DOCSLIB.ORG

The Representation of African Americans in Film Noir

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Representation of African Americans in Film Noir FROM PERIPHERY TO FOREGROUND: THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FILM NOIR By Phillip M. Calderwood Submitted to the Faculty of College of Arts and Sciences of American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In History Chair: Robert Peter J. Kuznick Dearn&f the College K e39oy Date ° 2007 American University Washington, D.C. 20016 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1445557 Copyright 2007 by Calderwood, Phillip M. All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 1445557 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © COPYRIGHT by PHILLIP M. CALDERWOOD 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FROM PERIPHERY TO FOREGROUND: THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FILM NOIR BY PHILLIP M. CALDERWOOD ABSTRACT This paper examines the representation of African Americans in classic American film noir, both in front of and behind the camera. Employing numerous film reviews and first-hand accounts, as well as a sample of 272 noirs, I discuss the production, content, and receptionDouble of Indemnity (1944), Crossfire (1947), Body and Soul (1947), No Way Out (1950), The Breaking Point (1950), The Phenix City Story (1955), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), and many other noteworthy noirs in the context of industry-wide political, economic, technological, and stylistic trends. While acknowledging that African Americans actors were absent from or relegated to marginal roles in the majority of noirs, I argue that the people behind many of these films contributed to and sometimes hastened gradual improvement in the representation of African Americans in Hollywood, not only as actors but as writers, composers, and producers. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE A WORKING DEFINITION OF FILM NOIR Originally, film noir was a term completely foreign to Americans. Right after World War II, when French audiences got their first glimpse of Hollywood’s wartime productions, many felt they were witnessing a dramatic change in American cinema. Movies like The Maltese Falcon (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1945) had a pessimistic tone and a fixation with social and psychological disorder that set them apart from the typical, glamorized fare Hollywood produced throughout the 1930s. The disheartening and vaguely nightmarish quality of these pictures resonated particularly well in France, a country that had not only suffered under German occupation but also engendered the traditions of surrealism and existentialism. From the summer of 1946 on, critics writing in French journals and magazines labeled these pictures “film noir”—literally, dark (or black) film. The label stuck, and by 1955 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton gave the subject its first book-length treatment, A Panorama of American Film A/o/r.1 1 For further information on the French origination and application of the term “film noir,” see Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), 1; Barton R. Palmer, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Film Noir, ed. Barton R. Palmer (New York: G.K. Hall/Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996), 3-5; James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 13, 15-19; Andrew Spicer,Film Noir (New York: Longman/Pearson Education, 2002), 2. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Meanwhile, in the United States, the moviegoing public and even the Hollywood community were largely unaware of the term. Few Americans had ever heard of film noir until the late 1960s and 1970s, when film studies became a legitimate academic program, and critics such as Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Raymond Durgnat, Paul Schrader, and Janey Place and Lowell Peterson produced the first scholarly works on film noir in the English language.2 By the end of the 1970s, however, American filmmakers and critics were applying the term to The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Conversation (1974), and other contemporary movies that harked back to the noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.3 Overtime, artists, intellectuals, advertisers, and consumers have applied “noir” even more loosely, making it much more than simply a cinematic descriptor. Nowadays, as James Naremore has rightly argued, noir evokes such a flexible and forceful set of ideas that it can refer to almost any artifact of our globalized, postmodern mediascape, including an advertisement, a comic book, a musical arrangement, or a television show.4 Noir is a problematic term, even when one uses it specifically to discuss the very movies that inspired French critics to write about film noir. Of course, 2 For ample demonstration that the producers, technicians, and artists associated with film noir were not aware of the term, see the numerous interviews in Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, eds.,Film Noir Reader 3 (New York: Limelight Editions, 2002). One possible exception is director Robert Aldrich, who apparently owned a copy of A Panorama of American Film Noir as early as 1956. See Naremore, 4. Works by Higham and Greenberg, Durgnat, Schrader, and Place and Peterson, are anthologized in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader, (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996). 