Chapter Resources

Chapter Two

Key Light—Hollywood Style and the Studios

• Key Light—Hollywood Style and the Studios  

The Hollywood style came about because of the formation of the movie studios. These came into being because of the will and determination of a few men, who as immigrants or first generation Americans saw movies not only as a profitmaking business, but as a way for them to demonstrate their love of America and, even more, an opportunity to create a moral universe that fit their sentiments and in the case of Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, their sentimentality.

Each of the studios reflected, to some degree or another, the personalities of their bosses and the production heads they hired. In 1923, as MGM was being formed out of the merging of a number of small companies, Mayer hired Irving Thalberg, who was at the time the general manager of Carl Laemmle’s Universal. Thalberg and Mayer were instrumental in creating the producer system, which demoted the position of director and raised the producer as the primary force in the creation of a film. As such, Thalberg all but ruined one of the great films of the silent period, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924). Von Stroheim was an independent, detail-obsessed, anti-sentimental director. His previous films, for example Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1923), are set in mythical European kingdoms in which adulteries and grotesque murders take place. Greed is set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco and is as grim and downbeat a film as one can imagine during the silent period. It could not have pleased Louis B. Mayer. Its length was impossible: Stroheim’s original cut ran over eight hours. Thalberg took it out of Stroheim’s hands and cut it down to two hours, which is the film we have today. Erich von Stroheim’s career was effectively over.

MGM continued producing mostly high key, bright and sentimental movies. Over at Warner Bros., Jack Warner and his producers, writers, and directors had a darker vision. Warner Bros. pioneered sound films. All the studios were experimenting with sound throughout the early 1930s, but it was Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), part silent, part talking and singing, that marked the turning point from silent to sound filmmaking. Beginning in the early 1930s, Warner Bros. began a cycle of gangster films—Little Caesar (Mervin LeRoy, 1931) and Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)—which, along with Scarface (Howard Hawks, independently produced by Howard Hughes, 1932), set the pattern for all gangster films to come.

Meanwhile, Universal was setting another pattern, this one for horror films, with Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), and The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935).

But no matter the studio or the genre, the producer system and the classical Hollywood style became the norm. There may have been inflections of the style from film to film and studio to studio, but continuity, shot/reverse shot, and over-the-shoulder editing, the 180-degree rule, happy endings, psychologically motivated characters, villains getting punished, and women becoming wives and mothers constituted the established narrative pattern.

Chapter Two

Further Reading and Viewing

Linda Williams discusses the early development of the image and its relationship to the body in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 34–57.

A study of Chaplin and his times is Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

One Keaton film is analyzed in Andrew Horton, ed., Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

A complete history of United Artists can be found in Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976).

A biographical history of the studios is written by Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1989).

Douglas Gomery writes The Studio System: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2008).

A cultural history of American film is Robert P. Kolker, The Cultures of American Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

A recent study of the interaction of imagination and corporation is Jerome Christensen’s America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Thomas Elsaesser’s collection of essays, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), is a good source of information on the formation of the early film industry.

The standard work on the classical Hollywood style is David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

Discussion of the computer effects in Gravity can be found at http://library.creativecow.net/kaufman_debra/Gravity-3D-Conversion/1 (accessed 19 November 2014).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

The Kiss (William Heise, 1896) is an example of early eroticism in film.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895), a “documentary” by the two French pioneers.

Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (Edison, 1901). This film reenacts the execution of the assassin of President William McKinley along with documentary footage of the prison where he was executed.

A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). The great “magic” film of early cinema and perhaps the first science fiction film.

The Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S. Porter, 1903). Porter was an early experimenter in editing to create a more complex narrative structure.

Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916). Griffith’s attempt to respond to the racism of Birth of a Nation (1915) is one of the monuments of the silent period, weaving together multiple narratives.

Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924) is a response to the sentimentality of Griffith and other silent film directors. An adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague, it was brutally cut by its studio, but remains a powerful film of the pre-sound period.

Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932). An excellent example of the MGM high style of the early 1930s.

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) is a culmination of 1940s filmmaking, using deep focus and long takes to address the issues of veterans returning home after World War II.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). Hitchcock’s response to the classical Hollywood style.

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are good examples of a director who works against the norms of the classical Hollywood style. See especially his trilogy: L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962).

Chapter Three

Key Light—Composition

• Key Light—Composition  

The movie screen is a contested space. It started small, as nickelodeon patrons in the late 1890s peered through the eyepiece of a machine, cranked the handle, and saw images of a couple kissing or the strongman Sandow flexing. It seems to be ending small on tablets and smartphones. In between there was great variety, from the large screen in the lavish picture palaces of the 1920s to the curved wide screens of the 1950s, the cramped screens of early mall theaters in the 1980s, and the huge Imax screens of contemporary stadium theaters. Television sets themselves—still chosen devices for watching movies on DVD or Blu-ray—have grown from small, low resolution cathode ray tubes to huge ultra high definition LCD flatscreens. In fact, the 4K resolution (8 million pixels creating a resolution of 3840 x 2160) used to project film digitally in many contemporary theaters is now available on high-end home TVs.

