UCLA Film & Television library has some episodes of the ABC television series "N.Y.P.D." that can be viewed on site. A series running from 1966-69, the show was filmed in New York, apparently in that "gritty documentary" style. Starred Jack Warden, Al Pacino was in one episode. 

This series paints a tough, realistic portrait of the work of the New York City Police Department. Filmed on location, N.Y.P.D. utilizes the highly mobile hand-held camera and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Tonight: Lt. Mike Haines and his two partners, Dets. Jeff Ward and Johnny Corso, investigate a blackmailing ring that specializes in extorting money from homosexuals"--TV guide, September 5, 1967.

UCLA record: 

http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=2&ti=1,2&Search%5FArg=N%2EY%2EP%2ED%2E&SL=None&Search%5FCode=FTIT&CNT=50&PID=1Mo0rGFfvsH4HgTJvewnZhMjxo7kTbs&SEQ=20091209142653&SID=1

Mathematician Yuri  I. Manin has a wide ranging book of essays entitled Mathematics as Metaphor. One essay, "The Empty City Archetype" considers the empty city in Jungian terms, for its relation to the collective unconscious. May be interesting for quotes, leads. He invokes Pierre Mac Orlan's "Ville Morte." 

Another image for the series. This one is featured in the "brainwashing" montage sequence of The Parallax View.

This famous picture of JFK in the oval office was taken by New York Times Photographer George Tames in 1961 and is titled "The Loneliest Job in the World." Tames on the photograph:

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

President Kennedy's back was broken during the war, when that torpedo boat of his was hit by the Japanese destroyer. As a result of that injury he wore a brace on his back most of his life. Quite a few people didn't realize that. Also he could never sit for any length of time, more than thirty or forty minutes in a chair without having to get up and walk around. Particularly when it felt bad he had a habit, in the House, and the Senate, and into the presidency, of carrying his weight on his shoulders, literally, by leaning over a desk, putting down his palms out flat, and leaning over and carrying the weight of his upper body by his shoulder muscles, and sort of stretching or easing his back. He would read and work that way, which was something I had seen him do many times. When I saw him doing that, I walked in, stood by his rocking chair, and then I looked down and framed him between the two windows, and I shot that picture.¹

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

A Idea to get back to:

In my introduction, a history of the thriller is maybe necessary -- if only in order to offset the negativity of my issues with noir. This discussion could revolve around Chesterton, Todorov, and Martin Rubin. Rereading Rubin just now I am seeing that he argues, following Chesterton's idea about the mythic within the detective story, that the nature of the thriller's urbanity is to redeem the mundane and banal elements of modern life, to revivify them. I'm not quite sure I agree with this though. Isn't this even maybe a bourgeois kind of neo-flaneur position? As in: "I'm so bored with the city that I need a thriller to help me imagine that there's something sublime in city life." I'm not sure how strict he is about this, but it neglects the epistemological bent of urban thriller narratives, the way the provide knowledge about the city. No? 

Too busy writing to explore this stuff now, but: 

- The Seventies in America eds. Bailey and Farber contains a chapter entitled "Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York in the 1970s" by Peter Braunstein. 

- Mineshaft Nights is a memoir by Leo Cardini of time spent in the NY s&M club that Cruising was filmed in. 

A few notes to put here just in case they get lost in the shuffle:

-While filming Klute, Pakula describes Fonda as being constantly on the phone, organizing her political activities and speaking engagements. She was also, at the time, under surviellance by the FBI. I'm unsure if she is aware of this fact at the time. (Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography, p 22) - I think this information can orginally be found in The Films of Jane Fonda by George Haddad-Garcia. 

-Klute starts shooting in the spring of 1970. The scenes of Peter Cable in his high-rise boardroom feature cranes and a building that seem very likely to be one of the WTC towers! The cranes are in movement during the shot. 

Also, these two images. One of Nixon in 1972, the other, earlier, of Peter Cable in Klute. Did Gordon Willis come to DEFINE a particular mode of visual presentation, so much so as to be influential in how American presidents, however disgraced, could be shown that way? 

Edit: The picture of Nixon was taken by Ollie Atkins, presidential photographer, at Camp David right after the 1972 election, during which the events of Watergate were still unfolding. 

A trio of great articles, all coming out of McGill on crime, film, and city-space (they have, apparently, a crime and media working group). 

Ned Schantz writes "The Telephonic Film" (in Film Quarterly) arguing that it may be productive to see the uses and fantasies of the telephone in Classical Hollywood film as akin to the importance of the letter to the development of the novel. He concentrates on the presence but relative invisibility of the phone, glosses over some telephonic visual conventions, and does analyses of It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and Sorry, Wrong Number. May be interesting to extend these ideas - or the concept of telephonic film into "Post-Classical Hollywood." 

