Film Noir II: Pre-Noir

Where did Noir come from? Noir found its roots in early German expressionism:







Noir also took many of its themes from the ganster/crime stories of the 1930s:

Film Noir I - Classic Noir

Definition:
Film noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat, and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theaters following the WWII.



The classic noir story:
A cynical, hard-hearted, disillusioned male character encounters a beautiful but promiscuous, amoral, double-dealing and seductive femme fatale. She uses her feminine sexuality to manipulate him. After a betrayal or double-cross, she is frequently destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero's life.



Typical noir moods:

• melancholy
• bleakness
• disillusionment
• ambiguity
• moral corruption
• guilt
• desperation
• paranoia

The classic noir anti-hero:

• corrupt
• down-and-out
• conflicted
• hard-boiled
• morally-ambiguous
• cynical
• obsessive (sexual or otherwise)
• brooding
• menacing
• frightened

The typical noir story line:

• elliptical
• non-linear and twisting
• maze-like and convoluted
• typically told with foreboding background music and flashbacks 
• often told with witty dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration.

Typical noir themes:

• the dark and inhumane side of human nature
• doomed love
• emphasized the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience

Typical noir visuals:

• expressionistic lighting
• deep-focus or depth of field camera work
• disorienting visual schemes
• ominous shadows
• skewed camera angles
• circling cigarette smoke
• unbalanced or moody compositions

Interior settings are often:

• single-source lighting
• venetian-blinded windows and rooms
• dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances.

Exterior settings are often:

• urban night scenes with deep shadows
• dark alleyways
• rain-slicked or mean streets
• flashing neon lights
• low key lighting

1975: Best Picture Showdown

In 1975, five films were nominated for 'Best Picture' by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. They were:

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest won. Jaws did not. Jaws, for better or worse, spawned three direct sequels and, some would argue, changed the face of Hollywood forever. (Summer suddenly became the season to make money in movie theaters - a phenomenon that had never before occurred.)

Here is the question of the day:

Did Cuckoo's Nest rightfully win the 'Best Picture' award, or was Jaws robbed?

This will not be an online discussion. Instead, please answer the question in a multi-paragraph, 300 word essay. Please put the word count in the upper right hand corner along with your name. Please be sure that your essay is thoughtful and thorough, as well as grammatically correct. You will probably want to take into account and state the criteria by which you are making your determination. You should also back up your claims with specific evidence from each film.

Jaws: On the Beach

Here's a pretty good article that gives a bit of a history of Jaws and also details some of the lasting effects it's had on the American movie industry. Give it a read. Report below in an online class discussion. Your comments should be thoughtful and thorough. You will be graded on quality as well and quantity.

SUMMER FILMS: ON THE BEACH

The Movie That Created the 'Summer Movie'

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY (NYT)

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 30, 2000

Twenty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg's ''Jaws'' created the Summer Movie as we know it: the action-heavy ''thrill ride'' sort of picture, aimed at sensation-hungry younger audiences, which moves into theaters around Memorial Day and remains there, partying hard, until the school year starts up again in September. ''Jaws'' opened on June 20, 1975, and its phenomenal popularity -- it was the first movie to relieve American audiences of more than $100 million of their hard-earned money -- helped turn Hollywood into what is now largely a summer-business town, sort of like Amity, the New England beach resort where the film's dire events take place. Watching the picture today, you might interpret it as a kind of allegory, in which the business community of Amity, refusing to close the beaches after a couple of fatal shark attacks, eerily embodies the ethics and aesthetics of the entertainment industry. The distributors and exhibitors do not shut down the multiplex even when they know that something lethal -- a ''Speed 2,'' a ''Godzilla,'' a ''Wild, Wild West'' -- lurks within.

This is not to say (as some do) that ''Jaws'' is responsible for the ''blockbuster mentality'' that has held sway over the major studios for the past couple of decades. When did Hollywood not try for blockbusters? You can pin this rap on any enormously lucrative picture you happen not to like; just from the decade preceding ''Jaws,'' suspects include ''The Exorcist,'' ''The French Connection,'' ''Love Story'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' ''The Godfather'' has the alibi of obvious greatness; even if it were the culprit, not a court in the world would convict it. The worst you can say about ''Jaws,'' I think, is that its success suggested, to the beady-eyed studio marketers, a link between the kind of movie it so spectacularly was and the time of year when it was released.

