Week 6, 10-1-14, Hollywood-The Studio System, Stars, Art and Industry: Part 1-STUDY OF FILM NOIR/American Genre Flashcards
Alfred Hitchcock first discovered America,
Shadow of a Doubt
Darkness in shadow of a doubt
Hitchcock sees darkness as less an infiltrating outside force than as the repressed backside of normalcy.
Murder in Shadow of a Doubt
Charlie
Image of Charlie
Charlie emerges as a virtual parody of the handsome-dandy image cherished by “normal” society.
Who disgusted Charlie?
disgust for the kind of rich women he has killed in the past
What is shadow of a doubt really about?
about awakening, the simultaneous darkening and enlarging of the world
You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day and at night you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares…
What Uncle Charlie says to niece Charlie
“The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die - from what scene?
Dining Room scene
– But, they’re alive! they’re human beings!
-Younger Charlie
If you ripped off the front of houses you’d find
“Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you’d find swine?”
DOUBLE INDEMNITY Dir/
Billy WIlder
Double Indemnity Hero
A disillusioned anti-hero with questionable ethics meets a dame with gorgeous gams that can’t be trusted.
Double Indemnity Universe
dark universe of film noir
Double Indemnity based on
actual 1927 criminal case of Ruth Snyder and her unfortunate husband
Double Indemnity gets its name from
insurance policy clause which pays the beneficiary double in the event that their spouse dies accidentally.
Double Indemnity Narration paints
indelible portrait of a weak and corrupt man painfully aware of his imminent demise
Double Indemnity visuals
gorgeous black and white cinematography employs shadowy interiors and chiaroscuro lighting
What did Double Indemnity visuals create?
creating visual markers that reflect each character’s internal conflicts and motives.
What did Double Indemnity visuals hint at
hint at a sense of imprisonment
The long silent street of film noir, a street where it is always night, and where the songs are always sad. That street is usually a dingy urban alley or a dank sidestreet, but in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, it was a deceptively quiet suburban avenue.
Just a quote from reading
What do Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson do?
they plot the murder of her husband are followed by the obsessive, relentless Keyes
Double Idemnity ancestors
Silent German Expressionist
What did Writer (Cain) of Double Indemnity think about movie?
Cain felt Chandler (screenwriter) had done a better job on the film of Double Indemnity than Cain had done on the novel
Who coined the phrase film noir
French film critics who noticed the trend of how dark and black the looks and themes
film noir is not
not a genre, but rather the mood, style or tone of a film.
Beginning of film noir
Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon”
End of film noir
Orson Welles’ 1958 “Touch of Evil”,
Span of Classical period
“classic noir period”, spanned the interval just after World War II, until the early to mid-1950s.
Film noir protagonists and social mainstream
drowning outside of the social mainstream.
What did film noir come to represent?
America’s stylized vision of itself, a cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition.
melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt and paranoia.
Moods of film noir
Film noir hero
the anti-hero
2 women of film noir
The Madonna (good wife, or good-girl) & the Femme Fatale.