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Archive for the 'Film criticism' Category
Richard Corliss: Fulltime Critic
Mary and Richard Corliss, Ebertfest 2008.
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Parker Tyler called James Agee America's biggest movie fan, implying that he was a lesser critic for loving movies. But Agee, who was often cast into despair by the films he met week by week, was actually in love with Cinema. From each release he sought glimpses of what he imagined movies could be, and so seldom were.
Tyler's phrase might better apply to Richard Corliss, but in a deeply complimentary sense. Like his friend and occasional jousting partner Roger Ebert, Richard didn't judge a film by whether it measured up to some ideal yardstick of the medium. He welcomed the movies—at Time, some 2500, between 1980 and now—as they came. He let his wide tastes, good sense, vast memory and knowledge, and breakneck gift for language decide what they counted for.
With Richard's death we lose not only an effervescent critic. Under his stewardship of Film Comment (1970-1990) he helped found modern American film culture. Richard T. Jameson has eloquently recalled the Corliss era, when a magazine that had been committed to documentary and censorship debates became the paradigm of new ways of thinking about American and European film. Like Movie in England, it championed auteurism, and so it attracted great critics like Andrew Sarris, Robin Wood, and Raymond Durgnat. Yet Richard's wide-ranging curiosity made Film Comment more pluralistic than its UK counterpart. It published reference-quality issues on animation, cinematographers, and set designers. In the days before the Net and specialized film books, cinephiles treasured these plump special numbers. The magazine ran historical and retrospective essays as well; refreshingly, not every piece was pegged to current releases. Richard gave us a new model of film magazines: richly designed, provocative (Durgnat especially), and sending the signal that everything cinematic could be studied.
When he went over to Time in 1980, that square magazine suddenly looked younger. With Richard joining art critic Robert Hughes, it became a source of lively and penetrating arts journalism. Both turned Timespeak into something fresh. Hughes pulled it toward the eloquent bluntness of the Anglo essay tradition, while Richard transformed the forced puns and slant metaphors into something sprightly. Sarris may have been his mentor, but the rat-tat-tat pileup of clauses (semicolons optional), the self-correcting afterthoughts (as if a nuance had just occurred to the writer), and a concentration on actors all seem to me indebted to Kael. On Edward Scissorhands:
Depp, who wears the hyperalert, slightly wounded expression of someone who has just been slapped out of a deep sleep, brings a wondrous dignity and discipline to Edward. Wiest does a delightful turn on the plucky, loving mothers from old sitcoms. The whole movie, in fact, time-travels between today and the '50s, when every suburban house could be a quiet riot of coordinated pastels. But the film exists out of time — out of the present cramped time, certainly — in the any-year of a child's imagination. That child could be the little girl to whom the grandmotherly Ryder tells Edward's story nearly a lifetime after it took place. Or it could be Burton, a wise child and a wily inventor, who has created one of the brightest, bittersweetest fables of this or any-year.
Richard gloried in the emotional and visceral energy of popular cinema. He defended both porn and zany comedy. On the Big Loud Action Movie he could channel Teenboy patois:
Toward the start of Fast Five — fifth and best in the series that began with The Fast and the Furious in 2001 — Brian (Paul Walker) is in a freight train and Dom (Vin Diesel) is steering a 1966 Corvette Grand Sport alongside it. At the last possible moment before the train goes through a bridge over a river, Brian jumps from the train and lands on the Corvette, which Dom then drives off a, like, million-foot cliff. As the car plummets down the ravine, our guys jump out and land safely in the water.
That "a, like, million-foot cliff" is alone worth the price of the issue. For such reasons, I think that Richard might be the most imitated critic of recent decades. Every reviewer at your town's weekly hip throwaway wants to write like this.
They mostly can't. In an essay on Fulltime Killer, Richard compared Johnnie To's cinematic output to A. J. Liebling's boast: "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." It pretty much applied to Richard himself. He wrote about film, books, TV, travel, sports. Of the Bulk Producers we always ask, "When does s/he sleep?" With Richard we have to ask: "When did he pause?"
The Richard I followed most closely was on display in long formats. His book Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (1974) made a stir that's hard to appreciate now. Good student of Sarris though he was, Richard was an auteurist. He once tried to persuade me that Russ Meyer was at least as good as Minnelli. Yet his book called us to arms in a different cause.
The most difficult and vital part of a director's job is to build and sustain the mood indicated in a screenwriter's script—a function that has been virtually ignored while citics concerned with "visual style" trot off in search of the themes a director is more liable to have filched from his writers. …
When it comes to the mood men, the metteurs-en-scène, auteur critics start tap-dancing away from the subject. George Cukor is a genuine auteur; Michael Curtiz is a happy hack; Mitchell Leisen is actually despised by some critics for "ruining" films like Midnight and Arise My Love. Yet what Leisen and the writers of Hands Across the Table did to make that film the most amiable of thirties screwball comedies is a prime example of sypatheric collaboration. As with so many delightful comedies, it is the writers who create the characters and establish a mood in the first half of the picture, and the director who develops both in the second half. The story line of Hands Across the table isn't flimsy; it's downright diaphanous. . . .
Openly imitating Sarris' catalogue The American Cinema, Richard's book created an artistic genealogy of screenwriters, picking out the Author-Auteurs, the Stylists, and so on and then ranking them.. But where Sarris is synoptic, Corliss is dissective. Working at full stretch, he gives pages of close attention to particular films. His analyses of The Power and the Glory, The Lady Eve, and The Marrying Kind (""wavering between third-person omniscient and first-person myopic") carry great intellectual heft, while Sarrisian potshots fly by. Reputations get deflated (Jules Furthman) or elevated (Sidney Buchman).
The other Richard book I hold close is his BFI monograph on Lolita, a sustained critical tightrope act. Trembling between whimsy, serious examination, and a Nabokovian delight in shameless cleverness (puns again), Richard gives us Kubrick's film as filtered through Pale Fire. There's a bespoke opening poem (shades of Shade) which is then glossed line by line in as digressive a manner as poor Kinbote pursues in the novel. Nabokov as Hitchcock, echoes of Goulding's Teen Rebel, Shelley Winters maneuvering her cigarette holder "as a Balinese dancer would her cymbals": every paragraph scatters pieces of candy.
Finally, something I return to often: Richard's 1990 essay attacking (no politer word will do) TV movie reviewers. "All Thumbs: Or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?" castigates the tribe's superficiality, their canned brevity, their reliance on clips, and above all their encouraging people to believe in quick judgments. Stars, numbers, grades, and thumbs are too easy. Richard bites Time's corporate hand, complaining about snack-sized opinions in People and Entertainment Weekly. Against this trend he speaks for longer-form writing, pointing out that Sarris, Kael, and others had their impact because they could surpass the word limits mandated for most reviewers. It takes time to develop ideas that are subtle. Obvious, maybe, but tell that to the young blogger who insisted to me that a review ought to take no more than 100 words.
Roger Ebert was a target of Richard's piece, and he replied in a courteous counterblast. Yet the men were fast friends. Richard did friendship superbly, with an effusive generosity. Just out of college, I submitted a couple of articles to the new Film Comment, and to my astonishment Richard accepted them. As I turned more academic, I stopped offering pieces to the magazine, but Richard–who could easily have become a film professor himself–didn't hold it against me. When I came to New York a few years later for a job interview that proved disastrous, Richard and Mary were the only friendly faces I encountered, and lunch at their apartment, larded with gossip, was the high point of that visit.
In later years I encountered Mary, mostly during our visits to MoMA, more than Richard. But every now and then I'd get another burst of gratuitous kindness. He reviewed my Planet Hong Kong in a funny online piece about how Hong Kong film takes the stuffiness out of anybody.
Even a relatively staid critic such as structuralist guru David Bordwell seems to be typing in his shorts, with a beer on his desk.
The last time I saw Richard was with Mary at Ebertfest in 2008. We had a diner breakfast, and Richard did a dead-on imitation of John McCain. I still see that smile—part devilish wise-guy, part nerdy enthusiasm, all glowing good humor. He was wearing goofy trainers bearing the logos of the Majors. They looked damn fine. We had a good day.
In an interview with David Thomson Richard recalls his life and the early Film Comment era. See also Matt Zoller Seitz's sensitive appreciation, especially on Corliss's mastery of the "long reported piece"–another point of contact with Agee.
Problems, problems: Wyler's workaround
The Little Foxes (1941).
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For me, shooting is a struggle where you only get to be happy for five minutes before you start thinking about the next problem to solve.
Ruben Ostlund, on Force Majeure
One of the most famous shots in American cinema occurs at a climactic moment in The Little Foxes (1941). Regina Giddens has just learned that her sickly husband Horace has let her brothers get away with a business deal that double-crosses her. They will reap all the rewards of bringing a factory to town, while she, who engineered the deal and expected Horace to fall in line, will get nothing. Horace is already not far from death, and their quarrel in the parlor precipitates a heart attack. He spills his bottle of medicine and needs some from his upstairs supply.
Regina refuses to go fetch it, and instead Horace must stagger up and out. While she sits, fiercely waiting, on the sofa, he tries to pull himself upstairs, but he collapses on the steps. Once he has fallen, and perhaps died, she stirs to action and rouses the household.
