Sample Exams for Exam #2

Identifications

Please write a sentence demonstrating your knowledge about the following people, films, or concepts. Then, in another sentence, indicate the importance of each item to this course. Each question is worth 4 points each. Suggested time per question: 2 minutes each.

I1. Dana Polan

I2. Cary Scott

I3. The Memphis Belle

I4. Internationalism

I5. Office of War Information

Quotations

Please identify the source of the following quotations (author’s name and/or approximate article title). Then, in one sentence, briefly describe how the quoted passage is relevant to the course. Each question is worth 5 points. Suggested time per question: 2 minutes each.

Q1. "If you are listening closely to a song on a tape and the tape is abruptly switched off, you are likely to feel frustrated.... Such feelings arise because our experience of artworks is patterned and structured. The human mind craves form. For this reason, form is of central importance in any artwork, regardless of its medium."

Q2. "It may seem odd to talk of something as elusive as the border of the image, since it may seem a sheerly negative feature, a simple edge or break. (After all, literary critics do not talk of the margins of the pages in Moby Dick.) But, in a film, the frame is not simply a neutral border; it produces a certain vantage point onto the material within the image. In cinema the frame is important because it actively defines the image for us."

Q3. "In the continuity style the space of a scene is constructed along what is called variously the "axis of action," "the center line," or the "180 degree line." The scene’s action--a person walking, two people conversing, a car racing along a road--is assumed to take place along a discernible, predictable line. This axis of action determines a half-circle, or 180 degree area, where the camera can be placed to present the action."

Q4. "If we place [the film] in history, we find that its release date... coincides with the transition to a post-war economy and the return of the troops. The relavitve economic freedom given to women as poart of the war effort had to be revoked, the boundaries redrawn, especially in terms of who was to fill managerial positions and other high-paying, decision-making jobs."

Short Answer Questions

Write a brief paragraph (4 or 5 sentences) in response to each of the following questions. Each question is worth 15 points. Suggested time per question: 8 minutes each.

S1. What are the important features of Act II within the three-act structure model of narrative? Give at least three examples from Act II of All That Heaven Allows.

S2. Briefly compare and contrast Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs and Home of the Brave in terms of how they represent the African-American experience.

S3. In his lecture on film noir, Walter defined three aesthetic features of this type of film. What are these three aesthetic features of film noir? Give some examples from Mildred Pierce that would lead us to claim that the film uses noir style. Be sure to discuss at least one specific scene from Mildred Pierce to support your answer.

S4. What is the thesis of Dana Polan’s essay, "A Brechtian Cinema?" Briefly explore how some of Polan’s observations might apply to the Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious.

Q1: Betty Hutton

A1: Film actress who first came to prominence during World War II as the girl-next-door in patriotic musicals (2 points). She is important to the course because she was cast against type by Preston Sturges as the girl who gets pregnant in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (2 points).

Q2: The North Star

A2: Made in 1943 and independently produced, one of the pro-Soviet films made during World War II at the behest of the Roosevelt Administration (2 points). These pro-Soviet films are important because, under the investigation of HUAC in 1948, they would prove embarrassing to Hollywood shortly after the war (2 points).

Q3. Wally Fay

A3: The sleazy businessman in Mildred Pierce played by Jack Carson (2 points). Wally is important to the course because Joyce Nelson’s analysis of Mildred Pierce suggests that he is more to blame for the film’s tragedies than either Mildred or Veda (2 points).

Q4: Draw and label the lighting scheme for Classical Hollywood Cinema’s "Three-Point Lighting"

A4: The key light is the first light that gets hung. In a shot-reverse shot set-up, it is usually hung so as to fully illuminate the face of the person speaking. The light hung opposite to the key light, behind the person speaking is called the back light. A third light is hung to eliminate any residual shadows; this third light is called the fill light (4 points).

Q5: Paul Schrader

A5: The author of "Notes on Film Noir" (2 points). He is important to the course because he argues for the importance of the World War II context for understanding film noir (2 points).

Quotations

Q1: "The opening shots of [the film] suggest the dark ambience of a film noir style: a long-shot of a rainy night street and a deserted car parked next to a California beach house, a dissolve to a slightly closer reframing--a composition on diagonals punctuated by the sound of two gun shots."

A1: Joyce Nelson, "Mildred Pierce Reconsidered," pg. 450. This relates to the class in that we studied both film noir and Mildred Pierce: Mildred Pierce is a film in which noir style bookends a more traditional woman’s film at its core (5 points).

Q2: "[The film] is a good example of Noel Burch’s dialectic idea of film elements: foreground and background, character and environment, image and soundtrack are all in conflict with one another. Yet Burch’s dialectic idea, as he himself notes, is far from political and so is [the film]. If [the film] is a metaphor for the confusions of life. . ., it is a disengaged metaphor at best for it fails to examine confusion through a politicized perspective. Indeed, the source of [character A’s] angst reveals itself to be none of the agents of social domination in the real world, but merely [character B]--another fictive character, whose power is tautological in origin."

A2: Dana Polan, "A Brechtian Cinema?," pg. 668. This relates to Walter’s analysis of the animated cartoons as possessing the surface trappings of a radical modernism, only to back away from them and reproduce the status quo, as in the case of the ending of Duck Amuck (5 points).

Q3: "The scene begins in the office of detective Sam Spade. In the first two shots this space is established in several ways. First there is the office window from which the camera tilts down to reveal Spade rolling a cigarette. As Spade says, "Yes, sweetheart?", shot 2 appears. This is important in several respects. It is an establishing shot, delineating the overall space of the office: the door, the intervening area, the desk, and Spade’s position."

A3: Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, Chapter 8 ("Editing: The Relation of Shot to Shot"), pg. 288. The quote lays out the operations of continuity editing, one of the cornerstone principles of the classical Hollywood cinema under scrutiny in this course (5 points).

