LECTURE NOTES. FILM THEORY 1.

The auteur moodle

Andre Bazin and the tradition of Realism: 

http://understandingfilm.wetpaint.com/page/4.+Andre+Bazin+and+the+Tradition+of+Realism

Safety First USA 1923

Utamaro and His five women Japan 1955

Alfred Hitchcock(1899–1980)

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?”

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”

“I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one.”

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033/

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) is a classic 1922 German Expressionist horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starringMax Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. The film, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, "vampire" became "Nosferatu" and "Count Dracula" became "Count Orlok").

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017075/

Suspense is generated when the audience can see danger his characters cannot see…

"There's no terror in the bang of the gun, only the anticipation of it."

his earlier work could create vivid terror in the mind of the viewer with very little spatter on the screen.

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.^[3][4]

Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,^[1] particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as naturalism and impressionism.

SummaryThe paper presents an interpretation of Hitchcock's Vertigo, focusing on the way its protagonist's drama resonates with the analyst's struggle with deep unconscious identifications, with the impossibility of maintaining detached objectivity or guaranteeing one's role as a reparative good object, and with the dangers of grandiosity, omniscience, and illusory control. The protagonist's 'countertransference love' crystallizes around a rescue fantasy, in which he is Orpheus, striving to bring Eurydice back from Hades; or a Knight, determined to behead an obscure Dragon endangering Beauty. Initially these key roles are sharply differentiated, through splitting and disavowal, which deprive the participants from their conflictual three-dimensionality. Eventually, however, the valiant Knight turns out to be as helpless and lonely as his Beauty, and in the final scene - as ruthless and lethal as the Dragon. This interpretation is compared to numerous other views of the film offered in the literature. The survey and comparison of the various views leads to fundamental issues in the psychoanalytic study of art. Interpretations can be seen as unavoidably coloured by the (counter)transference of viewers. It is suggested that a film has no hidden true meaning, and a new individual significance emerges in the transitional space opened up by each viewer's encounter with the emotional universe of the film. A defensive emphasis on the pathology of artists and their work may alienate us from art, and blind us to to ways we could learn from it, as persons and as analysts.
Just as, in the end, the detective is revealed to be the criminal, the doctor-therapist, the would be analyst, herself turns out to be an analysand. The Turn of the Screw in fact deconstructs all these traditional oppositions; the exorcist and the possessed, the doctor and the patient, the sickness and the cure, the symptom and the proposed interpretation of the symptom, become here interchangeable, or at the very least, undecidable. (Felman, 1982, p. 176)
This paper offers a psychoanalytic exploration of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Vertigo (1958). I will start from my own view of the film, continue with a review of the extensive literature debating it, and conclude with a discussion of a few issues related to the way Vertigo has been understood, and of some fundamental dilemmas in the psychoanalytic study of art. 


http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/epff3/berman.htm

In theory: The Death of the Author

Kicking off a new occasional series about the most influential literary theory, Andrew Gallix revisits a classic essay by Roland Barthes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author