Schindler's List

http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/schindlers-list-no-23/





http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html



THE COLDNESS IS PART OF THE FABRIC OF THE HORROR

Good point about the impersonal camera achieving maximum and "horrific effect",very apparent in this film. Note other points underscored below:

1. Subliminal parallels to other films.









2. Note spielberg's borrowings from his favorite directors, ie the two David Lean films.









3. Fiennes as Amon Goeth is a masterful performance of evil with a human face ,His "I pardon you" letting go of the boy and then shooting the boy as he leaves and goes into the prison yard is a macabre scene .The shooting is not openly shown and is shown by suggestion and the reaction in the face "of the passing by Kingsley."









4. There is a superb cacophony of editing design and photography recalling the film of wartime documentaries all weaving a horrifying tapestry of man's inhumanity and the remnant of humanity in man that always remains and resonates.








5. Movies watching us. Curious. They embed images in our brain as a secondary projector We are truly early hostages of our future biographies as I decipher the full import of that phrase.








6. The innocence of "the gaze" is put in a WAY making the American experience of film to be innocent as defined in this passage. After WWII that innocence can no longer be claimed as successive disclosures of our role in the WAR reduced our idyllic scenes to the naked calumny of our revealed acts.








7. It is the other pornography – the “artistic” pornography of Kapo, of The Night Porter and other retro '70s movies – that has always revolted me. QUOTE

It has been said by some people that Schindler himself is associated with
Spielberg and that this film is his dream project, one which only a director of
his standing would be able to undertake (yet even so he still tried to persuade
Roman Polanski to do it, though he would wait until The Pianist to tackle the
Holocaust). Spielberg dares to have his camera as impersonal towards each
individual atrocity as it would have been to the robotic Nazis committing them,
knowing that this understatement achieves the maximum impact. It may have
a few Spielberg touches of sentimentality – the colour transformation at the end
to show the real life Schindler Jews is unnecessary and the colour of the flames
and the little girl in the red coat is rather gimmicky – but in general he keeps
such sentiment away. Here at last Spielberg the filmmaker was
comfortable in an adult world, with all the censorables that had been so lacking
in his more financially lucrative assignments. That he made his massive
hit Jurassic Park in the same year is evident in the fact that certain scenes do
have subliminal parallels (one recalls the young boy escaping the Nazis in the
Plaszow camp, reminiscent in style to the two kids escaping the raptors in
Jurassic). Mind you, Spielberg doesn’t only borrow from himself, but from
his favourite directors. In the very first shot he cuts from the
extinguished candle smoke to that of a train in Krakow station, which pays
homage to two David Lean films (the cut from the matchstick to the sunrise in
Lawrence of Arabia and that from the glass slide to the tram in Doctor
Zhivago). Other shots recall Kubrick, Kurosawa and even Eisenstein.
This is a cinematic royal family of larceny and it works splendidly.

Spielberg has never made a film as complex as Schindler’s before or since, his enthusiasm and commitment to the project also rubbing off on his actors and crew. Liam Neeson can often seem too worthy an actor, but his Oskar Schindler is a masterful performance. There is a wonderfully revealing yet also misleading shot of him peering through his cigarette smoke at a group of Nazis out for a good time, seemingly the unacceptable face of capitalism. It’s Neeson’s greatest performance and Kingsley is equally memorable as the stalwart Stern, the brains behind the enterprise, who allows Schindler to do what he’s good at, “not the work, not the work. The presentation.” Yet both are outshone by Fiennes, whose Goeth is one of modern cinema’s great monsters, all the more so because he’s human, for all his faults. His performance is summed up in one brilliant scene where he lets a boy go with an “I pardon you”, subliminally pardons himself in the mirror, then goes out and shoots the boy, which Spielberg ingeniously doesn’t show, only through the reaction in the face of the passing by Kingsley. Throw in the superb editing, design, photography (recalling the wartime documentaries of the period) and music and Spielberg weaves a horrifying tapestry and document about man’s inhumanity to man and, equally importantly, his humanity in the face of such inhumanity. When watching it again to review it here, at the point where the naked women receive water in the gas chambers, a relative tells me “can you imagine the relief?” I said “no, and nor can you.” All we can hope for is that, for all time, nor will anyone else ever have to.

What does a child know? And especially that child – Serge D. – who wanted to know everything except what was about him? What absence from the world will later make being present in front of the images of the world necessary? I know of few expressions more beautiful than the one coined by Jean-Louis Schefer when, in L'homme ordinaire du cinéma, he speaks about the “films that have watched our childhood”. Because it is one thing to learn to watch movies as a “professional” – only to verify that movies concern us less and less – but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow and that have seen us, early hostages of our future biographies, already entangled in the snare of our history. Psycho, La Dolce vita, The Indian Tomb, Rio Bravo, Pickpocket, Anatomy of a Murder, The Sacrilegious Hero or precisely Nuit et brouillard are not for me movies like any other. To the brutal question “Is this watching you?” they all answer yes.
The dead bodies of Nuit et brouillard and two years later those in the first frames of Hiroshima mon amour are among those “things” that have watched me more than I have seen them. Eisenstein attempted to make such images but Hitchcock succeeded. Just as an example: how can I ever forget the first encounter with Psycho? We snuck into the Paramount Opera theatre without paying and the movie was very ordinarily terrorising us. But then, towards the end, there is a scene on which my perception slides, slapdash editing from which emerge only grotesque props: a cubist dressing gown, a falling wig, a brandished knife. And from the fear shared with the rest of the audience follows the calm of a resigned solitude: the brain functions as a secondary projector that would keep the image going, leaving the film and the world continuing without it. I cannot imagine a love for cinema that does not rest firmly on this stolen present: “to continue without me”.