Q4: "The coming of sound in the late 1920s altered the frame somewhat. Adding the sound track to the film strip required adjusting either the shape or the size of the image. At first, some films were printed in virtually a square format, usually about 1.17:1. ([For example], Public Enemy). But in the early 1930s, the Hollywood Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the so-called Academy ratio of 1.33:1."

A4: Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, Chapter 7 ("Cinematography"), pg. 227. The quote shows how a cinematographic feature like aspect ratio was historically altered by technological innovations like the coming of sound, something we studied earlier in the course in a slightly different way (5 points).

Short Answer Questions

S1: In Chapter 3 of Film Art ("The Significance of Film Form"), Bordwell and Thompson list four types of meaning and apply each to The Wizard of Oz. List these four types of meaning. In one sentence for each type of meaning, briefly apply these 4 types of meaning to Mildred Pierce. Which one type of meaning does Walter typically emphasize in his lectures?

A1: The four types of meaning are: referential (or tangible meanings), explicit (or openly asserted meanings), implicit (or meanings derived from interpretation), and symptomatic (or ideological meanings) (8 points). A referential meaning would be: "During the Depression, Mildred opens a restaurant in order to feed her family." An explicit meaning would be: "Mildred has to struggle because she is a single, working mother." An implicit meaning would be: "Mildred is forced to decide between working and motherhood, a typical bind for a woman in America." A symptomatic meaning would be: "Mildred Pierce, as an immediate post-war film, does the ideological work of urging working women back into the home" (4 points; 1 point each). Walter typically emphasizes symptomatic readings of films in his lectures (3 points).

S2: In his lecture on animation, Walter defined cultural imperialism. Briefly define cultural imperialism. Then, demonstrate how the concept might help us to understand the events depicted in Notorious.

A2: In his lecture, Walter defined cultural imperialism as, "The overt ways in which a country (for example, the U.S.) manipulates the affairs of the Third World through the exportation of cultural artifacts." (8 points). Notorious does not deal with cultural imperialism per se, but instead with "actual", military imperialism: Notorious is about the CIA going to Brazil to spy on escaped Nazis). However, one could push harder at the text, arguing that Alicia is a kind of cultural export that the CIA uses to ensnare the Nazis (7 points).

S3: According to Walter’s lecture on narrative structure (as derived from the work of Linda Seger), define the first and second turning points in a classically-structured film. Given these definitions, state what the first and second turning points of All That Heaven Allows would be. In one sentence for each, briefly defend your choices.

A3: The first turning point is the last moment in Act I in which the central question is asked most clearly; it typically spirals the plot off in a new direction. The second turning point is the moment at which we realize the climactic confrontation is inevitable (8 points). The first turning point of All That Heaven Allows is when Cary and Ron sleep together at the old mill. This decision emerges out of the sense that the central question of the film is, "Can Cary, an older widow, find love with a younger man of a lower class position, despite the puritanical opposition of all the societal members around her?" This question is most clearly asked once Cary and Ron sleep together because now they must make their relationship public if they are to be able to continue with it. The second turning point of the film occurs when Cary’s children tell her at Christmas that they are leaving her (the television scene). This moment forces a climactic confrontation wherein Cary must overcome her fear of the social order and pursue Ron so that she may be happy (7 points).

S4: In Chapter 7 of Film Art ("The Shot: Cinematography"), Bordwell and Thompson discuss what they term "mobile framing," including tracking and crane shots. List an example of a tracking shot from "the key scene" and of a crane shot from "the party scene" of Notorious. Briefly discuss the different functions of these mobile shots and why the differences between tracking shots and crane shots are important to these differing functions.

A4: For more on Bordwell and Thompson and "the mobile frame," see pp 243-258. A tracking shot features the camera mounted on a track. The camera then is pushed forward or backward so that it moves in a one-dimensional, linear fashion. A crane shot features the camera mounted in a boom, so that it can move through space in all three dimensions (8 points). A tracking shot in "the key scene" occurs when we think Alicia is walking to get the keys, but it turns out that Hitchcock has played a joke on us. A crane shot begins "the party scene," as the camera cranes from an extreme long shot of the entire party space from high above the ballroom all the way down to a close-up of the key in Alicia’s hand. The three-dimensionality of the crane shot is important to the party scene to give us a sense of the possibility of Alicia’s being the victim of surveillance from any angle, while this was not as important to the key scene, where the only threat of being seen is private (only Alex can possibly see her) (7 points).

Identifications

I1: Long Take

A1: "A shot that continues for an unusually lengthy time before the transition to the next shot" (Bordwell and Thompson’s film terms glossary, pg. 479) (2 points). We discussed the significance of the long takes in the walking sequences from The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (2 points).

I2: Off-axis camerawork

A2: The camera is off-axis when the camera axis (the line of sight of the camera) does not coincide with the dramatic axis (the 180 degree line) (2 points). We discused the importance of off-axis camerawork with respect to the "park bench scene" in Notorious, wherein the camera is as far off-axis as is possible (perpendicular to the dramatic axis), usually indicating a "low stakes" moment in a film (2 points).

I3: John Garfield

A3: A classical Hollywood actor of the 1940s and early 1950s, who appeared in many films noirs (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and social problem films (Force of Evil), who was investigated by HUAC for being a leftist, and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1952 (2 points). Important to the course because he represents the devastating effects HUAC had on the left-leaning films and actors of the immediate post-war era (2 points).

I4: Above and Beyond

A4: The second of two films made in Hollywood about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, made in 1952 (2 points). Important to the course because it represents the devastating effects HUAC had on the ability to produce challenging films about American history (2 points).

I5: Joyce Nelson

A5: The author of "Mildred Pierce Reconsidered," the thesis of which is that the film shows the ideological effects of the immediate post-war era on American women: the need to get them back into the home to free up jobs for the returning soldiers (2 points). Important to the course because Mildred Pierce is the film we saw as the example of the immediate post-war era (2 points).

Quotations

Q1: "In a 1940s [film], [character A], once again forced by destiny and by narrative to chase [character B], fires several times at his fleeing nemesis. The bullets fail to have their desired effect. Of course, the lack of deadliness is a typical quality of [these films], but this time [character B] stops and comments to the audience "Folks, those bullets are fake; we’re saving the real ones for the boys overseas."

