Hi everyone! I apologize about the lack of posting, and I am due a post just listing some of my random writing here and there, but this week I have a request from you. I am writing a paper for a seminar on canon-formation and new cinephilia, and I am centering it around re-writing the canon based on my oh-so favorite "Cinephiliac Moments" (see here for my original post on the subject). I want to list as many as I can, but I assume a list with multiple inputs from cinephiles like you that have very different tastes can lead to some better ideas. My real hope is that many of you will choose moments from films that aren't especially loved, or perhaps films that you find problematic but have that one moment that makes it all sort of worth it. (Just thinking of one myself—I'm not sure all of Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming works, but when he goes double split screen as the nukes rise out of the silos, man oh man is that cinema.)
So if you could do me a favor and reach down into your cinephile data base and write down any you think of in the comments, that would be greatly appreciated. Once I finish the paper, I'll post our "new" canon for all of us to look at and argue about.
Update: I am thankful for the responses below. A couple of notes. 1) Do not feel you need to explicate your situation, as long as it is understandable to what the moment is (ie. John Wayne walks away from the home at the end of The Searchers). 2) Feel free to list as many as you want. Seriously. Go nuts.
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]
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."
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.
