A summary of the main arguments of the reading. The abstract should fully cover the discussion of the chapter. Instructors aim for a complete summary. Three most important/compelling aspects of the book and a brief explanation of why. This course is designed to encourage critical thinking and I hope some of the insights will inspire you to think more critically/complexly about movies, genres and society, but this is strictly It’s not meant to be philosophical. Reading this might make you think about movie consumption, but it might also make you think about filmmaking in a more complicated way. Be clear as to how and why these insights are important/significant to you.
Two aspects of the reading you do not understand and a brief description as to why this interfered with your ability to understand the reading. Some of the reading will be more academic or filled with jargon and I encourage you to embrace the arguments rather than dismissing them. But we may need help in clarifying terms, argument, examples, etc., and this is what this section is for.
One question that seeks to go beyond the reading content. So this question should ask a deeper question based on cinema, society or theory. Like comedy, westerns, horror, and science fiction, crime has inspired dozens of critical commentaries. tally. But writing a coherent critical history of crime films is difficult, especially since they tend to be fragmented into subgenres whose significance seems to have little to do with cinema. The General Theory project itself, throughout its history, is the structuralism of Tsvetan Todorov, which allows a systematic analysis of common practices and inventions, and the economic motivations of the rise and fall of particular Hollywood, Rick Altman’s It has relied on advances in critical methods such as revisionist historicism. genre. Similarly, critical response to crime films and its many subgenres has been divided according to what kind of academic demic critique was prevalent at the time: author critique, directing critique, thematic critique, Structural criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, economic criticism, critical questioning, racial interrogation, or the politics of gender and identity. But superimposed on the “egoia” category is another surprisingly rigid set of categories dictated by the various crime subgenres themselves. This gangster film is the first crime subgenre to garner serious commentary, and tends to provoke debates about Hollywood mythmaking. Elements of this theme carry over in the discussion of film noir, but are complemented by equally strong elements of production criticism. Subsequently, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches rediscovered film noir, concentrating on the emerging erotic thrillers of his. Even newer critics are treating film noir from the perspective of economic and cultural history. Despite the ongoing debate about the value of these approaches, they have one thing in common. That is, they are all anti-intentionalist, seeking the meaning of popular genres not in the explicit intentions of their creators but in something broader and deeper: the mythology of universalism. Industry-wide production styles, patriarchal hegemony, material or cultural forces beyond control, and sometimes beyond the comprehension of creators. stand. This anti-intentionalist critique has never achieved the same degree of predominance in crime film criticism, but it remains the sole guiding principle of most contemporary scholarly criticism. Criticism of crime novels has long been influenced by another anti-intentionalist school, Structuralism, but structural analysis has never had a similar impact on crime film criticism. Rather, most commentary on detective films seems to point in the rationalistic, hero-centered direction of the film itself. myself. The result is a strange type of author critique centered around detectives as authors (or, at times, a list of stars who have played detectives in various films), and a tendency to accept films on their own terms rather than analyzing them. is strong. . It can be an individual, a group, or whatever format you haven’t explicitly invited. This difference results in two different types of genre stories being produced. One is an intentional narrative focused on detective films and the other is an anti-intentionalist narrative dedicated to gangster films and film noir. Both John Tusca and James Neamore can be called historians of crime films because they both seek to root crime films in a cultural context, but Tasca’s story is deliberate and unrepresentative of a particular detective series. While chronicling the facts and faces behind it, Naamoah’s story is far more trendy. Attempts to uncover motives or influences of creators who may be unwilling or willfully unaware of them. For these reasons, the critique of crime films, like the films themselves, is considered more insightfully in terms of the subgenre and the critical tactics that boldly promoted it, rather than in terms of a single, discrete chronology. will be However, isolating the main trends in crime film commentary and tracing the development of each reveals a general, irregular, and often repetitive chronological history of crime film criticism: izism. . This is history best understood in context. theory of crime fiction.