What I understand today is that the beauty of Stevens' movie is due less to the justness of the distance than to the innocence of the gaze. Justness is the burden of the one who comes “after”; innocence is the terrible grace granted to the first arrived, to the first one who simply makes the gestures of cinema. It wasn't until the mid '70s that I recognised in Pasolini's Salò or even in Syberberg's Hitler the other meaning of the word “innocent”: not so much the non-guilty one but the one who filming evil doesn't think evil. In 1959, young boy stiffened by his discovery, I was already caught in the sharing of the collective guilt. But in 1945, it was perhaps enough to be American and to witness, like George Stevens or Corporal Samuel Fuller at Falkenau, the opening of the real gates of the night while holding a camera. You had to be American – i.e. to believe in the fundamental innocence of the show – to make the German population walk by the open tombs, to show them what they were living next to, so well and so badly. It took ten years before Resnais began editing and 15 years before Pontecorvo made one move too many that infuriated us, Rivette and I. Necrophilia was therefore the price of this “delay” and the erotic body double of the “just” gaze – the gaze of guilty Europe, Resnais' gaze and consequently mine.

It is the other pornography – the “artistic” pornography of Kapo, of The Night Porter and other retro '70s movies – that has always revolted me. To the consensual attempts to create post-aesthetics, I would prefer the stubborn return of the non-images of Nuit et brouillard or even the flowing desire in Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS that I would not see. These films at least had the honesty to acknowledge an impossibility to tell a story, a stopping point in the course of history, when storytelling is stilled or runs in neutral. So we should not speak about amnesia or repression but rather about foreclosure. I would later learn the Lacanian definition of foreclosure: hallucinatory return into the real of something upon which it had not been possible to produce a “judgement of reality”. To say it differently: since moviemakers had not filmed the policies of the Vichy government at the time, their duty 50 years later was not to imaginarily redeem themselves with movies like Au revoir les enfants but to draw today's portrait of this good people of France who from 1940 to 1942 (and that includes the Vel' d'Hiv raid) did not move. Cinema being the art of present, remorse is of no interest.

British Film Noir

http://www.filmsinreview.com/2009/08/07/british-film-noir-part-1/2/
British noir has never been officially acknowedged and is cotermious,allegedly,or its peak period parallels American noir with several differences . It has been influenced by the French cinema of the 30'srather than German cinema of the 20's.Their belated appearance in Britain was due to a peculiarity of circumstances:

1. the British film industry was cautious and down beat films were frowned on.





2. the best of noir were embedded in the contemporary scene and films critical of the British way of life were not made.





3. Love on the Dole was barred from the screen in the 30's and wasn't made til 41 when the publicity surrounding The Grapes of Wrath made it a viable production





4. The censors were satisfied because Britain was at war and the depression was ensconced in the past.The British films of the depression were optimistic.





5. British noir got under way tentatively in 1938 and 1939, virtually disappeared in the war years (appearing, camouflaged, to add stylistic bite to a few war films), reappeared with a vengeance in 1945, the first post-war year, and paralleled Hollywood in peaking in 1947 and 1948. QUOTE British noir peaked with its American counterpart in 47 and 48. It disappeared in the war years camouflaged into the war films of those years.


6. Kenneth More, Kathleen Ryan and Andrew Ray in THE YELLOW BALOON, 1952. Most of them were the work of directors who had been studying film in the 1930’s, and who regarded-or had been taught to regard-the ”Golden Age” of French cinema of the mid to late 30’s as representing the peak of film art. QUOTE German cinema influences were dimished.


7. In Hollywood of course, where the leaders of the noir movement were the German emigré directors – Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, John Brahm and Robert Siodmak – German visuals had been a part of Hollywood film grammar since the late 20’s and the horror cycle of the early 30’s, and these directors were adept at combining those visuals with a kind of naturalistic expressionism best illustrated by Siodmak’s CRISS CROSS (1949). QUOTE It is not ironic but understandable that the leaders of the noir movement in Hollywood were the German emigre directors .Nuralistic expressionism in Hollywood followed suit due to their seminal influence.


8. British noir swerved off on a different tangent, influenced by French poetic realism (QUAI DES BRUMES, LE JOUR QUOTE


9. Other British divergences from Hollywood during this frmative periof of Noir:

• Britain had fewer stiudios and made less pictures stressing variety


• In Hollywood Universal, there was a sense to the films of continuity and familiarity.


• Crime in the British noir is more personalized and less subject to stylistic treatment in the films


• Actors rarely worked as a continuing unit in British Noir,though there was a certain amount of team collaboration at Ealing Studios.


