Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Boys Beware!
A good example of the "medicalization" Foucault speaks of. Here homosexual men are not sinners or sexual predators; they're just sick individuals who need help. And their disease is apparently highly contagious.
How Much Affection? (1958) Part 1
Mother-daughter talks often feature prominently in sex-education films for girls.
How to Say No: Moral Maturity (1951)
"How to Say No" treats peer pressure more than sexuality as such. But its strategies for presenting ideas to teen-agers are especially interesting.
Sex Education for Girls Part 1
It would obviously be interesting to compare films made for teen-age boys and girls.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)
By 1899, early films were developing simple narratives. One of the first tells the story of a stolen kiss. It seems impossible that the filmmakers and audiences of the time were conscious of the sexual symbolism of the train and the tunnel, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue in the film.
This may be one of the very first instances of the use of the basic language of cinema--cuts and editing--to reinforce the sexual inflection of the narrative.
Sandow
Like many other early films, this one records a vaudeville performance. Eugen Sandow introduced the US to body-building; he was the first man to entertain simply by displaying his body. It's interesting to consider how contemporary audiences reacted to this show.
Men Dancing - Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894)
You wanna talk about homosociality?
Many of the early American films show only men because they were made in Edison's studio as demonstrations of the capacity to display motion, and the staffs were almost all male.
The May-Irwin Kiss (Edison, 1896)
One of the very first images circulated in American motion pictures recreates a celebrated and shocking moment in a contemporary comedy: a kiss.
Lady from Shanghai
The celebrated hall of mirrors sequence at the end of The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) is one of the great visual emblems of film noir. The duplicity becomes so intense that it calls into question the stability of identity; passion leads to death because it disintegrates personality, leading the lover to project and introject the beloved to the point of annihilation. Killing you is killing myself . . .
Touch of Evil (1958) - Opening Scene
Orson Welles' Touch of Evil opens with a famous 3-minute tracking shot, illustrating the power of a long, continuous take. The fluid camera movement here inspired many imitations. It's also an unusually dark film noir, with suggestions of sexual torture.
The Big Heat
Another film noir classic from Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat, Gloria Grahame is not a temptress--well, only a little, anyway. Instead, she's the gangster's girl with her own moral code. When she steps outside the gangster's influence, she's punished with shocking violence.
Scarlet Street (1945) 1/10
Another pairing of Fritz Lang as director with Edward G. Robinson as the "little man" who turns murderous under the influence of a temptress. Scarlet Street was so dark and sordid that it was actually banned in several American states and cities, despite passing the Code board.
The Woman in the Window 1/14
The German director Fritz Lang was a very direct link between the German expressionist films of the '20s and film noir. Lang claimed that he fled Germany immediately after Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of a nationalized film industry under Nazism. In the US, he directed some of the classics of noir.
In The Woman in the Window, a mild-mannered professor falls under a woman's spell and finds himself enmeshed in a web of criminality, deception, and homicide. (The professor is our friend Edward G. Robinson.) Lang got around some of the strictures of the Code by framing the main action as a dream.
Maltese Falcon in exactly 7min
If you don't have time to watch the whole movie, you can check out this 7-minute abridgment.
Critic's Picks: 'The Maltese Falcon' - NYTimes.com/Video
New York Times film critic A. O. Scott has some interesting things to say about The Maltese Falcon and the concept of truth in a culture of lies.
Maltese Falcon - trailer
Come closer . . . I'm going to tell you an astounding story . . .
The Maltese Falcon is, like Double Indemnity, one of the sources and pillars of film noir as style and genre. Even in the trailer you can see another of the hallmarks of film noir: Deception, duplicity, lies, and deceit. The typical film noir not only appears cynical and "dark," it unravels a complex plot in which nothing is as it first appears. (This may be another reason why retrospective narration is common in film noir.)
Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaugnessy is one of the great deceitful femmes fatales of noir.
Sam: Was there any truth at all in that whole story?
Brigid: Some . . . not very much.
Monday, June 7, 2010
power struggle between Walter and Phyllis: sex, violence and murder
Walter tells Phyllis often to "shut up baby," always referring to her as "baby" and often cutting her off mid-speech. He tries to be a controlling male figure, feeling that he can handle the situation of getting away with murder better than her and that she will screw things up. He repeats to her the steps of driving from the train station to pick him up, even though she has memorized them. He sees her as inferior and a "weak link."