All of this seems to have put no burden on the film viewer. A part of the history of film is the seemingly infinite adaptability of the viewer to what is on the screen, within the screen, without much concern about the size of the screen. But the filmmaker is in a different and perhaps more difficult position in regards to what is framed by the composition he wishes to make. Does composition need to be cramped with characters crowded into the center of the frame so that they will be visible on any screen? Many filmmakers take the easy way out (frankly, so do many viewers) and simply “shoot (or view) down the middle:” no creative compositions, not even creative use of color (in any case, color is digitally tinkered with after the film is shot). Screen size, in many instances, dictates composition.

But in Chapter 3, we highlight some filmmakers who do take composition seriously and use it to help build a coherent mise-en-scène. Certainly CGI superhero movies and comic book adaptations require a large palette on which to paint their characters’ exploits. How does this palette appear on a tiny screen? How do some filmmakers take composition seriously?

Chapter Three

Further Reading and Viewing

John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), is an excellent source for the techniques and aesthetics of wide screen.

Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), remains the best work on German Expressionism.

The theory that horror films emerged as a response to World War I is presented in Robert Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber & Faber, 2001).

An excellent study of Busby Berkeley and his treatment of the human figure is in Lucy Fischer, Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 37–55.

An extended visual analysis of Psycho is Robert Kolker, “The Man Who Knew More Than Enough,” in Robert Kolker, ed.,Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 205–58.

André Bazin addresses the contemplative nature of deep focus and the long shot throughout his essays in What Is Cinema? cited in Chapter 1.

For a discussion of the technical aspects of color, see James L. Limbacher,Four Aspects of the Film (New York: Arno Press, 1977). Limbacher also analyzes screen sizes.

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) is a contemporary example of long-take cinematography.

Several filmmakers use wide screen as an expressive compositional element of mise-en-scène. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965) is one example. In the U.S., there are John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock (1955); Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Bigger than Life (1956); and Bitter Victory (1957). Ray also experimented with color schemes in Johnny Guitar (1954).

John Ford’s Westerns, which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 9, are studies in careful composition of the figure in the western landscape of Monument Valley. See, for example, My Darling Clementine (1946).

Chapter Four

Key Light—Challenging Hollywood Style

• Key Light—Challenging Hollywood Style  

The classical Hollywood style rules filmmaking and has since the 1920s. So a question arises, how do we keep responding positively to a set of formal and thematic constants that are basically unchanged? How is novelty or even originality entered into the demands of the style? Some filmmakers, as we have seen, go out of their way to challenge the style. The Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu made his award-winning film Birdman (2014) appear as if it were shot in one long take. Other filmmakers, like Oliver Stone in JFK (1992) and Nixon (1995), use editing that borrows some of the techniques of the Russian revolutionary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

In terms of content, Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014) creates some interesting changes to the conventions of the Hollywood style. He creates a character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is close to psychotic. An independent newsreel photographer, he manipulates people emotionally and physically, staging scenes, and causing more than one death. And he gets away with it. There is no redemption offered, no way for the viewer to excuse the character and evade his wild-eyed gaze. This is an unusual position for the viewer to be left in. It is uncomfortable, which is exactly what the classical Hollywood style wants to avoid.

Chapter Four

Further Reading and Viewing

For an interesting analysis of very early film and audience response, see Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007).

The standard work on the concept of the “suture,” the stitching of the viewer’s gaze into the narrative, is Daniel Dayan’s “The Tutor Code in Classical American Cinema,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds.,  Film Theory and Criticism 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 106–17.

In addition to Thomas Elsaesser’s collection of essays, Early Cinema, cited in Chapter 2, two other books present a broad and stimulating examination of the early developments of the classical Hollywood style, concentrating on the development of cutting and narrative patterns: Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); and Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). For early editing, see Stephen Bottomore’s essay “Shots in the Dark—The Real Origins of Film Editing” and André Gaudreault’s “Detours in Film Narrative: The Development of Cross- Cutting,” in Elsaesser’s Early Cinema.

An excellent treatment of sound in cinema can be found in Rick Altman, ed., Cinema/Sound (New Haven: Yale French Studies, 1980) and Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992).

There are a number of essays and books that discuss the ideology of the classical Hollywood style. An excellent and accessible essay is Robin Wood’s “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 592–601. Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image,cited in Chapter 1, is another good resource. For a detailed history of the classical Hollywood style, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960,cited in Chapter 2.

For the male gaze, read Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989).

Eisenstein’s essays are collected in two volumes: The Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); and The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).

A classic work on films made against the grain is Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Jean-Luc Godard, whose films will be discussed in Chapter 8, worked assiduously to counter the classical Hollywood style. See, for example, My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962).

The films of director Tony Scott offer dynamic examples of rapid editing. For example Domino (2005); The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009); and Unstoppable (2010).

Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) does interesting things with narrative form and classical cutting.

Independent avant-garde filmmakers often use rapid cutting, sometimes a frame a second. Stan Brakhage is a major practitioner whose work is available on a Criterion DVD.

Recent turns on the horror film include films made in Japan and remade in the U.S., for example Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002).