A1: Dana Polan, "A Brechtian Cinema?," pg. 662. Important to the course because it demonstrates the self-relexive nature of Warner Brothers’ cartoons, and the cartoons links to the World War II cultural context (5 points).

Q2: "The realistic movement also suited America’s postwar mood; the public’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The postwar realistic trend succeeded in breaking [the films] away from the domain of the high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people."

A2: Paul Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir," pg. 10.  Important to the course because Schrader shows the effects World War II had on the creation of the noir style (5 points).

Q3: "The power of the axis of action and the eyelines it can create is so great that the filmmaker may be able to eliminate an establishing shot, thus relying on the Kuleshov effect. In Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Nola Darling holds a Thanksgiving dinner for her three male friends. The scene is treated without any shot showing all four in the same frame. Instead Lee presents medium long shots including all the men, over the shoulder shot/reverse shots among them, and eyeline-matched medium close-ups of them. Nola is given her own medium close-ups."

A3: Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, Chapter 8 ("Editing: The Relation of Shot to Shot"), pg. 294. Important to the course because it shows how varied the implementation of continuity editing can be without violating its laws (5 points).

Q4: "Think of formal development as a progression moving from X through Y to Z. For example, the story of The Wizard of Oz shows development in many ways. It is, for one thing, a journey: from Kansas through Oz to Kansas. The good witch Glinda emphasizes this formal pattern by telling Dorothy that "It’s always best to start at the beginning."

A4: Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, Chapter 3 ("The Significance of Film Form"), pg. 83. Important to the course because it uses different language from Walter’s in lecture for describing how film narratives develop from beginning to end (5 points).

Short Answer Questions

S1: In his lecture on narrative structure, Walter defined the term character in a particular way so as to help understand three-act structure. Define character in this sense. Next, apply this concept to Mildred Pierce by briefly arguing how Mildred and Veda can be seen as characters under this definition. Briefly reflect on what this information about Mildred and Veda as characters tells us about the three-act structure of Mildred Pierce.

A1: According to film narrative theorists, a character is an agent who possesses an agenda (a goal) and must work throughout the film to develop agency (skills, tools) to fulfill that agenda (8 points). Mildred has an agenda (to be a good mother to Veda) but struggles developing the agency (she is too busy making a living for the family to properly attend to Veda, she is overindulgent with Veda). Veda has an agenda (to become rich) and almost possesses the agency to accomplish it (she manipulates just about everyone, but is fooled by the greater manipulator, Monte Beragon) (5 points). Mildred and Veda’s failures to gain the agency they need drives the plot from beginning to end (the punishment for Veda’s murder of Monte Beragon) (2 points).

S2: In his lecture on animation, Walter discussed the term, "counter-cinema." Define "counter-cinema." Then, decide which of the following three films (from which we watched clips in class) would most and least fit into the category of counter-cinema: Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, At Land, and Across the Pacific. Briefly defend your choices.

A2: Counter-cinema was a concept invented by the early 1970s film critics who sought to create a progressive cinema unlike the conservative cinema of Hollywood. The presupposition was that classical Hollywood style and narrative would have to be completely undone for a counter-cinema to be born (8 points). Films that are modernist or avant-garde would be examples of the counter-cinema. Therefore, Maya Deren’s avant-garde film At Land is the film on the above list that comes closest to counter-cinema. Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips is the kind of self-reflexive film that Dana Polan critiques as having the surface trappings of a modernist film, but does not produce progressive political interventions. Across the Pacific is a classical Hollywood film, and thus is least like the counter-cinema (7 points).

S3: In his lecture on the immediate post-war cinema, Walter described how gender discrimination became one of the social problems grappled with in films made immediately after the war. Using the explorations of Mildred Pierce in the lecture and in our reading as your guide, briefly discuss how Notorious might be seen as an immediate post-war social problem film about gender.

A3: In the reading Joyce Nelson and in lecture Walter linked Mildred Pierce to the immediate post-war discursive effort to return women to the home. In Mildred Pierce, this gets expressed via the film’s resolution, in which Mildred is stripped of her successful business and appears happy to be returning to the post-war home with her first husband Bert (8 points). Read through this frame, Notorious could be equally seen as a film about a woman, Alicia, caught between a public job (a spy) and a private life (her love for Devlin) (7 points).

S4: Theorists of narrative structure, from Aristotle to Linda Seger, emphasize the importance of the beginnings and endings of texts. Bordwell and Thompson argue this point as well: "By looking at the similarities and differences between the beginning and ending, we can start to understand the overall pattern of the film." Test this advice using the opening and final shots of All That Heaven Allows. State exactly what are the first and last images of this film. Then, briefly indicate what this tells us about your understanding of "the overall pattern of the film."

A4: The first narrative image in All That Heaven Allows is a high angle shot of birds flying around the clock tower of the small New England town. The last narrative image in All That Heaven Allows is a shot from the inside of the restored mill, looking out the huge window at the ever-friendly deer that frequents Ron’s yard (8 points). The overall pattern that might emerge from this is the relationship between nature and culture that drives the film’s conflict. That is, Cary is at first completely of the social world: she is a well-respected matriarch of the puritanical town. However, Ron’s philosophy is connected with nature (he grows trees, lives in a bucolic setting, etc.). Cary is forced to decide between culture (the town’s approval) or nature (her love for Ron). Thus, the film’s opening image expresses this conflict (the birds as nature, the bell tower as culture), and the film’s ending image resolves this conflict (Cary is with Ron in pristine nature, in which no cultural artifacts can be seen) (7 points).

Identifications

I1. Brian Henderson is the author of the essay, "The Searchers: An American Dilemma," which analyzes the John Ford Western (2 points). This is important to the course because Henderson provides a method for analyzing films’ allegorical relationships to historical events, in this case seeing The Searchers as a referendum on Brown vs. Board of Education (2 points).

