Film Noir

Alas this week I have not had the time to watch movies outside of class as I would have liked so I will take this post to analyze the film noir we have seen. Certainly it is a genre worthy of reflection and analysis. The films that we watched include Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, and Chinatown.

Here is a quick synopsis of each-
Out of the Past: Jeff Baily is living in the idyllic countryside and has found himself the perfect girlfriend there. However his past catches up to him when Joe says that Whit Sterling wants to see him again. Jeff then recounts to his girl friend how he used to work as a detective for Whit and was sent to find Whit's girlfriend Kathie Moffat but had ended up running off with her. His detective partner found him and Kathie shot him. Jeff then left Kathie and went to live his life out in the country. Whit is angry at this betrayal and forces Jeff to retrieve tax forms held by Whit's accountant who is trying to black mail him. It turns out to be a frame up which Jeff narrowly avoids. Jeff manages to convince Whit to make a deal with him when Joe is killed, but Kathie then murders Whit. Jeff dies when Kathie shoots him when he double crosses her in her attempt to run off with him. If you want a more detailed description of the movie go here.

Kiss Me Deadly: Mick Hammer is a detective specializing in finding out if a spouse is cheating. One day when he is driving home Gabrielle, a woman dressed in a trench coat, steps into the middle of the road and forces him to give her a lift. They are then apprehended, she is killed and Hammer is pushed over a cliff in his car but survives. The puzzle that she presents leads Hammer to investigate her case. He enlists the aide of Velda his partner in the detective business and avoids help from the authority. He meets up with Gabrielle's "roommate" Christina Bailey and realizes that there are a lot of big shots involved with the case and continues to pursue it because he believes that he will make it rich. There are several accidents involved as a mysterious force tries to dissuade Hammer from the case including the murder of his mechanic, two car bombs, and a stalker with a knife. Hammer successfully manages to avoid these pit falls and discovers a key that Gabrielle had hidden away which opened a locker that had a box with an atomic bomb in it. His partner Velda is kidnapped and he leads Christina to the box who then runs away with it. When Hammer goes to the police he learns that Gabrielle's roommate had been dead for days. Hammer goes to save Velda, but Christina shoots the man who paid her to get the box and opens the box. The world then ends.

Chinatown: J. J. Gittes is also a marriage detective. He is hired to find out if Mr Mulwray is cheating on his wife. The pictures he takes then end up in the newspaper and Gittes finds out that the person who hired him was not the real Mrs. Mulwray. To save face Gittes offers to Mrs. Mulwray to find out who set him up. Then Mr Mulwray turns up murdered. Gittes finds out that the water company is dumping water into the ocean when Los Angeles in the middle of a drought. When spying on the water company he is caught and a thug slices open his nose. Gittes keeps prying going to water officials' offices and finds out the company used to be owned by Noah Cross, Evelyn's father. He visits the orange fields where the water was being diverted to (thus causing some run off). He finds that the farmers aren't getting any water and are being forced to sell the land cheap to varies investors. He then talks with Mr Cross and begins to look for Mulwray's mistress. He finds her in Evelyn's house and he suspects that she killed her husband. He confronts her and calls the police in to make her fess up. When she does she says that the girl is both her sister and her daughter because Noah Cross raped her. Noah Cross is the bad guy in charge of buying up all the orange fields. Gittes then tries to get Evelyn and her daughter/sister out of there but there is a big showdown in Chinatown. Evelyn is shot and killed by the police, Cross gets custody of his granddaughter/daughter, and Gittes is sent home traumatized by the injustice caused by meaning well.

Common Elements:
A hard boiled detective as the main character: All three movies' protagonists were detectives. What type of detective varied on how pessimistic the movie was. The least pessimistic Out of the Past, had a typical if lower class and sometimes underhanded detective while Kiss Me Deadly with its paranoia and doomsday prophesy had a "bedroom dick" who would not shy from blackmailing his the spouse caught cheating or seducing the wife to show that she was unfaithful.

Femme fatale: Both Kiss Me Deadly and Out of the Past have a femme fatale character while Chinatown sets up Mrs. Mulwray to be a femme fatale character though in the end her motives are pure. To be honest the femme fatale character in Kiss Me Deadly Catherine Baily is less of the exotic seductress who then wraps the man around her fingers, but more of a woman trying to be independant, but failing. She tries to seduce Hammer, but fails. She tries to take the situation into her own hands and murders her employer, but ends up blowing up the world.

I felt that the best elements of typical film noir dialogue were found in Out of the Past. I found the dialogue with cryptic and often sarcastic remarks such as "it is called earning a living, you may have heard about it somewhere" in the constant battle between Jeff and Whits entertaining. It also helped develop the charactersas they made their mistrust shown in their words instead of faces or attitudes.

