Video-2 – Page 29 – Press Play Video Blog

WATCH: Film Noir Basics from THE MALTESE FALCON to BOUND to INHERENT VICE: A Video Essay

What exactly is film noir? Is it a movement, a mode, a style, or a
genre? These questions have preoccupied film scholars for decades. According to filmmaker Paul Schrader, noir
began with The Maltese Falcon and ended with Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil.
He’d add that it was largely an American movement that applied certain
stylistic (high contrast lighting, voice over narration, non-linear
storytelling) and thematic (existentialism,
the cruel mechanizations of fate, amour fou) elements in genres ranging from
melodramas to detective films. Another film scholar might add that
directors like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder never described their films
as being "noir." They thought they were making
thrillers. Film noir? That’s a term the French critics applied
retroactively.

This video essay series takes the fairly provocative stance that
film noir became a genre. Essentially, in its golden age during the
1940s, noir was a mode/movement that was superimposed onto other genres.
In the words of genre theorist Rick Altman, genres
can start off as "adjectives"–fragments of the style and theme might
be there, but the genre has yet to fully solidify because the filmmakers
and audiences haven’t quite gotten their heads around it yet. However,
by the time Robert Aldrich was making
Kiss Me Deadly in 1955, the writings of the French critics had
made it stateside (in fact, there’s a picture of him reading Borde and
Chaumeton’s
Panorama du Film Noir on the set of Attack!), and perhaps
the filmmakers and audiences had finally begun to think of noir as being
a noun. When neo-noir flourished in the 1970s (thanks to filmmakers
like Schrader), the movement emerged–fully
formed as a genre–from its black-and-white cocoon.

I write this trajectory into this introduction to the series because I
can imagine that some of my colleagues might have been troubled by a
video essay that calls film noir a genre. I am more than aware of the
history of this debate, and I will cover it in a subsequent
piece (Part I just covers semantics, Part II will focus on genetic
syntax, Part III on pragmatics–so the noir genre discussion will
primarily rest there, and Part IV will focus on evolution. There will
be a Part V on international noir, so don’t think I’ve
forgotten about that either!). What I’m attempting to do here is to
craft the video essay equivalent of an encyclopedia entry on film noir
for the undergraduate student with a new episode each month. If you’re
already familiar with the films and the key
debates, you may not find much in the way of "new" knowledge here. My
main audience–at least in terms of an intellectual presentation–is
the uninitiated. I assume the pleasures of the more
advanced fans and scholars of noir will be found
in the aesthetics of the pieces, although maybe they’ll be surprised by
a "new" recommendation (I love
Key Lime Pie, a fantastic animated short by Trevor Jimenez. In any case, I hope you enjoy the first part
of this ongoing series, and I look forward to the debate it encourages. Stay tuned for more!

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He the co-editor and co-founder of
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay and all of its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and
Cinema Journal). [in]Transition recently won an award of
distinction in the annual SCMS Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship
competition. His publications have appeared in
animation: an interdisciplinary journal, The Black Maria, Flow, In Media Res,
Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses of Cinema,
Studies in Comics, and a range of academic anthologies. He is
currently completing a manuscript on the overlap between American
blockbuster cinema and comic book style.

Watch: Andrei Tarkovsky and Fire: A Video Homage

Andrei Tarkovsky is as divisive a filmmaker as one might possibly dream up. When, back in 2011, one journalist used Tarkovsky as the crux of a piece about how certain films and directors are thought of as essential viewing whether or not their work is consistently compelling to all viewers, a verbal battle was started in the film-critical community that lasted for quite some time. And yet, watching the clips collected in this video essay from Good Alternative, even if one didn’t find Tarkovsky’s work, from Solaris to Stalker to Andrei Rublev, to be compelling–and no one says you have to, really–the evocativeness of the fire imagery present is, at the very least, interesting. In Tarkovsky’s films, fire moves, fire breathes, fire interacts with characters on screen as if it were one of them. As portrayed through Tarkovsky’s lens, fire becomes a source of change and motion in an otherwise still plane. What the fire means is less important than the fact that it is present–which, in this director’s hands, is quite enough.

Watch: A Video Essay on the 20 Black Best Actor Nominees Since the Beginning of the Academy Awards

There have been 87 Academy Awards ceremonies thus far. As Nelson Carvajal’s latest video essay points out, only 20 black actors have been nominated in the Best Actor category. Carvajal takes us through these performances, one by one: Sidney Poitier, in The Defiant Ones; Will Smith, in Ali: Morgan Freeman, in The Shawshank Redemption; Denzel Washington, in X; Jamie Foxx, in Ray; Chiwetel Ejiofor, in 12 Years A Slave; and many more. The truth this record reveals is startling–as startling in its injustice as the thrill of the performances thus honored. This piece offers valuable food for thought, at a time when such thought is rightfully pounding its fists on the table, saying it’s time for dinner…

Watch: A Video Essay on How “The Stomach Scene” in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN Was Made

Unless you were living under a large boulder for the past couple of decades, or perhaps you were raised by wolves, in which case your primary interaction with other living beings concerned the acquisition and consumption of foodstuffs, you probably watched, or at least have heard referenced, the by-now canonized scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien, in which a man is eating dinner, and then, all of a sudden, he starts eating more, and more, and more, and then… well… Perhaps you know the rest? This video essay from Cinefix explains a little bit about not only the special effects behind the scene itself (hint, if you haven’t seen the scene: the stomach is fake), but also the interactions of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, Ridley Scott, and the late H.R. Giger, the much-lauded special effects man who visualized most of what we now know as Alien, leading up to the scene itself. Some parts of the scene were a surprise to the actors involved, contributing to its frenzy–other parts required Herculean, meticulous planning. It’s important to watch little films like this because it’s important to know that what you’re watching on the big screen takes extensive cooperation between numerous individuals before it reaches you, in your seat, and a more private, personal cooperation, that of the viewer and the work, begins.