3 Because film noir is a French term, the proper plural is films noirs. However, since double­ plural nouns generally look awkward to readers of English, I will refer to these films simply as “noirs" or “dark movies.” 4 Naremore, 38-39, 255-56, 259, 276-77. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. those who are familiar with these movies usually have a general sense of what makes them noirs. Many of these movies were adaptations of novel, stories, and scripts by W.R Burnett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, and other hard-boiled writers.5 For this reason, noirs usually had certain characters types (e.g., crooked cops, case-hardened detectives, and femmes fatales), settings (e.g. exotic nightclubs, cramped apartments, and dead-end alleys), and plot elements (e.g., crime, deception, mental disorder, and social corruption). Noirs also benefited from the influence of European emigres, including cinematographers John Alton and Rudolph Mate, as well as directors Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Anatole Litvak, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Andre de Toth, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder. Partly because of these emigres, noirs often shared a signature visual style, involving black-and-white images, high-contrast lighting, and oblique angles.6 Still, few noirs contained all of these hallmarks, and scholars have spent decades arguing whether these movies constitute a genre, cycle, style, or movement. 5 All of the authors mentioned above appeared in publisher Marcel Duhamel’s Serie noire, a collection of paperback translations of American mystery and crime novels. When French critics designated certain movies as noirs, they were implicitly comparing these movies to this collection. See Borde and Chaumeton, 4 n.3; Naremore, 12-13; Palmer, ed., 5-6; Spicer, 2. 6 More than contributing to a signature visual style, these emigres brought elements of prewar European cinematic conventions, particularly German Expressionism, Weimar “street films,” and French Poetic Realism, to Hollywood. For a brief discussion of the European influences on film noir, see Spicer, 11-16. V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Even if the creators of these movies were unaware of the term, and no one can satisfactorily define it, film noir has become an appellation too popular to dismiss. Such popularity has prompted many scholars to try to identify every film noir ever made, a somewhat arbitrary endeavor that has nevertheless resulted in several useful catalogs of film noir.7 Some of these works include examples of film noir from other countries and from the silent era to the present, but most scholars agree that a classic period, a creative peak in terms of both productivity and innovation, occurred in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.8 (Scholars, in fact, sometimes set apart the films that
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Spring 2015 Catalog
    THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS SPRING 2015 CONTENTS More on New publications 1–29 VIETNAM AND Terrace Books 2–3, 5, 7, 9 THE HMONG Midwest Regional Titles 6, 7, 9, 28 Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War Recent Book Awards 30–31 Edited by John Day Tully, Matthew Masur, and Journals 32–34 Brad Austin “An excellent one-stop shop for nonspecialists Recent Backlist 35–39 who regularly find themselves teaching about the Ordering and Contact Information 40 Vietnam War.”—David Herzberg, SUNY–Buffalo Author / Title Indexes Inside back cover TH E HARVEY GOLDBERG SERIES FOR UNDERSTANDING AND TEACHING HISTORY SUBJECT GUIDE LC: 2012040084 DS 2013 366 PP. 6 × 9 22 B/W ILLUS. Africa 14, 24–25 E-BOOK ISBN 978-0-299-29413-7 African American Studies 8, 9 PAPER $29.95 S ISBN 978-0-299-29414-4 American Studies 1, 4, 8, 20, 26, 27 Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under Anthropology 1, 10, 14, 24 an Air War Art 23 Edited by Fred Branfman with essays and Asian Studies 1 drawings by Laotian villagers “In this small, shattering book we hear—as we are Biography 21, 26 so rarely able to do—the voices of Asian peasants Classics 22–23 describing what we can barely begin to imagine.” Communication & Journalism 20, 27 —Gloria Emerson, New York Review of Books Cookbooks 6 NEW PERSPECTIVES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Education 14, 29 LC: 2012032677 DS 2013 196 PP. 5½ × 8¼ 34 B/W ILLUS. Environment 7, 18, 28 THE GOVERNMENT E-BOOK ISBN 978-0-299-29223-2 Drama & Performance 22 OF MISTRUST PAPER $19.95 S ISBN 978-0-299-29224-9 Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power Fiction 2–5, 9, 16 in Socialist Vietnam The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Film 21 Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam Folklore 14–15 Ken MacLean Gay, Lesbian & Transgender Interest 4 “A highly original book with an unusually History 1, 8, 10, 18–19, 24–27 innovative methodology.”—Oscar Salemink, University of Copenhagen Human Rights 17–19 NEW PERSPECTIVES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Immigration & Diaspora Studies 14–15 Ken MacLean LC: 2013015051 HN 2013 Latin America 18 300 PP.
