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.