Lillian Hellman's original play had been a Broadway success, and this was one of the most notable scenes. How did Wyler stage it? Very oddly, as the frame up top suggests. We can't really see Horace's struggle on the stair. Not only does the camera put Regina in the foreground, but Horace is out of focus in the rear, at least until she rises whirling and runs to the background, the damage done.
Why did Wyler stage it this way? It depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what your definition of why is.
Deeper, closer
1941 was the breakout year of deep-focus filmmaking in Hollywood. Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Kings Row, Ball of Fire, I Wake Up Screaming, How Green Was My Valley, and several other films set the pace for a new stylistic option. In this style, the action is staged in depth rather than perpendicular to the camera, as most scenes in Hollywood cinema were. And the camera lens creates depth of field, in which even fairly close foreground planes are just as sharp as the action in the rear. Such images weren't unknown before; we can find them in silent cinema. But from 1941 on, depth staging accompanied by depth of focus would be increasingly common in Hollywood dramas, from thrillers and melodramas to film-noir exercises. Not all shots would be designed for maximal depth; continuity editing and closer views would still be used. But we do find such imagery becoming more common, particularly at moments of tension.
Cinematographer Gregg Toland is usually cited as a main source of this trend, and his work on Kane and Ball of Fire, as well as Ford's Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), became models of the new look. Toland also worked with Wyler on several films, including The Little Foxes. But even without Toland, Wyler had in some films cultivated a deep-focus look (as had Ford). Coming when it did, The Little Foxes proved a powerful demonstration of the deep-focus style.
Three aspects stand out. First, there's a certain economy of presentation. As Wyler and others pointed out, depth imagery permits directors to minimize editing. Instead of cutting from action to reaction, we see both at the same time.
Wyler suggested in publicity of the period that this gave the viewer more freedom of where to look, and André Bazin seized upon this rationale as part of his aesthetic of realism. Just as in the real world, in some films we must choose what to pay attention to.
But The Little Foxes went beyond the moderate deep focus of Stagecoach and other films to create very aggressive images. This is the film's second novelty. Several shots place the foreground very close to the camera. As a result, we get looming faces or objects in the front plane, and we still see well-focused dramatic elements behind.
A third source of power is less noted. In The Little Foxes, Wyler found ways to make deep shots comment upon the plot. For instance, the action offers Regina's daughter Alexandra, usually called Zan, a choice of being more like her mother (tough and vicious) or her father (tolerant and gentle). At other points Zan is paralleled to her ineffectual, alcoholic aunt Birdie. At one point, Birdie has predicted that Zan may wind up like her.
In a theatre production, there would be many staging strategies that would create these parallels, but Wyler uses a particularly striking one. One evening, while Regina and her brothers plot their scheme, Birdie has been relegated to a chair far from the discussion.
The composition diagrams Birdie's situation in the scene and her place in the family. Then Wyler cuts in to her.
This might be seen as a bit of heavy-handed emphasis, but actually he's doing two things. He's making manifest her reaction, a numb resignation to being excluded. He's also setting up, thanks to another depth composition, the chair in the hallway by the staircase. At the climax, it's Zan, as beaten down as Birdie, who slumps in that chair.
Thanks to depth staging and deep-focus cinematography, the second image emphasizes Birdie's solitude and prophesies Zan's.
Which only makes my first question more pressing. Some shots of the quarrel leading up to Horace's collapse on the stair exhibit flagrant deep focus.
We know from other shots in the film, like the Birdie/Zan comparison, that Wyler could have simply shown us Regina on the sofa in the foreground, in long shot or medium shot, while keeping Horace in focus in the background. In fact, Wyler tells us that Toland said, "I can have him sharp, or both of them sharp." Why opt for shallow focus that makes Horace's staircase seizure blurry and hard to see?
Fun with functions
Asking why? about something in an artwork actually veils two different questions.
The first is: How did it get there? The answer is a causal story about how the element came to be included.
The second sense of why is: What's it doing there? That's not a question of causes but of functions. How does the element contribute to the other parts and the artwork as a whole?
Take the second question first. You can imagine many functional reasons for Wyler's choice. Exactly because the rest of the film keeps image planes sharp, this moment gains a unique emphasis. Horace's collapse is marked as a major turning point in the plot. In an ordinary film, we wouldn't notice an out-of-focus background. Here, by reverting to the more traditional choice, Wyler makes shallow focus stylistically prominent. For once in a film, a dramatic high point isn't given to us with maximum visibility.
Another function is character revelation. In the film as a whole, we haven't been consistently restricted to any one character. Here, Wyler could have concentrated on either Horace or Regina, or he could have given them equal treatment. An obvious choice would have been intercutting shots of Horace crawling up the steps with shots of Regina, impassively turned from him. Probably most directors would have done it that way.
Alternatively, we might have been attached to Horace, letting us see Regina in the distance. That would have diminished her reaction and played up Horace's suffering.
Wyler's choice puts the emphasis not on the action—thanks to the distant framing, Horace's collapse can almost be taken for granted—but Regina's reactions, or rather non-reactions, moment by moment. We're made to see her turning slightly to listen to his struggles, while her staring eyes suggest that she's visualizing the action with a horrified fascination. It's as if her denying him the medicine was an experiment in seeing how far she could go. Now she knows. Her straining face is virtually willing her husband to die.
Keeping both this monstrous woman and her victim in focus would have divided our attention, then, and Wyler wants it squarely on Regina. He seems to have said as much in interviews.
We said we've got to stay on Bette all the time and just see this thing in the background, see him going in the background, but never lose her.
I wanted audiences to feel they were seeing something they were not supposed to see. Seeing the husband in the background made you squint, but what you were seeing was her face.
The second remark suggests another functional result of Wyler's choice. By making the collapse almost indiscernible, we become very aware of what we can't see. Thanks to selective focus, Bazin remarked, "The viewer feels an extra anxiety and almost wants to push the immobile Bette Davis aside to get a better look." The dramatic tension of the scene finds its counterpart in our frustration to see what any other film would show us.
Finally, we should note that the staircase is an essential element in the film's drama. Horace's collapse is only one major incident taking place around and on it. Significantly, when Zan finally breaks free of Regina and the rest of the family, the matriarch learns of it standing on the stairs. Having all but murdered her husband there, now she sees her daughter abandon her.
Shoot my good side
The Bishop's Wife (1948).
There are other functions we, as good critics, might seek out. For all of them, there is probably a loose causal story we're relying on: Wyler and his colleagues made some choices that bore fruit. Some of those choices may have aimed at fulfilling the functions we notice. Other functions we notice may come along as bonuses—unintended but still benefiting the scene. Unintended consequences, good or bad, come up in art as elsewhere.
There remains the other implication of why-did-they-do-it questions: the one that seeks out quite specific causes that govern the scene. How do we tackle that?
In my book On the History of Film Style, from which some of these Little Foxes observations are drawn, I argued that we can make stretches of stylistic history intelligible by thinking in terms of problems and solutions. Art historians have done this for a long while. Assuming that you want to suggest that something in the picture is farther away than something else, how do you do it? One way is through overlap, as in Egyptian art. Here the fishermen overlap the background, their legs overlap each other's, and the strings of fish that one is carrying overlap some legs.
Later image-makers suggest variable distances through size variations, placement in the format (a little bit of that here, with the river above/behind the men), tonal contrast, atmospheric perspective, linear perspective, and other techniques. These can be considered solutions, available to artists of different times and places, to the problem of suggesting three dimensions on a flat surface.
A problem/solution way of thinking can clarify some developments in the history of filmmaking too. If you have to represent two actions taking place simultaneously, how can you do it? Crosscutting, as Griffith and others showed in the 1910s, solves that problem. It offers spillover benefits too, such as controlling pace. Similarly, there's the problem of representing spoken dialogue. Silent films solved this in various ways—through a commenter in the theatre (the benshi in Japan), through actors voicing the roles behind the screen, and most commonly through intertitles. Later, synchronized sound solved the problem in a more thoroughgoing way.
These are very general answers to the how-did-it-get-there question. Occasionally we get more concrete information about problems and solution. For example, some Hollywood stars believed that one side of their faces was more appealing than the other. The stars with the most power could insist on being filmed on their good side, which led directors to make particular staging choices. (Claudette Colbert insisted her left side was her good side, so she's usually positioned on screen right, with her face turned toward screen left.) David Butler knew that Edward G. Robinson likewise favored his left side, so Butler needed to stage Robinson's one appearance in It's a Great Feeling (1949) with him entering a scene from right to left and playing in that position.
One vain star is problem enough, but what happens when you have two who prefer being shot from the same side? According to Henry Koster, the demands of Cary Grant and Loretta Young led to the staging of the scene shown at the top of this section. (For my reservations, see the codicil to this entry.)
The Little Foxes production provides evidence of another very specific problem. In staging the staircase collapse, Wyler faced an unusual difficulty. The actor playing Horace, Herbert Marshall, had a prosthetic leg.
Marshall lost his right leg, from the hip down, in World War I. Through practice he managed to stroll quite smoothly nonetheless, and he became a significant star and featured player in theatre and films. He doesn't need to walk much in The Little Foxes because his character is rolled around in a wheelchair. But the parlor-and-staircase scene was very demanding. As Wyler explains:
Now there was another problem involved with that, and that was the fact that Herbert Marshall has a wooden leg and couldn't make the stairs, you see. This is a trade secret. I had him stagger in the background, get behind her and just for a moment when he gets to the stairs he had to go to a landing over there, and just for a moment went out of the picture. And a double came in and went up the stairs, staggered way behind out of focus.
