With the arrival of the scientists, the music becomes more suspenseful, making us believe that if the adults actually apprehend E.T., he would be in danger. The music imposes this dichotomy upon the viewer—of childlike magic and adult rationality.

The idea of a duel between the innocent nature of childhood and adult maturity, of magic versus science, is set up subtly here, at the beginning of the film. It is not presented as a grand gesture, nor is it stated explicitly. Instead Spielberg and his collaborators use film art to guide us into the world of E.T. allowing us to understand the creature and his character, making him believable. At the same time, they help us to understand that maturity and adulthood are around the corner. Later in the film, we understand that the adults are not villains, but people who no longer look at the world the way Elliott and E.T. do.

Bibliography:

McBride, Joseph, Steven Spielberg A Biography, Second ed., Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2010.

Scheurer, Timothy E., "John Williams and film music since 1971." Popular Music & Society 21, no. 1: 59. Music Index, EBSCOhost (accessed October 8, 2012), 1997

Simon, John, "E.T. ETC.," National Review 34, no. 14: 908-910, Film & Television Literature Index, EBSCOhost (accessed October 1, 2012) 1982.

Wright, John W., "Levinasian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language," Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book. Ed. Dean A. Kowalski. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2008.

Chaplin Before 1920

2012-07-17T17:48:00.003-07:00

Charlie Chaplin was one of the most recognized symbols of comedy and the every man. His character the Tramp is instantly recognizable still today by youths and adults alike the world over. How did he get so big? Where did he come from and learn how to do the things that he did? The answers start after the beginning of films rise as a medium. Before he made such classics as the Kid, Modern Times, City Lights, and The Great Dictator, he worked on stage and in a series of shorts for various studios. He brought with him an artists touch and a mavericks sensibilities in his approach to filmmaking. It was his earlier experiences that helped allow him to make such beloved films later on in life.

Charlie Chaplin learned performance at a young age, his mother performed Vaudeville, and he picked up the trade from their. Later on in life when he returned to perform in Vaudeville he perfected his comedic timing and abilities. From there he would learn how to translate his comedy into the film medium. As the film medium took rise Keystone was one of the more popular studios for comedy. They provided broad comedy for people, as witnessed with the Keystone Cops. Of the kings of comedy directors of the period the most Mark Sennett had made good use of his time. Mark Sennett learned filmmaking and storytelling from D.W. Griffith. Griffith’s use of film language- how to cut and compose shots- became important. Whereas Griffith used such storytelling to tell moving dramatic stories, Sennett used method for the purposes of laughter and comedy. Sennett recognized the potential of Chaplin and called for him to come to Hollywood to perform. Chaplin worked under Sennett. Sennett was an informal pupil who worked under Griffith, and so Chaplin became an informal pupil who worked for Sennett. Although Sennett was a camera man, and Chaplin a performer. Making a Living was his first film, but his character the Tramp first appeared in Kid Auto Races at Venice. In the latter his character plays the stand offish camera hog as cameramen try to film children racing. It shows what is to come, a character who stands off against authority and kicks it in the rear.

Much of the studio method of filmmaking displeased Chaplin. The Studio method is often compared to Ford assembly method of manufacturing, which Chaplin would later parody in his film Modern Times- no doubt inspired by his experiences. Sennett had an unusual method of filming and comedy. Michael Conway wrote in his article A Bit About Charlie Chaplin and His films in the book “The Films of Charlie Chaplin, “The Keystone comedy shorts were made in a strange manner. Scripts were unnecessary in many of Sennett’s films. If someone had an idea for a funny situation, and it was possible to film it, the camera rolled. Slapstick was comedy and comedy was slapstick. Sennett held to the theory that rough and tumble comedy had the most appeal.” (18) Chaplin wanted to exert himself, however, as an artist and a comedian. He had power struggles with Sennett and director Mabel Normand. Virginia Wright Wexman wrote in “A History of Film, 7th edition,” “Chaplin’s enormous popular success and shrewd handling of the income he earned from it allowed him, throughout his career, freedom for social-political comment and a degree of artistic autonomy.”(32) By the end of his first year in Hollywood, 1914, Chaplin emerged as a one of the most popular comedians in Keystone and Hollywood.

It was the continuation of the want of control and money that caused Chaplin to leave Keystone in 1915. Sennett had allowed for Chaplin to direct many of his own pictures, but that was not enough for Chaplin. Beyond the purely financial reasons for leaving, Charlie also felt that he could express himself with more freedom elsewhere. Chaplin began to use more reels, lengthening his films from 2 to 3, making his movies longer and longer. There were a string of Companies that Chaplin worked for until 1919 when he cofounded United Artists. United Artists was a break from many of the more traditional studios in that it was, as the title plainly states, founded by “Artists,” being filmmakers and actors, although it would become a more traditional studio later on being financed by banks and businessmen. It was also during this period after Keystone pictures that Chaplin further developed his trait of the tragicomic story, told through his character the Tramp.

The popularity of Charlie Chaplin as a filmmaker and comedian results from a myriad of ways. Chaplin being a child and prodigy of Vaudeville sensibilities and entertainment. The fact that he could work with many of the early Hollywood greats as the medium was taking rise, allowing him to learn and experiment. Chaplin had perfect command over his body, moving often like a dancer to express himself through broad expressive movements. A The Tramp had a recognizable and graphic outfits of slapstick comedians; with his bowler hat, tight jacket, oversized shoes and pants, as well as his odd walk and cane. The elements together make him an instantly recognizable icon, to which people today still imitate. America was exiting a war and entering a depression, and the Tramp expressed many of the sentiments that Americans were feeling.The tragicomic element of Chaplin, I feel is one of the greatest elements of his films and the Tramp. That the Tramp was in nature a good person, funny and kind; yet he was self sacrificing for other good and decent people, he never really got a break that allowed him to prosper like most Americans. In those ways he reflect what many Americans were going through, and their values. This last element, I believe, is was truly separates Chaplin from other knockabout slapstick pictures; wherein authority gets slapped and we laugh, the end. I think that people did recognize the fact Chaplin did have more substance than did the Keystone Cops, and returned to him again and again.

Chaplin did continue to grow as an artist after 1920, but he established himself as an artist during this period. He learned filmmaking from Sennett and other filmmakers at Keystone. He had fine tuned comedy in the Vaudevillian stage. He had even gained control and power over his films that no one else except for D.W. Griffith had before. Chaplin was a power that rose and grew to become a worldwide icon.

Feminism and Society through Melodrama and Noir

2012-05-23T22:47:00.001-07:00

Walter Neff gazing at Phyllis Detrichson.

With noir films like Double Indemnity having such a sadistic female protagonist, can the film itself be considered feminist? Claire Johnston states, “Feminist cinema must include a challenge to the fetishistic and sadistic aspects of the scopic drive which Laura Mulvey demonstrates so convincingly.” Theorist Mulvey also pushes that the gaze in cinema, the power by men looking at and watching women, ultimately controls women. Noir contains several men “gazing,” such as Walter Neff being obsessed with Phyllis Dietrichson and staring at her constantly. That is when noir is kind; often there are scenes in which male characters outright slap women -- or do worse. It would seem that film noir is not feminist in its approach toward women. However, noir is not truly misogynistic, though its characters might be. It is not the characters, but the politics that define the movie.

Films often have a distinctive masculine or feminine appeal. This often has more to do with marketing. Masculine films could be action films, film noirs, and sports films. Whereas feminine films can be considered romantic comedies and melodramas. Without debating the semantics of masculine and feminine I wish to point out the differences between Film Noir and Melodramas, and the social commentary that they carry with them. The commentary that these two genres have upon society reflects mostly upon the gender roles of society. Both noir and melodramas reflect the poor treatment that women have in society, but they also show that in fact everyone is stuck within tight boundaries of society regardless of sex. The genres also blur the personal with the political, because both are interrelated.

Margarethe von Trotta, Douglas Sirk, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are all directors of Melodramatic films, and all originate from Germany. They are considered by many to be auteur directors as well, by putting a piece of themselves into their films. Douglas Sirk was influenced by German Expressionistic cinema in his use of framing. Framing was also used by Fassbinder and von Trotta for the use of isolating individuals from the collective group representing society, or entrapping a character. Shohini Chaudhuri writes about Sirk’s influence on Fassbinder, “Sirkian influences also inspire Ali’s mise-en-scene: pools of saturated color in the Asphalt Pub scenes; the use of mirrors, doorways, partitions, and grilles to internally frame characters within the cinematic frame.”2 Von Trotta’s mise-en-scene is described then in a similar way. “Women looking through windows or waiting at windows frequently appear in von Trotta’s films at key moments in characters’ psychological development and their attempts to relate to another--a sister or a friend.” The framing techniques enhance the story being told emotionally by the filmmakers in their films.


Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Here we see the members of the Asphalt pub gazing at Emmi.

Here Emmi is juxtaposed so we feel her isolation against the rest of the group.

Film Noir functions much in the same fashion. The directors of Film Noir either had a background with, or were influenced by German Expressionist cinema as well as the three previously described melodramatic directors. Shots in such films as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly often feature a lone wolf male protagonist against the world. One shot in Kiss Me Deadly features protagonist Mike Hammer being surrounded by a large staircase. Visually, this makes us uneasy by enveloping him in a swirling image. Later we find out that he really is in over his head and caught in the middle of a political storm much bigger than he is. Here is another character who sets out into the world, only to be enveloped by it.

Both Melodramas and Film Noirs feature protagonists that are trying to live by their basic wants or moral codes but find themselves in some way up against society. Chaudhuri states that Sirk’s “melodramas gave Fassbinder a model for making films that could perform ‘a moral critique of an immoral society’” In the concepts of the individual against society, and society’s moral corruption, we come to the point where these two genres mix and engage. Not every Film Noir or Melodrama has societal commentary that is a conscious effort by the filmmakers. Nor do Film Noirs and Melodramas all have the same commentary.

However, regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions, many Film Noirs and Melodramas comment on gender issues. We see this with the femme fatale in noirs, and by the use of a repressed female protagonist in melodramas. Both types of characters can be described in many cases as a female individual who is trying to advance or get ahead in the world on either a grand or micro scale. The femme fatale does so by unscrupulous methods and is therefore ultimately punished. Whereas the melodramatic female character receives societal punishment at some point, she is sometimes also rewarded by a deux ex machina.

Such an ending occurs in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, so that we gain the catharsis of the protagonist’s happy ending, but we acknowledge that only by an act of God was this allowed to happen in a morally bankrupt society. Fassbinder took it further by taking out the cathartic ending. Chaudhuri writes, “He designed his films’ closures to create another ‘ending’ in the audience’s head-to make it obvious to them that they must change their lives, even if society restricts their choices.”4 In either case the films are designed so that on some level we are aware of societal flaws and attempt to change them. Noir can also draw attention to societal troubles, Double Indemnity is conscious of the fact that Phyllis Dietrichson somewhat manipulated by society to the point she becomes a cold blooded murderer.

At the end of All the Heaven Allows Jane Wyman ends up with Ron Kirby. Yet the mise-en-sene of this scene makes her feel trapped. She is on the inside looking out, and the window serves to act as prison bars. So while it is a touching scene, it also becomes social commentary on the woman's place in society.

The background of the German melodramas and film noir show common similarities. Both are deeply rooted in a postwar atmosphere. Von Trotta and Fassbinder work in family histories that are related to the rise of the Nazi party. To them family history and the rise of the party are rooted in both the personal and the political. “Von Trotta views the political and social reality of postwar and contemporary Germany through the lens of personal relations and family dramas. For Fassbinder, too, politics and power relationships begin at home and are negotiated in interpersonal relations rather than in abstract political debates or historical conflicts.” In noir heroes are often returned war veterans trying to find their place back home. Often they cannot find their place. The world has changed, and it no longer needs them. Paul Schrader states that in this world, “one finds that the upward mobile forces of the thirties have halted; frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia.” In both melodrama and noir there is an overriding sense of pessimism for the world and mankind.

In Mariane and Julianne the two sisters become separated by political views. As they separate ideologically, they become separated physically as well. After one's arrest they are separated by a window and can no longer touch. In another a reflection of one moves over the face of the other, but as soon as it is aligned it disappears off the glass, representing their movement from each other.

Pessimism arises because it points to the fallacies of the world and attempts to get us to create change. While violence and the male gaze occur in the movie, viewers should not allow them to distract from the overall message of the film. Summing up Fassbinder’s thoughts Chaudhuri states, “‘the cultural representations through which we see and are seen’ should be the focus of our political struggle, not the gaze.” The message of the film should be at the forefront when viewed, because events that occur in the film exist to support the message. The message is political, going back to von Trotta’s view of the interrelation of the personal and political. Many noirs and many melodramas are very feminist in their politics, but are aimed at different audiences. I enjoy both and find them entertaining, because they portray similar outlooks of society.

