tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86831683960397691162024-02-07T10:51:49.411-08:00Film Notes From the CMA SeriesA selection of notes from programs that I curated at the Columbus Museum of Art between 1979 to 1992. All material is copyrighted.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-4504124940480846082010-04-10T09:10:00.000-07:002010-04-10T16:16:17.427-07:00The Great Detectives Sleuth Again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7J_9RnKxE_XP2t07kKVMOJNFScfXEK2fTFZxTlbEVSGboGCS_RqsYjGxQpjD9nbFO5ymX1sQoYvCgPg42o-rmGA6L4QmIEe9uSoD8_boCZsk0GN50XJnuCjvyZ4m3ddAPA8OYE1HWycTu/s1600/00perrymason9_500_b0e2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7J_9RnKxE_XP2t07kKVMOJNFScfXEK2fTFZxTlbEVSGboGCS_RqsYjGxQpjD9nbFO5ymX1sQoYvCgPg42o-rmGA6L4QmIEe9uSoD8_boCZsk0GN50XJnuCjvyZ4m3ddAPA8OYE1HWycTu/s320/00perrymason9_500_b0e2b.jpg" /></a></div>Everyone loves a mystery, or so it seems from the continued popularity of the genre. Certainly, the puzzle-like structure of mystery novels and films offers both a challenge and a satisfaction rarely found in other genres. It is with this in mind that we present another series of films full of shocking murders, stunning deductions, and a host of unlikely suspects with even more unlikely alibies.<br />
<br />
We begin this year's series with the 1938 production of the Sherlock Holmes tale <i>Silver Blaze</i>. The film was the last in the series starring Arthur Wontner, one of the most noteworthy actors to play the role prior to Basil Rathbone. Wontner played the part in five films made during the 1930s and, though each film varied in its fidelity to the source, Wontner's interpretation of Holmes remained faithful to Doyle's stories.<br />
<br />
Though essentially based on the short story of the same name, <i>Silver Blaze</i> also borrowed plot elements and characters from <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i> and "The Adventure of the Empty House." Although the film was updated to a contemporary setting and given a few "modern" touches, it retains the spirit of the original stories and a strong sense of authenticity.<br />
<br />
One of the more popular movie detectives of the 1930s was Philo Vance. First portrayed by William Powell, the role of Vance established him as an important leading man. When Powell left the Vance series for the <i>Thin Man</i> films, he was replaced by Warren William. By the mid-1930s, Warren William had become known as a second-string William Powell--an ironic twist considering that in the early 1930s William had been a major romantic leading man.<br />
<br />
The Philo Vance films starring Warren William tended to experiment with the material. A film which we have previously shown in this series, <i>The Gracie Allen Murder Case</i> (1939), was essentially a parody of the Vance films. This year we are showing <i>The Dragon Murder Case</i> (1934), which was produced as a mixture of murder mystery and horror film. The film's central plot device, a pool which is supposedly haunted by a ghostly dragon, allowed the photography and set design to exploit the gothic style that was common to horror movies of the 1930s.<br />
<br />
While the character of "Bulldog" Drummond is little known today, during the 1930s numerous films were made about his adventures. The character of Drummond was played by a long and distinguished list of actors including such performers as Ronald Colman, Jack Buchanan, Ralph Richardson, and Ray Milland. Such was the popularity of these films that, by the mid-1930s, as many as two to five Drummond films were released per year.<br />
<br />
The original character of Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, as created by H. C. "Sapper" McNeile, was an ex-soldier who turned to crime fighting because he found peace time life too boring. The literary Drummond tended to be a rough and violent figure, but the screen-version of the character was the epitome of sophistication. His cases also tended to be a bit on the fantastic side, filled with daring escapes and beautiful women. In this regard, Drummond is the direct forerunner to the character of James Bond.<br />
<br />
<i>Bulldog Drummond Escapes</i> (1937) was the first film in the American-produced Drummond series of the late 1930s. Both the film's narrative and Ray Milland's performance were based on the earlier Drummond films which had starred Ronald Colman. It was also the last Drummond film of the 1930s produced on an adequate budget before the series began to suffer from diminished popularity caused by overexposure.<br />
<br />
Even though his career went through a gradual decline during the 1930s, Warren William frequently appeared in the mystery films of this period. By the middle of the decade he was appearing on screen as Philo Vance, the Lone Wolf, and Perry Mason. William would originate the role of Mason in four films, beginning with <i>The Case of the Howling Dog</i> (1934).<br />
<br />
As the first in the series, <i>The Case of the Howling Dog</i> was produced on the largest budget. While this film takes certain liberties with the original novel, it contained the best-structured plot of the series and was devoid of any unnecessary comedy relief.<br />
<br />
In contrast, humor is the central focus of the four Miss Jane Marple films made in England in the early 1960s. The series began in 1962 with <i>Murder, She Said</i>, a loosely derived adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel <i>4:50 From Paddington</i>. The film retained the basic plot points of the novel, but was extensively revamped in order to showcase the unique and eccentric talents of Margaret Rutherford, who played Jane Marple.<br />
<br />
Rutherford, an actress, comedienne, and amateur psychic, represented a distinctly British combination of stubborn determination and whimsy. Though her portrayal of Miss Jane Marple was far removed from the character conceived by Christie, Rutherford did succeed in creating one of the more striking detectives to ever grace the screen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-34671521999392507362010-04-10T08:51:00.000-07:002010-04-10T08:51:17.356-07:00The Great Detectives Part Two<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifRK79nMIhX3mQ4d9grOXUnVcMEx7qdBPCZ-4jVj1utN2a9UYzlIw06yXFfQ1-Ur6pSrVpVk1s0mILGsMlZm2PSwly_5CBxN3Hskbyl9I4sow0m-_2pILLL0V9l6uNjCkQ_RmtNqIGu-MG/s1600/gracie-allen-murder-case-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifRK79nMIhX3mQ4d9grOXUnVcMEx7qdBPCZ-4jVj1utN2a9UYzlIw06yXFfQ1-Ur6pSrVpVk1s0mILGsMlZm2PSwly_5CBxN3Hskbyl9I4sow0m-_2pILLL0V9l6uNjCkQ_RmtNqIGu-MG/s320/gracie-allen-murder-case-sm.jpg" /></a></div>In the thirties, the mystery film was one of the most popular genres of the Hollywood film industry. The audience's demand for the films was enormous and every studio had at least one detective series in production. Not only were many mystery novels filmed, they even had their plots recycled into other films in order to meet this demand. Though prints of many of these films no longer exist, there are still copies from some of the major detective series from the period. In this continuation of last summer's program, we present five examples of the genre, many of which have seldom been screened since the thirties.<br />
<br />
For many viewers, Basil Rathbone is the definitive Sherlock Holmes. When he initially appeared as Holmes, however, Rathbone was unfavorably compared to Clive Brook, who played the role in only three films (<i>The Return of Sherlock Holmes</i> [1929] , <i>Paramount on Parade</i> [ 1930],and <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> [1932]), but made a major impression on viewers. Of the three films, the last is considered critically the best.<br />
<br />
Based both on the play by William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and on the short story "The Red Headed League," the film <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> is best remembered for its confrontations between Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty. Like many of the Holmes films of the thirties, the story was updated to the period and Moriarty's antics were modeled after the gangster tactics of Al Capone. The possible incongruity of the part of Moriarty were smoothly handled by Ernest Torrence, whose performance was an excellent counterpoint to Brook's droll and extremely self-assured Holmes. <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> is also notable for its photography which was strongly influenced by the German Expressionist cinema of the twenties.<br />
<br />
The best of the Philo Vance films are those starring William Powell. Unfortunately, the only one of those films still known to exist is <i>The Kennel Murder Case</i> (shown last summer). Of the other actors who played the role, Warren William came closest to equaling Powell. In the 1939 film <i>The Gracie Allen Murder Case</i>, William made his last appearance as Vance in one of the strangest films of the series.<br />
<br />
S. S. Van Dine, the author of the Philo Vance mystery novels, was a fan of Gracie Allen and wrote the original story for her. Critics were often annoyed by Vance's intellectual arrogance and demanding logic and the film may have been Van Dine's rebuttal to his detractors. In <i>The Gracie Allen Murder Case</i>, Vance remains coldly deductive, even when faced with Gracie Allen's puns and farcial comedy. It is not surprising that <i>The Gracie Allen Murder Case</i> has become a major cult film at repertory theaters.<br />
<br />
Of the three versions of <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart is undoubtably the best known. It was, however, modeled after the 1931 version starring Ricardo Cortez. Both films were faithful to the original novel by Dashiell Hammett and the two productions rival each other in the exactness of their casting of the major characters. Though Cortez was fashioned as a Latin lover in the Valentino mold during the twenties, he changed to playing tough guys and made an effective Sam Spade in the thirties.<br />
<br />
The visual similiarities between the two versions are very striking. It is believed that John Huston, prior to directing the 1941 film, watched the earlier production and used it as a visual outline. That the compositions in many scenes are almost identical would seem to support this theory. Though Huston's version is still superior, the original <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> is one of the most engaging mystery films of the early thirties.<br />
<br />
Only two Nero Wolfe films were made in the thirties before author Rex Stout withdrew the film rights to his other stories. Stout was appalled by the two films due to certain liberties taken with the main characters. In spite of their less than faithful approach, the two films were well crafted mysteries. <i>Meet Nero Wolfe </i>(shown last summer) had Edward Arnold more suitably cast in the title role rather than Walter Connolly who played Wolfe in <i>The League of Frightened Men</i>. But the second film had a better plot which compensated for any failings on Connolly's part.<br />
<br />
The narrative of <i>The League of Frightened Men</i> is unique in that Nero Wolfe must first establish that a murder has taken place before he can solve it. Matching wits with Wolfe is a deranged playwright who was superbly played by Eduardo Ciannelli. The comedy relief provided by Lionel Stander will annoy the purist, but <i>The League of Frightened Men</i> is generally considered to be one of the better mystery films of the period.<br />
<br />
The most successful mystery series of the thirties were the <i>Thin Man</i> films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. Combining murder with sophisticated comedy, the <i>Thin Man</i> films maintained an unequaled level of quality. The interplay between Powell and Loy was graceful and effortless and the films were produced by MGM as large budget productions.<br />
<br />
The third film in the series, <i>Another Thin Man</i>, was based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. Viewers familiar with Hammett's novels will notice that the story was derived from <i>The Dain Curse</i>. While Hammett provided the story, screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett supplied the witty dialogue. <i>Another Thin Man</i> veers so close to screwball comedy that the mystery is often less memorable than the funny banter between Powell and Loy. While many mystery films of the thirties attempted to include comedy relief, the <i>Thin Man </i>films were the only ones to successfully make comedy an integral part of the story.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-58021427719971411642010-04-10T08:24:00.000-07:002010-04-10T08:24:58.823-07:00The Great Detectives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5RZuvMacSOnFW1ZEqAwfqAx3pcAVf1Li3jry5_6JhMLkO-HkgsJvWHfPa7s5VjyCvHWwpCp27OdzqePRXtGIfrIhq6y2Ahha9czx7LyOZmTglNMOLWdjNxRn6mW-BpND5q12p9XEXJzwi/s1600/Rathbone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5RZuvMacSOnFW1ZEqAwfqAx3pcAVf1Li3jry5_6JhMLkO-HkgsJvWHfPa7s5VjyCvHWwpCp27OdzqePRXtGIfrIhq6y2Ahha9czx7LyOZmTglNMOLWdjNxRn6mW-BpND5q12p9XEXJzwi/s320/Rathbone.jpg" /></a></div>Nowhere is the seductive lure of the narrative more evident than in the mystery genre. The puzzle-box of a mystery story traps even the most disinterested viewer into the inevitable desire to know "how does it end." The mystery genre follows a simple yet riveting set of rules: a respectable facade or order is disrupted by murder; an outside force in the person of the detective proceeds to expose the potential chaos behind the facade; the final discovery of the murderer restores order, but usually at some physical or psychological cost to the original order. Since Oedipus first demanded to know "who did it," the structure of the genre has remained relatively unchanged.<br />
<br />
The thirties and forties were the two most active decades for mystery movies. While crime didn't pay, people were certainly willing to pay to see it and every studio had its various sleuths, gumshoes, Oriental masterminds, and bumbling policemen. So many mystery films were made during this period that plots were literally recycled with only the names of the characters changed to protect the screenwriters. The program <i>The Great Detectives</i> presents four of the best examples from this hectic period of gentlemanly mayhem.<br />
<br />
Having appeared in over a hundred films since the silent era, the team of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson was undoubtedly best represented by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. When they first appeared together as Holmes and Watson in the 1939 production of <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>, the studio was uncertain about the match but the film was so successful that a sequel was quickly produced the same year. This second film, <i>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</i>, remains the best of the series due to the cleverness of its plot and the high quality of its production (it had the largest budget of any of the films). The film's greatest asset is the creation of a villain who is Holmes's equal. Professor Moriarty may be mad, but he is a brilliant and often engaging madman who divides his time between plotting elaborate crimes and lecturing people on the difference between a slave and a superman.<br />
<br />
The snobbish and excessively erudite Philo Vance was one of the most popular detectives of the early thirties. Vance didn't simply solve the crime, he did a thesis presentation on all of the psychological nuances which led to the murder. A member of the velvet smoking jacket school of detection, Vance's early success on the screen was largely due to the abilities of William Powell to make the character both believable and sufferable. Previously type-cast as a villain, Powell proved himself as a leading man by breathing life and wit into a perpetual doctoral candidate.<br />
<br />
<i>The Kennel Murder Case</i> is one of the most complex of the Vance mysteries and is still notorious for having one of the longest denouement scenes ever. This excessive attention to detail eventually led to the unpopularity of the Vance films as the Dashiell Hammett school of tough-guy detectives introduced a quicker and more physical method. It is ironic that the one flaw to <i>The Kennel Murder Case</i> is an incorrect detail. The set designer for the film altered one of the townhouses in a way that made the solution to the mystery impossible.<br />
<br />
Perhaps fewer films where made about Nero Wolfe than about any other famous detective. Wolfe's creator, Rex Stout, disliked the media in general and films in particular, and while two Wolfe films were made in the thirties, Stout felt that they were not faithful enough to his stories and he refused to allow any further productions. The films, <i>Meet Nero Wolfe</i> and <i>The League of Frightened Men</i>, were taken out of circulation and were not commercially re-released until 1982. The reputation of the films, especially <i>Meet Nero Wolfe</i>, has remained strong, however, and Stout's criticism of the films is largely indicative of his own demanding temperament.<br />
<br />
The casting of Lionel Stander as Wolfe's assistant was, admittedly, a mistake. One of the major flaws of the thirties mystery movie was the conviction that every film needed some broad comic relief. Edward Arnold as Wolfe, however, was an amply appropriate choice. An excellent character actor, Arnold specialized in playing arrogant, overbearing figures. Plump more than fat, Arnold made up for his lack of excess poundage by zeroing in on Wolfe's domineering personality. While the recent television series (with William Conrad) portrayed Wolfe as a gruff but lovable old bear, Arnold went directly for the jugular. His Wolfe is good at what he does and only does it because his client pays him very large sums for doing it. As Wolfe points out in the novels, his layers of fat insulate him from trite sentimentality.<br />
<br />
Though not well known in the United States, the Inspector Cockrill novels have a strong following in England. The one film taken from these books, <i>Green for Danger</i>, is considered by many critics to be one of the best "whodunits" in the cinema. The director, Sidney Gilliat, had been one of Hitchcock's chief collaborators in the thirties and the film gave him an opportunity to pay homage to his mentor.<br />
<br />
The role of Inspector Cockrill gave Alastair Sim's droll talent a near-perfect showcase. With his shabby mackintosh and crumpled, ill-fitting derby, Cockrill is seemingly slow and inept. Prone to rambling comments and pointless anecdotes, Cockrill actually has a shrewd, steel trap mind which seizes significant clues from seemingly innocent details.<br />
<br />
By the mid-forties, the mystery film began to vanish from the screen. It is possible that the conflict inherent in the genre between chaos and stability ceased to make sense in an increasingly unstable world. In popular literature, the last detective to achieve widespread fame would be Mike Hammer, a character totally submerged in violence and brutality. The intellectual game of the mystery was irrelevant as the new anti-hero did his detecting with gun powder rather than brain power. Perhaps the secret charm of the thirties mystery film is our own nostalgia for an era when murder was a sport for gentlemen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-31934425903458371682009-08-16T13:49:00.000-07:002009-08-16T15:04:33.111-07:00Modern Japanese Cinema<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNvmo3_5jmvmNeLkdxaHhiMA2QHqEIghZshp_qX97qN0NB1TzjqBMx5cxuVgI-XOhT_XJsq55s5jOPvMJCWOb5wT17MxU-bp37oSJGIGRVbzBvqJg8VqNVNLusYcCMvl2lvV9eZ7eJgngq/s1600-h/WomanOfTheDunes.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 133px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNvmo3_5jmvmNeLkdxaHhiMA2QHqEIghZshp_qX97qN0NB1TzjqBMx5cxuVgI-XOhT_XJsq55s5jOPvMJCWOb5wT17MxU-bp37oSJGIGRVbzBvqJg8VqNVNLusYcCMvl2lvV9eZ7eJgngq/s200/WomanOfTheDunes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370685063094860962" /></a><br />The Japanese began producing films at approximately the same time as the West, but while the Western cinema was quickly taking shape, the Japanese cinema remained relatively stagnant. By the time the cinema became the major narrative art form in the West, the typical Japanese film served as a form of illustration for the <span style="font-style:italic;">bensei</span>, the traditional storyteller. The center of attention was the <span style="font-style:italic;">bensei</span> as he told the tale and the film was used primarily as a visual enhancement for tales that may (or may not) have been related to the original narrative of the movie. Meanwhile, film as an art in its own right for the Japanese only existed at certain specialty theaters which showed the major Russian, American and German films of the era.<br /><br />It was not until the 1920s, when various film directors began resisting the use of the <span style="font-style:italic;">bensei</span>, that the Japanese cinema began moving in its own unique direction. The foreign films of the 1920s were the original models copied by such early Japanese filmmakers like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, but this foreign influence was only the raw material that was quickly adapted and altered into distinctly Japanese forms. By the 1930s, the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi were considered too Japanese to be understood by foreign viewers.<br /><br />The Japanese cinema is also one of the few national film industries in the world (the other main example being Hollywood) that has had a long, continuous history since the silent era. However, quantity does not always correspond with quality (as Hollywood also amply demonstrates) and the Japanese cinema's history has gone through periods of immense creatively - such as the late 1930s and the 1950s - followed by other, less interesting stages of standard genre melodramas, potboilers, and the occasional soft-core porn.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the Japanese film industry is currently in the midst of such a period and the exciting and innovative films of the 1960s has been followed by economic problems within the industry and a reluctance on the part of producers to finance anything beyond quickie exploitation films. American movies dominant the marketplace and an upsurge in television viewing in Japan has not only made it more profitable for a Japanese director to work in television, but allows the director to achieve greater artistic independence on the small box rather than on the large screen. The few important artists still making films have found it necessary to either make blatantly commercial thrillers (which is what Kon Ichikawa has done) or else seek international backing for Japanese films (e.g. Nagisa Oshima's <span style="font-style:italic;">In the Realm of the Senses</span> was produced by a French company). After years of frustration, Akira Kurosawa found it necessary to accept the Soviet's offer to direct the non-Japanese film <span style="font-style:italic;">Dersu Uzala</span> - either that or retire from film making altogether.