Here you can see Marshall leave the foreground.
An axial cut in to Regina shows him stumbling behind her and going out of shot in the distance. This much Marshall could manage.
At that point the double stumbles into the frame and starts to crawl up the staircase.
Regina leaps up and runs to the rear, and the camera racks focus to the stair, but by now the double's face is out of frame.
So the director solved the problem of the actor's disability by a combination of deep staging, the use of a double, and shallow focus. This "trade secret" yielded a range of effects that, I think most viewers would agree, were vivid and exciting.
But there's always more than one way to do anything. Given the constraint of Marshall's artificial leg, or a player's insistence on being shot from one side, or the leading lady's overnight pimple, a director can work around it in several ways. One of the few critics to notice the implications of Wyler's choice was Raymond Durgnat, a critic very sensitive to style.
Given a "pimple" or a "wooden leg," different stylists will find different solutions. One changes the camera-angle; another introduces a last-minute panning shot; another will retain the original set-up, but throw heavy shadows to conceal the offending detail; another will interpose a pot of flowers or a table-cloth to conceal the trouble spot from the camera. The director has ample opportunity to maintain his style in the face of "accident." And it's no exaggeration to say that such stylists as Dreyer and Bresson would imperturbably maintain their characteristic style even if the entire cast suddenly turned up with pimples and wooden legs.
I'd add only that the director's choices are further constrained. Beyond the immediate problem, the broader pressure of norms will kick in. The norms of classical studio lighting, cutting, and performance limit the ways Toland and Wyler can cover up Marshall's infirmity. The norms of quality A-picture American filmmaking of the period militate against, say, editing the scene so that a dummy is substituted for Marshall on the stair. (We might get that in a serial, though.)
There are also the intrinsic norms set up in The Little Foxes as a formal whole. These favor handling the scene in depth in some way. Wyler reports the decision: "We said we've got to stay on Bette all the time and just see this thing in the background, see him going in the background, but never lose her." Wyler's earlier choices in the film created a kind of path-dependence for this critical moment. Deep-space staging could stay in tune with the rest of the film; but because of his actor's infirmity, he could give up deep-focus cinematography. This solution created a vivid variant on the film's intrinsic norm.
You can also argue that by deciding to call our attention to a distant plane in soft focus, Wyler fell back on something he had tried before. In the extraordinary late silent The Shakedown (1929), he showed a pie being stolen in a diner. First, there's a close-up, then a shot of the main couple looking to the background. In the center, out of focus underneath the coffee urn, the pie is slipping away.
The action isn't very discernible in my image, which is from a 35mm print; but the scene is shot quite soft anyway. I think audiences notice the gesture, slight as it is, because it's centered and nothing else is moving in the frame. More visible is the background action in a shot Wyler and Toland used in Dead End (1937). Two gangsters are sitting in a bar debating kidnapping a child. In the out-of-focus background,we can discern a woman wheeling a baby carriage along the sidewalk. She isn't the target, just a sort of reminder of children's vulnerability. As in The Little Foxes, a centered background action attracts our attention and makes us strain to identify it.
Faced with a similar problem in The Little Foxes, Wyler had the chance to dramatize a soft-focus background to a much greater extent than in these films.
One more causal factor might have shaped Wyler's decision. Lillian Hellman's original play takes place wholly in the Giddens' parlor and the hallway behind. The play text indicates that the staircase is in the rear of the set, with a landing offstage. The furniture sits downstage, closer to the audience. The foreground/background interaction in Wyler's staging is already there, in a rougher form, in the play's set arrangement.
And how does the play handle the moment of Horace's collapse? When Horace's medicine bottle breaks, Regina doesn't move. Calling for Addie the maid, Horace leaves and staggers to the rear playing area.
He makes a sudden, furious spring from the chair to the stairs, taking the first few steps as if he were a desperate runner. Then he slips, gasps, grasps the rail, makes a great effort to reach the landing. When he reaches the landing, he is on his knees. His knees give way, he falls on the landing, out of view. Regina has not turned during his climb up the stairs. Now she waits a second. Then she goes below the landing, speaks up.
REGINA: Horace, Horace.
The foreground/background dynamic, as well as the frozen indifference in Regina's performance, are written into the scene's stage directions. Hellman's instructions yield a further hint: Horace "falls on the landing, out of view." Within the norms of the deep-focus aesthetic, Wyler and Toland found a cinematic equivalent for this barely-offstage action–one appropriate for their film's particular style. They make Horace present, but he's "out of view."
Somebody may say: "See? You don't need all this fancy analysis. At bottom, Wyler was forced to shoot the scene this way because of Marshall's bum leg." This retort assumes that causal factors always trump functional ones. Instead, I think that by considering causal factors, insofar as we can know them, alongside functional ones, we can better understand filmic creativity in history.
Durgnat's point shows us how. Even when contingent circumstances "force" a filmmaker to change course, there are always several ways to do that. Picking any option brings in a cascade of other constraints and opportunities. Once Wyler has decided to double Marshall and sustain the take on Davis, soft focus is more or less necessary so we don't spot the stand-in. But the soft-focus provides a nifty opportunity to create the sorts of functions and effects we've already noticed.
Like everybody else, filmmakers choose within constraints—some apparent, some less visible, many just taken for granted. Those constraints limit what can be done, but they also enable other things to happen, perhaps things that the filmmaker couldn't have planned in advance. Once other filmmakers realize the results, they can plan in advance. A moviemaker today can try out Wyler's solution, free of the pressures that drove him to it. A significant part of filmmaking's traditions may consist of workarounds.
The Ostlund epigraph, apparently not available online, is taken from Hollywood Reporter's December awards issue, p. 13. My Egyptian picture comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's called Fish Preparation and Net Making, from the Tomb of Amenhotep (1479-1458 BCE), as rendered by Nina de Garis Davies. I draw the stage directions in The Little Foxes from Lillian Hellman, The Collected Plays (Little, Brown, 1971), 195.
My quotations about It's a Great Feeling and The Bishop's Wife come, respectively from two books by Irene Kahn Atkins, David Butler (Scarecrow, 1993), 227; and Henry Koster (Scarecrow, 1987), 87. Koster's memory fails him in his account of the Bishop's Wife window scene. It seems likely that Loretta Young favored her left side, which is her dominant orientation throughout the film. But there's no evidence in the film that Cary Grant favored that side of his face too. The scene at the window is too brief to count as an instance of much of anything.
When I wrote On the History of Film Style in the mid-1990s, I had the nagging memory that Marshall's artificial leg played a role in Wyler's staging, but I put it down as legend. (It's a pity I didn't pursue it, because the information would have fitted snugly into my sixth chapter.) Only when I discovered a 1972 interview with Wyler, with the "trade secret" mentioned above, did I realize there was something to the story. That interview was once online, but seems to have vanished. It's available at Columbia University. Durgnat's discussion is in Films and Feelings (MIT Press, 1967), 41. My other quotations from Wyler come from Axel Madsen, William Wyler (Crowell, 1973), 209.
Otis Ferguson reported on the filming of a different scene in The Little Foxes; I discuss that here. More generally, on the Bazin-Wyler connection, see this entry. Other Wyler-related entries can be canvassed here. For more on Hollywood's development of deep staging and deep focus, see not only On the History of Film Style but also Chapter 27 of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. As for Bette Davis's eyelids, much in evidence here, there's this entry.
Say hello to GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE
DB here:
Godard is making trouble again. Adieu au langage–known now as Goodbye to Language– is doing better in the US than any of his films have done in the last thirty-some years. It has a per-screen average of $13,500, which is about twice that attained by Ouija in its opening last weekend.
But that average represents only two screens, and it's going to be hard to expand because Goodbye to Language is in 3D. Many art houses would love to play it, but they lacked the money to upgrade to 3D during the big digital conversion of recent years. Even high-powered venues in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago don't have 3D installed. Here in Madison we're showing it as a benefit for our Cinematheque. But the film's prospects may be brightening.
Re-seeing it (twice) at the Vancouver International Film Festival back in September, I was struck by a few more ideas about it. Kristin and I avoid listicles, but after writing an expansive entry on the film, all I've got at this point is some scattered observations. Two ragtag comments are semi-spoilers, and I'll warn you beforehand.
The Power of post As far as I can tell, Godard hasn't used the converging-lens method to create 3D during shooting. Instead of "toeing-in" his cameras, he set them so that the lenses are strictly parallel. He and his DP Fabrice Aragno apparently relied on software to generate the startling 3D we see onscreen.
This reminds me that postproduction has long been a central aspect of Godard's creative process. Of course he creates marvelous shots while filming, but ever since Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), when he yanked out frames from the middle of his shots, he has always made post-shooting work more than simply trimming and polishing. His interruptive aesthetic is made possible by editing that wedges in intertitles (sometimes the same one several times). He breaks off beautiful shots and drops in bursts of music that snap off just before they cadence.