Systematic criticism of crime films has been delayed by three obstacles. cress. Early proponents of the cinematic arts, such as the British documentary filmmaker and historian Paul Rotha, abandoned the established genres of Hollywood entertainment for a more ambitious, individualistic and original film that was the exact opposite of crime fiction. There was a tendency to favor a graduation movie. Even within the genre, crime continued to be downplayed, favored by Westerns, and enjoyed a revival in widescreen and Technicolor versions in the 1950s, but this was one of the reasons so many crime films turned into routine B-movie “programmers.” because it was Double Immunity (1944) garnered budget and Oscar attention, becoming the most criminal lookalike of Paramount’s Shane (1953), but falling short. Finally, Alfred Hitchcock’s dominance in the suspense genre is such that when academic critics choose this crime film, they first look at Hitchcock’s film and the writer’s point of view, which they advertise as the work of a single director. meant that goal. For these reasons, crime films were largely ignored by English-language critics prior to 1970. By this time, detective novel criticism, the first type of detective story that encouraged continuous critical analysis, had already reached several different stages. Already in 1901 he became G.K. In Defense of Detective Stories, Chesterton writes that such stories “are the earliest and only form of popular literature in which the poetic sense of modern life is expressed”, and Robert Louis Stevenson does a great job of portraying the romance of the modern city. But it has been completely ignored by most other writers with serious literary aspirations. A quarter-century later, after Father Brown’s crime novels captivated the public imagination, Chesterton added a prophetic dimension to his analysis of the genre’s fascination. Because the shift from mystery to enlightenment in detective fiction is the present-day harbinger of the apocalypse. When the earthly veil is lifted, each mystery must be governed by a single, unifying concept whose outcome is “not just a bubble burst, but a dawn”2. The appeal of detective stories was indirect. In the opening chapter of Trent’s Last Case (1913), E. C. Bentley places the millennialism alluded to by his friend Chesterton on the stage of burlesque, setting the scene for the shooting of dubious investor Sigsby Manderson as a prelude to events with twists and turns that seem to ridicule human reason. It shows rocking (but ultimately trivial) results. Crime writers who followed Bentley, British Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham to American S. S. Van Dyne, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr secularize Chesterton’s emphasis on rationality as a harbinger of the transcendental apocalypse, dwarfing its theological underpinnings, while at the same time a comedy of character mannerisms. and created an influential recipe for detective stories as a civilized game. The spectator’s reasoning culminates in a “challenge to the reader,” explicitly expressed in Queen’s first nine novels (1929-1935). So it’s like an invitation to solve a mystery based on the clues presented to the detective and the reader. The often highly formulaic interaction of standard character types is between an enterprising writer devising an ingenious new method of murder and the true plot of the story, which is, in Carr’s words, a “sleight of hand contest.” It was nothing but an excuse for How to create an alibi for the cautious reader. Readers are determined to find a solution before it is revealed in the final chapter. The main theory of formal detective history, or the Golden Age as John Strachey called it, is in the form of a historical introduction to an anthology of short detective stories, or a list of rules that writers must follow in order to be fair to their readers. I took It was not until his 1940s that criticism of formal detective stories focused on the moral significance of these games. Nicholas Blake, to Chesterton’s analogy between the Revelation Resolution and the Apocalypse, argues that the story is a folk myth intended to assuage post-religious audiences’ guilt by linking “the Light and the Apocalypse”. added. The “dark side” of murderer social attitudes 6 W. H. Auden agreed with Blake that detective stories appeal to the audience’s “sense of guilt,” and argued that, in contrast to the more literary fiction of Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler, detective stories are “separated from the murderer.” He argued that there is an illusion that there is The illusion of being “taken back to the Garden of Eden” using the “magical formula” of “innocent found guilty contained”. “It was not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of an outside genius who removes sin by imparting knowledge of it.”[7] The third stage of crime, on the other hand, is the story. Criticism began with Chandler’s influential essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944). In contrast to critics who defended the Golden Age formula of astonishing mystery and rational discovery as an intellectual game and a ritual of moral cleansing, Chandler proclaimed in a frankly challenging opening sentence: . Proponents of the formal or classical crime novel think that a story that does not pose formal and precise questions is not a detective story, and fear those who label the clues around it pretty. Chandler defended “Dashiell Hammett’s Hardened Private Detective Story” and his own research as well, and they argued that “the kind of people who commit murder for any reason, not just to get a dead body.” to return murder to the world, and not with handcrafted dueling pistols, curares, or tropical fish, but with the means at hand.
