Perhaps it's a side effect of the strict academic cast of my recent days -- grading without the burden of performing in the classroom — that finds me listing geeky. Apologies in advance to those who originally directed me to these links — your names have been lost in the mists of time but burn brightly in my heart. Or something.
First off, above, an hour-plus throwdown on Vertigo, featuring among others my former prof Richard Allen. To his credit, he is the ONLY one who returned, with comments, a paper I submitted to satisfy a long-in-the-tooth incomplete, which ultimately led to me finally garnering my cinema studies M.A. [So I guess it's partially his fault I'm saddled with grading now?] As it happens, that same paper was also the one I later presented at my SCMS debut [& triumphant return to Chicago] in 2006.
Speaking of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual throwdown — thanks to the 11th hour goading of the 'Fesser and Signore Serial Narrative, I proposed a paper to deliver at the conference in New Orleans in March. Motherfuckers accepted it, to my chagrin. So now I gotta write a goddamned paper.
First, though, I think I should probably check out this U Wisconsin P publication, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 by Tino Balio. An excerpt from the tnr review that persuaded me it'd be useful for said goddamned paper:
...A common phrase of the era—“well, it’s a foreign film”—could denote intellectual or sexual sophistication, and in both cases they were profitable. Through the 1950s, foreign films accounted for about 7 percent of total box office—a staggeringly high number that has never been duplicated.
By 1966, however, a convergence of developments would scuttle the armada of foreign films that had arrived continuously for twenty years. In 1952, the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to film, allowing the sex in European films to escape a good deal of the era’s censorship. Owing to Hollywood’s production codes, no studio would dare put that kind of eroticism in American movies. But the European monopoly on sex ended in 1966, when Hollywood altered the Production Code. Its replacement by a ratings system two years later allowed the packaging of sex in films by giving them an “R” rating. Foreign films were no longer unique in that most profitable of ways. Moreover, the studios began to lose interest in distributing foreign films, and instead made deals to bring talented foreign directors over to direct American productions.
Another new text I covet is Pamela Robertson Wojcik's latest, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975. And not just because Pam is pretty much the only double alum I know in film studies. Although that plays a role. But also, what a good, innovative/well, duh/so fucking smart approach to thinking about a certain era/genre. To wit:
Rather than an incidental setting, this book argues that the apartment functions as a particularly privileged site for representing an important alternative to dominant discourses of and about the fifties in America. The apartment plot offers a vision of home, centered on values of visibility, contact, density, mobility, impermanence, permeability, spontaneity, and porousness that contrasts sharply with more traditional views of home as private, stable, and family-based.
...I began looking into the films, I became aware of how much this dominant strand of film and popular culture had been ignored or denied by the dominant reading of the period. Most accounts of the fifties assume not only that everybody moved to the suburbs, but also that entertainment shifted its focus to the suburbs as well. Again and again, I would read that the housewife was the dominant image of women, the suburban breadwinner the dominant male, and that all movies and TV shows looked like Leave It to Beaver.
The films pointed in a different direction—an urban fifties. They also pointed toward a burgeoning singles culture. Against the typical stereotype of the mandate for early marriage in the fifties, they served as a reminder that this was also the era of Playboy magazine, Sex and the Single Girl, and queer urban pulp fiction.
So, I not only examined the films as a genre, locating formal and thematic affinities among them, but also started to look at them as documenting an urban reality, on the one hand, and urban fantasy, on the other, both reflecting the urban and imagining it.