• It lacks the epic proportions of its Hollywood counterpart and deals with little people.


• The definitive British noir, Robert Hamer’s IF ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947), is particularly illustrative of this. The British system of life unfortunately conspires to keep a lot of “little” people in that niche permanently. With a lot of talent and persistence one can still rise to the top in England-but the modicum of talent (that would allow a person to succeed in the U.S.) is usually stifled in Britain by bureaucracy and other restrictions.QUOTE


• Thus British noirs (with such notable exceptions as Cavalcanti’s THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE) utilized genuine city streets and other locations far more than did Hollywood, possibly making them a little more realistic, but at the same time losing the cohesive studio-controlled stylization that marked Hollywood noir. QUOTE


• Many British dramas are understood over in the US as defeatist. the conclusions seem to be defeatist, whereas to the British they are rational and logical, the only workable selection of two choices. American audiences may wonder why the inhabitants of Bethnal Green, the drab London suburb that is the setting of IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY, don’t just pack up and move, at least to a suburb that has a few trees. The answers to that are (a) that housing in Britain has always been a major problem, and such a move might not be possible, and (b) that the people of these communities are often quite happy in them. quote
• Unlike many American writers and directors, who may well have been well-educated, but had often been forced to rough it in menial and/or purely physical jobs, the majority of British writers and directors had been well educated and from a near aristocracy.quote
• The setting up of specialist directors abnd technicians.
• Alberto Cavalcanti and Robert Hamer became the directorial specialists in British noir (Hamer also encompassing black comedy as well) with David MacDonald, Carol Reed and the American Joseph Losey trailing. Eric Portman, as both victim and psycho, became Britain’s closest parallel to Robert Mitchum in terms of his usage, although of course he avoided the tough detective hero that Mitchum did so well. Trevor Howard, Robert Newton, Herbert Lom and Richard Todd were all familiar male figures, while Margaret Lockwood, Jean Kent and Diana Dors dominated the distaff side.quote
• Emphasis on postwar problems and neuroses in British noir: DEAD OF NIGHT, CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS). The emphasis on postwar problems and particularly on the neuroses of war victims and veterans (MINE OWN EXECUTIONER, THE SMALL BACK ROOM) came to its peak in 1947-49 just as it did in Hollywood in such films as THE LOCKET.
• Major breakthrough in 1939? with five key films. But in Britain, the war brought noir production to a virtual standstill. While American noir thrillers did well at the British box office, such bleak films as OF MICE AND MEN were not well supported by wartime audiences seeking escapism. 1945 saw a major return to the noir style with six films, but most of them significantly period stories or fantasies not related to contemporary life. In 1946, the number was down to three, but two of them were major breakthrough noirs. Daybreak (even the title was somewhat of a homage to Came’s LE JOUR SE LEVE) was the most French of all the British noirs, and the center of a stormy censorship debacle. WANTED FOR MURDER, while it overlooked many intriguing possibilities, was the first of the new noirs to be both a thriller and to be set in contemporary London. quote
  