Bibliography:
Chaudhuri, Shohini. “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul." Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Ed. Geiger, Jeffrey and Rutsky, R.L. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.
Haynes, Todd. Far from Heaven, Safe, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story; Three Screen Plays. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
Johnston, Claire. “Classic Hollywood Cinema.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Nichols, Bill. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985.
Rueschmann, Eva. “The Politics of Intersubjectivity.” Sisters on the Screen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

*Note: It should be noted that both Noir and Melodramas had a deep influence by the German Expressionist film movement. Sirk himself came from that background, as well as several other directors and cinematographers of the time. I failed to mention this in the text, and it bears an important part explaining the style similarities of the two genres and their social commentary.

Culture in Mississippi Masala

2012-05-23T17:25:00.001-07:00

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi513212697/

Indians and all non-native Africans were forced out of Africa. The film raises questions about racism, what is a home and what is a native?

Mississippi Masala serves as a general human tale of love, loss, and friendship. It does so using a romantic identity, sometimes falling into the melodramatic a little. This format helps to draw us into the film, and relate to it on an emotional level. The movie unfolds like any other basic romantic story in which boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and the two end up together in the end. The story has more significant meaning than just that, however. Meena is an Indian girl who falls in love with Demetrius, a hard working carpet cleaner who is African American. They have cultural clashes as they date, but ultimately they feel that culture should not define them or their relationship. It also tells the story of Meena’s father, Jay, as he seeks penance from the Ugandan government which he feels has wronged him. The story acts as a parable for intolerance and racism in our times; and shows that racism, the act of disliking someone based off of their ethnic background, is not limited to strictly Euro-Caucasian. Identity plays a big part in the unfolding of the story of Mississippi Masala, in that the two characters have strong ties to their cultures which have helped to form their identities. The movie shows an important element of identity, which is that to find ourselves we have to distance ourselves from our cultural selves to see ourselves as we really are.

Mississippi Masala is set in rural Mississippi. Meena and her family are descendants of Indian culture. Her parents had made their home in Uganda until all non-Africans were told to leave. They moved to England and ultimately Mississippi. Demetrius is African American, and he works hard to be financially independent while all his friends are goofing off or trying to make it big in southern California. He and Meena both have strong cultural identities, but as they fall in love with each other their cultures come into conflict. Meena’s parents do not like Demetrius; there is the underlying problem that he is not Indian. Then Demetrius’s friends and family are concerned because of how “they” – Indians -- are with “our people.” The movie shows how racism is not limited to white people, but is a cross-cultural problem.

The movie Mississippi Masala shows realistic images of two distinct cultures in the film. Robert Stam and Louise Spence write about how many cultures are negatively stereotyped in several films. Then Hollywood overcompensated with “positive images” of cultures in which characters seemed too good to be true, and more often than not were. “A cinema dominated by positive images, characterized by a bending-over-backwards-not-to-be-racist attitude, might ultimately betray a lack of confidence in the group portrayed, which usually itself has no illusions concerning its own perfection.” This became another form of racism, and stereotyping in Hollywood. In Mississippi Masala we are given a more realistic look at an Indian culture relocated in America, and at a Mississippi African American community. This realism shows them in both positive and negative lights. However, it should be noted that many of the white folk in the film are shown as backwards hicks who cannot tell Native Americans from Indians and drive around in pickup trucks with American flags in their back windows. This could be deemed unfair stereotyping, but since this is a reversal of traditional cultural roles in film, and I found it funny as white male, it should be allowed to slide in this movie. On the other hand, Mississippi Masala does a fair job in presenting Indian culture, which is typically portrayed in a stereotypical fashion in American films.

Key to the idea of culture is that of identity. Culture stems from our identity, because it is “inherited memories” we have gained from our ancestors passed down to us. Stuart Hall explains, “‘Cultural identity’ in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.” In Mississippi Masala we see this with both families. At Demetrius’s family dinner we get to see everyone gathering around their grandfather for his birthday, talking about growing up together. We see this also with Meena’s family, at the wedding and other various random family get-togethers in which they celebrate with their native India’s customs. Despite the fact that they are in America, and attempt to fit in, they still actively practice their religion, which many of the locals deem foreign.

    Hall continues with a second position on identity, “As well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather -- since history has intervened -- ‘what we have become.’”2 That is to say, yes we share a social and cultural identity, however, we have an identity outside of that which is defined by our own individual words and actions. Demetrius in the film is shown against the backdrop of his culture, in which many of those amongst his age are just hanging out, and loitering the streets. He stands out because he works hard with his rug cleaning business and takes his life seriously. Meena breaks away from her family heritage by running away with Demetrius, giving Meena an identity away from her culture as well. They both look outward to define themselves, not allowing culture to define themselves.

    Despite the movements that Meena and Demetrius have undertaken to be with each other, they still have personal problems that delve into the realm of politics. Hall continues, “The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past’, since our relation to it... It is always construct through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental ‘law of origin’.”3 The movie moves into the political realm, when we watch Meena’s relatives try to kiss up to Demetrius after the car accident. They want to get assurances that he will not sue. Then after he sleeps with Meena, they quickly turn on him by stopping all business with him to guarantee that he will no longer have contact with Meena. The scandal goes so far to lose even an actual political client, and sends Demetrius broke to the bank.

    The politics are most in the forefront with Jay, who is suing the Ugandan government for his personal loss of property, and what he feels was an illegal eviction from what he considers his homeland. Jay and Meena were not born in India like some of their relatives, but they were born in Uganda. Meena left while she was a child and has little attachment to it, whereas Jay feels that Uganda is a large part of his culture and identity. In a flashback we see him playing as a boy with another Ugandan boy, and his mother calling the two of them together “brother.” While they are probably not biologically brothers, this goes to serve the idea that identity can be based on land, not just blood, as with the case of Jay. Throughout the movie he spends most of the time being bitter. Through flashbacks we see him with his native Ugandan friend, Jammubhai, undergoing the regime change and Idi Amin kicking out non-native Africans. Jay feels betrayed when his friend Jammubhai tells him in order to help him leave and thereby save his life that “Africa is now for Africans.” Jay is hurt because he feels that despite his cultural heritage he himself is African; he was born and raised there. Rather than see his friend’s words as friendly advice, it makes him angry and bitter towards him and Uganda. Hence Jay sues the government of Uganda.

    When Jay finally gets the government to hear his case and he returns to Uganda he looks up his friend Jammubhai only to discover that he had died years before. The news is such a shock to him that he breaks down emotionally. He realizes that his anger blinded him from continuing correspondence with a person that he considered his brother. This epiphany helps Jay to realize that suing the Ugandan government will not give him justice, nor will it bring back his friend, or give him the thing he realizes is most important of all -- happiness. Jay’s adventure is a parallel with Meena and Demetrius’s love story. The two lovers could have had a falling out, and began to, but in the end overcame those fears, so that they could have love and be together. Jay did not take the step to overcome his fear and anger, and lost his friend.

Jay revisiting his homeland, and gaining a greater realization.

    It through the journeys that Meena, Demetrius, and Jay all go through that they find themselves. They have to distance themselves from their culture to look inward and to see that they are more than what their community would have them be. Demetrius’s friends told him not to go after Meena, even though she made him happy. The same with Meena and her family. When they overlooked the opposition that their communities gave them to run away together they became happy. The greater story is Jay’s acknowledgement that he should look after his own daughter’s happiness and not fight to preserve the cultural heritage if it means destroying the happiness of those he loves. This catharsis in the end of the film then becomes ours, the audience’s. It seems so trivial to fight for something that isn’t real, but is just an abstract concept that we have kept alive.

1 Spence, Louise and Stam, Robert. “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009.
2 Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference.   Edited by J. Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.
3 Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference.   Edited by J. Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Hello (The Long) Goodbye

2012-05-10T23:50:00.003-07:00

Robert Altman’s the Long Goodbye dances the line of paying homage to noir and parodying noir. Modern audiences would consider it more homage, whereas a film like The Big Lebowski would be considered more of a parody. The Long Goodbye follows Phillip Marlowe as he tries to comprehend the apparent suicide of his friend, Terry Lennox, following the murder of Lennox’s wife. Many of the elements of a classic noir are there; the police are no help to him, the mob comes in for a debt from Lennox, a crooked doctor comes in, and there is a form of a femme fatale; but the film never fully fits into the noir box. In The Long Goodbye Marlowe is described by Altman as “Rip Van Marlowe”; meaning that it is as if Marlowe just woke up from the classic noir period and goes about his business. We watch in the film a person who is a moral relic of a bygone era, and Altman plays with this idea throughout the film. The Long Goodbye becomes its own sub-genre, neither homage nor parody to the films of a bygone era.


Here you can get a hint of the bleached out look of the film.

Though the film technique is not like that of classic noir - such as complex mise-en-sene, dark shadows, low key lighting, low and high shots; the film still retained some elements of classic noir. Naremore highlights stylistic differences when he says, “In place of carefully framed, angular compositions, it uses a roving, almost arbitrary series of panning and zooming shots that continually flatten perspective.”1 Noir is often described as being confusing, slow, and dreamlike, and in the Long Goodbye I felt these elements were retained. The dreamlike quality comes from obviously its slower pace, but also the fact that the film itself is bleached out. Altman said “I wanted to give the film the soft, pastel look you see on old postcards from the 1940s.”2 This makes the film feel like a forgotten memory one recalls in their dream. At times the film felt as if it were going nowhere, with several plot lines that I thought would never be tied up. I have faith in the plot structure of classic noir that their plots will be tied up, regardless of how convoluted they are. I suppose due to the chaotic nature of Altman films, I gave in to the complexity and felt that the subplots only loosely tied together through theme, and seldom wrap up together in the end. My initial confusion was probably also tied into the slow nature of the movie, wherein I felt frustrated with Marlowe’s slow attempt to solve his friend’s murder, and the characters that I initially felt were unrelated to the central problem, and that their problems took him further from the truth. However, Altman’s approach toward a noir detective story made me forget that everything ties together, and most loose ends are solved.

Here is Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe.

Elliot Gould plays Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. Marlowe’s friend, Terry Lennox, tells Marlowe that he is a born loser. Perhaps that’s why not every loose end is tied up at the end. Marlowe points out the fact that his cat runs away, and he never did find it at the end. Altman was trying to make a point here about the morals and times of the past through the use of Marlowe. Elizabeth Ward wrote, “The film noir protagonist had steadily lost any ability to effect change in a modern world, and this increasing powerlessness is correlative of diminishing social morality.”3 Marlowe does not stop any corruption or evil from occurring. When the gangster Marty Augustine smashes his girlfriend.s face Marlowe just watches, and when the novelist Roger Wade walks into the ocean and drowns, Marlowe cannot find Wade in the water to save him. Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe with swagger and a cool edge; it could be said of Gould’s Marlowe that he is more passive. Gould passively watches and asks questions, but the only action that he takes is in the end is when he finds his friend Terry and shoots him for his betrayal.

Marlowe being a wise guy with the police by putting finger ink all over his face.

Gould’s portrayal in many ways is in contrast with Raymond Chandler’s original version of Marlowe. Naremore points out that Marlowe is “a mumbling private eye who incessantly talks to himself.”4 Gould’s Marlowe does talk a lot, constantly throughout the film making smart-aleck remarks. Not every line is gold, but I enjoy a character that says what he wants to despite his surroundings, as shown in scenes in the police interrogation room and when Marlowe is held at gunpoint by the mobsters. Despite the fact that he is under pressure or in physical danger he cracks wise, perhaps as a way to deal with pressure. At times Marlowe is painful to watch because I had no idea why he didn’t speak up directly to those around him. Bogart’s Marlowe gives the impression that he is almost always has some upper hand or that he is confident enough to get the job done. That doesn’t come across as well to me with Gould’s portrayal. Although Gould does not seem to have Bogart’s confidence, his is a more accurate portrayal of a person solving a mystery. He is swimming up the creek without a paddle, with several other components in play that either purposefully or mistakenly lead him away from figuring everything out.


Is Eileen Wade a Femme Fatale?

The themes of corruption and misogyny that often shown in classic noir exist in The Long Goodbye, although shown differently than in classic noir. Naremore states that “the coke-bottle attack and the running gag about the stoned, bare-breasted girls who live in an apartment across from Marlowe-seem designed to exploit a new style of misogyny and violence under the cover of a smugly superior attitude toward private-eye stories.”5 The police are portrayed differently in the film too, where many film noirs portray police as being corrupt and greedy. Ward, however, states that “the ‘modern’ corruption of the police in The Long Goodbye is not caused by individual ambition and greed but by overload and burn-out.”6 We can look at these statements and make a number of assumptions: that our viewpoints on corruption and misogyny have changed including their starting factors, or that the methods in which that they are displayed have changed.

