| The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955) |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|11:19 am] |
I think this was my favorite one yet. What I liked best was Preminger's enjoyable way of creating cinematic space within the frame. When Frankie gets off the bus in the beginning and is looking in through the window of the tavern and watching the action take place in the bar. And even more so, later on, when Frankie and Kim Novak's character are looking at the bourgeois kitchen display in the department store.
In the first instance Frankie's reality is projected looking in on the bar scene: addiction, need, scams, and cruelty. In the second instance it's fantasy: marriage, gender roles, material wealth. In both cases we observe character's phsychological subjectivity articulated through the act of looking.
Slavoj Zizek calls this "cinematic art at its purist."
On the way out Robin said that he didn't consider the film to be pure film noir. Although the ending was dark, he said, there was too much redemption. |
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| The 13th Letter (Otto Preminger, 1951) |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|12:31 pm] |
Weird, I Confess wasn't the only Hollywood movie of the decade set and shot in Quebec. This was fairly nice. It did a good job of blurring the lines of right and wrong. I liked the scene on the (I assume) St. Lawrence River. Also the image of the hanging lamp that sways back and forth. i think Godard used that same image in King Lear. The ending is really nicely unsatisfying.
The funeral scene is really well shot. A great sense of motion to it. When the poison pen letter falls out of the casket and lands at the feet of the passing procession it's brilliant the way its foreboding hang over everyone, yet, in a public scene sunch as that no one could pick it up.
I love Quebec and sometimes I miss living close to it. |
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| Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) |
[Jul. 25th, 2008|11:36 pm] |
This was nicely dark and pessimistic. Harry Fabian is a scumbag, yet a sympathetic scumbag. He's an "artist without an art" and his schemes always end up with dashed hopes, debt, and the London criminal underworld after his throat. I love him.
The ending was pure poetry. Total desolation. The inevitability of of death and disappointment. The uselessness of it all.
The scene where he hides at Anna's boathouse.
"It's no use coming to me. I can't help you. Nobody can help you."
"I'm not looking for help."
Anna becomes Mother Theresa, holding Harry, lighting his last cigarette. he's already dead.
The last shot is of the gangsters, having killed the tragic sucker in broad daylight, walking away after throwing a cigarette of London bridge. |
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| The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) |
[Feb. 12th, 2008|12:43 pm] |
General Sherwood disappears from the story after that initial scene and the daughters take over. When I worked in a video store years ago I had The Big Sleep practically on repeat. Still, each time I see it, the plot whirls by at a dizzying pace. And while everything seems obvious and appears to make sense while it's happening, I never really fully get it. Not that's necessarily a problem.
Outside Eddie Mars' place, after his and Bacall's charade for Bogey that there's nothing between them, He meets her outside in the parking lot. I love the sideways tracking camera along the cars. The figures in the dark. The camera movement is so perfect for the scene. And again after Bogey is chasing Joe Brodey's (I think?) killer and he pulls his car ahead of him where he's escaping on foot on the sidewalk. The camera does this angled track along the sidewalk keeping pace with the killer's feet. And I'd seen the scene many times but on the big screen it was much more intense. |
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| The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006) |
[Sep. 17th, 2006|11:41 pm] |
There's something unique about when you're watching a scene that is a little badly handled, a little botched, and clumsily directed and the sparsely filled cinema begins to snicker. There's something special about that moment of mild solidarity when total strangers share in mocking something together.
Also, in this article from Cahiers du cinema my two areas of study collide: cinema and museology. It's all about the Cinematheque francaise reopening Henri Langlois' Museum of Cinema: In September, the Cinémathèque française re-opens its doors at Bercy, in the former American Center designed by Frank Gehry. The Cinémathèque’s defunct museum of cinema at Chaillot will be replaced by a permanent exhibition and a reflection on the art of collecting.
some of their collection includes:
1,000 costumes: Vivien Leigh’s dresses in Gone with the Wind, Delphine Seyrig’s dresses in Last Year at Marienbad, Claudia Cardinale’s dresses in 8 1/2, Louis Brooks’s dresses in A Girl in Every Port; as well as the costumes from Satyricon, Ivan the Terrible, The Merry Widow, etc.
1,500 objects: mother’s head in Psycho, the cyclist’s box in Un Chien andalou, the horse’s head from The Testament of Orpheus, the robot from Metropolis, the locomotive from La Roue ...
200 works of art: Starfish by Man Ray, Self-Portrait by Charlie Chaplin, Rhythmus 23 by Hans Richter...
The manuscript archives: by Henri Langlois (see below). 4,000 cinematographic apparatuses: Marey’s Zoetrope, Lumière’s Cinematographe, Biograph’s Mutoscope, Edison’s Kinetoscope-Kinetophone...
The mother's head from Psycho was reputed to once sit on Langlois' desk. I love that man. |
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| Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005) |
[May. 8th, 2006|04:28 pm] |
This was even better than I'd hoped.
I was thinking about how you can't really make a film noir anymore in the strictest sense because the term refers to films made after WWII that had a certain character to them that made them stand out from other gangster films. No one set out to make a noir. It just so happened that in that period there was a general cynicism about humanity mixed with the exile of expressionistic filmmakers who's fled Germany and found themselves in Hollywood resulting in films that decades later critics would look at and classify as noir. So today if the Coen brothers make a film like The Man who Wasn't There or Woody Allen makes Manhatten Murder Mystery they are not film noir proper but a sort of pastiche: They are inspired by a certain period of film. Conversely when Hitchcock made Shadow of a Doubt he didn't sit down and think, "I'm going to make a Noir." The film was just a product of its time.
The dialogue, story structure and pacing ofBrick is so accurately and authentically noir that it's every bit as good as attempts by the Coen brothers or Woody Allen. The feeling you get from it is the same as a film like The Big Sleep: a convoluted plot, the femme fatale, the anti-hero protagonist, the initial object of investigation, the larger mystery that it leads to, the violence, the exposition, and the ending.
Very exciting. |
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| High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941) |
[Jan. 11th, 2006|08:06 pm] |
Bogey looks older not just because the make-up department outfitted him with grey hair, but his face, even his eyes look worn, tired and biter. It's weird to think that this was made only a year or two before Casablanca. Earle (Bogey) is a prohibition-era gangster just pardoned after 8 years in the slammer. As is always the cast with films like this every attempt he makes to do right goes terribly wrong. While I ignore the whole crime-doesn't-pay message of of the film I appreciate its pessimism. |
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