Thomas Heise is interested in crime, urban geography, and literature (also film, I think) and has a few interesting essays out, one on Chester Himes' novel Blind Man With a Pistol, "Harlem is Burning: Urban Rioting and the 'Black Underclass' in Chester Himes' Black Man with a Pistol" (African American Review, 41 [3]). The intro sets up the problematic nature of the term "black underclass" and how it is introduced into sociological and public discourse in the 1960s,  looking at a few different studies during that time, not just the Moynihan report. He argues that "in circulating representations of black pathology and in furthering a misguided policy agenda that alienated poor, urban African Americans, this discourse constituted the new racial and class formation it claimed merely to discover and describe: a black underworld trapped below the lowest rung of the class ladder in a culture of poverty, disease drugs, violence, and vice." (488).

Finally, I have not really followed Will Straw too closely, except looking at a recent book called Cyanide and Sin. He actually has quite a few interesting essays on urban visual culture, particularly as it relates to crime fictions. Have not quite worked through everything yet, but there is an interesting symposium paper about film and city skylines at the logocities website (out of Concordia), as well as an essay called "Cities of Sin, Backroads of Crime" which I believe is about representations of urban spaces in print culture of the 1950s.  

_______

Also, in an effort to jump start my work on Pakula and Klute I have been reading through some of the criticism. It seems that Klute was at the center of a mild debate regarding the path of feminist criticism. Most famously, Christine Gledhill argued in a two-part essay in Women in 

Film Noir that Klute's adoption of noir conventions works to constitute a definitively anti-feminist message (this, against a review of the film by Diane Giddis which proclaims Bree Daniels a feminist hero). Rafaele Caputo later (in Continuum, 1992, 5 (2), criticizes--correctly, I think--Gledhill for her reductive construction of noir. This being said, Caputo offers only a few words on Klute itself. There are a few essays on Klute as well in an early issue (Fall 1972) of Velvet Light Trap, but again, they look to be (I have not read them yet) of the same character. 

How is this useful to me? Is there something in the power of Klute to attract debates that may provide a good launching off point? 

My rough idea so far is to argue that Klute, and the other three films in the paranoia trilogy, offer a mediation on figure and ground. For American cinema, it might be said, a crisis of figure and ground was initiated by the dissolution of the Classical Hollywood model -- a model which prescribed cinematic conditions for relations between people and space and therefore, for the legibility of mise-en-scene and movement within it. If this is all thrown into flux so is, for example, the image of the woman. No longer is there a definable and institutionalized visual system within which woman is constituted (say, following Mulvey) within a visual field. But the dissolution of Classical Hollywood visual conventions creates a vaccuum. How then is a narrative film constructed? How does narration take place? One could say, as Gledhill does, that Klute assimilates a "European" tradition. But, as Caputo basically asks, what does that even mean? I would argue that the film more likely partially adopts a documentary style, but that we should also ask what is it we are seeing? None of the critics I have read so far (on Klute, or anything else) have considered the problem of a  noir IN COLOR. Darkness is as much a part of Klute, but so is a rich color palette. Instead of the familiar alternation between light and dark creating (perhaps following Gunning on Naked city, He Walked by Night, and the city that never sleeps) is an alternation between figure and ground. Between what we distinguish as a scene and what we read as a figure moving through a scene (i.e. a figure against a background). 

The Klute DVD has a great contemporaneous behind-the-scenes documentary included in the special features entitled "Klute: A Background for Suspense" with great quotes from Pakula and Willis (also Sutherland and Fonda).

Parts of Klute were also filmed at Filmways Studios in Harlem (possibly 245 E 127 St) where the Godfather was also filmed. It would be interesting to find out what else from my list was shot here, as I'm sure imdb info on this is incomplete.

Also found an article from New York Magazine, March 16, 1992 (pp42-?) that has some things about Sonny Grosso's film and television work.

The anthology Mob Culture: The Hidden Histories of American Gangster Film contains two (so far that I have read) great articles that I will need to refer to. 

Grievson

Lee Grievson's "Gangsters and Governance in the Silent Era" reassesses the emergence of the gangster genre in terms of its representation of urban criminality as an aspect of modern experience. His approach is stated thusly: "I am particularly interested in situating the representational strategies an cultural work of these films in relation to other public discourses on crime and the city examining the points of intersection within a body of knowledge and power and the pervasive culture of social discipline in early twentieth-century America... Overall, the essay seeks to reconsider and recast the history of the gangster film beyond the restrictive context of Prohibition and the early 1930s economic depression, tracing out the beginnings of anxieties about criminal ganges in the turn of the century period and the cultural refraction of that anxiety as episodes in the imagination of the governance of tha mass public that predates--and indeed prepares the ground for--Prohibition and other practices of discipline and social control."