Altman’s the Long Goodbye contains many of the elements of noir, but like many neo-noirs never fully embraces all the elements. Times had changed, and the filmmakers and their techniques had changed with them. Altman wanted the film to look like a faded postcard, a forgotten memory, as opposed to noir’s highly stylized and graphic shots. While the world became more effective in fighting crime and became more feminist, corruption and misogyny still lingered. Maybe due to the serious nature of the content in The Long Goodbye, it can’t be taken as parody, but because of Marlowe’s attitude throughout the film it can’t be taken seriously either. Personally, I wish that more films would dance the line of humor and seriousness. However, as we see with this film, audiences often have trouble distinguishing between the two. So The Long Goodbye becomes neither homage nor parody, but stands on its own as a different kind of noir.

1.) Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Updated and Expanded Edition (Kindle Locations 2654-2655). Kindle Edition.
2.) Altman, Robert, and David Thompson. Altman on Altman. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.77
3.) Ward, Elizabeth. "The Post-Noir P.I.: The Long Goodbye and Hickey and Boggs" Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006. 237
4.) Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Updated and Expanded Edition (Kindle Location 2654). Kindle Edition.
5.) Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Updated and Expanded Edition (Kindle Locations 2665-2666). Kindle Edition.
6.) Ward, Elizabeth. "The Post-Noir P.I.: The Long Goodbye and Hickey and Boggs" Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006. 240

Human Values Through Film Design: Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator

2012-04-06T21:08:00.003-07:00

Charlie Chaplin learned comedy while working in vaudeville, and he went on to make genre comedies like many of his contemporaries. Compared to his peers Chaplin is sentimental in his story telling; he is more expressive, and his tramp character is lovable. As well as being a top-notch comedian and actor, Chaplin also directed the majority of his films. He was intelligent, and he was conscious of human suffering in the world around him. The times were hard for most people, the Great Depression provided troubles for people. He was gifted with an intuitive sense of cinema that let him make personal films, rich in humanity, when most movies were manufactured by a studio system that felt movies were a product and not art. Modern Times and The Great Dictator are two socially conscious films of his that have continued to find appreciative audiences.

Chaplin plays two roles in The Great Dictator, and each character has their own stories. The Dictator, Hynkel plans and plots to take over the neighboring country, and then the world; but he has to face several political and personnel problems that pop up. Meanwhile the Jewish Barber has to fight to survive; because Hynkel puts pressure on the Jews of Tomania, and is harassed by the Stormtroopers. The Barber is able to find love with Hannah, played by Paulette Godard. The end of the film has mistaken identities, caused by the fact that Hynkel and the Barber look so much alike; this was inspired by the fact that Hitler copied Chaplin’s mustache in real life. The ending of The Great Dictator has the Barber addressing a crowd of the dictator’s soldiers, and he gives them, and the whole world, a plea for peace. In this plea Chaplin stops acting as the Barber and speaks as himself; he stops speaking to the Tomanian troops and speaks to the citizens of the world. It is a beautiful and moving piece because Chaplin speaks his mind, and addresses his audience directly which few filmmakers do.

In The Great Dictator, while the Jewish Barber is in the hospital, after the first World War, time passes and the world changes drastically. To let the audience know that the world has changed since the end of the war, Chaplin uses a montage sequence. The screen fades from the Barber and his friend being told the war has been lost to whirling newspaper presses. The presses symbolize the gears and wheels of the world spinning, passing, and changing. Chaplin fades through different printing presses, and we see different shots of machines until a newspaper headline comes at us; “Armistice!” The camera fades into a crowd of happy people in the streets cheering the end of the war. Then the Barber is shown in the hospital, with his head bandaged. We are shown more headlines, many of them contemporary with Chaplin’s timeline, giving the audience a sense of time, “Lindberg flies Atlantic.” This is an attempt to speed the audience up to the present. The headlines show terrible times in the fictitious country of Tomania, which is a metaphor for Germany, and this helps us understand the last headline, “Hynkel Party Takes Power!” It parallels Hitler’s rise to power. The montage then shows us one last shot of the barber walking around so we know that he is in good health and alive, before giving us the film’s first shot of Hynkel. The montage sequence is important to the narrative because it gives the audience a greater sense of the timeline. For Chaplin’s original audience, it provided a brief history of the parallel world that he has created, wherein Hynkel stands in for Hitler. For modern audiences the montage gives them a greater understanding of the timeline, reminding and informing them of past events, letting the audience see the deplorable conditions of Tomania and how a person like Hynkel could rise to power. In less than a minute, several years worth of knowledge is given about the Barber and the conditions of Tomania.

The most beautiful and haunting sequences of The Great Dictator is when Hynkel dances with the globe, tossing it up into the air and gracefully catching it. Chaplin uses many long takes, and avoids cuts unless they are needed for an emotional affect, such as a close up of Hannah during Chaplin’s closing speech. In this sequence Hynkel tosses the globe. Rather than have the camera follow the globe up, the camera cuts to the globe and then follows it down. When you become used to this, the camera follows the globe up and then cuts to Chaplin lying down on the table. While it is not an extreme use of editing as many modern editors would use, it is subtly jarring. Hynkel is a pleasant person, but under the personality he is a violent brute. The quick subtle edits highlights this in Hynkel’s dance; he is dangerous. Finally, at the end of the sequence, he grabs the globe and it bursts, just as the Earth would have if Hynkel or Hitler would have conquered the Earth. In the most moving scene in The Great Dictator Chaplin uses little cuts for a greater emotional appeal. When he gives his speech and plea for humanity, which goes about five minutes, the camera cuts only once. Chaplin just stares straight into the camera for each whole take, breaking the “fourth wall” by looking at the audience. This contrasts with Hynkel’s dance and shows that Chaplin uses editing to highlight emotional aspects of the film.

The Great Dictator has a threatening yet humorous scene wherein Hynkel addresses members of the Jewish Ghetto through a loudspeaker. Chaplin speaks so it sounds like German, but it is just gibberish, and no translation is given. It is not what Hynkel is saying, but how he says it, that is threatening. We are set up in a previous scene where he states that he is going to threaten the Jews. While on the loudspeaker we see the Barber and Hannah reacting. They are on a crowded street when Hynkel’s voice booms in, and in seconds they are the last ones standing; everyone else has disappeared. The walk down the street at an increasing speed, but when Hynkel’s voice becomes more threatening they hide. There is no visible danger here, only the perception of Hynkel’s threat to them. The combination of the set-up, the sound production, and the acting make this sequence both frightening and hilarious.

Modern Times has plenty of plot and action by Chaplin’s design, compared to The Great Dictator the action veers away from the story. It is Godard’s urchin propels the Tramp into the next adventure. They dream of a future, and attempt to help each other. Chaplin tries to support her; declaring he will get her a home even if he has to work for it. It breaks off into events, going away from the story and into the plot; surviving the conditions of a city in 1930. We watch Chaplin working, imprisoned, and Godard as she works in a restaurant. Humor often works when the story and the plot diverge from the story, and perhaps this is why it was such a successful film. The Great Dictator on the other has less non-diegetic material, comparatively; and the action keeps more to the story. Plot developments in The Great Dictator build up to the speech in the end of the film; while not every piece of the plot fits the story it is tighter than Modern Times.

Chaplin had a strong ideology that was very pro-humanity, and he portrayed his views in his films. He gave the films implicit meanings that he consciously thought about for long periods. Modern Times shows how Chaplin felt about the industrial era, and how technological efficiency has dehumanized mankind. When the Tramp is working in the factory tightening bolts, he gets so caught up in the work that he does not notice that he is pulled into the machinery as he tightens the bolts of the machine. His body is contorted through painful-looking gears; he has become a piece of the machine itself. Chaplin’s plea for humanity to the soldiers,

“Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you — enslave you — who regiment your lives — tell you what to do — what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!...Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!”

Chaplin rose to fame during the Great Depression, and was conscious of the ruin around him. As Hitler rose to power many people in the United States supported him and his quest against the Jews; which appalled Chaplin. He knew that he could use his film as an overt and subtle weapon against social injustices he perceived.

Chaplin played with the frame rate in many of his films. By using the frame rate of 18 fps, or another speed, he could give the story a greater pacing he felt that he wanted. It allows for Chaplin to move in a manner he could not on his own; the Tramp could then move faster, be more graceful, or be clumsy. The effect works; it is subtle enough for the audience not to notice it. Paulette Godard’s character in Modern Times is introduced by showing her cutting a bushel of bananas and throwing them to children. She is a desperate and hungry street urchin. The frame rate is sped up; so that she is furiously cutting the bananas, which gives her more spirit and voraciousness as she goes at it. If watched her at a normal fps rate it would not create the same effect; the change is needed to make her seem more feisty. Later the Tramp goes swimming and somersaults into less than a foot of water in the lake. The reaction of Chaplin to this event is intensified by the action being sped up. It is only a short gag, but the audience spends more time watching him prepare for the dive than in the actual water. He stretches, and warms up, then dives. Another person would have somersaulted more awkwardly, and it would have only appeared painful, but Chaplin’s choreography combined with the adjusted fps rate makes it humorous to the audience instead of painful.

Modern Times, while a “silent film,” still made use of recorded sound; such as music, sound effects, and features Charlie Chaplin singing. The sound is postsynchronous, recorded after filming. It is the amalgamation of silent film techniques with prerecorded diegetic sound that makes the film interesting and unique. Whenever people talk to each other we cannot hear them, instead we read their lips or read the title cards. However, whenever a person talks through a machine, whether it is the Henry Ford-like boss, or a news radio announcer, we get to hear a voice. The only time that we get to hear a voice is through a machine. This adds to theme of the movie—the dehumanization of people because of technology and the “advances” of modern times: people have lost their voices, and they have become slaves to the machines they work for. When Chaplin’s boss comes down to see him and talk to him directly he no longer has a voice as he did when he was on the monitor. Everything he says goes unheard, and only the most important dialogue ends up on a title card. The restaurant scene of the film has Charlie Chaplin singing. However, the character loses the lyrics of the song and has to make up the lyrics. Instead of singing in English he sings in gibberish, imitating French. We can even hear the audience members cheering and laughing at his humorous gestures. Combined with Chaplin’s gestures and dancing, it is a humorous scene. Although the song is the first time many people have heard Chaplin’s voice, the scene is still more about the comical movements and gestures that he performs. This could have been Chaplin’s way of trying to defy modern conventions, which made many of his peers go over to talkies. Even in a historical moment, as Chaplin’s voice being heard, it is still about the pantomime and the mimegesis.

Chaplin would often use a deep focus in his films. He came from a theatre background, and would stage action so that he could use a longer shot, rather than a traditional establishing shot followed by close ups. Characters often speak to each other on screen together instead of two close ups intercut. In the shots of Godard’s Gamin with Chaplin’s Tramp, they talk facing each other, with their sides to the audience. Then in the factory scenes he uses a deep focus, giving us a sense of grandeur and depth in the factory. We can watch the great big gears in the background turning, and men wheeling machinery around with as much focus as Chaplin and other workers in the foreground. He was aware of his body as a comedic tool, and wanted to put it entirely in the shot.

Chaplin uses suspense as a comedic tool in both films by dangling his characters over danger while neither character is aware of it. In Modern Times Chaplin’s Tramp is rollerskating around a multi-level department store to impress his girlfriend; and while doing so comes close to death by approaching an open ledge. It would be an impressive feat of bravery, but the tramp is blindfolded, and he inches closer to the ledge with each pass. The audience fears for the Tramp, but he is unaware that he is in danger of getting hurt while showing off. The comedy kicks in when his girlfriend, Hannah, warns him and he takes the blind fold off. Now he is no longer graceful and flails about to get away from the ledge, getting closer to it. His surprise combined with the relief he never got hurt is what makes the scene funny. This replays in The Great Dictator when the Barber and Hannah escape the stormtroopers; with all of the friends’ belongings, including a hat box placed over the Barber’s eyes. The two run up to the roof, and the Barber runs out onto a beam unaware that a misstep could mean his death. His friend calls out to him to be careful. The Barber comically drops several items he is holding to his friends dismay, thinking he is placing them on the ground. Again, while we fear for his safety, the true comedy comes in when he takes the hat box off his head and looks down, he finally drops all the items and flails about until he can reach the safety of the roof. The dramatic build-up of Chaplin’s falling climaxes with his becoming aware of his danger, which leads to his safety and the audience’s release of emotion with laughter.