    [Show full text]
  • Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood
    Katherine Kinney Cold Wars: Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood n 1982 Louis Gossett, Jr was awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Gunnery Sergeant Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, becoming theI first African American actor to win an Oscar since Sidney Poitier. In 1989, Denzel Washington became the second to win, again in a supporting role, for Glory. It is perhaps more than coincidental that both award winning roles were soldiers. At once assimilationist and militant, the black soldier apparently escapes the Hollywood history Donald Bogle has named, “Coons, Toms, Bucks, and Mammies” or the more recent litany of cops and criminals. From the liberal consensus of WWII, to the ideological ruptures of Vietnam, and the reconstruction of the image of the military in the Reagan-Bush era, the black soldier has assumed an increasingly prominent role, ironically maintaining Hollywood’s liberal credentials and its preeminence in producing a national mythos. This largely static evolution can be traced from landmark films of WWII and post-War liberal Hollywood: Bataan (1943) and Home of the Brave (1949), through the career of actor James Edwards in the 1950’s, and to the more politically contested Vietnam War films of the 1980’s. Since WWII, the black soldier has held a crucial, but little noted, position in the battles over Hollywood representations of African American men.1 The soldier’s role is conspicuous in the way it places African American men explicitly within a nationalist and a nationaliz- ing context: U.S. history and Hollywood’s narrative of assimilation, the combat film.
    [Show full text]
  • Cuaderno-CCU-Mayo-Junio-18.Pdf
    1 2 La noticia de la primera sesión del Cineclub de Granada Periódico “Ideal”, miércoles 2 de febrero de 1949. El CINECLUB UNIVERSITARIO se crea en 1949 con el nombre de “Cineclub de Granada”. Será en 1953 cuando pase a llamarse con su actual denominación. Así pues en este curso 2017-2018, cumplimos 64 (68) años. 3 MAYO-JUNIO 2018 MAY-JUNE 2018 UN ROSTRO EN LA PANTALLA (V): A FACE ON THE SCREEN (V): MICHAEL CAINE (part 1: the 60’s) MICHAEL CAINE (1ª parte: los años 60) (celebrating Caine’s 85th birthday) (celebrando su 85 cumpleaños) Viernes 18 mayo / Friday 18th may 21 h. ZULÚ (1964) Cy Endfield ( ZULU ) v.o.s.e. / OV film with Spanish subtitles Martes 22 mayo / Tuesday 22th may 21 h. IPCRESS (1965) Sidney J. Furie v.o.s.e. / OV film with Spanish subtitles Viernes25 mayo / Friday 25th may 21 h. ALFIE (1966) Lewis Gilbert v.o.s.e. / OV film with Spanish subtitles Martes 5 junio / Tuesday 5th june 21 h. LA CAJA DE LAS SORPRESAS (1966) Bryan Forbes ( THE WRONG BOX ) v.o.s.e. / OV film with Spanish subtitles Viernes 8 junio / Friday 8th june 21 h. FUNERAL EN BERLÍN (1966) Guy Hamilton ( FUNERAL IN BERLÍN ) v.o.s.e. / OV film with Spanish subtitles Todas las proyecciones en la Sala Máxima de la ANTIGUA FACULTAD DE MEDICINA (Av. de Madrid). Entrada libre hasta completar aforo All projections at the Assembly Hall in the Former Medical College (Av. de Madrid) Free admission up to full room 4 5 “ (…) Existen unos ocho kilometros de papel de periódico y al menos siete biografías que hablan de mí (Dios sabe por qué), así que ¿por qué añadir algo a todo ello? Quizá con objeto de que, para variar, el disco suene en mi propio tocadiscos.