Stanfield

The other very important article is by Peter Stanfield about blaxploitation cinema, "Walking the Streets: Black Gangster and the 'Abandoned City' in the 1970s Blaxpoitation Cycle." Stanfield notes that many blaxploitation films employ scenes of protagonists walking and negotiating the streets. Narratively this often functions to establish their urban knowledge, but visually these scenes transmit a sense of realism. Noting the standard criticism of blaxploitation--the idea that the films failed to produce or promote a progressive vision or agenda for the black population and that--Stanfield argues instead that black social can be glimpsed "obliquely" in these films, in their "particular representation of street life" (287). The intriguing element of Stanfield's argument--and something that I think I have been trying to get at all along--is captured when he writes: "The [blaxploitation] films work to construct a specific city experience, one that is grounded in the PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF URBAN CENTERS yet also transformed by the NARRATIVES INSPIRED BY FORMULAIC URBAN CRIME FICTIONS. Blaxploitation film of the 1970s narrates stories in which the representation of street life simultaneously invokes and dramatizes the experience of everyday life." His assertion about MELODRAMA + THE EVERYDAY is drawn from the work of cultural historian Michael Denning's book Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1997 - around p. 200) who writes "a story to be a story had to be set in a contemporary time and knowable landscape, but its plot had to be out of the ordinary; 'everyday happenings' according to this... aesthetic, did not make a story. The story was an interruption in the present, a magical fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters, a death and rebirth that turned the world upside down." So, though blaxploitation films, as Stanfield notes, presented caricatured versions of urban revolutionaries, they were "linked to the quotidian realities of their contemporary audiences." 

Stanfield also makes a point about urban migration patterns (with statistics to back himself up) that despite the fact that "white flight" was taking place, ever increasing numbers of blacks and puerto ricans were moving to urban centers throughout the 1960s and 70s. This is the reason why the term "inner city" and its concomitant connotations were invented, and why "the city" came to be equated with blackness, specifically black poverty (he also notes that middle-class and professional blacks exited the city with the whites). 

There are a few problems (opportunities, for me) with Stanfield though. To make a--very interesting--point inner cities becoming the new West he reproduces Paul Virilio's quotation of the mayor of Philadelphia following race riots in the early 1960s: "from here on in, the frontiers of the State pass to the interior of the cities." To me this quote is not so straightforward though. What exactly does the mayor mean here? Stanfield, and I think Virilio too, take this to mean that the mayor is saying that American cities now take on, in American imagination and reality, the wildness of the Wild West. But could not the mayor be making a more pragmatic statement regarding the (fiscal and governmental) responsibility of the State to the city? After all, the frontier of the state of Pennsylvania is what, Ohio? Not exactly the Wild West really. Again, the wording is very confusing to me and I could be wrong, but I also don't necessarily trust the judgments of a British scholar and an italian archictect/"cultural theorist" (and Virilio can be a real crackpot). Also, earlier Stanfield writes in reference to the opening sequence of Shaft, which mostly I believe take place in the Times Square area, that "The streets of Harlem belong to John Shaft." 

The last problem I have with Stanfield is that he draws too sharp a distinction between the blaxploitation cycle and films of the "Hollywood Renaissance" by people like Friedkin, which played only to white fear about the city (likely in suburban cinemas). This is a provocative idea -- is it possible to split the urban crime films of the 1970s into those that played to white fear and those that address, as blaxploitation arguably does, the urban social experience (one of escape + confinement according to Stanfield)? On the white hand, 1970s urbanity figures along the lines of Travis Bickle's vision of a "dantesque inferno," on the black hand side the city represents containment with limited promise of escape. Stanfield though doesn't go further in his analysis (for whatever reason). I wonder if this is a useful hermeneutic to look at - or how my own project would fit in. Certainly,  I think that the city was presented as hell, but not to everyone. Maybe it's that the promise of the 1970s is also oblique? Is there not a promise offered, whatever its violent resolutions, in the identity-dissolution series: Deathwish, Deathwish II, Cruising, Hardcore, Looking For Mr. Goodbar? Also, is there not a glimpse of a cosmopolitan lifestyle (not yet gentrified, commodified) in films like Serpico and others that is important? 

Michael Winner, interviewed in Millimeter, Feb. 1975, discusses the speed and efficiency of his shooting schedule:

"Another factor in the speed of production is my shooting exclusively on location. I always do, never in a studio. Life is lived in real places, and I shoot in real places." (From Voices of Film Experience, Leyda ed., 510)

Is it true that location can lend speed to production? Roizman disagrees in his interview in Masters of Light and in the very same volume of this magazine! 

"Most people today think you can save a lot of time and money shooting on actual locations... it's become a vogue to get that 'real look,' but there are times when a studio-built set can save you. You can work faster and over many more set-ups per day." 

Earlier in the Winner interview, he claims the ability too shoot more setups per day than most directors. 

Must track down this issue. 

From Roger Greenspun's December 23, 1971 review of Dirty Harry:


Dirty Harry fails in simple credibility so often and on so many levels that it cannot even succeed (as I think it wants to succeed) as a study in perversely complimentary psychoses.
What does succeed, and what makes Dirty Harry worth watching no matter how dumb the story, is Siegel's superb sense of the city, not as a place of moods but as a theater for action. There is a certain difficult integrity to his San Francisco, which is not so beautiful to look at, but is fantastically intricate and intriguing—a challenging menace of towers and battlements and improbable walls.