In both sound and image, the post-production process for Godard is a kind of transformation, an openly admitted re-writing of what came from the camera. He slaps graffiti on his own film. In Narration in the Fiction Film, I argued that our sense of a Godard film being "told" or narrated by the director proceeds partly from his ability to create the impression of a sort of Cineaste-Emperor, a sovereign master who is governing what we see and hear at any given moment. The collage principle suggests someone behind the scenes pasting these fragments together. Not only his commentary (once whispered, now croaked) but every shot-change and bit of music and noise, every intertitle and look to the camera all bear witness to Godard as God. Before he cut a strip of film; now he twiddles a knob or guides a slider. In all cases, we still feel his playful, exasperating hand.
Godard's famous collage aesthetic relies on aggressive changes to image and sound in postproduction that all but deface the surfaces of his movie. No surprise, then, that Godard 3D lays out those surfaces boldly, with distant planes sharply edged and volumes that stretch out before us.
Yet with his superimposed titles, sometimes hovering among the audience, he can flatten volume and stack up planes like playing cards. It's partly a joke that the 2D title below is closer to us than the 3D one behind it, but even that sticks out further than the unidentifiable light array that is farthest away.
The Rule and the exception. Just as Hollywood cinema erected rules for plotting, shooting, and editing, it has cultivated rules for "proper" 3D filming. An informative piece by Bryant Frazer points out some ways that Godard breaks those rules. Still, just calling him a maverick makes him sound merely willful. Part of his aim is to explore what happens if you ignore the rules.
This is Godard's experimental side: He considers what "good craftsmanship" traditionally excludes, just as the Cubists decided that perspective, and smooth finish, and other features of academic painting blocked off some expressive possibilities. To get a positive sense of what he's doing, we need to understand what the conventional rules are intended to achieve. Consider just two purposes.
1. 3D, the rules assume, ought to serve the same function as framing, lighting, sound, and other techniques do: to guide us to salient story points. A shot should be easy to read. When 3D isn't just serving to awe us with special effects, it has the workaday purpose of advancing our understanding of the story. So, for instance, 3D should use selective focus to make sure that only one figure stands out, while everything else blurs gracefully.
But 3D allows Godard to present the space of a shot as discomfitingly as he presents his scenes (elliptical, they are) and his narrative (zigzag and laconic, it is). As in traditional deep-focus cinematography, we're invited to notice more than the main subject of a shot, but here those piled-up planes have an extra presence, and our eye is invited to explore them.
2. According to the rules, 3D ought to be relatively realistic. Traditional cinema presents itself as a window onto the story world, and 3D practitioners have spoken of the frame as the "stereo window." People and objects should recede gently away from that surface, into the depth behind the screen. But Adieu au langage gives us a beautiful slatted chair, neither fully in our lap nor fully integrated into the fictional space. It juts out and dominates the composition, partly blocking the main action–a husband bent on violence hustling out of his car.
That chair, or one of its mates, reappears, usually with greater heft than the human characters shoved nearly out of sight behind it.
In sum, visual realism of the Hollywood sort is only one mode of moviemaking. Godard lets us know from the very start that he's after something else. The film's first title announces: "Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality." Goodbye to Language is an adventure of the imagination.
Innovation, intractable. Godard has been around so long that some of his innovations—jump-cuts, interruptive intertitles—have become common in mainstream movies. But there remains an intractable core that is just too difficult to assimilate, and he has always been a few jumps ahead of people who want to de-fang his experiments.
Supposedly Picasso told Gertrude Stein: "You do something new and then someone comes along and makes it pretty."
A fresh eye. French thinkers have long pondered the possibility that language separates us from the world. It drops a kind of scrim that keeps us from seeing things in their innocent purity. Given the film's title, I suggested in an NPR interview that Godard's use of 3D, along with the insistence on the dog Roxy, is aiming to make us perceive the world stripped of our conceptual constructs (language, plot, normal viewpoints, and so on). Personally, the idea that language alienates us from some primordial connection to things seems to me implausible, but I think it's a central theme of the film. This very talky movie exploits a paradox: we must use language to say goodbye to it.
Learning curve. Critics put off by Godard, I think, have too limited a notion of what criticism is. They seem to think that their notion of cinema, fixed for all time, is a standard to which every movie has to measure up. They are notably resistant to a simple idea: We can learn something from films. Not only can we learn things about life but we also learn things about cinema. We learn things that we never realized that film can do.
But then, how many critics actually want to learn something about cinema, which can only happen the way we learn anything: by wrestling with something that strikes us as difficult?
Two soft spoilers ahead!
On re-viewing, I was struck by other ways in which the two long parallel stories echo one another: a big bowl of flowers, later one of fruit; the repetition of "There is no why!"; and an odd colorless or nearly colorless image of each principal woman.
As with so much else in the film, Godard posits his own slippery version of a parallel-universe plot, and this overall formal option is underscored by these stylistic choices. In the first prologue, the woman on the left above is also given to us in a color shot, as if the disparity color/black-and-white points ahead to the nearly black-and-white color shot to come.
The (apparent) deaths of the principal men are rendered very obliquely, but apparently out of story order. This juggling with chronology, a staple of modern cinema, is fairly rare in Godard, at least as I recall.
Clearly, 3D is becoming something we cinephiles need to face up to. I balked at the beginning, but I've come around. Important filmmakers like Godard, Herzog, and Wenders are working with it. Just as important, we've never until now been able to study 3D movies closely. I remember watching Bwana Devil and others on a flatbed in the Library of Congress in the early 1980s, but if I stopped on any frame, I couldn't tell what the 3D effect was like. Of course any 2D print of a classic 3D title represents only one camera's view.
The victory of digital projection yielded a benefit I hadn't foreseen when I wrote Pandora's Digital Box. After Dial M for Murder came out in BD in 2012, I realized I needed to upgrade. We bought a bargain TV and BD player just when 3D TV had been declared dead. Now our 3D collection has expanded to include Hong Kong titles as well as favorites like Wreck-It Ralph, Gravity, and A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. Costs of 3D discs are sometimes low, and while you need a bigger monitor than we have to approach the force of a big-screen viewing, we can at least study a director's use of the format frame by frame.
So for viewers who can't get to Goodbye to Language in theatres but who have a 3D TV may take heart: Kino Lorber will be releasing a 3D Blu-ray disc.
Vadim Rizov has a brief but intriguing interview with Aragno in Filmmaker Magazine. ""Hollywood says you shouldn't have more than six centimeters between cameras, so I began at twelve to see what happened." Obviously a simpatico collaborator.
I discuss aspects of Hitchcock's use of 3D in Dial M for Murder here.
P.S. 4 November 2014: The distribution of Goodbye to Language has become a cause célebre. Justin Chang surveys the situation in Variety.
P.P.S. 13 November 2014: Geoffrey O'Brien's enthusiastic appreciation of the film not only illuminates it but conveys the excitement of seeing it.
P.P.P.S. 14 November 2014: Two more thoughts, after seeing the film again last night at our Cinematheque screening. First, the "unidentifiable light array" I mention above is actually on the cover of the French edition of A. E. Van Vogt's The World of Null-A shown later in the film. Second, this time I noticed that the war imagery in the film's first part subsides in the second, to be replaced, it seems, by Roxy's wanderings–a more lyrical, peaceful counterweight to the horrors invoked earlier. The pivot would seem to be the first helicopter crash at the end of the first part. There among the flaming ruins we can see the burned head of a dead dog. Roxy's proxy? Anyhow, the original survives, exuberantly, in the film's second long part.
Goodbye to Language.
Zip, zero, Zeitgeist
Dawn of Planet of the Apes (2014).
DB here:
The silly season always seems to catch me off guard. This time I got the word in a New York Times feature, "The Moviegoers."
Here two writers, Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, conduct an email conversation about recent films. You may have thought that the Times already has a large stable of movie reviewers, headlined by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott. But mainstream movies are very accessible (as opposed to, say, serial music or Baroque architecture), so nearly everybody has something to say. And because nobody knows what counts as expertise in movie reviewing, why not bring on two of the commentariat? Once you become a public intellectual, what you say about anything is interesting.
Granted, both participants in the dialogue, Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, have been movie reviewers. Mr. Bruni wrote for the Detroit Free Press, and Mr. Douthat currently covers film for the National Review. Through some process yet unexplained, these movie reviewers became second-string social and political pundits for the Times. That would seem a step up, so why put them back in the reviewing game?
The rationale is supplied in the series introduction, which talks of the plan to discuss "movies, pop culture, television, and other real-world distractions." The Times style guardian might want to pause on the last phrase: Are these phenomena distractions in the real world (as in "real-world opportunities")? Or are they distractions from the real world? I think the writer means the latter, which translates into this: Politics is the important stuff, mass art is a lightweight diversion. And we all need diversion, especially a newspaper aiming to attract readers under fifty.
So we have two Op-Ed columnists taking a break from serious matters in order to shoot the breeze about summer releases. In "Two Thumbs Up…Yer Arse." Charlie Pierce, our fouler-mouthed Mencken, has exposed some curious assumptions about poverty displayed in the Moviegoers' first round of chitchat. What interests me here is another aspect of the column, which showcases one standard move that many reviewers make.
