Ulmer's Film Noir: "Detour"

Women of the mid-20th century are assumed to be the more polite of the two genders. Film noir brings a new light to the personality traits of women, allowing them to be more...expressive in their emotions. This new style of the 40s gives women the ability to project their attitudes and natural sass towards men who disrespect them. Before this, you would expect to see women being polite as well as men being polite to them with their common undertones of bigotry. Vera (Ann Savage) is shown getting drunk and acting obnoxiously towards Tom Neal, as Al Roberts. There is constant disagreement between the two, which also portray the film noir ideals, as explained in the readings.

In general, film noir is something I've always been interested in due to the outright cynicism and pessimism that is exemplified through plot and dialogue. The style caters a little more to my personality which certainly raised my interest in the film Detour.

Freaks (1932) directed by Tod Browning

What is the common definition of a horror film? There is the "classic" female victim screaming her head off while running down a dark alley horror film, there is the suspenseful jump-scare style horror film, or just another gory horror film with stabbings and shootings as far as the eye can see. The film Freaks is a horror film that is horrific in context. As a viewer of the 1930s, seeing a film that spotlighted the acts of a circus that were simply used for entertainment, being viewed as real socialites who experience the same intrinsic feelings that "normal people" do, would be quite unnerving and uncomfortable. In scene where the "freaks" are avenging Hans from being poisoned by Cleopatra and Hercules, they are crawling through the mud making themselves seem like the creatures that the audience is comfortable characterizing them as, rendering them as horrific as they have initially believed before empathizing with their feelings during the first half of the film.

Although the film was very...unusual and hard to understand at some points I enjoyed the variety and difference in the nature of the horror that was portrayed. Profoundly unusual.

Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr."

Sherlock Jr. by Buster Keaton is the first silent film that I've seen, and after getting past the fact that I was only going to be listening to music accompaniment and reading the dialogue I really began to enjoy the piece.

One of the first examples of a "gag" scene is the part with the dollar bills and the trash pile. The young projectionist finds something in the window of the shop next door, it seems to be a box that he would like to buy. To his dismay the he only has $2 while the box costs $3. Despite trying to barter with the clerk he leaves the store in disappointment. The first significant thing I notice is the fact that he tried to barter at all, sort of reflecting the times as it is an uncommon practice nowadays. When returning to his trash pile in front of the cinema the Keaton finds a paper stuck to his foot, and after many attempts at displacing the paper, he ends up passing it off to a man walking out of the building. This is an example of a gag being used for comedic purpose, and as one of the first comedic elements in the film, it is quite effective. There is also irony due to his qualm with money while the man walking out happens to flipping through cash in his wallet. This kind of comedy seems bizarre and silly to my eyes but I can imagine it’s simplicity and sheer parody was appreciated at the time.

What am I doing here.

Hello, I am Andy Schamma. I am a freshman in Electronic Media in CCM. It seems there are a lot of us roaming around this class. Anyways, my interests lie with performing arts and anything I can do with recording live performances or enhancing them in any way is my goal. As far as movies go I am always looking for recommendations as I will watch almost anything. I tend to stray away from comedies that are funny for the sake of being funny (includes Rom-Coms).  I particularly like psychological thrillers and most documentaries. I look forward to analyzing some new films as well as learning some techniques used in the film industry.