BRITISH FILM NOIR: PART 1By Archives • Aug 7th,
2009 • Pages: 1 2
While film noir has now become a fashionable subject for dissertations and
several (very good and very useful) book-length surveys and studies, virtually
all writing on the subject seems to follow the dictates of the French critics
who coined the term and were decidedly arbitrary in pinning it down to a period
and a country, namely America. Actually, as in all genres and schools of
film-making, it exists all over the world-in France, Germany and the
Scandinavian countries in particular – and its roots can be traced well back
into the pre-war period, extending far beyond the 1940-1958 boundaries so often
set down.
British film noir is particularly fascinating, not only because it
has never been officially acknowledged to exist, but because its peak period
parallels that of American noir, but does so with several major differences, the
key one being that it has always been influenced by the French cinema of the
30’s rather than the German cinema of the 20’s.
While I don’t deny the
possibility of the rediscovery of one or two individual British silent features
that provide noir characteristics to the same remarkable extent as D. W.
Griffith’s 1914 THE ESCAPE, British noir actually has no real roots in either
the silent period or the early 30’s. Certain Hitchcock films come close – MURDER
(1930) and SABOTAGE (1936) in particular – there are too many other ingredients
that prevent them from being wholly representative of that school. There are two
basic reasons for the belated appearance of native noir in Britain. One is that
the British industry was always cautious, and always essentially
entertainment-oriented; down-beat films were constantly frowned on. (Films with
tragic or unhappy endings weren’t uncommon, but that isn’t quite the same
thing). Secondly, the best of noir seems to come out of the contemporary scene –
and the British film censors (exercising their restraints before production as
well as after) saw to it that films critical of the British way of life, or
offering social or political protest, just didn’t get made. Thus Walter
Greenwood’s powerful novel of life in the depression, Love on the Dole, was
barred from the screen in the 30’s. It wasn’t made until 1941, when the
publicity surrounding The Grapes of Wrath made it seem commercially viable for
the British to bring out their equivalent. The censors were mollified because
Britain was then at war, the depression was far behind them, and the film became
“history” rather than “social protest.”
British films from and of the
depression were unfailingly optimistic; while Hollywood was offering us I AM A
FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG, Britain gave us Gracie Fields’ SING AS WE GO. (Good
film though it is, it’s disconcerting to find it now regarded as the definitive
British spokesfilm for the depression!)
British noir got under way
tentatively in 1938 and 1939, virtually disappeared in the war years (appearing,
camouflaged, to add stylistic bite to a few war films), reappeared with a
vengeance in 1945, the first post-war year, and paralleled Hollywood in peaking
in 1947 and 1948.
Kenneth More, Kathleen Ryan and Andrew Ray in THE YELLOW
BALOON, 1952.
Most of them were the work of directors who had been studying
film in the 1930’s, and who regarded-or had been taught to regard-the ”Golden
Age” of French cinema of the mid to late 30’s as representing the peak of film
art. German influence had remained in British cinema, but to a diminishing
degree, and for new directors to be “inspired” by German technique during the
Nazi period would have been unwise and unpatriotic. In Hollywood of course,
where the leaders of the noir movement were the German emigré directors – Fritz
Lang, Billy Wilder, John Brahm and Robert Siodmak – German visuals had been a
part of Hollywood film grammar since the late 20’s and the horror cycle of the
early 30’s, and these directors were adept at combining those visuals with a
kind of naturalistic expressionism best illustrated by Siodmak’s CRISS CROSS
(1949). So while Hollywood noir went its some- what nightmarish way, inspired by
silent German films of fantasy and legend, British noir swerved off on a
different tangent, influenced by French poetic realism (QUAI DES BRUMES, LE JOUR
SE LEVE).
Apart from this initial stylistic difference, there were other ways
in which British noir was to diverge from its Hollywood counterpart. Britain had
fewer studios and made far less pictures, with as much stress on variety as
possible. In Hollywood, at Universal alone, Robert Siodmak, composer Miklos
Rosza, cinematographer Woody Bredell and such stars as Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo were under contract, and created a sense of familiarity and continuity
in the many noir films they made. In Britain, the few craftsmen and players who
specialized in noir were scattered, and rarely worked as a continuing unit, al-
though there was a certain amount of successful team-collaboration at Ealing
Studios, which, not coincidentally, made some of the best noirs. Too, London
studios were more conveniently located than Hollywood for appropriate location
shooting (especially since good, sunny weather was not a requirement for film
noir!)
Thus British noirs (with such notable exceptions as Cavalcanti’s THEY
MADE ME A FUGITIVE) utilized genuine city streets and other locations far more
than did Hollywood, possibly making them a little more realistic, but at the
same time losing the cohesive studio-controlled stylization that marked
Hollywood noir.
Crime has always been a dominant factor in the noir film, and
in Hollywoodfilm it was often organized crime, headed by an unassailable
Mabuse-derived master criminal, often with strong links to corrupt politicians.
British politicians are sometimes not very bright in their handling of private
scandals, but basically, in the performance of their duties, they are not
corrupt. And the British underworld, envious of what it knew of American crime
from Hollywood movies, tried to imitate it superficially (costume, wisecracking
patter) but was too inefficient to organize itself on a big scale. Thus crime in
the British noir is more personalized: the hapless, accidental murderer on the
run, or the war veteran’s involvement in petty black-marketeering, the dominant
criminal activity of the post-war era. British noir seems to lack the epic
proportions of its Hollywood counterpart in that it deals with ”little” people
caught up in fairly commonplace events. The definitive British noir, Robert
Hamer’s IF ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947), is particularly illustrative of this.
The British system of life unfortunately conspires to keep a lot of “little”
people in that niche permanently. With a lot of talent and persistence one can
still rise to the top in England-but the modicum of talent (that would allow a
person to succeed in the U.S.) is usually stifled in Britain by bureaucracy and
other restrictions. Moreover, after the war, the British were increasingly