<br /><br />The 1960s stands out as the most recent period of major innovation in the Japanese cinema. It was a period that was fueled by national and international upheavals in the arts and by a growing sense of disenchantment among the younger generation of Japanese artists with many aspects of the society in which they lived. The spirit of compromise and mild optimism found among the Humanist filmmakers of the post-World War Two era was replaced with a more formalistic and rebellious attitude. New forms and structures were developed to deal more critically with contemporary subject matter while those filmmakers who dealt with historical subjects did so in a highly self-conscious effort to re-evaluate Japanese history and culture in light of the present situation. <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Suicide</span> by Masahiro Shinoda takes a Brechtian approach to the traditional form of the Bunraka puppet play, purposefully exposing both the manipulations of the puppet-masters upon the actors and the film making process itself.<br /><br />The avant-garde in Western art and literature had a strong influence upon many of the Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s, a "coming full circle" considering the influence of Japanese art upon the original avante-garde movement in the West. When Nagisa Oshima began working in the cinema, he was more impressed with the films of the French New Wave than he was with his own country's cinema and the stylistic similarities between his films and those of Jean-Luc Godard has not been overlooked by Western critics. Likewise, <span style="font-style:italic;">Woman in the Dunes</span> is obviously derived from Franz Kafka's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Castle</span> and novelist/screenwriter Kobo Abe's concerns are those of a European Existentialist. The allegorical content of the film is structurally austere and visually <span style="font-style:italic;">Woman in the Dunes</span> is highly similar to a European "art" film.<br /><br />As previously mentioned, Japanese culture was targeted for a critical re-evaluation. The new filmmakers were acutely aware of the changes that had taken place in modern Japan and of the apparent failure of traditional values. This failure in the face of recent history is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the way that Oshima chronologically structures <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ceremony</span>. The various ceremonies of the film are set during politically important years of the post-war era. 1947, at the beginning of the film, was the start of the Cold War and the first wave of "Red Purges." In 1952, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was signed and Japan began to reap a profit from U.S. involvement in the Korean War. That same year, Japan's Communist Party broke with the students (one of whom was Oshima) in the radical movement. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was renewed in 1961 despite violent protests. 1964 was the year of prosperity and the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. In the year the film was made - 1971 - the Security Treaty was renewed again and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima led a small private army in a take-over of the National Security Force headquarters. Mishima's siege - his impassioned speech in support of the Emperor and "true" Japanese culture - and his act of ritual suicide afterwards, had stunned his fellow artists. In spite of his fanatical right-wing politics, Mishima was an influential voice to both sides of the Japanese political spectrum and his spectacular death forced to the surface the self-destructive contradictions which the Japanese intellect is seemingly incapable of resolving.<br /><br />These contradictions - the disastrous outcome of military imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s; the massive disruption of an age-old culture and the overly enthusiastic embracing of things American; the attempt to build a democracy out of the remains of a politically feudalistic nation while simultaneously maintaining the Emperor; the deep relevance for the beauty of nature while the modern landscape is transformed into an industrial wasteland - has produced, according to Kon Ichikawa's <span style="font-style:italic;">Odd Obsession</span>, a particular kind of impotency in the Japanese soul. <br /><br />Bitter, ironic and a lover of macabre humor, Ichikawa has been a major influence upon the Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s because, says Shinoda, "he makes films only for the sake of making films, (his) work has a kind of innocence and very pure pleasure. In the technical realm he has been the most influential in pointing out directions for the avant-garde...." His willingness to experiment (he made one film told from the point of view of a cat) and sheer audacity in subject matter (after <span style="font-style:italic;">Odd Obsession</span> he made <span style="font-style:italic;">Fires on the Plains</span> in which a group of stranded soldiers resort to cannibalism) is often combined with an ambiguous moral viewpoint. Unlike many of the other Humanist directors of the 1950s, Ichikawa ask questions rather than teach lessons and the vague optimism of his contemporaries is replaced with a biting pessimism.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-59442147410930777432009-06-21T11:02:00.000-07:002009-06-21T11:26:57.416-07:00The Debonairs: Gary Grant and William Powell<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggFFBT1tf3Opo4gi5YteRr5qNS-JrT7VjhfTNEip9Fx78hiD9kVHN6_XSnnMzfQH8DoP5YDSnGjCW_ZY1cl8TZPyEVhXazXilhUnzSIBnxMP5_aFObeXmhFciCDa9k9yNDVAy3hdRV9D_c/s1600-h/awful+truth.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 161px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggFFBT1tf3Opo4gi5YteRr5qNS-JrT7VjhfTNEip9Fx78hiD9kVHN6_XSnnMzfQH8DoP5YDSnGjCW_ZY1cl8TZPyEVhXazXilhUnzSIBnxMP5_aFObeXmhFciCDa9k9yNDVAy3hdRV9D_c/s200/awful+truth.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5349848688782134226" /></a><br />The art of film acting is a difficult skill. Unlike the direct and immediate impact of the live theater, a film actor pokes his way through small, disorderly pieces of a screenplay, and the quality of his performance is often more dependent upon lighting directors, photographers, and editors than his own thespian talents. At best, a film actor can develop a personality, a distinctive style which becomes his "character" through a series of films. In other words, he comes to represent a specific type of character to such an extent that to cast him in a film would, in part, determine the nature of the film. Such actors do not merely play at being a character in a film but instead play "themselves." That is, they play a consciously created character that becomes their screen personality.<br /><br />Of this type of performer, perhaps two of the most distinctive yet under-rated have been Gary Grant and William Powell. Both Grant and Powell became identified with a certain type of role, that of the urbane, sophisticated leading man in romantic comedies. As masters of the debonair, Grant and Powell developed personalities which allowed them to move through a performance with a smoothness and an apparent lack of effort which made their acting look all too easy and natural to be considered acting. Because of this, recognition of their talent was not given until late in their careers. Yet their popularity with audiences remains strong and, in spite of numerous recent attempts, no contemporary performer has been capable of matching them for grace, wit, and charming self-assurance.<br /><br />The transformation from Archibald Leach to Gary Grant was, in itself, a major performance. As a shy and introverted child from a middle-class family in Bristol, England, Grant was surprisingly determined when, at the age of thirteen, he left home to join the Bob Pender Troupe. It was with this group that Grant learned acrobatics, dancing, pantomime,and a variety of other skills, as well as a motto which he later adopted as his own: "Never stay on too long. Never let the audience get tired of you. Always leave them laughing and wanting more."<br /><br />Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Kansas City, William Horatio Powell seemed an even more unlikely candidate for the debonair school of acting. Powell originally entered law school at the University of Kansas before he decided to defy his father's wishes. Borrowing $700 from his aunt, Powell left the legal profession after two weeks of classes and enrolled in New York's American Academy of Dramatic Art. While the English music halls became Gary Grant's training ground, Powell studied his craft through the more conventional route of stock companies and the Broadway theater.<br /><br />The films in this program have been selected to emphasize particular aspects of both Grant's and Powell's screen personalities. The two films starring Gary Grant represent his portrayal of a distinctly masculine male who undergoes a series of humiliations that become a test of both love and character. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Awful Truth</span>, he plays the role of a philandering husband who discovers his own enormous potential for jealousy in the first ten minutes of the film. The mutual attempts of Grant and Irene Dunne to sabotage each other's love affairs become not only the proof that they still love each other, but is also the force by which they achieve a new equality in their relationship. Their romantic rivals (Ralph Bellamy and Molly Lament) are not so much sexual contenders as they are pawns in the marital game. By the end of the film, Grant and Dunne have to be reconciled because no one else can put up with them.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I Was a Male War Bride</span> goes even further with sexual humiliation. Beginning with an antagonistic relationship of equality (Ann Sheridan's WAC lieutenant behaves in almost as masculine a manner as Grant's captain) the film follows a progressively unequal path. The more romantically involved Grant and Sheridan become, the more humiliation Grant must suffer, whether in the form of an errant motorcycle or the rigid bureaucracy of the U.S. Army. Grant's impersonation of a woman officer during the final third of the film is not only a travesty of his own masculinity, but also a satire on the military mentality. Never has a man looked less like a woman (even Grant's wig is obviously a bobbed horse's tail), but the fact that he's dressed like a woman and has signed all the forms as Mrs. makes him a woman according to the rules and regulations of the army.<br /><br />The William Powell films are representative of the type of comedies which made him famous during the thirties and forties. In both films he is teamed with Myrna Loy, his most popular leading lady. <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Wedding</span> is an ideal sample of the type of romantic screwball comedy films which they made during the period; films in which logic took a highly circular route and the most improbable events came about in probable ways. The central plot in <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Wedding</span>, Powell's conviction that the only way to win the woman he loves is by courting her sister, only makes sense within the uniquely whimsical confines of a Powell-Loy comedy. Like the other films of its type, <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Wedding</span> does not convince the viewer with its narrative rationale, but instead succeeds in winning our suspension of disbelief.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Shadow of the Thin Man</span> presents Powell in his most famous persona as private detective Nick Charles. The fourth of a series of six <span style="font-style:italic;">Thin Man</span> films, <span style="font-style:italic;">Shadow of the Thin Man</span> was the last film of the series to be directed by W.S. Van Dyke before his death. Van Dyke had directed the previous three films, which accounts for their consistent wit and style. The two films which came after this one (<span style="font-style:italic;">The Thin Man Goes Home</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Song of the Thin Man</span>) are noticeably lacking the urbane polish of Van Dyke's productions which lead to the films' loss of popularity at the time. As murder mysteries go, the <span style="font-style:italic;">Thin Man</span> films became increasingly marginal, but as witty comedy films they remained fresh and inventive and were the best showcase for the "perfectly married" teamwork of Powell and Loy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-55771576578443737772009-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:002009-04-19T13:34:58.707-07:00Point Blank: Films of Disenchantment<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyT82dWinEjuqTZOq-erwfnA9r7FBKFziFykAszb-GnDb2URXRVdPSLaccb4GxfRtrAgAMZqG8qSpA_dBMEUFjJKCUWNo8cdp3iVf1LJVlrBFLEKQ90DwQ5n0IbF0sXJnZYk-3nCwrtw-q/s1600-h/point_blank.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 131px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyT82dWinEjuqTZOq-erwfnA9r7FBKFziFykAszb-GnDb2URXRVdPSLaccb4GxfRtrAgAMZqG8qSpA_dBMEUFjJKCUWNo8cdp3iVf1LJVlrBFLEKQ90DwQ5n0IbF0sXJnZYk-3nCwrtw-q/s200/point_blank.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326503447089274370" /></a><br />The Film Noir genre has functioned in the American cinema as a powerful fulcrum for the disturbances and discontent of modern society. The genre's tendencies toward glib cynicism and dark shadowy photography result in nightmarish reflections of a treacherous and claustrophobic world. Through this genre, numerous filmmakers have been able to express the negative underside to the optimism and complacency of mainstream culture. With its codes and generic conventions, Film Noir has created a large and substantial text of critical disenchantment.<br /><br />The program "Point Blank: Films of Disenchantment" presents three significant examples of Film Noir from the late 1960s to late 1970s, when the genre reached its most extreme and experimental stage of development. Jack Shadoian, in his book <span style="font-style:italic;">Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film</span>, writes that at this time the genre "is forced inward, toward its own procedures, which become increasingly sophisticated. It used to be that well established procedures could be used to move outward toward an audience they could securely engage. Now the audience must be seduced into accepting new aesthetic resources and complex (and at times schizophrenic) attitudes."<br /><br />The program begins with a screening of <span style="font-style:italic;">Point Blank</span> (USA 1967), the second theatrical film to be directed by the English filmmaker John Boorman in his first, and nearly last, American production. The audacious and highly experimental style of the film alienated the American distributors, who proceeded to dump <span style="font-style:italic;">Point Blank</span> on the second-run market. In spite of this, the film has proven to be one of the more important and influential works of the 1960s. It is also one of the most difficult to interpret. Even the existence of the film's central character is left open; Boorman himself has stated that <span style="font-style:italic;">Point Blank</span> must be viewed as either a dream or as a ghost story.<br /><br />The rampant ambiguities of the narrative are magnified by a visual structure based upon fragmentation and non chronological association. When Walker, the main character, traverses the length of the Los Angeles International Airport, his footsteps are inter-cut with scenes from the past and present. The ending shot is a duplicate of the opening shot. In addition, mythic references are invoked; for example, at the beginning of the film, Walker ascends from the water and, ultimately, descends into darkness and nothingness -- both suggestive of Boorman's interest in Arthurian legend.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Remember My Name</span> (USA 1978) was the first of three overt excursions into Film Noir genre by the maverick American filmmaker Alan Rudolph. It is also an important example of a relatively recent proto-feminist variation on what has been traditionally a male dominated genre. This conversion of Film Noir into Femme Noir initiates a series of major shifts in the sexual codes of the genre and changes the traditional image of the femme fatale into an avenging angel.<br /><br />The illusion of feminine vulnerability is one of the central themes of <span style="font-style:italic;">Remember My Name</span>. Throughout the film, Geraldine Chaplin's waif-like appearance is suggestive of physical and psychological fragility. She displays, however, an iron-will and a sense of determination which is symbolized by her peculiar habit of stamping out her cigarettes in the palm of her hand. Several of the men in <span style="font-style:italic;">Remember My Name</span> act on the mistaken assumption that they are either protecting her or manipulating her. Behind her doe-like eyes, however, Chaplin has a strength and a sense of personal justice that gives her control over the men around her.<br /><br />Rudolph's mentor is filmmaker Robert Altman. Though Altman is today a virtual nonperson in Hollywood, during the 1970s he directed some of the finest films of the period, including <span style="font-style:italic;">M*A*S*H</span> (USA 1970), <span style="font-style:italic;">McCabe and Mrs. Miller</span> (USA 1971), <span style="font-style:italic;">Thieves Like Us</span> (USA 1973), and <span style="font-style:italic;">Nashville</span> (USA 1975). Subsequently, many of Altman's films were revisionist critiques of Hollywood conventions and established genres. With his production of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Goodbye</span> (USA 1973), Altman entered into a problematic debate with the noir genre and the near-mythic stature of one of the genre's most important fictional figures, Philip Marlowe.<br /><br />In the novels by Raymond Chandler and the films adapted from them -- including <span style="font-style:italic;">The Big Sleep</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Farewell, My Lovely</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Lady in the Lake</span> -- Philip Marlowe has come to represent the archetypal private eye, a tattered and worn gumshoe whose verbal flippancy masks a surprisingly chivalrous code of honor. In the film <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Goodbye</span>, however, Altman views Marlowe as an anachronism of the 1930s; an honorable man adrift within an uncaring and amoral culture. When Marlowe awakens at the beginning of the film, he is like a modern Rip Van Winkle who finds that the world as he knew it has irrevocably changed. Though Altman views both Marlowe and his moral code with nostalgic sympathy, he also realizes the degree to which modern society has turned cold and decadent. In making <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Goodbye</span>, Altman presents and shares in Marlowe's genuine sense of disenchantment.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-74636041952731424492009-04-19T12:48:00.000-07:002009-04-19T13:08:38.734-07:00Sembene: The African Screen<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_fhOCvp0M_GFSz73BDjy4aKlTxloe_LdYMmJ2671K3CbaKOH7ZNGi9Hr2_1MMGAAgVZm6mak0DwCUb_XSavSdwhxs6QgBFKFR6YQmutP3GwuC1LpWzAnkcAFBp3J63jYzmkQl2Oewq-jK/s1600-h/xala.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_fhOCvp0M_GFSz73BDjy4aKlTxloe_LdYMmJ2671K3CbaKOH7ZNGi9Hr2_1MMGAAgVZm6mak0DwCUb_XSavSdwhxs6QgBFKFR6YQmutP3GwuC1LpWzAnkcAFBp3J63jYzmkQl2Oewq-jK/s200/xala.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326496745044143618" /></a><br />"We must understand our traditions before we can hope to understand ourselves."<br /> --Ousmane Sembene <br /><br />Though the typical American film goer is largely unfamiliar with the African (and especially the country of Senegal)cinema, nonetheless the name of Ousmane Sembene has emerged to great critical prominence on the international screen. As the leading filmmaker of the surprisingly active Senegalese cinema, Sembene has created a body of works that artistically probes the historic and contemporary problems of Africa. In the process, his films has given an expressive voice to the thoughts and feelings of his fellow countrymen and Africans.<br /><br />Sembene was born in 1923 in the village of Ziguinchor in southern Senegal. At an early age he choice not to follow in his father's profession as a fisherman. Instead, he drifted through a series of jobs as a mechanic, a mason, and a sharpshooter in the French army during World War Two. By 1948, he had traveled from Senegal to France where he worked as a longshoreman in Marseilles and became a militant union organizer.<br /><br />It was also during this time that Sembene began to write poems and stories. His first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;">Le Docker Noir</span>, was published in 1956 and earned critical praise in both Africa and Europe. With such other novels as <span style="font-style:italic;">Xala</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Dombaye</span>, Sembene established himself as a major writer.<br /><br />By 1961, Sembene had become increasingly interested in film making and he received a grant to study at the Moscow Film Institute under the Soviet director Mark Donskoi. When he returned to Senegal, Sembene began working on a series of short films and, in 1965, made his first feature with the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Black Girl</span>.<br /><br />The films in this program represent two specific aspects of Sembene's concerns. The October 10 presentation of <span style="font-style:italic;">Ceddo</span> (1977) is a major example of Sembene's interest in critically reconstructing the events and issues of Senegalese history.<br /><br />The word "ceddo" refers to the common village people who live under the feudalistic system presented in the film. While the power struggles and revolutions of the film are motivated by the political desires of the various tribal and religious leaders of the film, it is the "ceddo" who are presented by Sembene as the heroes and victims<br />of historic events.<br /><br />The October 17 screening of <span style="font-style:italic;">Xala</span> (1974) presents Sembene's caustic view of modern Africa and the problems of the independent African state. The main character of <span style="font-style:italic;">Xala</span> is a successful African businessman who, despite his talk of African heritage and identity, speaks in French instead of his native language, drinks only bottled water from Europe, and can't live without the air conditioner. Then he is struck by the "xala," a curse of impotence which sends him on a panic-ridden search of doctors, soothsayers, and shamans, a journey which forces him to face his own identity. Sembene's unrelenting attack upon hypocrisy and self-deceit has made <span style="font-style:italic;">Xala</span> one of his most controversial films.<br /><br />The film <span style="font-style:italic;">Emitai</span> (1971), to be shown on October 31, invokes recent African history and tribal mythology and religion. The film is set during the final days of World War Two and describes the clash which took place between the French army and the Diolas tribe in the Casamance region of Senegal.