Detective films Banned in occupied countries during the war Noir refers to the low key lighting Disenchantment Doom Cynical times Great Depression 1930s World War II Atomic Warfare McCarthyism ID: 725844
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Slide1
Film Noir
Dark stylized
Detective films
Banned in occupied countries during the war
Noir refers to the low key lightingSlide2
Disenchantment, Doom
Cynical times
Great Depression 1930’s
World War II
Atomic Warfare
McCarthyism Slide3
Laura 1944
Before the end of WWII
407, 300 military lost
Traditional representations of masculinity, McPherson, Dana Andrews
Lydecker
, homosexual actor (subtext) Clifton Webb
Audience is linked to
criminal
psychology
Infatuation of investigator with Laura
McPherson relies on procedure-–sublimates desire Slide4
Feminist reading
Laura
(victim)
The men–
all are just pesky at first, until they are spurned and become aggressive. The late critic Robin Wood, who noted the fluidity and hybridity of genres, might have seen the film as a comedy of suitors gone nightmarish.Slide5
The Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code after censor/stick-in-the-mud Will Hays, regulated film content for nearly 40 years, restricting, among other things, depictions of homosexuality. Slide6
The Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code after censor/stick-in-the-mud Will Hays, regulated film content for nearly 40 years, restricting, among other things, depictions of homosexuality.
Casting of Clifton WebbSlide7
Three possible approaches to narrative:
a) As
representation
b) As structure
c) As
narration
d) As Process Slide8
Staging imagines what an individual observer will
see
Cutting imagines viewer attention as well as mimic psychological process of taking in a
scene
V.I.
Pudovkin
set the invisible observer approach as something more fluid and dynamic than making a film like staging a
play
Camera movement correlated with perspective or flux of everyday
life
A pan or tilt represented the turning of a
head
Tracking shot: striding forwardSlide9
Andre
Bazin
—classical editing mimics human acts of attention—an event exists within a continuum
Bazin’s
aesthetic favored the viewer as an active observer
Sergei Eisenstein
conversely believed that cinema is a spectacle calculated for the viewer
Narration “is the process of making manifest some essential emotional quality of the story”
Eisenstein’s films are meant to be persuasive—agitprop: explicit political
message
Battleship Potemkin (1925)Slide10
--Matthew Sorento
That Laura comes back “from the dead” is a clever spin on what Freud called the “return of the repressed”. Hardly the seductress, Gene Tierney’s Laura stands as an odd figure
among
the women of noir.
In retrospect, this “negative” point is actually a strength as no woman could match such an
idealization.
Preminger
captures not the breakdown of a family but the failed attempt to make such a unit, as well as the retaliation against the offence to fragile masculinity. The passion-
cum
-murder of noir turns to the thrills of identity and illusion.Slide11
Schemata: describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them
DiMaggio, P (1997). "Culture and cognition". Annual Review of Sociology.
23
: 263–287
Slide12
“A constructivist account would thus consider film viewing as a dynamic psychological process manipulating a variety of factors”Slide13
Illusion of Apparent Motion
Perceptual capacities: illusion of apparent motion
an optical
illusion
of motion produced by viewing a rapid succession of still pictures of a moving objectSlide14
Genre
Prior knowledge and experience: knowledge of the perceptual world as well as other films—film conventions Slide15
Structure
The material and structure of the film itself: In narrative cinema, as we shall see in the next chapter—narrative films invite the spectator to execute story-constructing activities Slide16
The film presents cues, patterns and gaps that shape the viewer’s application of schemata and testing of hypothesis
The viewer must take as a central cognitive goal the construction of a more or less intelligible story
What makes something a story? What makes a story intelligible?
The patterns of recalling and comprehending a story are remarkably uniform across all age groupsSlide17
Causal Connections
When information is missing, perceivers infer or make guesses about it
When events are arranged out of temporal order perceivers try to put those events in sequence
A spectator comes to the film already tuned, prepared to focus energies toward story
constructionSlide18
Comprehending a narrative requires assigning it some coherence
Causal connections are especially important in remembering stories
If the text as presented omits causal connections, perceivers tend to supply them when retelling the tale
Distortions in comprehension and recall tend to occur at points when the narrative violates or
ambiguates
this ideal scenario
Early statement of the protagonist’s goal help perceiver to fill causal and temporal connections more exactly