Typically film noir is filmed in black and white, but Chinatown was a neo-noir film and was filmed in color. While I find the black and white useful in emphasizing certain aspects of the characters and plot, such as when Kathie's face is shown half in shadow and half in white light when Jeff can't decide if she is good or evil I find the color movie easier to watch and more engaging. The black and white film style also made the movies seem even more bleak and depressive. I found that Polanski was able to achieve some of the affects that the black and white films had by purposly manipulating color. In one of the last scenes of Chinatown Evelyn is shot and great spurts of red blood are running down her face contrasted sharply with the drab setting. In a black and white film this scene could not nearly have been so shocking, the blood would have faded into the background and complex lighting schemes of the typical film noir styled shot. With the color Chinatown was able to achieve a more depressed and pessimistic world view than would have been otherwise possible by shocking the reader with the final scene.

Enchanted

Enchanted, directed by Kevin Lima, is a funny and amusing, though not outstanding, film. A quick synopsis is Giselle (Amy Adams) falls in love with Prince Edward and is set to marry him in what is a stereotypical Disney ending. Edward's mother, the evil Queen, will lose her thrown if her marries so she sends Giselle into the "real" world and the Prince comes to save her. In the real world Giselle finds herself lost and without friends and has to contend with the difficulties of strange emotions such as anger and hate.

The movie, taken in small snapshots, is wonderful. The animation is particularly good. One scene that really caught my attention was when the Queen's minion was talking to her from the real world and she sent him poison apples. The apples seemed to flawlessly transition from cartoon apples in the Queen's hand to real apples in the cooking pot. The animators also did a really good job on Pip the talking chipmunk and the animals that Giselle talks to and has help clean the Robert's apartment (Robert is a lawyer that eventually befriends Giselle in the real world). In the scene most of the animals seen are real, trained birds and rats. The only exceptions are the animals that interact with objects. They are animated. The animation was very good and just watching the film for the first time there were only a couple instances where the animals stood out as obviously animated. Amy Adams also did a great job of acting like she was talking to the animated animals. There was also an animated dragon at the very end which reminded me a lot of Saphira from Eragon. Overall I was very impressed with the technical aspects of the film.

I must admit that the music was very good and really helped the movie flow along. Also subtle background music that played when a character from the animated realm talked helped emphasize their differences from the real world. Some of the music was changed slightly from the typical Disney music, which helped the film seem more of a satire of the Disney process. However, if you look closely at the movie you find that it really is just a more typical Disney movie in disguise. The girl still finds the man of her dreams, everyone is justly punished or rewarded, and the main characters live happily every after with things resolved in a nice little package. Perhaps film noir is making me slightly cynical, but I would have preferred a more realistic ending if this was truly going to be a viable critique on the Disney process.

The one thing I didn't really like about the film was that altogether it didn't make a very compelling story. The characters from the animated world, except for Giselle, were very flat. The prince's egotism and self-absorption got especially tiring after awhile. There were several scenes that were brilliant as stand alone scenes like cleaning up the apartment or walking through the park, but they lacked a clear connection and relevance with the storyline. So all in all I felt it was a good movie with a lot of laughs, but probably not something I am going to see again.

TV Shows vs. Movies

People often tend to classify TV shows as a lower category than movies. I think this is because the main drive behind TV shows is to get viewers to watch the next show, while movies just aim to have their movie watched and then discussed. This leaves filmmakers more willing, and in fact, encouraged, to incorporate critical messages and controversial topics into their movies. This drives conversation about their movie and will help promote people to see it at least once, just to see what all the hype is about. On the other hand, including controversial themes can drive away viewers and TV series is all about keeping a consistent audience. So how do they do this?

TV shows still incorporate all the technical aspects that a film would. The cinematography, the lighting, the acting, it is all there. What they do is have larger than life characters which the viewers feel that they can connect with, but what they really need is a hook. Romantic comedies are driven by constant question of whether or not the couple will get together in the end, much like screwball comedy movies but drawn out over a longer time frame. Mystery series will often have a bad guy that reoccurs over several episodes so the viewer feels the need to find out what happens. Frequently in order to keep the viewer interested the shows become more risque and push social boundaries. I feel this is why usually TV shows past the first three or so season are not good anymore. They start with a good storyline and premise and then the episodes get crazier and crazier as the editors try and one up the previous episodes.

One TV show that I think is particularly good at capturing the viewers attention is CSI. The episodes are slightly longer than the normal shows, running around 45 mins. I like them because the main focus of the show is solving a mystery and not the social relationships of the CSI members. In this respect it is more like a mini detective movie over a soap opera. However, I freely admit that the story lines get fairly repetitive and that it is not really something that one would watch more than once. I do feel that music choices for the series is really good and helps draw the viewer into the movie. It is also quicker and less mentally taxing to see a an episode of CSI than to see a full length movie with intense social commentary. Both movies and TV show have their uses and it is just what the viewer wants to get out of the experiance which one is "better."