frustrated when wartime austerity (food and clothes rationing for example) were
maintained for many years, and a return to normalcy seemed forever delayed.
Ambition didn’t seem to do much good, so they settled for security. Many British
dramas (BRIEF ENCOUNTER) and noirs are often misunderstood over here, because
the conclusions seem to be defeatist, whereas to the British they are rational
and logical, the only workable selection of two choices. American audiences may
wonder why the inhabitants of Bethnal Green, the drab London suburb that is the
setting of IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY, don’t just pack up and move, at least to a
suburb that has a few trees. The answers to that are (a) that housing in Britain
has always been a major problem, and such a move might not be possible, and (b)
that the people of these communities are often quite happy in them. IT ALWAYS
RAINS ON SUNDAY doesn’t stress the point (perhaps because it assumes it will be
taken for granted) but it does show the community as closely knit, offering
small-scale but enjoyable social gatherings, and with no signs of racial tension
between different ethnic groups. Only occasionally does the importance of
security and normalcy seem truly tragic, and then usually in a story that does
not deal with every-day life, and where the true tragedy of the final solution
is so hidden below the surface that it is virtually invisible. Typical is the
mirror episode (directed by Robert Hamer also) of the compendium horror film,
DEAD OF NIGHT. In that genuinely frightening story, the pleasant but cloddish
husband (Ralph Michael), quite unworthy of his more stylish and intellectually
stimulating wife (Googie Withers) really comes to interesting life only when he
is “claimed” by the haunted mirror. It’s significant that he is the only one of
the party of friends gathered for a weekend at Roland Culver’s cottage that does
not appear outside of his own story. One hopes that his wife had been smart
enough to dump him, but in all probability he was staying at home, earning a few
more pounds by bringing his dull accountancy work home from the office.
MINE
OWN EXECUTIONER, with Kieron Moore, and Burgess Meredith, 1947.
Which brings
us to another representative difference: professions. The major continuing
profession in American noir films is that of insurance (DOUBLE INDEMNITY,
PUSHOVER, PITFALL) since it conveniently provides the twin motivations of Greed
and Sexual Temptation. In British noirs, the unsympathetic heavies tend to be
uneducated spivs with delusions of belonging to an Upper Class (a major crime in
itself, beautifully exemplified by Griffith Jones in THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE)
who usually make their living from black marketeering and nightclubs. The
trapped, sympathetic victim-hero usually makes his living in a particularly
demeaning and non-profitable job. Eric Portman, haunted by the insanity of his
hangman father in one film, was himself an official hangman in another earning a
little extra money in another “demeaning” job, that of a barber. Because of its
servile status and the very limited amount of money to be made from it, the
British noirs really had it in for barbers. Ralph Richardson’s frustration at
earning only a few pennies a day as a barber in ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE is what
leads him to theft and murder. Unlike many American writers and directors, who
may well have been well-educated, but had often been forced to rough it in
menial and/or purely physical jobs, the majority of British writers and
directors had been well educated and from a near aristocracy. Their innate class
distinction prejudices invariably show up in their films, and the poor barber
seems to be regarded as only a step above the toilet attendant or the garbage
collector. (The former was ignored in British films, the latter used frequently
for purely comedic purposes).
In certain ways, British noir did parallel
American, not least in the setting up of specialist directors and technicians,
and of course, players. Alberto Cavalcanti and Robert Hamer became the
directorial specialists in British noir (Hamer also encompassing black comedy as
well) with David MacDonald, Carol Reed and the American Joseph Losey trailing.
Eric Portman, as both victim and psycho, became Britain’s closest parallel to
Robert Mitchum in terms of his usage, although of course he avoided the tough
detective hero that Mitchum did so well. Trevor Howard, Robert Newton, Herbert
Lom and Richard Todd were all familiar male figures, while Margaret Lockwood,
Jean Kent and Diana Dors dominated the distaff side. Despite the thematic French
influence, cinematographic specialists were often German, especially in the
earlier days when Gunther Krampf’s skills were much utilized. While quite
coincidentally Miklos Rosza provided the score for perhaps the first total,
bona-fide British noir (1939’s ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE) before monopolizing the
field in Hollywood, it was the French Georges Aurio who became the dominant noir
composer for films of realism (IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY) and fantasy and horror
(DEAD OF NIGHT, CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS). The emphasis on postwar problems and
particularly on the neuroses of war victims and veterans (MINE OWN EXECUTIONER,
THE SMALL BACK ROOM) came to its peak in 1947-49 just as it did in Hollywood in
such films as THE LOCKET.
As in Hollywood too, British noir seemed poised for
a major breakthrough in 1939, with five key films. But in Britain, the war
brought noir production to a virtual standstill. While American noir thrillers
did well at the British box office, such bleak films as OF MICE AND MEN were not
well supported by wartime audiences seeking escapism. 1945 saw a major return to
the noir style with six films, but most of them significantly period stories or
fantasies not related to contemporary life. In 1946, the number was down to
three, but two of them were major breakthrough noirs. Daybreak (even the title
was somewhat of a homage to Came’s LE JOUR SE LEVE) was the most French of all
the British noirs, and the center of a stormy censorship debacle. WANTED FOR
MURDER, while it overlooked many intriguing possibilities, was the first of the
new noirs to be both a thriller and to be set in contemporary London. It also
made references to the austerity of postwar life, though in a tolerant way. A
young romantic couple, dining out, find that all of the items that attract them
on the menu are actually unavailable. The British were still able to laugh at
the retention of wartime hardships, confident that better times were just around
the corner. But they weren’t, and all the frustrations and resentments seem to
explode on film in 1947 with a huge leap from three noirs to seventeen.
Part
two of this article in the next issue will include a checklist of British noir
from 1938 to 1963 (the reasons for those boundary dates will be explained
therein) and a survey of the noir highlights of that 25-year period.