I2. The Palmer Raids occurred in 1920, as Woodrow Wilson’s FBI investigated suspected Communist sympathizers in the United States as a hysterical reaction to the success of the Russian Revolution (2 points). This is important to the class because it serves as background material demonstrating how American citizens were taught to be fearful of Communism well before the 1950s, and thus arose the need for World War II-era films like The North Star to teach American citizens that the Soviet Union was our friendly ally (2 points).

I3. Martin Pawley is the half-white, half-Indian sidekick to Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) (2 points). This is important to the course because it is the changes made to Pawley’s character in the film (in the novel he is all-white) that provides the evidence for Brian Henderson’s argument that the film version of The Searchers is a referendum on Brown vs. Board of Education (2 points).

I4. Bryna Productions is Kirk Douglas’ film production company, formed in the early 1950s (2 points). This is important to the course because the formation of the company is an example of how actors began to form their own independent production companies in the 1950s, a direct economic result of the effects of the Paramount Decree, which allowed for exhibitors to choose the films that they would show (2 points).

I5. Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 film, directed by Alfred Hitchcok, about a small-town girl who discovers that her uncle is a serial murderer (2 points). This is important to the course because Shadow of a Doubt is an example of how Hollywood war-time films about the home front are not nearly as simplistically patriotic as we might expect them to be, a fact indicated by the bar scene in which lascivious soldiers populate the mise-en-scene while Uncle Charlie is telling his niece what a cesspool the world is (2 points).

Quotations

Q1. "The rhetoric of death in [Film X] evokes identification with the primary character through his rather significant absence from the final frames. One only sees his motorcycle flying through the air and exploding. The camera pulls up and away into the heavens, reinforcing the meaning that he has been transmuted by death into something higher, mystical, and natural. He and the camera quite literally transcend, and the audience is invited to participate empathetically in this aggrandizement of the suffering and beset male. In this case, pathos displaces ethics."

A1.  This quote comes from Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s chapter, "From Counterculture to Counterrevolution," page 26 (3 points). This is important to the course because Ryan and Kellner provide a reading of the end of Easy Rider (Film X) different from the one Walter offered in class. In class, Walter suggested that the film’s ending works to punish the countercultural figures, whereas Ryan and Kellner suggest that they are being mythologized (2 points).

Q2. "The second phase was the post-War realistic period from 1945-’49. These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster, and Charles McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway, Dassin, and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as The House on 92nd Street, The Killers, [Film Y], . . ., and The Naked City."

A2.  This quote comes from Paul Schrader’s essay, "Notes on Film Noir," page 12 (3 points). This is important to the class because Schrader offers a periodization of film noir, allowing us to see a film like Force of Evil (Film Y) as a film noir, even though it is distinct from the highly stylized films noirs of the earlier war-time period (Double Indemnity and Scarlett Street) and the later baroque period (Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil) (2 points).

Q3. "[Director Z] proved himself a master stylist of color in Magnificent Obsession (1954). . . and [Film A]--a series of stunning melodramas which are classics of their type. Before retiring in 1959 from filmmaking, [Director Z] also contributed several impressive widescreen action films as well as the moving antiwar film A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. He spent the remainder of his life in Germany, directing stage plays and teaching at the Munich Academy of Film and Television."

A3.  This quote comes from Chapter 12 ("Hollywood, 1952-1965") of David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film, page 481 (3 points). This is important to the class because it serves as a good example of Cook’s great man, auteurist method, in this case applied to Douglas Sirk (Director Z). This stands in stark contrast to Walter’s approach to this material, emphasizing the cultural politics of Imitation of Life (Film A) rather than the individual genius of director Douglas Sirk (2 points).

Q4. "Throughout the history of the cinema, some filmmakers have consistently preferred to utilize shots of greater duration than the average. In various countries in the mid-1930s there was a tendency to increase the length of the shots, and this tendency continued throughout the next 20 years. The causes of this change are complex and not fully understood, but film scholars agree that the use of unusually lengthy shots--long takes, as they are called--constitutes a major resource for the filmmaker."

A4.  This quote comes from Chapter 7 ("The Shot: Cinematography") of Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art, page 259 (3 points). This is important to the class because it describes the long take’s rise to prominence in the late classical Hollywood cinema, an example of which we studied in detail during the first two walking sequences in Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) (2 points).

Short Answer Questions

S1. In a brief paragraph, resolve the three-act structure of Imitation of Life. In order to emphasize brevity in your answer, stick to the four part method for resolving the three-act structure of a film as outlined in Walter’s lecture. Be sure to justify your choices for the major plot elements, but do not over-write your answer. One paragraph detailing the three-act structure of the film will suffice. There is no need to summarize the entire plot of the film to complete your answer.

A1.  Step 1: Identify the protagonist-antagonist structure. Lora is the protagonist of the film, since it is her character arc we follow in the film, as she rises from poverty to stardom. The film’s surface plot is about her conflict between being a theatrical star and a mother, thus the antagonist is her daughter Susie. (4 points).   Step 2: Settle upon the film’s central question. The central question of the film is, Can Lora be both a successful stage star as well as a good mother. This question gets us from the first act of the film, when Lora begins her rise to stardom to the end of the film, when Susie confronts Lora on her bad mothering (4 points).  Step 3: Define the two turning points. The first turning point of the film is when Lora gets her first big acting break, since this is the moment that most clearly asks the central question about Lora’s conflicts between success and motherhood. The second turning point of the film is when Lora returns from Italy (where she has been shooting the Fellini film), since this makes the climactic confrontation between Lora and Susie (over their love for Steve) inevitable (4 points).  Step 4: Fill in the other elements. The catalyst is when Lora gets her first call for an acting job (the dog powder commercial), since this sets the surface plot about Lora’s theatrical stardom in motion. The climax is when Susie confronts Lora about being a bad mother in her bedroom, since this conversation revolves around Lora’s neglectful mothering (3 points).