When studio executives first saw ''Jaws,'' they must have reacted like those old cartoon characters whose eyes would pop open and turn into dollar signs. The movie proposed a solution to a problem that had been plaguing the suits since the late 60's -- how to tap into the big ''youth'' market, but reliably. The studios didn't quite understand the appeal of pictures like ''The Graduate,'' ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' ''Easy Rider'' and ''M*A*S*H'' and certainly couldn't replicate it. (For that matter, they couldn't even figure out how to clone ''Love Story.'') But ''Jaws'' was, on the face of it, entertainment of a type the studios knew how to produce. At that time, action pictures were mostly being marketed to older audiences, but ''Jaws'' showed Hollywood it could sell action to kids too, with a few adjustments -- a faster pace, a hipper kind of humor, a stronger sense of horror and no Charlton Heston. (Mr. Heston had in fact wanted to play the police chief in ''Jaws,'' but Mr. Spielberg wisely rejected him in favor of Roy Scheider.) And why not release that type of movie in the summertime, when -- for the middle-class young, at least -- the livin' is easy?

The discovery of the action-youth-summer nexus is a stirring myth for marketing departments, a Grail legend for M.B.A.'s. Ordinary moviegoers, however -- and especially those over 25 -- tend to view this achievement as rather a mixed blessing. What if, some pleasant evening in July, you want to go to the movies, but just don't feel like a blow-you-through-the-back-wall-of-the-theater experience? You're out of luck, and that could make you a tad resentful toward ''Jaws'' and its spawn. But that feeling should be resisted, because ''Jaws,'' like ''The Godfather,'' is a great film. And it, too, deserves immunity from prosecution for the crimes of present-day Hollywood.

In order to grant ''Jaws'' the coveted ''Godfather'' exemption, though, it may be necessary for film historians and the higher-minded segment of the film audience to overcome a few prejudices about genre. ''Jaws'' is, after all, fundamentally a horror movie. There's a rugged, nautical-adventure component to the second half of the picture, in which the three main characters -- Police Chief Brody, an icthyologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the salty old shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) -- roam the coastal waters in search of the giant homicidal fish. But the movie has a lot more in common with ''Dracula'' than with ''Moby-Dick.'' This great white shark is no Great White Whale, gorging on metaphor; it's a monster, pure and simple, and its sole purpose is to generate fear.

That's the essence of the horror genre -- in fact, the only way of defining it that connects supernatural thrillers about ghosts and vampires with sci-fi monster movies (''The Thing,'' the ''Alien'' series), and also with slasher and serial-killer sagas (''Halloween,'' ''The Silence of the Lambs'') that don't require the viewer to believe in occult forces, life after death, the Devil, or extraterrestrial organisms. The shark of ''Jaws,'' as conceived by Peter Benchley, the author of the best-selling 1973 novel, is a natural predator exaggerated just enough to turn it into an acceptable horror-story nemesis: it's described as a ''rogue,'' with atypical feeding patterns that almost suggest a purpose, a malevolent will; and it's larger than normal, making it, of course, that much harder to kill. Those are the characteristics requisite to a monster: a whiff of evil and an aura of invincibility.

And Mr. Spielberg, who had successfully attributed those very qualities to, of all things, a big truck in the television movie ''Duel'' (1971), knew even more than Mr. Benchley did about the mechanics of producing fear. One of the reasons the film is so much better than the book is that Mr. Spielberg is more single-minded in his dedication to scaring us silly; he eliminated the novel's distracting subplots, and his editing rhythm is so unsettling that the audience never gets the chance to relax, even during apparent lulls and scenes of comic relief. We're always aware of something awful under the placid surface.