Hitchcock Noir and the Use of Landscape

The origins of this post lie in a book I found in a used bookstore a few months back: The Cinematic City edited by David B Clarke (Routledge 1997). This is an academic book with a collection of essays on the “relationship between city and cinema”, which contains some fascinating essays on the noir city. This title I have perused and commented on the Film Noir blog. An excellent Essay on noir in the films and craft of Alfred Hitchcock can be found in
Silver, Alain J.: The fragments of the mirror: The use of landscape in Hitchcock. In: Wide Angle 1,3, 1977, S. 52-61. See my other post on the Noir Encyclopedia II.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/filmstudies/reviewslist.html#film
This is the most comprehensive indexing and resource guide to film studies I have seen and can be accessed to in depth research on most topics.

Pound the medievalist

http://washingtonart.com/beltway/pound.html

• I have noted the following from the article below:

• His fear of disorder and obsession with crackpot economic theories derived from his association with Major Charles H Douglas


• He assumed high fascist arrogance of state imposed order as a consequence


• This was delusion with nasty anti Semitism added which he later repudiated.
• H investigated the causes of the war in his lengthy essays to be discussed in another post.
• Was he a paranoid eccentric or just off the scale as a poet with a super sensitive antenna?
• Are poets the antennae of the race?
• He broke through the barriers and expanded poetry as no one previously had done.
• Note what TS Eliot who with other writers petitioned for his freedom had to say.He wrote to Archibald MacLeish concerning Pound of the problem to get Pound released. They would have to convince the authorities he was neither sane nor insane and might "be off the scale."
• One of my professors from undergraduate days at Calvin College, Henry Zylstra, suggested that possibility back in 1949. Pound's derangement, he said, might be more than a personality disorder; "Pound may be so sensitive a recording device that he is recording the schizophrenia deep within western culture." QUOTE
• His revolution was deep and broad. (More narrowly you can find Pound's imprint on the output of Pound-like cantos by Washington poet Carlo Parcelli, and on Parcelli's work with the e-magazine Flashpoint.) quote

But what finally is Washington to make of this poet-in-residence? I'm back
to Uncle Ez. The "treatment" had probably little effect. He had surrendered
himself in Italy so that he could get to Washington to "save the Constitution."
His obsession with crackpot economic theories, derived largely from Major
Charles H. Douglas, and his fear of disorder, sane enough to begin with ("1918
began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same"), twisted him into the
high fascist arrogance of state-imposed order. He carried into that delusion a
nasty anti-Semitism first acquired in the suburbs of Philadelphia. At St. E's he
was still ranting about the need for racial purity. Out of touch with America
(and also by the way with Nazi death camps, which he would instinctively have
abhorred) he had thought for years that Mussolini was the hero who would solve
the fiscal mess at the root of poverty and war. Uncle Ez was the kind of
paranoid eccentric who would listen to no one but himself. Unforgivably so. Now
all he could do, holding onto his arrogance, was to move past Mussolini's
collapse into older kinds of order that he could (and he really could) make
present and new in the later cantos. Washington meant psychoanalysts and lawyers
and bureaucrats, and that to any Uncle Ez in the world means almost nothing at
all.
Assuming that there is such a thing as Washington poetry, hopefully
never defined, Pound of course influenced it enormously ­ simply because he
broke through and expanded the possibilities of all poetry in English. From him
we learned to respect hard edges and metrical log jams, we learned to mine words
instead of manipulating readers with words. Our poems dared to become little
cyclotrons, energy transformers. His revolution was deep and broad. (More
narrowly you can find Pound's imprint on the output of Pound-like cantos by
Washington poet Carlo Parcelli, and on Parcelli's work with the e-magazine
Flashpoint.)
It is tempting to honor Pound's achievement by setting aside
what is ugly in its content. But that won't do. You can't separate a poem's
content from its form and still be talking about a poem. Poetry is formed
content. T. S. Eliot may have seen a way through when he wrote to Archibald
MacLeish that their problem in trying to get Pound released would be to convince
others that Pound "is neither sane nor insane." That is to say, Pound might be
off the scale. One of my professors from undergraduate days at Calvin College,
Henry Zylstra, suggested that possibility back in 1949. Pound's derangement, he
said, might be more than a personality disorder; "Pound may be so sensitive a
recording device that he is recording the schizophrenia deep within western
culture." That's an interesting way of reading Pound, who said early on that
"poets are the antennae of the race."
It was only after his release from
Washington, back in what Henry James called deep dark old Europe, that Pound got
free of his furies. After long periods of silence (incredible to anyone who knew
him) he would admit to visitors that he had been wrong. "I botched it." He told
Allen Ginsberg that "the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice
of anti-Semitism." And in the end, far from Washington, the indignant gods he
had tried to recover who had never really left us (the mind, the mind) came
almost back, close enough again in fragments of cantos to bring to his madness
and imperfections and failings a final hush:
A blown husk that is
finished........but the light sings eternala pale flare over
marshes........where the salt hay whispers to tide's change.
(Canto
115)

Dahl and Dealings with Stephenson and CS Forester

Dahl's writing career jump started quickly with Shot Down Over Libya.Forster had asked for some RAF anecdotes to make a story but published Dahl's reminiscences exactly as they were.The title of the article was changed to that title although h was not shot down. During the war he worked for the BIS writing propaganda for the Allied Cause.He was introduced to espionage and the Canadian spymaster Wm Stephenson known as Intrepid.He supplied intelligence from Washington to Stephenson and his organization British Security Coordination.He was sent back to Britain for alleged misconduct by British embassy officials and Stephenson sent him back to Washington after the war with a promotion.


Revealed in the 80's, he was also an agent for MI-6, the British foreign intelligence service to promote Britain's cause and message in the U.S., working with Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy.He combated the America First Movement.