Modern Times and The Great Dictator are a culmination of everything that Chaplin had learned working on film years prior. They also show his ability to adapt and grow; he redeveloped himself to use sound design, and even use speech as a comical and dramatic device. Most impressive of Chaplin is how he used his films not just for entertainment or for self gain, but he used them to promote social values he developed. He was worried about industry destroying men’s souls, and a dictator destroying the world. There hasn’t been anyone quite like Chaplin since.

Gilda: The Singing Dancing Noir Heroine

2012-04-05T15:18:00.003-07:00

"Sure, I'm decent."

Gilda is both interesting and terrifying to watch for the relationships the characters carry with each other. Johnny starts off as the narrator, but then by the end almost becomes the villain. The love triangle between Johnny Farrell, Ballin Mundson, and Gilda suggests relationships both of love and of doom, as is the case of Ballin. Through mere suggestion we question the nature of relationship between Ballin and Johnny, whom are extremely close. Then there is the sadomasochistic relationship between Johnny and Gilda. She walks and talks like a femme fatale, but she rises beyond being one by being sympathetic and relatable. In the 1940s it was traditional in films to show women in housekeeping roles; except in film noirs, wherein women who rebel against patriarchy would be punished. In the noir world women were not allowed to get ahead, or be freed; they were to be controlled. Gilda becomes unusual because of it’s portrayal of the title character in a different light; trying to promote herself, exhibiting herself in sexually, yet Gilda is depicted as being sympathetic. Gilda is more optimistic in the film world. Gilda is not a femme fatal, and she is able to persevere through her afflictions and come out the better for it.

Gilda is represented in strange ways. One of Ballin’s rules is that the club should be filled with men and unattractive women, so that Ballin can further control the gamblers by forcing their focus on gambling. With her appearance, Gilda disrupts the focus, redirecting it to herself. She is an exhibitionist, daring to challenge the authority of men over her body, by singing and dancing. Ballin has the rule that woman and gambling do not mix; however, Ballin when confronted by Johnny Farrell with this rule responds, “My wife does not come under the category of women.” Ballin may perceive and be attracted to Gilda for the fact that her behavior is masculine rather than feminine. There is an implied homosexual relationship between Ballin and Johnny. With that in mind it would be safe to assume the thing that attracted Ballin to Gilda would be her femme fatal like behavior. Femme fatales in noir is that they try to act like men rather than be servants of men, so is this could be the element that attracts him toward her. Gilda, the character in the movie world and the movie in our world, becomes a challenge toward patriarchal society. Richard Dyer writes that “The casting of Hayworth as Gilda gives the character a positive charge (where femme fatales are usually negative, in the sense of being absent in terms of personality, mere functions or the eternal unknowable.)”

. What becomes the strangest part of Gilda in the film noir universe is that she becomes sympathetic. Instead of a femme fatal sent to castrate the men, she becomes a woman fighting for her own happiness and freedom from those who are continually trying to control her.

Much of the uniqueness of the character of Gilda is created by Hayworth, the actress who played her. Other noir films had to get smaller actresses to perform due to small budgets; however, Gilda was not a B picture and therefore could afford a name actress. Rita Hayworth brought her charm to the performance of Gilda. Dyer writes about in the 40‘s Rita was considered a ‘love goddess’ for heterosexual men, but she was also “an identification figure for heterosexual women.” Dancing, he explains, was unnecessary for the character but was there because Hayworth was known for dancing. Dyer continues, “They introduce a new element into the construction of the character as a sexual object -- namely, movement.” The elements of dancing, movement, singing, and exhibitionism are all important to understanding the character Gilda, and her relationship with Johnny. He is always trying to control Gilda, not allowing her to dance, sing, or move freely.

Johnny is punishing her, we are never told directly why and it becomes irrelevant. Naremore probably best explains the noir hero by stating “In many cases, the noir protagonist's ability to serve as a role model is undercut by his quasi-gay relationships with men, by his masochistic love affairs with women, and by his more general weakness of character.”

The extremes that Johnny goes to can not be justified in his treatment toward Gilda. In terms of plot development, the Nazis could have been interchangeable with gangsters. Nazis become a symbol of Johnny and Gilda’s relationship in the film and a reminder of the extremes of controlling people, allowing intolerance and hatred to blind people as it did Johnny. Johnny becomes a dictator in his treatment of Gilda, and her apartment, which he never visits, becomes her prison, from which she is never allowed to leave. After she runs away and is told that it is safe, she realizes that it was all a ruse, she was never safe. Though Ballin tries to kill Johnny and Gilda at the end, he never quite succeeds in behaving more outrageous than Johnny. He is controlling of Gilda even when she is married to Ballin, and forces her to play the good wife to Ballin. Motivations could stem from revenge against her, or that he wants Ballin to be happy and have an obedient and good wife, because of his feelings toward Ballin. Both of which could be true but it never really matters. Johnny feels threatened in the end by Gilda and that is why he treats her the way that he does. Angela Martin said, “she doesn’t necessarily have to kill or harm anyone, she just carries the threat by her very presence.” This better explains the reasoning of Johnny’s behavior. Johnny runs the casino with his own Gestapo, and treats Gilda with the hatred and intolerance that a dictator has for minorities, because he feels she is a threat by being there.

Here Gilda is caught dancing with another
man, and Johnny has come to pull her away.

Gilda refuses to allow herself to be controlled. She puts up with the cruelty Johnny gives her, perhaps, more than most would. Through it all she dances, she sings, she owns herself and refuses to be owned by Johnny, by keeping her movement free. While Hayworth was a pin-up model, and a sexual fantasy for men, there is a feminist element of freedom with her in this role. Dyer wrote “the particular kind of movement, the association with it of Hayworth’s image, its narrative placing, all make it possible to read Hayworth-as-Gilda... in Marjorie Rosen’s terms: ‘for the first time a heroine seemed to say, “This is my body. It’s lovely and gives me pleasure. I rejoice in it just as you do”, or else in terms of male heterosexual enjoyment of the character - of surrender rather than control.” An element of male masculinity in film noir and Gilda becomes about control, as Johnny controls Gilda.

Another difference between Gilda and other film noirs is everything gets straightened out, for the most part, and ends with a more traditional happy ending. Instead of being punished in the end, Gilda is rewarded. Johnny changes, acknowledges his wrong-doing against Gilda and asks for her forgiveness. Ballin, the only person standing between them and won’t let them go, gets killed. The two go off together away from the casino and the Nazis. While the change of Johnny is presented logically, with Uncle Pio and Detective Maurice Obregon appealing to Johnny to be more sympathetic and reasonable throughout the film, but the transformation is still quick and magical. Not surprisingly, some of the writers were women, and perhaps that is why this stands out as a more pro-feminist film. So the writers could have been trying to appeal to men to drop misogynistic behavior and live harmoniously with their female counterparts.

Johnny fights Nazis and cops who want to control him. Johnny even fights off luck. Then he ends up trying to control Gilda. Why should Gilda be any more controlled than he? Film noir exemplifies masculine behavior, and Gilda’s plea is to allow the Gildas of the world to continue to sing and to dance. Gilda is not a femme fatal because she is not one sided, and she becomes sympathetic. Gilda is free because of her movement. She sings and dances, and refuses to allow herself be controlled. Unlike many film noirs female characters, Gilda becomes a role model for women.

¹ Dyer, Richard. ‘Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. Kaplan, E. Ann.British Film Institute. 2008. 119.

² Dyer, Richard. 120

³ Dyer, Richard.

⁴ Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 2008. Ebook edition.

⁵ Martin, Angela. ‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of the 40s Film Noirs.’ Women in Film Noir. Ed. Kaplan, E. Ann.British Film Institute. 2008. 208.

⁶ Martin, Angela. 208.

Sequoia Sempervirens of "Vertigo"

2012-03-28T23:35:00.000-07:00

SPOILER ALERT: **If you haven't watched Vertigo already, do not read on.**

In Vertigo, Scottie and Madeleine escape up to Muir Woods to look at the redwood trees together. The sequence is powerful not just because of the beauty of the redwoods, but because of the overpowering nature of them. Scottie and Madeleine, who is really Judy, are reduced as figures into small mammals in comparison to the sequoias. Madeleine projects her fear of death and the unknown. Scottie tries to comfort her and get her to open up, but gets pulled further into Madeleine’s lies. The feeling is of despair and hopelessness for the two characters; though they are together now, there are forces suggested ripping them apart. Those forces are the implied; through a ghost story told by Gavin and Madeleine Elster that Scottie begins to believe, and the truth that Gavin Elster has hired a doppleganger to be his wife and mislead Scottie as part of his plan to kill his wife. This sequence conveys the treachery of Scottie’s friend Gavin setting him up, Judy impersonating Madeleine to mislead him, and at the same time the supernatural happening which is all part of the set up.

Hitchcock’s use of mise-en-scene projects this sense of disparity and hopelessness in the forest sequence. The trees are huge and majestic, overpowering the image of the screen. Andre Bazin illustrates the idea of image when he said, “By image I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object there represented.” Madeleine and Scottie are viewed in the corner as tiny figures in the screen. The dichotomy of the characters and the trees make the scene sinister. There is light in the front ground of the shot where the car is, however, in the corner of the shot Scottie and Madeleine are walking into it is darkened by the shade of the trees. The viewer in this shot is suddenly transported with the fade from a comfortable sea road to a menacing land, where we feel foreboding danger lies in waiting for us. In the next shot we have a similar placement when we see the two standing next to a large singular sequoia. Scottie and Madeleine talk about the tree, and Scottie tells her it is “two thousand years or so.” The tree’s given age, combined with the juxtaposition of the wide shot, gives us a menacing view of a giant domineering sequoia tree enveloping them. Madeleine talks about how many people must have lived and died in the tree’s lifetime, furthering the ominous feeling set in the woods. However, the film is now building up to the idea that as old as these trees are so is Madeleine’s “soul.” In the film this will propel Scottie to believe Madeleine, allowing him to become a rube in Elster’s plot.

Madeleine and Scottie are dominated by the giant sequoias. Scottie blends in, while Madeleine's coat makes her stand out.

Mortality becomes an issue in this scene.The lifespan of the trees, as Madeleine points out, shadows the life and death over several individuals during that point and time. She states that she does not like the trees, because it puts her into the frame of mind of “knowing she has to die.” The trees become a symbol of life and death; both Madeleine’s “former” life and a foreshadowing of her future death, as Madeleine Elster and then as Judy Barton. Madeleine talks about the future as if it were hopeless, and we feel as though it were hopeless because we remember Madeleine’s past “life,” and the tragic death there. This scene, as well as several others in the movie, have a sense of foreboding and disparity about them.

The forest is presented as being very dark. Light has trouble getting through the trees, the trees and the floor being covered by deep shadows. Scottie and Madeleine themselves are lit in such a way that you would almost think that they were indoors, not outside. Madeleine wears a white coat through the sequence so she stands out in the shadows; whereas Scottie is wearing a dark suit and blends in with the shadows in shots as he walks in arm with her. They are shot with soft romantic lighting, with Madeleine practically glowing. It is believable lighting within the redwood forest, and draws us into the scene. The romantic glow on her face as Scottie questions her, probing about her “past” life, as she tries to deflect the answers, makes us begin to believe her lies, just as Scottie begins to believe them as well. The two of them are in the literal and metaphoric dark as Gavin Elster, the real Madeleine’s spouse, makes his plans to kill Madeleine. The two are pawns in his plans, and Scottie is in the dark.

In the end of the sequence they leave the redwood forest. Scottie asks Madeleine where she would like to go, and she responds, “Somewhere in the light.” With that they exit the forest and go back to the beach, where they find light. Then Madeleine leads Scottie back into the darkness by answering his questions with more lies. The forest is the set up, and this is the punchline. Madeleine is then capable of telling Scottie about the deal with the grave in Spain. She questions her sanity and states that she isn’t mad, but gives into the delusional idea that her past life is haunting her. This allows Scottie to kiss her, signing his fate, as he falls in love with her. Hitchcock makes use of rear projection in this sequence by timing their kiss with the splash of an ocean wave. The two events happening at the same time make it all the more dramatic, and it seems to be destiny for the two to kiss. The whole sequence is about the disparity of Madeleine and Scottie falling for it. We believe him because the woods become a dark tunnel that they are passing through together, after which Scottie is able to “rescue” her and bring her into the light.

Hitchcock is considered an auteur director, as well as a genre director at times. This means that there are repetitive motifs, themes, and ideologies in his films that reflect who he is and what he thinks. Robin Wood wrote, “It is only through the medium of the individual that ideological tensions come into particular focus, hence become of aesthetic as well as sociological interest.” Robin Wood explains that the suspense of his Hitchcock’s films, “his ‘suspense’ always carries a sexual charge in ways sometimes obvious, sometimes esoteric....[S]exual relationships in his work are inevitably based on power, the obsession with power and dread of impotence being as central to his method as to his thematic.”

