I've watched a bunch of things this week in an attempt to catch up on all the required viewing before next week's exam. I saw Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1947), but to be honest sitting here right now I can't tell you a thing about it. This is a problem, they're all starting to blur. The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1944), a documentary that was trying to be supportive of the war effort, but was so brutal they didn't actually show it until after the war ended. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946) a noir film that I liked a lot and we talked about in class today. A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) a women's film that I also enjoyed, particularly in contrast to Ivers. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) that is where the famous line "I'm ready for my closeup Mr. de Mille." comes from. And Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) which is an Avant Guard short film that we watched in class today.
As I was watching Meshes of the Afternoon I kept thinking that if this film had come up for review when Nancy, Linda and I were judging for DC Shorts, the best I would have been able to comment about it would be: it seems fine on the experimental scale but since I don't like experimental films I can't really recommend it. Then we got a whole student presentation on Maya Deren where we learned that she was working in the context of art films but was trying to do something other than be a surrealist which was the predominant intellectual thing of the time. And we picked it apart a bit and it made more sense, but I still thought if the only way for people to "get" your film is for you to explain it to them or for them to see it several times then you've kind of failed. Because people go to a screening and see a film once and make an opinion and you aren't usually there to hold their hand through it. But I also feel a little bit bad for her because Meshes was her first film and it's still the most famous and most likely to be screened. I like Memory Sticks, but boy 80 years from now I hope it's not the only thing I'm known for.
When we were talking about Film Noir one of the things that came up that was interesting was how different eras will tell the same story and bring something different to it. Film Noir itself wasn't a genre in the traditional sense. When they were being made people didn't make Film Noir the way they made a Gangster film or a Western. But there were a group of films of varying crime and melodrama genres that had so many stylistic similarities that French critics in an attempt to insult the Americans came up with the term Film Noir. One of the common threads of these films was the Femme Fatale. There would be a relatively innocent man drawn into crime by a usually rather amoral woman. These were all post-WWII films so people look back at them and say well it has to do with all the male anxiety of the time with all the men returning from the war having been displaced in their jobs by the women. The thing is an awful lot of those films were adapted from books that were written in the 30s. So the original stories of middle class crime weren't about the threat of women. They were about the threat of economic chaos and the Depression.
We ended class with a discussion of what stuff will be on the exam next week, which is effectively everything we've talked about up to now. It will be a multiple choice test, which is both good and bad. The right answer is there and I tend to be good at tests like that. On the other hand those tests tend to be very nit-picky and detailed and are more about what you remember than about what you understand. And the clip identification portion is not just see a very short excerpt and know what film it is, but name the director and year as well. (Hence all the directors and years above.) And that's just a matter of flash cards and memorization. I'm not good at names and dates and I've never been interested in regurgitating names and dates and so I'm annoyed that I'm going to have to spend the weekend forcing names and dates into my brain just to delete it all this time next week. It feels like such a waste. The tests are not a big portion of our grade. To be fair he is more interested in our presentations and our papers and what we really learn and understand. But I say why have the test at all?
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