Unit One

Citizen Kane is a fictional documentary of Charles Foster Kane (loosely depicting the life of William Randolph Hearst) done by reporter Jerry Thompson. Thompson interviews Walter Thatcher, Kane's financial adviser and guardian. Kane's parents had given his custody to Thatcher when they gained the permits to a successful gold mine. With Thatcher Kane was well provided for materialistically, but lacked love. As Kane grows up he decides to run a newspaper, the highlights of this are provided by Kane's friend Mr. Bernstein. The more practical and critical commentary of this time is from Kane's companion, though not necessarily friend Jed Leland. Kane claims to write for the common man, but is really serving his own interests in being loved by the populace. He eventually loses the newspaper in the midst of the depression. Kane marries twice, once to Emily Norton which fails because of his obsession with the newspaper, and once to Susan Alexander whom he forces to be an opera singer. She eventually leaves him because though he will give her whatever she wants he cannot love her, but expects to be loved in return. It is Kane's affair with Susan that eventually loses him his election for governor of New York. After the lost election Kane exiles himself at Xanadu, a palace in the middle of being constructed, there he dies alone uttering his last words "Rosebud" which drives the whole plot. Rosebud turns out to be the name of his childhood sled.

Overall Citizen Kane is a very powerful movie. It brings up several key issues such as the trust placed in elected officials and how much they actually believe their policies and how much they say they believe their policies to get elected. It is also a good study of human interaction and what will drive people into action. For example Kane wants to be loved by everyone, even Jed Leland after he starts writing a critical review of Susan's opera performance. That is why he tries to prove he is honest by finishing Leland's critical view and then attempting to bribe him into friendship after he is fired. Though Citizen Kane is not one of my favorite movies it incorporates a lot of cinematic elements which help make it an important film benchmark and gets several key points of Orson Welles across.

During the whole movie the viewer is intensely aware of their position as a viewer and don't get too emotionally attached to the sequences of events. Admittedly this could partly be because we watched it in so many segments that it seemed broken up and disjointed. However mostly I believe it is because there is no redeeming character. Kane is essentially trying to con the people, others are weak characters, and Jerry Thompson is unimportant. Orson Welles also makes conscious cinematic decisions to emphasize this. The opening scene with a series of dissolves of fences after fences makes the viewer feel like an intruder on a private scene. There are no shots from a subjective point of view and the movie switches from character perspective to character perspective with no constants except Kane, but the viewer never gets to see his perspective. This further increases the viewers distance from the people and sequences happening on screen. This is probably why I did not connect so well with the movie and why it isn't one of my favorites. There could be many reasons that Welles chose to create this distance, personally I believe that it is because it makes it more like a documentary that Thompson was trying to create.

There are key scenes Orson Welles manipulates in an attempt to create Kane as a darker character. When Kane is a young man running his newspaper business he signs what he calls a "Declaration of Principles" where he swears to tell nothing but the truth and support the working man. Normally this would be a cause for the viewer to emotionally connect with Kane and applaud him for his ideas. However, Orson Welles juxtaposed that scene with a scene prior to it depicting Kane's blackmailing and unethical information gathering techniques and downright lies. In addition during the scene Kane is cast in shadow making it seem as if he had a darker purpose and meant solely to trick the public. Kane also forces Susan to become an opera singer. The ruthlessness of this is shown when the viewer is allowed to empathize with Susan for a moment as she stares out in terror at a gaping black hole of an audience. That scene was so powerful because it was low key lighting with high contrast between the black audience and the glaring lights and though it was not a subjective shot it showed a similar composition to what Susan would be seeing. Something that I did not catch, but was still an important aspect of the movie was a musical motif where the same music was played at Kane's newspaper party, his theme song for his election campaign, and when he courts Susan. The music is slightly different, sometimes more melancholy than others. Welles is superb at manipulating the cinematic elements to make Kane seem like a more devious person and stress several characteristics that Welles wanted to associate with William Randolph Hearst.

Art of Film Introduction

Film is a very interesting medium for portraying ideas and story lines. Unlike books and other written sources, film presents a visually to play on the emotions of the reader. With written media there can be discrepancies on how one visualizes situations, but with film the discrepancies come into play when one interprets the situation. Directors can manipulate how viewers see their films by emphasizing different aspects of their film through various film making techniques.

Though many language arts classes touch on how to interpret film and other visual media, none go into much detail. The Art of Film class is designed to explain how directors achieve their various affects and how one can be an "active" movie viewer, instead of a passive witness.