Kristin Jamieson Introduction to American Cinema Summer A 2011

Kristin Jamieson

Originally from Overland Park, KS but moved to Florida 5 years ago. I am currently in the LSCC Nursing Program It has been 10 years since I took ENC 1101 and 1102 This is the first Power Point I have ever made!!! My favorite all time movie is A League of Their Own

Kansas 12/7/2009

Joselyn 6/4/1999

Made in the USA Pg 220-222

Film Noir-Black Film Authors Where did the films come from? Pulps/Hard Boiled Fiction Exploitative Stories (Sex, Violence, and Drugs) Goal

Pg 221- And, as we shall see, film noir deals with a uniquely American experience of wartime and postwar despair and alienation as a disoriented America readjusts to a new social and political reality.
The French Connection Pg 222- These films unsettled audiences. Through their violation of the traditional narrative and stylistic practices of classical Hollywood cinema that oriented and stabilized spectators, these films created an uncomfortable and disturbing malaise or anxiety in their viewers.

Film Noir: Genre, Series, or Mode?

Pg 222- Though most critics and historians regard noir as a mode of film practice whose identity chiefly resides in its ability to make audiences uneasy, there is considerable disagreement over what exactly film noir is. Genre: Iconography Fixed Character Types Predictable Narrative Patterns Style/Series or Cycle: Dark Aesthetic Movement Schizophrenic Nature Mode: Affective Phenomenon Historical Era WW II Depression

Pearl Harbor

Noir Aesthetics, Themes, and Character Types Pg 225- Film noir emerged as a cycle or series of films. It consists of a finite group of motion pictures made during a specific historical period that share certain aesthetic traits and thematic concerns. Aesthetics: 225- Aesthetically, noir relies heavily on shadowy, low-key lighting; deep-focus cinematography; distorting, wide-angle lenses; sequence shots; disorienting mise-en-scene; tension-inducing; oblique, and vertical composition lines; jarring juxtapositions between shots involving extreme changes in camera angle or screen size, claustrophobic framing; romantic voiceover narration, and complex narrative structure, characterized by flashbacks and or convoluted temporal sequencing of events.

Noir Aesthetics, Themes, and Character Types Continued

Thematically: Existential Issues: Futility of individual action Feelings r/t living in Industrialized, mass society Being and Nothing Arbitrariness of social justice Pg 225- which results in individual despair, leading to chaos, violence, and paranoia. Noir Heroes: Detectives Antisocial Loners Gainfully Employed Amnesiac Pg 226- These amnesiacs epitomize the social estrangement and psychological confusion that had settled in the formerly healthy American psyche after war. Audiences established a troubled identification with these heroes who had become cut off from their own pasts and whose identity crises mirrored those of the nation as a whole.

Noir Stylistics: A Shift in Perspective

Pg 227- With every violation from the norm, film noir stylistics marked and intrusive intervention between the spectator and the straightforward exposition of the story, foregrounding narrative form and thus making it visible. French Perspective: Same old familiar classical Hollywood Cinema

New Alien Spirit Aesthetic Elements Highly subjective, voiceover narration Hallucinatory Sequences

*******With a Twist*******

Pg 228- But when American films began to adopt- even for a moment- a foreign tongue, the disquieting forces of fear and paranoia crept into what used to be, for most American audiences at least, the stabilizing and reassuring experience of going to the movies.

From Disturbing Conventions to Conventional Disturbances

Pg 228- They were noir for audiences seeing them for the first time in the 1940s and 1950s. And, though they continue to appear noir in relation to earlier films for subsequent audiences, we tend to be less disturbed by them today than our grandparents must have been in the postwar era. Subsequent American cinema- itself influenced by film noir- has hardened us to its unsettling power. Neo-Noir Is a style often seen in modern motion pictures that prominently utilize elements of film noir, but with updated themes, content, style, visual elements, or media that were absent in film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. Pg 228- Following the publication of Schraders Notes on Film Noir in 1972, screenwriters and directors deliberately set out to make films noirs, transforming the disruptive stylistic strategies and disturbing thematic obsessions of postwar film noir into a system of expectations and convictions.

Noir And the Production Code

Production Code: The body of censorship regulations governing what Hollywood was permitted to show on screen Instituted in the 1930s Prohibited subject matter: Nudity Homosexuality It was desexualized and displaced Interracial Sexual Activity Incest Rape Abortion Excessive Violence Brutality Profanity Detail description of criminal acts Use of drugs
The relaxation of the production code in the late 1950s seemed to be the end of the noir era. Pg: 229- American films of the mid- to late 1930s rarely dealt with these subjects, but film noir frequently did, often resulting in amazing displays of narrative contortion as the films alluded to prohibited material without directly violating the Code.