Chapter Five

Key Light—Discovering the Storytellers of Film

• Key Light—Discovering the Storytellers of Film  

An interesting and challenging multi-stepped series of case studies in relation to Chapter 5 might work as follows:

Begin by getting accustomed to reading credits. They form a small narrative in themselves, the story of individuals responsible for a film, many of whom are active across a number of films, especially directors of photography (the cinematographer or “DP”), production designers, and composers (there is also a recently added credit for “sound design”).

Once you begin noticing and even jotting down the names of these individuals, take one film and watch and listen to it through the filter of one of its contributors. In other words, watch the film with an eye to how the images are made: Is there a basic color scheme? How is the lighting designed (keep an eye out for key light, back light and fill)? How is the production designed? Is it a period piece or contemporary? How are the sets and locations decorated and integrated with the lighting? How are the characters photographed? What about the music? Is it a composed score or does the film use prerecorded music? Sound effects? In most contemporary films, almost every sound is constructed in postproduction.

Consider the matter of words. Every film begins with words on a page; the actors need words to speak. Yet the screenwriter, with very few exceptions, is the least celebrated of all the major contributors. If you go to the Academy Award Oscars website and look up nominees and winners, you’ll find the list for adapted or original screenplay down at the bottom of the list. Why is the writer so denigrated? Have you seen a film that succeeds on the basis of dialogue alone? Try reading a screenplay, some of which are available online. But keep in mind that there are many versions of a screenplay: the original version, the shooting script, and the “cutting continuity,” which is a transcription of the completed film. Here is a script for The Dark Knight. How does it compare to the film itself? Can you find the sequence analyzed in Chapter 7?

Chapter Five

Further Reading and Viewing

An excellent, though challenging, source of information on the individual subject and its shifting positions is Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

One of the best works on cinematographers is a compilation film called Visions of Light (Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarty, Stuart Samuels, 1992) available on VHS and (preferably) DVD. It contains good commentary and excellent visual examples. A recent collection of essays is Patrick Keating, ed., Cinematography (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014).

There is very little written on production design. Two books are Beverly Heisner, Production Design in the Contemporary American Film: A Critical Study of 23 Movies and Their Designers (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1997) and Lucy Fisher, ed., Art Direction and Production Design (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Lev Manovich covers in detail the work of computer design in film in his previously cited The Language of New Media. The film Side by Side (2012), available on DVD, contains many interviews with directors and cinematographers concerning computer-generated imagery.

Douglas Gomery’s The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005) is invaluable. A collection of essays on theories of sound can be found in Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

One of the best books on film editing is an old one by the director Karel Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing (New York: Hastings House, 1968).

There is a growing body of work on film music: David Neumeyer, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Philip Hayward, ed., Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema (London and Oakville Connecticut: Equinox, 2009); Kathryn Kalinak Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994). For the use of popular music in film, see Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, eds., Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s (London: British Film Institute, 1995) and I. Penman, “Juke Box and Johnny-Boy,” Sight and Sound 3, no. 1 (April 1993), pp. 10–11. An annotated bibliography of readings about film music is James Wierzbicki, Nathan Platte, Colin Roust, eds., The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2012).  Stories of Stravinsky in Hollywood can be found in Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) and John Baxter, The Hollywood Exiles (New York: Taplinger, 1976). Steven C. Smith’s A Heart and Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1991) is a wonderful biography of the greatest film composer.

A good survey of Hollywood screenwriters is Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (New York: Penguin Books, 1975). For some stories about writers in Hollywood, see Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun (New York and Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1981).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Some of the footage from Welles’s It’s All True was put together in a film of the same name (1993).

Examples of the work of some major cinematographers include:

• The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, Gregg Toland, cinematographer, 1940)
• Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, James Wong Howe, cinematographer, 1947)
• Border Incident (Anthony Mann, John Alton, cinematographer, 1949)
• Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, Gilbert Taylor, cinematographer, 1964)
• McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, Vilmos Zsigmond, cinematographer, 1971, 1973)
• The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio Storaro, cinematographer, 1970, 1972)
• The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, Gordon Willis, cinematographer, 1972)
• Seven (David Fincher, Darius Khondji, cinematographer, 1995)
• The Matrix (Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, Bill Pope, cinematographer, 1999)
• Gone Girl (David Fincher, Jeff Gronenwith, cinematographer, 2014).

The work of composer John Williams can be heard in all of Steven Spielberg’s films, as well as the Star Wars series and JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991).

Similarly, Bernard Herrmann composed the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s films from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964). He also scored Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), among many other films and television shows.

The work of the studio composer Miklos Rozsa is at its best in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

French composer Georges Delerue has written many scores, most notably for Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and Maurice Jarre has been equally prolific, perhaps most notably for Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, 1962, 1965).

Richard Sylbert was an important contemporary production designer in such films as The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967); Rosemary’s Baby; and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1968, 1974).

Chapter Six

Key Light—Film Acting

• Key Light—Film Acting  

There are a number of important points to keep in mind about acting in film: a film performance is not a performance in the conventional sense because it is done in fits and starts, bits and pieces, usually out of sequence. Beyond dialogue, film acting is dependent on the gaze—the ways in which characters look or do not look at one another or at objects. There seem to be a set number of facial expressions and ways of holding the body that instantly communicate emotional states.