The problem for serious people like Mr. Douthat and Mr. Bruni is this. If movies are "real-world distractions," why spend any time talking about them? More specifically, why should political pundits talk about them? The obvious answer: Somehow these products of popular culture open a window into what's really going on. Mr. Douthat:
In this sense I do think moviemakers are tapping into the American psyche, but I also think they're replicating a flaw of the American political debate. I'm not sure we'll get very far by painting the rich as morally hopeless people who must be subverted, vanquished, overtaken.
And when Mr. Bruni asks, "Tell me about the trend that made you happy, and (speaking of political allegories) whether you like 'Apes' as much as everyone else," Mr. Douthat replies:
There was something poignant about watching "Apes" against the backdrop of the mess in the Middle East and of the war in Israel and Gaza, because it's a disturbingly good allegory of reciprocal mistrust, asking the right questions about how peace ever reigns when combatants can't bring themselves to forgive error, to take the first step, to turn from the past and focus on the future, to start afresh. It's a disturbingly good allegory about corrupt leaders, too: how they whip up fervor in the service of their own ambition; how we rise and fall based on the clarity and wisdom with which we choose them.
You may want to reply that if this is what the Times wants, you will undertake to supply them with 3000 words of it every day at reasonable rates. But put aside the banalities about politics. I'm interested in the suggestion that movies can bear traces of the national psyche, or reflect national debates we're having right now, or provide inadvertent "allegories" of contemporary history.
These ideas enjoy an astonishing popularity. They are staples of movie journalism. The trouble is that they don't hold up.
Reflections on reflectionism
That mass entertainment somehow reflects its society is, I believe, the One Big Idea that every intellectual has about popular culture. The notion shapes the Sunday Times think piece about how the movies of the last few months capture the current Zeitgeist (or one a while back). It informs the belief that we can define periods in American popular art by presidential eras–Leave It to Beaver as cozy Eisenhower suburban fantasy, Forrest Gump as an expression of Clinton-era post-Cold-War isolationism. Reflectionism may be the last refuge of journalists writing to deadline, but it's also found in the industry's talk about itself. "Oscar Best Pic Contenders Reflect America's Anxieties," Variety announced last winter.
The threat of circularity. Behind this Big Idea is an assumption that cinema, being a "popular art," tends to embody some state of mind common to the millions of people living in a society. The very idea of a massive mind-meld like this seems implausible. America's anxieties and our national psyche? The anxieties of the 1% are not yours and mine, and I doubt that even you and I share a psyche.
The argument easily becomes circular. All popular films reflect society's attitudes. How do we know what the attitudes are? Just look at the films! We need independent and pretty broadly based evidence to show that the attitudes exist, are very widespread, and have been incorporated in films. And it won't do to simply point to the same attitudes surfacing in TV, pop songs, mass-market fiction as well, because that just postpones the problem of correlating the attitudes with groups of living and breathing people.
Critics seem to assume that if a film is successful at the box office, it must reflect the audience's inner life. Yet the sheer fact of a movie's popularity doesn't prove that these attitudes are out there. Just because Spider-Man (2002) was a huge success doesn't mean that it offers us access to America's national mood or hidden anxieties. People spend time with a piece of mass art for many reasons: to kill an idle hour, to meet with friends, to find out what all the fuss is about. After the encounter, consumers often dislike the art work to some degree, or they remain indifferent to it. Since people must buy the movie ticket before they experience the movie, there can't be a simple correlation between mass sales and mass mood. You and lots of others may be suckered into going to a film you dislike, but just by going you've already been counted as among those who support it. Doubtless many people enjoyed Spider-Man. But it's very difficult to say how many.
And did all of the patrons who enjoyed it do so for the same reasons? That remains to be shown, and it's hard. We know that a movie may appeal to several audiences at once, packaging a range of appeals. In fact, it's a strategy of the film industry to produce movies that contain fuzzy messages, contrary attitudes, and something for nearly everybody. Must we find reflections of cultural needs in every aspect of a movie that might appeal to somebody?
Movies are narrowcasting. The film audience is a skewed sampling of the population. According to industry statistics, about one-third of Americans over the age of two never go to the movies, and another ten percent go once a year.
Another 40% go "occasionally"–less than once a month. It turns out that the heavy moviegoers, those going once a month or more, are currently just 11% of the population. Take Dawn of Planet of the Apes. Assuming an average ticket price of $8 and no repeat viewings, at most about 25.5 million Americans and Canadians have seen the movie. That's about 7% of the countries' total population. We would need to tell a pretty full story about how the mental life of 350 or so million people gets into movies seen by a thin, self-selected slice of the population.
Moviegoers are atypical of the population in other respects. Since the beginning, Hollywood cinema has catered to the middle class. Moviegoers have been younger, better educated, and better-off economically than non-moviegoers.
The real mass medium of our time is network television (as radio was before). On one night, a single episode of The Big Bang Theory can attract 19 million viewers. A film that had that viewership across an opening weekend would take in over $150 million. That is $50 million more than the latest Transformers movie garnered at its debut. If Messrs. Douthat and Bruni want to take the national temperature, they should watch TV–ideally, the ads on the Super Bowl (shown to 112 million viewers).
Actually, you can argue that television really is a more reliable barometer of mass tastes, not just because of its prevalence but because TV viewing depends on recidivism. People may not know they'll like a movie before they attend, but they tune in to shows that have proven to satisfy them. Still and all, mass taste is not the national psyche.
The long road from the White House. A primary prop for reflectionists is politics. Talk about an American film of the 1950s and sooner or later someone will invoke the reign of blandness that was (purportedly) the Eisenhower administration. But why do we assume that the population's mind set switches its course whenever a new President is elected? Many voters stubbornly adhere to the same values election after election; others vote in order to throw out a rascal and aren't at all satisfied with the newcomer.
There couldn't be a direct tie between elections and moviegoers' attitudes. About thirty percent of today's audience consists of people too young to vote. The most reliable voter turnout is among the over-forty-five set, which until recently constituted only about twenty percent of moviegoers. Of course, maybe movies reflect the attitudes of non-voters, or people who are indifferent to politics. But then why identify periods of political history with periods of movie history?
Reflectionists have always been reluctant to offer a concrete causal account of how widely-held attitudes or anxieties within an audience could find their way into art works. What precise story could we tell to explain how changing the occupant of the White House can affect popular culture? How exactly does a party platform or a candidate's charisma or the new administration's policies seep into Hollywood movies for the multitudes?
Movies' crystal ball. If there ever were a dominant mood at large in the land, it would be very difficult for that mood to find its way into a current movie. There's often a lag of several years before a script gets to the screen. Many of the films released in 1997, though read as responding to current crises, were bought as projects in 1993 and 1994. Dawn of Planet of the Apes was begun in 2011, written through 2011-2012, and began shooting in April of 2013–all before the current standoff between Israel and Hamas.
Maybe the moviemakers are somehow in touch with political forces before they crystallize? One critic has proposed that films can have this prophetic power. Puzzled that no Obama-era movies had emerged by 2012, J. Hoberman suggests that the most "Obama-ite" ones came out before Obama was elected:
The longing for Obama (or an Obama) can be found in two prescient 2008 movies—WALL-E (the world saved by an endearing little dingbot, community organizer for an extinct community) and Milk (portrait of another creative community organizer—not to mention a precedent-shattering politician who, it's very often reiterated, presented himself as a Messenger of Hope).
This is nearly a miracle. Somehow these filmmakers sensed that Americans (well, 53% of the people voting) were yearning to be led by a community organizer. But how specifically could the filmmakers have arrived at that prescience? In fact, they would have had to be long-range prophets. Milk began as a 1992 project, and the final version of the script was prepared in 2007. The Pixar adepts started talking about WALL-E in 1994 and began drafting scripts in 2002. Why don't we ask filmmakers to predict our next president right now?
Pick and choose. Of all the films of the summer, Bruni and Douthat settle on a few. Of all the hundreds of 2008 films, two presage Obama. This selectivity is typical of the reflectionist approach, which typically ignores the range of incompatible material on offer.
If 1940s film noir reflects some angst in the American psyche, how to explain the audience's embrace of sunny MGM musicals and lightweight comedies in the same years? The year 1956 saw the release of The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, Giant, The King and I, Guys and Dolls, Picnic, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Searchers, and The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. Pick one, find some thematic concerns there that resonate with social life of the time, and you have a case for any state you wish to ascribe to the collective psyche. But take any other movie, or indeed the industry's entire output, and you have a problem. One alternative is for us to find that the films share common themes, but these are likely to be of an insipid generality. Or we could float the rather uncompelling claim that several hundred films reflect hundreds of different, and contradictory, facets of the audience's inner life.
Consider the source. Of course filmmakers sometimes deliberately include political comment. But then the film is "reflecting" the purposes of its particular makers, not the mass public. The filmmaker may claim to be tapping the Zeitgeist, but it's really the Zeitgeist as she or he understands it. It's not the public expressing itself spontaneously and unselfconsiously through the movie.
Movies use a lot of collaborators, and they may have varying agendas. The most powerful players are inevitably going to shape the initial project in specific, often personal ways. The preoccupations of the screenwriter, the producer, the director, and the stars necessarily transform the given idea. And these workers, living hermetic lives in Beverly Hills and jetting off to Majorca, are far from typical. How can the fears and yearnings of the masses be adequately "reflected" once these elites have finished with the product? Maybe some violence in American films gets there not because the crowd secretly wants it but because Hollywood creators compete in pushing the envelope. Once more we need a story about how widespread opinions get incarnated in the work of an unrepresentative group.
