Mark,
Re your comments below:
> Wait a minute, you've added a second condition
here,
> that the film is a
> "crime/suspense film." So I guess it's
not
> EXCLUSIVELY a function of
> visual stylistics.
Leaving aside the fact that, given the subject of this list,
"crime film" is implicit, in my very first post on this
thread I said film noir was a ". . . crime film marked by
particular visual stylistics." So I'm not adding
anything.
> And what makes it a
> crime/suspense film if not the
> plot in the script? So it must have something to
do
> with the script.
The same script can be used for a film that is either noir or
non-noir depending on the visual approach. In fact, I can
give you an example.
In the late '40s, Harry Kleiner wrote a script for a cop
movie called THE STREET WITH NO NAME about an undercover FBI
agent who infiltrates a gang organized along military lines
in some nondescript Midwest metropolis. In the mid-50s,
Samuel Fuller took that script, changed the setting and some
details (now it took place in Tokyo and the hero was an
undercover Army MP infiltrating a gang of American ex-GIs
organized along military lines; otherwise the plot and most
of the dialog was identical), and remade it as HOUSE OF
BAMBOO. This time Kleiner (who didn't actually work on the
new script at all) shared screenwriting credit with Fuller.
The first film, shot in black and white with the use of light
and shadow common to film noirs, was a film noir. The second,
shot in color, and mostly in daylight, was not.
Significantly, Fuller was quite capable of using the visual
stylistics associated with film noir, as he proved in movies
like THE CRIMSON KIMONO and UNDERWORLD USA. He just chose not
to use that approach with BAMBOO.
So while both were crime films (and were, as you point out,
crime films because of the script), they weren't both noirs
because only one of them used noir visual effects. And that's
why script and story (story, in this case, was the same and
script was virtually the same) isn't the determining factor
in whether or not a given crime movie is a film noir and
visual approach is.
> So there's a third condition, making it even
less
> EXCLUSIVE. How
> exactly does self-consciousness manifest
itself,
> though? I'd say
> through slavishly imitating the visual stylistics
of
> its model. So if
> it self-consciously adopts the style of a
director
> (and cinematographer
> and set designer and lighting technician, etc)
who
> defined that style
> (whether or not they were aware of it at the
time),
> how could it not be
> noir, IF noir is EXCLUSIVELY defined by
VISUAL
> STYLISTICS?
Self-consciousness manifests itself in the realization that
there is such a thing AS film noir. The classic noir
filmmakers were, for the most part at least, not aware of
this because they'd never heard the term. It may have existed
prior to the early '60s, but it didn't come into common usage
until then. No doubt the classic noirists were aware of
certain stylistic similarities, and, in all likelihood, were
influenced by them when they were making films with similar
stories, but that's different from consciously setting out to
make a film noir.
> In other words, what is it about the
visual
> stylistics of the Coen
> Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There that bars it
from
> being noir?
Haven't seen it and so can't comment, but most of the Coen
films I have seen have been in color, which, at least in the
'40s and '50s, would have been an automatic
disqualifier.
It's less so now, because color filming has advanced in a way
that makes it possible to use color images in ways that are
strikingly similar to the ways B&W images were used in
the '40s, '50s, and early '60s
(i.e. BLADERUNNER, or SE7EN, for example). But the deliberate
intention to make a film that reproduces the visual effects
of another era that defined a particular style has the effect
of making those visual flourishes seem less like an organic
part of the work
(as they were in the '40s, '50s, and early '60s), and more
like mimicry. Which is another way self-consciousness
manifests itself.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do you
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Feb 2003 EST