    [Show full text]
  • ATINER's Conference Paper Series HUM2014-0814
    ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: HUM2014-0814 Athens Institute for Education and Research ATINER ATINER's Conference Paper Series HUM2014-0814 Iconic Bodies/Exotic Pinups: The Mystique of Rita Hayworth and Zarah Leander Galina Bakhtiarova Associate Professor Western Connecticut State University USA 1 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: HUM2014-0814 Athens Institute for Education and Research 8 Valaoritou Street, Kolonaki, 10671 Athens, Greece Tel: + 30 210 3634210 Fax: + 30 210 3634209 Email: [email protected] URL: www.atiner.gr URL Conference Papers Series: www.atiner.gr/papers.htm Printed in Athens, Greece by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. All rights reserved. Reproduction is allowed for non-commercial purposes if the source is fully acknowledged. ISSN 2241-2891 22/1/2014 2 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: HUM2014-0814 An Introduction to ATINER's Conference Paper Series ATINER started to publish this conference papers series in 2012. It includes only the papers submitted for publication after they were presented at one of the conferences organized by our Institute every year. The papers published in the series have not been refereed and are published as they were submitted by the author. The series serves two purposes. First, we want to disseminate the information as fast as possible. Second, by doing so, the authors can receive comments useful to revise their papers before they are considered for publication in one of ATINER's books, following our standard procedures of a blind review. Dr. Gregory T. Papanikos President Athens Institute for Education and Research 3 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: HUM2014-0814 This paper should be cited as follows: Bakhtiarova, G.
    [Show full text]
  • Violence and Masculinity in Hollywood War Films During World War II a Thesis Submitted To
    Violence and Masculinity in Hollywood War Films During World War II A thesis submitted to: Lakehead University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree in Master of Arts Matthew Sitter Thunder Bay, Ontario July 2012 Library and Archives Bibliothèque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'édition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-84504-2 Our file Notre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-84504-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant à la Bibliothèque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par télécommunication ou par l'Internet, prêter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des thèses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, à des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette thèse. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation.
    [Show full text]
  • Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 Pm Page 2 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 Pm Page 3
    Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 2 Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 3 Film Soleil D.K. Holm www.pocketessentials.com This edition published in Great Britain 2005 by Pocket Essentials P.O.Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ, UK Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing P.O.Box 257, Howe Hill Road, North Pomfret, Vermont 05053 © D.K.Holm 2005 The right of D.K.Holm to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may beliable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The book is sold subject tothe condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in anyform, binding or cover other than in which it is published, and without similar condi-tions, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publication. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1–904048–50–1 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Book typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire Film Soleil 28/9/05 3:35 pm Page 5 Acknowledgements There is nothing
    [Show full text]
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Adapted Screenplays
    Absorbing the Worlds of Others: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Adapted Screenplays By Laura Fryer Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD degree at De Montfort University, Leicester. Funded by Midlands 3 Cities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. June 2020 i Abstract Despite being a prolific and well-decorated adapter and screenwriter, the screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are largely overlooked in adaptation studies. This is likely, in part, because her life and career are characterised by the paradox of being an outsider on the inside: whether that be as a European writing in and about India, as a novelist in film or as a woman in industry. The aims of this thesis are threefold: to explore the reasons behind her neglect in criticism, to uncover her contributions to the film adaptations she worked on and to draw together the fields of screenwriting and adaptation studies. Surveying both existing academic studies in film history, screenwriting and adaptation in Chapter 1 -- as well as publicity materials in Chapter 2 -- reveals that screenwriting in general is on the periphery of considerations of film authorship. In Chapter 2, I employ Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s notions of ‘the madwoman in the attic’ and ‘the angel in the house’ to portrayals of screenwriters, arguing that Jhabvala purposely cultivates an impression of herself as the latter -- a submissive screenwriter, of no threat to patriarchal or directorial power -- to protect herself from any negative attention as the former. However, the archival materials examined in Chapter 3 which include screenplay drafts, reveal her to have made significant contributions to problem-solving, characterisation and tone.
