Contemporary interview with Gordon Willis in The Boston Globe by Mark Feeny January 14 2007. Conrad Hall calls Willis "The Prince of Darkness."

Chapter 1 should focus more on Klute and the status of noir in the early 1970s. Quote Naremore on the problems and possibilities of colorized noir. Note Straw's account of the mulitplicity of noir-like tags: film-blanc, film-gris, etc. Straw's development of tabloid crime aesthetic based on true crime digest covers that feature place-less b&w crime scenes in broad daylight (as opposed to hi-contrast, or Wee Gee-like crime scenes) could be drawn into parallel with "figures in windows" aesthetic. Perhaps also verite could be mentioned here as THE b&w moving image of the 1960s. Color would be associated with technicolor/H-wood artifice. Also ref. opening essay to recent Neo-Noir anthology.

An off the cuff quote from Edward Buscombe's entry on The House on 92nd Street in the BFI Companion to Crime: "Almost any issue that Hollywood wanted to make a film about could be refracted through the generic conventions of the crime film." (175)

Paired with this quote from Will Straw on Leftist involvment in the social documentary genre: "At the heart of the semi-documentary was the tension between its restricted institutional frame and teh rich possibilities offered by narrative worlds outside the studio backlot." (in "Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left," 'Un-American Hollywood," 141.)

Important also to look at is Parker Tyler's relation of narratives of investigation to documentary in American Quarterly 1 (1949), 99-115 [See notes to Straw's essay] AND Kracauer's review of Boomerang! in an article called "Those Movies with a Message" in Harper's 196 no. 1176 (May 1948): 568.

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.  

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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). 

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.