Hitchcock uses the obsession with power and sexual relationships in Vertigo as well, slowly developing Madeleine and Scottie’s relationship.

Many of Hitchcock’s films have male protagonists that stare obsessively at their female counterparts, such as in Rear Window and Marnie. Vertigo has an obsessive protagonist as well. Scottie becomes a voyeur, a spectator, watching Madeleine. Laura Mulvey wrote that, “Scottie’s voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to.” In the redwoods sequence it is much the same as well. He watches her, never tells her anything but only asks her questions. Mulvey says that Scottie’s “erotic drive is to break down and force her to tell by persistent cross questioning.” That is exactly what Scottie does here in this scene; he watches Madeleine, never telling her much about himself, instead only interacting with her by interrogating her like a police officer, digging deeper into Madeleine’s hesitant stories, which makes her more believable.

The scene in the redwoods gives way to the feeling of despair about the doomed relationship between Scottie and Madeleine. As they walk through the forest, discussing Madeleine’s thoughts, we are aware of both the words she says and doesn’t say. The tragic nature of their relationship is given a feeling of predetermined doom, that life will outweigh them. Hitchcock’s use of mise-en-scene presents the redwoods as giants bearing over Scottie and Madeleine, suggesting in the long run they are insignificant, which they are, even in their own lives, being pawns in Elster’s plans. The lighting is dark and bleak in the forest, with most of the trees covered in shadows, the light hidden from them. Scottie, as well as the audience, begins to believe Madeline's deception and thinks she is being drawn in by a past life, while at the same time the atmosphere doesn’t betray the reality of Judy and Elster’s lies to Scottie.

General Impressions from "Cabaret"

2012-03-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

I was afraid the decadence and hedonism that I knew would be portrayed in Cabaret would be too much for me, however it was not. The film is PG and is relatively tame. The emcee I would imagine is too much for people, and there is an open tolerance of sexuality talked about with many people that more conservative persons will not enjoy. Historically the depiction of sexuality is accurate in the film. Despite what many people want to believe, all of these controversial bits we talk about today were still around then. Yet, it is not so much the elements of the sexuality that struck me but the technique.

Editing in the film was startling and moved the scenes quickly. We watch Brian Roberts yell at a Nazi soldier, and then kicked down a Nazi flag. Before we can witness the fight there is a straight cut to Roberts in bed with a broken arm and a black eye. The fight is implied, we have the set up, and the resolution, but not the actual event, it is created in our minds from the clues given. Films today rely too much on violence, and spectacle. When in fact they are incredibly unnecessary for story telling purposes, only there to provide bloodlust and dazzle us. Cabaret is all too aware that it detracts from the story, and moves it right along. There are only ever jump cuts throughout the film, no fades, or any other kind of transitions. The cuts add to the immediacy of the growing Nazi threat that is ever so present throughout the film by making us uneasy. It also challenges us as viewers to invest ourselves more into Cabaret because we would suddenly be in another scene without any indication of time or space passing, and we have to be more involved in the film to figure it out.

There was much I wanted to write about the theme of Cabaret, but after several tries to write I felt I could not do it justice without dedicating more time than I originally wanted.

General Impressions While Watching In Time.

2012-03-17T00:29:00.001-07:00

This are general thoughts and feeling upon watching In Time. I fear that I run short here, but there is a thing as too much.

In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol, features Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried as a pair that harkens back to the Bonnie and Clyde style duo, with shades of Robin Hood. In the film time to live is handed out to people like paychecks after they turn 25, and they never age after that point. Timberlake’s character, Will Salas, is from the lower class ghettos; and is mysteriously given over a hundred years worth by Henry Hamilton before he kills himself. Hamilton, played by USA’s White Collars star Matt Bomer, gives an existential crisis that challenges the immortal upper class: no one should live forever, because what does your life matter if you don’t die. (He never says it in those direct words, but that is how I took it.) Salas then breaks into the upper class part of the city, where he meets Amanda Seyfried’s character Sylvia Weis. Together they become a Bonnie and Clyde/Robin Hood-esque duo, robbing banks for years and handing them out to the poor.

Time is measured on the arms of individuals,
like a quasi bioengineered watch.When it hits zero, you die.

Not to many films are “pure” genre films, meaning that they adhere to the rules and formulas of any one specific film. There are bits and pieces of film noir, science fiction, and caper/heist films in here. It moves slow like a film noir, never using the fast cuts that we see in most modern action films today. More importantly, in my humble opinion, there are moments the camera lingers on characters as the let an emotion settle in them, or they think. It doesn’t linger on the characters thinking in a Douglas Sirk film, it still is slower than most films, (Michael Bay,) and does mean it is more intelligent than most films, (again Michael Bay.) Many people have complained about this film being too slowThe original point of the creation of fast editing and montage was to insure the audience would not think, but allow the film to think for them,(any commercial and again, thank you, Michael Bay.) I think that intellectuals in the meantime are put off by the parrelels it may have with Bonnie and Clyde, but this is forgiveable. Films, especially American films, reuse familiar film Genre formats when presenting outlandish and abstract ideas that people may reject. If you do not believe me watch Oceans 11 and then Inception, and tell me there are no parallels between the two films. I found that the pacing of the movie, its beats, and its twists kept me into the story and entertained.

As Bonnie and Clyde meets Robin Hood, robbing the rich,
distributing to the poor.

This film draws several parallels with the real world. The first and most obvious in American culture is the concept of health care. With publicity about the American health care system by the media, example Sicko by Michael Moore, and Obama’s failing fight for a universal healthcare many people will watch the film and think that it is exactly like that. In many ways it is. It is more about the distribution of wealth, not just in the U.S., but there is also the implication of a world wide phenomenon, (the ending hints playfully at the idea of there always being a bigger fish.) We have witnessed the 99 percent riots, and the movie hints at a similar goal.

Seyfried and her father belong to In Time’s 1 percent population. Those that live there move slowly, compared to those that live in the slums. In the slums you have to rush or else your clock might run out and you will die. The 1 percent are leisurely in their pursuits, and don’t take any risks because the only way that they can ever die is “with a bullet.” Seyfried’s characters father quotes Social Darwinism, wherein only the strong survive, as his justification for his life style. He even says that for him to be immortal, many people have to die. I know that there are those in the audience that will watch this and think he maybe over the top as a villain, but any educated person, or any person who has listened to similar people know that these are direct lines from this world.

The movie never hints at socialism, but compassion, I believe. This maybe a misreading by me because I want to believe in the Capitalist system despite its inherent flaws because I enjoy the liberties attained to me by the American system as opposed to the restrictions by the Socialist system. Timberlake and Seyfried’s characters are generous with their time, even if it means running their clocks down to a point it may risk their lives. If everyone in a Capitalist system was generous there would be no Occupy Movements, there would be no need. However, we do have Occupy because there is corruption. Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwin directly, or with science, but business leaders misreading of Darwin in the early turn of the century 1900’s. I’m not suggesting that every CEO or banker is like this either, but in fact I have heard many interesting discussions with some that explain it is not truly them but the main thing we are all worried about: the system broken.

If you think I am contradicting myself, I can understand your thinking. I must explain myself here a little bit. I took a Humanities class last semester, and my Professor explained that no system works properly. A socialist system, as history has witnessed, is just as corrupt as a capitalist system. It is better for us to work inside the system and try to change it, and have “compassion” as we work in it. However in the movie it never goes in this direction. Cillian Murphy plays Raymond Leon, a police detective who came from the slums, worked his way up, and now fights for the system. Timberlake and Seyfried continue to fight outside the system, tearing it down slowly. This model of change could not work in our world, because the system in our world is even bigger than the one in In Time, and therefore even more police forces. Perhaps this is Andrew Niccol working in the system for change, he made the movie with the system to get people talking and thinking. This is something I will have to research in the future, perhaps, as to his thoughts on his film.

There are many more things that can be said, and should be said about this movie. I will close with these last thoughts: it was amazing this movie was made. It isn’t subtle in who it is attacking, big businesses/banks, who are funders of big movies like this. It almost doesn’t surprise me that it didn’t get more press, and was not a success. However, with the Occupy movement this movie capture the zeitgeist perfectly, so why was it not a bigger success through grassroots? I believe that this movie though it was not a success, like many great movies such as Citizen Kane, will appreciate in time.

Film Noir: the Genre that Wasn’t a Genre

2012-03-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

Because it is not a set genre, as Science Fiction, people disagree as to what is and is not Noir. Schrader writes, “Almost every critic has his or her own definitions of film noir, along with a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up. A film of urban nightlife is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption.”

Keeping this in mind how do we determine what is a film noir? By its style, its content, and the mood it presents we determine whether it is “Film Noir.” Noir has its own style, that harkens back to German expressionism, and it uses it to convey its mood. The mood of Noir is caused by the events of the time.

To understand film noir, we have to understand and interpret the mood of the time. World War II was ending, and soldiers were coming home. Many of them came home to the jobs, positions, and other posts of life to find their worlds upside down. Women had taken over in many aspects of society. Traditionally men were the bread winners, but with them fighting the war, now women stepped in. Women gained independence they did not have before. The change of gender roles created a threat to the masculinity for many men returning home. Many of those same men had faced tough situations that conflicted with their moral senses. The redefining of morality and the world led into existentialism. Robert G. Porfirio writes “Existentialism is an outlook which begins with a disoriented individual facing a confuse world that he cannot accept. It places its emphasis on man’s contingency in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes, a world devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates.”

The change of the world created an existential outlook for many of those returning from the War.

The confused existential outlook reflects itself into film noir. In Double Indemnity we witness Keyes moral confusion when he realizes that his best friend, Neff, has taken him for a ride. Again in The Third Man, Lime has taken his best friend Martins for a ride. These men are faced with the fact that their friends have betrayed their moral centers and therefore Keyes and Martins must decide wether they should betray their moral code of friendship, or their general sense of morality. The black and white world ends here and ethical decision making becomes grey. Schrader writes about the hard-boiled detective novels that Film Noir has its roots in, “The hard boiled writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism, and their protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code. The hard boiled hero was, in reality, a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart...”

The portrayal of women in Film Noir, as femme fatales, represent a threat to masculinity. They are powerful dominant women. Sometimes they act as catalysts for murder, Double Indemnity, try to frame the protagonist, The Long Goodbye, or use him to get to their objective, The Maltese Falcon. Gaylan Studlar writes, “the protagonist’s meeting of a woman governs his direction and his doom, a situation that would be repeated, with variations, throughout much of film noir in Hollywood’s postwar years.” The Femme Fatale is mysterious and dangerous. She is seldom presented as a fully fleshed out character. In This Gun for Hire, the hit man Phillip Raven is given a fully thought back story which he tells. Not too many Film Noir’s give this for women. Richard Dyer rights, “...woman in film noir are above all us unknowable. It is not so much their evil as their unknowability (and attractiveness) that makes them fatal for the hero.To the degree that culture is defined my men, what is, and is known, is male. Film noir thus starkly divides the world into that which is unknown and unknowable (female) and, again by inference only, that which is known (male).”

Woman in Noir become the unknown, the grey space, defying ethics. Phyllis Dietrichson best portrays this in Double Indemnity, her personality which allows her to kill is never fully explained. She lives in the shadows, literally and metaphorically, hidden from Neff. It should be noted that not every film noir has a femme fatale. This Gun For Hire has a positive female force which makes the killer Raven reconsider his methods and actions. Just as not every noir needs a femme fatale not every noir needs to adhere to the rules of noir.

Noir has a greater cinematic presence than other film genres do to the restrictions presented on it at the time. James Naremore writes in “More than Night: Notes About Film Noir” of the limitations that filmmakers were allowed to show. The HUAC was suppressing political commentary by the left wing filmmakers. The Production Code Administration, Will Hays, and the MPPDA would not allow filmmakers to show gruesome violence, or sexual matter. Such impositions only helped the creative process of the filmmakers, wherein they continued to put in subject matter but in a more stylistic fashion. Double Indemnity, for example, uses a fade to imply sexual intercourse, whereas the book had a sense of urgency. Yet the implication is still there, the same effect is used in the Maltese Falcon as well. “Hollywood in the 1940s always depicted sexual intercourse through symbolism and ellipsis,” writes Naremore, “Scenes such as these remind us of what Christian Metz calls the “peculiarity” of censorship, which always allows things to pass around it.... The censor...seldom leaves a blank spot or an X across a scene. “You can see the censor,” Metz remarks, much as you can see the workings of a secondary revision in dreams; usually it manifests itself as a slight incoherence or displacement...and from the point of aesthetics, it sometimes has salutary results.” He continues to talk about how censorship restrictions upon films often give it a “confusing and dreamlike” quality in many pictures. This does not just apply to sex, but depictions of sexuality, violence, and other offbeat elements of the stories censors did not like.