In sum, reflectionist criticism throws out loose and intuitive connections between film and society without offering concrete explanations that can be argued explicitly. It relies on spurious and far-fetched correlations between films and social or political events. It neglects damaging counterexamples. It assumes that popular culture is the audience talking to itself, without interference or distortion from the makers and the social institutions they inhabit. And the causal forces invoked–a spirit of the time, a national mood, collective anxieties–may exist only as abstractions that the commentator, pressed to fill column inches, invokes in the manner of calling spirits from the deep.
Primate see, primate do
This isn't to say that society has no impact on films. Of course it does. But we understand that process best by taking film as film.
Film critics serve us best when they explore how a film uses the medium to yield its effects. Critics can enlighten us about how filmmakers work with their givens (subjects, themes, genres, artistic traditions, star personas) and generate an experience shot through with meanings, feelings, and ideas. We should recognize that a large part of any movie is the result of will and skill, not the passive reflection of vague social turmoil. There will be some unintended effects too, of course, but we can try to understand those as coming from specific conditions of production practices, traditions, and creative options.
One first step, for example, would be to consider Dawn of Planet of the Apes as following the plot pattern of the revisionist Western.(Spoilers follow.) The humans, like settlers in the west, need resources held by the apes, who live in self-sufficient harmony with nature. They wish others no harm. A well-meaning emissary from the humans, Malcolm, leads a team into ape territory to tap an energy source. Thanks to Malcolm's promises of peaceful coexistence, humans and apes become friendly. But other members of Malcolm's team don't trust the apes and provoke violence. There is also the brooding ape Koba, who wants revenge for his mistreatment in experiments. The peace treaty is broken by both sides.
Koba, Caesar's friend and rival, escalates the war with the humans when he discovers the cache of weapons. While Caesar tries to keep Koba from fomenting rebellion, Malcolm must try to restrain the humans' leader, Dreyfuss. This is a familiar duality: the unruly tribal brave hot for vengeance who must be disciplined by the wise chief, and the sensible lieutenant who tries to restrain his rapacious superior.
The science-fiction premise has been shaped to fit the familiar pattern of liberal Westerns, in which blame can be placed on weak, cowardly, vengeful, or power-hungry individuals who block well-meaning leaders from finding peace. The classic equivocation of Hollywood film (there's always an element that says, "Yes, but then there's…") is well summed up by the ambivalent to-camera glare of Caesar that begins and ends the movie: Angry? Sorrowful? Defiant? Implacable? Your mileage may vary.
The political themes are sculpted in another way, through family parallels. Caesar has a wife, Cornelia, and a son, Blue Eyes. Malcolm has a wife, Ellie, and a son, Alexander. The prospect of peaceful coexistence between human and ape is encapsulated in the two families' growing fondness for each other. The parallels are sharpened by contrasts. Alexander comes to accept the apes, while his more rebellious adolescent counterpart Blue Eyes temporarily aligns himself with the false father Koba—only to prove himself loyal to Caesar at the climax.
By contrast, Dreyfus and Koba are lone males, without women or offspring. Granted, we are allowed some sympathy for both: Koba has been mistreated by humans, and Dreyfus has lost his family in the collapse of civilization. Still, Caesar is morally superior to both because he has lived in each world harmoniously. Before the final battle, the wounded Caesar gets to recall his first human family, typified by his father figure, on video.
Onto the settlers vs. Indians plot, then, is grafted what film scholars have called a "family adventure" pattern, one that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s with E. T.: The Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park and other films seeking "four-quadrant" success. The result is more made-in-Hollywood archetype than grassroots allegory.
My sketch is Film Studies 101 and needs plenty of nuancing. To go further we should consider how this movie, or any movie, puts flesh on its plot bones. How does the film handle point-of-view and exposition? How does it generate sympathy or antipathy? How does it create character conflicts both external and internal? Does it accord with the sharply contoured plot architecture characteristic of US studio filmmaking (and maybe popular literature too)? If I were trying to do a finer-grained analysis of Dawn, I'd try to understand how the Western and family-adventure templates intertwine with these factors and gain force as the film unfolds.
The point would be not to suggest that these plot patterns reflect the attitudes or anxieties of the audience, let alone a national psyche. Rather, the patterns are chosen by the filmmakers because they have proven emotionally appealing to at least some viewers (and apparently in cultures outside the US). And they can be fashioned to accord with contemporary norms of moviemaking. Instead of passive reflection, we have active creation.
It isn't all controlled by the filmmakers. Like all actions, filmmaking can have unintended consequences. If some members of the audience respond in the way the filmmakers wanted, so far, so good. If the results are grasped in ways that the makers didn't expect or prefer, that comes with the territory too. Mass-market filmmakers take inherited forms and tweak them in new ways. The audience, in its turn, appropriates what it's given, sometimes in predictable ways, sometimes in unpredictable ones. No national psyche is needed for this process to keep rolling.
Instead of reflection, better to think of refraction, the bending and reconfiguring of social themes under the pressure of filmmaking traditions. We understand mass-market films better when we see them as, sometimes opportunistically, grabbing material from the wider culture (whether that material reflects mass sentiment or not) and transforming it through narrative and stylistic conventions. That transformation, or rather transmutation, is central to the artistry of popular entertainment.
Movies are worth studying for themselves, not just as channels for Op-Ed memes. Critics who are sensitive to the art, craft, history, and business of cinema will be able to enlighten us about all aspects of a film, including its political ones.
Jeff Smith's new book, Film Criticism, The Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds examines how critics of the 1950s found allegories of resistance to HUAC in movies made at the time. It's a good reminder that this sort of reflectionist criticism goes back pretty far.
In tune with Jeff's argument, in an earlier entry I argued that reflectionist readings of popular cinema intensified during the 1940s. But our best critics pushed back. Parker Tyler proposed that movies don't so much reflect social myths as they invent their own, and he suggested that the process follows the zany logic of dreams. Otis Ferguson, James Agee, and Manny Farber mostly avoided Zeitgeist explanations and talked about films' implications in relationship to art, craft, and other media and artforms. I survey their work in a series of recent entries: on Ferguson, on Agee, on Farber (here and here), on Tyler, and on their originality, their cultural context, and their legacy.
The pie chart come from the MPAA report on 2013 moviegoing, p. 11.
For a wide-ranging and skeptical examination of one aspect of this topic, there's Alan Hunt's article, "Anxiety and social explanation: Some anxieties about anxiety," Journal of Social History 32, 3 (Spring 1999), 509-528.
Peter Krämer developed the concept of the family adventure film in contemporary Hollywood. See his "Would You Take Your Child to See This Film? The Cultural and Social Work of the Family Adventure Movie," in Steve Neale, ed. Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routlege, 1998), 294-311.
If there's an allegory in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, perhaps it's a Bolshevik one. Josef Stalin was known as Koba, which would make Caesar a Lenin figure and Rocket a stand-in for Trotsky. (I doubt that the conservative Mr. Douthat would welcome this reading.) If the reference is intentional, it provides a good example of how a Hollywood film simply seizes cultural flotsam willy-nilly, perhaps to give intellectuals something to ponder. As Christopher Nolan explains of his Batman trilogy: "We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks."
Parts of today's sermonette are pulled from an essay published in Poetics of Cinema in 2008. That essay also charts areas of control that filmmakers and audiences enjoy. Another entry on this site dealt with these questions in relation to The Dark Knight and, again, the good, grey Times.
Daumier: Types Parisiens (1840-1843): "Ah, I can see my street, there's my house, there's my garden and my wife, I can see Laurent – Oh, I have seen too much."


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Description: No Description Provided
- Valve Size: 0.8000 inch
- Connection: Threaded, Tube Fitting
- Media Description: Water (General)
- Valve Type: Pressure Relief Valves
Supplier: BI-TORQ® Valve Automation
Description: AND BENEFITS Pilot operated spool valve technology 3/2 or 5/2 field convertible High flow 1.4 cV Integral push-button manual override LED power indicator (standard) Rapid response time (up to 5 cycles/sec) 100% continuous duty cycle Ideal for a variety of pneumatic actuator applications
- Valve Type: Solenoid Valves, Spool Valves
- Pressure Rating: 37 to 150 psi
- Connection: Threaded
- Media Temperature: 14 to 176 F
Water Quality Testing Instruments - HM Digital EC/TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) Controller w/ 4-20 mA signal and conductivity electrode -- PSC-154
Description: µS/ppm (0-999); 1 µS/ppm (1000-9999) ATC: Yes (1 - 65°C) Calibration: Digital by push button Set-Point: Single point, controlled by on-screen up/down buttons (to any point within the range) Relay Control: The unit will open or close a circuit via dry contacts when the ppm/µS level
- Water Quality Measurement Instrument: Conductivity / Dissolved Solids, Suspended Solids
- Mounting / Environment: Panel
Description: Resolution ± 10 μS Accuracy & repeatability ± 1.0% Deadband/Setpoint Adjustable Auto/Manual outputs Menu selectable Output relays 2 selectable use and 1 for blowdown Keypad 16 tactile push-buttons Display 16 X 2 Character Water meter input Contact head, paddle wheel or turbine Timer Max
- User Interface: Knobs / Switches / Meter
Description: LU77-5005 (Replaces LU72-5005) EchoSwitch Multi-Point Ultrasonic Level Switch The general purpose ultrasonic level sensor provides continuous level detection up to 26.2' (8m) with 3 programmable relays for level switch or level control functions, and is configured via the integral push button
- Media Type: Liquid
- Device Classification: Sensor System
- Measuring Range: 4 to 98 inch
- Meter Technology: Ultrasonic / Sonic
Supplier: Gems Sensors & Controls
Description: problems in hazardous locations for the sewage, waste water, chemical and groundwater pump/solenoid valve control; automatic or manual alternation; high and/or low level alarms with silence/acknowledge capabilities. Series 67 controls can be used in hazardous applications as an intrinsically safe
- Control Signal Output: Switch / Relay Output
- Special Capabilities (if required): Level Controller
- Form Factor: Circuit Board
- Media: Liquid
Supplier: OMEGA Engineering, Inc.
