This the cover of the 1st ed. of Death Wish. Why does Paul Benjamin shed a blood tear? For his city? For the people he's killed?

From the dust jacket:

Death Wish is the story of a society having a nervous breakdown. It is about something that causes a secret uneasiness far back in the conscious minds of many people. What would happen to a man who is unable to keep to the narrow line that stands between being victim or executioner?

Paramount purchased the rights to both Death Wish and a novel called Relentless. The latter was produced by CBS television in 1977 - a story about an Arizon state trooper--who is also Indian-- that pursues a paramilitary group of robbers (who killed his uncle and have taken a woman hostage) into the mountain and uses his knowledge of the wilderness to track them.

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. 

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.

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?