The style of Noir comes from the camera. Dutch angles, long shots, low-key lighting, foggy sequences, long shadows, neon lights in a night time environment, and wet streets reflecting city lights are all some of the key elements of Noir. Compositions play heavy into Film Noir. Schrader writes, “Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action.” Often characters are framed so that the city seems to be bearing over them, as if it will crush them very soon. A similar ominous effect is created by filming actors low angling up so that the ceiling dominates over them. Frames within the film frame were often employed to give a fatalistic feel toward a certain character. Such as the bars that fall over Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the end of the Maltese Falcon, to represent the prison where she is sent to. There are too many film noir stylistic motifs to talk about here, but it is important to note them to understand how it ties back into the heart of Noir, its bleak existential outlook. Even when Noir has a happy ending, such as Sam Spade solving the murders in the Maltese Falcon, it is still bleak because his partner is still dead, and the woman he fell in love with is going to prison because he sent her there.

The period of time in which Noir existed was a turbulent time, marked by the war and its end. Returning soldiers were trying to understand the world that they had stepped into, having an existential crisis. Like other art film drew from the world around it at the time it existed. The filmmakers often depicted very dark material, darker than what many censors would allow them to depict literally, so instead they depicted elements artistically on the screen. Noir style is very important to understand it as a genre. However, as it has been shown here, it is important to understand the social and philosophic reasoning for using the style. Merely looking unique or splendid for artistic sake would not be enough to make it a wonderful film style.

Bibliography:

Dyer, Richard. “Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. Kaplan, Ann.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. University of California PRess, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 2008. Ebook edition.

Martin, Angela. “Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Films Noir” Women in Film Noir. Ed. Kaplan, Ann.

Porfirio, Robert G. "No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir" Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006.

Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Studlar, Gaylyn. "Double Indemnity" Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Ed. Geiger, Jeffrey and Rutsky, R.L. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Control in Gamespace

2012-03-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

McKenzie Wark wrote the book Gamespace, drawing parallels between our reality and the beloved video games of our society. In it he drew many life comparisons, about the fomulation of our "gamespace" and ourselves, and the need for video games. Video games, he feels, are necessary because they give us options where movies do not, but unlike reality conform to fairness toward the rules. However, as video games have become more complex and advanced they become more chaotic like this world.

Yet this world is a game. As we play video games and develop theories on how to overcome the obstacles--gamer theory--we also develop theories on how to overcome obstacles in everyday life--gamespace. Gamespace is the world in which we live in. As we continue to develop theories for gamespace, the gamespace changes. McKenzie Wark argues that games like “The Sims” are so popular because this world does not follow the rules it gives. McKenzie writes in Gamer Theory, “If it is a choice between ‘The Sims’ as a real game and gamespace as a game of the real, the gamer chooses to stay in The Cave and play games. The contradiction is that for there to be a game which is fair and rational there must be a gamespace which is neither.”(49) In “The Sims” the player follows the rules given to get to achieve career goals they wish to succeed in. However, in the real world many of us have followed the rules only to get passed over. When I was in Retail Management I followed all the rules to move up the ladder, however, because of office politics that were beyond my reach, another person was given a promotion that was meant for me. This is the gamespace that we live in, a place that contains shifting rules, which do not always result in predictable success.

So what then allows for success in society? Wark writes, “Here is the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: ‘To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.’ In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a placeless, senseless realm where quite a different maxim rules: ‘From each according to their abilities--to each a rank and score.’ Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters.”(21) As if we were in a game, our abilities best determine who we are in society. Our everyday life is like a game; we are driven to compete and succeed, to win against all others. “Gamespace wants us to believe we are all nothing but gamers now, competing not against enemies of class or faith or nation but only against other gamers.”(24)

Those who have control over the gamespace wish to keep control; they are the military-entertainment complex. Like a video game, gamespace and its inherent rules can grow stale and boring. Wark states “Boredom becomes pervasive, uncontainable--a real threat.” Wark continues that the military-entertainment complex displaces the boredom of one game into another, always striving to keeping players entertained. “Boredom with any particular game is always displaced onto another game, before it calls into question the imperfections of gamespace as a poor excuse for how one could live and labor among these richly productive and seductive lines.”(173) The enemy of the game is boredom because it recalls for gamers the fact that “the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number.”(166) Wark wrote this examining gamers and games, but in gamespace this can be applied as well. The accumulation of products, goods, money, and land all amount to a hollow trophy. Society has to change the rules of gamespace, the same rules that frustrate us and passed me over for a promotion, otherwise the players may leave or try to change the gamespace.

http://www.amazon.com/Gamer-Theory-McKenzie-Wark/dp/0674025199/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331713647&sr=8-1

Societal Backlash against the Images of the Spectacle Society

2012-03-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

This was written in December during the beginning of the 99% protests but thought I would publish it now with no good reasoning.

Many Americans among the group that is currently being called “the 99%”--the group behind the widespread “Occupy” activities--have grown tired of not having power over their own lives. The Watts Riot in 1965 was similar to today’s Occupy movement in causation, but different in execution. Debord writes in the Decline and Fall of the Spectale-Commodity Economy, ““The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers.” Class separation has long been ignored in America, and class of wealth has now become a spectacle of its own. Those of us in the 99% are given to view the lifestyle of those in the 1% as a commodity, something to aspire to, something to aquire. However the lifestyle of the 1%--and the power that it represents--remains a spectacle for the 99%. The Watts riot and the 99% movement are both about tearing down the separation brought on by viewing the spectacle of the 1% class.

The Watts Riot was a backlash against the spectacle created by capitalism. The blacks in the riot had become frustrated with a system that would not help them, but flaunted, in a spectacular fashion, commodities in front of their eyes. They looted the 1%, taking items from stores. Debord again writes, “The Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything.” After being taunted to want commodities, they wanted to tear down the walls of spectacle and take what they wanted.

Spectacle creates a schism for society. We experience life without having personal experiences. In an advertisement, we watch people use a vacuum cleaner, and they tell us how great it is; vicariously we understand how smooth and quiet it runs. Yet we have never used the vacuum. Debord writes in the Society of the Spectacle, “Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image.”(3) The combination of separation and spectacle exists not only with commodities, but in all aspects of life. Government becomes a spectacle wherein many people feel that they can witness political events, but that they have no direct effect on them or their world. Tension builds and mounts until people have had enough and riot, or create movements.

The events of the Watts riot raised questions. Looters would take stolen fridges to homes without power. This is an example of the overwhelming desire for commodities. Debord continues in the Decline and Fall of the Spectale-Commodity Economy, “Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.” What is forgotten by the general population is that the images in advertisements and other forms of propaganda spectacle are nothing. As Debord says in the Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” What is an image but printed ink, or light reflected from a screen. We give meaning to the images; the images have no thought or real power but what society gives them. Steven Shaviro comments on Andy Warhol’s view of images, “Images are nothing like objects. When things retreat into their images, the way they do on TV, they lose their solidity, their palpability, their presence. Images have a weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing. They haunt us, like ghosts; they empty out space, the better to flicker interminably in the void. Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to a state of almost transparency.”

We allow the spectacle of society to control and run our lives. However, it is not real, it has no true power. Yet our relations with those images give them power: power to separate our society into classes, power to make us desire commodities that have no use. They, in the end, are nothing. However, we want them to be something, and that is why they have power.

Sources:

¹ Debord, Guy. The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,The Situationist International Anthology, 2006; http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.Watts.htm

² Shapiro, Steven, 16 Andy Warhol, Doom Patrols, 2007, http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch16.html

When Harry Met Holly: Existential Crisis Portrayed in The Third Man

2012-03-01T22:54:00.011-08:00

Existentialism is one of the philosophies of choice for Film Noir, and The Third Man presents us with an existential crisis. The Third Man, written by Graham Greene, is a Noir world that exists in what critics term “Greeneland.” James Naremore describes Greeneland as “a world of dingy rooming houses, canned fish, drooping aspidistras, and doomed characters.” This is the world that Holly Martins lives. Martins is of the Noir world, an alienated “Hemingway hero.” American in a British-occupied Vienna. He arrives to find out that his friend, Harry Lime, whom he has come to visit at Lime’s request has died. Martins investigates foul play against Lime, and discovers that his friend is not who he thought him to be. Martins becomes confused in a world where not only he, but we the audience, do not speak the native tongue. His previous beliefs of right and wrong, good and evil, are challenged. Martins eventually must reconcile his beliefs and act on his beliefs to be authentic with himself. The Third Man shows us, using the film language attributed towards Film Noir, the existential struggle that Martins must go through as he learns the true nature and identity of his best friend.

Martins tries to understand his world but he is constantly befuddled as he gains new revelations. He is not cool like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon; instead he is a schmuck in way over his head. Martins is not clever, either; for most of the first half of the film he believes that the police have murdered his friend Harry Lime. In most Noir films it would be typical for the police to be bungling, incompetent, or even the killers. However, the character Colonel Calloway is competent and presents Martins with empirical evidence that it is Lime who is immoral. With this, Martins begins to believe that things were not as he perceived them. Martins gets drunk repeatedly throughout the film, and his testimony is not taken credibly by others because of it. Robert G. Porfirio writes, “The Hemingway hero is a person ‘to whom something has been done’; that most central to this hero is the loss, and an awareness of it.” What Martins has lost is his friend, first in a literal way, and then in a spiritual way. As much of a schmuck as Martins is, he means well, and has a good heart. He is a moral person who stands by his friends. Morality is at the center of the conflict in The Third Man. Martins wants to help his friend Harry Lime, spending the first half of the film searching for Lime’s killer. We are given an interesting backdrop in the dog-eat-dog landscape of post war Vienna. The moral crime in the film is the existence of a black market for medicine. Martins is shown that Lime is watering down penicillin to steal the rest and sell on the black market. It is a blow to Martins, because his friend Lime is not just rebelling against authority, like they did in their youth, Lime has become a killer.

Halfway through The Third Man, Martins stumbles tipsy out of Anna’s flat and into the street. He sees Lime in a doorway, and is shocked by the revelation that his friend is still alive. Not just alive, but hiding from Martins as well as the police. Everything terrible that Martins found out that Lime had done, he is still doing. It is an existential blow to Martins, because now he has to determine the fate of his friendship, and eventually the fate of his friend who is draped in shadows.

Shadows play an important part in revealing that Lime is still alive. We are set up for the revelatory scene while Martins is in Anna’s apartment saying goodbye to her. Martins moves away from a flower box in the window and the camera pans through the flowers to give us a shot below of the street. We see the dark figure of a man in the street looking up at Anna’s apartment, but we cannot see his face. He moves back into a doorway and into the shadows. Then a cat comes over to him and plays with his shoes. After Martins is finished talking with Anna, he goes back into the streets. Martins would have walked right past Lime, who is hidden in a darkened doorway, but the cat meows, drawing attention to him. Martins looks at the doorway, which is shown with canted angles. At first Martins heckles the man from behind a wall, but then walks over to a ledge, leaning his back against its wall. All Martins can see is Lime’s shoes. Then we hear an angry local woman, and she turns the light on. The light the old woman turns on would not be as bright as the one shown on Lime’s face; its artificial, giving a dramatic introduction to Lime. With the light on Lime there are shadows of shadows of window panes behind him. These become symbolic bars for Lime, because he is a wanted man, and upon arrest would go to jail. We are shown a canted angle shot up of Martins’ reaction to the news his friend is alive. Martins’ world is again twisted and skewed. As the emotion of the reunion sets in, the camera pans into Lime’s face for a close up. Lime is grinning proudly like a friend who just pulled a gag on his best mate.

Then the light goes off and Lime disappears into the shadows again. Martins runs toward him, but a random car driving by delays him and gives Lime a chance to escape.

The shadowy doorway is empty when Martins gets there, but he hears loud footsteps and chases after Lime.

Martins does not see Lime’s face again in this sequence but see’s Lime’s shadow after he turns a corner. Lime’s large shadow is on the wall running away from him. Janey Place and Lowell Peterson write, “Claustrophobic framing devices such as doors, windows, stairways, metal bed frames, or simply shadows separate the character from other characters from his world, or from his own emotions.” The shadow is used tremendously in The Third Man. It is used to portray mystery as seen in this scene. It is an element of thrills when Lime is chased through the sewers by the police with their shadows looming around every turn. Martins’ Austria becomes a world of literal shadows. Within the context of this scene, the shadow literally keeps the mystery of Lime’s identity from Martins, like a blank sheet pulled over him. Then after Lime takes off, neither his face nor even his back are seen; instead we just see his shadow from around a corner. Martins is disconnected by his emotions and a lack of knowledge. Lime and Martins have become separated here by secrets, ethics, and shadows.

