Well, the 600 or so pages of reading and the 3 films that I never managed to cross off my to-do list can now be set aside and I have a new chance to not fall behind. Of course I didn't do any of the reading or watching for today because I was studying for the exam so I'm already behind, but not so far as to be unrecoverable.
The test was... fine. We started with 11 10-second clips from films that we had to identify with name and director. I had memorised all the director names but identifying the clips was never going to be something I'd be good at. And it's not like he was picking famous moments from the films. I could have watched each of them yesterday and I still wouldn't have done any better than I did. I should have known I'd got at least one wrong (I got at least half wrong I expect) when I realised Citizen Kane wasn't anywhere on my list. But even ones I recognised - a quick shot of someone breaking a window and sticking a gun out - I thought, oh yeah, I remember that. I don't know what film it's from. But it was a gangster film so that narrowed it down. And from there I'm pretty sure I guessed right. And I know I guessed right on the last clip as well. It was a guy alone walking down a deserted street. When we came back after the test was done for the lecture half someone asked because we'd been debating it in the hallway. We had all narrowed it down to one of the two noir films from 1947 but were fairly evenly distributed between them. The professor's answer was "It was Force of Evil of course. What else could it possibly have been with [name of actor that I can't recall] walking down Wall Street like that?" He was genuinely surprised we didn't all know. The actor was very small in the screen so you couldn't see him even if that would have helped, and I'm not sure I'd recognise Wall Street now much less in 1947. At least I feel good about being able to recognise 40s Noir and then pick between the two possibilities. But the fact I got it right was luck.
The multiple choice part was better. There were only a couple of questions I really didn't know anything about. Most of it I either knew out right or knew enough about generally that I could narrow it down and make an educated guess. And really that part of the test made me feel like I'm learning the right stuff.
But then we got to the lecture portion of the class today and we were talking about Elia Kazan and mostly Streetcar Named Desire and a little bit of On the Waterfront and also just Kazan and his place in history. He got called before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee, I think is properly what that stands for) and named names so he didn't get blacklisted. And then he took that opportunity to keep working and made something of it: On the Waterfront, a film about a guy who is the hero because he was an informer.* The discussion about Streetcar was interesting because we studied Tennessee Williams in high school and I'm pretty sure watched this film then. (Or at any rate I've seen this film and that's likely when.) And I've also seen the play. But he picked it apart and pulled out things that I never saw or noticed or knew before. Williams wrote the play with Brando in mind. Brando actually went up to Provincetown and auditioned and stayed for a little while with Williams and his lover while the play was being written. In the play Blanche's husband killed himself because she caught him having an affair with a man. That had to be taken out of the movie because the Code was still in effect and so you couldn't even hint at the existence of homosexuality. But the theme of it being dangerous to love a man was still there because it was dangerous for Blanche to love Stanley. Also in the play Stella knows what happened but goes back to Stanley anyway and in the movie she goes to the neighbor's when she gets out of the hospital with her baby. The Code says if you've done something wrong (Stanley rapes Blanche while Stella is in the hospital) then you have to have some form of punishment for that.
One last interesting thing. In the 40s there was a fairly standard visual language for how the femme fatale was portrayed in Film Noir. And Kazan uses that here when showing Stanley. That had to get pointed out to me, though the film studies students picked up on it quicker. That language is not part of my current vocabulary and we breezed through film noir in a week so I didn't get it. But once it was pointed out I could see the comparison. It strikes me as kind of a brave choice, but Brando is such a manly man that there's no genuine risk to his masculinity in using cinematic techniques to hint at him being the beautiful villain that will be the downfall of the flawed hero. (And boy, he was beautiful as a young man.)
* "I coulda been a contender" comes from On the Waterfront. Yet another famous line that I imagine lots of people can quote without knowing where it comes from. And it strikes me as A) not the most interesting part of that scene. There was a real nice moment between the brothers just before that. And B) largely incidental to the bigger point of the movie. Important because it was the first time his older brother betrayed him, but over all not the point.
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