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.
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