Director Carol Reed uses dutch angles on and off throughout the film. It becomes even more uneasy to have a shot with a dutch angle, followed by a cut back to Martins with a normal angle, and then to cut away and back once more with another dutch angle. Martins is shown dutch against the wall, and then again not dutch. After he moves across the street he is dutch again. It is as though Reed doesn’t want us to become familiar with one or the other, but always keeps us on our toes. The use of dutch angles follows Martins’ confusion and frustration in many other scenes as well. The more confident that Martins is in confronting Lime’s killer, he is shown in normal shots; then as Martins’ shock of Lime’s being alive hits him, the dutch angles return. It is an uneasy world for Martins, and for the viewer.

This scene in the film shows Martins in an existential crisis. “Existentialism,” writes Porfirio,” is an outlook which begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept.” Martins has been told his friend was killed, and now he faces a dead man, no longer dead—his best friend who has indirectly killed many people. Porfirio continues, “It places its emphasis on man’s contingency in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes, a world devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates.” Martins has been confronted by the police for their help, which conflicts with his relationship with Lime. Only Martins can decide what he can do. This scene is about choice, for Martins to decide if he should live an “authentic” or an “inauthentic” life. Inauthentic is to reject values of oneself. Whereas an authentic life is to “discover the ability to create one’s own values; in so doing each individual assumes responsibility for his life through the act of choosing between two alternatives.” Choice comes later in the film, but should be noted here. The crisis arises at this scene of the film fully for the first time, meaning that Martins must look within himself authenticate his values and decide whom to help.

The revelation of Harry Lime being alive is midpoint in the film. At the beginning of the film, Martins arrived in Vienna to see his friend. Now, in this scene, Martins finally sees and understands his friend. The search for Lime’s killer has changed Martins’ outlook and view of Lime. In this scene, with little dialogue, and none of it from Harry Lime, Reed created a dramatic scene using many of the techniques attributed to film noir. We see the challenge that the crisis pushes Martins into, before he begins to state it in the following scenes with the police and then Anna. Martins loves his friend Lime, but knows he has a greater duty in stopping him to be authentic with himself.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. University of California PRess, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 2008. Ebook edition.
Peterson, Lowell and Place, Janey. "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir." Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006. 84.
Peterson, Lowell and Place, Janey. "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir." Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006. 68
Porfirio, Robert G. "No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir" Film Noir Reader. Ed. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James. 8th ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006. 81
Porfirio. 87

The Spectacle of Sex in Strange days

2012-02-29T12:14:00.011-08:00

Strange Days is a late 90's Film Noir/Sci-fi genre film by Katherine Bigelow, set in the near future. The first draft of the film was written by her former husband, James Cameron. The film deals deeply with issues of race and sex. It is owned by Universal Studios.

This is part of a series of papers I wrote for a Humanities class last semester.

The a central plot device to the film Strange Days is the use of the SQUID, an electronic device that records an individuals senses to a disk that can later be replayed for another persons pleasure. The use of the SQUID can help people experience things that they would likely not experience otherwise; sexual encounters, theft, etc. The SQUID becomes the ultimate spectacle replacing not just visual images but all of a persons senses. “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.” What is the world view that has materialized in Strange Days? That men dominate women, and white men dominate all. The film presents a bleak future in which LA has become a police state, and powerful men buy and murder for control.

Here we see Tom Sizemore as Max experiencing the SQUID.

It is the men who dominate in the film; record producer Philo Gant who keeps tight control over his women, Max dominates over the singer Faith and the other women he rapes. Women have no control over the film. Faith is a shell of a woman, who has been battered emotionally and physically by the men in her life now has become a compliant shell. She obeys whoever is the biggest male that can guarantee her a form of safety. She leaves Lenny for Philo Gant who can give her wealth and promises her a career, then she leaves Philo for Max who guarantees her safety from Philo’s abuse. Each male is a step in a spiral downward. She is destructing and taking place in it. Many of the men are obsessed with replay through the SQUID’s. Max uses it so that when he rapes and kills women they are forced to watch it from his perspective. Philo Gant has SQUIDS planted on persons under his employ so he can keep tabs on his assets. The SQUID, a spectacle, becomes a source of control. Controlling not only by surveillance, but now what other people experience.

Spectacle becomes a greater factor for Lenny, Philo Gant, and Max. They have become seperate and distant from other people in their lives. Max lies about who is; claiming to be Lenny’s friend while setting him up. Philo Gant can’t communicate or connect with people so he keeps tabs on them with SQUIDS’s on spies; using brute force to keep those who oppose him from falling out of line. Lenny can’t get over the past he had with Faith, his ex-girlfriend; he replays disks of them interacting over and over. This creates further distant between him and Faith, because he objectifies her as well.

Faith becomes a spectacle to Lenny obsessing over her. He creates a distance with her by stopping interacting with her, replaying SQUID imagery of her. Faith tries to talk to Lenny, but Lenny never listens to her. He objectifies her in his mind, she no longer is a person but a spectacle. DeBord writes that the spectacle “is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.” SQUID replays and sneaking into Faith’s performances are ways of playing out the experience he wants, neither situation is real. Lenny creating a spectacle of Faith rather than interacting removes himself from her life. McKenzie Wark writes of those who play video games, a form of spectacle, but then remove themselves from making history because of it. Lenny too removes himself from a positive history of Faith by clinging onto the past in a literal form of recorded SQUID disks containing those memories.

Watching the film I realized that I was like Lenny, holding onto memories of a former girlfriend and turning them into something they were not. She was a different person, and so was I. Like Lenny I became slightly pathetic and unable to act. Those memories of my former love had become a spectacle of their own, keeping me moving in a direction that I had chosen; not one that I necessarily wanted. DeBord states, “the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.” I, not just a state or overseeing organization, created a spectacle in my own life to keep myself and the status quo moving; similar to Lenny.

The film depicts men objectifying women over and over; in both personal ways-like Lenny, pornographic ways-the buyers, and sadistic ways-like Max. There is a separation between the sexes, they never see woman as more than objects for the majority of the film. Strange Days isn’t largely pessimistic about men, however. The end shows Max connecting with Mace. Mace who is as just as powerful and intelligent- if not more so- than any of the men in power, is thrown down in the film like the other women. When Lenny is able to stop making a spectacle of the past he is able to move on and connect with Mace.

International Films as Culture

2012-02-27T08:39:00.004-08:00

In class I hear some professors pointing out the cultural differences found in foreign films. I find this odd. Having taken anthropology and psychology classes, as well as being familiar with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, I find myself disagreeing with my professors in this view. While yes, many foreign films are different than American films I believe that there are more elements in common.

To give an example of a difference I will point out the Japenese film Tokyo Story. My professor, Lau, highlighted the fact that the director Yasujiro Ozu risregards the "180" rule. This rule states that there is a line in a room and the camera can only show what is on one side of it. This helps to establish a continuity on a more subconscious element for the viewer. This way the characters on screen always look at the same direction, as if we were talking to them or they were on stage. Ozu will place the camera in a room where ever he pleases, so the characters will face to the right of the screen, and without moving, suddenly face the left within an edit. Now, I will contend that this could be viewed more as a "trend." Since film is relatively knew, and a capitalist country like ours allows for very little experimentation, of course filmmakers in other cultures are going to do something subtle as break the 180 rule. Most of the Japanese films I have watched, and even the more modern ones have not done this.

My teacher also explained that many of us in the audience, being "Western," may not understand the film, since it is about family, and modernization. This is absolutely wonk. Towards the end of the film the mother in the family died, and most of the children recovered emotionally from her death and went back to their busy lives rather quickly. At my Grandmothers death I was upset at the way her possessions were handed and bartered out the same way as in this film. I worry about my parents death, and I worry about life after they die. I worry about dissapointing them, not living up to their expectations. All of this is in the film. So how am I different from the eastern audiences that cried during this? I cried. My favorite How I Met Your Mother episodes dealt with Marshall loosing his father. This troubled me because I realised that I don't know what I will do without him. Visiting my Grandparents there is a conscious effort to try and cut pop culture and technology out of conversations, and many of us family members have failed to do so, leaving my Grandparents in the cold. They haven't caught up to modernity, and we have left them behind. So this element is not limited to Japan.

Joseph Campbell and other people that study story have noticed that you can break stories down into the most base elements. When you do this there are repetitive elements in all stories. There are different arguments that there are only 32 stories, and another for only two, (comedy and tragedy.) The human experience is very broad, and not limited to one nation, ethnicity, gender, ect. I wish people would open up there eyes and understand that. The only thing that seperates us is language. (I make this argument since technology can allow us to overcome geographic boundaries.) Film is in itself its own language, and like any language a director like Ozu can play with it. Regardless of the amount he has tweaked it there is a relatable human story there.

The Art of Citizen Kane

2012-02-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

Orson Welles, along with cinematographer Greg Toland and writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, created in Citizen Kane a groundbreaking film in by how it uses film techniques. Montage, long takes, and matte shots were used before Citizen Kane. The complexity of the film takes us on a journey that goes in a full circle while drawing the viewer in. Welles created a fictitious story that is a mystery about a man who lived in the public but few people understood. Citizen Kane’s focus is on the title character whom is loosely based off of William Randolf Hearst, the media tycoon known for his yellow-journalism. We watch Kane start off idealistic, and then descend into muck-racking, politics, and scandal. The point of the film is to show this very public man in a more human light. Welles humanizes Kane, making him sympathetic despite his dictator like behavior. The story is told with an investigative reporter interviewing people who knew Kane in hope of finding the meaning of the word “rosebud.” While Welles weaves this story he artistically presents beautiful mise-en-scene to serve it.

Naremore writes, “Citizen Kane is fundamentally different from a film like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon: it doesn’t present seperate versions of an unknowable reality, but instead gives different facets of a single personality.”1 The story gives an energetic feel by jumping around time through the interviews. However, the flashbacks inside the film serve a linear function in the storytelling. Naremore continues “Kane’s biography is depicted more or less chronologically, through the memories and judgments of five characters who knew him at progressively later stages. We never have the feeling that these characters are distorting the truth... for all its interest in subjectivity and psychology, Kane has a rational structure; its a film about complexity, not about relativity.”2 In the bulk of the film we view Kane’s life in a chronological order, excepting the beginning when we witness his death; the reporter interviews people in Kane’s life who represent Kane at different stages of his life, from childhood to old age.

The screenplay Welles constructs with writer Mankiewicz is complimented by the visuals Welles creates with cinematographer Toland. Adding to the mystery of the film, and the surreality of Kane’s life. Naremore writes “Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an “inquirer,” and the periodic frustrations it encounters (a door closing, a light clicking out, a sled being pulled away) are like teasing affronts to our curiosity.”3 Welles uses the visual component of cinema to further the mystery of the story in our search for the meaning of “rosebud.” The visuals add to this mystery and also our knowledge of Kane in the shots by mise-en-scene. Such shots are: the table sequence wherein Kane and his wife grow farther and farther apart through the passing of time, or Kane standing between his political rival and his wife as he has to choose to follow his career or his family, and the large windows shot in deep focus that bear over Kane as financial problems weigh over him. The mise-en-scene gives us insight into Kane we otherwise would not have as an audience.

Presented in reverse order is Kane and his wife, wherein over time we see them growing further apart via there placement around the table.

Many of the shots are unique in how they are composed.Using a deep field of focus Welles creates layered shots that allow the takes to go long. He uses matte shots to allow himself to compose objects and actors in front of a shot that could not fit in front of the camera. The scene where Welles as Kane is writing on the typewriter with Joseph Cotten behind him made use of this technique.

Here is the shot of WELLES being placed by a matte shot in front of Cotten.

In the film Welles uses what Rudolf Arnheim calls “the constancy of form,”4 meaning that he takes common objects and distorts them. Naremore recognizes this ability in Citizen Kane when he writes “The real significance of Welles’s work was not in its phenomenal realism, but in its defamiliarizing, ‘strange-making’ qualities.”5

Here is an example of the "strange making" qualities in which a snow glob is shown in an extreme close-up, wherein we can see the house on the side and in a reflection Kane's nurse entering in.

Andre Bazin argues that there is a dichotomy in cinema between films that use montage and those that use longer takes, which he calls “reality.”6 Welles masters the long shot in Citizen Kane, such as the shot of Kane’s mother and father debating the ethics of giving young Kane to a mentor while young Kane plays in the background. However, Welles also uses the montage in the film, apparent when Kane’s second wife’s performance are cut together with and newspaper headlines, and Kane’s face are all cut together. This montage alludes to the passing of time, but it also builds an psychological idea. As Sergei Eisenstein wrote, “The combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” 7

Welles draws upon film theory to enhance in telling his story. His gift as a filmmaker in knowing when to use techniques at the correct time. Welles and Toland masterfully compose their shots to give a heightened sense of emotion, bringing the film to a point of pure artistry. The filmmaking enhances the mystery and story, giving us an experience rather than just a story. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece because it weaves a complex and mysterious story that draws us in.