How much an individual viewer actually enjoys that unremitting tension is, I suppose, a matter of temperament. What makes a horror movie more disturbing than other kinds of suspense thrillers and action movies -- police dramas, say, or the international intrigue Tom Clancy serves up -- is that the anxiety it generates is magnified by a sense of helplessness: you're up against a force that can't be mastered by reason. Many adults, especially those of the well-educated, professionally accomplished variety, don't like that feeling one bit and may complain about having been manipulated by a genuinely scary movie like ''Jaws.'' (If there's manipulating to be done, they're going to be the ones to do it.) Those of us who don't feel quite so masterly are a good deal more comfortable with the horror experience. Teenagers get it in a big way.

Two years after ''Jaws'' opened, Mr. Spielberg himself sounded a little sheepish about what he'd done, almost apologetic about the film's effectiveness. ''I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture,'' he said. ''I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror.'' He was unfair to himself. Of the thousands of suspense-and-terror machines constructed for the movies in the medium's first century, only a few have made their ''moving, working parts'' function so smoothly. (Even though the movie's mechanical shark, famously, didn't work very well at all.) But Mr. Spielberg didn't want to be known as, in his words, ''a shark-and-truck director,'' perhaps in part because, like all young virtuosos -- he was 28 when ''Jaws'' opened -- he had a tendency to get bored with his own facility, to undervalue the skills that other artists would sell their souls for.

And he probably suspected, too, that as a director of horror movies he would never be taken entirely seriously as a filmmaker and might even wind up looking faintly disreputable. (The career of his friend Brian De Palma would, over the next 10 years, provide confirmation of that suspicion.) Mr. Spielberg could have used some of the magisterial confidence of Alfred Hitchcock, who was always inordinately proud of ''Psycho'' -- the ''Jaws'' of 1960 -- precisely because it was the film in which he exercised the most absolute control over viewers' responses. The master of suspense wasn't apologetic about creating fear, because it's a potent emotion, and he was fortunate (or, if you will, cynical) enough to believe that for a filmmaker no emotion was better than any other.

Hitchcock may not have been right about that. The sheer terror of ''Psycho'' is less complex, and less rewarding for the audience, than the metaphysical dread that informs ''Vertigo.'' And fear, it should be said, is potentially more dangerous than many other emotions: wielded by demagogues and propagandists, it can be hugely destructive. But it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to be moronically simple, either. ''Jaws'' is the proof.

Although Mr. Spielberg's technical prowess is ideally suited to the horror genre, his temperament really isn't. He brings a rather sunny outlook to extremely dark material, a contrast that weirdly enhances the paradox at the center of Mr. Benchley's story: the juxtaposition of summertime fun and sudden, violent death. (In ''Jaws,'' a day at the beach isn't exactly a day at the beach.) Mr. Spielberg doesn't merely juxtapose those elements but seems rather to unite them; they meet, somehow, at the horizon.

What struck me as I watched ''Jaws'' again recently (there's a good letterboxed video but no DVD yet) is how much more humor and beauty Mr. Spielberg brings to it than it really needs to be an effective genre piece. The interplay of the three men in the boat is often hilarious (think, for example, of the improvised-looking scene in which they drunkenly compare scars), and even the most shocking bits of carnage are so elegantly conceived that they have a sort of perverse wit. For all the relentless, terrifying momentum ''Jaws'' builds up, it's an unusually companionable horror picture: it doesn't oppress viewers with claustrophobic atmosphere or try to wow them with special effects. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single process shot in the movie. The ocean and the clear sky are allowed to be themselves, and so are the three sensibly apprehensive men who move through this gorgeous setting in search of the beast. ''Jaws'' makes fear look natural -- which of course, it is. In this picture, we understand terror so well we can even laugh at it.

I don't mean to denigrate ''Jaws'' by making it sound profound. This is not the sort of picture that wants the audience to think too hard. It's a visceral-experience movie, and its distinction, I believe, is that it's truer to the experience of physical fear than any other horror movie, before or since. I also wouldn't want to claim that the film's influence hasn't been a little pernicious. We'd all give a lot, I'm sure, to have been spared the overbearing action-and-horror fests of the past 25 summers (including, prominently, Mr. Spielberg's own ''Jaws'' knockoff ''Jurassic Park''). But it's time to let ''Jaws'' off the hook. Like the great white, it is what it is, and does what it does with extraordinary efficiency and power. And so what if most of its descendants have been terrible? If every summer movie were as good as ''Jaws,'' none of us would ever get to the beach.