Innocence Lost: The Literary Origins of Film Noir Historical Events that contributed to Film Noir: Outbreak of war in Europe World War II Chaos after the war (Loss of American Innocence) Great Depression Hard-Boiled Fiction Pg 231- the protagonist of these works was the classless, restless man (sic) of American democracy, who spoke the language of the street. Noir Heroes: Weak Intellects Fate Language

Women in Film Noir Pg 234- The proletarian tough guy achieves his toughness by repressing all signs of weakness in himself- and all weakness, for him, is associated with the feminine. Women as a social menace: Changing Status Taking over male roles Pg 235- Film noir registered the antifeminist backlash by providing a picture of postwar America in which there is no family or in which the family exists chiefly as a negative phenomenon. In noir, the family was either nonexistent or negative Pg 235- In film noir, the world of crime and that of the family overlap. Crime has moved from outside the family to within it, and the impetus for crime came as often from women as from men. Typical Noir Families: Wives who killed husbands Husbands who killed wives Children who killed their parents Lovers who wanted to kill each other

Women as Psychological Terror

Women and the insecure noir hero: Psychic Threat Laura Mulvey How did Hollywood Respond: Disavowal Fetishization Devaluation Pg 236- female sexuality was routinely devalued by the male protagonists, who felt threatened by it. Thus, women in noir tended to be characterized as femmes fatales intent on castrating or otherwise destroying the male hero. Pg 237- Often noir women were both fetishized and devalued, constructed as spectacular objects of male sexual fantasy who then turned on those whose desires initially empowered them.

Homosexuality and Film Noir

Some of the first widely available images of homosexuality in our time were those provided by American Film Noir. (Dyer, 2005) How are homosexuals represented in Film Noir and what are they doing?

Men Fastidious Dress Manicured Nails Love of Art Bitchy Wit Metro

Women Big-Boned Hair Drawn Back Hard Loud Voice Tailored Suits Short Hair

Traits Nymphomania Pornography Sado-Masochism Incest Transvestism

A Critique of Populism
Pg 237- The destabilization of sexual relationships found in film noir is symptomatic of a larger social disorder. Jeffersonian Democracy: Equality-Through-Universal-Ownership Pg 237- But the closing of the frontier, the exhaustion of free land, and the rapid industrialization of America in the latter part of the nineteenth century began a slow process of social change. The agrarian ideal gave way to an industrialized mass society. By 1920, for the first time in American history, more people lived in urban than in rural areas. The old middle class consisting of shopkeepers, farmers, and property owners gave way to a new middle class dominated by hourly wage earners, who owned neither land nor houses. Pg 237- Film noir reflects a transitional stage in American ideology as American identity shifted from nineteenth-century, preindustrial, agrarian prototypes to twentieth-century models that acknowledge the nations transformation into a mass consumer society and an industrialized, corporate state.

Old Myths: Populist Ideology Hard Work Frugality Honesty Being Good Neighbors Self-sufficiency Egalitarianism ????? Common Sense Authenticity Moral Sincerity

Pg 239- Film noir, as a phenomenon of the 1940s, grew out of the horrifying realization that the populist myth that had given comfort American identity in the past was just that- only a myth- and that a new realityhad taken its place. It was a realization that, coupled with the trauma of the war and the disillusionment of the postwar period, served to smash the utopian fantasy world of the 1930s ideology..small- town America did not exist anymore.

Pg: 240- By the late 1950s, the advent of the television virtually destroyed the low-budget, B-film industry that provided a bulk of film noirs. The mood of the country began to reflect a newfound, postwar prosperity, and at the end of the decade, the promise of John F. Kennedys New Frontier turned Americans from potentially depressing thoughts of technological blight produced by industrialization to utopian visions of a machine-age paradise filled with labor-saving devices.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Kiss me, Mike, I want you to kiss meThe liars kiss that says I love you but means something else. Your good at giving such kisses. Kiss me. Kiss Me Deadly has been named the greatest ex. of American Noir Cinema Based on a novel by Mike Spillage What makes Kiss Me Deadly a Film Noir? The predominance of darkness and nighttime Morally Ambiguous Protagonist Existential Underpinnings Influenced by German Expressionist Artist and Filmmakers Homme Fatale Argument The end-justifies the means philosophy

Characters Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) Harsh, unsympathetic detective, searching for a box he knows nothing about.

Velda (Maxine Cooper) Mikes assistant in the Private Investigation Firm

Christina Georgina Rossetti (Cloris Leachman) Watch her in the beginning! She is one of the only women in the film that is portrayed as educated, has a progressive view of men and women, and is ingenious.

Question
The great whatzit is clearly a symbol of truth. The idea that all will be revealed once it is found is each characters fundamental motivation. Everyone is desperately fighting to find the mysterious box because it represents an answer to something they cant explain, a desire for the ultimate; a divine explanation for everything. They have no idea that such an object is unattainable in an existential world. Each character, even Mike, who for most of the film does not even know what hes looking for, rationalize the great whatzit into something they want or need. For Christina, it might have been truth or beauty. For Mike, it appears to be money, or perhaps redemption. For Dr. Soberin and the FBI agents, it is power. The only character that seems to realize such a whatzit is nothing more than a destructive myth is Velda, who muses: They. A wonderful word. And who are they? They are the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatzit. Does it exist? Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what? So what is the great whatzit and do you feel that today we are all still in search of our own great whatzit?

Works Cited Belton, John. American Cinema American Culture. New York: McGrawHill, 2009. Print. Dyer, Chris. Homosexuality and Film Noir. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Np. 1977. Web. 18 May 2011. Weston, Robert. Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Film Monthly. Np. 14 May 2005. Web. 18 May 2011.