Dahl married Patrician Neal in 53 and was married for 30 years and had 5 children: Olivia (who died of measles encephalitis in 1962, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy. He dedicated The BFG to Olivia after her death, and subsequently became a proponent of immunisation.[13]
Quote- Olivia died of measles encephalitis in 62. He dedicated the BFG after her death, and became a proponent of immunisation. After Theo's injury he became involved with the WDT valve to alleviate his son's condition hydrocephalus when his baby carriage was hit by a taxi in NY City.
He married Patricia Neal in 53 and in 65 she had three aneurysms and he took charge of her rehabilitation. They were divorced in 83 following Dahl's affair with her friend Felicity Crosland whom he subsequently married, 22 years his junior.
His children and grandchildren had attained prestigious careers later:

• Ophelia Dahl is director and co-founder (with doctor Paul Farmer) of Partners in Health, a non-profit organisation QUOTE
• Lucy Dahl is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Tessa's daughter Sophie Dahl (who was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her grandfather's book The BFG) is a model and author who remembers Roald Dahl as "a very difficult man – very strong, very dominant ... not unlike the father of the Mitford sisters QUOTE

An aside. Dahls' detailed bio appears in The Irregulars, a sound book I've been listening to. His meeting with C S Forrester, a then young writer and agent of the BIS, to romanticize and high light the British plight was given flesh and detailed.The BIS engaged in cultural propaganda in romanticizing the British plight and the "evil" Nazi menace to win sympathy in the US with the British cause to engage America in the war. His writing stint was accidental and the story A Piece of Cake was accepted unaltered by Forrester. Britain's plight was showcased effectively and the support of FDR proved a tip in the balance.

Dahl began writing in 1942, after he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as
Assistant Air Attaché. His first
published work, in the 1 August 1942 issue of The Saturday
Evening Post was "Shot Down Over Libya", describing the crash of his Gloster
Gladiator. C. S. Forester had asked
Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story.
After Forester sat down to read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish
it exactly as it was. The original title of the article was "A Piece of
Cake"—the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that the he
was not "shot down".[7]
During
the war, Forester worked for the British Information Service and was writing
propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption.[8] This work
introduced Dahl to espionage and the activities of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson,
known by the codename "Intrepid". During the war, Dahl supplied intelligence
from Washington to Stephenson and his organisation, which was known as British
Security Coordination. Dahl was sent back to Britain, for supposed
misconduct by British Embassy officials: "I got booted out by the big boys," he
said. Stephenson sent him back to Washington—with a promotion.[9] After the
war, Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organisation and he and
Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.[10]
He ended
the war as a Wing Commander.
His record of five aerial victories, qualifying him as a flying ace, has been
confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records, although it
is most likely that he scored more than that during 20 April 1941 where 22
German aircraft were downed.[11]
He was
also revealed in the 1980s to have been a clandestine agent for MI-6, the
British Foreign Intelligence Service, serving in the United States to help
promote Britain's interests and message in the United States and combat the "America First"
movement, working with other well known men including Ian Fleming and David
Ogilvy.[12]
[edit]
Postwar life
[edit]
Family

Patricia
Neal and Roald Dahl
Dahl married American actress Patricia
Neal on 2 July 1953 at Trinity Church
in New York City. Their
marriage lasted for 30 years and they had five children: Olivia (who died of measles
encephalitis in 1962, aged seven), Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy. He
dedicated The BFG to Olivia after her death, and subsequently became a proponent
of immunisation.[13]
When he
was four months old, Theo Dahl was severely injured when his baby carriage was
hit by a taxi in New York City. For a time, he suffered from hydrocephalus, and as a
result, his father became involved in the development of what became known as
the "Wade-Dahl-Till" (or
WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition.[14][15]
In
1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms
while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy; Dahl took control of her
rehabilitation and she eventually relearned to talk and walk.[16]
They were divorced in 1983 following Dahl's affair with Neal's friend, Felicity
Crosland, and he subsequently married Felicity ("Liccy") d'Abreu Crosland (born
12 December 1938), who was 22 years his junior.
Ophelia Dahl is director
and co-founder (with doctor Paul Farmer) of Partners in Health, a
non-profit organisation. Lucy Dahl is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Tessa's
daughter Sophie Dahl (who was the
inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her grandfather's book The BFG) is a
model and author who remembers Roald Dahl as "a very difficult man – very
strong, very dominant ... not unlike the father
of the Mitford sisters sort of roaring round the house with these very loud
opinions, banning certain types – foppish boys, you know – from coming
round."[citation
needed]

Noir Encyclopedia Apr 2010

http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/new-edition-of-the-film-noir-encyclopedia-slated-for-april-2010.html/comment-page-1#comment-2548

Note my comment on this blog on the upcoming Apr 2010 Noir encyclopedia and also on Nopir as Cathartic and British Film Noir.The book Iallude to is a group of excellent seminal essays found on Amazon. I gave the url site in my comment.