S2. In his lecture on the 1960s, Walter indicated that there are two critical frameworks through which to understand the Hollywood Renaissance. Briefly describe these two approaches to the Hollywood Renaissance. Next, briefly apply each approach to a Hollywood Renaissance film that we discussed in class.

A2.  The Hollywood Renaissance can be seen either through its modernist aesthetic experimentation and narrative genre revisionism, or as a marketing ploy designed to appeal to niche market audiences (8 points). Easy Rider uses jump cuts (Peter Fonda throwing away his watch), and is thus importing the tradition of modernism into the American cinema. Or, Easy Rider vilifies the counterculture, and thus is a crass marketing ploy designed to appeal to a countercultural audience while not really transforming the political orientation of the Hollywood cinema, as we see at the end when the countercultural figures are killed off and punished for their transgressions against mainstream America (7 points).

S3. In his lecture on film noir, Walter suggested that there are three major narrative features of film noir. List these three features. Next, briefly indicate whether Force of Evil could be considered a film noir using this narrative definition. Could Force of Evil be considered a film noir using some other criteria to define the genre?

A3.  The three narrative features of film noir are: labryanthine narrative structure, round-about dialogue, and existential endings (8 points). Force of Evil doesn’t really possess any of these features, although one could certainly argue for the existential pessimism of the film’s ending, when John Garfield is left sulking over his murdered brother’s corpse. Instead, Force of Evil is a second period (immediate post-war) noir as defined by Paul Schrader (see quotation #2 above). These noirs featured more gritty street realism than the expressionist noirs we studied during the film noir lecture (7 points).

S4. Briefly compare and contrast a documentary from the World War II period with one from the 1960s. What are the assumptions that each film makes about how a documentary should be aesthetically constituted? In the course of your answer, be sure to discuss one specific moment from each of your chosen documentary films.

A4.  Documentaries made in America during World War II were done in the Classical documentary style. As such, they featured aggressive aesthetic interventions to manipulate the viewer toward their propagandistic ends. These documentaries would fit with the Flaherty side of the documentary debate. The Memphis Belle would be an example of such a Classical war-time documentary. As we watch the array of bombers, a narrator with a booming voice tells us in a poetic fashion about the significance of the bombers for the war effort (8 points). The cinema verite movement in the 1960s was a direct reaction against the classical documentary. These documentaries eschewed the aggressive aesthetic interventions of the classical documentary, preferring instead to let the camera record reality in a relatively unfettered manner. As such, these documentaries are more in the vein of the Grierson tradition. The Spanish teacher teaching about Existentialism in Frederic Wiseman’s High School (1968) would be a good example of cinema verite: the camera is placed in the corner of the room and there is no voice-over narrator or non-diegetic music (7 points).

Identifications

I1. Genre Revisionism

A1. "Genre filmmaking which interrogates, questions, or challenges the assumptions of its genre" (from an overhead during the 1950s lecture) (2 points). This is important to the course because in the 1950s and 1960s, we have studied a number of genre revisionist films. For example, The Searchers interrogates the segregationist assumptions of the Western by advocating the need to assimilate the half-Indian Martin Pawley into the community (2 points).

I2. Catalyst

A2. The precipitating event of a plot; the event which starts the story in motion (2 points). This is important to the course because we studied the features of the three-act structure. The first important element of Act I is the catalyst. For example, the catalyst of Jaws is when the skinny-dipper gets eaten by the shark (2 points).

I3. While the City Sleeps

A3. A suspense-thriller from 1956 directed by Fritz Lang which predates the Oedipal serial killer narrative of Psycho by 4 years (2 points). This is important to the course because Walter used the film as an example of how a non-traditional film history might choose to decenter Psycho as the most important film of the early New Hollywood period (2 points).

I4. Elia Kazan

A4. The director of On the Waterfront who "named names" before HUAC, thus ratting out his Hollywood liberal friends to the anti-communist witchhunt (2 points). This is important to the course because Walter read On the Waterfront as an apology for naming names in direct comparison to Spartacus’ radical defense of personal integrity, even under threat of torture (2 points).

I5. Mitch Wayne

A5. The central protagonist of Written on the Wind, played by Rock Hudson (2 points). This is important to the course, because tough-guy Mitch is part of a quartet of characters (Kyle, Marylee, and Lucy Hadley representing the other three) that give Written on the Wind such a complex narrative structure, thus making it a prime example of a film constructed under the "Sirkian system" (2 points).

Quotations

Q1. "That the plasticity of the human voice is quite consciously employed by directors for what are often thematic ends is known: Hawks trained Lauren Bacall’s voice so that she could be given ‘male’ lines in To Have and Have Not, an effect which Sternberg anticipated when he took great care to cultivate Marlene Dietrich’s diction, and it is hard to miss the psychoanalytic significance of [Actor A’s] voice in [Film B], sounding as if every word had to be painfully pumped up from the bottom of one of his oil-wells."

A1. This quote is from page 173 of Thomas Elsaesser’s "Tales of Sound and Fury" (3 points). Actor A is Robert Stack, while Film B is Written on the Wind. This is important to the course because Walter read the melodramatic nature of the Sirkian system--aggressive aesthetics producing psychoanalyzed characters--in terms very similar to those that Elsaesser uses in this quote (2 points).

Q2. "Robert Aldrich emerged at this time as America’s most powerful practitioner of post-forties film noir in Kiss Me Deadly, a masterpiece of the form whose commercial success led Aldrich to establish his own production company, for which he directed twelve films in the next seventeen years. Aldrich had begun his directing career in television, and his first big-budget film had been the boisterous widescreen Western Vera Cruz (1954), shot on location in Mexico and a clear antecedent of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). During the fifties, he earned a distinguished reputation for such award-winning films as The Big Knife and Attack, although he also directed a number of indifferent features under contract to various studios."

A2. This quote is from page 481 of David Cook’s chapter on Hollywood from 1952-1965 in his book, A History of Narrative Film (3 points). This is important to the course because here we see an auteurist, great man analysis of Kiss Me Deadly, while Walter in lecture and Paul Schrader in "Notes on Film Noir" did a genre-based analysis of the same film (2 points).