It is from the properties of such a theater that Dirty Harry creates its own feelings and makes its only real meaning, and occasionally even generates a curious misty atmosphere that owes nothing to vague imaginings and everything to a desperate awareness that for this world the only end of movement is in pain.

Some quotes from Roger Greenspun's Oct 8, 1971 review of French Connection:

"I don't mean that they are not exciting. The French Connection is a film of almost incredible suspense, and it includes, among a great many chilling delights, the most brilliantly executed chase sequence I have ever seen. But the conditions for the suspense (indeed, the conditions of the chase—to intercept a hijacked elevated train) carry with them the potential for failure not of this particular action, but of all action in the great doomed city that is the film's real subject. From the moment, very early on, when Hackman first pistol-whips a black pusher, you know that the world is cursed and that everybody playing out his allotted role is cursed along with it.
In a more pretentious and less perceptive film, destinies might have turned tragic. In The French Connection they become all but invisible. The whole movie has slightly the look of being background material, or maybe excellent pre-credit material, for another movie. It moves at magnificent speed, and exhausts itself in movement. The central characters repeatedly appear as if out of the city's mass and then disappear into it again—a superb conception for an action of difficult pursuit, but one that never allows the luxury of personal identification.

That is why only Gene Hackman surfaces as a character, although there are the fragments of many good performances—seen as if across the street, outside the window, or at the other end of the subway platform. There are also faults: a murder too many, some shaky motivation among the bad guys, a degree of coldness that perhaps even exceeds the requirements of the cold intelligence that controls the film.

But The French Connection is mostly a credit to everyone who helped shape it. This would include Ernest Tidyman, who wrote the screenplay and who also wrote Shaft; Owen Roizman, the cinematographer; and William Friedkin, a director whose previous work (The Birthday Party, The Night They Raided Minsky's...etc.) may not have prepared anyone for the excellence of this."

David Cook points out in Lost Illusions that the subjective killer p.o.v. technique popularized by Jaws probably more likely originated with Larry Cohen's It's Alive. 

Bloomberg on possibility of New York reverting to 1970s New York: 

When discussing the current crisis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, now seeking a third term, promises that he will not allow the city to return to the darkness of those days, although he stresses that it faces "giant financial problems."

"I know some are concerned that city services will erode," he recently told reporters. "Let me remind you that the city went down that road in the 1970s ... I can just tell you that we are not going to make that mistake again."

Found some interesting items on the emergence of the singles scene here:

http://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2008/10/page/2/

The original T.G.I. Fridays in New York, opened in 1965 and located at 63 St and First Ave. was also known as the first singles bar. 

Looking back at Altman's Film/Genre I can see now that the concept of genre--especially his idea of genre as less fixed, more in flux will in fact be useful as a way to situate the films I want to look at. I think that this will be much easier to do than, as I think I was doing before, trying to argue that my films are somehow *outside* genre. In terms of an ongoing process of genrification, my films are certainly a descendant of film noir, though to what degree they are "neo-noir" is questionable, and Altman provides ways of distinguishing my films from films that nostalgically and self-consciously invoke noir (or have been subsequently claimed to be doing so by critics). So I think I am okay to provide a generic context and rationale for the films I want to study in my proposal, the only problem I think is in naming what these films are - "urban thriller," still seems a bit clunky. In terms of methodology, I have been thinking about invoking Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope as a way to make the argument about concrete locality/space (the American city) and specific forms of representation (the films I want to look at) that seems to have been eluding me so far. Vivian Sobchack's essay "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir" has been extremely helpful for understanding how this might be done. Still a problem for me though is in trying to find what you've called the gestalt of the thing. I have been thinking about arguing that the city in the 1970s forms a sort of uncertain transitional space, apart and discontinuous from the suburbs that becomes a sort of repository of repressed energies that are put on multiple vectors--I'm thinking particularly of Klute, Hardcore, Cruising, Deathwish here. Shown by history, the city becomes renewed through more repressive forms of social control as place of business, and middle-class consumption and entertainment. But was there a point when it could have gone another way, towards a more liberatory, democratic, or collective form of living? I am apprehensive though about valorizing something like the "loss of identity" as a form of political awakening.

Read the first chapter of Mark Seltzers Serial Killers - it promises to be a useful source of information and analysis on the broader culture surrounding serial killing. He cites many films, novels, and journalistic reports, but does not necessarily attempt (so far) a thor0ugh formal analysis of the visual construction of serial murder/violent events. One of the concepts he develops is the idea of 'stranger-intimacy' - I'm not exactly sure what he means by it yet. The killer's anonymity, apparent selflessness, and desire to merge with the mass is something he discusses in the introduction and is pretty fascinating. Also, he mentions the circuit between criminological processes of profiling and crime fiction, recounting the writing of Thomas Harris's books and his research at the FBI, as well as FBI profiler John Douglas's book Mindhunter in which he admits: "Our antecedents actually go back to crime fiction more than crime fact" going on to cite Poe's detective stories as an inspiration! Amazing.

