Japan started producing samurai movies in the 50s and 60s. Akira Kurosawa directed quite a few early classics, each one considered not only a great samurai movie, but great movies period.







In the late 60s and 70s, samurai movies took kicked it up a notch to compete with Chinese kung-fu movies. (More about them later...)










This plus Godzilla, somehow, lead to this...



Anyhoo, back to reality.

Chinese and Japanese relations have, historically, been strained. Bruce Lee's film The Chinese Connection is about a Chinese martial arts school that must defend its honor against its Japanese rivals.




Recently, a film entitled Ip Man explored the same teritory. It is the 'real life' story of Bruce Lee's real life instructor.




Here are some of the Chinese 'kung fu' classics:






















Maybe one of the most ground breaking kung fu movies was Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.




Of course, over the years there have been some pretty terrible martial arts movies that have diminished the grandeur of the genre:






One more thing... Thailand has martial arts movies, too. This next fight scene is one take. It's from a movie entitled The Protector.




Also - here's one more scene from Crouching Tiger...




And also also, martial arts films have influenced nearly every aspect of Western action film making...

Action Shots

The following fight sequence is from the 2005 film The Protector. You might want to watch this once more than once. It is one single shot - no cuts or edits.




The next scene is from Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2012). It's pretty much the opposite of The Protector.




Here's one more. It's from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

21st Century Cinema

Supersize Me (2004)

Bowling for Columbine (2002)

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2004)

 Man on Wire (2008)

Lord of the Rings

Persepolis (2007)

The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Gone Nutty (2002)

No Country for Old Men (2007)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Cinema in the 90s

Unforgiven (1992)

 Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Forrest Gump (1994)

The Matrix (1999)

Thelma and Louise (1991)

Strange Days (1995)

Clerks (1994)

 Schindler's List (1993)

Philadelphia (1993)

 Dances with Wolves (1990)

More Mocumentaries

Best in Show








Waiting for Guffman

70s and 80s Extra Credit

Here's your prompt for the independent extra credit film critique. (Remember, the rule is that the film you are choosing should (1) either be from our class handouts on the 70s and 80s or okayed by me, and (2) a film you've never seen before.

Your answer should be thoughtful and thorough. You will be graded on content and quality. Overall, your task is to prove to me that (1) you watched the film and (2) gave it serious consideration. All work should be 100% original. There is no reason for any outside research. If you do include outside research it MUST be properly cited. Use SPECIFIC details from the film the support your responses.

1. Give a summary of the events of the films - significant characters, conflicts, events, etc.
2. Answer this question:  How is this film representative of films from the decade? (Review your notes and our class handout.)
3. Identify where on the realism/formalism continuum this film fits, and explain why.
4. Describe in detail your overall impression of the film.

The 1970s

THE HOLLYWOOD BRATS

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Godfather (1972)

 
Taxi Driver (1976)

The French Connection (1971)

THE GAME CHANGERS

Jaws (1975)

Star Wars (1977)



EXPOITATION

Mad Max (1979)

Super Fly (1973)

Shaft (1971)

Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

60's Cinema

Cleopatra (1963)



Dr. Strangelove (1964)



Planet of the Apes (1968)



Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)



Yojimbo (1961)




The Graduate (1967)



Little Shop of Horrors (1960)



Barbarella (1968)

Welcome to Beaver's House

Here are a few clips to get us into the mindset of a typical 1950s movie goer. These films are samples of the predominantly reactionary attitudes of the 1950s. These reactionary attitudes favored themes such as the following:

• Conservatism
• Pro-military attitudes
• Traditional values
• Fear (outsiders, homosexuals, communism, atomic fallout, the unknown)
• Knowledge as a potential danger

Keep in mind that a progressive film, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, would by their very nature wish to question these ideals.

Some terms to remember: A reactionary is a person who holds political viewpoints that favor a return to a previous state (the status quo) in a society. A progressive is a person who advocates or favors gradual social, political, and economic change (reform).

Appreciating Our Parents (1950)

Duck and Cover (1951)

Soapy the Germ Fighter (1951)

Drug Addiction (1950)

Leave it to Beaver (1959)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Captured by the Frame

Follow these steps to complete your Captured by the Frame Analysis in which you provide insihgt into a frame of film. You will be graded on thoughtfulness,  thoroughness, your ability to use the elements of film we have previously studied, as well as grammar and mechanics. This blog is full of examples of what we're looking for, so feel free to poke around and see what you find.