For the first two-thirds of the movie, Phyllis comes across as a clingy, dependent female, who is more attached and needy towards Walter than he is towards her. She is smarter than this, though - if she did not act so clingy and was instead nonchalant and withdrawn, distanced, Walter would have tried harder to obtain her. She would not have been able to achieve her other affair and solely financial intentions involving him as efficiently. Phyllis is in control of the situation and never even loves Walter (until she almost kills him), but uses him to get the insurance money from her husband's death and (it seems) run off with her stepdaughter's ex-boyfriend. The gun/murder scene between Phyllis and Walter is the consummation of this power struggle of their "love," or hatred, ironically - and, appropriate to the time period and its media's tendency to uphold patriarchal authority, Walter ultimately overcomes Phyllis, murdering her.
There is also a power struggle in the almost incestuous affairs of Walter and Phyllis with the younger lovers (Lola and her ex-boyfriend). Walter manipulates Lola at first to stop thinking that Phyllis and an unknown companion are behind the murder, because he fears both his condemnation and Lola's contempt of him. Later, he manipulates Lola to believe in her inclination that Phyllis and her own ex-boyfriend are implicated in it together, as this clears Walter. Phyllis manipulates the ex-boyfriend by telling him that Lola doesn't love him anymore, so that he will stay out of contact with Lola and be drawn towards her, instead. Phyllis and Walter both use their age and twisted wisdom to overpower these younger individuals for arguably sexual reasons (at least involving flirtation and self-fulfillment).
Some symbols of sexual dysfunction in the movie are the broken foot of Phyllis' husband - this shows his inferiority, his emasculation, and his older and decrepit state. He cannot and does not "perform" for Phyllis, and this is what she argues draws her towards the younger, healthier, and more libidinous Walter. When the car almost doesn't start during the runaway from the murder scene, this symbolically demonstrates (foreshadows) the failure of the sexual relationship between Phyllis and Walter. There is a lot of looking through windows, especially by Walter, which demonstrates voyeurism and the desire for what is not possessed. Doors and blinds are shut often, to show the need for privacy during the sexual act (and the parallel between that and the murderous act), especially one of adultery. The fact that Phyllis and Walter discuss murder in the supermarket, next to baby products, juxtaposes death and birth, along with death and the "fruit of the sexual act." These relationships are complicated and intertwined, just as the relationship between Phyllis and Walter. The intended outcome (as it occurs to Walter and the audience, at least) is shot down, literally, by Phyllis' larger murder plans - she kills sex, kills people, and figuratively kills babies and "the family" (a stretch, but a point for debate).
The recurrent comments about making the murder "clean" and "straight down the line" are also used to comment about the path towards love between Phyllis and Walter. Because their "love" affair ultimately ends in murder, the sexual act is linked to murder, specifically the clean and straight shooting of a gun. This is not only an overt Freudian symbol for the sexual act, but complicates the lovers' relationship in that it is, from the beginning, a path of manipulation and death, through Phyllis' intentions. She "wields the gun" and the power for most of the movie (despite dramatic irony, the audience and Walter not knowing about it) but that gun is taken from her in the end.
For the first two-thirds of the movie, Phyllis comes across as a clingy, dependent female, who is more attached and needy towards Walter than he is towards her. She is smarter than this, though - if she did not act so clingy and was instead nonchalant and withdrawn, distanced, Walter would have tried harder to obtain her. She would not have been able to achieve her other affair and solely financial intentions involving him as efficiently. Phyllis is in control of the situation and never even loves Walter (until she almost kills him), but uses him to get the insurance money from her husband's death and (it seems) run off with her stepdaughter's ex-boyfriend. The gun/murder scene between Phyllis and Walter is the consummation of this power struggle of their "love," or hatred, ironically - and, appropriate to the time period and its media's tendency to uphold patriarchal authority, Walter ultimately overcomes Phyllis, murdering her.