    [Show full text]
  • Ronald Davis Oral History Collection on the Performing Arts
    Oral History Collection on the Performing Arts in America Southern Methodist University The Southern Methodist University Oral History Program was begun in 1972 and is part of the University’s DeGolyer Institute for American Studies. The goal is to gather primary source material for future writers and cultural historians on all branches of the performing arts- opera, ballet, the concert stage, theatre, films, radio, television, burlesque, vaudeville, popular music, jazz, the circus, and miscellaneous amateur and local productions. The Collection is particularly strong, however, in the areas of motion pictures and popular music and includes interviews with celebrated performers as well as a wide variety of behind-the-scenes personnel, several of whom are now deceased. Most interviews are biographical in nature although some are focused exclusively on a single topic of historical importance. The Program aims at balancing national developments with examples from local history. Interviews with members of the Dallas Little Theatre, therefore, serve to illustrate a nation-wide movement, while film exhibition across the country is exemplified by the Interstate Theater Circuit of Texas. The interviews have all been conducted by trained historians, who attempt to view artistic achievements against a broad social and cultural backdrop. Many of the persons interviewed, because of educational limitations or various extenuating circumstances, would never write down their experiences, and therefore valuable information on our nation’s cultural heritage would be lost if it were not for the S.M.U. Oral History Program. Interviewees are selected on the strength of (1) their contribution to the performing arts in America, (2) their unique position in a given art form, and (3) availability.
    [Show full text]
  • George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection LSC.1042
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5s2006kz No online items George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection LSC.1042 Finding aid prepared by Hilda Bohem; machine-readable finding aid created by Caroline Cubé UCLA Library Special Collections Online finding aid last updated on 2020 November 2. Room A1713, Charles E. Young Research Library Box 951575 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575 [email protected] URL: https://www.library.ucla.edu/special-collections George P. Johnson Negro Film LSC.1042 1 Collection LSC.1042 Contributing Institution: UCLA Library Special Collections Title: George P. Johnson Negro Film collection Identifier/Call Number: LSC.1042 Physical Description: 35.5 Linear Feet(71 boxes) Date (inclusive): 1916-1977 Abstract: George Perry Johnson (1885-1977) was a writer, producer, and distributor for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916-23). After the company closed, he established and ran the Pacific Coast News Bureau for the dissemination of Negro news of national importance (1923-27). He started the Negro in film collection about the time he started working for Lincoln. The collection consists of newspaper clippings, photographs, publicity material, posters, correspondence, and business records related to early Black film companies, Black films, films with Black casts, and Black musicians, sports figures and entertainers. Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page. Language of Material: English . Conditions Governing Access Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page. Portions of this collection are available on microfilm (12 reels) in UCLA Library Special Collections.
    [Show full text]
  • Complete Film Noir
    COMPLETE FILM NOIR (1940 thru 1965) Page 1 of 18 CONSENSUS FILM NOIR (1940 thru 1959) (1960-1965) dThe idea for a COMPLETE FILM NOIR LIST came to me when I realized that I was “wearing out” a then recently purchased copy of the Film Noir Encyclopedia, 3rd edition. My initial plan was to make just a list of the titles listed in this reference so I could better plan my film noir viewing on AMC (American Movie Classics). Realizing that this plan was going to take some keyboard time, I thought of doing a search on the Internet Movie DataBase (here after referred to as the IMDB). By using the extended search with selected criteria, I could produce a list for importing to a text editor. Since that initial list was compiled almost twenty years ago, I have added additional reference sources, marked titles released on NTSC laserdisc and NTSC Region 1 DVD formats. When a close friend complained about the length of the list as it passed 600 titles, the idea of producing a subset list of CONSENSUS FILM NOIR was born. Several years ago, a DVD producer wrote me as follows: “I'd caution you not to put too much faith in the film noir guides, since it's not as if there's some Film Noir Licensing Board that reviews films and hands out Certificates of Authenticity. The authors of those books are just people, limited by their own knowledge of and access to films for review, so guidebooks on noir are naturally weighted towards the more readily available studio pictures, like Double Indemnity or Kiss Me Deadly or The Big Sleep, since the many low-budget B noirs from indie producers or overseas have mostly fallen into obscurity.” There is truth in what the producer says, but if writers of (film noir) guides haven’t seen the films, what chance does an ordinary enthusiast have.