Step 1 - Grab Your Image Using VideoLAN

1. Select a movie.
2. Insert the DVD into the computer.
3. Close any windows that open. (We will not be using Microsoft Media Player.)
4. Open VLC Media Player (Start - All Programs - VideoLAN - VLC Media Player)
5. Start playing the movie. (Play - Disc - Play)
6. Pause the movie on the frame you wish to capture.
7. Click on Snapshot. (Video - Snapshot)
8. Find your image in the document folder, view it using Windows Photo Viewer. (right click - Open With - Windows Photo Viewer)
9. Move the image into the file folder of your choice.

Step 2 - Consider Your Frame

1. Review all of the elements of cinematography in your note packet, and consider how each applies to your frame, if at all. 
2. Review all of the elements of mise en scene in your note packet, and consider how each applies to your frame, if at all. 

Step 3 - Share Your Understanding of Your Frame

1. Paragraph 1 - State the title of your movie and establish the context/background story of the frame. In other words, what's been happening in the film so far?
2. Paragraph 2 - State the exact minute of second that your frame appears in the film, and provide and overview of what if occurring in the frame.
3. Paragraphs 3 through ? - Each body paragraph will explore a different cinematic element as it is used by the filmmakers in the frame. (camera angle, costuming, contrast...etc.)
4. Final Paragraph - Summarize the overall effect created by the filmmaker with the use of the aforementioned elements.

Step 4 - Submit Your Project

1. Name your image and your text document with similar names - both including your complete last name.
2. Save them to Mr. Cowlin's 'toteach' folder - 'Captured by the Frame Period 5' folder.
3. Projects are due by April 18.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss

If anybody is in the mood for some extra credit, here you go. Read the following Casablanca analyses and comment freely below. Be specific (with regards to the film and the reviews) in your comments. You'll get credit for quality and quantity.

March 19, 2012

EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK’S: “CASABLANCA” ON THE BIG SCREEN

David Denby

The New Yorker

Sometime in the sixties, a mythic event occurred in Harvard Square. At the Brattle Theatre, during a showing of “Casablanca,” the sound failed in the last scene, and the assembled worshipers, speaking as one, intoned the famous final line: “Louis, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It’s just possible that the story is true. In the entire history of American cinema only a few other movies—“Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Godfather”—have been loved as much and as well as “Casablanca.” After seeing it on television for years, or suffering through a chewed-up print in a broken-seat revival house, moviegoers will have a chance to witness a freshly struck print this Wednesday, March 21st, on large screens. “Casablanca” is seventy years old. For one day, it will be playing all over the country. It’s worth going: the most familiar movie in the world is still fresh; it has so many little busy corners to nestle in.

The universal adoration has been produced by an unrepeatable combination of impudent wit and doomed romanticism, all of it held together by voluptuously emotional anti-fascist sentiment. Politically, “Casablanca” is a very knowing film. Several people in the movie refer to the not-so-hidden earlier activities of Humphrey Bogart’s saloon keeper Rick Blaine—running guns to Ethiopia and fighting in Spain on the Loyalist side (“and well-paid for it each time,” as he acidly notes). The vast American theatre audience of the forties (eighty to ninety million people a week) was expected to know what all that referred to, and why it was the right (that is, left) and smart thing to do in the thirties. Rick helped Haile Selassie take on the Italian fascists, and helped the Spanish Socialists fight Franco. Among other things, the movie is a desperate appeal to the honor of the French, who had gone down meekly before the Nazis, and a poke in the ribs to sleeping Americans: Get into this war and win it. “Casablanca” was completed in 1942, but it’s set in December, 1941, the time of Pearl Harbor.

As for myself, everything I know about history is derived from the prologue. A slowly spinning globe sits in a fleecy tuft of clouds, and a dour March of Time voice outlines the refugee situation during the war. We see documentary footage (the trudging homeless) and an animated map—an inky line movies from Paris to Marseilles, from there to Oran, and finally to Casablanca, where the lucky ones escape via Lisbon and the rest “wait…and wait…and wait.” Stranded (“I will die in Casablanca”), they congregate at Rick’s American Café, a vast white stucco cavern, with arches, interior rooms, potted palms, a bar, a bandstand, an upstairs office. It is the Big White Nightclub of so many Hollywood movies in the thirties and forties movies, made exotic by men in fezzes. A more astonishing collection of scoundrels, innocents, and cynics has never been brought together in one place. There are refugees and black marketers, defrocked bankers and resistance fighters, gamblers, floozies, French colonial policemen, American and Spanish entertainers, and, eventually, Nazi officers (who in reality never set foot in Casablanca). It is all of Europe, monitored by a cynical American and his black sidekick at the piano (the very talented actor Dooley Wilson, who was taught to sing for this movie, with memorable results). Except for an earnest young wife who is willing to sell her virtue to get herself and her husband out of Casablanca, there isn’t a dull one among them. “Casablanca” is the most sociable, the most companionable film ever made. Life as an endless party.

The opening scenes are a series of preposterously barbed encounters. All these people are stranded in unoccupied France—colonial Morocco—with its unfathomable protocols of safety and risk. Fascists and anti-fascists insult one another and get away with it. It’s almost a sport: who can make the most insinuating remarks? Rick’s old girlfriend Ilse Lund (Ingrid Bergman) shows up with her noble resistance-fighter husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), and they, too, immediately go to the café and trade insults. All of this is nonsense, of course—no underground leader would show up in a tropical white suit in a night club with his gorgeous wife on his arm—but the movie takes place in a magic space, the blissful imagining of big-studio Hollywood, a playground for the knowing, the sexual, the witty, the risk-takers.

Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, an elegant Nazi with precise diction, keeps hissing threats at Laszlo, but Strasser’s power is limited. Casablanca is actually run by two men of the world, the corrupt prefect Louis Reynaud (Claude Rains) and Rick, the American freebooter; and it’s swayed by a minor deity, Senor Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet, who wears a fez and speaks in a British accent). Ferrari proudly refers to his elevated status as “the head of all illegal activities in Casablanca.” Clearly a man of substance, it’s his party, too. Everything is negotiable in Casablanca, where the sternest idealism and the most obvious larceny are in constant touch. We want the world to be like this—fast, allusive, morally compromised, and noble at the same time. Every night, Rick the alcoholic saloon keeper puts on a white dinner jacket and presides over his tumultuous playpen.

“Casablanca” was based on “the world’s worst play” (according to James Agee)—an unproduced work, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. An anonymous Warner Bros. story analyst in New York, reading it in manuscript, nevertheless reported the alluring presence of “sophisticated hokum.” The most important producer at Warner, Hal B. Wallis, who had just signed a deal giving him unlimited control over the pictures he worked on, began assembling a script. The usual accounting of this tortuous process goes like this: Screenwriter Casey Robinson fleshed out the romantic entanglement of Rick and Ilse; the twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein worked on the structure; and Howard Koch handled the politics and toned everything up. The men gathered at Wallis’s farm, in the San Fernando Valley, and blended the different parts together. (Koch remained with the production and re-wrote parts of it as it was shot.) Wallis dismissed the studio’s gruesome initial choice of actors (Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan), got turned down by George Raft (who was offered the part of Rick), and then traded, for one picture, Warners’ star Olivia de Haviland to David O. Selznick for the young womanly Swedish beauty Ingrid Bergman. Finally, with Bergman and Bogart, who was grumpy and dissatisfied, in tow, he began production in Burbank, in April, 1942. The Warners staff director, Michael Curtiz, an exiled Hungarian Jew, was in charge.

That mélange of screenwriters produced some adorably terrible lines, including the much appreciated “Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight.” But it also produced such famous bits of insolence, as the exchange between Rick and Louis (“I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”), and, of course, the single best use of the passive voice in movie history: Rick plugs Strasser, and Renault says to his men, “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.” As the production moved along, no one knew how the story would end—an uncertainty which, it is commonly believed, enhanced Ingrid Bergman’s anxiety, playing into her extraordinarily touching performance. Wallis and Curtiz eventually agreed to shoot Howard Koch’s preferred ending, with distraught Ilse, still in love with Rick, going off with Laszlo to America, and Rick and Louis going off together into the fog. (In Morocco? Fog? Never mind.) Wallis himself apparently wrote the closing line. In the end, the American cynic, the selfish bastard who “sticks his neck out for nobody” but gets things done, agrees to fight the Nazis. The Axis powers are doomed.