Description: are simultaneously visible with our dynamic display that includes a push button operator interface. Water flow controllers are available from 50 milliliters per minute full scale to 500 milliliters per minute full scale.
- Number of Control Outputs: 1 outputs
- Controller Inputs: DC Voltage Input, Serial / Digital Input
- Control Signal Output: Analog Voltage, Serial / Digital
- Control Technique: Limit / Set Point Control, PID Control
Supplier: ACME Engineering Products, Inc.
Description: . Features Disconnect Switch or Magnetic Breaker, door interlocked Dual Digital Display Microprocessor Controller Emergency Stop push button Provision for Remote Flow interlock input Audible and visual alarm circuit with associated display lights
- Maximum Temperature: 1200 F
- Maximum Pressure: 800 psi
- Type: Steam
- Technology: Steam Generator
Solids Flow Meters - Solids Flow Measurement - CentriFeeder Gravimetric Feeder with Integrated Control Valve or ICVSupplier: Eastern Instruments
Description: Adjustment, Static Calibration, Dynamic Calibration, and Field Calibrations Calibrations can be done with the simple push of a button! Complete customization of the electronics is available for almost any application from batching to custom mixing applications. SYSTEM SOLUTIONS SINGLE UNIT
Solids Feeders - Solids Flow Measurement - CentriFeeder Gravimetric Feeder with Integrated Control Valve or ICVSupplier: Eastern Instruments
Description: Adjustment, Static Calibration, Dynamic Calibration, and Field Calibrations Calibrations can be done with the simple push of a button! Complete customization of the electronics is available for almost any application from batching to custom mixing applications. SYSTEM SOLUTIONS SINGLE UNIT
- Feeder Type: Other
- Application / Operation: Metering
- Flow Control: Volumetric
- Material Characteristics: Dry / Free Flowing
UV Disinfection and UVGI Sanitization Systems - Trojan UV MAX Pro 10 UV Disinfection Systems -- 400-650647
Description: . The system controller is equipped with an intuitive interface allowing for ease of maintenance and troubleshooting for the operator. A newly designed UV sensor offers a more reliable reading of the UV intensity of the lamp and with the push of a button you can confirm the proper operation of the sensor
- Application Type: UV Water Treatment (Filter / System)
- Configuration: Process / Line Mounted
- Lamp / Output Power: 100 watts
Supplier: Seetru Limited
Description: with non-flammable liquids. For flammable liquid applications please see either G35 Seemag or G31 Seeflex This gauge is commonly used for the water storage and coolant tanks on board cargo ships, tugs and military vessels. Push-button operation Except when a reading is being taken, the gauge is permanently
- Media Type: Liquid
- Device Classification: Level Gauge
- Maximum Operating Pressure: 53.37 psi
- Material Temperature Range: 302 F
Description: : 0-9999 µS TDS Range: 0 - 5000 ppm Temperature Range: 1-75°C; 33-167 °F Accuracy: ±2% (of the reading) Conversion Factor: NaCl (avg. 0.5) Resolution: 0.1 µS/ppm (0-999); 1 µS/ppm (1000-9999) ATC: Yes (1 - 65°C) Calibration: Digital by push button
- Controller Inputs: Switch / Relay Input
- Control Signal Output: Current Loop, Switch / Relay Output
- Control Technique: Limit / Set Point Control
- Form Factor: Panel / Chassis Mount
Supplier: HVACQuick.com
Description: Valve) is built into the pump housing, reducing the number of external devices. The S-50 models are adequate for runs of under 50 feet. The S-50 models carry a three year warranty. NOT FOR USE WITH TANKLESS WATER HEATERS. At the push of a button, the S-Series pumps cold water sitting in the hot
Supplier: CMH Manufacturing Co.
Description: buttons, etc., is mounted at optimum height for easy hands-on control in a NEMA 12 enclosure. Automatic function provides override push button operators for tilting the machine up and down.
- Operating Pressure: 1000 to 1500 psi
- Flow: 360 to 2040 GPH
- Total Power: 5 to 25 HP
- Reservoir Capacity: 42 to 70 gallons
Description: separately) SPECIFICATIONS TDS Range: 0 - 5000 ppm Accuracy: ±2% (of the reading) Resolution: 0.1 ppm (0-999); 1 ppm (1000-9999) ATC: Yes (1 - 80 degrees Celsius) Calibration: Adjustable (manual by push button) Factory Calibration: 342 ppm NaCl Set Points: Adjustable by push button. Set
- Controller Inputs: Switch / Relay Input
- Control Signal Output: Switch / Relay Output
- Control Technique: Limit / Set Point Control
- Form Factor: Panel / Chassis Mount
Supplier: Alliance Sensors Group
Description: Steam Valve Position Feedback using LVDT Position Sensors Redundant Control Systems using LVDT Position Sensors Feed water boiler pumps, Stop Valves, Throttle Valves and Conditioning Valve Position Sensor Feedback Features Smart setup with 2 front panel push buttons --- NO POTS Built-in null
Supplier: Lancer Corporation
Description: Industry standard platforms in 22'' width, six valves, lever or push button dispensing versatility Illuminated interchangeable front graphics, standard fluorescent 15 watt light bulb Visual low-ice indicator lights up to alert the need for ice in the dispenser bin High-capacity ice storage bin
- Type: Mix and Dispense
- Dispensing Type: Solid Stream
- Application: Food / Beverage
Supplier: Gluefast Company, Inc. (The)
Description: for precise adhesive application every time. What is the Standard PAT Adhesive Applicator? The standard Pneumatic Adhesive Tank (PAT) from The Gluefast Company, Inc includes a pressure tank, air gauge assembly, and glue line assembly with push button valve to dispense most water based glues and adhesives
Supplier: Watts Premier
Description: The Filter-Pure (UF3) is equipped with a unique swivel valve, in head, push button assembly. This allows for a simple and sanitary filter change that does not require you to turn off the water source to the system. This three stage filtration system is equipped with a stage 1 five micron Sediment
Supplier: Lutz - JESCO America Corp.
Description: stoke per switch closure contact (i.e. water meter or PLC). Simple one push button operation mode selection. LED operation mode indicators. Selectable energy supply to stroke solenoid resulting in lower energy consumption and reduction in operation noise. Adjustable overload protection
- Maximum Discharge Pressure: 43.5 to 232 psi
- Maximum Discharge Flow: 1.8 to 214 GPH
- Media: Chemicals, Liquids
- Power Source: AC Powered
Supplier: MAXPRO Technologies, Inc.
Description: benches can be provided with manual control or push button control to handle your speci?c application. All test benches are provided with an 8-gallon stainless steel reservoir, aircontrols, valves and gauge for manual operation. For a push button control system, you do not need to specify the remote
- Mechanical Test: Hydrostatic / Burst, Specialty / Other
- Display / Interface: Analog Display / Interface
Supplier: Uehling Instrument Company
Description: alarm sounds and a message pad flashes to inform the user why the alarm has sounded. A reset push-button silences the audible alarm. Thereafter, the message pad remains illuminated until the alarm condition has been corrected. Should another channel(s) sense an alarm condition, the audible alarm
- Leak Detection Method: Mechanical Float Switch (Relay Contact)
- Specific Detectable Liquid Types: Water
- Output Options: Switch or Alarm Signal
- Built in Alarm Indicator: Yes
Supplier: Gilson Company, Inc.
Description: ) Tank: 12x10x9in (305x254x229mm), LxWxH. External Dimensions: 15x13x13in (381x330x330mm). Generator Dimensions: 14x12x7in (351x292x178mm). Ultrasonic frequency is 80kHz. Threaded inlet and outlet drain connections are provided. Generator has on/off push button. A Sieve Holder Rack is included. Extra
Supplier: Hale Engineering Company, Inc.
