HISTORY OF ART AND FILM. HA1007: Reading Film

Transcription

1 HISTORY OF ART AND FILM HA1007: Reading Film Semester 1: 2014/15 Professor James Chapman

2 INTRODUCTION TO THE MODULE Reading Film is a Level 1 film studies module intended to introduce you to the techniques and skills of formal and visual analysis of film texts. The module is based on close readings of ten films that are all part of the film studies canon. Our discussion of the films will be informed by critical literature that exemplifies several of the major theoretical approaches to the study of film, including aesthetics, formalism, authorship, genre and psychoanalysis. Part I focuses on Classical Hollywood Cinema. Classical Hollywood is the dominant mode of film practice in the history of the medium and an understanding of its formal properties and narrative codes is essential for any film degree. We will consider films by major directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), John Ford (The Searchers) and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), and examples of the Hollywood melodrama (Casablanca) and the musical (Singin in the Rain) that represent different variations on the classical model. Part II, Alternatives to Classical Hollywood, considers five examples of films that ALL, in their different ways, illustrate different formal and aesthetic characteristics to the classical paradigm. There are three examples of distinctive national cinemas - French Poetic Realism (La Grande Illusion), British quality cinema (Brief Encounter) and the French new wave (A bout de soufflé) - and two films by auteur directors (Ingmar Bergman s The Seventh Seal and Luis Buñuel s Belle de Jour) that belong to the tradition of art cinema. These offer us ways of reading a film that take into account different narrative and stylistic features. For example, it is sometimes suggested that European cinemas offer more psychologically realistic characterisations and that their narratives are more open than Hollywood films. Teaching Lectures/screenings will be on Mondays in the University Film Theatre (in the basement of the Attenborough Seminar Block). Seminars will be on Tuesdays. Group A: Tuesday : ATT 214 Group B: Tuesday : FJ SW SR2 Group C: Tuesday : FJ L17 Group D: Tuesday : FJ SW SR1 Group E: Tuesday : FJ L17 1

3 Attendance It is the policy of the Department of History of Art and Film to make attendance at all lectures, screenings and seminars compulsory. In our experience there is a direct correlation between attendance and performance. Whether or not you inform your tutor beforehand, it is a matter of urgency that you complete the online absence form which can be found at: Completion of this form will inform the office and your tutor of the circumstances of your absence. Illness lasting more than 5 days must be supported by a doctor s note or other medical evidence. Registers are taken at classes and persistent offenders will be issued with a warning for neglect of studies, which will result in disciplinary action and may even lead to the termination of your course. Assessment The module is assessed by two essays of 2000 words each. You must achieve a minimum mark of 40 for each essay in order to pass the module. Essay 1 (50%): To be submitted by on Friday 7 November Essay 2 (50%): To be submitted by on Friday 12 December It is important that you submit assignments on time: this is to enable tutors to plan their time for marking large amounts of coursework. Work submitted late without good reason will be subject to a late submission penalty and marks will be deducted. Please note that I couldn t find any books in the library because they were all out is not a good reason! Set books There is one set book for this module: Jeffrey Geiger and R. L Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). This includes critical essays by leading film studies scholars on 44 films, including six of the films included in this module, focusing on close textual analysis. It is also the set book for the second semester module HA1114 Realism and the Cinema. Course reader There is also a course reader for this module, consisting of ten critical readings - either journal articles or book chapters - chosen to complement each week s films. The reader is available from the School Office (Room 1514). Please ensure that you collect your copy otherwise you will need to source the readings yourself. (Note that these may not all be available in the University Library.) Further reading Each week s programme includes an annotated bibliography of suggested further reading. While you are not expected to read everything on these lists, it should go without saying that you should make every effort to read as widely as possible around the subject - especially 2

4 when it comes to the preparation of your essays. The bibliographies are not exhaustive: one of the skills you will develop throughout your degree course is how to conduct bibliographic searches of your own. You should use them as a guide to help you in constructing your own further reading schedule: remember that the bulk of your time on this module (and on most others for that matter) is spent on independent study. Further viewing I have also included a few suggestions for other films to watch in connection to each week s set film. Again it should go without saying that you should make every effort to watch as many films as possible, not just for study but also for the intrinsic pleasure it brings. There are viewing facilities in the University Library and in the College of Arts, Humanities and Law Multimedia Suite in the Attenborough Seminar Block. Contacts If you have any academic queries concerning the module, contact Professor James Chapman either by (jrc28@le.ac.uk) or in person (Attenborough Tower 1713). Please see the departmental notice board on the 17 th Floor of Attenborough for my office hours. Learning outcomes All modules have stated learning outcomes : these represent the knowledge and skills that you should have acquired by the end of the module. Learning outcomes are assessed through the various assessment components: if you pass the module you will be deemed to have achieved these outcomes. By completing the module, including all its assessment components, you should be able to: Analyse the formal properties of a narrative film, including its structure, narration, editing and mise-en-scène. Apply the principles of textual analysis both to different film texts. Understand the basics of the main approaches to film analysis such as formalism, authorship, structuralism and psychoanalysis. Demonstrate competence in writing critically about film. 3