A few actors are responsive to one director, giving that director their best performance. Robert De Niro, for example, did his best work with Martin Scorsese, in films such as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). His later work without Scorsese—especially those films in which he attempts a comic performance—are not very good. Meet the Fockers (Jay Roach, 2004) is not a memorable film or a stellar job of acting on De Niro’s part. It is not that De Niro can’t do comedy. Scorsese’s The Kind of Comedy (1982) proves that he can take the psychopathic character of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and turn it upside down for comic effect.

John Wayne, an actor who has moved from his role in films to become a cultural icon long after his death, is another case in point. Wayne was not a very good actor unless he was being directed by John Ford, which he was in more than twenty films, or by Howard Hawks, for whom he made three.  Compare his performance in non-Ford Westerns like The Alamo (1960), which he directed himself, with Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

In Chapter 6, we saw a number of stock poses and gazes that are repeated from film to film, by actor to actor. Continue this database with other examples of facial expressions and body language. How do these conventional acting gestures and looks compare with how we act in everyday life? Once you can establish the way film characters look, can you still hold that film acting is realistic?

Chapter Six

Further Reading and Viewing

James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) and Christine Gledhill’s edition of essays, Stardom: Industry of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) are useful resources. See also Richard Dyer’s Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979).

The cultural historian Garry Wills has written an important book on John Wayne: John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Early film acting is discussed in Patrice Petro, ed., Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

Contemporary acting is covered in Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, Frank P. Tomasulo, eds., More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

The silent comedians Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton defined comic acting in silent film: Chaplin in, for example, The Gold Rush (1925) and Keaton in The Play House (1921).

From The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936) through The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk, 1954), Humphrey Bogart played a small variation of characters that he inhabited with toughness and grace.

Marlon Brando is always interesting to watch. In addition to the films mentioned in the text, there are The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953); On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954); and most especially his late work, Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972).

Robert De Niro stands out in Martin Scorsese’s films, especially Mean Streets (1973); Taxi Driver (1976); and Raging Bull (1980).

Contemporary actors and actresses who do unusual work include Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013); Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper appear together in The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2013).

Meryl Streep is a chameleon actress who seems to change physically depending on her characters in, for example, Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983) and Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008), in which she co-stars with another major contemporary actor, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. One of Hoffman’s best films is The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012).

Anderson directed the British actor Daniel Day-Lewis—another chameleon—in There Will Be Blood (2007). Day-Lewis morphs into another character in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002).

Chapter Seven

Key Light—Paul Thomas Anderson/Wes Anderson

• Key Light—Paul Thomas Anderson/Wes Anderson  

In our discussion of new American directors, we merely touched upon the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, who is emerging as one of the most interesting auteurs of his generation. Anderson started with a small film, Hard Eight (1996), and quickly moved to higher budget, star-filled films like Boogie Nights (1997), a film about the porn business that starts out rather lighthearted but turns grim by its conclusion. Magnolia (1999), which we discussed in the text, was followed by Punch-Drunk Love (2002), an Adam Sandler vehicle, carefully composed and edited, showing the influence of the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

But it is two of his recent films, There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012), that place Anderson in the first rank of major filmmakers. His images are carefully and boldly composed. The tempo of his editing is deliberate. The quality of the performances he elicits from Daniel Day-Lewis in Blood and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in The Master is remarkable, simultaneously restrained and exuberant. In these two films, he has the ability to create basically reprehensible characters who manage to fascinate us by their very amorality, their propensity for violence and manipulation, and their ultimate inscrutability. This is not the usual experience of the psychologically motivated film character. Anderson provides no motivation, except perhaps greed on the part of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview or narcissism in Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd. Phoenix’s Freddie Quell remains a cipher throughout The Master.

He keeps our gaze riveted on his characters while at the same time making them part of a carefully created mise-en-scène. A kind of multiple definition occurs: the characters are defined by what they say and do and how they are seen. But these multiples fail to add up. We observe the slow decline of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood from independent oil man—someone who hates people but maintains a fondness for his son—to drunken millionaire living in a mansion he hates. He hates his son; hates the fraudulent preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) who has been dogging his heels; hates himself. The inevitable blood spilled is Eli’s (the second man Daniel kills), bludgeoned by a bowling pin. Daniel’s last words as he sits by the body are “I’m finished.” The ambiguity of the statement is belied by the power of Anderson’s images which leave little doubt about the decline of the character despite the fact that we never are allowed a satisfying insight into what makes that character work.

Another Anderson, Wes Anderson, has made his mark by creating small, seemingly lightweight films that, despite their whimsy, often touch upon matters that may not be quite profound but still speak to everyday, and sometimes historic concerns. Anderson is always experimenting, playing with narrative form and indulging in a visual playfulness that includes animation (Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009, is completely animated) and models. He is acutely aware of his medium’s artifice and more and more plays to it rather than creating an illusory sense of realism. He enjoys extremes: twelve-year-old lovers in Moonrise Kingdom (2012); a middle-aged man who makes love to a variety of older women in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). This film employs a box-like structure of storytelling, narrative within narrative, spinning off characters as it goes, and touches—ever so lightly—on the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s.