Neither Paul Rosa, Parker Tyler, or Robert Warshaw, the first major critics to study crime films in English, are named directly, but they all show a positive disdain for genre films. . Ann. Writing shortly after Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, the pair uncover the unconscious collective myths that play a far greater role than conscious individual artistry in the making of Hollywood movies. I have the same project. “Lack of personal control” over certain Hollywood lumber projects, as Tyler argues in The Magic and Myths of Cinema (1947). All of this, combined with the “lack of respect for the original” and “the premise that cinema is an original invention with theoretically infinite resilience,” contributes to the “industrialization of a machine worker’s daydream.” It creates a situation that more closely matches the collective myth. — than individual art. 1° Tyler and Warshaw are an articulated program of individual filmmakers to explore the underlying unconscious and conscious myths of “what the public wants”, the collective tastes that movies appeal to. are ignoring l ‘Still, their approach to crime’ movies couldn’t be more different. America’s first film metaphysicist, Tyler is an antigenic rhetorician, and for him the narrative films produced by Hollywood studios represent a unique sovereign genre created in response to the needs and desires of audiences. is. Although most of the films Tyler criticizes represent examples of popular genres rather than personal aspirations for artistic achievement, he prefers the ontology beyond the genes of cinema rather than the idiosyncrasies of genre indicators. are interested in contributing to For example, Tyler’s analysis of double compensation focuses on the relationship between Walter Neff and his boss Burton Keyes. From the beginning, he emphasizes, the intimacy between two men is an example of the psychopathology of the insurance industry. Insurance agents like Walter make a living out of marketing “myths”… Human wisdom has provided ways to protect against certain outcomes such as accidents and deaths,” while experts like Keyes “are just waiting to debunk this myth.” and claims to act as an “ethical remedy” to the seller’s sales success. According to Tyler, as the story progresses, Keyes emerges more and more clearly as Walter’s “sexual conscience”, “ruling his life as a hidden judge of his sexual claims and customer insurance claims.” “He is an indomitable person. and denounces the “psychology of war” theory, in which Walter sells himself the idea of homicidal violence as a means of “moral zeal, in his case sex zeal.” 12 Tyler turns to Mildred Pierce (1945) and compares her to Citizen Kane (1941), but what audiences most want to know is who Rosebud is, or who Rosebud is. This lack of precision jeopardizes the identification of the camera eye with the “universal audience.” She fires a fatal shot at Monte Veragon (Zachary Scott). Both movies are based on a single paradox. It is about replacing “the irrational or symbolic mystery of the human soul” with the official “rational or mechanical mystery” of the detective story, and the potential for the audience to subconsciously recognize its inexplicability. It’s an all-knowing scientific camera eye. About these two species from the mystery. Mildred Pierce’s story thus leads to the climactic visualization of the Monte murders, which ultimately identifies Mildred’s daughter Vedha (Anne Bryce) as the actual killer, but “Mildred’s Sin “dream” and act at the same time. Among them was the Executioner, who had died too, and who was the alter ego of her youthful self and her current inner desires, “a form of herself…”. [13] The film’s detective apparatus establishes Mildred’s (Joan Crawford) innocence in order to bring about a happy ending, but her identification with Vedas suggests that she is involved in Vedas’ sins. [Fig. 13]. 13]. Tyler’s ler’s own implication is that this paradox, although it emerges with unusual usual clarity in mystery stories, is essential to all the dreams of Hollywood, wood, essential indeed to the nature of the camera eye of narrative cinema.14 In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), Warshow emphasizes by contrast the specificity of the gangster genre in posing a resistant alternative ternative to the prevailing myth of optimism and social happiness that amounts to an unofficial imperative of democratic cultures. Unlike “happy"' movies like Good News (1947), which "ignores death and suffering," fering," and "
sad”‘ movies like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), which “uses death and suffering as incidents in the service of a higher optimism,” mism,” gangster films express “that sense of desperation and inevitable table failure which optimism itself helps to create.” The gangster of Hollywood mythology – a figure much better known to most audiences than any actual gangsters – expresses the ethos of the city: “not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.” And his “pure criminality,” which “becomes at once the means to success and the content of success,” shows, through the rise and fall of his career, his futile attempt to establish his individual identity in a world whose only security is to be found in protective social groups, that “there is really only one possibility: failure. The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death.” In the end, the gangster dies as the scapegoat of his conflicted flicted audience, the man who represents both the capitalistic imperative ative to rise above others and the democratic imperative to remain equal to others. Hence “he is under the obligation to succeed,” even though his audience knows that “success is evil and dangerous, is – ultimately – impossible.” He does what no other movie hero can do: allows his audience to accept their failure as a moral choice by disavowing avowing the corruption implicit in his fatal success.
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