5 SCREENINGS The module is taught over ten weeks. All lectures/screenings will be in the University Film Theatre on Mondays Part I: Classical Hollywood Cinema Monday 6 October: Rear Window (USA, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Monday 13 October: The Searchers (USA, dir. John Ford, 1956) Monday 20 October: Citizen Kane (USA, dir. Orson Welles, 1941) Monday 27 October: Casablanca (USA, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) Monday 3 November: Singin in the Rain (USA, dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952) Part II: Alternatives to Classical Hollywood Monday 10 November: La Grande Illusion (France, dir. Jean Renoir, 1937) Monday 17 November: Brief Encounter (Great Britain, dir. David Lean, 1945) Monday 24 November: The Seventh Seal (Sweden, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1956) Monday 1 December: A bout de soufflé (France, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 Monday 8 December: Belle de Jour (France/Italy, dir. Luis Buñuel, 1967) Please ensure that you arrive promptly for all lectures and screenings. As a courtesy to others, the use of mobile phones is strictly prohibited during all lectures and screenings, including sending and receiving text messages. 4

6 1. REAR WINDOW (1954) Alfred Hitchcock is possibly the most significant film-maker, if not for the history of film, then certainly for the history of film studies: most of the theoretical approaches to film that have emerged in the academy over the last forty years or so have arisen from engagement with Hitchcock s films. The critical literature on Hitchcock s films therefore represents a paradigm of the intellectual history of the discipline. Rear Window is one of Hitchcock s most popular films, the first he made for Paramount Pictures in the 1950s where he enjoyed a great degree of creative autonomy in his choice and treatment of subjects. It provides an ideal introduction to reading film on account of its exemplary use of film form and technique and Hitchcock s mastery of mise-en-scène. It exemplifies what Hitchcock called pure cinema : the idea that a story in film could be told in purely visual terms. It is a film that revolves around the act of looking and therefore is a ripe subject for understanding the mechanics of point-of-view: Hitchcock s films tend to be more fullsome than most others in their insistence upon optical subjectivity. We will consider Rear Window as an example of Hitchcock s mature period and will focus especially on its editing. But we will also consider how the film addresses themes such as voyeurism and spectatorship. To this extent the film has often been claimed as being about the mechanics of the cinematic apparatus itself. In so far as it also, apparently, invites us not only to look but, moreover, to look in a gender-specific way, Rear Window also makes for a useful introduction to feminist critiques of classical Hollywood cinema. Set reading Elizabeth Cowie, Rear Window Ethics, in Film Analysis, pp Item 1 in the Course Reader: Tania Modleski, The Master s Dollhouse: Rear Window, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (NY: Methuen, 1988), pp Further viewing Hitchcock s American films are readily available on DVD and VHS. Vertigo (1958) makes a useful comparison with Rear Window for its systematic use of point-of-view (see especially the BFI Film Classic on Vertigo by Charles Barr). Lifeboat (1944) and Dial M for Murder (1953) are other films where Hitchcock confined himself to a small set - saying that he liked the technical challenge - while Rope (1948) exemplifies a different style of narration in its use of long takes rather than montage. Psycho (1960) remains probably the classic Hitchcock film, even if its moments of shock and surprise have become familiar to us all. And that s before we ve considered Strangers on a Train (1951), The Trouble With Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963) or Marnie (1964) 5

7 Further reading There is an extensive critical literature on Hitchcock, including no less than three books on Rear Window itself: Belton, John (ed.), Alfred Hitchcock s Rear Window (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Fawell, John, Hitchcock s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film (Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004) Sharff, Stefan, The Art of Looking in Hitchcock s Rear Window (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997) The classic auteurist studies of Hitchcock include: Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, trans. Stanley Hochman (New York: Continuum, 1988) Wood, Robin, Hitchcock s Films (London: Tantivy Press, 1965). See also Wood s revised version Hitchcock s Films Revisited (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) There are several useful collections of critical essays including: Allen, Richard, and S. Ishii Gonzalès (eds), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: British Film Institute, 1999) Detelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1986) For feminist critiques of Hitchcock see: Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988) Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989) The best historical study of Hitchcock s career is: Kapsis, Robert E., Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) And the most recent - and most balanced - biography of the director is: McGilligan, Patrick, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2003) 6