1 Naremore, James. “Citizen Kane.” Film Analysis, A Norton Reader. Ed. Jeffrey Geiger, and R.L. Rutsky. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2005. 348
2 Naremore, J. 348
3 Naremore, J. 346
4 Arnheim, Rudolf. “From Film as Art” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 285
5 Naremore, J. 344
6 Bazin, Andre. “From What is Cinema” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 42
7 Eisenstein, Sergei. “From Film Form” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford, 2009. 15

(And my apologies for any formatting errors, I am having trouble copying the text from Pages into a blog form.)

Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness

2012-02-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is about the world’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson rose to prominence during the early 20th century and created controversy by winning the championship title. At the same time that many African Americans were persecuted and limited in their position in society, Johnson went out and did what he wanted, disregarding social trends that were based entirely on race and social mores. Ultimately it was his lifestyle that proved his undoing. He provoked the political powers of the time. The film’s director Ken Burns makes documentaries about people he feels embodies aspects of America. Here Burns presents us Jack Johnson, a man who embodies the American idea: Stanley Crouch states in the film, “Johnson embodied the American idea of being able to go where you want to go on the basis of your ability.” However, despite Johnson fighting for this American idea, Burns also presents us a story wherein he is opposed by America. Johnson represents the fact that America has opposed the American dream out of bigotry and intolerance. He was a fighter for the heavyweight title, racial equality, and freedom.

Gary R. Edgerton writes in Ken Burns’s America about Burns’s biographies being “majoritarian rather than marginalized.” Meaning that they are larger than life people who show the majority of views and movement of America. Edgerton says Burns’s reasoning is to ask, “‘Who are we Americans as a people?’ This preoccupation with the elemental question--‘Who are we as Americans”’--could not be more relevant in an era when multiculturalism has become the source of sweeping and fundamental reappraisals of almost every aspect of national life.” Edgerton wrote this concerning the film Thomas Jefferson, but this line of questioning ourselves as Americans can be applied toward Unforgivable Blackness as well. J.B. Lewis writes in the forward of Johnson’s autobiography In the Ring and Out, “In the story of Jack’s life, there is an abundance of thrill and adventure, but there is also the ripened wisdom of years of experience.” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in the book Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, “He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing--no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female--could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men.” He embodied the American spirit, his actions are what we aspire to be. However those that opposed him show America as it was and as it is.

Two schools of thought existed amongst the African Americans of the time, that of the militant black man, and that of Booker T. Washington. Geoffrey C. Ward quotes a critic of both movements who explains, “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and depredations, it deprecates political action and preaches the doctrine of industrial development and the acquisition of property.... The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place. It believes in money and property, but it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.” In the time of Jack Johnson, many of those in the African American community followed Washington’s school of thought, and were outraged as well as white Americans with Johnson’s behavior. White America had become used to Washington’s school of thought, and having submissive black Americans under them.

The behavior of Johnson was that he was a celebrity flaunting his wealth, slept with only white women, and moved into white neighborhoods, further enraging white men. Ward states, “While most negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. At a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat--profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.” Johnson’s individualistic personality isolated him from both black and white Americans. Johnson became a threat to white Americans, and their pride. J.B. Lewis writes, “Steeled by a determination that a man of [Johnson] race should not posses laurels so highly prized in the realm of sports, it was easy to marshal against him native prejudices, and back them with charges of deviation from the moral code and violation of certain statues.” They sought to use the Mann Act. Ward describes it in Unforgivable Blackness as having “barred the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes.’” Ward continues that the “language of the act was loosely drawn, and both within and without the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation...there were those who believed that “debauchery” and “other immoral purposes” might be more broadly defined to include what the newspapers called “escapades,” sexual relations between consenting adults.” Ward quotes Congressman Seaborn Roddenberry in the book Unforgivable Blackness, “No... degradation in all the years of southern slavery possessed such villainous character... as the provision of the laws of Illinois which allows the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain....Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit.” This was America’s reaction to the first black man winning the boxing heavyweight championship.

Ken Burns presents us the dramatic story of Johnson through cinematic storytelling. Edgerton writes about Ken Burns’s four plot structures for his epic documentary Civil War in Ken Burns’s America, “To start with, he employs narrative descriptions which primarily move the story along. These sections follow a simple chronology and are designed above all else to provide the audience with the basic historical facts and figures on what is happening and who is involved in the action at any given time.” The movie’s companion book of the same name, shares the writer Geoffrey C. Ward. The film’s narration, read by Keith David, follows the text of the book. It is only when we watch interviews with James Earl Jones, Stanley Crouch and Burt Sugar-- living specialists of Jack Johnson--that the film’s narration veers away from Ward’s original text. Most of the film follows the format given by the book for the narration.

Edgerton continues, “Second, he designs what he calls emotional chapters...which have the ‘ability to float between episodes.’ This category of scene is less bound by chronological demands than by its capacity to affect mood and engage an audience emotionally at strategic moments within the plot.” An effective emotional chapter in the film occurs after Johnson’s death in the film; Stanley Crouch reveals a personal story about Johnson arriving in his father’s gym. Johnson gets inside the ring with the fastest boxer there and wears him out. Johnson then leaves abruptly like a magician. Burns forms a story of Johnson to show his character; this gives the viewer a sense of the emotion of the mystery and legend that was Jack Johnson.

Edgerton explains the third type of scene, “Telegrams in a sense, are a mixture of both the scenes of narrative description, because they are bound to whatever event is transpiring in the story line at the time.” An example of a telegram is when Johnson goes to trial under the Mann Act. It is introduced by the narrator and moves into Belle Schreiber’s testimony against Johnson. We are shown pictures of Belle Schreiber and various shots of court houses, while an actress reads the transcript. This creates an illusion that we are witnessing the actual testimony. Then actor Samuel L. Jackson gives his voice to Johnson, and we hear Johnson say he never met with Belle in a hotel. Burns presents us exterior and interior shots of a hotel, suggesting Johnson is lying, that he did indeed meet her there. It could be any photograph of any hotel Burns is showing us, but Burns creates a situation in which we believe Johnson is lying in court.

Edgerton explains Burns’s fourth technique, “‘editing clusters.’ Burns “constructs editing clusters as his way of critically analyzing the various sides of a theme, question, or controversy that is central to a better overall understanding of his subject.” Burns will cut together relevant images with “a montage of commentators,” who give “conflicting and corroborating opinions, creating a collage of multiple viewpoints.” Burns uses this technique during the trial of Johnson by having Congressman Roddenberry give his opinion of mixing races, W.E.B. DuBois defend Johnson’s actions despite his disapproval of them, and using commentators like Stanley Crouch, James Earl Jones, and Randy Roberts. This conflict of opinions gives the audience a greater understanding of the trial and era from differing viewpoints.

Burns used careful research and storytelling techniques to convey the life and historical worth of Jack Johnson. The plot structure: narrative descriptions, emotional chapters, telegrams, and editing clusters convey the historical and the emotional aspects of Johnson in the film. Johnson becomes more than a boxer in Burns’s film, he becomes a symbol of America. He is an example not just of the American ideal of gaining rewards through hard work; but of the opposition individuals receive when they try. Through him we can better understand racism, bigotry, and intolerance, that has held, and continues to hold, America back from embracing individuals and those that pursue the American ideal.

Bibliography:

Edgerton, Gary R., Ken Burns’s America, Palgrave, New York, 2001

Lewis, J.B., Proteus Limited, New York, 1977

Ward, Geoffrey C., Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Vintage, 2006

The Balance of Film Art

2012-02-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

Art is a form of expression; a way in which we communicate a story, a thought, emotion, or an idea with highlights to the skill and craft involved. In film persons can craft movies to create stories by shooting footage then cutting, arranging, and pasting it together; in an effort called editing. Shots have to be arranged, like paintings or photographs, in a way to help explain the scene. The shots and editing become different elements of the art, the same way paint and the brushes would be a part of a painting. A film has to be arranged skillfully and in a manner that is original and unique to itself to be called art.

The brush strokes of film would be editing. As a brush delivers and presents its audience with paint; editing takes and arranges footage shot somewhere else and gives them a cohesive story. Hitchcock states that “pure cinema is pieces of film assembled.”

Sergei Eisenstein argues that the intellectual power and emotional weight of a film is in the use of montage. He explains montage, “The old film-makers...regarded montage as a means of producing something by describing it, adding individual shots to one another like building blocks...But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another (the ‘dramatic’ principle.)”

To Eisenstein montage is not just editing pieces of the film together, but rather an emotional segment in a film placed strategically to create a new idea using images by creating conflict through the use of editing. It allows film to become something more, to create something with those pieces that previously did not exist on their own. Those pieces are the shots, composed of the mise-en-scene.

Mise-en-scene could be compared to the paint in a painting; the composition of everything on the screen, the bare elements assembled in editing. Film composition uses techniques found in painting, drawing, and photography. Shots in a well crafted film are composed as skillfully as great music. Arnheim writes that “film art developed only gradually when the movie makers began consciously or unconsciously to cultivate the peculiar possibilities of cinematographic technique and to apply them toward the creation of artistic productions.”

Peter Wollen writes Hitchcock’s, “own menu of ingredients ran as follows: ‘Lighting creates mood, the camera dramatic impact, music stirs the emotions, colour has an aesthetic effect, widescreen provides showmanship and spectacle, all of the elements needed for the machinery of the production.”

All of these add to the visual elements of what the audience sees in a shot. Truly artistic filmmakers make use of changing the camera’s perspectives on recognizable objects, giving fresh takes with “constancy of form,” by shooting common objects in new angles.

Paul Begin writes “Mise-en-scene does in space what montage does in time.”

Therefore if montage creates new ideas that we would otherwise not surmise then so must mise-en-scene.

Arnheim states, “Film resembles painting, music, literature, and the dance in this respect-it is a medium that may, but need not, be used to produce artistic results.”

He says that a post card and military march are not considered art and just as most movies should not be considered art. With the possibility of being art, how should artistic merit of a filmmaker be deciphered? Begin writes that “Often a director’s style depends on his or her attitude toward mise-en-scene versus montage.”

Montage and mise-en-scene should not be viewed as competing elements, but pieces of film used to compose ideas and emotions the filmmakers are trying to convey. An artist knows the tools and techniques needed to convey the message and grasp a balance of montage and mise-en-scene appropriate for the particular film. Many films simply tell a story, when they become art is where the skill and craft excel.

Films have the capability of being art, and they have the ability to not be art. The deciding factors lie in the use of the elements, and how they are composed together, and the manner in which they are arranged. To shoot and assemble is not art, but to skillfully go about it and craft a movie in a way presenting the audience with ideas and ways of seeing things in an original way brings it to be. For film the main components of its art is the mise-en-scene and montage. When skillfully they are composed together they create a film that is every bit as artistically rendered as a well crafted painting.

Bibliography:

Begin, Paul. "Buñuel, Eisenstein, And The 'Montage Of Attractions': An Approach To Film In Theory And Practice." Bulletin Of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 1113-1132. Academic Search Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Rudolf Arnheim. “From Film As Art,” Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford, 2009)

Sergei Eisenstein. “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]” Film Theory and Criticism. (New York: Oxford, 2009.)

Wollen, Peter. "Theory And Practice." Journal Of Media Practice 6.2 (2005): 73-81. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Of God, Film, and Men.

Best of Film: 2012 Part 1

2.) The Dark Knight Rises

3.) Lincoln

4.) Moonrise Kindgom

5.) Argo

6.) Skyfall

Introducing the Extra Terrestrial

Chaplin Before 1920

Feminism and Society through Melodrama and Noir

Culture in Mississippi Masala

Hello (The Long) Goodbye

Human Values Through Film Design: Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator

Gilda: The Singing Dancing Noir Heroine

Sequoia Sempervirens of "Vertigo"

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched Vertigo already, do not read on.

General Impressions from "Cabaret"

General Impressions While Watching In Time.

Film Noir: the Genre that Wasn’t a Genre

Control in Gamespace

Societal Backlash against the Images of the Spectacle Society

When Harry Met Holly: Existential Crisis Portrayed in The Third Man

The Spectacle of Sex in Strange days

International Films as Culture

The Art of Citizen Kane

Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness

The Balance of Film Art

SPOILER ALERT: **If you haven't watched Vertigo already, do not read on.**