Transcript Document

What we are doing
Influences ON the genre
Influences of the society in which it
was created (Film Noir reflected the
issues and concerns of American pre
and post-WWII society).
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The corruption of the 1920s prohibition & the rise of the gangster
The Great Depression
The exodus of German film makers
Pre and post-war disillusionment
Changing role of women
The Hays Code - link to the values in
society at the time and how directors
had to work around them.
Influences on the genre from other
film and literature.
Film - German Expressionism, Italian
neo-realism, & gangster films
Literature - 'Hard Boiled' detective
novels and pulp fiction
Noir conventions (and how they're
influenced by society)
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Style - specific visual elements
Characters - the femme fatale and the flawed
male
Settings - the corrupt city, dark alleys
Themes - fate, greed, lust alienation, entrapment
Narrative devices - voiceover, flashback
Influences OF the genre
• Erosion / subversion of the Hays Code
through sexual innuendo & dialogue.
• On neo-noir (Sin City, Chinatown, Brick)
• Dystopian Tech-Noir (Bladerunner)
• Other forms of media - advertising, graphic
novels etc.
Women’s Suffrage
• In 1920 women in America finally
got the vote.
• With industrialization, more women were
working and earning their own money.
• During the war, many women stepped up
taking the factory jobs left behind
Random piece about the 1920s and
the Great Gatsby
• When the early explorers first came to America, escaping
the corruption of their old world in search of the promise of
a new world, they travelled from east to west. Now,
America itself is corrupted, so the characters in The Great
Gatsby travel from west to east - in search of wealth and
sophistication - leaving the moral values and stability of the
west behind. It is this eastern part which is called a "valley
of ashes" by Fitzgerald, a place where morals are left out
and only superficial, material-driven people can live in
peace. Fitzgerald uses this change in direction as a symbol
for the deterioration of American ideals and the American
Dream, helping to prove that our quest for wealth and
sophistication is corrupting our culture, and causing us to
live in a wasteland of morals - an ash heap of civilization.
Prohibition & Gangsters
• From 1920 to 1933 prohibition meant a ban on the sale, transport
& distribution of alcohol.
• Gangsters took over the illegal distribution of alcohol resulting in
rampant underground, organized and widespread criminal activity.
• Crime really did seem to pay. And your average everyday person
was ok with this because it meant they got their liquor.
• Moral boundaries were blurring.
Hitler & his mates
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Film Noir is dark. It’s not presenting a pretty, happy world where
everything ends well. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. The darkness
that Nazism brought to Europe is the same darkness that cloaks the characters of
film noir.
Many of the directors of noir films were émigrés who had fled Europe to escape
Nazism.
Billy Wilder who directed Double Indemnity was Jewish and had fled Berlin in 1933
the week that the Reichstag burned.
Fritz Lang, director of the groundbreaking Metropolis in 1927 had departed
Germany in 1934. Joseph Goebbels, the propoganda minister had told him that
Hitler wanted him to be the film-maker-in-chief to the Nazi state. Lang, who had
been born a Jew decided this wasn’t such a good plan, and fled to America. In
1945 alone he directed three noir films - Ministry of Fear, Scarlet Street and The
Woman in the Window.
Robert Siodmak, director of The Killers, was a refugee from Nazism, as was the
composer he employed on the film, the Hungarian Miklós Rósza, who had
encountered the Führer in person. He once watched a Nazi dad push his eight
year-old into Hitler's presence with the words, "This is the greatest moment of
your life." The boy burst into tears and refused to salute. The father slapped his
son in the face and dragged him away. The Killers begins with a pair of trenchcoated hitmen arriving in a small town; they're working for a mobster, but their
silhouettes suggests they might easily be from the SS.
Freud and Modernism
• Noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture
–reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and
disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist
sensibility. The camera is used to represent these feelings.
• The representation of the protagonist's subjectivity is crucial - his
perceptions (both accurate and deluded), his state of mind, his
desires, obsessions and anxieties. The need for attending to the
handling of perspective in film noir is concisely summed up in Fritz
Lang's explanation of his subjective camera work: 'You show the
protagonist so that the audience can put themselves under the skin
of the man'; by showing things 'wherever possible, from the
viewpoint of the protagonist' the film gives the audience visual and
psychological access to his nightmarish experiences.
http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Film%20Noir.html
German Expressionism
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In the 1920s the Germans were loving their film making. Unfortunately due to the
hard economic times, they couldn’t afford the luxuriant stylings of Hollywood
films.
Meanwhile the art world in Europe was looking to the future, experimenting with
bold, new ideas and artistic styles.
The film makers drew from these ideas, developing their own style using
symbolism, light and shadow to create deeper meaning in their films.