8 2. THE SEARCHERS (1956) John Ford is widely recognised as one of the greats of American cinema with a directorial career spanning nearly fifty years. His style of direction is very different from Hitchcock s: in particular he draws far less attention to the camera and prefers to shoot in an unobtrusive way in contrast to Hitchcock s flaunting of his own authorship. Yet Ford is also recognised as an auteur for the thematic and formal consistency of his films and, in particular, for his mastery of the Western genre - the genre that André Bazin called the American film par excellence. The Searchers is a Western from Ford s mature period and is regarded as a masterpiece of the genre. It demonstrates all the themes that we commonly associate with the Western: the frontier, the relationship between the individual and society and the paradigms of Garden and Desert that structure the Western narrative. It is also notable for its beautiful Technicolor cinematography of Monument Valley (a location that Ford returned to time and again in his Westerns). At the same time The Searchers is a more adult Western than mere cowboys and Indians and is notable, in particular, for its treatment of racism and miscegenation. We will consider the structure of The Searchers as a narrative. Film theorists such as David Bordwell and Raymond Bellour write of symmetry in film narratives: the idea that films come full circle and that the end answers the beginning. The narrative of The Searchers lends itself to this method of analysis, not least in the famous opening and closing shots. We will also consider Ford s economical style of direction - described as poetic or lyrical by critics such as Lindsay Anderson - and his masterful use of mise-en-scène. Set reading Item 2 in the Course Reader: Arthur M. Eckstein, Darkening Ethan: John Ford s The Searchers (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Film, Cinema Journal, vol.38 no.1 (1998), pp Further viewing Ford s œuvre provides an embarrassment of riches for the film enthusiast. His Westerns alone include half a dozen that are among the finest examples of the genre: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagonmaster (1950) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) all share The Searchers thematic concerns with frontier mythology. But Ford was far more than just a director of Westerns, as demonstrated by films such as The Informer (1935), Young Mr Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1942), They Were Expendable (1945), The Quiet Man (1952) and Mister Roberts (1955). Interestingly, although Ford won four Academy Awards for Best Director, more than anyone else has ever done, none of them were for his Westerns: The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. 7

9 Further reading Again there is an extensive critical literature, including two books on The Searchers itself: Buscombe, Edward, The Searchers (London: British Film Institute, 2000) Eckstein, Arthur M. and Peter Mehman (eds), The Searchers: Essays & Reflections on John Ford s Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Screen Education devoted a special issue to The Searchers: copies of these articles can be found in the dossier on the film available for consultation in the HAF Slide Room. The best critical studies of studies of John Ford are: Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1981) Dossier on John Ford in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp McBride, Joseph, Searching for John Ford (London: Faber and Faber, 2004) Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974) The Searchers is a key point of reference in studies of the western genre. The literature is vast, but see in particular: Buscombe, Edward (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western (London: Andre Deutsch/ British Film Institute, 1988) Buscombe, Edward, and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1999) Cameron, Ian, and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London: Studio Vista, 1996) Coyne, Michael, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997) Kitses, Jim, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004). Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 8

10 3. CITIZEN KANE (1941) Citizen Kane might just be the most famous film in cinema history and is certainly the one most often afforded the accolade of best film ever made. To understand why this is, we need to consider what it is that makes Citizen Kane so special. The circumstances of its production were unique: Orson Welles was given almost carte blanche by a studio (RKO Radio Pictures) that sought prestige in the film industry. The biographical legend of Welles - that he was a genius whose talent was not recognised by the philistine world of Hollywood and was doomed to spend the rest of his career travelling the world as a peripatetic filmmaker and jobbing actor - further enhances the special status of Citizen Kane. Most critical discussion of Citizen Kane focuses on its formal properties, especially its use of long takes coupled with deep-focus cinematography. Yet, as David Bordwell has suggested, the best way to understand Citizen Kane is to stop worshipping it as a triumph of technique. It exemplifies a highly complex narrative structure that is unusual for classical Hollywood and, arguably, closer to the traditions of European art cinema that emerged after the Second World War. To this extent Citizen Kane s major significance may have been its influence on other film-makers. Andre Sarris, for example, called it the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation. Citizen Kane also provides a test case for the auteur theory: the idea that the director is the main, even the sole, creative influence in the film-making process. In the early 1970s the outspoken film critic Pauline Kael averred that Welles s role in shaping the film had been exaggerated (principally by Welles himself) and that much of the credit belonged to co-writer Herman J. Manciewicz. This claim sparked a bitter controversy that raged for many years. Set reading James Naremore, The Magician and the Media, in Film Analysis, pp Item 3 in the Course Reader: Peter Wollen, Introduction to Citizen Kane, from Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp Further viewing Welles s career after Kane was fragmented and unfulfilled. He completed one more film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was heavily re-edited by the studio before release (see the BFI Film Classic by V.F. Perkins), and thereafter was employed only occasionally by Hollywood as a writer-director. The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch of Evil (1958) are two superior examples of film noir that both reward investigation, while his Shakespearean adaptations Macbeth (1949), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1965) exemplify different methods of adapting the Bard in cinema. 9