There is also a power struggle in the almost incestuous affairs of Walter and Phyllis with the younger lovers (Lola and her ex-boyfriend). Walter manipulates Lola at first to stop thinking that Phyllis and an unknown companion are behind the murder, because he fears both his condemnation and Lola's contempt of him. Later, he manipulates Lola to believe in her inclination that Phyllis and her own ex-boyfriend are implicated in it together, as this clears Walter. Phyllis manipulates the ex-boyfriend by telling him that Lola doesn't love him anymore, so that he will stay out of contact with Lola and be drawn towards her, instead. Phyllis and Walter both use their age and twisted wisdom to overpower these younger individuals for arguably sexual reasons (at least involving flirtation and self-fulfillment).
Some symbols of sexual dysfunction in the movie are the broken foot of Phyllis' husband - this shows his inferiority, his emasculation, and his older and decrepit state. He cannot and does not "perform" for Phyllis, and this is what she argues draws her towards the younger, healthier, and more libidinous Walter. When the car almost doesn't start during the runaway from the murder scene, this symbolically demonstrates (foreshadows) the failure of the sexual relationship between Phyllis and Walter. There is a lot of looking through windows, especially by Walter, which demonstrates voyeurism and the desire for what is not possessed. Doors and blinds are shut often, to show the need for privacy during the sexual act (and the parallel between that and the murderous act), especially one of adultery. The fact that Phyllis and Walter discuss murder in the supermarket, next to baby products, juxtaposes death and birth, along with death and the "fruit of the sexual act." These relationships are complicated and intertwined, just as the relationship between Phyllis and Walter. The intended outcome (as it occurs to Walter and the audience, at least) is shot down, literally, by Phyllis' larger murder plans - she kills sex, kills people, and figuratively kills babies and "the family" (a stretch, but a point for debate).
The recurrent comments about making the murder "clean" and "straight down the line" are also used to comment about the path towards love between Phyllis and Walter. Because their "love" affair ultimately ends in murder, the sexual act is linked to murder, specifically the clean and straight shooting of a gun. This is not only an overt Freudian symbol for the sexual act, but complicates the lovers' relationship in that it is, from the beginning, a path of manipulation and death, through Phyllis' intentions. She "wields the gun" and the power for most of the movie (despite dramatic irony, the audience and Walter not knowing about it) but that gun is taken from her in the end.
These are some films I feel are interesting in depicting love and sex farther outside of the "norms" in American society. These films address many of the themes we talked about today, such as Freud, sexual fluidity and sexual anxieties. Many also have to do with physical disabilities or psychological disturbances, as well as what society debates may or may not be psychological disturbances. Overall, I feel they are movies that draw on these issues in very complex ways.
-"Harold and Maude" (1971)
-"Benny and Joon" (1993)
-"Transamerica" (2005)
-"Freaks" (1932)
-"Rosemary's Baby" (1968)
-"Eraserhead" (1976)
-"Harold and Maude" (1971)
-"Benny and Joon" (1993)
-"Transamerica" (2005)
-"Freaks" (1932)
-"Rosemary's Baby" (1968)
-"Eraserhead" (1976)
"There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff . . . "
Restrictions on what could be said in a Hollywood movie inspired dialogue dense with verbal irony--they know what they're talking about, we know what they're talking about -- but nobody's going to come out and say it. This creates a partnership between them that's subversive by its nature--and we collude in it.
(Billy Wilder wrote the script with the mystery writer Raymond Chandler--adapted from the extraordinary novel by James M. Cain.)
Sex in American Cinema - Summer 2010 St. Mary's College of Maryland - ARTH350.01 TFMS 425.03
From early instances of the silent-screen star as sexual ideal to contemporary same-sex romance, the movies have not only reflected Americans’ attitudes about sexuality but actively taught us what to believe, denounce, and accept. This course examines the capacity of American cinema to represent sexual norms, and just as characteristically and meaningfully, to subvert the normal, with particular emphasis on the profound historical and cultural influence of the Hollywood Production Code. Examples for study are screened in class and include representative works from genres such as melodrama, farce, film noir, horror, the western, and experimental and adult film.
Course Objectives:
§ To identify and investigate the historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic issues in the representation of sex and sexuality in the American popular film tradition.
§ To develop skills in the critical analysis of cinema as art, formulating and exchanging original responses to cinematic works based on identification and consideration of significant cultural and aesthetic issues.
§ To develop appreciation of the key questions in critical approaches to mass art, especially the genre approach to cinema.