They also made different sorts of films – where Hollywood went for perky
romances and action adventure films, the Expressionist films dealt with madness,
insanity, betrayal and other “intellectual” topics.
Psychoanalysis was popular at this time with Freud and Jung both busy analysing.
While pure expressionist film making didn’t last too long, its influence was huge,
with the idea of enhancing the mood of a film through shot choice, angles and
lighting still in operation today. Films such as Bladerunner and Batman Returns and
much of Tim Burton’s work are heavily influenced by expressionism.
When German film makers like Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity) and Fritz Lang
(Metropolis) fled Nazi Germany, they bought this dark, moody style with them.
The fact that it was a nice and cheap style to film (relying as it did on lighting to
create a mood), made it particularly appealing to Hollywood.
Pulp Fiction
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WWII
• World War I was meant to be “The War to End all wars”. You can
imagine people were pretty irritated some twenty years later when
they found out it wasn’t, and they were back in the trenches again.
• Between 60 and 80 million people died in WWII. Of these, over half
were civilians.
• People had been powerless in the face of the huge forces that
swept the globe. This led to a feeling of FATALISM – that you had
little real control over your life.
• They also seen Europe carved up after the war (the YALTA
agreement) where those with the power did what they liked.
• In addition people had seen some pretty horrific things during the
war (and in the decade or so preceding). Suddenly going back to
‘regular’ life was bound to be unsettling.
Auschwitz
• It is estimated that
between 800,000 and 5
million people died in
the gas chambers of
concentration camps
such as Auschwitz
during the Second
World War II. It was
liberated by Russian
forces in early 1945.
Buchenwald
• A camp liberated by
American forces in
April, 1945. Not a
‘death camp’ as
such, none the less
tens of thousands
died in appalling
conditions.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki
• Between 150,000
and 246,000 people
died when the first
atomic bombs were
dropped on
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
The firebombing of Dresden
• Between 13 February and
15 February 1945 heavy
bombers dropped more
than 3,900 tons of highexplosive bombs and
incendiary devices on
Dresden in Germany. The
resulting firestorm
destroyed 39 square
kilometres of the city
centre, and Between
24,000 and 40,000 people,
largely civilians, were
killed.
The Yalta Agreement
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The Yalta Agreement - February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met for the purpose of discussing Europe's postwar
reorganization. Mainly, it was intended to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn
Europe. It was at this conference (amongst other things) that the post war partitioning of Europe
was decided, setting the stage for the Cold War. Your everyday man or woman didn’t have much
say.
Iwa Jima
• The battle was the first American
attack on the Japanese Home
Islands, and the Imperial soldiers
defended their positions
ferociously. Of the 22,785
Japanese soldiers entrenched on
the island, 21,570 died either
from fighting or by ritual suicide.
Only 216 were captured during
the battle. The Allies suffered
6,821 deaths out of 26,038 total
casualties.
• Fun fact: Teruo Nakamura was
the last Japanese soldier to
surrender in 1974 – 29 years
after WWII ended.
Normandy Landings
• An actual death toll for the
Normandy Landings (the landing
of Allied troops in Europe in June
1944 is unknown. Bodies
disintegrated under bombs and
shells. Soldiers drowned and
disappeared. Company clerks
who tallied casualties were killed.
Records were lost. "Landing crafts
were hit," said Ivy Agee, an 81year-old from Gordonsville, Tenn.,
who fought on Omaha Beach.
"Bodies were flying everywhere.
There was blood on the edge of
the water; the beach was just
running with pure blood."
Changi
Changi was one of the
more notorious Japanese
prisoner of war camps.
Changi was used to
imprison Malayan civilians
and Allied soldiers. The
treatment of POW’s at
Changi was harsh but fitted
in with the belief held by
the Japanese Imperial
Army that those who had
surrendered to it were
guilty of dishonouring their
country and family and, as
such, deserved to be
treated in no other way.
Nazi fun times.
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When the Reichstag burned in 1933,
Hitler used it as an excuse to leap
into some hard core fascism.
The day after the fire, the Reichstag
Fire Decree was passed.
It suspended most civil liberties in
Germany – you could be arrested
with very little cause.
Publications not considered
“friendly” to the Nazi cause were
banned and often burnt.
Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944
• You are watching out for:
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Corruption!
Innuendo
Expressionistic camera work (shadows, extreme angles)
Fatalism – a belief that you are unable to change your
destiny.
– A failure of crime to pay
– Femme Fatale – wicked spider women
– Flawed Males – ready to be led astray by the
aforementioned wicked women.
We’ll talk after about how society caused these
conventions to come about, but it’s not too soon to start
putting it together yourself.