11 Further reading Unsurprisingly there is a great deal of critical literature on the best film ever made : a range of articles can be found in the dossier in the HAF Slide Room for a start. Otherwise a good introduction to reading Citizen Kane is provided by the BFI Film Classics series: Mulvey, Laura, Citizen Kane (London: British Film Institute, 1992) The controversy over the authorship of Kane is aired in: Kael, Pauline (ed.), The Citizen Kane Book (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971) Most of Kael s charges against Welles are rebutted in a detailed empirical study of the film s production history based on the studio archives: Carringer, Robert L, The Making of Citizen Kane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 rev. edn.) For discussion of Welles s relationship with the Hollywood studio system, see: Heylin, Clinton, Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005) Schatz, Thomas, History of the American Cinema Volume 6. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) There is surprisingly little good critical material on Welles himself (in contrast to, say, Hitchcock) and the best tends to be quite old, such as: Bazin, André, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991). (First published in 1972 by Les Editions du Cerf, Paris.) Bazin s critical ideas about realism can be traced through his influential essays: Bazin, André, What is Cinema? 2 vols, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 & 1971) An interesting comparative study of Welles and two other directors covered in this module is: Singer, Irving, Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005) And two biographies of Welles from contrasting perspectives: Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (New York: Anchor, 1990) Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) 10

12 4. CASABLANCA (1942) Casablanca is widely regarded as one of the classic Hollywood movies, though unlike the preceding three films it does not feature prominently in the masterpiece tradition of film history. This is largely because Casablanca is seen very much as a studio film - a result of the production strategies of Warner Bros. - rather than as an unusual or unique production in the manner of a Citizen Kane. Moreover, its director Michael Curtiz is regarded as a journeyman rather than a great artist: or, to use the terms of the polemical French critical journal Cahiers du Cinéma, as a metteur-en-scène rather than an auteur. Its critical standing has not been helped by remarks such as Pauline Kael s the best bad film ever made. More recently, however, film historians have claimed Casablanca as an example of what André Bazin called the genius of the system. We will consider the extent to which Casablanca is a paradigm of the classical Hollywood style. How far does it illustrate the potentials and limitations of classical form and narrative? We will also look at the question of studio style by comparing Casablanca to contemporaneous films from other studios. It has been argued, for example, that the films of Warner Bros. exhibited a distinctive look, a visual style determined partly by stylistic choices but also by economic considerations that is different from the rather more sumptuous sets and costumes of, say, Paramount or M-G-M. To this extent we will relate film style to the institutional mode of production universally known as the studio system. Set reading Dana Pollen, The Limitless Potentials and the Potential Limits of Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Analysis, pp Course Reader Item 4: Robert B. Ray, The Culmination of Classic Hollywood: Casablanca, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp Further viewing In order to test how typical or representative of classical Hollywood cinema Casablanca is, you should watch a selection of studio films from the same period. I d suggest starting with other Warner Bros.-Humphrey Bogart vehicles such as The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941), To Have and Have Not (dir. Howard Hawks, 1944) and The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946). Other films by Casablanca s director Michael Curtiz, a craftsman who worked in a range of genres, include The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City (1939) and White Christmas (1954). The cult appeal of Casablanca is explored in Woody Allen s Play It Again, Sam (1972). 11

13 Further reading Although Casablanca is widely regarded as a classic, there is surprisingly little critical material - perhaps reflecting the perception of it as a studio rather than an auteur film. There is, however, a comprehensive history of the film s production: Harmetz, Aljean, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca - Bogart, Bergman and World War II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993) The only major study of its director is: Robertson, James C., The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz (London: Routledge, 1993) Otherwise your main sources will be studies of the Hollywood film industry, including: Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985) Schatz, Thomas, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) Schatz, Thomas, History of the American Cinema Volume 6. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) In the 1980s the University of Wisconsin Press published a series of studies based on the Warner Bros. archives that each included a contextual history of the production and an annotated screenplay. The series includes many of the studio s classics including 42nd Street, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep - though oddly, for some reason, not Casablanca. However, a selection of studio documents relating to the film s production is reproduced in: Behlmer, Rudy (ed.), Inside Warner Bros (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985) Finally, Casablanca is subject to a semiotic analysis by: Eco, Umberto, Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage, Substance, vol.14, no.2 (1985), pp (A copy of this article, and others, is in the dossier on Casablanca available for consultation in the HAF Slide Room.) 12

