Here are the critical readings for Wednesday, February 5th's class on Film Noir.
film_noir_reader_part_1.pdf | |
File Size: | 7417 kb |
File Type: |
film_noir_reader_part_2.pdf | |
File Size: | 2608 kb |
File Type: |
naremore_more_than_night.pdf | |
File Size: | 2984 kb |
File Type: |
Our film for the week is Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947), which we are going to see on Wednesday night at Film Forum. To give you a grasp on the genre as you do the week's readings, I have included these clips along with commentary to help orient you to the style and themes of Film Noir. Please watch them and use them as a companion to the reading materials.
The first clip below is the trailer for The Lady from Shanghai. The trailer emphasizes many of the defining aspects of the genre, beginning with a dangerous, married woman: "This is the notorious Mrs. Bannister...." Note also the way the film foregrounds a hero with less power than the femme fatale, a sinister, threatening atmosphere, a sense of legal confusion and persecution, strong use of light and shadow, and a theme of marital betrayal. The film is styled as "The exciting story of a reckless woman" who is depicted as dominant and cruel (or unknowable) and it typically includes (far more frequently than other genres) displays of physical violence against women.
The first clip below is the trailer for The Lady from Shanghai. The trailer emphasizes many of the defining aspects of the genre, beginning with a dangerous, married woman: "This is the notorious Mrs. Bannister...." Note also the way the film foregrounds a hero with less power than the femme fatale, a sinister, threatening atmosphere, a sense of legal confusion and persecution, strong use of light and shadow, and a theme of marital betrayal. The film is styled as "The exciting story of a reckless woman" who is depicted as dominant and cruel (or unknowable) and it typically includes (far more frequently than other genres) displays of physical violence against women.
Why does The Lady from Shanghai end in San Francisco's Chinatown? Here are some thoughts from scholars that might help to answer that question.
Wong, K.Scott. “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain.” MELUS, Vol. 20, No. 1, Chinese-American Literature (Spring, 1995), pp. 3-15.
Some of the most virulent images of Chinatown appeared in popular periodicals, government documents, and labor union pamphlets of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These images tended to cluster around a number of common themes: the physical "mysteriousness" of Chinatown, unsanitary living conditions, immoral activities, and the general Otherness of the Chinese themselves, all of which contrasted with familiar idealized images of "American" communities.…Chinatown was also portrayed as a vice district of gambling, opium smoking, and the female slave trade, all under the control of a mysterious underground network of tongs (secret societies) and hired thugs. These images contrast sharply with the imagery of white American communities with public parks, theaters, and brightly lit stores (4).
The Chinese were believed to be unassimilable, with no desire to adapt to American life. Therefore, the Chinese were seen as a threat to American culture and social institutions. Taking a closer look at the images and critiques of the Chinese-American community, it becomes clear that representations of the Chinese and Chinatown were often part of the larger racial and polit-ical agenda of promoting segregation and exclusion. Segregation was sanctioned by concerns about declining property values, sanitary habits, and the possibility of white flight (5).
The wellworn image of Chinatown as a place of corruption, crime, and secret societies is an image that has had a long life. In Michael Cimino's 1985 film Year of the Dragon, New York Chinatown is under the thumb of corrupt associations involved in sophisticated crime rings. According to Stanley White, the Polish-American detective whose mission is to "clean up" Chinatown, the people are cowed by a "thousand years of tradition," making them impervious to any notion of reform. Throughout the film, Chinatown is contested terrain: a cultural space for the detective to conquer and reform, a business enclave from which the gangs and the associations profit, and a community in which the Chinese-American television reporter struggles and fails to come to grips with her ethnicity. Once again, Chinatown is the site for other people's purposes. Indeed, this cinematic representation of Chinatown may well be viewed as merely an alternative "on location" opportunity for writers Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone to work out their ambivalent feelings about the war in Vietnam. Stanley White, a Vietnam veteran, asks if he'll be allowed to "win this war," linking the jungles of Southeast Asia to the "mysterious" streets of New York Chinatown (12).
Wong, K.Scott. “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain.” MELUS, Vol. 20, No. 1, Chinese-American Literature (Spring, 1995), pp. 3-15.