<br /><br />The word "Emitai" is the name for the god of thunder in the religion of the Diolas people and the unique relationship between these people and their gods is one of the major themes of the film. For the Diolas, the gods and spirits are real and Sembene attempts to capture in <span style="font-style:italic;">Emitai</span> the unique sense of reality as it is felt and seen by these people.<br /><br />The 1968 film <span style="font-style:italic;">Mandabi</span> concludes the series on November 7. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Mandabi</span> (translation: the money order), Sembene creates a poignant satire in which he details the bizarre clashes which exists between the influences of European culture and ancient African customs. The film's main character quickly discovers that the simple task of cashing a money order can, and does, become a major point of conflict between Third World bureaucracy and the surviving structures of European colonization.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Mandabi</span> also becomes, for Sembene, a study of the vices and virtues of the common people of Africa. Sembene is sharp and bitter in his attacks on the deceptions used by many of the characters in <span style="font-style:italic;">Mandabi</span>. In turn, he finds in his hero an ultimate expression of traditional virtue.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-42762114244746148942009-04-19T09:39:00.000-07:002009-04-19T10:12:06.381-07:00Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW4FaRORQoPvnG3c5IRnlemuYAfrOCFKIoCLoZZ1RlGtGBP7CSTgGgz1M2IVUhofQ3RrVCJrrCaaqf2beo458X1PTbWsliJ_4jglujTLNlswk7fx9b62wm6oK2VJUKs8_WkzeKDtQyhGmD/s1600-h/open+city.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW4FaRORQoPvnG3c5IRnlemuYAfrOCFKIoCLoZZ1RlGtGBP7CSTgGgz1M2IVUhofQ3RrVCJrrCaaqf2beo458X1PTbWsliJ_4jglujTLNlswk7fx9b62wm6oK2VJUKs8_WkzeKDtQyhGmD/s200/open+city.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326451196879331314" /></a><br />It is generally known, though not often well appreciated, that the Italian Neo-Realist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s had a profound effect on the direction of the modern cinema. It was not simply due to the fact that the Neo-Realist movement rejected the artificial and illusionistic tendencies of the Hollywood dream factory, though the documentary-like photographic style and open-ended narratives of the early Neo-Realist films did defy the sleek yet empty artifice of the commerical cinema. But the Italian Neo-Realist movement had several more serious objectives and it is these larger concerns, rarely dealt with by contemporary filmmakers, that still makes the movement supremely important to a critical understanding of film images and their relationship to society.<br /><br />For the Neo-Realist filmmakers, the cinema was crucially concerned with ethical and political issues. To believe otherwise was not just an evasion of the artist's responsibility, but also invoked the false notion that any artist lived apart from the history and culture surrounding him. Further, for the Neo-Realists, the cinema had an obligation to critically confront the actual day-to-day realities of their society. Most Western filmmakers simply do not do this, instead they work within the confines of genre conventions, mock mythic perspectives, and predetermined middle-class ideology. The Italian Neo-Realist cinema, however, took to the streets and countryside of Italy, searching for the sense and feel of how people really lived, with an admitted bias toward the otherwise forgotten faces of the poor.<br /><br />Roberto Rossellini is often wrongly credited with being the founder of the Neo-Realist movement. There was no single founder and Rossellini was one of several major Italian filmmakers who emerged from the fascist era with a vigorous desire to steer the cinema away from the banalities and lies of the Mussolini period. Rossellini was, however, one of the most gifted of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and was the first to reach a wide international audience through his production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Open City</span> (Italy 1945). He was also the one filmmaker of the movement who adhered to the principles of Neo-Realism throughout his career and who most extensively explored the visual, moral, and historical ramifications of the main philosophical concerns of the movement.<br /><br />Though Rossellini had directed several films during the fascist period, it was only with the impending liberation of Rome that he was able to create a work fully expressive of his experience of life under war and dictatorship. <span style="font style:italic;">Open City</span> was largely shot on location while the German army was still retreating from advancing American forces and some of the troops in the film were actual German soldiers who were unaware of the cameras. But the vivid documentary look of the film is not to be confused with objectivity. Part of the raw emotional power of <span style="font-style:italic;">Open City</span> (and it still remains an emotionally potent experience on first viewing) is derived from its subtle use of comic and melodramatic conventions. Further, the seemingly improvised structure of the film belies its overt political agenda. Like all of the Neo-Realist filmmakers,Rossellini was a leftist and,while he was not a member of the Italian Party, he was interested in forging the foundation for a possible coalition between the party and the Catholic Church. The central narrative of <span style="font style:italic;">Open City</span> is an attempt to present points of commonalty between the two major social forces in post-war Italy.<br /><br />The legacy of fascism and World War Two were two of the major subjects of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and <span style="font-style:italic;">Open City</span> was the first installment in Rossellini's war triptych in which he relentlessly examined the personal and ethical conditions of the war and its aftermath. The other two films in this triptych, <span style="font-style:italic;">Paisan</span> (Italy 1946) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Germany, Year Zero</span> (Italy/Germany 1947), expanded beyond the immediate concerns of <span style="font-style:italic;">Open City</span> as each work focused on the larger social and cultural effects of fascism.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Paisan</span> is centered on the points of contact and misunderstandings that directly and indirectly arose between the Italians and Americans during the liberation of Italy. Even the film's title refers to this since the word "paisan" was a relatively archaic and unused term that was imported back to Italy by Italian-American troops. Throughout most of the short stories of <span style="font-style:italic;">Paisan</span>, Americans and Italians confront each other through a series of linguistic confusion, cultural contradictions, and, in the film's finale, mutual sacrifice.<br /><br />While <span style="font-style:italic;">Paisan</span> deals with the war's final days in Italy, <span style="font-style:italic;">Germany, Year Zero</span> explores the persistence of the fascist mentality in post-war Germany and Europe. It was a basic tenet of the Neo-Realist movement that history had to be critically examined, not forgotten, and that the failure to do so would merely pave the way for a resurgence of history's most recent horrors. Rossellini sensed that all of Europe was at a crossroad and that, like the character of Edmund in the film, the European mind was still conditioned to the mental and social structures of the recent past.<br /><br />The satiric vein of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Machine to Kill Bad People </span>(Italy 1948) was an unusual departure for Rossellini and it is no secret that he lost interest in the film just before the end of filming, leaving it to be completed by another director. Yet the film not only works as a surprisingly deft comedy, but its allegorical narrative actually delineates the philosophic attitudes of the Neo-Realist filmmakers to the photographic image. The camera was not a passive instrument for them, but rather a powerful weapon. The gaze of the lenses was not impassive, but rather a forum for moral judgement and political determination. Neither film nor photography were neutral, but rather loud voices in the greater struggles of the society.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Stromboli </span>(Italy 1949) was the first of several collaborations between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who had grown intensely dissatisfied with both her life and career in Hollywood, was extremely impressed by the film <span style="font-style:italic;">Open City</span> and contacted Rossellini about the possibility of working together. It was not long after their first meeting that Bergman and Rossellini began their romantic relationship and when she left her Swedish husband for Rossellini, Bergman was systematically blacklisted from Hollywood for "immoral" behavior. She would spend most of the 1950s in Italy with Rossellini, raising their children and acting in his films. While the films they made together tended to be more melodramatic than his other works, <span style="font-style:italic;">Stromboli</span> and the other films not only offered Bergman some of her finest opportunities for displaying a very naturalistic form of acting, but they also created an extensive portrait of the many emotional and psychological faces of a woman.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-13114154680417971772009-04-07T09:20:00.000-07:002009-04-07T09:39:27.368-07:00Self-Reflections: the West German Cinema<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZVwpHKkJ7IS_PDXh8tkncyQlEwESC2d9wM3E_KVO0b8vAOlRRKgWrbnOVKaFXiSyA9j7A0gzC686gyCg7JVNCX6SadCPkrGw-iZZkKA9r5vOOy6pyMPHv2q4x3vU2vX6A5bgvgFO1cBty/s1600-h/germany_pale.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 143px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZVwpHKkJ7IS_PDXh8tkncyQlEwESC2d9wM3E_KVO0b8vAOlRRKgWrbnOVKaFXiSyA9j7A0gzC686gyCg7JVNCX6SadCPkrGw-iZZkKA9r5vOOy6pyMPHv2q4x3vU2vX6A5bgvgFO1cBty/s200/germany_pale.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321989695610425106" /></a><br />Since its beginning in the late sixties, the New German cinema has reflected the major social and political concerns of West Germany. These concerns have led the filmmakers of the New German cinema to focus either directly or indirectly on the moral and political problems of recent German history in a manner previously unexplored in the West German cinema. While older Germans would prefer to forget the Nazi era, younger Germans have felt it necessary to confront this problem. Contemporary German filmmakers realize that they must, in one way or another, deal with this legacy because they know their present world was shaped by these experiences.<br /><br />The films presented in this program are four of the more important works which deal with the problem of fascism. <span style="font-style:italic;">David</span> (1979) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Germany, Pale Mother</span> (1980) are direct confrontations with the Nazi era. <span style="font-style:italic;">Young Torless</span> (1966) explores the roots of fascism in German culture, while <span style="font-style:italic;">Katzelmacher</span> (1969) presents a parable on the latent potential for fascism in modern Germany. Like mirrors, all four films present a critical self-reflection of the filmmakers and their culture.<br /><br />Peter Liltenthal, the director of <span style="font-style:italic;">David</span>, is the son of a Jewish family which immigrated from Germany to South America in the early 1930s. This, combined with his own experiences after returning to Germany as a film student, gives Lilienthal's direction of <span style="font-style:italic;">David</span> a very personal intensity. His earlier films, which were concerned with totalitarianism in South America, were politically astute, but lacked the more intimate feel of <span style="font-style:italic;">David</span>.<br /><br />For Lilienthal, <span style="font-style:italic;">David </span>is more than a search for his cultural identity as a German Jew. It is also a tribute to those who managed to escape the brutality of the Third Reich and to survive with their culture and spirit in tact. While the film is about the Holocaust, it is also about one person's ability to resist and survive and, ultimately, to find a renewed sense of personal strength.<br /><br />Volker Schlondorff is one of the best-known filmmakers of the New German cinema. He learned film making in France while working as an assistant director to Louis Malle, and it was with Malle's help that he was able to produce his first feature film, <span style="font-style:italic;">Young Torless</span>. The film was based on a novel, written by Robert Musil in 1906, which was a critical attack on the Prussian education system. The novel presented a system which encouraged the strong to prey upon the weak; a frightening study in sadism which foretold of later events in Germany.<br /><br />Some critics felt that Schlondorff's film version was heavy-handed in its political viewpoint, and it is true that Schlondorff has the advantage of hindsight over Musil. The film is, however, faithful to the original novel, and Schlondorff may be right in his assumption that it is impossible to view <span style="font-style:italic;">Young Torless</span> in any way other than hindsight.<br /><br />When he made his second film, <span style="font-style:italic;">Katzelmacher</span>, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was emerging as one of the most important figures in the New German cinema. He was already an extremely controversial actor, writer, and director whose theater pieces were considered both daring and outrageous. Fassbinder based <span style="font-style:italic;">Katzelmacher</span> on a short play he had previously improvised for the "Anti-Theater" company he belonged to. It was the second of ten feature-length films made during a two year period that marked the<br />first phase of Fassbinder's artistic career.<br /><br />The word "katzelmacher" is a derogatory slang term for foreign workers in Germany and it is the name the youths in the film use for the Greek portrayed by Fassbinder. The young gang in <span style="font-style:italic;">Katzelmacher</span> lack both ambition and direction, and the hostility they feel for the Greek worker is a meaningless attempt to justify their own aimlessness. The youths have created a closed society in which an outsider, such as the Greek, is an open target for the venting of their frustrations. In this respect, Fassbinder reminds us that the basic driving force toward fascism is still active and can be found in any setting.<br /><br />One of the most important women filmmakers currently working in Germany is Helma Sanders-Brahms. She has previously made several documentaries for German television as well as a biographical film about the writer Heinrich von Kleist. It was <span style="font-style:italic;">Germany, Pale Mother</span>, however, that brought her to international attention. The controversy surrounding the film when it was released in Germany is not surprising, for it is the most direct confrontation with the Nazi era ever made by a German filmmaker.<br /><br />Based upon her parent's own experiences during World War II, Sanders-Brahms deals with the actions and moral responsibilities of the average German during this period. Further, she is concerned with the manner in which this legacy has affected her own generation. In doing this, she attempts to remove the silence that has existed for so long in Germany regarding this period. For this alone, <span style="font-style:italic;">Germany, Pale Mother</span> may be one of the most daring films of the New German cinema.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-7134929540182043152009-03-24T09:14:00.000-07:002009-04-05T12:23:27.351-07:00John Ford: A Changing Vision of the West<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjCI78V_zAj5pV3jm9j5cumupJFX7uL8FNH60eDFilswKXQHL0Ss6dmcJ_laWpWk01fgQ_exf_QIMR_nC5Bj-R1FeKvOZn5nd5Xb4zyKxACPOP3jRJCK4X0e6PGU5H_a3PfM6TuO_qnTvN/s1600-h/the_searchers_ford_trailer_screenshot_8.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjCI78V_zAj5pV3jm9j5cumupJFX7uL8FNH60eDFilswKXQHL0Ss6dmcJ_laWpWk01fgQ_exf_QIMR_nC5Bj-R1FeKvOZn5nd5Xb4zyKxACPOP3jRJCK4X0e6PGU5H_a3PfM6TuO_qnTvN/s200/the_searchers_ford_trailer_screenshot_8.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316793341794339186" /></a><br />"John is half tyrant, half revolutionary; half saint, half Satan; half possible, half impossible; half genius, half Irish."<br />-Frank Capra<br /><br />"(I admire)the old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford."<br />-Orson Welles<br /><br />"He sees more out of one good eye than two producers see out of four."<br />-Martin Rackin<br /><br />"I'm John Ford. I make Westerns."<br />-John Ford<br /><br />He was born John Augustine Feeney on Feb 1, 1895 in a farm house on Cape Elizabeth, Maine., Later, when he followed his older brother Francis to the desert boom town of Los Angeles, he changed his name to Ford and picked up odd jobs as an extra (in <span style="font-style:italic;">Birth of a Nation</span> he's the Klansman wearing glasses) and stuntman in the blossoming movie industry. Francis Ford, already established as an actor, went on to direct silent films while his layabout brother spent most of his time hanging around the back lots with out of work cowboys (the last of the real ones) and making the acquaintance of a retired US Marshall named Wyatt Earp. Then in 1917, John Ford got his first chance to direct because he was the only member of the crew to show up sober one morning.<br /><br />The West of cowboys and Indians, gunfights and Tombstones, had ended a mere twenty years before and now a new West was taking shape on dusty back lots under the guidance of a young, half blind Irish-American who would, between 1917 and 1966, direct over one hundred films, win six Academy awards, a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and the Medal of Freedom from the US government. It is ironic that before he died from cancer in 1973, Ford commented that: "I certainly had no desire to go into pictures or have anything to do with them. Still haven't."<br /><br />Ford's work ranged from the stark fatalism of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Voyage Home</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Fugitive</span> to the bucolic humor of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Quiet Man</span>; the social concerns of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Grapes of Wrath</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">How Green Was My Valley </span>to the anti-social slapstick of <span style="font-style:italic;">Donovan's Reef </span>and the just plain anti-social in <span style="font-style:italic;">Seven Women</span>. The Western films, however, are the ones Ford is best remembered for. Not merely, as Howard Hawkes once said, because he did corn good, but because he took the Western genre and so extensively reshaped and personalized it that virtually every Western made within the past thirty years has been indebted to him. Of modern Westerns, the Italians pay him tribute in the Monument Valley sequences of Sergio Leone's <span style="font-style:italic;">Once Upon a Time in the West</span> and Sam Peckinpah - possibly the most self-consciously anti-Fordian director to ever work in the genre - gave homage in <span style="font-style:italic;">Ride the High Country </span>before biting back in <span style="font-style:italic;">Major Dundee</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wild Bunch</span>.<br /><br />The period of films this program is concerned with are the Westerns Ford directed between 1939 and 1962 and specifically with the changes that took place in the text of his films during that time. With <span style="font-style:italic;">Stagecoach</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">My Darling Clementine</span>, Ford creates his most eloquent statements on the survival of civilization against the hostile personifications of the wilderness. Nomadic and rootless, both the Ringo Kid (in <span style="font-style:italic;">Stagecoach</span>) and Wyatt Earp (<span style="font-style:italic;">My Darling Clementine</span>) appear out of the desert and they each carry with them a basic, primitive need for revenge, a need that could pose a threat to the community (the stagecoach and Lordsburg; Tombstone) they enter. Likewise both must confront evil families (the Palmer brothers and the Clantons) that are perversions of the values celebrated by Ford and both Ringo and Earp become a defender of communal life and values (even though the Kid and Dallas leaves Lordsburg and the "dubious gifts of civilization,"they do so only to go somewhere else and start their own families).<br /><br />Their victories over these evil families (in effect, over the wilderness itself) reaffirms the moral and social order of the community, even if Ford does show at the beginning of <span style="font-style:italic;">Stagecoach </span>some distrust of the self-righteous elements of society such as the Ladies Law and Order League.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Searchers</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</span>, the nomadic figures of Ethan Edwards and Liberty Valance are at best destructive forces which must ultimately be rejected by society (the closing of the door at the end of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Searchers</span>) and at its worst, a deranged thug who must be eliminated by a similar wilderness figure whose act of murder is in turn an act of self-destruction. The ceremonies and dances in <span style="font-style:italic;">My Darling Clementine</span> re-enforces the shared values of the community,, In <span style="font-style:italic;">Fort Apache</span>, the military and social rituals suggests the problems which divides the fort's self-contained society. The wedding ceremony near the end of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Searchers</span> dissolves into chaos with Marty's and Ethan's return,. The fight which breaks out between Marty and Charlie is presented by Ford as rough house comedy but what it suggests within the larger context of both the film and Ford's work is a darkening of vision, a sense that what once seemed good and noble has turned sour and the values Ford once embraced are brought under critical scrutiny and found wanting. With <span style="font-style:italic;">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</span>, Ford grows nostalgic toward the wilderness past and, while recognizing the historic inevitability of the emerging civilization, he seems to dismiss the future as a cruel sham.<br /><br />That Ford became disillusioned with the society around him is evident from most of the films he made after the Second World War,, How deep his despair went is most noticeable in his Westerns. Ford once said that when in doubt, make Westerns and he followed his own advise only to carry his doubts with him into a genre that is often (and wrongly) assumed to be morally simplistic,, Even in his lesser films of this period, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Cheyenne Autumn</span>, his faith gives way to pessimism as he shows his much loved Seventh Cavalry mowing down unarmed Indians. The Wyatt Earp of <span style="font-style:italic;">My Darling Clementine</span> is a near mythological hero, but in the Dodge City sequence of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cheyenne Autumn</span> Earp is presented as a cross between a card shark and a pimp and, though he is slightly more honorable than the cowboys around him, both he and society carries the smell of corruption.<br /><br />Ford was the cinema's folklorist and his hopes, and later cynicism, on the myths of the American West act as a barometer for the changes which were to come. As Andrew Sarris wrote, the films of John Ford are "a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and also in its ultimate memory-image on the horizon of history,"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-34004298953951914782009-03-24T08:46:00.000-07:002009-03-24T09:03:08.120-07:00The Laughmakers: The Comedians of the '30s and '40s<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikgd3KYcyN2pLUnkE802WucT53KIkfL4vKrHCb1Jyb44HaIU88qQhpNWbWe29mk7PWF5owko5RKb5HlA4vkbkQrLOZebSujAkPqwCk5A5tj_MZ-UITEkv8EYEplfbwPE7ZMamP31f8uws3/s1600-h/marx_thinker.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 146px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikgd3KYcyN2pLUnkE802WucT53KIkfL4vKrHCb1Jyb44HaIU88qQhpNWbWe29mk7PWF5owko5RKb5HlA4vkbkQrLOZebSujAkPqwCk5A5tj_MZ-UITEkv8EYEplfbwPE7ZMamP31f8uws3/s200/marx_thinker.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316784743440803234" /></a><br />One sign of the changes that took place in American culture between the 1930s and 1940s can be found within the comedy film genre of the period. The comedy films of the 1930s were dominated by the "zanies," broadly played and clownish figures who represented a mix of vaudeville and the circus. The 1940s was increasingly represented, however, by comedians whose talents had been honed on radio and who were more comfortable with the one-liner rather than the baggy pants. Slapstick, the physically expressive humor of the silent cinema, had already been tempered by the 1930s to the verbal demands of the "talking picture." It became almost extinct, however, in the 1940s as the ear became more important than the eye.<br /><br />Aside from being one of the greatest comedy teams of the era, the Marx Brothers also represented the changing spectrum of American comedy. Harpo was an overt throw back to the silent period as he combined his nonverbal tantrums and barrages with an anarchistic sense of innocence. Chico was a continuation of the vaudeville ethnic humor tradition in which bad accents and fractured English played to a sympathetic ear among the immigrant laborers who were a prominent part of the early vaudeville audience. Groucho, on the other hand, was the verbal specialist of the team and his nonstop banter of puns, non sequiturs, and one-liners more closely resembled the audio gags of radio rather than the broad farce of vaudeville. The Marx Brothers' successful transition from stage to screen in the 1930s was not surprising. Groucho's ability to continue his own career as a radio, and then television, comedian was due to his unique position within the changing context of American comedy.<br /><br />W. C. Fields was the embodiment of the vaudeville performer. First trained as a juggler, Fields was able to use his skills to develop an extremely idiosyncratic form of physical humor. He also had a reputation for his fast wit and sharp tongue and he began interjecting his own brand of commentary into his sight gags. Further, Fields had a deep conviction that humor was based on cruelty and that the audience was laughing at you, not with you. Fields had a distinctive, though erratic, film career and his screenplays (usually written by him under a preposterous pseudonym) veered between surrealism and barroom braggadocio. His jaundiced view of the world was developed, in part, from Fields own harsh upbringing and he had a strong distaste for hypocrisy and conventional morality. He was also not particularly fond of either children or dogs.<br /><br />Laurel and Hardy were one of the few comedy teams of the silent period who discovered a successful niche in the sound era. Though they rarely received great critical support and their films were mostly "B" productions, they retained a surprisingly strong sense of affection from their audience. This was due, in part, to the "everyman" nature of their characters. Throughout their films, they portrayed men of limited skills, dreams, and ambitions who simply wanted to get through the day with the least amount of agony. Repeatedly, they discovered themselves in a world in which petty pride, misplaced envy, and duplicity would systematically reduce their existence to a state of violence and anarchy. They would wade through the chaotic universe of their films with a nonchalance based not upon bravery but rather upon their inability to completely comprehend the world round them. In the face of adversity, they neither overcame nor endured. They simply muddled through.<br /><br />At the height of his career, Bob Hope was the ideal radio comedian. His brand of humor was based on story gags and so-called "groaners," jokes that were meant to be bad so that he could milk the real laugh by his defensive come back to a groaning audience. Hope lacked the slapstick skills and strong personality of the earlier generation of film comedians and throughout his numerous movies he always played variations of the same character, an average guy with a smart mouth. This was indicative, however, of the direction of the comedy genre in the 1940s. Increased competition from radio programs steered comedy films toward the verbal rather than the physical and a form of comic realism began to take precedent over the extreme exaggeration of an earlier era. Hope was indicative of these changes in which the large screen found itself increasingly influenced by radio and, by the end of the 1940s, television.<br /><br />Like Hope, Red Skelton was most successfully connected with radio and television. Unlike Hope, however, Skelton was able to create comic characters and handle physical humor. Originally trained as a mime, Skelton also benefited greatly from the comedy coach that M-G-M Studios hired to direct him through his scenes. That Buster Keaton, his coach, never received any credit for his labor is a mute testimony to Keaton's "nonperson" status by that time in Hollywood. Yet it was through his direction of Skelton that Keaton was able to stage the silent cinema's last stand as he created some of his final visual gags on the screen. Through this connection, as well as his own talents, Skelton provided a bridge between two generations of film comedians.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-75324006805414551772008-10-13T12:52:00.000-07:002008-10-13T13:21:25.692-07:00The American Cinema of the 1930s<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNNAwHS_yZhXgM0JQptwGKlMsJR8i1bfNCIuBainhw6pkucgMyo75irzRVIV5I3t9QhQP5eFyLPztIFgOtbMwVshgk4UAohlckJ1oov1NwGKrJ3OEkdLpB1n_bLPTWRZtRKWePqdOW1sA0/s1600-h/capra.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNNAwHS_yZhXgM0JQptwGKlMsJR8i1bfNCIuBainhw6pkucgMyo75irzRVIV5I3t9QhQP5eFyLPztIFgOtbMwVshgk4UAohlckJ1oov1NwGKrJ3OEkdLpB1n_bLPTWRZtRKWePqdOW1sA0/s200/capra.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256735149404778322" /></a><br />The American society of the 1930s was shaped by several powerful factors. The stock market crash of 1929, and the economic depression which ensued, created the greatest amount of social unrest since the Civil War. Widespread poverty and unemployment in the early 1930s resulted in an increased sense of cynicism and a heightened disrespect for authority throughout American society. Further, the global spread of fascism and the increasingly belligerent posture of Germany and Italy in Europe during the 1930s added to the anxieties of the period.<br /><br />The Hollywood film industry attempted to grapple with the social and political problems produced by the Great Depression, although Hollywood itself was not severely affected by the Depression. <br /><br />Likewise, the film industry was feeling the effect of technical changes. The new technology of sound recording in the cinema was sending the film industry through its own very intensive crisis. In the 1920s, the silent cinema had reached a highly developed level of visual aesthetics and had produced a generation of extremely well-known stars. By 1930, the unique conditions of the sound cinema, including the very sensitive microphones on the sets, had forced the camera to assume a static role in film production, and an entire generation of silent era stars became, within a few years, unemployable hacks because of their unimposing voices. In the wake of this "mass extinction," new performers began to emerge. Now that the cinema could talk, Broadway stars who had previously been disdainful of the silent cinema began boarding Los Angeles-bound trains. Even writers who had held Hollywood in total contempt found it easier to complain while basking in the California sun.<br /><br />Broadway-trained directors, such as George Cukor and Rouben Mamoulian, made the westward journey. The effect that these new filmmakers would have on Hollywood, as they made the transition from stage to screen, would be widely varied. Cukor would make the stage, directly or indirectly, the central concern of his films. In contrast, Mamoulian would embrace the camera with a giddy fascination for its unique visual possibilities.<br /><br />Though the theatre itself is only directly invoked in a sub-plot of <span style="font-style:italic;">Dinner at Eight</span>, the theatrical nature of life is Cukor's subject matter. The film is rigidly divided into a series of tableaux, with the chiming of a grandfather clock periodically interjected as a coda. Cukor keeps his camera at a slight distance from the performers and maintains a sense of the proscenium arch throughout the film.<br /><br />The narrative of <span style="font-style:italic;">Dinner at Eight</span> presents an understated but provocative view of societal collapse. The film suggests that the Jordans, the film's old money family, have lived lives built upon illusions and, in the aftermath of the stock market crash, those illusions have proven false and pathetic. They belong to an age that has ceased to exist and the world is about to be dominated, the film suggests, by such new barbarians as Wallace Beery's vulgar industrialist.<br /><br />The fall of the old order presented in <span style="font-style:italic;">Dinner at Eight</span> represented the degree to which American society had developed both a fear and a fascination with anarchy in the 1930s. Hollywood found an appropriately violent and primordial forum for anarchy in the gangster genre. Though the gangster genre only retained its enormous popularity for a brief time (roughly from 1929 to 1933), it rapidly evolved an interesting set of codes and meaning.<br /><br />In an early gangster film, such as Mamoulian's <span style="font-style:italic;">City Streets</span>(USA 1931) a sense of moral integrity and innocence could still be viewed as a strong oppositional force to the urbanized corruption of crime. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Public Enemy</span> (USA 1933), there is no innocence and the gangsters' violence becomes an extension of the society around them. In <span style="font-style:italic;">City Streets</span>, Cooper's character is a superb shooter who must be seduced into killing. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Public Enemy</span>, Cagney portrays a killer who is enamored by his own remarkable capacity for violence.<br /><br />While the gangster film was expressive of the anarchistic impulses of the 1930s, the screwball comedy genre attempted to use momentary chaos as the means toward achieving a new democratic vision. In many screwball comedies, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night </span>(USA 1934), the social class structure is turned topsy-turvy. This comedic upset was especially overt in the comedy films of Frank Capra as he attempted to articulate his own concept of populism. In Capra's <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night</span>, as well as in his other films of the 1930s, the common man is presented as the exclusive bearer of common sense while the wealthy, the intellectual, and other members of "privileged" society are presented as having lost touch with the basic core of humanity. Often, Capra's populism depended upon a raw and very overt appeal to sentiment--yet the decade which gave us the toughest of hoods also relished "Capracorn" and the emotional catharsis which it provided.<br /><br />Throughout this period, the film studios remained one of the largest employers in Southern California and, while the price of a movie ticket was low, box office receipts were at an all-time high. The massive social unrest caused by the Depression did, however, worry many of the studio moguls. Some even feared the possibility of a revolution and felt that the film industry had a moral duty to avert political catastrophe. Many studio moguls became supporters of Herbert Hoover. Others, such as Harry Cohen of Columbia Pictures, became admirers of Benito Mussolini.<br /><br />Of all the Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers maintained the most consistent approach to the production of social protest films. Budgets, more than politics, dictated the film production schedule at Warner Brothers and many of their films of the early 1930s were inexpensively made. Further, the films were usually about controversial, and highly exploitable, subject matter — a guarantee for quick returns at the box office. Many of these films, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang</span> (USA 1932) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Wild Boys of the Road </span>(USA 1933). were among some of the finer productions of the period.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang</span> remains one of the most uncompromising social protest films ever produced by a Hollywood studio. The film was adapted from the real life experiences of Robert E. Burns, a man who was wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced to a Southern chain gang from which he repeatedly escaped. The film successfully invokes a nightmarish world in which an entire state's legal system is seemingly intent on destroying one man and, in the process, it delineates the means by which a man is ultimately forced to become the thing he is accused of being.<br /><br />Likewise, William Wellman's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Wild Boys of the Road</span> attempts to present a vivid portrait of one of the major social problems of the Depression-era. Unemployed, homeless youths were, by the early 1930s, drifting across the country by the thousands. Forming into loosely-netted gangs, they would hop trains and hobo from city to city in search of jobs and their next meal. At its best, <span style="font-style:italic;">Wild Boys of the Road</span> captures the dangers and unique despair that beset its characters.<br /><br />While Warner Brothers articulated the anger that was rampant during the Depression, Columbia Pictures attempted to appeal to feelings of populism and patriotism. In a film like <span style="font-style:italic;">Washington Merry-Go-Round </span>(USA 1932), Columbia attempted to merge fictional narrative with news-reel footage of one of the major events of the early 1930s, the Veterans Bonus Marches. In these marches over 20,000 veterans of World War One marched on Washington, D.C., demanding their army bonus pay. After a series of riots and takeovers of federal parks and buildings, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to break up the tent cities and other encampments erected by its own veterans. Machine guns and tanks were used to clear out the marchers. Somehow, in <span style="font-style:italic;">Washington Merry-Go-Round</span>, this event becomes the basis for patriotic reaffirmation.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">American Madness </span>(USA 1932), the bank runs of the 1930s are presented as being caused by human weakness and individual villains, not by the collapse of the economic system. Likewise, the heroic efforts of a single man could, in the film's view, prevent and alter the problems of the period. Despite the fact that both America and the world at large were in the grip of complex and enormous historic forces, Hollywood still clung to the myth that heroic individual action is the catalyst for economic and social stability and growth.<br /><br />The belief that a single individual could change and cure the problems of the Depression fostered many illusions among Hollywood moguls and other prominent Americans, especially the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, along with certain other powerful Americans, became an admirer of the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini and felt that the United States could learn from Il Duce's model. Although Hearst was not directly involved in the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Gabriel Over the White House</span> (USA 1933), his nationally published editorials did influence the values purveyed in the film. Its vision of a benevolent American dictator, who is possessed by the archangel Gabriel, presents one of the more extreme, but by no means inauthentic, manifestations of a deeply troubled and volatile era.<br /><br />One of the most influential directors of the 1930s was Frank Capra, and his films, especially his comedies, seemingly reflect the realities and illusions of the Great Depression era. His work, however, has long been the subject of intense controversy, and modern critical estimations of Capra1s films range from extreme reverence to respectful loathing. Despite this critical debate, Capra has retained an enormous popularity with many audiences and his film <span style="font-style:italic;">It's a Wonderful Life </span>(USA 1946) has become a virtual institution in its own right. But it is the 1930s that stand as the period during which Capra as a filmmaker seemed to have been completely in artistic and mental union with his audience.<br /><br />Capra was born to a Sicilian peasant family in 1897 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 6. His early career was divided between studies at the California Institute of Technology, work as a ballistics instructor during World War One, as well as time as a pool hustler and occasional con artist. He essentially bluffed his way into the film industry during the silent era and quickly became one of Hollywood's more successful comedy directors — especially with the films he made with the silent comedian Harry Langdon. The critical debate as to who was the more important creative force behind these films is presumably resolved by the fact that after Capra and Langdon ceased their work partnership, Capra's career flourished while Langdon's did not.<br /><br />By the start of the sound movie era, Capra was already a well established director with a polished technical style, and because of the commercially successful track record of his films he was allowed a remarkable degree of directorial freedom as he became Columbia Pictures' most prominent filmmaker. With an unusual degree of artistic control, Capra began to shape his own distinctive cinema.<br /><br />During the 1930s, the elements of Capra's ambivalent attitude began to manifest themselves loudly in his films. A disdain for the wealthy class appears in many of his films, especially in <span style="font-style:italic;">Ladies of Leisure </span>(USA 1930), <span style="font-style:italic;">Platinum Blonde </span>(USA 1931), <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night</span> (USA 1934). and <span style="font-style:italic;">Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</span> (USA 1936).On the other hand, Capra could present quite agreeable portraits of individual members of this same class, such as Ralph Graves in <span style="font-style:italic;">Ladies of Leisure</span> and Walter Connolly in <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night</span>. In each case, the characters' capacity for sentimentality rather than the sum of their bank account is used to determine their virtue. Even Capra's caustic presentation of spoiled heiresses in both <span style="font-style:italic;">Platinum Blonde</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night</span> seems more determined by his sense of masculine prerogatives rather than the characters' social status.<br /><br />While Capra was a proponent of the wisdom of the common people, he also distrusted them anytime they assembled into a group numbering more then 12. In such films as <span style="font-style:italic;">The Miracle Woman</span> (USA 1931), <span style="font-style:italic;">American Madness</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</span>, the people are viewed as a mindless mob that can be goaded into action by lies and chicanery. This message is most overt in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Miracle Woman</span> in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a radio evangelist who views her flock as being ripe for financial shearing and who manipulates them through the irrational forces of blind faith and emotionalism. In these instances, Capra views the people as an angry rabid crowd ready to perform either a hanging or a crucifixion. Likewise, the crowd can only be controlled by a strong, determined man (e.g., Walter Huston in <span style="font-style:italic;">American Madness</span> and Gary Cooper in <span style="font-style:italic;">Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</span>) who can withstand public humiliation and the threat of potential violence. The implicit message seems to be that the greatest virtue of the common man is that he can be led by a decent, sentimental leader.<br /><br />Capra's attitude toward the common man is in sharp contrast to his defiantly anti-intellectual bias. Even when his heroes are writers, such as Robert Williams in <span style="font-style:italic;">Platinum Blonde</span> and Clark Gable in <span style="font-style:italic;">It Happened One Night</span>, their working method is more intuitive than analytical and their concerns are emotional rather than rational. Byproducts of intellectualism, such as the law and psychoanalysis, are viewed by Capra as either nonsense or a crooked scheme. Despite the fact that the main character in <span style="font-style:italic;">Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</span> is something of a rustic philosopher, he is untainted by any overt education and his philosophy appears to have been gathered by osmosis while sitting in a New Hampshire woods. In turn, his adversaries are lawyers who resent his natural intelligence almost as much as they envy his money.<br /><br />The contradictory messages and attitudes in Capra's films are neither strengths nor flaws. Rather, they are some of the very elements of his work which reflected the emotional and mental composition of his audience, Capra's popularity was based upon his ability to identify and portray the inherent beliefs and subconscious concerns of his period. His films did not so much express the physical realities of the 1930s, but rather they articulated the apprehensions and mythic constructs of that era. The contradictions and confusions found in his films were not just his, but were also those of his viewers. Capra represented his time, for both better and for worse, to a degree unparalleled by any other filmmakerUnknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-78778250178586036382008-10-02T12:46:00.000-07:002008-10-02T13:06:31.195-07:00Harold Lloyd: Slapstick and the American Success Story<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibqTOAdfHq4V2tEKHaGdDxnMsav5geEmRNcr-rJ1YukKzBgghgyjZLwgdFC0l2uMJwqco5qKKrGnESGDCsNtdEeqxYdQfMWKgsUzOO4sbLRRAYOncIPpX-1IwTsC8ueuGzn3NDFc4WTn9N/s1600-h/safetylast.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibqTOAdfHq4V2tEKHaGdDxnMsav5geEmRNcr-rJ1YukKzBgghgyjZLwgdFC0l2uMJwqco5qKKrGnESGDCsNtdEeqxYdQfMWKgsUzOO4sbLRRAYOncIPpX-1IwTsC8ueuGzn3NDFc4WTn9N/s200/safetylast.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252650351528020946" /></a><br />"Comedy comes from inside. It comes from your face. It comes from your body."<br />—Harold Lloyd<br /><br />The cinema of the 1920s is often referred to by historians as the Golden Age of comedy. It was during this time that three extremely talented film comedians were at the height of their popularity and prowess. This triumvirate of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd reflected in their films the changing social conditions of the period. Chaplin's Little Tramp appealed to the large population of newly arrived, and often impoverished, immigrants who were forming the manual work force of an expanding industrial society. Keaton represented the new class of the technocrat and many of his finest films concerned the battle between man and machine. Lloyd, however, did not concern himself with either poverty or machinery. He was the clown prince of America's first generation of aspiring managers.<br /><br />The 1920s was a time of economic growth and the aggressive expansion of business. The Horatio Alger myth, in which the right combination of hard work and good luck would result in great financial reward, prevailed in popular culture. Lloyd's films embodied this belief and their humor is derived from the increasingly bizarre means by which his character achieved success.<br /><br />The archetype of Lloyd's films is perhaps <span style="font-style:italic;">Safety Last</span> (1923). Lloyd's character is that of a young man from a small town who has gone to the big city to achieve his fortune in the world of business. His job, however, is that of a clerk in a department store and his only chance for advancement is through a death defying promotional stunt for the store. Lloyd's hero ultimately achieves his dream of success, but he achieves it through guile and<br />extraordinary good luck rather than hard work.<br /><br />In spite of their belief in the American success story, Lloyd's heroes rarely succeed through merit. A polite degree of deceit and trickery is presented as a moral necessity for his characters' survival. At the climax of <span style="font-style:italic;">Safety Last</span>, for example, Lloyd's hero is the one who finally climbs the skyscraper when his plan to secretly change places with a professional building climber backfires. He scales his way to the top, but only because he is tricked into doing the stunt himself.<br /><br />This idea of deceit as the means to success appears in many of Lloyd's films. The world of boxing presented in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Milky Way</span> (1936) is one of fixed fights and tightly scripted bouts. Further, Lloyd's milkman-turned-pugilist is launched on his career due to a feat he didn't actually perform. The hero of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Milky Way</span> has only one vital move as a boxer, an incredibly fast ability to duck, and it is on the basis of this minor skill that he attempts to win fame.<br /><br />This contradiction in Lloyd's films was repeatedly expressed by the dual nature of his characters. His screen persona was that of a basically likable, average man who contained a striking degree of optimism and innocence about the world. This same man, however, was also capable of conman ship and his repeated display of ingenuity was concerned with avoiding the legitimate ways he was supposed to perform his tasks.<br /><br />This recurring narrative pattern, in which the hero must deceive in order to win, is a major theme in such fairy tales as <span style="font-style:italic;">Cinderella</span>, which was the original inspiration for Lloyd's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Kid Brother</span> (1927). The family of women in <span style="font-style:italic;">Cinderella</span> is changed to a family of men in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Kid Brother</span>. The bucolic landscape presents a world that is almost as remote to the urban sensibility as the mystical kingdom of the original story. Unlike the fairy tale, however, Lloyd depends upon his wits rather than magical intervention in order to claim his new position within the rural society of the film.<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />The Kid Brother</span> creates a highly romanticized statement on the American success story and it was one of Lloyd's personal favorites. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sin of Harold Diddlebock</span> (1946) attempted a more satiric, critical look at the assumptions which under lied his screen persona. Not surprisingly, it was one of Lloyd's least favorite films.<br /><br />Certainly, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sin of Harold Diddlebock</span> represented an unusual collaboration between two very different comic minds. The film was written and directed by Preston Sturges and his more flippant, caustic sense of humor contrasted with Lloyd's image of eternal optimism. Despite their use of deception and guile, Lloyd's heroes viewed society as being essentially good. Sturges did not particularly believe in goodness and his characters knew how to lie, cheat, and steal and then argue that anyone who didn't lacked ambition. Lloyd was like a shy smile and a glass of milk; Sturges was more like a leer with a scotch chaser.<br /><br />Sturges's viewpoint is best represented by the opening and ending scenes of the montage sequence which begins <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sin of Harold Diddlebock</span>. At the beginning, a young Diddlebock sits at the desk of his new job with his hands poised, eager to start working on an account ledger. His eyes are fixed on a calendar portrait of President Warren G. Harding. The year is 1923, the year Lloyd made <span style="font-style:italic;">Safety Last</span>. At the end of the scene, twenty-two years later, an older, extremely frayed Diddlebock sits at the same desk with the same ledger and stares in shock at the calendar portrait of President Harry S. Truman. No longer an aggressive young man, Diddlebock has been stuck in the same position for his entire career.<br /><br />Despite his slapstick presentation of the American dream, Lloyd was an idealistic believer. Sturges was not and he seemed to have been interested in Lloyd's persona primarily to discredit it. The tension between these two opposing views in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sin of Harold Diddlebock</span> created a strange, and not uninteresting, battle concerning the myth of the American success story.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-86031109603177884872008-10-02T11:59:00.000-07:002008-10-02T12:24:06.543-07:00The Hollywood Screenwriter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHlbj2XjdwI61Chva_WVgb-vsznxUkMendoOfLc_XqW7i3uD5J8zkOVz75t0QPTkRvHZ_j4pFSzDRFRfh54kHk_qc7VMevZ5kOV8nHwV6KzRNAmOBa0-QvGJBTCEddSS3LrglThrN4SXzL/s1600-h/The-Great-McGinty-Posters.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHlbj2XjdwI61Chva_WVgb-vsznxUkMendoOfLc_XqW7i3uD5J8zkOVz75t0QPTkRvHZ_j4pFSzDRFRfh54kHk_qc7VMevZ5kOV8nHwV6KzRNAmOBa0-QvGJBTCEddSS3LrglThrN4SXzL/s200/The-Great-McGinty-Posters.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252638858337409474" /></a><br />"Writers are a necessary weasel."<br />--comment allegedly made by Harry Cohen, chief of production at Columbia Studios<br /><br />"Help! I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese laundry."<br />--Anonymous note thrown out the window of a screen writer's office building in Hollywood<br /><br />The role of the screenwriter is one of the more mysterious parts film making process. The fact that the screenwriter works in a medium that is visual rather than literary seemingly marks him as an odd wheel, yet his work is the essential first step that must be taken before a director or cinematographer is hired. Historically, the the screenwriter has been treated as a dispensable part of the creative process and it was not unusual for one screenwriter to find himself rewriting the work of another screenwriter who was, likewise, ghost writing another writer's script. In short, the Hollywood screenwriter was an all important part of the film industry and nobody in their right mind would admit to being one. <br /><br />The plots of Hollywood films were not, however, magically invented during the film's shooting. Likewise, the actors did not make up their own dialogue. Without the screenwriter, many directors would have wandered lost through their narratives and countless "stars" would have mumbled incoherent, monosyllabic lines. While the history of the Hollywood screenwriter would fill many volumes, this festival tribute at least pays homage to some of the major writers whose wit, vision, and sheer determination has shaped the American cinema.<br /><br />As both a writer and director, Preston Sturges redefined the American comedy film during the 1940s. His unique combination of broad slapstick and verbose verbal humor allowed him to create a series of cinematic portraits of America in which an energetic sense of naivete was mixed with a well seasoned cynicism. As a hyphenate (that is, a writer who became a writer-director), Sturges achieved virtually total control over his films and was able to pursue his most idiosyncratic of whims.<br /><br />Sturges first directorial effort, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Great McGinty</span> (USA 1940), amply represents his view of American politics as a lively bag of hooey. In lampooning both political corruption and reform movements, Sturges surveys the gap between democratic ideals and the realities of American society. Further, Sturges maintains a curious sympathy with corruption and the superficial impression of worldly knowledge attached to the corrupt.<br /><br />While Sturges sense of satire was thoroughly American, Billy Wilder retained his native Viennese respect for stylish decadence. Wilder was often fascinated by the American capacity for simplistic ideals, but he also viewed parts of the American sensibility has being both puritanical and a little bit crazy.<br /><br />As a writer-director, Wilder was able to maintain, like Sturges, a strong control over his material. Unlike Sturges, his influence carried well past the 1940s and he was able to work equally well in both comedies and dramas. His comedies, however, represents some of his most important contributions as Wilder was most freely capable of flaunting the contradictions that existed between his sentimental tendencies and sophisticated appreciation for worldly delights. In the film <span style="font-style:italic;">A Foreign Affair </span>(USA 1948), he plays havoc with these irreconcilable differences between America and Europe.<br /><br />One of the major screenwriters of the 1930s and 1940s was Dudley Nichols. Though his work would range from farce to melodrama, his vision tended toward a moody and fatalistic view of the human condition. He often worked best as a collaborator with strong directors as demonstrated in John Ford's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Voyage Home </span>(USA 1940) and Fritz Lang's <span style="font-style:italic;">Scarlet Street</span> (USA 1947) and in each film he successfully adapted himself to Ford's tragic sense of Irishness and Lang's Teutonic notion of predestination.<br /><br />More often than not, a screenplay is a collaborative effort and the credit-line for some scripts reads like the starting lineup for a ball game. That is often especially true with a director like Alfred Hitchcock who traditionally viewed screenwriters as the people whose job it was to explain how the main characters ended up dangling from Lincoln's nose. For Hitchcock, the screenplay's main function was to make the highly improbable seem almost possible. The writing team responsible for <span style="font-style:italic;">Foreign Correspondent</span> (USA 1940) consisted of two of Hitchcock's more trusted collaborators, Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, as well as James Hilton and Robert Benchley. While Bennett and Harrison were responsible for wrangling sense out of the film's wildly convoluted plot line, Hilton assisted with the extensive rewriting that took place during the filming as Hitchcock attempted to keep pace with the rapidly changing political conditions of Europe at the beginning of World War Two. Likewise, the humorist Benchley contributed to the film's jaundiced presentation of journalism.<br /><br />Despite their importance to film making, screenwriters are largely ignored by the viewing public. During the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, and the industry blacklist that ensued, screenwriters were an easy target. Studio executives found it convenient to appease reactionary organizations by blacklisting the more anonymous figure of the screenwriter rather than an actor or director and nearly half of the original Hollywood Ten, a group of subpoenaed witnesses who refused to testify before the House on Un-American Activities Committee, were writers.<br /><br />One of the original Ten was Albert Maltz, who was often responsible for creating tense thrillers such as <span style="font-style:italic;">This Gun For Hire</span> (USA 1941). The overt political subject matter of the film, especially its critical presentation of a traitorous industry magnate, was as indicative of the film's time period as it was of Maltz's politics. While Maltz was later accused of "premature anti-fascism," Pearl Harbour took place during the film's production.<br /><br />The blacklist, and the general degree of moral cowardice displayed in Hollywood during that period, was the basis for Carl Foreman's screenplay <span style="font-style:italic;">High Noon </span>(USA 1952). During the time he was writing the screenplay, Foreman was himself being investigated by the House Committee and, after completing the film, was blacklisted from the industry. His sense of "standing alone" against overwhelming forces was fueled into the film's bitter observations on the failure of integrity.<br /><br />One of the most notable victims of the blacklist was Abraham Polonsky. His two most important screenplays, <span style="font-style:italic;">Body and Soul</span> (USA 1948) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Force of Evil</span> (USA 1949), presented an overall scathing view of American society that led to him being dubbed "the most dangerous man in America" by a U. S. congressman. In turn, he was blacklisted until well into the 1960s. Yet his early screenplays represents a powerful legacy that details the betrayed hopes and ambitions of a generation.<br /><br />One screenwriter who did "name names" was Budd Schulberg. Schulberg's brief membership in the American Communist Party was most notable for its acrimonious ending and, by the 1950s, he was welling to testify though his reasons for doing so are not quite clear. Schulberg would later claim that he didn't trust secret societies and felt that these names should be brought out into the open. Others felt that it was Schulberg's way of getting back at Party members who attacked his novel <span style="font-style:italic;">What Makes Sammy Run</span>. A mix of both reasons is possible. Yet during the 1950s, Schulberg would both directly and indirectly provide the cinema with two extremely bitter attacks on the corruption and mercenary state of living in America during this time period. Both <span style="font-style:italic;">On the Waterfront</span> (USA 1954) and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Harder They Fall</span> (USA 1956) presents portraits of morality warped by greed and power. In this respect, Schulberg successfully created a more critical and nasty view of American society than most of the blacklisted screenwriters would have ever attempted and the contradictory nature of Schulberg's art and personal actions remains the subject of intensely heated debate.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-56429354124913120432008-09-24T13:37:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:11:05.526-07:00Olivier and Shakespeare<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFlqSzgROH0BDH7eaJskEThBHi6o7rOW9TCFNm7OuDAvqePFoiofnVW_sdQbh2mei6UtLc_SXnuQYSYWzyZKmy-2-zb4TNYpa3K2ck80dEctEkEWeqGNnJbQTg1nUaVRiPbGWPPQ4Dv7SG/s1600-h/olivierhamlet.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFlqSzgROH0BDH7eaJskEThBHi6o7rOW9TCFNm7OuDAvqePFoiofnVW_sdQbh2mei6UtLc_SXnuQYSYWzyZKmy-2-zb4TNYpa3K2ck80dEctEkEWeqGNnJbQTg1nUaVRiPbGWPPQ4Dv7SG/s200/olivierhamlet.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249693009986857490" /></a><br />Laurence Olivier may be one of the greatest actors of the 20th century. He is also, undeniably, one of the major interpreters of the plays of William Shakespeare in the cinema. While other filmmakers rival Olivier's Shakespearean work -- most notably Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa -- he has demonstrated a striking and intuitive sense of the language, and its meaning, of the Elizabethan bard. In our program, "Olivier and Shakespeare," we present three films -- two of which were directed by Olivier -- in which he presented his skills as both an actor and as a Shakespearean student.<br /><br />It is appropriate that Olivier, who was born in 1907, would make his stage debut at the age of 14 as Kate in a school production of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Taming of the Shrew</span>. Soon afterwards, he devoted his studies to acting at various schools and the Birmingham Repertory Company. He was encouraged in his dramatic studies by his father, an Anglican minister whose delivery of sermons were notoriously theatrical. His extensive training, combined with his own natural good looks, made it possible for Olivier to enter film acting in 1930.<br /><br /> His earliest films are, on the whole, uninteresting. Though he grew a moustache in order to emulate his screen idol, Ronald Colman, he did not succeed as a romantic leading man. His screen career would not really begin until 1935, when he signed a contract with the British producer Alexander Korda. It would be these early Korda films, as well as a variety of stage roles, that would begin to attract critical attention to Olivier. By 1937, he had joined the Old Vic theater company and had successfully played such roles as <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry V</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Macbeth</span>.<br /><br />Though Olivier was the star of one of the few major Shakespearean films of the 1930s, <span style="font-style:italic;">As You Like It</span> (England 1936), he was not totally pleased with the stylistic approaches which the cinema had taken to Shakespeare's plays. Paul Czinner's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">As You Like It</span> was most opulent and avoided the excessive superficiality of some of the other Shakespearean productions of the period. Like the other films, however, it made extensive cuts to both the text and the language in an attempt to reach a broader audience.<br /><br />Fidelity to the text was not, however, Olivier's chief concern. In his own production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> (England 1948), he was willing to make numerous cuts to the text (in fact, he removed nearly an hour's worth' of footage from the film in order to bring it down to its release length). A fidelity to both the language and the spirit of the text were, however, very important to Olivier.<br /><br />It is not surprising that his first film as director would be the 1944 production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry V</span>, a role which was a favorite of his. The film was made by Olivier as a patriotic epic and it was produced by the British Ministry of Information as a morale booster during World War Two. Prior to the war, Olivier felt a hesitation about performing the part on stage because he felt that the audience might not accept the role's suggestively jingoistic sensibility. The hardships and devastation brought about by the war, however, convinced Olivier to produce the film.<br /><br />In directing <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry V</span>, Olivier attempted to unite the theatrical language of Shakespeare with the naturalistic qualities of the photographic image. The film opens and closes within the confines of the Globe Theater, Shakespeare's own theater. By bracketing the vividly realistic scenes of the film between the opening and ending shots of the Elizabethan stage performance, Olivier attempted to bridge the distance between the artificiality of the theater and the realism of the cinema.<br /><br />The making of <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry V</span> had exhausted Olivier and he swore that he would never attempt a Shakespearean film ever again. With the 1948 production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span>, he fortunately proved incapable of keeping that oath. He had also intended to only direct <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span>, not to act in it. Money for the production, however, was only available if Olivier played the role. With great reluctance, he again functioned as both actor and director in a demanding production.<br /><br />The filming of <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> took place during a difficult period in Olivier's career. He and his wife, Vivian Leigh, were just recovering from a Hollywood boycott against them that was allegedly sponsored by David 0. Selznick when they had bolted from their contract with him. In turn, a variety of strains were being placed on the marriage due to Leigh's increasingly deteriorating mental condition. Likewise, rumors of an alleged affair between Olivier and his co-star, Jean Simmons, did not help either.<br /><br />In filming <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span>, Olivier selected black and white as the photographic tone for the work, contrary to the vibrant colors which dominated <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry V</span>. He also decided upon using "deep focus" for the photographic structure of the film, thereby stressing the spatial relationships of the film's sets and giving an equal compositional balance to the film's characters. The fact that he achieved this complex balance in <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> is a tribute to Olivier's skills as an artist.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-7453705341503492182008-09-24T12:16:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:13:02.508-07:00Orson Welles: The Artisitc Ego<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIS8KPU9e5loRKumK1VpTFCCLL0LoJo2N-ZXa9dZtExSNXBdpws8UEiFvRO0_dq7aBn4nO9DL4y1S5YOvENqkowW-2O5S51xBbUbZBl-tbvat9aPqjdRzwd_pb4VMiN4fipxBDqwfVJUe0/s1600-h/citizen-kane-poster-c10047715.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIS8KPU9e5loRKumK1VpTFCCLL0LoJo2N-ZXa9dZtExSNXBdpws8UEiFvRO0_dq7aBn4nO9DL4y1S5YOvENqkowW-2O5S51xBbUbZBl-tbvat9aPqjdRzwd_pb4VMiN4fipxBDqwfVJUe0/s200/citizen-kane-poster-c10047715.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249686067711460850" /></a><br />"I believe, thinking about my films, that they are based not so much on pursuit as on a search. If we are looking for something, the labyrinth is the most favorable location for the search. I do not know why, but my films are all for the most part a physical search."<br />- Orson Welles<br /><br />In 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio production of <span style="font-style:italic;">The War of the Worlds </span>which so frightened the nation that many people actually fled for the hills. For an actor, writer, and director at the age of 23, it was an amazing acknowledgement of his talents and the first of many controversies that this <span style="font-style:italic;">wunderkind</span> would provoke. His off-Broadway Richard Wright's <span style="font-style:italic;">Native Son</span> in 1941 caused great social discussion just as his 1955 verse-play of <span style="font-style:italic;">Moby Dick</span> provoked a storm of literary debate. When he made his film debut with <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span> (USA 1941), a thinly disguised biography of William Randolph Hearst, Welles provoked more than just controversy, he also provoked Hearst. Hearst's power as a newspaper tycoon was waning when <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span> was made, but he and his associates were still able to harass Welles for years.<br /><br />The controversies are, however, insignificant in regards to Welles's films. He is one of the greatest, and one of the most idiosyncratic, filmmakers in the cinema. His combination of brilliance and megalomania delight and annoy the viewer simultaneously. He refuses, however, to bore the audience and even his detractors cannot deny that his films are at least lively enough to enrage them.<br /><br />Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father was an inventor, industrialist, and hotelier and his mother was a concert pianist. His parents loved to travel and their friends included such people as Harry Houdini and William Randolph Hearst. His parents died while he was a child and Welles was raised by his guardian, Dr. Bernstein. When he was 16, Welles left school and traveled to Ireland where he attempted a career as a painter. Painting, however, was the one art form in which Welles failed. Finding himself stranded in Dublin with little money and an interest in working in the theater, he attempted to convince the owners of the Dublin Gate Theater that he was a famous American actor who had decided to grace them with his talents. They did not believe him, but were impressed by his audacity and hired him to play minor parts. By 1932, when he was barely 17, he was directing plays by Ibsen and Chekhov at the theater.<br /><br />Welles returned to America in the mid-1930s and went to work in both theater and radio. He directed an all-black production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Macbeth</span> and, for a brief time, provided the voice for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Shadow </span>radio series. During this time, he and a group of other performers banded together as the "Mercury Theater" and produced a series of radio plays, the most infamous being <span style="font-style:italic;">The War of the Worlds</span>. It was the "Mercury Theater" that Welles took with him to Hollywood for the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span>.<br /><br />Welles was given total control over <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span>, an unprecedented act by any Hollywood film studio. He filmed on a closed set and the details of the production were kept secret. Prior to the film's release, however, word leaked out that it was loosely based on Hearst's life and his newspapers began a protracted campaign against both Welles and the film. The release of <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span> was delayed and Welles, who was already listed as 4-F, was repeatedly drafted by the Army, courtesy of Hearst's influence.<br /><br />Hearst's outrage over <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span> can be appreciated, for the film freely borrows from the various scandals which surrounded him. It is Welles, however, who is most exposed in the film. Welles lost both of his parents at the age of 8, the same age that Kane is sent away from his parents. The character of Bernstein in Citizen Kane was modeled after Welles's guardian. Kane's megalomania seems, in retrospect, to be a mirror image of Welles's own ego. In an interview, Welles once stated that Hearst did not have enough style to be Kane. Welles is notorious for style.<br /><br />Perhaps Hearst should have been offended by the fact that his life was used as a stage upon which Welles strutted his own self-absorption. The dominant theme in all of Welles's films is that of the supreme egotist who must ultimately fail due to his inability to truly control the world around him. Welles may flaunt his own megalomania, but he does so in order to critique it and no other filmmaker has ever been so harsh when it comes to self-criticism.<br /><br />For many critics, Welles's other films are elaborate footnotes to <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span>. Though this is not true, and many of these films are unique in their own right, they certainly continue the concerns of Welles's original work. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Trial</span> (France 1962) presents society as a cruel, irrational force which has an ego of its own; an ego to which the individual must either adapt or be punished. In this respect, it is as if Charles Foster Kane had succeeded in creating his artificial universe (the Xanadu of Citizen Kane) and we, the viewer, are trapped within it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Lady From Shanghai</span> (USA 1948) deals indirectly with the destruction of the universe. All of the characters, except Welles's, are self-absorbed with their own fears, desires, and need to control others. The film's finale, a shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, presents the world as a complex series of self-reflections which are eventually shattered by a barrage of gunfire. In no other film has the self-destructive nature of megalomania ever been presented with such fascination as well as contempt.<br /><br />With <span style="font-style:italic;">Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight</span> - Spain/Switzerland 1966), Welles attempted in to explain himself. Like Kane, Falstaff is an egotist who seems concerned only with himself. His need, however, for love and approval from others is far greater and his inability to achieve this is painful to him. Kane's wealth insulated him from his own feelings. Falstaff has nothing but his feelings and in this regard, he is like a child. Unlike Kane, Falstaff knows that he does not control the world and, at the same time, he knows that he cannot change his nature.<br /><br />Falstaff's ego is tempered by the fact that he knows better, and this conflict in his character makes him the most humane, and ultimately tragic, figure in all of Welles's films, It is as if Welles is saying that the overbearing nature of his ego is due to the fact that he has no other perspective from which to view the world. His self-absorption is actually a dynamic form of introspection.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-60380191876019035932008-09-23T09:34:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:15:42.628-07:00The Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWkZ2PXF6Uqv_rW-2ggq64tjaJC5qkJvIwmX23HoiCq-438IucrZLtMM3WBfUIS8beTwz1pusA2fuoMRfnzMtWTwWYs_ftTsQjrWaGSLvwvpIEAu2-AfFnpCnPsh7BOHjqlb5zIWJqKuh/s1600-h/red+desert.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWkZ2PXF6Uqv_rW-2ggq64tjaJC5qkJvIwmX23HoiCq-438IucrZLtMM3WBfUIS8beTwz1pusA2fuoMRfnzMtWTwWYs_ftTsQjrWaGSLvwvpIEAu2-AfFnpCnPsh7BOHjqlb5zIWJqKuh/s200/red+desert.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249260571611899474" /></a><br />In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Italy became the national force behind one of the most important movements in the modern cinema: the Italian Neo-Realist movement. Beginning with such films as <span style="font-style:italic;">Rome: Open City</span> (Italy 1945) by Roberto Rossellini and <span style="font-style:italic;">La Terra Trema</span> (Italy 1947) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica, the Italian cinema brought to the art of film making an overt social and political consciousness. With the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government and the end of the Fascist controls which had stifled the Italian cinema of the 1930s, an energetic spirit of film making literally took to the streets of Rome.<br /><br />Though the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement were very different from each other, they shared certain common concerns. The recent political history and diverse social conditions of modern Italy were the central subject matter of the original Neo-Realist productions. Likewise, the Neo-Realist filmmakers combined a seemingly objective cinematic style with subjective, and overtly political, viewpoints. Whether they were moderate democratic figures like Rossellini and De Sica, or avowed Marxists like Visconti and, later, Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement immersed themselves in the vivid turmoil of contemporary Italy.<br /><br />Aesthetically, the Neo-Realist movement presented the triumph of spatial realism over editing and montage. Long-takes and camera motion became the chief tools of this cinema. In these films, the artificial reconstruction of reality through the editing process was replaced by an intense concern for the ever changing nature of an open-ended sense of composition and perspective. The Neo-Realist camera would prowl the set (which often would be a real location), delineating the spatial dimensions perceived through the lens and allowing the compositional elements of the image to shift and change.<br /><br />By the mid-1950s, the Italian cinema began to change, but the basic tenets of Neo-Realism remained an important influence. Increasingly, new forces were being felt by Italian filmmakers and the Neo-Realist cinema had to adapt to the unique demands of the period. The need for increased production monies led Italian filmmakers into a series of co-production ventures. This meant, however, that Italian films had to address themselves to broader European concerns and risk losing some of their Italian perspective. The Italian filmmakers also began shifting away from the special realism of the early films and toward the more internalized concerns of psychoanalysis. The short-lived economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of modern industrialization created an increasing sense of alienation in Italian society as the ancient landscapes and cities were seemingly replaced by the dehumanizing forms of modern technology. This resulted in a nostalgia for the pre-Fascist past, especially the 19th century and the agrarian culture of the Italian countryside. This nostalgia was not, however, uncritical; Italians explored their past in search of the roots of their contemporary problems.<br /><br />It was because of these complex and diverse forces that the Italian cinema entered its second great period during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, a second generation of major filmmakers emerged and many of the earlier artists of the Neo-Realist movement entered new stages in their own development, producing films which were sometimes even more impressive than their original work. It was an active and dynamic decade that still overshadows the minor achievements of the 1980s. In this program, we present some of the significant films in the Italian cinema during this last great period.<br /><br />One of the most famous of the second generation filmmakers to appear in the 1960s was Bernardo Bertolucci. Though <span style="font-style:italic;">The Conformist</span> (Italy/France/W.Germany 1970) was his first film to receive wide international attention, Bertolucci was already known in Italy for his work both as a filmmaker and as a poet. His earliest films, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Before the Revolution</span> (Italy 1964) and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Spider's Stratagem </span>(Italy 1970), were expressive of his political concerns with Marxist ideals as well as his revisionist view of recent Italian history. He became increasingly concerned, however, with Freudian psychology and sexuality, as demonstrated in his production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Last Tango in Paris </span>(Italy/France 1972) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Luna</span> (Italy/USA 1979). While Marxism and Freudianism are not necessarily contradictory, Bertolucci's growing interest in psychology paralleled his disenchantment with conventional Marxist politics. Both <span style="font-style:italic;">The Conformist</span> and, especially, <span style="font-style:italic;">1900 </span>(Italy/USA 1976) are indicative of this developing contradiction in his films.<br /><br />The question of sexual identity and political commitment are central to <span style="font-style:italic;">The Conformist</span>. The film's narrative, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's character attempts to hide a homosexual episode from his youth by mindlessly conforming to the Fascist society around him, suggests the coercive nature of ideology. Though his father is an imprisoned Leftist, Trintignant's character joins Mussolini's political party and becomes a member of the Fascist secret service. The meaninglessness and banality of his actions are ultimately exposed by a series of political, sexual, and finally, murderous confrontations in which his lack of convictions results in brutality and betrayal.<br /><br />Though his best-known films are those of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni originally emerged as part of the Neo-Realist movement. His earliest feature films, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Cronaca di un Amore </span>(Italy 1950), were already moving toward a cool, austere stylization which prefigured the abstract and demanding aesthetics of his later works. With the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">L'Avventura </span>(Italy 1959), <span style="font-style:italic;">La Notte</span> (Italy 1960), <span style="font-style:italic;">L'Eclisse</span> (Italy 1962), and <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Desert</span> (Italy 1964), Antonioni created a stunning series of films which successfully redefined the spatial concerns of the Italian cinema.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Desert</span>, as in his other films, the spatial relationships of Antonioni's compositions emphasize negative space and accent the strange and ugly appearance of the industrial landscape surrounding the film's characters. This was also Antonioni's first film in color; he used a striking range of garish contrasts and monochromatic design in order to invoke the madness and alienation felt by Monica Vitti's character. With <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Desert</span>, Antonioni created a genuinely disturbing vision of a world dominated by slag heaps, factories, and industrial waste.<br /><br />Like Antonioni's career, Pietro Germi's went back to the beginning of the Neo-Realist movement. Though Germi had a long film making career and had produced a substantial range of works, he is probably best known for two comedy films of the 1960s--<span style="font-style:italic;">Divorce, Italian Style </span>(Italy 1962) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Seduced and Abandoned </span>(Italy 1964).In these films, Germi presented a series of bitingly savage satires on Italian society and mores.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">Seduced and Abandoned</span>, Germi deals with the contradictions of Sicilian culture and the self-serving mentality of the Italian male. The film's black humor systematically exposes the hypocrisies of the characters' actions and outlines the particular conditions of Sicilian life. As in Germi's other comedy films, the slapstick and farce of <span style="font-style:italic;">Seduced and Abandoned</span> succeeds in chastening the more dubious aspects of Italian behavior.<br /><br />As a filmmaker, novelist, poet, and essayist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important — and most controversial — Italian artists of the 1960s, Even his violent death in 1975 remains a subject of heated debate. His films, however, provide a complex legacy which ranged from the harsh Neo-Realist statement of <span style="font-style:italic;">Accattone</span> (Italy 1961) to the psychological and political subject matter of <span style="font-style:italic;">Teorema</span> (Italy 1968) and Pigsty (Italy 1969). The abrasive, and often extreme, nature of Pasolini's films made him an unusual director for a religious film. Yet his production of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Gospel According to Saint Matthew</span> (Italy 1966) is one of the few serious and intelligent works ever made on the life of Christ.<br /><br />The film was a fairly close adaptation of Saint Matthew's gospel, tracing the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection. By using a documentary style of photography and a cast of non-professionals for his cast, Pasolini invoked the spirit and stylization of the Neo-Realist cinema. In the film, he places a strong emphasis on Christ's place within the context of the politics and history of the gospel's time period. In making <span style="font-style:italic;">The Gospel According to Saint Matthew</span>, Pasolini attempted to create a grand synthesis of Christianity and Marxist politics. In the process, he created a film of unique intensity and integrity.<br /><br />The paradoxical life and career of Luchino Visconti parallels the contradictions of modern Italy. A direct heir to the Visconti title, he rejected his aristocratic heritage and became a member of the Italian Communist Party. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Realist movement, Visconti actually lived with Sicilian peasants and fishermen during the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">La Terra Trema</span>. Yet Visconti was a supreme aesthete whose films contained an odd combination of Marxist analysis and operatic grandeur. By the 1960s and 1970s, his films were obsessed by history and decadence as he articulated a series of visual treatises on the futilities and failures of politics and art.<br /><br />Visconti's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Death in Venice</span> (Italy/France 1971) was a curiously personal production for him. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, the theme of both the story and film were close to Visconti's own personal situation and concerns. His failing health and growing estrangement from the modern world was similar to that of the central character of <span style="font-style:italic;">Death in Venice</span> and the eulogistic tone of the film was indicative of Visconti's own feeling of nostalgia as well as knowledge of the deceits of history and the social bankruptcy of the past.BernUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-29684761291751843462008-09-22T13:06:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:17:35.852-07:00Ingmar Bergman: Major Works<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirk5Rcs5IW3WOOPPJgj5wbJ2D9_2n8sBF3Bdlj3Xw5QjC0P7MXKr93AsO7gbHN3WCTKj_QtkgQ2ULWWdaFhf64fpy5phO57xw9CudM0DAsOPpq6wq7K0nkmCE9IIHZXrTqRE8h_do8ZTo7/s1600-h/wild_strawberries.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirk5Rcs5IW3WOOPPJgj5wbJ2D9_2n8sBF3Bdlj3Xw5QjC0P7MXKr93AsO7gbHN3WCTKj_QtkgQ2ULWWdaFhf64fpy5phO57xw9CudM0DAsOPpq6wq7K0nkmCE9IIHZXrTqRE8h_do8ZTo7/s200/wild_strawberries.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248940365488418754" /></a><br />"There are many filmmakers who forget that the human face is the starting point in our work. To be sure, we can become absorbed by the aesthetic of the picture montage, we can blend objects and still life's into wonderful rhythms, we can fashion nature studies of astonishing beauty, but the proximity of the human face is without doubt the film's distinguishing mark and patent of nobility.'<br />--Ingmar Bergman<br /><br /><br />Since 1945, Ingmar Bergman has produced a series of films that are critically notable for their emotional intensity and extensive philosophic reach. His films have consistently dealt with a highly defined set of evolving themes that have, at their core, an overwhelming concern with individual consciousness. With this acute sense of self-awareness, Bergman has repeatedly explored the repressive side of human nature, the potential sterility of intellectual ism, and God's apparent indifference to mankind. Firmly rooted in the literary and philosophic traditions of August Strindberg and Soren Kierkegaard, Bergman is an artist whose films asks questions rather than present answers and his search for meaning within a possibly meaningless universe brings Bergman to the forefront of existentialist inquiry in the cinema. Though some critics have periodically accused him of latent narcissism, Bergman is one of the few filmmakers whose work transcends the flat and shadowy limitations of the screen.<br /><br />Bergman was born in 1918 to the family of a stern and aloof Lutheran minister. In his childhood, he received an extensive exposure to religious doctrine and education. The theatre, however, became Bergman's great interest and one of his fondest childhood memories would be of magic lantern shows. The magic lantern, a primitive forerunner to the cinema, would be an all important reference point for the mature Bergman in the 1930s and 1940s as he became a theatre playwright and director and, beginning in 1944, a regular screenwriter for Svensk Filmindustri.<br /><br />His transition from screenwriter to writer-director would take place in 1945 with the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Crisis</span>. This was the first of 12 minor films directed by Bergman that would, in retrospect, present his crucial first steps toward his major works of the 1950s. While most of Bergman's early films were realistic studies on the increasing potential for alienation within modern Swedish society, these works also provided Bergman with a good training ground in which he finely honed his skills for narrative structure while collecting round him the actors and actresses who would form a virtual repertory company under his command.