14 5. SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1954) We conclude Part I of the course by looking at a genre that is synonymous with Hollywood: the musical. While musicals are not unique to Hollywood, the genre is widely held to have reached its most perfect form in the American cinema and to have a particular resonance with American culture. Singin in the Rain was one of a cycle of extravagant Technicolor musicals produced by the renowned Arthur Freed Unit at M-G-M in the post-war period that are generally deemed to represent the artistic peak of the genre. We will consider the formal and aesthethic strategies of Singin in the Rain as an example of the integrated musical that incorporates the spectacle of song and dance routines into the narrative. With its foregrounding of spectacle and performance, the musical challenges the conventional model of classical Hollywood cinema based on straightforward, unobtrusive, invisible narration. The musical, in contrast, draws attention to its own fictionality and to its status as entertainment. Is this a mechanism for disguising its ideological strategies, which some critics have seen as highly conservative? Singin in the Rain is among the most highly self-reflexive of musicals. It is set in Hollywood at the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s and can be seen as an example of Hollywood mythologising its own past. Set reading Jane Feuer, Winking at the Audience, in Film Analysis, pp Item 5 in the Course Reader: Jane Feuer, Spectators and Spectacles, The Hollywood Musical (London: Macmillan/British Film Institute, 1982), pp Further viewing There is no shortage of further viewing for the musical. Start with other films by the Arthur Freed Unit, for example The Pirate (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1948), Easter Parade (dir. Charles Walters, 1948), On the Town (dirs Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, 1949), An American in Paris (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1951), The Band Wagon (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1953) and Gigi (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1958). The other great cycle of Hollywood musicals - again representing the integrated musical - were the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers series produced by Pandro S. Berman at RKO in the mid-1930s: for example The Gay Divorce (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1934), Top Hat (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1935), Swing Time (dir. George Stevens, 1936) and Shall We Dance? (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1937). An alternative to the integrated musical is the backstage musical, exemplified by the films produced by Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros. such as 42nd Street (dir, Lloyd Bacon, 1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (dir. Busby Berkeley, 1933) and Footlight Parade (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Dance, Girl, Dance (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1940) is a rare example of a studio film directed by a woman and has been claimed by some critics as a feminist examination of the gendered gaze in cinema. 13

15 Further reading The best starting point, once again, is the BFI Film Classics series: Wollen, Peter, Singin in the Rain (London: British Film Institute, 1992) An illuminating analysis of Singin in the Rain and the ideology of entertainment can be found in the section entitled How to Take Gene Kelly Seriously in chapter 1 of: Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) A useful introduction to the history of the musical is the relevant chapter in: Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981) While there are fewer studies of the Hollywood musical than, say, the Western (though there is no shortage of celebratory fan material), Singin in the Rain is invariably a key text in studies such as: Altman, Rick (ed.), Genre: The Musical (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical (Bllomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Barrios, Richard, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Cohan, Steve (ed.), Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2002) Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical (London: Macmillan/British Film Institute, 1982) For a history of the Freed Unit, see: Fodin, Hugh, The World of Entertainment: The Movies Greatest Musicals (New York: Avon, 1975) While Fordin s account is based largely on interviews with surviving personnel, the studio archives inform chapters 19 and 22 of: Schatz, Thomas, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) 14