The two Andersons are an interesting contrast in their approaches to cinema: one deeply engaged in the seriousness of his medium; the other using it with the lightest and most inventive of touches.

Chapter Seven

Further Reading and Viewing

Peter Woolen’s work on auteurism, in his book Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1972), provides some useful ideas.

Two of the clearest essays about the existence of the author are Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988) and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” in Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, eds., Twentieth-Century Literary Theory (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1987).

The best work on Robert Altman is by Robert T. Self: Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2007).

Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) analyzes the work of Arthur Penn, Oliver Stone, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. Jon Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998) presents a number of takes on contemporary Hollywood.

For a study of Paul Thomas Anderson in the context of contemporary American filmmaking, see Jason Sperb, Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2013).

For various approaches to Hitchcock and Psycho, see Robert Kolker, ed., Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). A collection of essays on Hitchcock’s films is in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader 2nd ed. (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2009) and in Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague, eds., A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). A four-volume collection of essays edited by Neil Badmington is Alfred Hitchcock (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). The classic work on Hitchcock is the career interview conducted by French filmmaker François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).

For Dorothy Arzner, see Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). A biography of Blaché has been written by Alison McMahan: Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002). For the career of Ida Lupino, see Marsha Orgeron, Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).

A recent book on African American film is Monica White Ndounou, Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press). The classic histories of African Americans in film are Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Of interest are the films that made up the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the 1960s and 1970s. They made the concept of the auteur briefly recognized by the studios. For example: Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967); The Graduate; Catch-22; Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1967, 1970, 1971); Easy Rider (Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, 1969); Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1970, 1972); Harold and Maude; Shampoo; Coming Home; Being There (Hal Ashby, 1971, 1975, 1978, 1979).

Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, in addition to Magnolia (1999), include Boogie Nights (1997); Punch-Drunk Love (2002); There Will Be Blood (2007); The Master (2012); Inherent Vice (2014).

Wes Anderson’s films, in addition to The Grand Budapest Hotel, are Bottle Rocket (1996); Rushmore (1998); The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004); The Darjeeling Limited (2007); Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009); Moonrise Kingdom (2012).

Martin Scorsese’s output is huge. In addition to the films mentioned in the text, there are: Boxcar Bertha (1972); Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974); After Hours (1985); The Color of Money (1986); Kundun (1997); Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

David Fincher’s recent films include Zodiac (2007); The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011); two episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards (2013); Gone Girl (2014).

A recent notable auteur, whose work we will look at in Chapter 10, is Todd Haynes: Safe (1995); Velvet Goldmine (1998); Far From Heaven (2002); and his 2011 HBO remake of the 1940s film Mildred Pierce.

Chapter Eight

Key Light—Ingmar Bergman

• Key Light—Ingmar Bergman  

An important European filmmaker not discussed in Chapter 8 is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. During their time in the late 1950s through the early 1970s, his films were extraordinarily popular the world over. Bergman’s best films are dark visions of psychological and sexual turmoil. Their characters are inward-looking, filled with existential and religious anxieties and doubts. Visually, Bergman’s landscape is the face, filmed close up, emerging from the shadows. The Seventh Seal (1958) takes place in the Middle Ages during the time of the crusades and the plague. A self-loathing knight, who feels a spiritual emptiness, an inability to connect to his God, faces Death, personified as a pale figure draped in black, with whom he plays chess by the sea. The film is filled with striking images and words of spiritual pain.

No matter the period in which his films are set, their characters are consumed with doubt and tormented by their loss of spirituality and a sexuality that they cannot understand or manage. Persona (1966) begins with a film projected on a screen, images of animal slaughter, a hand with a spike driven through it, a spider, and corpses. One of the images, of a young boy, moves his hand across images of the faces of the two women who will be central to the film. The sequence is an attempt to join the modernist movement of self-reflexive cinema current at the time, as we have seen in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and later in the New German Cinema. But it is a prelude only to a melodramatic narrative of two women, a mute actress and her nurse, who bares her soul and empties her spirit until the personalities of the two characters merge, figuratively and perhaps physically.

There is much that is visually striking in Bergman’s films, due to the work of his cinematographer Sven Nykvist. There is also much melodrama as his characters tear themselves and others apart emotionally in their pain and doubt. His films seem insular, cut off from the world, islands of self-doubt in a world of pain. But they are worth looking at if only to gauge the taste of art cinemagoers during the golden age of European filmmaking.

Chapter Eight

Further Reading and Viewing

An excellent overview of global cinema is Roy Stafford, The Global Film Book (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).

An analysis of postwar European and international cinema is in Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye, originally published in 1983, available online from Open Book Publishers, http://www.openbookpublishers.com/reader/8.

A large survey is Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

For Italian film, see Peter Bonanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009).

Current theories of transnational and global cinema are found in Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2010).

The best discussion of the French New Wave remains James Monaco’s The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co., 2009) is a clear, intense reading of Godard’s films in the context of the New Wave.

Thomas Elsaesser has written New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989). The influence of Bertolt Brecht’s theoretical writing is collected in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).

