Colonialism

Powerful countries wanted COLONIES, so they could have more resources. gold, ivory, sugar, labour, slaves, etc. 

 These colonies would increase the EMPIRE

 Often, locals were enslaved to do labour. Other slaves were brought in.

 The Colonists (French, English, Portugues) assumed all the powerful social roles.

Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture.

       In relation to Black Orpheus, Black Brazilians found themselves struggling most, descending from slaves brought there, while European Brazilians enjoyed wealth and social standing. 

Cinéma vérité:

-Filmmaker can participate in the shot

-Artistic choices can be made

-This method creates an artifice within the film

Observational Cinema:

-Filmmaker edits the footage

-No commentary or Voice Overs

Direct Cinema:

-No editing

-"Fly on the wall"

High contrast lighting is pretty self explanatory so learn this:

Low Key Lighting: Low-key lighting often uses only one key light,optionally controlled with a fill light or a simple reflector.

High Key Lighting: 

a style of lighting that is bright, even, and produces little 

contrastbetween light and dark areas of the scene. Mostly white with a small amount of dark areas.

In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the American cinema

1. Lighting grew darker

2. Characters more corrupt

3. Themes more fatalistic

4. Tone more hopeless

No more romance and happy endings

In general, refers to those Hollywood films of the 40s and 50s which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption •

• Not a lot of optimism

• Post-war sentiments

• Femme fatale

Film Noir's Heyday, 1940s-50s

Film noir is a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave 

• The term only became common in the 1970s Elements of menace inspired by German expressionism (Caligari, Noseferatu) 

Two Major Influences

• The hard-boiled tradition In the thirties authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Caine, Horace McCoy and John O'Hara created the "tough", a cynical way of emotions •

The German Influence Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates in the twenties and thirties • Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Braham, Max Ophuls, Fred Zinneman, etc

Looks as if she's looking for the good life: husband, family, etc. but is actually out to get money •

• Enticing

• Duplicitous

• Scheming for money

• Many feminist critiques of the femme fatale

• Often "uses" the male (and female) protagonists for personal gain

Orpheus: The Myth

• Orpheus was the most talented musician in the world. He played the lyre.
• He fell in love with a girl named Eurydice.
• Shortly after they married, she was attacked while walking through the forest by some guy named Aristaeus.
• She escaped him, but was bitten by a snake and died. 
• Orpheus pleaded to Hades to bring her back to life. He played so beautifully that Hades agreed, upon one condition: as Orpheus would leave the underworld he could not look back.
• Orpheus played his lyre to lead her out of the underworld, but he couldn't hear her footsteps.
• He looked back.
• So she died again. And then in grief, he killed himself.

New wave:

Doesn't follow the classical form of narrative where everything returns to order.

Neo-realism:

In attempts to simulate realism, endings were usually inconclusive. For all you 136 buffs, bicycle thief would a good example.

Bittersweet:

End acheives some sort of resolution but at a heavy price. "Sad Ending" were order isn't restored but things move on.

To romanticize something because it comes from a far away place. 

-A hero is called to action from Ordinary world

-A journey: separation, intiation, return.

Ordinary world -> Special World -> Return to Ordinary/better world

-Protagonists puresure lost object

-Hero faces final foe

-Restoration of social order (Happy ending); Return to Ordinary world.

• Born into a middleclass home in Ardennes, France.
• Educated as an art teacher.
• spent most of World War II as a prisoner of war
• entered the film industry in the late 1940's.
• Fugitive in Saigon (1957) Camus's first feature film, was a protest against the war in Indochina and recieved little attention.
• Show his anti-colonial views.

Ethan does not re-enter the house at the end of the film. This suggests that hes not welcome back into the community after what hes done.

Things to support this argument:

-The defining of boundaries, suggesting that everything outside of their community is savage, and violent. Ethan has become to violent and no longer belongs. 

-Ethan's similarities to Scar, (the chief of the tribe) Doubling.

-Suggested shady past (the Minted coins, the ambiguous relationship between himself and Martha)

-Basically Ethan its sketchy, and immoral and kind of a terrible person. The film acknowledges this, even if it isn't obvious.

1. New Wave rejected Hollywood norms and Classical Narrative

2. Godard, Francois Truffaut, and other New Wave filmmakers used jump cuts: disruptive edits that leapt ahead in time

3. They used hand-held cameras, and created documentary feel

4. They also violated the directional rules

5. They violated the 180 degree rule

 • Sarris suggests that the director shows his or her identity in the film

• The director is the author of the film Screenwriters are no longer as important, as they were in Classical Hollywood (which New Wave rejects) 

• Director is the authorizing factor of the film

• They bring their style to every thing they do

Drew and Associates

- group of documentary filmmakers who procuded cinema verite (ie Don't Look Back, Primary)

- members included: Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert Maysles

- they experimented with technology

- direct cinema opposed traditional documentaries because the filmmakers were not visible; they focused on the subject

Primary and Grey Gardens

- Primary: 1960, directed by Robert Drew

- followed Kennedy in the presidential primaries and presented him more intimately than the man with whom the public was familiar 

- a groundbreaking documentary that set the tone for cinema verite

- Grey Gardens: 1975, directed by Albert Maysles, Muffie Meyer, Ellen Hovde,David Maysles

- followed relatives of Jackie Kennedy who were living in a run down home in Long Island

- used cinema verite to let them tell their own stories

"Fly on the Wall"

- style of documentary filmmaking

- the crew works unobtrusively, not interfering with the subject

- this is found in direct cinema; for exmaple, Don't Look Back is filmed with a fly on the wall style

"Creative Treatment of Actuality"

- coined by John Grierson

- his principles of documentary were that it could be exploited into a new art form, as opposed to Vertov, for example, who believed documentary presented "life as it is"

Let Dylan do it Directly

- Don't Look Back

- device used by Pennebaker

- he didn't interview or communicate with Dylan; he simply filmed his interactions, allowing him to drive the film

- for example, the interview with the Time reporter

In summary:

John Ford deviated from book and script to make Ethan Edward's be a bad person. Accomplished this by removing scenes from the book and original screenplay and adding/modifying other scenes. For example the scene of Ethan scalping Scar was added in.

-Shady Past

-Affair with Martha

-Cynicism towards religion

-Scar represents everything Ethan wants to be/is

-Shoots people in back

-Disrespects dead

Ultimately challenges western tropes. "John Wayne can't be evil, riding in on his white horse all magestic like."