16 6. LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937) In Part II of the course we move on to examine five examples of European film-making. We start with Jean Renoir, surely one of a handful of directors who, even following the denial of the auteur theory, deserves the epithet of great. Renoir (second son of the Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir) is particularly associated with a movement in French cinema of the 1930s that critics have labelled Poetic Realism. Poetic Realism was a style of film-making characterised by narratives of disillusionment and despair, featuring fatalistic and doomed protagonists who are victims of social conditions and circumstances beyond their control. This is markedly different from the generally optimistic and affirmative films of classical Hollywood. Hence Poetic Realism, like other national movements, is sometimes claimed as an alternative mode to classical Hollywood. La Grande Illusion marked Renoir s greatest critical and commercial success. It is a study of national identity, masculinity, comradeship and, perhaps above all, class and social change. Renoir s films are characterised by a deceptively simple style of direction that privileges composition in the frame through long takes and deep focus. In his films, wrote Bazin, the search after composition in depth is, in effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent panning shots and entrances. To this extent Renoir was the precursor of Orson Welles. We will also consider the themes of the film, which was claimed by critics on the left as a bold statement of pacifism (the illusion of the title being the idea of national unity) and by critics on the right as a defence of patriotism (the illusion being the ideal of pacifism). How can the same film support two such fundamentally contradictory readings? Set reading Course Reader Item 6: Pierre Sorlin, Escaping the Present. The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp Further viewing La Grande Illusion is available in a DVD set with two other Renoir films, Le crime de Monsieur Lang (1935) and La Bête Humaine (1938). You might also compare La Grande Illusion to La règle du jeu (1939), a more bitter and satirical critique of French society that provoked riots upon its release in Paris. Renoir s later films (he worked in Hollywood during the Second World War) are something of a mixed bag, though his propaganda film This Land Is Mine (1943) displays his characteristic humanism. Look out, too, for other French films of the 1930s such as L Atalante (dir. Jean Vigo, 1934), Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) and Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938), which reveal the extent to which Poetic Realism was a group style rather than unique to Renoir. 15

17 Further reading After some time in the critical wilderness, there are signs of a revival of interest in Renoir and La Grande Illusion in particular, demonstrated by two recent studies: Jackson, Julian, La Grande Illusion (London: British Film Institute, 2009) O Shaughnessy, Martin, La Grande Illusion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009) There is a reasonable critical literature on Renoir in English, though it is not as extensive as the likes of Hitchcock or Ford. The most useful studies are: Faulkner, Christopher, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) O Shaughnessy, Martin, Jean Renoir (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Insights into Renoir s view of film (and much else besides) can be gleaned from: LoBianco, Lorraine, and David Thompson (eds), Jean Renoir: Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1994) Renoir, Jean, My Life, My Films (New York: Atheneum, 1974) The nearest equivalent of Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson s The Classical Hollywood Cinema for the French film industry is: Crisp, Colin, The Classic French Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993) Renoir s films inevitably feature prominently in critical studies of French cinema such as: Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993) Hayward, Susan, and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990) Powrie, Phil (ed.), The Cinema of France (London: Wallflower Press, 2002) And a useful introductory text on European cinema (including a case study of La règle du jeu) is: Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (eds), European Cinema: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) 16

18 7. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) Brief Encounter exemplifies what film critics and historians have identified as a tradition of quality in British cinema during the mid-1940s. The terms of this debate centred around notions of realism on the one hand (influenced especially by the documentary movement) and literary pedigree on the other. Critics averred that the Second World War had brought a new degree of realism (both aesthetic and psychological) to British film-making in contrast to the flimsy entertainment cinema of the 1930s. The critic Roger Manvell, for example, wrote in 1946: This new vitality, this new individuality are of essential importance to British cinema, and they are a direct product of the War years. Brief Encounter was one of four films arising from the fruitful creative collaboration of director David Lean and writer Noël Coward. It was much admired at the time for its sober narrative that eschewed melodrama in preference for emotional restraint and psychological realism. Those same features later brought about a critical reaction against the film, often caricatured for its stiff upper lip characterisations, at a time when film studies was more interested in films of melodramatic excess. More recently Brief Encounter has come back into favour as a film that is open to reading from a gay perspective: its bittersweet story of an unconsummated love affair has special resonances for gay male critics. We will consider various different readings of Brief Encounter, focusing especially on its representation of a sense of Englishness that is outside history and geography. In particular we will look for clues to establishing the time and place of Brief Encounter. We will also consider whether its emotional restraint is a conscious aesthetic choice or a result of cultural determinants. Set reading Course Reader Item 7: Antonia Lant, Processing History: The Timing of Brief Encounter. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp Further viewing David Lean is best known as the director of epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) that seem far removed from the intimacy of Brief Encounter, though his unjustly under-rated Ryan s Daughter (1970) is a sort of intimate epic that stands up remarkably well today despite its hostile reception from critics at the time. Lean also directed two celebrated adaptations of Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). Lean and Coward s other three collaborations were the wartime propaganda films In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944) and, in an entirely different vein, the supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945). 17