Q3. "A lens of less than 35mm in focal length is considered a ‘wide-angle’ lens. Such lenses tend to distort straight lines lying near the edges of the frame, bulging them outward. . . . When a wide-angle lens is used for a medium shot or a close-up, the distortion of shape may become very evident. The lens of short focal length has the property of exaggerating depth. In [this photo still] from The Little Foxes, the lens makes the characters seem farther from each other than we would expect in so relatively small a locale."

A3. This quote is from page 216 of the cinematography chapter in Bordwell and Thompson’s book, Film Art (3 points). This is important to the class because we saw clips from the first turning point of The Graduate, in which a wide angle lens was used to flatten the space in similar terms to Bordwell and Thompson’s analysis of The Little Foxes (2 points).

Q4. "Market conditions rendered the studios ripe for takeover, and in fact a number of the studios were absorbed in a post-1965 conglomerate wave. Paramount was taken over by Gulf & Western in 1966, United Artists by Transamerica in 1967, and Warner Bros. by Kinney National Services in 1969, the same year MGM was bought out by real-estate tycoon Kirk Kerkorian. This trend proved to be a mixed blessing for the studios. The cash-rich parent company relieved much of the financial pressures and spurred diversification, but the new owners knew little about the movie business and, as the market worsened, tended to view their Hollywood subsidiaries as troublesome tax write-offs."

A4. This quote is from page 15 of Thomas Schatz’s essay, "The New Hollywood" (3 points). This is important to the course because it offers a detailed insitutitonal/economic history of the New Hollywood to go along with Walter’s lecture and Ryan and Kellner’s essay detailing cultural historical analyses of the films of the New Hollywood (2 points).

Short Answer Questions

S1. The post-war period in American social history (1945-1963) is usually very much concerned with the Civil Rights movement, that is, the African-American struggle for liberation. However, the films that we’ve watched from this period have not at all dealt directly with the African-American experience. Explain how two of the readings that we’ve done for this section of the course would address this lack of attention to African-American history. In the course of your answer, be sure to make reference to a specific argument in each essay so that you can compare and contrast how each essay deals with the African-American experience in its own unique way.

A1. There are three possible articles from this section of the course that you might use to discuss issues of race (Henderson, Naremore, and Ryan/Kellner), only two of which deal with films from 1945-1963. Henderson argues that The Searchers allegorically re-works the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Naremore argues that film noir (literally, black film) allegorically reworks the conditions experienced by black men in post-war America using white alienated characters. Naremore makes this argument in analyzing the French novel, I Spit on Your Graves. 8 points each for a satisfyingly detailed analysis of the race-related components of these two articles.

S2. In his lecture on the 1950s, Walter analyzed the 5 effects of the Paramount Decree. List these five effects. Then, use at least two of these effects to explain how and why we should see Strait-Jacket as a post-Paramount Decree film. Be sure to discuss at least one specific moment from the film in support of your answer.

A2. The importation of European Art Cinema, the rise of Independent Production, the fall of the Production Code, the demise of the blacklist, and the economic re-organization of Hollywood (8 points). Strait-Jacket is directed by William Castle, one of the exploitation level filmmakers who got his start in the 1950s as a result of the rise of independent production. Strait-Jacket, however, is a studio film made at Columbia; a major studio like Columbia would have only hired a shlock-meister like Castle under the economically restructured New Hollywood conditions of the early 1960s. The very end of the film indicates the aesthetic effects of this restructuring, as Castle is allowed to deface the icon of the studio: Lady Columbia’s head has been cut off and lies by her feet as the spectators leave their seats to go home! (7 points).

S3. In lecture, Walter used film noir to typify immediate post-war Hollywood filmmaking (1945-1950). However, other films were made in Hollywood during the immediate post-war era that were not films noirs. In a paragraph, compare and contrast the two immediate post-war films that were screened in their entirety for this class. Which of these two films is a film noir? For what reasons? How does the noir nature of this film contribute to our understanding of immediate post-war America? For the film that isn’t a film noir, how does it relate to its immediate post-war American context? What different aesthetic and/or narrative strategies does this film use to convey its message?

A3. The film noir that we watched is Detour. Notorious is the other film, which is a suspense-thriller (5 points). Detour is a film noir stylistically, as it uses low-key lighting, and narratively, featuring a labranthine plot about a man who is doomed never to reach his girlfriend in Los Angeles. Detour is also a film noir thematically, as it features an existential analysis of this doomed man. In Paul Schrader’s analysis, this is also what makes Detour a good example of an immediate post-war film, as our protagonist allegorically stands in for alienated returning GI’s incapacity to settle back into "normal" post-war American life (5 points). Notorious uses classical Hollywood film style (high key lighting) and a linear narrative, and is thus not a film noir. It is about post-war America quite directly, featuring a plot about Nazis who have survived the end of the war and continue to threaten the well-being of America by developing atomic weaponry (5 points).

S4. In his analysis of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Walter argued that the first turning point is not only a narratively important feature, but is also a moment of potential stylistic disruption. In a paragraph, apply Walter’s argument to the first turning point of Watermelon Man. To do so, be sure to define "first turning point," argue what the first turning point of Watermelon Man is, and specifically describe the stylistic practices employed by the film at this pivotal narrative moment.

A4. The first turning point of a classically-structured film is the moment that most fully posits the central question, the moment at which the plot is spiralled off in a completely new direction (5 points). The first turning point of Watermelon Man is when Jeff wakes up and realizes he has turned black, because this clearly asks the central question (What would you do if one day you woke up to discover your racial identity had changed?) (5 points). The film is very aesthetically and ideologically aggressive at this moment. Aesthetically, color filters and rapid zooms are used to indicate that Jeff’s world has completely unravelled. Ideologically, the film confronts us directly with Jeff’s blackness, through a very comic gesture in which Jeff’s black butt moons the camera in close-up (5 points).