Recent work on Bollywood includes Raminder Kaur, Ajay J. Sinha, eds., Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2005).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Neorealists

Luchino Visconti: Ossessione (1943)

Roberto Rossellini:

Paisan (1946)

Germany Year Zero (1948)

Stromboli (1950)

Europa 51 (1952)

Voyage to Italy (1954)

Vittorio De Sica:

Miracle in Milan (1951)

Umberto D. (1952)

Ingmar Bergman was a popular Swedish director whose films include:

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Persona (1966)

Some additional films of the French New Wave

François Truffaut:

Jules and Jim (1962)

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

The Wild Child (1970)

Day for Night (1973)

Jean-Luc Godard:

Contempt (1963)

Pierrot le Fou (1965)

Masculin Féminin (1966)

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)

La Chinoise (1967)

Eric Rohmer:

My Night with Maud (1969)

Claire’s Knee (1970)

Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)

New German Cinema

Wim Wenders:

Alice in the Cities (1974)

The American Friend (1977)

Wings of Desire (1987)

Werner Herzog:

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans (2009)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (this is a small sample of a huge output):

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970)

Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)

The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1971)

Effi Briest (1974)

Fox and His Friends (1975)

In a Year of 13 Moons (1978)

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980; a 14-episode German television series)

Veronika Voss (1982)

Bollywood

Representative titles suggested by India media scholar Manjunath Pendakur. They are subtitled and readily available:

Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)

Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983)

Roja (Mani Rathnam, 1992)

Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowarikar, 2001)

Rang De Basanti (Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra, 2006)

Omkara (Vishal Bharadwaj, 2006)

Wong Kar-wai

Chunking Express (1994)

Happy Together (1997)

2046 (2004)

My Blueberry Nights (2007)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

La Promesse (1996)

The Son (2002)

The Silence of Lorna (2008)

Two Days, One Night (2014)

Michael Haneke

Benny’s Video (1992)

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000)

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Amour (2012)

Chapter Nine

Key Light—Evaluative Criticism: Interstellar (2014)

• Key Light—Evaluative Criticism: Interstellar (2014)  

Learning about film requires an analytic approach, judgment-free. Only after you are certain about your abilities to understand how a film works can you venture into areas of evaluation and judgment—that is, whether a film works or not, is good or bad. Here I would like to offer a brief example of evaluative criticism using Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) as an example.

In Chapter 7, we looked at Nolan’s work and analyzed a sequence from The Dark Knight (2008). His Batman films demonstrate a clever eye at constructing and editing sequences appropriate to the action/superhero genre. With Interstellar, he enters the somewhat crowded field of science fiction, a genre that, as we saw in Chapter 9, has a long history. It is also a genre that has undergone changes with the advent of CGI. Filmmakers can create alternative worlds and digitally animated aliens with relative ease and considerable detail, though not necessarily with any more imagination than was at play in pre-CGI science fiction.

The apex of the science fiction genre is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a pre-CGI, handmade work of towering intellect manifested in complex imagery. Interstellar is Nolan’s attempt to create a modern-day version of 2001 in a film that deals with complex ideas articulated in a vast astral landscape. 2001 concerns origins and destinies of intelligent life. It explores the complexities and ironies of artificial intelligence and suggests the possibilities of alien intelligence guiding human destiny. Or not. The ironies and ambiguities of Kubrick’s film permit many readings, many possibilities, as we have seen in our discussion of the film in Chapter 9.

Nolan’s film explores the fascinating theories of dark matter and worm holes, of multiple dimensions and alternative universes. But where Kubrick tells his stories with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of powerful and carefully articulated images, Nolan has his characters talk a great deal, spinning out theories, getting involved in melodramatic exchanges. The film is dominated by Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, the “hero” of the film, who takes his crew through interstellar adventures in search of a way to save a dying earth. He and his crew have a robot, TARS, who, unlike 2001’s HAL, is a helpful, if sarcastic presence. TARS bears a slight resemblance to the monoliths of 2001.

Kubrick allows the mysteries generated by his film to remain mysterious. The penultimate sequence in which astronaut Bowman is imprisoned in a strange room in some infinite realm of the internal mind permits of no easy interpretation. Neither does the final image of Bowman as an unborn fetus, encircling the earth. Nolan also has a sequence near the end of his film that takes place in a room—created somehow in a fifth dimension by an unnamed “they,” a huge structure that, at the same time, allows a small opening behind the bookcase of Cooper’s home. Time and space are rearticulated and Cooper, who has not aged through his travels in time and space, can here communicate with his daughter, who has grown into an elderly woman. The concept is grand if a bit preposterous. Where Kubrick suggests, Nolan spells out. He becomes a literalist of the imagination and in so doing asks the viewer to accompany him and his characters through quasi-scientific theorizing manifested in not thoroughly convincing imagery but with a maximum of “wire work”—characters suspended by wires who seem to be floating in zero gravity.

Interstellar is a huge undertaking, solemn, without irony, making imaginative leaps that privilege effect over coherence. Its characters and their exploits are not in sync with the scope of Nolan’s thinking. Its images and editing are not tight enough to suggest more than the dialogue. For Kubrick, the image is everything; for Nolan it is subordinated to a complexity that outstrips his ability to visualize it. For Kubrick, irony works against facile explanation; for Nolan, intense seriousness dulls the rhythms of his film and threatens absurdity.