Got teeth?

Here is some documentary footage about Jaws if you are interested. Watch a few and post below for extra credit.

Action Films vs Musicals

Step one: read this review of House of Flying Daggers from the New York Times:


MOVIE REVIEW | 'HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS'
"Fanciful Flights of Blood and Passion"
By A. O. SCOTT


The Chinese director Zhang Yimou first came to the attention of American audiences in the early 1990's, as the maker of stirring, visually glorious tales of historical turmoil and forbidden love like "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou." Then, later in the decade, he entered a neo-realist phase, with rough-hewn, modest stories of peasant indomitability like "Not One Less" and "The Road Home."


Now in his early 50's, Mr. Zhang has embarked on the third chapter of an already dazzling career, reinventing himself as an action filmmaker, first with "Hero," a late-summer hit for Miramax, and now with "House of Flying Daggers," which Sony Classics is releasing.


Set in the twilight of the Tang Dynasty, and filmed, from the look of it, at the peak of China's foliage season, "House of Flying Daggers" is a gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving. A Chinese mainlander's tribute to the sword and martial-arts epics of the past, most of which were produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it also echoes the widescreen Technicolor westerns and musicals that the Hollywood studios cranked out in their early battle against television.


Mr. Zhang, who once directed a production of "Turandot" with a cast of thousands in the Forbidden City in Beijing, possesses an operatic ability to turn intimate stories into grand spectacles. His diva of the moment is Zhang Ziyi, whose delicate facial features fill the screen and whose lithe movements animate the film's heady combat choreography.


Ms. Zhang plays Mei, a blind courtesan who turns out to be a member of the Flying Daggers, a shadowy squad of assassins waging a guerrilla insurgency against the corrupt and decadent government. She is pursued by two government deputies, Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), whose loyalties come into question as the chase turns into a love triangle. Everyone is engaged in several layers of deceit, and some of the third-act revelations are more likely to provoke laughter than gasps of amazement.


But realism is as irrelevant a criterion here as it would be in an Italian opera. The movie is about color, kineticism and the kind of heavy-breathing, decorous sensuality that went out of American movies when sexual candor came in. Occasionally, Ms. Zhang bares one of her lovely shoulders. If she showed any more, the projector might catch fire.


It might anyway, from the sheer audacious heat of some of the action sequences. Two in particular - the "echo game" set piece that takes place in a brothel and a later battle in a grove of whispering bamboo - are likely to become classic reference points, cherished like favorite numbers from "Singin' in the Rain." It is a commonplace that action movies are closely related to musicals, and few directors prove the point with as much discipline and flair. The bamboo-forest scene is not just a bravura exercise in vertical and horizontal choreography. It is also a heroic feat of sound design, with the whistle of the bamboo fronds played in counterpoint to the impact of cudgels and spears.


The story inevitably gets lost in this sensory barrage, and it is hard to feel much for the three lovers as they sing their climactic arias of jealousy and betrayal. The final confrontation takes place in the midst of a sudden snowstorm, which envelopes the sun-dappled field that had, a few moments earlier, been a perfect spot for al fresco love-making. And "House of Flying Daggers" itself, for all its fire and beauty, may leave you a bit cold in the end.



Now read this review from the Chicago Sun Times:



House of Flying Daggers
"Stylish scenes make 'Flying Daggers' soar"
BY ROGER EBERT / Dec 17, 2004


Movie imagery, which has grown brutal and ugly in many of the new high-tech action pictures, may yet be redeemed by the elegance of martial arts pictures from the East. Zhang Yimou's "House of Flying Daggers," like his "Hero" (2004) and Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000) combines excitement, romance and astonishing physical beauty; to Pauline Kael's formula of "kiss kiss bang bang," we can now add "pretty pretty."


Forget about the plot, the characters, the intrigue, which are all splendid in "House of Flying Daggers," and focus just on the visuals. There are interiors of ornate elaborate richness, costumes of bizarre beauty, landscapes of mountain ranges and meadows, fields of snow, banks of autumn leaves and a bamboo grove that functions like a kinetic art installation.