Sixth Sample Exam #2

Identifications

I1. Anti-blaxploitation film

A1. A revisionist genre film which revises its generic material in order to explore the abuses of African-Americans within these generic traditions (2 points). Ganja and Hess, which turns the racial politics of the vampire film on its ear, was the example of an anti-blaxploitation film that we studied in this course (2 points).

I2. Jefferson Washington Gerber

A2. Jeff Gerber is the main protagonist of Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man; he is the white guy who mysteriously wakes up as a black man one morning (2 points). Jeff’s names, derived from two pre-Civil War presidents, are part of the film’s parody of stereotypes held about African-Americans; Jeff’s white doctor tells him he should have known he was black because his parents named him after presidents, like many 19th century black parents (2 points).

I3. Risky Business

A3. Risky Business is the mid-1980s film starring Tom Cruise as a punky white kid who runs a bordello in order to pay off the repairs to his father’s fancy sports car, which he has driven it into Lake Michigan (2 points). The film is an excellent example of Reaganite comedy, featuring a privileged white teenager who gets all the breaks, using his privilege to get into Princeton--by getting his interviewer laid--thus perpetuating a cycle of inequal access to wealth (2 points).

I4. Stephen Heath

A4. Stephen Heath is the author of the essay, "Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory," an article which attempts to examine the ideological process of the New Hollywood cinema by performing a reading of Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (2 points). Heath’s article is important to the course because, in the midst of his larger theoretical discussion, he makes the same ideological observations about Jaws that Walter’s textual-based method produced: the film is a middle-class remake of Moby Dick, the film punishes and banishes its two women characters, the film responds to the Watergate crisis, and the film resonates with the American loss in Vietnam (2 points).

I5. The Maysles Brothers

A5. The Maysles Brothers--Albert and David--made the important cinema verite documentary, Salesman (1969), about a travelling Bible salesman (2 points). This is important to the course because, unlike Frederick Wiseman’s High School, which uses aggressive zooms and close-ups to comment on the teachers that are the subject of the film, the Maysles Brothers’ technique in Salesman is in keeping with the spirit of cinema verite: to remove the filmmaker as much as possible from the process of recording documentary evidence (2 points).

Quotations

Q1. "The precocious filmmaker of Fireworks took the personal film in a different direction from Brakhage, toward magic, ritual, and a critical engagement with popular culture through image and sound. . . . Both comic and portentous, [Film A]’s aesthetic is linked, as several critics have suggested, to Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Montage of Attractions’ in which the shock of perception from the clash of linked images is more important than the underlying narrative."

A1. This quotation comes from Robert Sklar’s chapter on the 1960s avant-garde cinema, page 484 (3 points). Film A is Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, from which we watched a clip in class wherein pop songs were juxtaposed against imagery of gay sexuality. Sklar’s concept of "the clash of linked images" suggests that Scorpio Rising is modernist in sensibility, and thus an important pre-cursor to the experimentation of the Hollywood Renaissance (2 points).

Q2. "Reviewers in the United States had already seen a vague connection between the pictures discussed by Frank and Chartier, but they made no attempt to invent a new term. The New Yorker described [Film B] as a murder melodrama", and The Los Angeles Times called it an ‘intellectual exercise in crime’ (Times critic Philip K. Scheuer notes, ‘I am sick of the flash-back narration and I can’t forgive it here.’). . . . The American critics also grouped the films in unusual ways: The Los Angeles Times compared [Film B] to the MGM adaptation of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy; and Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, compared it to Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek."

A2. This quotation comes from James Naremore’s essay, "Film Noir: The History of an Idea," page 17 (3 points). Film B is Double Indemnity, which we watched in its entirety in this course. Naremore suggests that film noir was not as obvious to American critics as a completely new style, as it was to the French critics, who had not seen the development of a darker American cinema during World War II, having last seen American films from 1939 (2 points).

Q3. "All these images have now been incorporated into the form of a parasitic insect known as [Character C]. [Film D] outslicks them all–crooked cops, doublecrossing niggers, gangsters, and anyone who gets in his path–and gets away with the money and the girl."

A3. This quotation comes from Richard Wesley’s essay, "Which Way the Black Film," an indictment of the offensiveness of blaxploitation films like Shaft and Superfly, page 70 (3 points). Wesley reserves most of his bitterness for Superfly, character C in film D of the same name. Wesley finds Superfly and the other blaxploitation films to be propagating stereotypes about African-Americans, an argument that Walter historicized and complexified in his lecture on the blaxploitation film (2 points).

Q4. "One needs to distinguish carefully between the childlike and the childish (just as one needs to distinguish the true innocence of childhood from the sentimental, sanitized, desexualized version of bourgeois ideology). Peter Coveney’s admirable The Image of Childhood undertakes just such a distinction, examining the differences between the Romantic concept of the child (Blake, Wordsworth) as symbol of new growth and regeneration (of ourselves, of civilization) and the regressive, Victorian sentimentalization of children as identification figures for ‘childish adults,’ the use of the infantile as escape from an adult world perceived as irredeemably corrupt, or at least bewilderingly problematic."

A4. This quotation comes from Robin Wood’s essay on Reaganite cinema, "Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era," pages 175-176 (3 points). Wood draws on Romanticism to suggest that there is a complex way of celebrating the regenerative power of the younger generation (such as was celebrated in the late 1960s), but that the films of "The Lucas-Spielberg Syndrome" merely infantilize the spectator by offering simplistic fantasy serials for the New Hollywood’s male teenage audience (2 points).

Q5. "In a 1979 article, Stuart Byron surveys the influence of [Director E]’s film [Film F] on several young directors and screenwriters. ‘In one way or another,’ he concludes, ‘the film relates to. . . Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, [and] George Lucas. . .; to Hardcore, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,. . . and Star Wars. . . . When one film obsesses so much talent, it won’t do just to call it a cult movie. [Film F] is the Super-Cult movie of the New Hollywood."