Chapter Nine

Further Reading and Viewing

An ideological reading of genre can be found in Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 717–726. See also Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, and Pleasure (London: BFI, 1980).

Studies of genre can be found in Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genre: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Steven Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1983); and Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999). There is interesting discussion about the tension between genre and individual expression in Leo Braudy’s The World in a Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and by Robert Warshow in his essay “Movie Chronicle: The Western” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” in the same collection.

David Cook presents an excellent history of Hollywood censorship in A History of Narrative Film 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

A study of the Production Code can be found in Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2007).

A lively history of the Warner Brothers’ gangster film and biography of its stars is in Robert Sklar, City Boys (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). A classic study of the genre is Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Useful histories of documentary are Richard Meran Barsam, Nonaction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, eds., A New History of the Documentary Film (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005).

A strong analysis of Leni Riefenstahl’s work is in Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage, 1982).

For current theory on nonfiction film, see Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

A fine study of World War II documentaries and their directors is Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014).

The best book on John Wayne is by the historian Garry Wills, John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). There are literally dozens of books and articles on John Ford. An old but sturdy survey of the Western is Philip French, Westerns: Aspect of a Movie Genre(New York:Viking Press, 1974). Also, see Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson, eds., Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998).

A collection of essays on The Searchers is Arthur M. Eckstein, Peter Lehman, eds., The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). For the idea of the cowboy hero creating a domestic space he can’t inhabit, see J. A. Place, The Western Films of John Ford (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1974).

For the science fiction genre, see J. P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Gangster films

Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932; Brian De Palma, 1983)

The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939)

Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007)

Documentaries

Michael Moore:

Sicko (2007)

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Errol Morris:

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

A Brief History of Time (1991)

The Western

John Ford:

My Darling Clementine (1946)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Rio Grande (1950)

Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

Other Westerns:

Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947)

Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Shane  (George Stevens, 1953)

The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954)

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)

Deadwood (HBO series, various directors, 2004–2006)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Science fiction and contemporary horror

Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)

The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953)

It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954)

The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957)

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Phil Kaufman, 1978)

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004)

Super 8 (J. J. Abrams, 2008)

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

Halloween (various directors, 1978–2009)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (various directors, 1984–2010)

Star Trek (various directors, 1993, 1995, 2009, 2013)

Chapter Ten

Key Light—Melodrama

• Key Light—Melodrama  

“Melodrama,” I wrote in Chapter 10, “is about provoking emotion.” A question hangs over this assertion: why do we want our emotions provoked? We willingly fall under melodrama’s spell, feel for the characters, even weep with their loss and sadness. What happens when our emotions are frustrated, when a melodrama pulls us up short and refuses to permit the gush of feeling, or absorbs them back so that we are asked to consider the characters rather than our emotions about them?

Much of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work does this, and we see how Ali: Fear Eats the Soul frustrates our response by using attention-calling techniques, like having his characters stare directly at the camera, or by undercutting the reconciliation of Ali and Emmi by having a doctor assure her that Ali’s condition is caused by his status as an immigrant and will keep recurring. The seeping in of air—in this case the air of social and economic realities—has the curious effect of deflating the melodramatic emotional surge.

Another case in point is Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). This is a costume drama, set in the late eighteenth century, about a young man, played by Ryan O’Neal, who fakes and fights his way into a marriage with a rich woman. He has a son, who dies. But plot, as always, is less relevant than the form of the film. Barry Lyndon is filmed and edited at an unusually slow pace; its compositions are painterly and call attention to themselves. Kubrick will begin with a close shot of the characters and then slowly zoom out, diminishing them, forcing us to see them as part of a larger landscape. The characters, with few exceptions, are all but expressionless. And although there is a surge of emotion over the death of Barry’s son, this is quickly squelched by a series of events involving Barry’s violence, a duel with his stepson in which he loses a leg, and his banishment from the family. The film has a climactic moment and a coda, both of which are highly charged, but defy easy emotional response. The last we see of Barry, he is without a leg, helped by his mother into a coach. Kubrick chooses to freeze the frame so that Barry in his misery is frozen in time. The film then returns to the Lyndon family in their chateau, quietly signing checks, doing the books, the domestic scene reduced to a ceremony of accounting.

All of this, accompanied by the elegiac eighteenth and nineteenth century music that Kubrick uses to infuse the images, results in a film that is deeply moving yet at the same time cool and distant. It redefines melodrama and the ways in which we are asked to respond to it.

Chapter Ten

Further Reading and Viewing

So much has been written on noir, but the best remains an essay by the screenwriter (of Taxi Driver, among others) and director Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Schrader on Schrader, ed. Kevin Jackson (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). A good visual analysis is offered by J. A. Place and L. S. Peterson, “Some Visual Notes on Film Noir,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 325–338. See also Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Jonathan Auerbach, Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2011). For a feminist reading, see E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980).

For discussion of whether noir elaborates a destruction of the women-based family or merely recuperates it, see Claire Johnston, “Double Indemnity,” in the previously cited Women in Film Noir, pp. 100–111; and Joyce Nelson, “Mildred Pierce Reconsidered,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 450–457.