The action scenes set in these places are not broken down into jagged short cuts and incomprehensible foreground action. Zhang stands back and lets his camera regard the whole composition, wisely following Fred Astaire's belief that to appreciate choreography you must be able to see the entire body in motion. Tony Scott of the New York Times is on to something when he says the film's two most accomplished action scenes are likely to be "cherished like favorite numbers from 'Singin' in the Rain' and 'An American in Paris.' " Try making that claim about anything in "Matrix" or "Blade Trinity."


The scenes in question are the Echo Game, and a battle in a tall bamboo grove. The Echo Game takes place inside the Peony Pavilion, a luxurious brothel that flourishes in the dying days of the Tang Dynasty, 859 A.D. An undercover policeman named Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) goes there on reports that the new dancer may be a member of the House of Flying Daggers, an underground resistance movement. The dancer is Mei (Zhang Ziyi, also in "Hero" and "Crouching Tiger"), and she is blind; martial arts pictures have always had a special fondness for blind warriors, from the old "Zatoichi" series about a blind swordsman to Takeshi Kitano's "Zatoichi" remake (2004).


After Mei dances for Jin, his fellow cop Leo (Andy Lau) challenges her to the Echo Game, in which the floor is surrounded by drums on poles, and he throws a nut at one of the drums. She is to hit the same drum with the weighted end of her long sleeve. First one nut, then three, then countless nuts are thrown, as Mei whirls in mid air to follow the sounds with beats of her own; like the house-building sequence in the Kitano picture, this becomes a ballet of movement and percussion.


Jin and Mei form an alliance to escape from the emperor's soldiers, Mei not suspecting (or does she?) that Jin is her undercover enemy. On their journey, supposedly to the secret headquarters of the House of Flying Daggers, they fall in love; but Jin sneaks off to confer with his Leo, who is following them with a contingent of warriors, hoping to be led to the hideout. Which side is Jin betraying?


Still other warriors, apparently not aware of the undercover operation, attack the two lovers, and there are scenes of improbable delight, as when four arrows from one bow strike four targets simultaneously. Indeed most of the action in the movie is designed not to produce death, but the pleasure of elegant ingenuity. The impossible is cheerfully welcome here.


The fight in the bamboo grove inspires comparison with the treetop swordfight in "Crouching Tiger," but is magnificent in its own way. Warriors attack from above, hurling sharpened bamboo shafts that surround the lovers, and then swooping down on tall, supple bamboo trees to attack at close range. The sounds of the whooshing bamboo spears and the click of dueling swords and sticks have a musical effect; if these scenes are not part of the soundtrack album, they should be.


The plot is almost secondary to the glorious action, until the last act, which reminded me a little of the love triangle in Hitchcock's "Notorious." In that film, a spy sends the woman he loves into danger, assigning her to seduce an enemy of the state, which she does for patriotism and her love of her controller. Then the spy grows jealous, suspecting the woman really loves the man she was assigned to deceive. In "House of the Flying Daggers" the relationships contain additional levels of discovery and betrayal, so that the closing scenes in the snow field are operatic in their romantic tragedy.


Zhang Yimou has made some of the most visually stunning films I've seen ("Raise the Red Lantern") and others of dramatic everyday realism ("To Live"). Here, and with "Hero," he wins for mainland China a share of the martial arts glory long claimed by Hong Kong and its acolytes like Ang Lee and Quentin Tarantino. The film is so good to look at and listen to that, as with some operas, the story is almost beside the point, serving primarily to get us from one spectacular scene to another.


Now spend a few minutes and take a look at these three scenes both reviews mentioned. The first is from the film.




The second is a very famous scene from the film Singin' in the Rain.




And the third is a nearly as famous scene from An American in Paris.




Maybe you noticed that Ebert, in the second review, directly referenced Scott from the first review. Well, there seems to be one point on which the two critics agree and one point on which the two critics disagree. Your task is to write one thoughtful, thorough paragraph to one of the two prompts I've set up in the comments below. (The first prompt is about the similarity I just mentioned, and the second prompt is about the difference.) This is not an online discussion; rather, it is a thoughtful response to a prompt. Again, your entry should be a well written paragraph posted in the response field of one of the two comments I've posted.

For extra credit you may write a second response to the other prompt.