Some of the most virulent images of Chinatown appeared in popular periodicals, government documents, and labor union pamphlets of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These images tended to cluster around a number of common themes: the physical "mysteriousness" of Chinatown, unsanitary living conditions, immoral activities, and the general Otherness of the Chinese themselves, all of which contrasted with familiar idealized images of "American" communities.…Chinatown was also portrayed as a vice district of gambling, opium smoking, and the female slave trade, all under the control of a mysterious underground network of tongs (secret societies) and hired thugs. These images contrast sharply with the imagery of white American communities with public parks, theaters, and brightly lit stores (4).
The Chinese were believed to be unassimilable, with no desire to adapt to American life. Therefore, the Chinese were seen as a threat to American culture and social institutions. Taking a closer look at the images and critiques of the Chinese-American community, it becomes clear that representations of the Chinese and Chinatown were often part of the larger racial and polit-ical agenda of promoting segregation and exclusion. Segregation was sanctioned by concerns about declining property values, sanitary habits, and the possibility of white flight (5).
The wellworn image of Chinatown as a place of corruption, crime, and secret societies is an image that has had a long life. In Michael Cimino's 1985 film Year of the Dragon, New York Chinatown is under the thumb of corrupt associations involved in sophisticated crime rings. According to Stanley White, the Polish-American detective whose mission is to "clean up" Chinatown, the people are cowed by a "thousand years of tradition," making them impervious to any notion of reform. Throughout the film, Chinatown is contested terrain: a cultural space for the detective to conquer and reform, a business enclave from which the gangs and the associations profit, and a community in which the Chinese-American television reporter struggles and fails to come to grips with her ethnicity. Once again, Chinatown is the site for other people's purposes. Indeed, this cinematic representation of Chinatown may well be viewed as merely an alternative "on location" opportunity for writers Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone to work out their ambivalent feelings about the war in Vietnam. Stanley White, a Vietnam veteran, asks if he'll be allowed to "win this war," linking the jungles of Southeast Asia to the "mysterious" streets of New York Chinatown (12).
Lott, Eric. “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” American Literary History, 9.3 (1997), 542-566.
Or there is the Chinatown to which Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) tries to escape in the last section of Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, a film which, for all its interest in narrating ethnicity (from Welles’ “Black Irish” O’Hara to the various national and ethnic descents of his sailor associates to the abused black maid Bessie to Arthur Bannister’s “Manchester Greek” mother to Elsa’s own sojourn in China), is not above playing stereotypes for a laugh: during the trial scene two Chinese women in the courtroom, speaking sotto voce in their native tongue, break it off with one saying “You ain’t kiddin’!” Chinatown and Elsa’s Chinese gang herald the darkness of Los Angeles’ would-be El Dorado and summon as well the ghastly nature of Elsa’s fatal plotting—though the final scene in the Chinese funhouse asserts how easy it is for such racialized corruption to knaw at the hearts of whites split (by the famous funhouse mirrors) into dissociated parts and, as O’Hara puts it, “chewing away at their own selves” (558).
Or there is the Chinatown to which Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) tries to escape in the last section of Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, a film which, for all its interest in narrating ethnicity (from Welles’ “Black Irish” O’Hara to the various national and ethnic descents of his sailor associates to the abused black maid Bessie to Arthur Bannister’s “Manchester Greek” mother to Elsa’s own sojourn in China), is not above playing stereotypes for a laugh: during the trial scene two Chinese women in the courtroom, speaking sotto voce in their native tongue, break it off with one saying “You ain’t kiddin’!” Chinatown and Elsa’s Chinese gang herald the darkness of Los Angeles’ would-be El Dorado and summon as well the ghastly nature of Elsa’s fatal plotting—though the final scene in the Chinese funhouse asserts how easy it is for such racialized corruption to knaw at the hearts of whites split (by the famous funhouse mirrors) into dissociated parts and, as O’Hara puts it, “chewing away at their own selves” (558).
Below is the trailer for one of the quintessential noir films, The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as private detective Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his client Brigid O'Shaunessey. The film is based on the hard-boiled detective novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett who, along with Raymond Chandler, was one of the most important writers to influence the genre of film noir. Here in the trailer, with classic noir sadomasochism, Bogart is styled as "the most ruthless lover you'll ever meet"-- "He makes crime a career-- and ladies a hobby!" Also note the suspense element here, with the opening narrative frame of the trailer reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock psychological terror approach. He does not save his violence for women-- in another scene, he tells his potential client Joel Cairo (played by Peter Lorre), "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it."