    [Show full text]
  • National Gallery of Art Fall10 Film Washington, DC Landover, MD 20785
    4th Street and Mailing address: Pennsylvania Avenue NW 2000B South Club Drive NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART FALL10 FILM Washington, DC Landover, MD 20785 FIGURES IN A STRAUB AND LANDSCAPE: JULIEN HUILLET: THE NATURE AND DUVIVIER: WORK AND HARUN NARRATIVE THE GRAND REACHES OF FAROCKI: IN NORWAY ARTISAN CREATION ESSAYS When Angels Fall Manhattan cover calendar page calendar (Harun Farocki), page four page three page two page one Still of performance duo ZsaZa (Karolina Karwan) When Angels Fall (Henryk Kucharski) A Tale of HarvestA Tale The Last Command (Photofest), Force of Evil Details from FALL10 Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Henryk Kucharski), (Photofest) La Bandera (Norwegian Institute) Film Images of the (Photofest) (Photofest) Force of Evil World and the Inscription of War (Photofest), Tales of (Harun Farocki), Iris Barry and American Modernism Andrew Simpson on piano Sunday November 7 at 4:00 Art Films and Events Barry, founder of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art , was instrumental in first focusing the attention of American audiences on film as an art form. Born in Britain, she was also one of the first female film critics David Hockney: A Bigger Picture and a founder of the London Film Society. This program, part of the Gallery’s Washington premiere American Modernism symposium, re-creates one of the events that Barry Director Bruno Wollheim in person staged at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford in the 1930s. The program Saturday October 2 at 2:00 includes avant-garde shorts by Walter Ruttmann, Ivor Montagu, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Charles Sheeler, and a Silly Symphony by Walt Disney.
    [Show full text]
  • The American Indian in the American Film
    THE AMERICAN INDIAN IN THE AMERICAN FILM Thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in American Studies in the University of Canterbury by Michael J. Brathwaite 1981 ABSTRACT This thesis is a chronological examination of the ways in which American Indians have been portrayed in American 1 f.ilms and the factors influencing these portrayals. B eginning with the literary precedents, the effects of three wars and other social upheavals and changes are considered. In addition t-0 being the first objective detailed examination of the subj�ct in English, it is the first work to cover the last decade. It concludes that because of psychological factors it is unlikely that film-makers are - capable of advancing far beyond the basic stereotypes, and that the failure of Indians to appreciate this has repeatedly caused ill-feeling between themselves and the film-makers, making the latter abandon their attempts at a fair treatment of the Indians. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface iii Chapter I: The Background of the Problem c.1630 to c.1900. 1 Chapter II: The Birth of the Cinema and Its Aftermath: 1889 to 1939. 21 Chapter III: World War II and Its Effects: 1940 to 1955. 42 Chapter IV: Assimilation of Separatism?: 1953 to 1965. 65 Chapter V: The Accuracy Question. 80 Chapter VI: Catch-22: 1965 to 1972. 105 Chapter VII: Back to the Beginning: 1973 to 1981. 136 Chapter VIII: Conclusion. 153 Bibliography 156 iii PREFACE The aim of this the.sis is to examine the ways in which the American Indians have been portrayed in American films, the influences on their portrayals, and whether or not they have changed.
    [Show full text]