Description: mounted in sidewalls & ceiling, pre-piped to solenoid valve that is activated by wall mounted push button, for an adjustable time cycle - (2) 36" x 80" aluminum frame doors & frames w/ ¼" clear safety glass window, electrically interlocked w/ electromagnetic locks & (3
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DynaQuip Controls
Award-winning protection from an industry leader.
is immediately broadcast to the WaterCop main valve causing the valve to close. Water flow is quickly cut off to all areas of the home and any continuous flooding is stopped. We are pleased to announce our most robust system, WaterCopPRO Integrated, has won several awards including ESX 2015 Innovation Award and Best New Product Finalist at CEDIA 2015.This system is an all inclusive solution which includes supervised, wireless or wired leak and temperature sensors with local alarm and local push... (read more)
Browse Water Valves Datasheets for DynaQuip Controls
JORC Industrial LLC
Air Saver System - Auto Open/Close Tank
is over. Features: Slow valve opening to avoid water hammer in pipe line system. Time programmed or remote controlled. Built-in quartz controlled timer. Integral lithium battery protects program for five (5) years. Current time display. Each individual day can be programmed according to specific working day shift requirements. Reset Function. External push button controls (disassembly not necessary). Easy to program. FPM seals. Orifice 1 or 2 inch. Manual valve opening and closing possible, in case... (read more)
Browse Ball Valves Datasheets for JORC Industrial LLC
mounting interfaces, stall protection, and a sleep/wake mode to preserve battery power. With simple push button set-up, VALVCON high duty cycle, brushless DC actuators include signal fail position options, switch selectable power loss position, on-board manual control, battery status indication, and up to ten full cycles after loss of line power. Options and accessories include a choice of control packages, electronic holding brake, heater for operation to -40F, and fully adjustable switches. All... (read more)
Browse Electric Valve Actuators Datasheets for Metso
Myron L Company
AQUASWITCH I ™ DI/RO Bank Switching System
Features: Automatically switches from exhausted to fresh DI/RO bank. Push-button override for immediate bank change-over. Adjustable purge timer for "fail-safe" operation. LEDs continually give status on both DI/RO banks. Alarm output activated as each bank is depleted. IP65/NEMA 4X splash & corrosion proof enclosure. What it Does: The AQUASWITCH I ™ is a special purpose dedicated computer which automatically "changes out" an exhausted Dl or RO bank for a fresh stand-by bank. LEDs... (read more)
Browse Water Quality Testing Instruments Datasheets for Myron L Company
Hach Company
Orbisphere™ 6110 total package analyzer
Industrial Application Manager, said. "Operators can now make real-time decisions impacting quality and productivity.". The 6110 offers more repeatable analyses with minimal operator intervention. Both validation and calibration can be programmed to occur automatically, saving time and ensuring accurate measurement. When inserting a sample, a positioning aid and laser crosshairs confirm optimal placement. With the single push of a button, the instrument performs the analysis. For more information... (read more)
Browse Water Quality Photometers and Colorimeters Datasheets for Hach Company
International Thermal Systems LLC.
Designed for cleaning dairy and beverage cases
pressure solution to perform the final cleaning of the cases. In the rinse stage 3, ambient water recirculates and is applied at a low-pressure to rinse the cases free of chemicals before they exit the washer. Model E-40 Push-Thru Track Case Washer features 4-stage treatment designed to clean 50 cases per minute. One pre-wash stage, two high volume high-pressure wash stages and one recirculated water low-pressure rinse stage thoroughly clean the largest number of cases per minute. A pre-wired... (read more)
Browse Industrial Parts Washers and Cleaning Systems Datasheets for International Thermal Systems LLC.
Shortridge Instruments, Inc.
Designed for use with AirData Multimeters
Top for exhaust and return air only. Includes (1)top - sized 14"x14"x14". PRODUCT INFORMATION. Capture Hoods Kits are designed for use with the following Multimeters: ADM-850L AirData Multimeter. ADM-860C AirData Multimeter. ADM-870C AirData Multimeter. ADM-880C AirData Multimeter. Kits Include: Flow Measuring Base with Sensing Manifold. Two Position Flaps and Control. Push-Button Handle. Carrying Case. Capture Hood Kits DO NOT include a meter. FlowHood Tops for Every Application. Standard... (read more)
Browse Air Flow Sensors Datasheets for Shortridge Instruments, Inc.
More Information Top
A modeling language for Petri net based factory automation systems
The system con- sists of a tank, a sensor measuring it, a magnetic valve supplying water , a push button and a controller to con- trol them.
States > Illinois > State > Regulations > Title 77 - Public Health > Chapter I - Department of Public Health > Subchapter r - Water and Sewage > [77 Ill. Adm. ...
c) All water closets shall have push button flush valves .
States > Illinois > State > Register > 2013 > 04/26/2013
All water closets shall have push button flush valves .
States > Illinois > State > Register > 2014 > 05/09/2014
All water closets shall have push button flush valves .
Trainz/Things You Can Do In Trainz - Wikibooks, open books for an open world
The mouse cursor point moves levers, turns valves to replenish boiler water , pushes buttons , tugs the horn cable and so forth, then the control takes effect.
Thermohydrodynamic desludging of large tanks and process equipment
It is sufficient to push the button on the automatic water flow valve on the control panel in the operator's room to feed water into the ring collector.
Design Fires in Road Tunnels
Response: Motorists at scene deploy hoses from hydrant boxes, but cannot activate water since valves require the push- ing of an operating button in addition to traditional turning of handle.
Meggitt Avionics
The calibrator consists of twin open-ended water and mercury manometers with a push - button changeover valve to permit continuous calibration throughout the range.


text:
Amazon is the big player, but there are others
Always pay yourself first
Join the NASDAQ Community today and get free, instant access to portfolios, stock ratings, real-time alerts, and more!
AMAG Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s
) third quarter 2012 loss of 16 cents per share was narrower than
the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of 24 cents and the
year-ago loss of 78 cents per share. Lower operating expenses
resulted in a narrower loss.
Quarterly revenues climbed 1.1% to $17.4 million, below the
Zacks Consensus Estimate of $21 million. Bulk of the revenues in
the third quarter of 2012 came from Feraheme sales.
Quarterly Highlights
AMAG records revenues mainly from Feraheme, an injectable drug
for intravenous use as iron replacement therapy for the treatment
of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in adults suffering from chronic
kidney disease (CKD).
In the reported quarter, net sales of Feraheme amounted to
$16.2 million, up 2.4% from the year-ago quarter.
AMAG has a partnership agreement with
Takeda Pharmaceuticals
) for Feraheme, in the EU and Canada. We note that Rienso (EU
trade name of Feraheme) was launched recently in the EU while it
was launched in Canada in October this year. AMAG already
received $3 million as milestone payment for the Canadian launch
of the drug and is anticipating a $15 million milestone payment
from Takeda for the European sale of the drug.
AMAG is working on expanding Feraheme's label. The company is
conducting two studies conducted in patients with IDA regardless
of the underlying cause. AMAG reported positive results from the
second phase III clinical trial during the third quarter of 2012.
AMAG intends to submit a supplemental new drug application (sNDA)
to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for this indication
by year end.
Total operating cost (including cost of goods sold) in the
quarter amounted to $22.3 million, down 35.9% from the year-ago
period. Lower research and development (R&D) expenses related
to the company's global IDA clinical program helped reduce
operating expenses. Both R&D expenses and selling, general
and administrative (SG&A) expenses were on the downtrend in
the reported quarter.
Feraheme Outlook Raised
AMAG updated its guidance for 2012. Feraheme sales are now
expected in the range of $58-$60 million for 2012 (old guidance:
$55-$58 million). Further, AMAG has lowered its total operating
expenses (excluding cost of goods sold) guidance to the range of
$87-$90 million (old guidance: $90 - $95 million).
The company still expects to exit 2012 with cash and
investments of $225-$230 million. The guidance excludes the
impact of a business development transaction. AMAG also expects
to receive milestone payments totaling $33 million pertaining to
regulatory approvals and commercial launches of Rienso in the EU
and Canada. Of this $33 million AMAG has already received $18
Our Take
We currently have an Outperform recommendation on AMAG. The
stock carries a Zacks #3 Rank (short-term Hold rating). We expect
investor focus to remain on Feraheme's performance and the
company's efforts to expand the product's label.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
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text:
UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction
Click below to share this pageTweet
Why other people's skin always feels softer
Published: Sep 11, 2015 5:17:37 PM
- Grand Challenges UCL 2034 Grants
- Report: Minds of Caste discussion
- Watch Minds of Caste discussion
- 2015-16 Small Grant Winners
- Marking 150 years of the UCL (UK)-Japan relationship
- Contemporary India – A challenge to the Idea of India: discussion report from Caroline Selai
- UCL researchers: Why contribute to The Conversation?
- Building Virtual Transcontinental Student Links supported via Grand Challenges Student Fund
11–12 February 2011
A three-part exploration of Carmen across times, cultures and media. An interdisciplinary conference will explore issues of intercultural and intermedial translation and adaptation through the prism of Carmen. Two evening shows will further explore them through performance. In CARMEN STAGED, UC Opera will perform Bizet's Carmen Suites, countered/accompanied by a video artist's projection of Carmen imagery. CENTRIFUGE: CARMEN SAMPLED sees multimedia artist Robin Storey and dancer/choreographer Johanna Devi improvise around anchoring concepts.
Supported by the UCL European Institute and the UCL Mellon Programme
Page last modified on 14 apr 11 14:29


text:
W.I.P 2 by JPayne2016Watch
©2012-2015 JPayne2016
Poser > Photoshop painted swimsuit for non-nudity viewers
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She kinda resembles Gena Lee Nolin
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Thank you
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