19 Further reading Brief Encounter is a canonical text for British cinema and there is no shortage of reading matter. I would suggest starting with the BFI Film Classic : Dyer, Richard, Brief Encounter (London: British Film Institute, 1993) Dyer reads the film in terms of its Englishness but also suggests a gay reading; for a more trenchant reading from that perspective see: Medhurst, Andy, That special thrill: Brief Encounter, homosexuality and authorship, Screen, vol.32, no.2 (Summer 1991), pp. The discourses of quality cinema are analysed in: Ellis, John, Art, Culture, Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies, Screen, vol.19, no.3 (Autumn 1978), pp (A revised and more accessible version of this article, shorn of its comparisons with the 1970s, was published as The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, , in Andrew Higson, ed., Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 1996, pp ) More general studies of British cinema including some discussion of Brief Encounter are: Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996). (See especially the introduction, Amnesia and Schizophrenia.) Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London: Cassell, 2000) Landy, Marcia, British Genres: Cinema and Society, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Murphy, Robert, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain (London: Routledge, 1989) Murphy, Robert (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1997) There is a dearth of good critical studies of David Lean, but an authoritative biography is: Brownlow, Kevin, David Lean (London: Richard Cohen, 1996) 18

20 8. THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) This week we move away from nationally-specific movements to look at the international phenomenon known as art cinema. Most historians see this as a feature of (predominantly Western) European cinemas in the decades following the Second World War. It is a movement focused on auteurs (such as Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni) and characterised by more ambiguous and open narratives. The art cinema movement also encompassed some non-western film-makers (such as Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa) whose films were shown to great acclaim in the West. David Bordwell argues that art cinema is a distinct mode of film practice with its own formal practices and conventions, particularly psychological realism and authorial expressivity. Ingmar Bergman is closely associated with the art cinema movement and The Seventh Seal (Der Sjunde Inseglet) is the film that established his international reputation amongst critics. It is an allegorical film dealing with existential and other philosophical issues through a story of a medieval knight who plays chess with the figure of Death. Its obscure narrative and philosophical discourses have made The Seventh Seal an endlessly debated film as critics attempt to unravel what it is about. Like Citizen Kane s Rosebud, the quest to discover the meaning of The Seventh Seal is a recurring concern within film criticism. Yet there is much more to The Seventh Seal: it is also a film of great, if austere, visual power and expression. We will, therefore, also consider how Bergman uses form to create meaning, considering the film s relationship to other film styles such as the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s and the work of other Scandinavian directors such as Victor Sjöstrom and Carl Theodor-Dreyer. Set reading Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Cinematic Form and Cultural Criticism, Film Analysis, pp David Bordwell, The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. Film Criticism, vol.4, no.1 (1979), pp Further viewing Bergman s key period was between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s with a series of intense, brooding dramas including Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Silence (1963) and Persona (1966). Easily characterised (caricatured even) as all Nordic gloom and depression, Bergman s late-career masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (1983) is surprisingly accessible and affirmative. The influence of The Seventh Seal can be seen in such varied films as Woody Allen s Love and Death (1976) and Bill & Ted s Bogus Journey (1991). 19

21 Further reading Again the best starting point is the BFI s Film Classics series: Bragg, Melvyn, The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) (London: British Film Institute, 1993) A trawl through back issues of critical magazines such as Sight and Sound will unearth a wealth of responses to Bergman, a key figure in the art cinema movement, though in recent times the director has been less fashionable. Useful studies include: Blackwell, Marilyn, Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Columbia: Camden, 1997) Gado, Frank, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986) Kahn, Jesse, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Bergman s own views on film-making can be discerned from: Bergman, Ingmar, Images: My Life in Film (New York: Little, 1994) Björkman, Stig, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima (eds), Bergman on Bergman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973) There is little in English on Swedish cinema, though recent work has tended to place it in the context of Scandinavian or Nordic cinema: Soila, Tytti, The Cinema of Scandinavia (London: Wallflower Press, 2003) Solia, Tytti, Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Gunnar Iversen, Nordic National Cinemas (London: Routledge, 1998) For a different approach to the notion of art cinema, see Neale, Steve, Art Cinema as Institution, Screen, vol.22, no.1 (1981), pp Both the Bordwell and Neale essays are included in a useful collection of critical writings on aspects of European cinema: Fowler, Catherine (ed.), The European Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2002) And a recent study of the reception of European art cinema in the United States: Betz, Mark, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 20