A5. This quotation is the opening paragraph of Brian Henderson’s "The Searchers: An American Dilemma," page 430 (3 points). Director E is John Ford and Film F is The Searchers. Henderson suggests the vast importance that the images and narrative of The Searchers have had on the Brat Generation, including the first turning point of Star Wars--the discovery of the burned-out aunt and uncle--being a verbatim riff on the first turning point of Ford’s Western (2 points).

Q6. "A film that briefly revived the postwar social film, with an expose of racketeer control of New York waterfront unions, [Film G] was an important example of how collaboration was honored. In the first full year of widescreen, this standard size black-and-white film won eight Academy Awards, including those for best picture and best director, and received twelve nominations overall."

A6. This quotation comes from Robert Sklar’s chapter on "Hollywood in the 1950s," page 354 (3 points). Film G is Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, a film we also discussed as being crucial as a defense of anti-communism in general and the practice of naming names in particular (2 points).

Short Answer Questions

S1. What is the thesis argument of the essay, "White," by Richard Dyer? Briefly explain how he demonstrates this argument by analyzing The Night of the Living Dead. Then, briefly explore how Dyer’s argument might be applied to another film of your choice which was discussed in this course (a film screened in its entirety or one from which clips were shown).

A1. Richard Dyer argues that the problem in race studies has always been the notion that this implies there’s something wrong with people of color. Instead, he claims that the problem is with white people and their inability to see how they profit from a system of racial privileging. He thus proposes that to study race one needs to study whiteness as a racial category. The problem with this is that whiteness is invisible, since every film is about white people, it would be a daunting task to define whiteness as a racial category. Instead, he turns to films that make whiteness stand out, make it look strange. Such is the case with The Night of the Living Dead, a film that uses Ben, a lone African-American character, who is normal, to stand out against the deviant white zombies (5 points). I’m not sure if any of the films that we’ve seen work quite as well as The Night of the Living Dead. However, there are some cases that work better than others. Like Richard Pryor comedy routines that have him making fun of the way white people talk, there’s a parody of whiteness at the beginning of Watermelon Man that makes whiteness strange. Jeff, being played by a black man in "whiteface" makes whiteness strange. Many jokes are played at the expense of whiteness, as in the white bread toasting gag. Other films we’ve seen that might be useful to study from the perspective of whiteness include the noirs: as Naremore discusses, Walter Neff in Double Indemnity might be a sort of allegorical stand-in for an alienated post-war black male (5 points). 

S2. What are the three ideological features of film noir that Walter presented in his lecture on the genre? Briefly explain to what extent you think Force of Evil is a noir that fulfills these ideological conditions.

A2. Walter suggested that ideologically, the film noir is most often seen as a misogynist genre, because of the femme fatale stereotype of the spider woman. He also suggested that many noirs also interrogate the construction of masculinity, indicting a hyperviolent postwar male, as in Vince Stone in The Big Heat. Carried to its extreme, this hyperviolent male could threaten not just the individual but the entire social order, as in the atomic threat in Kiss Me Deadly (5 points). Force of Evil does have a femme fatale, in Tucker’s wife, but she is such a marginal figure in the film, far overshadowed by the girl-next-door, Leo’s assistant, that Joe becomes interested in. The gangsters are your usual noir-ish male thugs, but the film seems much more concerned with white collar corruption, seeing the not particularly violent Joe as the real evil; he is the face of civility that hides the evil gangsters’ operations. It is at the global level that Force of Evil becomes most like a noir, as in Kiss Me Deadly: what is at stake in these films is the very well-being of the city, threatened by a systemically corrupt gangsterism. This is allegorized in Force of Evil as the gangsters threaten the American way of life through their "776" scheme (5 points).

S3. In his lecture on blaxploitation, Walter suggested that the 1960s American Independent Cinema presented different issues than those presented by the mainstream Hollywood assimilationist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. What were two of the race-related issues presented by the independent cinema? Briefly explore whether Watermelon Man, as a blaxploitation-era mainstream Hollywood film, does or does not grapple with these two issues.

A3. The two issues that I discussed were: passing, with respect to John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and "economic racism," with respect to Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963) (5 points). There is no direct representation of passing in Watermelon Man, but one could construct an allegorical reading of the film which would suggest that the entire film is a metaphor for passing, with Jeff Gerber hiding out in a white, middle-class suburb, finally coming to consciousness about racism and joining a black paramilitary group. On the other hand, the central motif of Watermelon Man is about how economic racism affects black people’s lives: as a white guy, Jeff had no problem succeeding at the insurance business, but as soon as he turned black, he was fired from his job and could only get a job shoveling shit at the city dump (5 points).

S4. What were the five major effects of the Paramount Decision, as Walter presented them in his lecture on the 1950s? Briefly explore whether The Night of the Living Dead would be a useful film for discussing one or more of these effects.

A4. As Walter presented them, the five major effects of the Paramount Decree were: the importation of European art cinema, the rise of independent production, the fall of the Production Code, the demise of the blacklist, and the economic re-organization of Hollywood (5 points). The Night of the Living Dead is an exploitation-level horror film, independently produced. The film’s very existence is the result of the rise of independent production. It is a film which features cannibalism, and thus would not have been made within a studio system bound by the Production Code. It is a film which ends radically, with a white lynch mob killing an innocent black protagonist, and thus would have been an unlikely film to have been made during the hysterically anti-communist 1950s, during which mainstream black leaders like Martin Luther King were derided as communists for challenging the Jim Crow culture of the South (5 points).

S5. Define the phrase, "polysemous text," as defined by Walter during his lecture, "The Return of the Blockbuster." Briefly explore whether you believe The Searchers is a good example of a polysemous film.

A5. A "polysemous text" is one which is multiply-voiced, which activates multiple, and often contradictory meanings (5 points). The Searchers is relatively coherent about its assimilationist racial message, and thus not a great candidate for a polysemous reading, if we only consider Henderson’s reading of the film. However, Henderson’s entire notion that The Searchers is both about Native Americans in the 1860s and African-Americans in the 1950s is a great example of what Walter called polysemy in the Jaws lecture (5 points).

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman