Film Noir Studies

For anyone interested in further acquaintance with film noir, this website is a good place to start:

Film Noir Studies

The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)

After coming to America, Fritz Lang exerted considerable influence over film noir--it's not hard to see how its themes and concerns might have presented an American counterpart to Lang's interests in M.
This scene sums up the atmosphere of corruption and duplicity that permeates film noir--and reminds us that, while noir often seems to present central female figures as the source of moral corruption, it also exposes the violence to women in male-dominated social groups--in this instance in a way that is shocking because it's casual as much as because it's so brutal.

Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

The brilliant opening scene from the definitely sordid, tawdry, practically insane film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.

A. O. Scott on The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

The Maltese Falcon is one of the indispensable American films and a big influence on film noir style and themes. Here New York Times critic A. O. Scott suggests a deep connection between noir's exposure of the corruption at the heart of the American romance with wealth and the present crisis of the national economy. (Well, he says as much as he can expect his masters in corporate media to tolerate.)
The Maltese Falcon set the noir theme of the hero who is deeply flawed, cynical, maybe almost entirely amoral--except that he has a job to do; and the treacherous woman who tries to lead him astray. Why would this theme feature so prominently in American popular film?

Road House (Jean Negulesco, 1948)

Many films noirs (well, it's French) of the '40s and '50s not only provide a moral and social counter-tradition to Hollywood cinema, they also provide a production model that paralleled Italian Neorealism--with gritty stories came some gritty production conditions. Film noir to some extent elevated the B picture to a new status (especially as it was discovered by critics of the '60s as a serious American popular art form). It also paved the way for some TV shooting techniques. (Virtually everyone associated with this film ended up doing more TV than film.)

Sunset Boulevard - A Look Back

For anyone really interested in the film, there's a great documentary on Sunset Boulevard, available in three parts on YouTube (and included in the DVD release).

" . . . those wonderful people out there in the dark"

Sunset Boulevard: The End.
There may be no other scene in cinema that presents the relation between audience and film in such a rich, complex, and creepy way. Focusing on the audience's complicity in cinematic illusion--and thus a fundamental cultural dishonesty and inauthenticity--is pretty common these days. But Billy Wilder was certainly one of the hugest influences on the cynical style in cinema.

"I AM big--It's the pictures that got small"

Numerous memorable moments from Sunset Blvd are available on YouTube and elsewhere on the 'net. Here is how the audience are introduced to Norma Desmond--and to protagonist Joe Gillis, at least as he looks while he's still living.

Italian Neorealism

Martin Scorsese provides a short introduction to Italian neorealism -- starting with Open City.

Rome, Open City (1946)

The house-to-house search -- in which comedy is succeeded by tragedy.
Who needs subtitles? Try watching this pivotal scene without translation to see what comes across without it.

Preston Sturges - The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1941) - Part 1 of 10

Preston Sturges' satire of American puritanism and self-righteousness, still breath-takingly cynical, and relevant.

Preston Sturges - Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Preston Sturges' great Hollywood satire is available on YouTube.

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941)

His Girl Friday crosses genres: it's both a classic newspaper picture and a definitive screwball comedy. The humor establishes this as  a "comedy of divorce," a variation on an ancient theme of the war between the sexes, but the film's serious side comes from its critique of the press's exploitation of human tragedies. It is well worth seeing in its entirety.

Betty Boop - Minnie the Moocher

Betty Boop - Snow White

Busby Berkeley - Gold Diggers of 1933 - We're in the Money

Busby Berkeley - Gold Diggers of 1933 - Remember My Forgotten Man

Love Me Tonight (1931) - Isn't It Romantic?

Just a couple of years into the sound era, Love Me Tonight offers one of the cleverest, most delightful musical numbers ever filmed--and incidentally, a tellingly witty illustration of how music gave cinema the power to conquer popular culture and the world. Genius.

Cecil B. Demille - "Old Wives for New"

The mode of DeMille's films says a lot about what brought huge popular audiences to movie houses in the years after World War I. DeMille became famous making slightly provocative films about beautiful women and "modern" love affairs. In "Old Wives for New," Charles Murdock feels trapped in an unhappy marriage. His wife Sophy has "let herself go" and takes no interest in the world beyond her home. On a camping trip he meets the fascinating Juliet Raeburn, a beautiful young self-made woman he feels is his true soulmate. When rumors circulate that Charles has found a lover, he throws suspicion upon a less reputable woman who has pursued him in order to spare Juliet from social disgrace.
The film touts ideals of fidelity and self-sacrifice. But it also proposes that marriage can be a trap; that both partners must work to merit the other's continuing interest; that "adultery in one's heart" is no sin, but more or less inevitable; and that sometimes, divorce really is the answer.

Rudolph Valentino in "The Sheik"

This scene from The Sheik suggests something of the enthusiasm for suggestive material in one style of blockbuster film in the '20s. The equation of the erotic with the exotic underlines the theme so often found in American film--and more broadly, in American culture: titillating material is displayed constantly, but in a spirit of condemnation and moral superiority.

The context:
Lady Diana Mayo (Agnes Ayres) is admired for her independence, high spirit and modern ideas, but when she is kidnapped by an Arab sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan (Rudolph Valentino), she finds herself falling under the spell of his exotic masculinity. In the popular novel on which the film is based, Lady Diana learns to appreciate the sheik only after he takes her by force; in the film, he restrains himself and wins her with his consideration and respect for her. (When the film was re-released during the Code years, a scene of attempted rape had to be cut.)
Even so, the character of the sheik is recast for the film as the child of European parents, adopted by an Arab sheik; anti-miscegenation laws of the time would have precluded scenes suggesting romance and kisses between a European lady and an Arab man. The film was banned in Kansas City all the same.
"The Sheik" was crucial to Valentino's career as the greatest male sex symbol of the time--and created a huge backlash among American men, who boycotted the film and railed against the "effeminacy" of his screen image. He died at 31 in 1926, setting off a mass outpouring of grief among American women that was a significant moment in the history of Hollywood's power over the public imagination.

Buster Keaton - Sherlock, Jr.

Keaton uses not only his extraordinary talent for physical comedy, but essential elements of cinematic form, to construct his comedy. Like a lot of great actors and scenarists, he seems at his best when he's contemplating cinema itself.

Chaplin - Monsieur Verdoux

The final section of Chaplin's oddest film: a comedy about a wife murderer. The dark tone of this comedy seems almost quaint now; at the time, it inflamed Chaplin's right-wing enemies, particularly as its message appeared to dismiss the moral failings of private life in comparison with the enormities committed by states and corporations. Chaplin unquestionably suggests that banks and businesses are responsible for every crime committed by the people they impoverish.

Chaplin - The Great Dictator: Hynkel's speech

Chaplin - The Great Dictator: Adenoid Hynkel's dream of world conquest

One of Chaplin's--and the cinema's--most effective and unforgettable criticisms of fascism.

Chaplin directing City Lights

The home movies of Chaplin directing that were referred to in class.

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush

Another celebrated Chaplin moment: stranded in the freezing North, Charlie serves his shoe for dinner.

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

I haven't found a great copy of Modern Times online, although I imagine it's available as steaming video somewhere. Here's the scene of the feeding machine, one of Chaplin's great comic images of dehumanization in mechanized society.

More on Dovzhenko's "Earth"

The LA blog Film Journey has a short piece on a UK release of a restored version of Dovzhenko's Earth featuring side-by-side comparison of a few shots with the dark, grainy, indistinct Kino DVD we viewed in class. It gives you a little bit of a sense of how the film should look. It's always evident that Dovzhenko intends to take advantage of the luminosity of cinematic images.
  You can view  a clip  on the Mr. Bongo site here.
You can see in this comparison that the Kino version crops the image, too, which may explain why characters' heads were sometimes out of frame. The article also says the the version we saw is over-cranked, which may explain why some characters' movements are a little too fast and jerky and may threaten to verge on comedy. I would really love to see this release.
If anyone knows how to get at this version, please let me know.

Dziga Vertov - Man with a Movie Camera

Almost unique among documentary films in its complexity and influence.

Dovzhenko - Earth

An unusually beautiful film - very influential among filmmakers and artists, though not much known among the general public.

Eisenstein - Battleship Potemkin

The Birth of Soviet Cinema - Part One

The Birth of Soviet Cinema (as seen in class), now available on YouTube, due to my extraordinary efforts.

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City - Walter Ruttmann, 1927

Secrets of a Soul - G. W. Pabst, 1926

Pabst is known especially for an extraordinarily fluid and vivid realism. In this film, undertaken with the participation of two members of Freud's psychoanalytic circle, he seizes the opportunity to create a symbolic visual language of dreams, memories, and fantasies.

Pandora's Box - G. W. Pabst, 1929

This film from 1929 is still radiant, beautiful, fresh, and deeply disturbing.

The Last Laugh - F. W. Murnau, 1924

Nosferatu - F. W. Murnau, 1922

The first of 13 parts. YouTube also has the complete film in one post, but the quality of this version is somewhat better.

From Siegfried (The Nibelungen) - Fritz Lang, 1922

The celebrated scene in which Siegfried slays the dragon. Bathing in its blood, he becomes invincible--except for one tiny patch on his shoulderblade where the blood did not reach. It is there that he is ultimately struck by a spear and killed.

The Golem (1920)

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

Serials: Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires, 1915 - Part Two: The Ring That Kills

Serials kept the cinema audience returning from week to week to see how an exciting story developed and turned out, in 10-15-minute installments. "Les Vampires" is one of the most successful examples in film history. (The "vampires" of the title are a criminal gang, not the vampires of Dracula, Twilight, or True Blood.)

The conventions are borrowed from 19th-century stage melodrama (as in Griffith's 2-reelers): increasingly bizarre and arcane ways to endanger the heroes and the innocent, cliff-hangers that pose apparently inescapable threats, conspiracies that draw stark lines between good and evil, depravity and innocence.

The posters for Feuillade's serials, including Fantomas and Judex, are a major contribution to French and international popular art in the early 20th-century, and are quoted in the work of Braque, Picasso, and Margritte.

Feuillade was criticized for making his criminal villains appear glamorous. He tried a serial focused on a police detective, but the villains continued to be more interesting than the good guys--another great cinematic tradition.

The figure in bat costume in this episode is said to have inspired Bob Kane to create the Bat-Man.

Letter: To My Old Master

Just in time for our screening of Griffith's Birth of a Nation, this extraordinary letter shows up on the "Letters of Note" blog from an ex-slave to an ex-master, in response to an offer of work back on the old farm. Jourdon Anderson wrote from Ohio to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, with an incisive irony that Jonathan Swift or George Orwell might envy. Among other remarks:

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.

D. W. Griffith - Intolerance 1916

The success of The Birth of a Nation inaugurated the age of Films as Art--and brought on the first great controversies about the political dimensions of film. Successful efforts to suppress Birth of a Nation because of its appalling interpretation of American history and its offensive treatment of African-American characters motivated Griffith only to a kind of reflexive self-pity: His intentions were so obviously good, who could possibly want to prevent audiences from free access to the beneficial effects of his art?
The great director found himself inspired to tell the story of Intolerance (of the kind that he felt he suffered from). A contemporary melodrama is intercut with tales of ancient Babylon, the suppression of Protestants in 16th-century France, and Griffith's own spin on the story of Jesus Christ. Some of the most elaborate sets in film history were constructed for this spectacle; some were tourist attractions in Los Angeles for years afterward. But compared to his less grandiose melodramas such as Broken Blossoms and Way Down East--which still convey great emotional power--the story-telling in Intolerance seems flaccid and uninspired. Over the decades, however, it has provided generations of film students with lessons in editing.

D. W. Griffith - Broken Blossoms 1919

Another true masterpiece of over-the-top melodrama, cross-cut narratives, amazing performances--and sentimentalized racism. (The story from which the film was adapted was called "The Chink and the Child.")

D. W. Griffith - The Birth of a Nation 1915

The entire film -- all three hours. Get comfortable.

D. W. Griffith - One is Business, the Other Crime

Griffith's racism and nostalgia for the pre-Civil War South make him appear to us as an extreme reactionary. But like many conservatives, he was also a populist. In this film, he takes the radical stance of comparing the activities of bankers and investment houses to theft. Significantly, he uses the essential language of cinema to cut back and forth between two opposed scenes, making the audience confront the comparison in ways that may cause them to change their view of society. This technique was later employed crucially by leftist filmmakers in Germany and the Soviet Union, and became the essential element in political filmmaking. But they were borrowing from Griffith.

D. W. Griffith - His Trust Fulfilled - Part Two 1911

Like many white Southerners (even now), Griffith romanticized the ante-bellum period as a social system that embodied conservative social values. Setting aside the brutality and constant debasement of slavery, Griffith emphasized self-sacrifice, loyalty, the "nobility" of labor . . .
In this popular short (you can find part on on Youtube here), a faithful former slave suffers terribly to fulfill a promise made to a master and see that his little charge makes a good marriage.

Significantly, Griffith uses inter-cutting to tell a story about the good old days of slavery--as he later did on a much grander scale in Birth of a Nation.

D. W. Griffith - What Drink Did 1909

Many of the early two-reelers -- 10-15 minutes each -- told a simple story derived from the stock situations of 19th-century stage melodrama, with an obvious moral lesson.
They were also often intended to encourage the "improvement" of the lower classes who attended cinemas in large number. The temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition was stimulated by films like this one, and Women's Suffrage was helped along by images of intelligent, determined women in the movies

D. W. Griffith - Corner in Wheat 1909

Onesime Horloger

Winsor McCay - Gertie the Dinosaur - 1914

Winsr McCay and His Animated Pictures 1911

An Interesting Story - G. A. Smith 1905

The Kiss

Sandow the Strongman

The Sick Kitten (1903)

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Boxing Cats

The General - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926 - Scene for Shot-by-shot Analysis

Film Before Film - Phenakistoscopes

Film Before Film - Thamatropes

Daily Show + Gingrich = Melies

Last night's Daily Show featured this image as part of a satirical report on Newt Gingrich's plans to put an American base on the moon "by the end of [his] second term as President."
Jon Stewart had a pretty good line. He said that the twice-divorced candidate for the Republican presidential nomination "has realized that the Earth is very sick and now he wants to leave it for a younger planet."

Aren't you glad you get the visual reference, though?

Happy 114th Birthday, Sergei Eisenstein!

Eisensein will be an important presence in our course. This excerpt from the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin represents one of the greatest examples of his montage aesthetic.

The General - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926

AS3440A History of World Cinema

AS3440A HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA TO 1960 (3 cr) SP 2012
THE CORCORAN COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
DEPT. OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, moving pictures evolved from a children’s diversion to a force that transformed life at all levels, contributing significantly to American economic and cultural domination of a new world--as seen onscreen. The key issues we examine in this course remain just as relevant now as one hundred years ago: the double nature of cinema as both a capital-intensive, technologically complex medium and a collective art form; the development of conventions, genres, and narrative strategies; the dynamic between mimetic and expressionist tendencies in film art; the social and economic dimensions of film culture; and the role of national cinemas in world culture and politics. Serious consideration of how these material, social, and aesthetic issues affect cinema's status as art has formed the pattern for redefining art in all media and contexts in the past century.
Other issues that arose in the first two decades of cinema have remained central: the conventions of story-telling in narrative film; the establishment of the movies as a cheap, popular art form, defined in opposition to "high art" and the culture of the rich; the star system and its transformation of celebrity into a central, almost spiritual value; conservative and religious (and sometimes liberal/radical) opposition to the forms and subject matter of cinema as popular art; the economic and political power of Hollywood; and the identification of the film industry with the United States' international standing.

OBJECTIVES
Our study will focus on appreciating classic films both as artworks and as historical documents, emphasizing:
• The development of cinema as both a technological and a collective art form--involving social and economic practices, narrative styles and codes, genres and popular tastes.
• The production of narrative films in the tension between pseudo-documentary and fiction—between "reality" and "imagination," or mimetic and expressionistic aims
• The rise of the Hollywood production system and of national cinemas as a distinctive modern phenomenon in society and art.
• The role of cinema in creating the form and social dimensions of the modern mass audience, including the tendencies to both homogenization and the establishment of niche markets.
• The creation of history, especially national histories, through the medium of film:
How does cinema recreate and reinterpret national history?
How does cinema respond to and portray the historical forces that affect our lives?
How does cinema tell its own history, as celebration and satire?
• The relation of the rise of cinema to American cultural and economic domination of the twentieth century
• The codes of signification in cinema: how we learn to "read" films and how their conventions develop
• The artistic aims and sensibilities of major figures and movements in cinema around the world, with special emphasis on Hollywood cinema.
• The audience's creative reinterpretation of cinematic artworks outside their original historical and cultural contexts.