22 9. A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (1960) The nouvelle vague ( new wave ) was a phrase used to describe a group of new, mostly young French directors who made their first films in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s including Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. While their films were very different in content and style - the new wave should never be seen as a unified or coherent school - what they all shared was a commitment to the idea of film as a form of personal expression. Some, including Godard and Truffaut, had also been film critics before they turned their hand to direction and were steeped in cinema history - particularly Hollywood. A bout de souffle (known in English as Breathless) is the paradigmatic example of new wave cinema. What I wanted, Godard said, was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. On one level A bout de souffle is a gangster film and an homage to the Hollywood B-movie (Godard dedicated the film to Monogram Pictures, one of Hollywood s minor studios.) On another level it is a deconstruction of classical film form, employing all manner of jarring discontinuity devices, especially jump cuts and non-match on action shots. The result of Godard s breaking of the rules of classical narration is a highly kinetic style of cinema that seems quite literally out of breath. Set reading Richard Neupert, Godard Jumps Ahead, in Film Analysis, pp Item 9 in the Course Reader: Michel Marie, It really makes you sick! : Jean-Luc Godard s A bout de souffle (1959), in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), pp Further viewing Although it was short-lived - most commentators agreed that it had exhausted itself by c the French new wave was responsible for several important films. The earliest, and most conventional, were And God Created Woman (dir. Roger Vadim, 1956) and The Lovers (dir. Louis Malle, 1958), the films that made stars of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau respectively, but the films that came most to represent the new wave were those of Claude Chabrol - Beau Serge (1959) and The Cousins (1960) - and François Truffaut: The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962). Godard became the darling of the cineastes, deconstructing genres such as the romantic comedy (Une femme est une femme), the gangster film (Bande à Part) and science fiction (Alphaville). His Le Mépris (1963) is generally seen as marking the symbolic end of the new wave, whereafter he moved towards counter-cinema in Pierrot le fou (1965) and Weekend (1967). 21

23 Further reading You should have no difficulty in finding critical material on A bout de souffle, both in its own right and in the context of French new wave cinema. The two most recent studies are: Marie, Michel, The French New Wave: An Artistic School (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) Neupert, Richard, A History of the French New Wave (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) Other works either wholly or partly about the new wave include: Forbes, Jill, The Cinema in France After the New Wave (London: Macmillan, 1992) Graham, Peter (ed.), The New Wave (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) Wilson, Emma, French Cinema Since 1950: Personal Histories (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999) The critical literature on Godard in English is limited and tends to reflect the high theoretical agenda of film studies at the time that Godard was the enfant terrible of film culture: MacCabe, Colin, Laura Mulvey and Michael Eaton, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: British Film Institute, 1980) More accessible studies are limited in the main to: Sterritt, David, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) And two older studies: Brown, Richard (ed.), Focus on Godard (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1072) Roud, Richard, Jean-Luc Godard (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970) A selection of interviews and critical essays by Godard can be found in: Milne, Tom (ed.), Godard on Godard (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972) And for a general, if highly theorised, history of French cinema, see: Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993) 22

24 10. BELLE DE JOUR (1967) Belle de Jour is another example of the international art cinema movement, exemplifying its stylistic diversity in so far as its glossy visual style and high-contrast colour cinemtaography are very different from the expressionist black-and-white gloom of The Seventh Seal. At the same time, however, Belle de Jour again demonstrates the obscurity of art cinema. Its narrative of a frigid Parisienne housewife who enjoys a secret other life in a suburban brothel blurs the distinction between reality and fantasy to such a degree that is difficult to know how much of the film takes place only in the imagination of its protagonist. This is a characteristic device of art cinema, questioning our assumptions about the diegetic world of the film and our knowledge of what happens. Luis Buñuel, like Hitchcock and Ford, enjoyed a long career, having started making films in the 1920s, notably the acclaimed Surrealist classic Un chien andalou (1929), and spending many years working in Mexican cinema. Belle de Jour, a critical and commercial success, is from Buñuel s late career when he had returned to film-making in Europe. Belle de Jour provides a particularly apposite conclusion to this module because it is comparable in several ways to our first film, Rear Window. For one thing both films are much concerned with the act of looking, reminding us that voyeurism and spectatorship are at the heart of reading a film. Like Hitchcock s film, furthermore, Belle de Jour is particularly open to interpretation from the perspective of psychoanalytical feminism, not least because of its examination of female desire and sexuality. And the presence of the ethereal beauty Catherine Deneuve, another cool blonde in the style of Grace Kelly, offers us another way of reading film through stars and performance. Set reading Peter William Evans, Female Desire. The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp (This chapter also includes a close reading of Buñuel s The Diary of a Chambermaid, which is used as a comparison with Belle de Jour. You may, if you wish, choose to focus solely on the section on Belle de Jour, pp ) Further viewing Buñuel enjoyed an immensely rich and creative period between the late 1960s and mid-1970s including Tristana (1970) - again with Catherine Deneuve - The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1973), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) - all films that question the notion of diegetic reality and are notable for Buñuel s characteristic mixture of seriousness and satire. 23