The topic of sex in cinema is not only controversial but often confusing, in ways that may reveal the perplexing relation of sexuality to the life of our culture. It signifies at least three things:
1) The representation in cinema of all aspects of sexual life—from rituals of courtship to actual sexual practices—and the pleasures and anxieties society finds in these depictions.
2) The place of cinema as a social institution in the social and cultural history of sex—for example, the status of film stars as role models and ideals; cinema as a factor in the history of adolescent sexuality; and the immense influence of the adult film industry.
3) The special theses of depth psychology, especially the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, on the relation between cinema as fantasized experience and the libido in individuals—i.e., an understanding of cinema as a cultural institution built on a biological endowment of sexual instincts and a psychological foundation of sexual drives.
The particular areas of study and investigation in this course--aside from the pleasure of critically examining some great movies--are:
§ The social, historical, and economic factors in the development of the codes of representation in cinema, governing what may and may not be represented, and how it is to be interpreted.
§ Film genres as a crucial means by which cinema conveys ideas about sex, with special attention to the stock situations, settings, characters, and iconography associated with film genres.
§ The role of sexuality in a prominent but often despised mode of popular narrative and especially of American commercial film: melodrama.
§ And especially: the capacity of popular cinema (and media generally) to represent sexual norms—or more precisely, “the normal”—and just as characteristically and meaningfully, the subversion of the normal.
Course Schedule
Monday June 7
1. What do we talk about when we don’t talk about Sex?
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Introduction to course
What to Watch for When You Watch a Film
Film noir: The other side of the mirror
Tuesday June 8
2. Looking at the Invisible and Talking about the Unmentionable - The Hollywood Production Code
Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933); excerpts from Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)
It Started with a Kiss: Sex and Early Cinema - The Kiss (Edison, 1896), The Kiss in the Tunnel (G. A. Smith, 1899), Let Me Dream Again (G. A. Smith, 1900)
Read: Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood, 1-3, Appendices
Thursday June 10
3. The Erotics of Cinema – Overperforming Sex
Excerpts from films of Mae West, Busby Berkeley, and Betty Boop
Read: Doherty, 5, 7, 12
Mellen, “The Mae West Nobody Knows”; Fischer, “The Image of Woman as Image”
Essay #1 Due: On Double Indemnity or Baby Face - Sexuality on Screen
Friday June 11
4. More Than a Woman – Performing Gender as Sexual Spectacle
Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
Read: Dyer, “Monroe and Sexuality”
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Monday June 14
5. Overcoming the Normal
Kinsey (Bill Condon, 2004) with Sex Ed videos: As Boys Grow . . . , How To Say No, Boys Beware, Am I Normal?
Read: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, especially Parts One-Four (1-131)
Essay #2 Due: Some Like It Hot
Tuesday June 15
6. Family Melodrama – The Nineteen-Fifties as a State of Mind
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
with excerpts from Rebel without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, Imitation of Life
Read: Singer, “Meanings of Melodrama”; Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”
Thursday June 17
7. Oedipal Fantasy - The Thing That Wouldn’t Die
The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
Read: Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality, esp. II. Infantile Sexuality and III. The Transformations of Puberty
Essay #3 Due: Response to Freud or All That Heaven Allows
Friday June 18
8. Double Feature: Can a Sex Comedy Actually Be More Bizarre and Grotesque than a Horror Movie?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)
Monday June 21
9. Is Race Sex?
Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975) with excerpts from Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Read: Wood, “Mandingo: The Vindication of an Abused Masterpiece”
Essay #4 Due: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pillow Talk, or The Terminator
Tuesday June 22
10. Cowboys Are Totally Gay
Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
Read: Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema”; Schatz, “Film Genre and the Genre Film”
Thursday June 24
11. Pornography - Everybody Gets It
Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2005)
with excerpts from Pornography: the Secret History of Civilization, Adult Stars
Read: Williams, Hard Core 1-5, Conclusion and Epilogue (1-152, 265-315)
Essay #5 Due: Response to Williams
Friday June 25
12. Experimentalism - Fantasy is Truth
Excerpts from films of Kenneth Anger - Fireworks, Scorpio Rising and Andy Warhol, - Kiss, Blow Job, Lonesome Cowboys, Trash
Read: Grundmann, “Introduction”
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