Paired with Mary Ann Lep's research in Apprehending the Criminal I can definitely make a case for criminology being largely a bogus science... Or, more seriously, a science which masquerades as a science, being in fact a product of a collective literary imagination (?)

In "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," Roman Jakobson notes two types of aphasia, one to do with the inability to substitute, the other to combine -- in other words an incapacity with relation to similarities (metaphor)  or with contiguity (metonymy). 

"The development of a discourse my take place along two different semantic lines: one       topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The

metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression  in metaphor and metonymy respectively" (42)

He argues that milder forms of this aphasia can be detected in the verbal arts and that the uneven exercise of one pole can lead to the deterioration of the other (for which he cites an example of a Russian author prone to metaphor who, in his old age, exhibited traits of a similarity disorder - he split the idea of his self into his first and last names, unable to unite the two names, first and patronymic into a unified figure. An analysis of his writings reveals a tendency towards metonymy and synecdoche).  

Asking why there has not been more study of the two poles, Jakobson concludes that in metalinguistic practice "the researcher possesses more homogenous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy , based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation... Not only the tool of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the preponderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship." Thus he determines that literary study suffers from a contiguity disorder. 

Martin Rubin's Thrillers may deserve a reconsideration. In his section "Supercops" (137) he notes that an influx of police thrillers in the 70s may be due to law and order issues being foregrounded in 1968 and 1972 political campaigns and to "a general (though transitional and deeply conflicted) swing to the right in American politics. "Transitional and conflicted" is interesting to me here. Is there a sense in which the fear of city deployed in these films is politically ambiguous? Also, police films of this period seem to be where social issues of the day get there most nuanced and for the most part, liberal working through.  

- Meetings about the dissertation proposal last week were encouraging and fruitful, though I got contradictory responses to my use of Kracauer's Theory of Film as a critical framework. One advisor thought it worked, the other didn't. Both agreed, however, that I need to more explicitly broach the issue of race, which I am working on now. One advisor also suggested that ideas of realism might be hindering to me. He suggested instead that I look to Jakobson's "Metaphor and Metonymy" and a way of understanding disparate aesthetic impulses involved in constructing/imagining worlds. Metaphor having more to do with a classically Romantic impulse, and metonymy having to do with the idea of contiguity, which in my project would parallel the idea I have about the story of urban mystery as a "stretching out" across the city, connecting disparate spaces. Still have to read Jakobson to figure out how this might work.

- These past few days, in an effort to get back to "first principles," as well as to possibly understand the historical "philosophy" and parameters of my project, I have been reading Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectics of Seeing. Not sure exactly if Benjamin or the idea of dialectical images will be helpful to me for understanding the the imagery of the city in the the 1970s, but it's good to read nonetheless. 

-Interesting quote from a Martin Scorsese interview in Scenes from the City (a photographic book about filmmaking in NYC) wherein (to paraphrase) the interviewer (James Sanders) and Scorsese talk about the difference between his and Woody Allen's films. Scorsese says they're fascinating to him precisely because they reference an intellectual milieu that is totally alien to him (he grows up in a house with no books, no New Yorker magazine) and that it's kind of funny that Allen's films never involve experiences of urban danger or violence - his New York is safe. Possibly good quotes for entering into a discussion on how Allen's films involve anticipating NY gentrification (a point Sanders makes in Celluloid Skyline).  If so, what do Scorese's films represent the anticipation of? Or do they concern forms of urban experience no longer relevant? 

- Finally finished my proposal draft, for better or for worse.

- Issues came up in my draft regarding reality/realism and its relation to the cinema and the city nexus. The basic problem is that I am trying to describe, I think, a phenomenological experience of seeing the city on film and I am mostly using the terms "realism" or "reality" or documentary for this experience, arguing that film both documents and imagines city space (or that there's something like a dialectic of documentation and imagination). On the imagination side, I slot the narrative/diegetic world that the film is supplying, putting the films I'm studying within a -- largely literary -- tradition of urban mystery. On the documentation side, I argue vaguely about cinema's photographic bases, its ability to communicate the idea "reality" photographically. But I think maybe what I actually mean here are the films' referential qualities, which may or may not have to do with photography/cinematography necessarily. Tom's essay "Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality," which I read today, is enormously helpful in sorting these things out. In it he argues that we rethink the proposition that the basis of cinematic realism lies squarely within the indexical nature of photography, which is its basis. Among other things, he argues that the indexical relation, wrongly ascribed to Bazin is not the only way to figure cinematic realism and points instead to experiences of cinematic motion as an alternative (one which encompass a lacuna in film theory - the consideration of animation as film). For this argument about motion an early article by Christian Metz is signficant. BUT, the most important, and somewhat liberating aspect of this essay, is the way it undoes the necessary relation between ideas about cinema's realism and photography, and points out that there are perhaps many other ways this relation can be understood (motion is only one avenue). 