In real life, the place that everybody came to was Hollywood in the thirties and forties. In the fascist period, Los Angeles was the arts capital of the Western world. Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Otto Klemperer were there, as well as Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hanns Eisler, and many, many others. The studios were crawling with European musicians, actors, and directors. Wallis put together the staggering cast, which included Peter Lorre, Greenstreet, Veidt (who had been a major star in Germany), Marcel Dalio (the star, a few years earlier, of Renoir’s “Rules of the Game”), Leonid Kinsky (the lecherous bartender), and S. Z. Sakall (the chubby waiter Karl), mainly out of Warners’ pool of contract players. The commissary at lunch, with its mix of nationalities and accents, may not have been all that different from Rick’s Café. The people there are all desperate for work, desperate to find a home, yet happy to be alive and stuck in an absurdly sunshiny place in a naïvely optimistic country. The combination of European bitterness and American joy made “Casablanca” possible. America will save Europe. American movies will save Europe. When Victor Laszlo leads the demoralized French in the “Marseilles,” and even Yvonne, the chippy who is sleeping with a Nazi officer, joins in, the stoniest intellectual collapses in tears. It never fails, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Kitsch has never been so powerful.

Kenneth Tynan called the movie “a masterpiece of light entertainment,” which, I think, strikes exactly the right note. You can’t take any of “Casablanca” seriously—but then, you are not meant to. The breathless excitement of the last third, with its reversals at gunpoint, is laughably melodramatic, and you laugh at yourself for being so caught up in it. Michael Curtiz, a very skilled director, keeps the camera moving through the café, rushing from table to table like an eager waiter. In the Paris flashbacks, he sustains the high-romantic tone of ardor and rain-soaked disillusion. He’s good at all the small atmospheric things going on in corners—the people selling each other something or desperately drinking or gambling. The closeups of Bergman, lit by cameraman Arthur Edeson (who also shot “The Maltese Falcon”), are uniformly ravishing. The general level of craftsmanship and Burbank Orientalism is superb. It would be hard, however, to see much of Curtiz’s point of view in the material. The auteurs of “Casablanca” are Hal Wallis and the long-ago big studios themselves—their atmosphere and talents, with corruptions and generosities all mixed together—what André Bazin called “the genius of the system.”

September 15, 1996

CASABLANCA

Roger Ebert

Chicago Sun Times

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that “Casablanca” is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making “Casablanca” thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an “A list” picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet,Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of “Casablanca” was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,” he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. “What is your nationality?” the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, “I'm a drunkard.” His personal code: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Then “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, “As Time Goes By.” He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (“I thought I told you never to play that song!”). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (“Round up the usual suspects.”)

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the “happy” ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (“it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as “Havana,” Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of “Casablanca” is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

Going to the Movies in the 1940s

Before we get into our 1940s movie, I thought you might like a peek at what a day at the movies was like in the 1940s. You got all of this, plus a movie, for around a dime.

The Three Stooges


Movie Tone News - circa 1941

Spy Smasher Chapter 4 - 1942

War Bond Drive Cartoon - circa 1942


"Moose Hunters" 1937

"Education for Death: the Making of a Nazi" - 1943

"Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor" 1936

The Origins of Cinema

The Silent Era

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895)

The Big Swallow (c1901)

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Frankenstein (1910)




Steamboat Willie (1928)

One Week (1920)

Defining Kubric's Style

In a thoughtful, thorough, multi-paragraph essay, perform the following task:

Define Stanley Kubrick's style.

Consider the following when constructing your response:

• Your notes - cinematography, editing, sound, and mis-en-scene (everything...and that's a lot)
• The images collected below from the film
• Any other Kubrick films you might have seen on your own (for a list of his films, click here)
• Check out clips of Kubrick's films online (Youtube, etc.)

Your essay won't be due until the Thursday after break, so you can either work on it over break if you have time or work on it the four days we have back at school. Your choice. If you have any questions, please let me know.