<br /><br />By the early 1950s, Bergman was increasingly directing films whose unique themes and stylization clearly identified them as the artistic achievement of his own singular vision. This was first, and most genuinely achieved in <span style="font-style:italic;">Sawdust and Tinsel </span>(Sweden 1953). The film's barren landscape mirrors its emotional theme in which the bluster of masculine sexuality and pride is exposed as a shallow reservoir of guilt and spiritual impotency.<br /><br />By the second half of the 1950s, Bergman created some of his most ambitious efforts. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Seventh Seal</span> (Sweden 1957) became his supreme statement on the human condition. In the film, idealism and pragmatism are divided between Max von Sydow's knight and Gunnar Bjornstrand's squire. Suggestively, through out the film, neither God nor devil exists and only Death, who engages the knight in an ongoing game of chess, seemingly represents the greater cosmic order. It is against this "silence of God" that Bergman also directed such films as <span style="font-style:italic;">The Virgin Spring</span> (Sweden 1959) -- the one film by Bergman in which God answers -- and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Silence</span> (Sweden 1963), a film in which even human communication ultimately fails.<br /><br />Age and death are the final arbitrators of life in both <span style="font-style:italic;">Wild Strawberries </span>(Sweden 1957) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Autumn Sonata</span> (Sweden 1978). With age comes a lifetime accumulation of memories, regrets, and the deep self-awareness of a once possible happiness that was never achieved. The surrealistic veneer of<span style="font-style:italic;"> Wild Strawberries </span>contrasts sharply with the realistic and intimate structure of <span style="font-style:italic;">Autumn Sonata</span>, but both films address themselves to Bergman's concern with mortality and the complex, and often failed, inter-relationship between love and family.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-30504671400640825372008-09-22T11:56:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:19:12.103-07:00Bunuel's Mexico<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKQupuTrR5h4_pdcZc9cDDYTqipxbzby6xT4LhKBll3cSPouDdquZt6F8rK9P8Dhwz6dSHCbZJbldMOdWm1KmYhP_PLhOSPRqZPDLKDjMUPVdQo8647PlVxL0ZxCf7vX1Zctr1BxqZBBi/s1600-h/los+olvidados.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKQupuTrR5h4_pdcZc9cDDYTqipxbzby6xT4LhKBll3cSPouDdquZt6F8rK9P8Dhwz6dSHCbZJbldMOdWm1KmYhP_PLhOSPRqZPDLKDjMUPVdQo8647PlVxL0ZxCf7vX1Zctr1BxqZBBi/s200/los+olvidados.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248927549933205106" /></a><br />"Whether he uses the device of dream or poetry or cinematic<br />narrative, Bunuel the poet penetrates man's profoundest being and<br />reaches the most unexpressed, deep-lying areas of his inner self.<br />His hell. And his heaven...." <br />--Octavio Paz<br /><br />Luis Bunuel's reputation as an important and daring filmmaker was first established in France with <span style="font-style:italic;">Un Chien Andalou</span> (1928)and <span style="font-style:italic;">L'Age d'Or</span> (1930), as well as the Spanish documentary film <span style="font-style:italic;">Las Hurdes</span> (1932). In these three early works, Bunuel's social and political concerns were already evident along with his surrealist convictions. For Bunuel, the difference between the surrealistic experimentation of <span style="font-style:italic;">Un Chien Andalou</span> and the stark realism of <span style="font-style:italic;">Las Hurdes</span> was only a matter of a slight shift in perception. Often, his surrealism was used to express a scathing sense of social criticism. In turn, his more realistic productions contained a striking sense of the dream-like nature of reality.<br /><br />This unique quality of Bunuel's cinema is especially evident in the films which he made in Mexico during the 1950s. Virtually all of his Mexican films were made as "commercial" productions, ranging from light comedies to musicals to melodramas. Within the context of the commercial cinema, however, Bunuel was able to interject his own personal vision. With a combination of artistic skill and subversive charm, Bunuel created some of his most provocative films.<br /><br />Two examples of Bunuel's ability to undermine a film's narrative context can be found in<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Illusion Travels by Streetcar</span> (1953) and <span style="font-style:italic;">El Bruto</span> (1952). <span style="font-style:italic;">The Illusion Travels by Streetcar</span> is intended to be a picaresque comedy in which a junked streetcar becomes the central stage for a minor gesture of working class rebellion. The theft of the streetcar results in the creation of an extended feeling of community among the workers who travel on the car, and a sense of disturbance among the wealthy. The slight joke of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Illusion Travels by Streetcar </span>allowed Bunuel to fashion a satiric presentation in which the streetcar becomes a microcosm of class-consciousness and anarchistic impulses.<br /><br />The melodramatic conventions of <span style="font-style:italic;">El Bruto</span> are subverted by Bunuel into a covert form of political criticism and a very overt expression of destructive sexuality. The principal character in <span style="font-style:italic;">El Bruto</span> is largely incapable of understanding his role within a system of oppression until he himself becomes a murderous agent in the system's employ. His progression from butcher in a slaughterhouse to hired assassin for a landlord is presented as a logical step in a brutal social order.<br /><br />El Bruto's class awareness is raised, marginally, by the love he feels for a rent striker's daughter, but the more chaotic force of sexual desire finally consumes him. While the pure love he feels for one woman causes him to reassess his previous actions, he cannot cope with the seductive gestures of his employer's wife which, literally, reduce him to barking like a dog.<br /><br />In both <span style="font-style:italic;">El Bruto</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Los Olvidados</span> (1950), Bunuel explores the condition of people who live on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The children who live in the slum presented in <span style="font-style:italic;">Los Olvidados</span> exist within an environment in which the moral notions of good and evil have, for all practical purpose, no meaning. The innocence of Pedro, one of the film's main characters, renders him weak as opposed to the stronger, more corrupt figure of Jaibo. The horrific conditions of the slum world depicted by Bunuel essentially negates any and all moral possibilities.<br /><br />The severe pessimism of <span style="font-style:italic;">Los Olvidados</span> is balanced by the more dialectical structure of <span style="font-style:italic;">The River and Death</span> (1955). The film's narrative is concerned with the irrational force of an ongoing blood feud and the need to overcome such impulses with reason and humanity. The village community of <span style="font-style:italic;">The River and Death</span> is near feudalistic in its customs and behavior and Bunuel is not unduly optimistic. The pattern of reconciliation which forms in <span style="font-style:italic;">The River and Death </span>is achieved only after a protracted process of systematic slaughter. <br /><br />Bunuel once stated that "In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon." During his Mexican period, Bunuel worked within the confines of commercial concerns and budgetary limitations. In spite of this, he produced a series of works which are unique in the cinema. He remained, most defiantly, a free spirit.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-24387670838452565652008-09-12T14:16:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:20:46.606-07:00Hitchcock: Two Lost Works<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiojy-4mXl4hQqLILYCP4sN1HYS3UES1S1lcKwOro8XRwBTlH9daKJ0e_1ZA1YEKy39ep-7mbH8RvXjaqf-2Vu6rWjYevWnDKqCEKIMNOnwnM-pZBErozIjdKt8vSaIyWp8xkrhFn6n25jB/s1600-h/ring.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiojy-4mXl4hQqLILYCP4sN1HYS3UES1S1lcKwOro8XRwBTlH9daKJ0e_1ZA1YEKy39ep-7mbH8RvXjaqf-2Vu6rWjYevWnDKqCEKIMNOnwnM-pZBErozIjdKt8vSaIyWp8xkrhFn6n25jB/s200/ring.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5245252905513570546" /></a><br />Though he directed nine feature-length films during the silent era, Alfred Hitchcock's early works are rarely revived. With the exception of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lodger</span> (England 1926), Hitchcock's silent productions were non-thrillers and for most of the 1920s he was best known for directing domestic melodramas and, occasionally, comedies. Yet it was during this period that Hitchcock learned his skills as a filmmaker and his silent productions often display a surprisingly strong sense of visual daring and technical virtuosity. Further, his silent melodramas tend to reveal aspects of Hitchcock's thematic concerns that are often hidden beneath the more overt chills of his suspense films.<br /><br />A film that was of major importance in the critical advancement of Hitchcock's reputation was <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span> (England 1927). Written by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, the film was his first production for British International and the producer John Maxwell. Though the work relationship between Hitchcock and Maxwell would last until 1932, it was often strained by Maxwell's insistence on producing films adapted from the theater. Hitchcock was more interested in exploring his own emerging sense of cinematic art and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span> was a determined effort to combine photographic naturalism with the experimental techniques of the Russian Avant-Garde and German Expressionist cinemas.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span> was also the first of ten films in which Hitchcock collaborated with the cinematographer Jack Cox. Together they successfully created images of stark light and dark, smoke-filled shadows that would have a profound effect upon a generation of English photographers, including Bill Brandt who was especially attracted to the visual structure of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span>. Within the traditionally stage-bound English cinema of the 1920s, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span> was like a gauntlet being thrown by a young director who was already in command of his art and was anxiously attempting to test the limits of film further than the constraints of the British film industry would allow.<br /><br />His second film for Maxwell, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Farmer's Wife</span> (England 1928), was based on a popular play of the period. This gesture of appeasement to Maxwell's sense of standards persuaded Hitchcock to approach the film as an act of mere craftsmanship. It did, however, allow him a chance to display his gift for comedy, a skill that Hitchcock would slyly use in many of his later suspense films.<br /><br />In a way,<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Farmer's Wife</span> represents a light-hearted variation on one of the major themes in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span>. The conditions of marriage, the illusions of love, and necessary betrayals forced by conflicting social and psychological, was a recurring concern that dominated much of Hitchcock's work. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ring</span>, these contradictions can only be resolved through a perverse combination of pain and sentimentality. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Farmer's Wife</span>, a surprising act of good common sense is all that i takes to end the ever escalating humiliations suffered by the film's romantically inclined character. In both cases, masculine pride proves worthless against the forces of love and matrimony.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-92038055358723650292008-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:22:32.542-07:00The 1920s: Films of the Deco Decade<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuFdIJuZXzspELp1EmgFpp6bzy1NNEWKLC-Ax71MO_i9lAwj1o4rJJ3SuMs7916-CdFwCxOy69yAJBJtmkaf-IvlylxhuMAfzSIPVgMKliig7NfjEARE1TRdURPUhdjmUnLNRrebNAcET1/s1600-h/foolish+wives.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuFdIJuZXzspELp1EmgFpp6bzy1NNEWKLC-Ax71MO_i9lAwj1o4rJJ3SuMs7916-CdFwCxOy69yAJBJtmkaf-IvlylxhuMAfzSIPVgMKliig7NfjEARE1TRdURPUhdjmUnLNRrebNAcET1/s200/foolish+wives.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243708275239627410" /></a><br />Art deco, art nouveau, and the Viennese secession styles are all prevalent in the vibrant photography and set designs of many of the grandiose and decadent films of the 1920s. This unique combination of grand, sweeping visual gestures and, at times, delirious excesses embodies a dominate strain of the culture and, in some cases also reflects, the contradictions that were evident in both the cinema and the history of the period. This program presents four of the major films of the deco decade -- works that represent a distinctive sampling of the period's popular aesthetics and its own unique image. <br /><br />Alfred Hitchcock's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Pleasure Garden </span>(England/Germany 1925) was a co-production between the British producer Michael Balcon and the German Erich Pommer who was one of the key figures in the development of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Hitchcock was an unknown quantity in 1925 since, prior to his directorial debut on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Pleasure Garden</span>, he had worked primarily as an art director on Balcon's films. The film was made as an English production set in London and Africa and totally filmed in Pommer's studios in Munich. It was to be a challenging introduction to film making for the future "master of suspense."<br /><br />The heavy German Expressionistic influence found in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Pleasure Garden</span> is due not only to the location of the film's actual production, but also to Hitchcock's great fascination with the works of such directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Added to this was an unusual mix of set designs, ranging from the gaudy glitz of the theatre scenes to the pseudo-exotical of the English's notion of colonial Africa. The film's narrative of betrayal, madness, and miscegenation is, in part, indicative of the racial ideology that underlined British Imperial thinking. It also represents, however, a first-step in Hitchcock's recurring theme of marriage as a state of danger rather than bliss.<br /><br />Hitchcock once stated that he learned how to make movies by watching repeated viewings of Lang's <span style="font-style:italic;">Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler</span> (Germany 1922). This film, which was the first part of the epic-length production <span style="font-style:italic;">Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit</span>, presented Lang's vision of a modern Germany collapsing under the weight of economic chaos, social instability, and extreme decadence. Against this backdrop, the half-mad master criminal Mabuse thrives through combined cunning and pure will as he murders and extorts his way to power. The obvious political implications of the story were developed further by Lang in his two sequels --<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Testament of Dr. Mabuse </span>(Germany 1932) in which Mabuse directly prefigures the Third Reich, and <span style="font-style:italic;">The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse</span> (Germany 1961) in which the doctor's will power proves strong enough to transcend both death and the passage of time in order to attempt the creation of a new Germany in his own image.<br /><br />Lang utilized a variety of stylistic designs in the film's photography in order to invoke the period. Sharp angles and distorted perspectives create a subtle sense of disorientation through out the film as Lang depicts a society increasingly dominated by Mabuse's paranoid megalomania.<br /><br />Though he was critically considered to be one of the major filmmakers of the 1920s, Rex Ingram remains largely unknown by modern audiences. His most successful film of the period,<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse</span> (USA 1921), has become mainly a footnote in movie history books, despite the fact that this production not only made Rudolph Valentino a star but also made it financially possible for M-G-M Studios to be formed. Yet the film still has a striking pictorial power that may come as a surprise for viewers unfamiliar with the expressive qualities of the silent cinema. In fact, many of the scenes in the film were based on oil paintings, especially the works of Maxfield Parrish. This, combined with Ingram1s almost obsessive quest for exotic details, gave his films a stylistic polish that helped to balance his unpredictable wavering between excessive profundity and sentimental superficiality.<br /><br />Based on the popular novel of the period by Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse</span> was originally intended as an anti-war epic in which World War One is literally shown as fratricide. The film's noble aspirations, however, were presented within the context of a very American view of Europe, and upon its release, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse</span> was protested against by the English, French, and German governments. Even though it is now clearly dated, the film remains a fascinating and vivid document of its era.<br /><br />If sentimentality was one of Ingram's flaws, the lack of it was worn as a virtual badge of honor by Erich von Stroheim. In his production of<span style="font-style:italic;"> Foolish Wives</span> (USA 1921), von Stroheim proceeded to scandalize the American film audience by presenting a caustic portrait of European cynicism and debauchery that would reconfirm his title as "the man you love to hate." While he was overtly flaunting his self-created image of European corruption, von Stroheim was also attacking American naivete, xenophobia, and middle-class hypocrisy while simultaneously insulting the honor and privileges belonging to the alleged nobility. That an artist like von Stroheim was able to make <span style="font-style:italic;">Foolish Wives</span> is a testament to both his skills and his special self-destructive nature.<br /><br />Though at the time it was claimed to have been the first film ever to cost a million dollars, the actual production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Foolish Wives</span> was not that expensive. Von Stroheim did, however, pursue his notion of realism to new extremes as he completely reproduced Monte Carlo as a full scale working model on Universal's back lots, including a completely operational casino. For von Stroheim, his sets had to be as authentic as possible since his artistry was based upon the massive accumulation of physical details. As with the naturalist writers of the late 19th century, von Stroheim was interested in presenting the realities of the world with all of its warts and blemishes carefully cataloged. It was in this manner, he felt, that something resembling truth could be reclaimed from the lies and illusions of society.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-63725359756227217522008-09-08T10:19:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:24:12.806-07:00New Films From Taiwan<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu60zeEHObMD59egdIb_pDLHX0Oq6fGzXGma7qg1PaHfQnmE-LC6fDUti1pSpFeKx6QDLWVe0mJtOWxxch3ZQ4TL_njO1xqCP4VpJMQgGSkgVmakSZ3dskWlZEFnHvoJtLcuwgNmuxgE7I/s1600-h/hou-hsiao-hsien.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu60zeEHObMD59egdIb_pDLHX0Oq6fGzXGma7qg1PaHfQnmE-LC6fDUti1pSpFeKx6QDLWVe0mJtOWxxch3ZQ4TL_njO1xqCP4VpJMQgGSkgVmakSZ3dskWlZEFnHvoJtLcuwgNmuxgE7I/s200/hou-hsiao-hsien.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243703725312389410" /></a><br />In recent years, the film industry of Taiwan has gained increasing prominence in the East Asian film market. Many recent Taiwanese films represent the rise of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers whose work displays a significant break from the traditional concerns of the past in favor of a more idiosyncratic, personalized approach to film making. The six films presented in this series is a major sampling of the films and filmmakers who are currently reshaping the Taiwanese cinema. <br /><br />The development of the Taiwanese cinema has proceeded in three stages. The first major period, during the 1960's, was characterized by the work of writers and directors who were part of the Shanghai film studios of pre-Revolutionary China. The second, and most commercial period, occurred in the 1970's when a large number of martial arts films and contemporary melodramas were produced. This development coincided with the formation of close commercial ties between the Taiwan and Hong Kong film industries. While some critics view the 1970's as an artistically unsatisfying period, the cultural and commercial contact with Hong Kong helped to produce the more personal and daring cinema of the current period.<br /><br />One of the most important figures of the new Taiwanese cinema is writer/ director Hou Hsiao-hsien. He is represented in this program by two of his own films — <span style="font-style:italic;">Green, Green Grass of Home</span> (1982) and <span style="font-style:italic;">A Summer at Grandpa's</span> (1984) - as well as his script for Ch'en K'un-hou's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Growing Up </span>(l983). The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien are often concerned with the feelings and perceptions of children. This concern for childhood and the child's perception of the adult world is a common theme in the East Asian cinema, but for many Taiwanese filmmakers it takes on a special significance. Hou, like many of his fellow Taiwanese directors, is sharply aware of the immense changes which have taken place in Taiwan during the past 30 years; an essentially rural culture has been transformed into a highly urban, Westernized society. This has resulted in a "coming of age" for Taiwanese society—one that closely parallels the growth and experiences of the children in Hou's films.<br /><br /><br />The complex nature of the cultural ties between mainland China, Hong Kong,and Taiwan were strained with the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">If I Were For Real</span> (1981), directed by Wang T'ung. The film, a Taiwanese-Hong Kong co-production, adapted from a play by three mainland writers who were, supposedly, jailed after the play had been banned by authorities in the People's Republic. The completed film was also banned from public screening in Hong Kong for fear of offending mainland China. This complex system of give-and-take between the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, is not uncommon in the East Asian film industry.