"The chief limitation to the indexical approach to Bazin comes from the difference between a semiotics that approaches the photograph  (and therefore film) as a sign

and a theory like Bazin's that deals instead with the way that film creates an aesthetic 

world." (Gunning 33)

- Also, read preface to Phenomenology of Perception. 

Some sources to remember:

Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle - haven't looked at it yet, but it seems to be the writing on stalker film that I knew existed but could not find. Looks promising. 

David Bordwell's The Way Hollywood Tells It has what looks to be a useful chronology of important developments in Hollywood Film, 1960-2004. 

Update: The Vera Dika book is not helpful. 

March 16, 2009

Still looking for ways to frame this project, I've hit upon the idea of situating it within the genre of urban mysteries. City mysteries are serial and novelistic genre that was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century and are typified by Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and G.W.M Reynold's Mysteries of London, though they spawned many imitators and offshoots, particularly in the U.S. Apparently the best U.S. iteration is George Lippard's Quaker City, (about Philadelphia) though there are of course many city mysteries of New York (most notably, New York by Gaslight and New York in Sunshine and Shadow). I briefly took a look at David Reynolds introduction to Quaker City and it notes that Lippard, apparently, was a sort of proto-Marxist, though he probably never read Marx, he shared many of his views about the power of labour etc. 

A better resource though, are books by David L. Pike, a contemporary scholar who has written three books on the imagination of underground and subterranean cities. I think this will be a better guide than Rosalind Williams more well known Notes From the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination . 

Chapter 3 of Pike's book Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 is great. It addresses the city mysteries genre extensively, and ends by talking about film noir and Blade Runner.  Pike also writes about cinema and has a somewhat interesting article in Wide Angle from 1998 about post-war literature and film about living underneath cities, though he doesn't cover extensively enough the visual representations of these undergrounds, focusing primarily on narrative elements without reference to visual construction. 

On p. 164-165 in Metropolis on the Styx though, Pike mentions the ways in which the city mysteries genre was constructed upon an idea about verisimilitude in its reference to real locations and social and economic realities -- in contradistinction to the genre that it ultimately was born out of, the gothic (of which Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho was the first to use the word "mystery" in the title) which was concerned with metaphysical incarnations of evil. I could eventually tie this in with a chapter I am considering that deals with location photography and the construction of verisimilitude (I think this is a somewhat fraught topic. Realistic settings and appeals to verisimilitude require just as much construction and labour -- as French Connection DP Owen Roizman notes -- as studio settings. There is a "reality effect" going on here. Will have to read Barthes on this.) 

Focusing on the idea of city-mysteries in my own project, instead of merely detection, frees me to engage a number of topics related though not directly under the rubric of detection/investigation. I even toyed with the idea of separating out my project into conceptual vertical and horizontal spaces: above ground, underground, up high, inside, outside, urban, suburban, exurban, etc. But I'm not sure this would really work that well. 

March 9, 2009

- Looked at Paul Cobley's The American Thriller. It's interesting so far for the way it defines "thriller," in terms of literary production, which may be useful. Also, the index contains an extensive list of film, TV, and print thrillers, sorted by subgenre.

- Cobley's book referenced another literary study Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s by John Sutherland. Though fairly theoretically light, Sutherland's analyses seem fairly illuminating. I read his chapter on Death Wish, which compares Garfield's two books (the second being Death Sentence in 1976) with the film adaptation. Sutherland determines the roots of the story in the tradition of the Western, but also usefully compares it to Kubrick's/Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, noting the complexity of the transformation from victim to victimizer/vigilante and argues that in reality there is a struggle between generations being enacted here, where the old are killing the young, "for if society can find no way of living with the young, it is doomed." (161).

But also: "The appeal of Death Wish is not merely its retributive fantasy of counterattack in the grim war of generations [a theme developed in Joe for example]. Garfield's novels (Death Wish and Death Sentence) and Winner's film celebrate the release of the individual from the complex tensions of modern city life and 'responsible' adulthood. Benjamin [the Kersey character of the books] has an emancipated area of his life, a free-fire zone unknown to his office colleagues, where his will is absolute; where he can do what he feels to be right without interference from authority, or the dictatorship of 'civilized values.' The liberal's well-meaning paralysis is periodically relaxed by the sastisfactions of the cold-blooded executioner . It is, as Garfield presents it, highly therapeutic. Benjamin develops a 'positive' attitude to his daytime work... His is a Jekyll and Hyde personality that works, a functional schizophrenia. The most potent appeal of Death Wish does not lie in its superficially crude code of vengeful violence, but in the suggestion (which was also being made by the 'Playboy philosophy' of the period) that one could profitably absorb into one's middle-aged existence elements of youth's 'swinging' irresponsibility." (162)

This is great. Refuted here is the idea that Death Wish -- and I would have to somehow make a similar argument for the film version -- is some right-wing fantasy. It actually a liberal fantasy. Kersey advocates, after all, a liberal philosophy towards crime at the beginning. His turn to vigilantism is not so much a political conversion, as a realization of long-held fantasies. These needs to be developed more, but I think following the lines of the therapeutic nature of the killing, as well as "functional schizophrenia" will be interesting. Also, what of the relation btw. Death Wish and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which also features a somewhat similar Jekyll and Hyde, night/day split (Also -- is split personality really szhizophrenic? Must check.)

