More Amour!

Photo of 2013?

I already discussed Michael Haneke's Amour with David Ehrlich back at the New York Film Festival, but was honored to join the gang of The Film Stage Podcast to go for a second round on the film. We begin the discussion with a look at the themes of Michael Haneke (manipulation, intrusion, surveillance, and his umm Twitter account) and then dive into the complicated Oscar-nom'd film. It's a fun and worth discussion of your time, so take a listen.

Updates from the Land of Film and Television

A recap of recent work...

Sleepless Night, a very small and intimate South Korean drama I saw as part of the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look series, is a genuine, honest, and moving portrait of a young marriage. It's sure to be near the top of my 2013 film list, that is, if it gets a release. I wrote about it in the hopes that it can get a distributor.

I don't know why I was curious about the Mark Wahlberg neo-noir thriller Broken City, but then I learned that Allen Hughes of the Hughes Brothers was directing. Too bad it seems nobody bothered to show up. I reviewed this travesty over at In Review Online.

I have a really weird obsession with watching NBC's Smash. Don't ask me why, but I find it fascinating to watch and tweet-mock a show with friends. Anyways, I did a piece over at Indiewire talking about the ways it will change in the next season with a new showrunner.

GradSkool: The Subversive Power of Slapstick in Keaton's Seven Chances

One thing I hope to do with this blog is address the alarming lack of content that has been a pervasive problem since I started graduate school last semester. To make up for it, I'm going to be giving excerpts from papers I wrote while in graduate school last semester. Please note that these posts have a different tone than my normal blogging, but hopefully you'll get something out of them. Here is something I wrote on Buster Keaton's Seven Chances. 

The key moment in Seven Chances is thus the previously mentioned procession of the brides, in which the film moves from what had been mostly genteel comedy into pure farce. This deep focus shot is the moment in which the sexual forces driving the film completely are turned on their head.^[1] In the first half, the women are objects toward a goal—their names appear on a list, but their actual personalities and characterizations are unimportant. Keaton subverts this instead turning himself into the object of desire, but this because of his money than his own personality—he becomes a means to an end than an actual end. As Mowes notes about this shot, “Railing, arch, enclosures, and held within them a stationary figure who passively waiting, but now a man rather than a woman—all the elements proclaim that a great reversal has come.”^[2] The slapstick that will follow is thus more than just a transition of comedy but a subversive commentary on class and capitalism by reversing the form of comedy. For Jimmy, the object in the first half is not marriage but money, disdained in the genteel comedy, and in the second half not money but marriage (to Mary), a tradition upheld by genteel comedy. But this is the opposite for the universe he inhabits in the two sections of the film. When the citizens of the town are made aware that there is money involved, chaos ensues so much that it seems the entire community is warped into a slapstick tradition. Before this moment, it appeared that this town was a model of genteel traditions and social upstanding, but the capital greed suddenly changes everything, sending bride after bride from all shapes, sizes, and classes. The humor loses all tradition of narrative-driven realism in favor of “lowering” these once genteel characters into the humor of the working class by exposing the genteel women’s true desire. ^[3]  

GradSkool: "Honest and Popular Don't Go Hand in Hand:" Gender Discourse in Elaine May's Ishtar

One thing I hope to do with this blog is address the alarming lack of content that has been a pervasive problem since I started graduate school last semester. To make up for it, I'm going to be giving excerpts from papers I wrote while in graduate school last semester. Please note that these are going to be sometimes dense, often boring, and most likely not very good, but I'm sure someone out there is going to enjoy them. Here is something I wrote on Elaine May's Ishtar, which is actually part of a larger project on the writer-director-star I'll be doing in 2014.

May made radical comedies that eluded any sort of expectations, which is even more true of her final film Ishtar, only remembered today solely for its over-sized budget, critical shellacking, and failure at the box office. However, Ishtar’s comedy now seems twenty years ahead of its time—it is the type of film that one would make now with Will Ferrell and John C. Riley. But Ishtar was doomed from the start; Grodin, who plays the willy CIA agent, notes, “The media jumped on the cost of Ishtar because it was a good story…the brunt of all this cost seemed on Elaine May, which was really strange because she’d be about the third person to look at…If the picture had cost half as much, I believe the reviews would have been twice as good."

GradSkool: Lang's M as Proto-Noir

One thing I hope to do with this blog is address the alarming lack of content that has been a pervasive problem since I started graduate school last semester. To make up for it, over the next week, I'm going to be giving excerpts from papers I wrote while in graduate school last semester. Please note that these are going to be sometimes dense, often boring, and most likely not very good, but I'm sure someone out there is going to enjoy them. The first here is a paper I wrote on Fritz Lang's M as a work of proto-noir. Please note that I refer through the paper to a chapter Chris Fujiwara wrote on Out of the Past, which can be found in his book on Jacques Tourneur. 

M is in very much about the city—the structures allow for the anonymity of Beckert to walks the streets without suspicion, which also addresses Fujiwara’s third point related to cities. As Gunning explains, “Berlin is a city hungry for and inundated by information. But the way this flow of information interrelates essentially alienated is attested to by Beckert’s letter, his desire to communicate…yet remain anonymous.”^[1] M demonstrates both textually and visually how urban landscapes and technology are essentially responsible for letting Beckert get away with his murders. Berlin is a city of strangers, so during an early sequence, a number of strangers are accused of being the murderer for no particularly reason in striking point-of-view shots, which also implicate the spectator and further suggest the anonymity of the murderer as it extends beyond the screen space. Later, the iconic thumbprint towers over the investigator, as technology emphasizes and empowers the myth of the monster. Most essential however is the approach of the police to capture Beckert in comparison to the gangs and how they fail. The police use their archival documents and topographical view of the city (as noted by the many maps Lang highlights in scenes with them) to search for Beckert, leaving them with a name and an address but no man. Instead, it is the criminals who find the man in bodily form (his name remains anonymous). Thus, like the classic noirs, M suggests a world in which the institutions that create and signify progress are also the ones where exploitation is most likely to occur, and here it is the rise of the interconnected institution of the city.

Billion Dollar Noir: Christopher Nolan and the Reconstruction of Film Noir in Hollywood

In this month's issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, I have a published piece on Christopher Nolan and his very problematic adaptation of the genre of film noir. Because it is published, I am not allowed to put the entire thing on this blog. However, I can provide a brief excerpt. Please visit the journal's website in order to read the entire thing, though I'm not sure its online yet. Enjoy:

The apex of Nolan’s career, his $200m dollar sci-fi spectacle Inception, certainly shows his most self-conscious attempts to bring out noir motifs.  It is no coincidence that the heist genre has been celebrated in works like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1958), both of which feature a one last job, as the protagonist Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has here.  Nolan certainly shows a craft is subverting some of the main tropes—Cobb’s job is not stealing something but instead putting something inside a vault.  Additionally, the significant portion of the narrative takes place inside the psychological plane, where existential fears can manifest themselves into physical threats (the basis of film noir).  The central threat, and perhaps the most unique character Nolan has put on screen, is Mal, the dead wife of Cobb (Marion Cotillard).  Cobb is overwhelmed by guilt of leading his wife to suicide, one that he feels responsible for enough that she becomes a dangerous and malicious figure whenever he enters the dreamscape.  She literally becomes the femme fatale, a dangerous female that is the manifestation of the anxiety of the protagonist.  As Mark Fisher notes, she “represents a psychoanalytic Real—a trauma that disrupts any attempt to maintain a stable sense of reality, that which the subject cannot help bringing with him wherever he goes” (42).