Roald Dahl's further adventures WWII

I can but imagine the above scenes as he saw them in the great expanse. His mistaken mission to no man's land was so typical of the errors that cost lives during the war. Fortunately, he received recoverable albeit lifelong injuries. Spared for his later covert fiascoes consistent with his personality? Note the Eleusina and Battle of Athens campaigns . He was alongside Pat Pattle which must have been,again only I can imagine, an intoxicating experience for Dahl given his temperament and the initial attendant disappointments must have been telling when transferred as attache to the British embassy in Washington. Was MI6 a shot in the arm to him and a boon to the British allied cause just when needed?The delivery of the package was again beyond the call of duty or fuelled his addiction to adventure and danger. Confusion of aerial engagement none knowing whom they shot down is well voiced by Dahl at the time.The pilots hiding is reminiscent of the rescue of pilots by the French resistance and also of my reading of stories of their being sheltered and hid by Monsignor O'Flaherty in Rome. Just an interesting aside. Note the rest of the narrative and their being lost from the squadron.

Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersa
Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight, and was then taken
by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in
and out of love with a nurse, Mary Welland. Dahl had fallen in love with her
voice while he was blind, but once he regained his sight, he decided that he no
longer loved her. An RAF inquiry into the crash revealed that the location to
which he had been told to fly was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been
sent instead to the no man's land between
the Allied and Italian forces.[7]
In
February 1941, Dahl was discharged from hospital and passed fully fit for flying
duties. By this time, 80 Squadron had been transferred to the Greek campaign and
based at Eleusina, near Athens. The squadron was now
equipped with Hawker Hurricanes. Dahl
flew a replacement Hurricane across the Mediterranean Sea in April 1941, after
seven hours flying Hurricanes. By this stage in the Greek campaign, the RAF had
only 18 combat aircraft in Greece: 14 Hurricanes and four Bristol Blenheim light
bombers. Dahl saw his first aerial combat on 15 April 1941, while flying alone
over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were
bombing ships and shot one down. On 16 April in another air battle, he shot down
another Ju-88.
On 20 April 1941, Dahl took part in the "Battle of Athens",
alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle and Dahl's
friend David Coke. Of 12 Hurricanes
involved, five were shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle.
Greek observers on the ground counted 22 German aircraft downed, but because of
the confusion of the aerial engagement none of the pilots knew who they shot
down. Dahl described it as "an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards
me from every side."
The wing returned back to Elevsis. Later on in the day,
the aerodrome was strafed by Bf 109s, but none
of them hit any of the Hawker Hurricanes. The Hurricanes were then evacuated on
21 April 1941 to a small, secret airfield near Megara, a small village, where
the pilots hid. Approximately 50 miles (80 km) north the Luftwaffe was
searching for the remaining Hurricanes. By approximately 6 or 7 a.m., about
thirty Bf-109s and Stuka dive-bombers flew
over the seven pilots who were hiding. The Stukas dived bombed a tanker in the Bay of
Athens, and sank it. Dahl and his comrades were only 500 yards (460 m)
away from the incident. Surprisingly, neither the bombers nor the fighters were
able to spot the Hurricanes parked in the nearby field. At some time in the
afternoon, an Air Commodore arrived at
the airfield by car and asked if one of the seven could volunteer to fly and
deliver a package to a man named Carter at Elevsis. Roald Dahl was the only one
who volunteered to do it. The contents of the package were of vital importance,
and Dahl was told that if he was shot down, or captured, he should burn the
package immediately, so it would not fall into enemy hands, and once he had
handed over the package, he was to fly to Argos, an airfield, with the rest
of the seven pilots in the squadron.
For the rest of April, the situation was
horrible for the RAF in Greece. If the Luftwaffe had destroyed the remaining
seven planes, they would then have had complete control of the skies in Greece.
They intended to wipe them out. If the squadron were to be found, it would mean
the worst. According to Dahl's report, at about 4:30 p.m. a Bf 110 swooped over
the airfield at Argos, and found them. The pilots discussed that it would take
the 110 roughly half an hour to return to base, and then another half hour for
the whole enemy squadron to get ready for take-off, and then another half hour
for them to reach Argos. They had roughly an hour and thirty minutes until they
would be strafed by enemy aircraft. However, instead of having the remaining
seven pilots airborne and intercepting the 110s an hour ahead, the CO ordered
them to escort ships evacuating their army in Greece at 6:00. The seven planes
got up into the air, but the formation was quickly disorganised as the radios
were not working. Dahl and Coke found themselves separated from the rest of the
wing. They could not communicate with them, so they continued on flying, looking
for the ships to escort. Eventually they ran out of fuel and returned back to
Argos, where they found the entire airfield in smoke and flames, with tents
flamed, ammunition destroyed, etc.; however there were few casualties. While
Roald Dahl and David Coke took off, three other aircraft in the wing somehow
managed to get away. The sixth pilot who was taking off was strafed by the enemy
and killed. The seventh pilot managed to bail out. Everybody else in the camp
was hiding in the slit trenches. Immediately after Dahl and Coke figured out
what was going on, the squadron was sent to Crete. A month later they were
evacuated to Egypt.
As the Germans were pressing on Athens, Dahl was
evacuated to Egypt. His squadron was reassembled in Haifa. From there, Dahl flew
sorties every day for a period of four weeks, shooting down a Vichy French Air
Force Potez 63 on 8 June and another
Ju-88 on 15 June, but he then began to get severe headaches that caused him to black out. He was
invalided home to Britain; at this time his rank was Flight
Lieutenant.