Also somewhat interesting -- in the Garfield book the Benjamin is an accountant, in the film Kersey is an architect. There is a medium relation here maybe (novel-->paperwork, film--->space?)

- Also looked at Noel Carrol's "The Future of an Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond) from October 20 (Spring, 1982). He develops an idea of filmmaking in the seventies as being dominated by films that allude to film history. Another take on the fate of genre and popular/intellectual American film and the Hollywood "Renaissance." Some items on detective films.

March 3, 2009

- Read Chapter 4 of Adam Lowenstein's Shocking Representation - "United States/'Only A Movie: Specters of Vietnam in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left". This chapter and the book as a whole in more interesting to me as a model/paradigm for how my project could eventually look, rather than for its specific ideas -- which are actually good. In the chapter, Lowenstein discusses the film, its publicity and reception in relation to anxieties across bourgeois/countercultural distinctions, and the specific affect the violence engages, with a brief comparison to Deliverance. There are numerous references to books and articles about screen/allegorical violence which may be useful.

- One of these references was to Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Clover has a chapter called "Getting Even" about revenge films which I skipped through. I found some of her analysis a bit uneven, and it seemed to lack an acknowledgment of visual/formal elements involved in filmic construction.  (She also says that in Wolfen, "animal-related Native Americans living and working in Manhattan... bring a a halt to a new development on their ancestral land." This is inaccurate -- the Native Americans in this film are not shown to be the wolf-gods that have emerged to protect their land, the Natives tell the investigator about the Wolfen, but are not, in fact, the Wolfen.)

Nevertheless, she coins the word "urbanoia" to describe a series of films where country folk enact revenge on city-folk, arguing that these films explore how city wealth is contrasted with country poverty and that they engage the economic guilt of the city. This is done primarily through an analysis of Deliverance and a film called Hunter's Blood (which excises the subtleties of the former). The one problem I have with this analysis is that it may be too much based in narrative/structural elements and lacks reference to the historical conditions that the films might refer. The "city-folk" in these film are more precisely suburban folk; the spatial encroachment that is being avenged is of suburban development. Particularly, during this time (the 1970s -- though Hunter's Blood  is from 1986, 14 years after Deliverance) the economic boom of the "New South." In contrast, the North-eastern cities of the rust belt were suffering economic decline. I think that while the city-country dynamic is interesting, in terms of its reference to US class politics, I think it may be a narrative displacement. The country people are "Others" -- nightmarish people conjured from National Geographic photologues (a fact that Clover does acknowledge). 

- My criticism of Clover may be a bit overwrought. If it is, it may be simply because I think the term "urbanoia" as a reference to city people's fear of the country is misplaced. The fear here is of middle-class whites of the country, a fear that co-exists with a fear of the inner city -- and there are just as many inner-city urban revenge films -- Death Wish being the primary one.  Not only that, but there are whole cycle of films, perhaps beginning with Walking Tall (Phil Karlson, 1973), which was immensely popular (according to David Cook in Lost Illusions -- see also Cook for films of the New South) which deal with revenge in a non-city/country way. 

February 26, 2009

- I read Neil Smith's introduction to Lefebvre's Urban Revolution to re-familiarize myself with his basic ideas, and as preamble to reading Production of Space (which I plan to read once this fucking proposal is written). Smith outlines Castell's critiques of Lefebvre's concept of urbanization, noting that the one that still seems to stand is the flawed notion that urbanization comes to determine industrialization -- that is cities in essence run the mode of production in capitialist societies, rather than vice versa. I'm not sure that this will be an especially useful trail to follow, but something else that he does in Production of Space does. Lefebvre, according to Smith, corresponds an evolution of space to the "orthodox" stages of modes of production: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism. These correspond, in Lefebvre's view to: absolute, historical, abstract, and differential spaces (differential being collective, or socialist space). I'm thinking that it will be the character of abstract space that is most interesting to me, but it is something that Dimendberg has looked at closely in relation to film. ISSUE: How do I keep this dissertation from becoming Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity II?

- I would like to write about obscene phone calls and film.
- Also, the history of point-of-view.

- Got Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America - despite the academic title, it's actually an art/coffee table book with an essay by Will Straw and (amazing) cover images from American true crime magazines. Two interesting references: 1) Pierre Mac Orlan - french novelist and critic, who has this idea about crime being part of the "social fantastic." Mac Orlan has a poem/song called La Ville mort, and a fellow traveller of the surrealists in post ww1 Paris, interested in Atget. Also, now-French scholar Dominque Kalifa who has written some what look to be amazing, hardly ever translated articles on the history of crime and the social imaginary. One article "Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth Century Paris" looks to be very interesting. 