<br /><br />An important development in the Taiwanese cinema of the 1980s has been a sharp increase in realism and social criticism. This is especially evident in Chang Yi's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Kuei-Mei, A Woman</span> (1985). Based on the novel by the Taiwanese feminist writer Sho Sa, the film presents a surprisingly bleak view of working-class life in Taiwan. This film is also an example of the degree to which modern Taiwanese filmmakers are willing to explore controversial issues despite the traditional censorship previously imposed upon Taiwanese cinema.<br /><br />One of the most important and critically acclaimed films to be made in Taiwan is Edward Yang's <span style="font-style:italic;">That Day, On The Beach</span> (1983). The film attempts to encapsulate, through the memories and feelings of two female friends, the past 13 years of Taiwanese history. The film's ambitious scale and complex experimental structure started a critical debate which still rages in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It has also been an increasingly influential film on the East Asian cinema, an achievement that speaks well of the promise of the new Taiwanese cinema and its filmmakers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-63295450529982479422008-09-08T09:16:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:25:40.916-07:00The New Australian Cinema<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5JA9QsJGZ1qBM3gHt_KWBHB6dNkd4Z7zxlI-iHxjfsGx5yMKMlytsg5LTDAxfCJHvkaCVQ_g52deZpuSxGeYZkacH95wHTpNUo610hWM_bRGVZsJttMhTxpskADZUc0Wu78Xf-R4TeLK/s1600-h/madmax.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5JA9QsJGZ1qBM3gHt_KWBHB6dNkd4Z7zxlI-iHxjfsGx5yMKMlytsg5LTDAxfCJHvkaCVQ_g52deZpuSxGeYZkacH95wHTpNUo610hWM_bRGVZsJttMhTxpskADZUc0Wu78Xf-R4TeLK/s200/madmax.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243690687692362354" /></a><br />An innovative group of filmmakers has emerged from Australia within the last ten years. Their films have combined a unique blend of traditional narrative film making with themes and concerns that are indigenously Australian. <br /><br />George Miller has become one of the most successful film makers of the New Australian cinema as a result of his highly charged visual style. Such films as <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad Max</span> (1979)and its sequel <span style="font-style:italic;">Road Warrior</span> (1981) have established a strong commercial niche for Australian films on the international market. In the process, Miller has fashioned a distinctly Australian form of film genre. Although his<span style="font-style:italic;"> Mad Max</span> films borrowed heavily from Hollywood examples, he reshaped the conventional forms of American cinema into a strange and fatalistic new manner that defies easy classification.<br /><br />The first <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad Max</span> film is derived from such traditional genres as police thriller, and motorcycle gang movies, but is combined with a darkly satiric tribute to the Australian's obsession with automobiles. Miller has stated that Australia has a car culture in much the same way as America has a gun culture. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad Max</span>, Miller depicts a crumbling future society in which the automobile has become the chief weapon in a manic fight for survival.<br /><br />While Miller has created Australia's commercial cinema, Peter Weir is the creator of its philosophical context. When Billy Kwan, a character in Weir's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Year of Living Dangerously</span> (1982), says that "We are not quite at home in this world," he speaks for all of Weir's protagonists. Weir is sharply aware of the fact that Australia is a land in which European culture has been transplanted and that Australians are not exactly Westerners. In all of Weir's films, the ultimate conflict exists between the materialistic-based rationalism of modern Western society and the metaphysical, seemingly irrational beliefs of non-Western cultures.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Plumber </span>(1979), Weir presents an absurdist comedy in which a well-ordered academic household is turned topsy-turvy by the increasingly illogical and aberrant behavior of a plumber. The apparent insanity of the plumber proves to be a force which nearly overwhelms reason. The film also suggests that the plumber is somehow an agent for revenge by a tribal shaman, who the wife admits to having previously insulted. Weir repeatedly returns to the photograph of this shaman and this visual counterpoint reinforces the film's main theme concerning the inevitable clash between a well-ordered universe and the irrational forces which lurks within it.<br /><br />Even before the international success of <span style="font-style:italic;">My Brilliant Career </span>(1980), Gillian Armstrong had received attention for several short films. She especially won praise for her direction of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Singer and the Dancer </span>(1976), the film which launched her professional career.<br /><br />The film was adapted from a short story by the Australian author Alan Marshall. With Marshall's approval, she changed the original characters from two young boys to two women, one young and the other old, and restructured the story into an emotionally charged critique of women's role within Australian society. With <span style="font-style:italic;">The Singer and the Dancer</span>, Armstrong provided a balance to the chiefly masculine concerns of the Australian cinema.<br /><br />Phillip Noyce is best known to American viewers for his feature film <span style="font-style:italic;">Newsfront </span>(1978), but he has also made an impressive series of documentaries and short films. One of the best of these early films is his dramatic production <span style="font-style:italic;">Backroads</span> (1977).<br /><br />The film explores the darker aspects of racial problems in Australia. The two main characters, a white drifter and an Aboriginal, are both presented as outsiders from mainstream society. Together, they steal a car and travel through the Australian wasteland, picking up hitchhikers and forming their own makeshift society. During the journey, however, the Aboriginal remains an outsider who is refused admittance even within this limited white social group.<br /><br />For many critics, the New Australian cinema came of age with the production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunday Too Far Away </span>(1975). It was the first film made by the South Australian Film Corporation which had been specifically created to produce and encourage regional film making.<br /><br />The extreme realism of <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunday Too Far Away</span> was achieved by the use of real locations and exact recreation of the harsh, dangerous lives of shearers in the Australian Outback. The cast and crew spent several months living under primitive conditions in this hostile environment, which took both an emotional and physical toll on the cast members. In one scene, when Jack Thompson's character begins weeping from the physical strain of his life, both the strain and the tears were real.<br /><br />Originally three hours long, the producer of <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunday Too Far Away</span> cut the film in half. Even with the drastic cuts, the film was highly praised by both Australian and foreign critics. It was presented at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where it played to an enthusiastic audience and its critical success paved the way for the international respect which the new Australian cinema now enjoys.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-40039505513791309292008-08-21T13:18:00.000-07:002008-09-25T08:27:50.546-07:00Billy Wilder's America<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsPYEq-5T2LLZG0QE-qsI6EaKB4Ja1A3M4kXC_j-CzXWpoT75nG6K6-OD1dtnh9H7ep4uNKuSWxNr6v0BCzY2ujtr0GUTIZFY4FGW-Rp202ZdsJnYRpGTxz84-BcneNZGi642IuVmLkGEP/s1600-h/double+indemnity.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsPYEq-5T2LLZG0QE-qsI6EaKB4Ja1A3M4kXC_j-CzXWpoT75nG6K6-OD1dtnh9H7ep4uNKuSWxNr6v0BCzY2ujtr0GUTIZFY4FGW-Rp202ZdsJnYRpGTxz84-BcneNZGi642IuVmLkGEP/s200/double+indemnity.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5237080865429487602" /></a><br />Throughout his film making career, Billy Wilder has displayed an unusual appreciation for the mannerisms and slang-filled language of American culture. As a native European, Wilder's foreigner status made it easier for him to perceive the unique, to him even exotic, nature of American customs and mores. His hasty approach to learning English through radio programs, baseball games,and tabloid newspapers allowed him to develop a strong sense of how the language was actually spoken by various Americans. His early experience with destitution when he first arrived in California (for a brief while, Wilder lived in a deserted ladies room in a hotel), as well as his later wealth and success, gave Wilder a sharp Knowledge of society's highs and lows.<br /><br />As much as Wilder admired his adopted country, however, he never completely abandoned either his Viennese accent or his European-based perspective. This dichotomy between the two cultures directly and indirectly infuses his films with a sensibility that often reveals new angles on common sights, an outsider's more critical view on the very things that we take for granted.<br /><br />This peculiar mix of America and Europe became evident early in Wilder's life. Born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, he got the nickname Billy because of his mother's fondness for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Raised primarily in Vienna, Wilder spent his childhood witnessing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing social and economic chaos that followed after World War One. He became a newspaper reporter in Berlin during its most extreme period of decadence and run-away inflation in the 1920s and occasionally worked as a dance instructor and gigolo just to survive financially. His great passions, however, were American movies and jazz. <br /><br />Through a lucky, and rather bizarre coincidence, Wilder was able to gain entry into the Berlin film industry and, beginning with <span style="font-style:italic;">Menschen am Sonntag</span> (Germany 1929), he was quickly established as a major new screenwriter. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party forced Wilder, who is Jewish, to flee to Paris. There he was able to find work as the co-director of the low-budget production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Mauvaise Graine</span> (France 1933). Wilder's preference, however, was the role of screenwriter and it was this talent that first brought him to work at Paramount Pictures in 1935.<br /><br />The German director Ernst Lubitsch was at this time not only Paramount's most successful filmmaker, but also one of the most influential people at the studios and he was able to secure jobs for many Central European emigres, especially in the screenwriting department. This unusual mix of accents among the writers once led to a sign being hung on the Writers Building's door: "You must work here. It is not enough to be Hungarian." Wilder was hired to lend a sense of authentic Viennese wit to a few minor productions and was otherwise so under-used that he spent many of his days reading the Help Wanted ads. It was not until he was teamed on a script with Charles Brackett that Wilder's own best qualities came forward, The extreme differences between the two men inspired their scripts as Wilder's liberalism and European worldliness squared off with Brackett's New England-bred conservatism and idealism.<br /><br />It was, however, Wilder's transition from screenwriter to director that allowed his own themes and concerns to become overt. Initially, Wilder became a director in order to protect the integrity of his and Brackett's scripts. Increasingly though, he found his directorial vision at odds with his collaborator and finally, when Wilder's macabre sense of humor took control on <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunset Boulevard</span> (USA 1950), their work relationship ended.<br /><br />The similarities and differences between Wilder and Brackett's work can be traced through the dark and light qualities of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lost Weekend </span>(USA 1945). Brackett had a very personal interest in the film due to his wife's own alcoholism and, in certain ways, Jane Wyman's character is a stand-in for him as she attempts to comprehend the nature of the illness. Wyman's sense of ideals and feelings is indicative of Brackett's own combination of despair and a strong sense of self. However, the film's vivid sense of degradation and madness, especially the infamous bat/mouse nightmare, was gleaned from Wilder. The increasing destitution experienced by Ray Milland's character was familiar to Wilder from his own days of extreme poverty and the nightmare scene has been described by him as a conflict between two sides of his own subconscious, a conflict in which one side feels compelled to devour the other.<br /><br />Brackett's concerns in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lost Weekend</span> were central to the script. His intentions in <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunset Boulevard</span> were ignored. Brackett originally conceived the idea for <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunset Boulevard</span> as a screwball comedy. As he and Wilder repeatedly rewrote the screenplay, the narrative evolved into a dark, gothic vision that was uniquely Wilder's. Brackett continued to provide his sense of craftsmanship to the script, but he realized that he was now involved in making someone else's film. Further, his own sensibilities were now submerged beneath the weight of Wilder's propensity toward megalomania, decadence, and black comedy.<br /><br />It was not so much that Wilder had changed. Instead, <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunset Boulevard</span> represented the complete emergence of the caustic, hard-edged vision already obvious in his earlier production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Indemnity</span> (USA 1944). The novel's tale of adultery and murder played out against a Southern California milieu of bright sunlight and quiet stucco houses intrigued Wilder. The ambivalent psychology and poetic texture of Cain's book were less appealing to Wilder. With the help of Raymond Chandler, he fashioned the narrative into a flinty, flippant view of corruption and betrayal, all played out against the most banal of settings. In a way, the American author Cain wrote a very European novel and the European Wilder directed an extremely American film.<br /><br />Further, while Brackett was an idealist, Wilder was often capable of being a sentimentalist. Despite the cynicism and seeming fatalism of <span style="font-style:italic;">Double Indemnity</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunset Boulevard</span>, Wilder often seems to be a pessimist with a romantic dreamer screaming to get out. That is especially evident in the contrary tendencies of <span style="font-style:italic;">Ace in the Hole </span>a.k.a. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Big Carnival</span> (USA 1951). The film offers a sarcastically devastating critique of American journalism and commerical exploitation. It also contains an abrupt sense of belated spiritual redemption through the power of emotional release. If a worldly spark of cynicism is Wilder's European heritage, then this latent streak of romanticism and sentimentality is, in part, what led him to America.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8683168396039769116.post-23396338513223705642008-08-21T13:05:00.000-07:002008-08-21T13:17:36.033-07:00The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci: Marx and the Oedipus Complex<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigFAXuDcQlkEeMmAy5IyF2Jxn66XSz1nw5tNhgu6ObkFWh4hh3uRDrzQLHXZhay5LW3Av5HdiIfPFR-OQ5rWONu1gs1-PbhietNvNBLW2poYpTmesqEpajhUqGBi2WxNhSA0uN56CnHDHe/s1600-h/bertolucci.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigFAXuDcQlkEeMmAy5IyF2Jxn66XSz1nw5tNhgu6ObkFWh4hh3uRDrzQLHXZhay5LW3Av5HdiIfPFR-OQ5rWONu1gs1-PbhietNvNBLW2poYpTmesqEpajhUqGBi2WxNhSA0uN56CnHDHe/s200/bertolucci.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5237067197019262242" /></a><br />A long-standing, and often antagonistic, division has existed between Marxist political theory and Freudian psychology. One example of this split was the official Soviet rejection of psychoanalysis during the rule of Stalin. Likewise, there have been numerous accounts from the Hollywood blacklist period of Party members who were convinced by their psychoanalysts to "name names" as part of their therapy. For many Marxist thinkers, the subjective universe of Freud was a narcissistic rejection of scientific materialism. In turn, many psychoanalysts treated communism as a neurotic manifestation of the Oedipus complex. Within the orthodox views of both camps, no point of reconciliation seemed possible. It is within this framework that the films of Bernardo Bertolucci occupy a unique position.<br /><br />Bertolucci first became prominent in Italy for his work as a poet and critical essayist. He was, however, increasingly drawn to the cinema through his friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini and his work as assistant director on Pasolini's production of <span style="font-style:italic;">Accattone </span>(Italy 1961). Pasolini's own position as poet and filmaker, as well as his status as a renegade Marxist, demonstrated to Bertolucci that a complex synthesis of politics, art, and psychology was possible. Further, the cinematic legacy of Italian Neo-Realism gave Bertolucci a model from which he could freely borrow, even while he was rejecting much of its simpler, more sentimental vision of left-wing politics (though his 1977 production of <span style="font-style:italic;">1900</span> is virtually the last Neo-Realist epic ever filmed).<br /><br />From Pasolini, Bertolucci derived a sharp awareness of the interaction between the personal and political worlds, especially in the arena of <span style="font-style:italic;">sexual politics</span>. From the previous generation of Neo-Realist filmakers, he inherited an appreciation for the formal and moral possibilities of the cinema. With his discovery of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci learned to view the cinema as a uniquely political medium. This pedigree enabled Bertolucci to mix his commitment to radical politics within a framework of psychoanalytic concern.<br /><br />A recurring theme in Bertolucci's films is the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex. This theory concerning infantile sexuality, in which the child subconsciously wishes to usurp the position of the father in relationship to the mother, is traditionally presented in psychoanalysis as the primal event in a person's mental development. Further, the resolution of this conflict through the repression of the oedipal urge is viewed not only as the first step toward therapeutic adjustment but also as one of the major foundations of the social structure. Bertolucci sees the Oedipus complex as a primary component to both psychological and political awareness. He does not, however, view repression as the only correct resolution of the complex. In turn, the father figure represents more than simply parental authority, but also the patriarchal structures of the state.<br /><br />The failure to resolve this conflict in either direction is part of the text of <span style="font-style:italic;">Before the Revolution</span> (Italy 1964). Though the title of the film is taken from Talleyrand -- "He who did not live in the years before the (French) Revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is" -- the emotional tone of the work is more directly summarized by the hero's admission that for him, "life will always be before the revolution." This alienating sense of being suspended between a complacent middle-class and a radical proletariat permeates the film as its central character finds himself dissatisfied with his own class, but also realizes that he is not capable of being culturally aligned with the communist workers. He rejects the world of his father (and the affair with his aunt is a substitution for the mother), but he cannot sucessfully follow the revolutionary path advocated by his intellectual mentor, the second father figure in the film. He fails to come to any significant resolution of the crisis and, seemingly, is destined to drift.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Spider's Stratagem </span>(Italy 1970), the enigmatic figure of the father still controls the son despite the father's own death years earlier. Supposedly, the father died a martyr in the fight against fascism. History, however, can be a deceptive web through which one generation is capable of ensnaring the next. The degree to which the father has imposed himself upon the son is reinforced in the film by the fact that the same actor plays both parts. Throughout The Spider's Stratagem, the romantic entanglements and political betrayls of the father systematically envelop the son, entrapping him within a personal history of deceit.<br /><br />Bertolucci's most direct confrontation with the Oedipus complex is presented in <span style="font-style:italic;">Luna</span> (USA/Italy 1979). The title symbolically refers to the mysterious qualities of sexuality contained within the figure of the mother in relationship to the ambivalent sensibilities of the adolescent male. Framed within the context of opera (the mother is a prima donna on tour in Italy), Bertolucci uses the artificial stage worlds of Verdi and Mozart as a means of reflecting the potentially destructive psychological events within the film's narrative. Like the myth that is its namesake, the Oedipus complex contains within it the brutal possibilities of tragedy, and the son's passage through his interior crisis will be critical in determining his entry into maturity. The ambiguous ending of <span style="font-style:italic;">Luna</span>, in which the father must finally assert himself, is not so much a reconciliation as it is a brief pause in a process of psychological development that must continue long after the film has ended.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luna</span> recongizes that the Oedipus complex, when viewed from the position of the mother and son, contains a potential for tragedy. In <span style="font-style:italic;">The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man</span> (Italy 1981), the complex is presented from the father's perspective. From this viewpoint, the complex becomes the basis for black comedy. The father is the ridiculous man of the film's title, the contradictory representative of a previous generation who must eventually be replaced by the new. The convoluted, and ultimately unresolved, mystery plot of the film is indicative of the father's inability to accept his powerlessness in resolving, and eventually manipulating, his son's crisis. In turn, he only gradually realizes that the crisis is actually his own and that he must simply accept the fact that "the son always replaces the father."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0