There are two excellent anthologies of essays on melodrama and film: Marcia Landy, ed., Imitations of Life: A Reader of Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); and Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is (London: BFI, 1987). The standard essay is Thomas Elsaesser’s “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” reprinted in Home Is Where the Heart Is. See also Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Imitations of Life. For melodrama and early film, the standard book is Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2001). A study of melodrama in literature (quite applicable to film) is Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

Film Noir

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939)

Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946)

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)

Melodrama

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945; Todd Haynes, 2011)

Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982)

Steel Magnolias (Herbert Ross, 1989)

Chapter Eleven

Key Light—Why Take Film Seriously?

• Key Light—Why Take Film Seriously?  

“Why take film seriously?” This is the question moving throughout our discussions in Film, Form, and Culture, and it’s not a trivial or self-evident question. Since you are taking an intro to film course, you might immediately answer “yes,” of course film must be taken seriously. That’s what we are doing here. But behind that answer has been a bit of work. Did you, at some point in the course, feel that you might not be able to look at a film as a source of entertainment? Did you find the comparison of Vertigo and This is 40 too incongruous? Perhaps that was the last straw in our attempt to convince that all film deserves some serious attention. But in fact it is the test of the high/mid/low theories of culture and a confirmation that you can embrace all film and find links between them and your response to them.

But, at the moment, that embrace is shifting. Television, long considered at the low end of the cultural spectrum, is now becoming the medium in which some of the most imaginative filmmaking is occurring. Network television not so much, but cable, HBO especially, and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon are creating fiction and documentary programming with a variety and sophistication that seems missing in much contemporary conventional cinema. To be sure, this is “narrow casting” in the sense that it is available only to people with high end flat screens, a good Internet connection, and a willingness to pay a premium for the services.

Does this mean that “quality” (if we can still use that word) is available only to a select number of well-off viewers? That would suggest that “culture,” in the old sense of the word, has shifted back to the well-to-do. House of Cards or True Detective have a considerably smaller audience than the latest Marvel comic book adaptation at the multiplex.

I think we need to avoid getting back to the old class-based constructions of culture and rather look at the spectrum of offerings and the variations of taste, something we have not discussed in the text of Film, Form, and Culture. Taste is extremely personal, though it can be influenced by peer pressure. A person who likes Spider-Man movies or Fifty Shades of Grey may not be attracted to Spiral, the French police procedural on Netflix. Taste is part of the cultural complex, and it is one of the things that defines us as individuals.  It is also what generates the now all but overwhelming amount of choice we have in regards to film across the media landscape. As attendance in actual theaters diminishes, as digital filming, distribution, and exhibition become universal, as the variety of screens multiplies, and the definitions of what is cinema expand, so expand the cultures of the imagination.

Chapter Eleven

Further Reading and Viewing

The literature on cultural studies is quite large. Here are a few titles: Stuart Hall, ed., Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980); Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Richard Hoggart, On Culture and Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992); John Fiske, Television Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Andrew Milner, Jeff Browitt, Contemporary Cultural Theory, An Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

Recent books exploring the influence of the digital on the media are Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006) and William Merrin, Media Studies 2.0 (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).

For a serious discussion of fans and their work, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, rev. ed.(New York and London: Routledge, 2012).

A classic work on subcultures is Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1988).

A book that combines mass media and cultural studies is James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009).

One critic in the early 1950s attempted a somewhat neutral analysis of popular culture, although some of his work is marked by Cold War rhetoric: Robert Warshow wrote some groundbreaking analyses of the Western and gangster film genres, which we have referred to in our discussion of genres. See his book, originally published in 1962, The Immediate Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Another critic, Gilbert Seldes, also wrote against the grain in his book The Seven Lively Arts, originally published in 1924, the early, formative period of mass culture (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2001).

An excellent analysis of the relationship between Benjamin’s essay and film and new media is in Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. A difficult but rewarding book on Benjamin and the Frankfurt School is Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

A sharp, concise summary of postmodernism can be found in Todd Gitlin’s essay “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (New York: Routledge, 1989). See also Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 2000). The classic work on the postmodern is Jean-François Leotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1984).

For a study of Hitchcock’s popularity, see Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

For a good history of the 1950s, see James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945-1968 (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1986). On the zoot-suit riots, see Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare,” in Angela McRobbie, ed., Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses (Boston: Unwin-Hyman, 1988), pp. 3–22. There is a large literature on the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Hollywood. Two excellent sources are Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics and the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); and Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003). One of the most popular books voicing the fear of conformity in the 1950s was William Whyte’s The Organization Man, originally published in 1956 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002).

One of the best recent studies of the changing ideas of masculinity in the 1950s, by a scholar whose work led me to the Look articles, is Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Susan Jefford’s Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994) offers an interesting political take on contemporary action/adventure films. See also Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).

Two books on Vertigo are Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (New York: St. Martin’s Press Griffin, 2001) and Katalin Makkai, ed., Vertigo (London and New York, Routledge, 2013).

Suggestions for Further Viewing

A few significant Hitchcock films not mentioned in the text:

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Notorious (1946)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

The Birds (1963)

Other films directed by Judd Apatow:

Funny People (2009)

Trainwreck (2015)

A brief selection of films produced by Apatow not mentioned in the text:

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Adam McKay, 2006)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008)

Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, 2008)