February 24, 2009

Reading the essay "The Abandoned City of the Forties," and the way it made connections between Cornell Woolrich's noir and the urban mysteries genre of the mid to late 19th centuries, I began to wonder if this might be a productive way to explore the films the of the 1970s I'm interested in. My problem right now is that I lack a unifying concept in which to link all of the films I'm interested in.

I picked up Richard Maxwell's book on the urban mystery genre The Mysteries of Paris and London. He is particularly interested in Hugo, Dickens and the Sue and Reynold books and the first chapter "Allegory and City Life" explains transformations of the concept of allegory in Goethe and Ruskin, then sketches out the allegorical figures he explores in the city mystery texts (they are: Labyrinths, Crowds, panorama, and the importance of paper and paperwork) -- "Passing from figure to figure, the allegorist works towards the truths of city life." He also identifies three stages by which individual figures are clarified in the novel of urban mysteries - three methods of interpretation within the texts (20-21).

I'm wondering how I could use or incorporate allegory into my project. I suspect by looking to Lowenstein's example in Shocking Representation I could figure out how the concept could
be applied to film "texts" I don't think that as whole I could use allegory, but maybe it could work for a chapter -- perhaps one on Pakula's films. Jameson also discusses allegory extensively, so maybe I could think of how he fits in.

I've been thinking also about the ways I could link Goffman's writings in "Normal Appearances" with Matter and Memory as a way of talking about the visual representations of stalking and pursuit -- the way in which individual impressions of peripheral views are built up in succession resulting in something like paranoia.

I have some ideas about the vigilante being a sort of perversion of the detective figure. Michel Butor (in Passing Time?) talks about how the detective story is constructed on two murders - the first, the illegitimate criminal event, occasions the second, the detective of the murderer. The second "murder" is metaphorical . Butor links this to the Oedipal construction of the detective story -- the detective is the true son of the murderer, who must slay his father. In Death Wish this murdering of the murderer is more literally played out -- but the murder committed (of Kersey's wife) does not need really to be solved, it is not a mystery, he just must find the murderers/rapists and kill them. The criminal changes here too -- they are not artists who produce an aestheticized scene, they do not produce an illusory crime-scene for the detective to interpret and solve. But the criminals of Death Wish are strange in other ways. Their brutality surely "fathers" vigilantism in some way -- i.e. creates Paul Kersey.

Am I making vigilantism out to be more interesting than it is? Or am I looking at it in the wrong ways? The typical way to read these films is as ideologically right-wing. The justice system in cities having failed, viewers identify with the pathos of citizens who mete out their own justice. The problem with this being that these films work out fantasies that justify scenes of violent killing. The narrative provides an alibi-which is indisputable-for the spectacle that ensues. While I agree with this somewhat, I find something more interesting in the fact that between the narrative justification and the violent specatcle, there is a form of pursuit that takes place -- which sustains our interest. Paul Kersey moving through the city is what is most memorable about these films (especially Death Wish 2 where his disguise and pursuit is extended and pronounced). If there is a perversion of the detective story here it is of the transformation of investigation to pure movement/ambulation -- and if we follow Walter Benjamin's argument, that Poe's Man of the Crowd is an "x-ray of the detective story" we might actually see this transformation as a regression (or even a purer form). What if investigation was not a process of building a case from facts divined from the crime scene, inteligently analysed and decoded? What if it was just a naked pursuit that ended in a fatal gunshot?

February 18, 2009

-Watched most of The Detective (Gordon Douglas, 1968) -- Frank Sinatra plays a proto-Serpico liberal cop doing battle with corruption and bigotry in NYPD. There is also shades of Fort Apache, The Bronx, and Assault on Precinct 13 with the police station becoming somewhat like the Alamo within a larger urban fabric of social breakdown, crisis. Sinatra makes a speech to the district commissioner about the ghetto re: doing something to curb the crisis instead of just managing it. An early case deals with a homosexual murder and Sinatra's tolerance is pitted against the other officer's disdain

-Read a little of Mark Seltzer's article in Urban Culture vol 4. on the relationship btw. the urban pathology of the serial killer and the domestic space in which his crimes are committed.

February 17, 2009

- Read review of Will Straw's Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America in Journal of Visual Culture 7(3). Straw's essay for this book may be interesting, though it focuses on tracing style through production/industry histories. Reviewer notes two books that may be interesting: Tom Cohen's Hitchcock's Cryptonomies (about secret agents?) and True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity -- the latter may be specifically about true crime literature though.

-Started  "Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties" in Shades of Noir. Very interesting connections made btw. American variation of the city mystery genre (Lippard's Quaker City is the prime example) and the romans noirs of the forties. Details about the abandonment of cities and good references for making a case about the specificity of urban modernity to America. 

-Leafing through Routledge's four volume Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies -- nothing too interesting so far. 

- Picked up new-ish architecture anthology The Unknown City. May be interesting.