WATCH: In Nicolas Winding Refn’s DRIVE, Screen Quadrants Tell A Story of Desire: A Video Essay

In his latest video essay, the second in a week, in fact, Tony Zhou tackles Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. Interestingly, he comes at it from a geometrical standpoint, as he did in his last piece, on Kurosawa. Zhou shows that, if you look at the arrangement of figures in the film as if they were figures on a plane, their relationships clarify and intensify, and the immense care Refn put into the crafting of the film becomes evident. This is, indeed, an appropriate way to look at this film–often Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan seem as much like visual elements in a canvas as they resemble, in their portrayals of their characters, people we might pass on the street. Tony Zhou is on fire, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Watch: A Video Essay on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Provocative Use of the Long Shot

The characters in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson share many similarities.
They come from dysfunctional families, they are desperately seeking
acceptance, they let their emotions get the best of them, and the list
goes on. But a similarity that seems to especially stand out is a sense
of isolation. Anderson’s characters are adrift, looking for someone or
something to connect with in their lonely worlds. This idea is
expressed visually through the use of long/extreme long shots. We are
often presented with characters lost within the frame, and therefore
have trouble connecting with said characters–we become isolated
ourselves. Here is a look at Anderson’s use of the long/extreme long shot
throughout his first six feature films.

MUSIC: "Alethia" by Jonny Greenwood

Films:

Hard Eight (1996)
Boogie Nights (1997)

Magnolia (1999)

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

There Will be Blood (2007)

The Master (2012)

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

Watch: A Video Essay on Robert Altman’s Evolution, From Early TV Work to His Last Films

https://vimeo.com/116894504

So it turns out that Robert Altman, before Nashville, before The Long Goodbye, before Short Cuts, before The Player, directed for television. And this was good television: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for instance. Or Bonanza. Or Combat! Or Bus Stop, based on William Inge’s famous play of the same name. At the time that he directed for TV, Altman was killing two birds with one stone, in a sense. He was making a living as a director, but he was also developing the relaxed, somewhat drifting style which would later characterize his work. And, while doing so, he was studying, in a sense, with older technicians, from whom he could learn something about craft, about structure, and about dramatic build on screen, which would serve him well when he unleashed himself into celluloid glory. This excellent Film Comment video essay by Violet Lucca takes us through Altman’s early work, offering it as a window into his later films.

Watch: The Geometry of Akira Kurosawa: A Video Essay

It’s not always easy to determine why some parts of an artistic piece, be it a chapter in a novel, a verse in a song, or a scene in a film, work for you, and why others don’t. The reasons why these passages work might not be immediately clear to you–and when the reasons surface, they might not be the ones you were expecting. With his inimitable zing, seasoned video essayist Tony Zhou takes us on a stroll through a scene from a classic Akira Kurosawa film, The Bad Sleep Well, and it turns out that the reason the scene "works" is its geometry, the relationship between its rectangles and its triangles, which, as you watch the scene, becomes akin to a kind of visual language. The director may not be using that language to say anything terribly complex, or that you haven’t heard before, but the succinctness and the tightness of the visual statement being made propels you, much as you might be propelled through a plotless video essay. After his verbal diagramming of this scene, Zhou suggests that we could look at all of Kurosawa’s scenes, in all of his films, this way, as geometrical compositions moving from harmony into disharmony and back.

Watch: Why Are the LORD OF THE RINGS Films Better Than the HOBBIT Films? A Video Explanation

Whether you’re a fan of Peter Jackson’s films of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or not, this video essay by Sean Hickey gives a fairly well-reasoned explanation of why one might not have as much fun watching these films. The Hobbit trilogy, Hickey reports, takes the qualities that made the Lord of the Rings films so successful: grand scale, interpersonal intrigue, suspense, believable conflicts, and tries to reproduce them, in some cases aping the older film, without much success. You’ll see a lot of your favorite clips from both parts of the story here, but marshalled in support of a fair question: why try to improve on a formula that worked so well in the first place? And why divide it up into three parts?

Watch: Title Sequences: The Leap from Alfred Hitchcock to David Fincher

Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher have made remarkable thrillers, and they have also been responsible for some wildly imaginative title sequences. This video essay by Susana Sevilla shows us how, as filmmakers have transitioned to digital filmmaking, the images they present us with have changed as well. Savila focuses on contrasting the angular, stylish titles of Psycho or North by Northwest with the more surreal, dreamlike sequences of films like Se7en or Panic Room. Both directors’s openers are disorienting, certanly; they bring us from the day-world outside the theater into the night-world within it, and they drive home that what we are watching on the screen is not real, never will be real, and will force us into direct contact with the more discombobulating parts of our imaginations. Because the directors are using different tools, though, their ways of easing us into the strange dream of their movies is different; a different visual language is being spoken by Saul Bass in the older films than the one being spoken by Kyle Cooper in the later films. Whatever the language, though, this well-researched piece makes a concise point deftly and elegantly. Watch it, and behold title sequences that are like small movies by themselves.