Murray Pomerance

Light, Looks, and The Lodger

One interesting harbinger of modernity may have been a technical and economic development that took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century theatre, as stage light was transformed. The eighteenth-century writer August Klingemann informs us that by 1825, the lighting of the auditorium was still paid for by the court, while the lighting of the stage was an obligation of the theatrical management, with the effect that stages were generally dimmer than auditoria. As, by the mid-nineteenth century, stages became brighter and then, with the introduction of electric illumination around 1880, quite dazzling; and as concomitantly the auditorium fell into darkness, the performance area became distinguished as a locus of notable events, and thus it developed that, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, “The audience that assembled in the auditorium now directed all its attention to the events on the stage. In essence, it was no longer ‘an audience’, but a large number of individuals, each of whom followed the drama for him or herself. The new ideal was to achieve direct communication between the spectator and what was being presented” (206). The composer Marc’Antonio Ingegneri stipulated, “The darker the auditorium, the more luminous seems the stage”; so, as Schivelbusch points out, “the more distinct” seemed the objects and creatures that appeared on it (206). The modern “audience” as we know it no longer gives serious consideration to the auditorium itself or to actions taking place there but instead lingers unwatched—indeed, invisible–outside the precincts of light, and is born from the advent of electric stage lighting. The new darkness of the auditorium fragmented a socially organized unity into discrete parts, reduced each onlooker, as long as the incandescent stage was there to be gazed at, to one whose powers of observation could be specifically isolated not only from those of his neighbors but also from other characteristics of his own personality. The audience as an agglomeration of individual witnesses springs from the technical possibility of focusing on a highlit area of heightened value. Stanley Cavell addresses this focal gesture and predilection, this looking away from looking, when he writes of cinema, “One can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture: the one working now. When my limitation to myself feels like a limitation of myself, it seems that I am always leaving something unsaid; as it were, the saying is left out” (126). If we were to ask, “Where is that saying or looking left when it is left out?” we could discover the answer to be only, “In the dark, from which harbor we eagerly see the light”–or see, more sharply, “what light falls upon, the world illuminated.” Interestingly, Cavell continues, “The camera is outside its subject as I am outside my language.” The

The Dramaturgy of Action and Involvement in Sports Film

Sport is essentially cinematic. Its moments are temporally contingent dramatizations of intent and meaning especially opened to vision–that of fans, referees, scorekeepers, managers and owners, certainly, and also that of athletes performing. Unlike much organized activity that is the subject of popular film–legal argument in the courtroom, kissing, surgical or police procedure, corporate management, university lecturing, writing and other creative activity–sport is naturally susceptible to cinematic treatment because it is inherently and densely consequential and inherently visual. At present I am interested in the conventional treatment of sport in Hollywood narrative, especially in the use of the camera to create for the screen a rendition of sports activity that fulfills what Mary Beth Haralovich notes as the “requirements of the entertainment film,” notably “dramatic value, narrative clarity, unambiguous morality” (n.d.). This analysis is an attempt to attend both more microcosmically and more discursively to the actual instrumental engagement of viewers’ attention and involvement than do typical analyses of filmed sport, which tend to take the diegetic action as given so that it may be considered in light of prevailing cultural considerations. For me, even one of the best of these analyses, the especially sensitive and brilliant sociological treatment of sports cinema to be found in Baker (2003), foregoes a treatment of actual shot construction in relation to narrative logic, taking that logic more or less for granted and proceeding toward an exceptionally astute discussion of numerous sports narratives that stand upon it. In his discussion of Body and Soul (1947), for instance, it is to “the combination of [James Wong] Howe’s newsreel style [of cinematography] and the fight announcer’s subdued description” (119) that he credits our engaged participation with Charley (John Garfield) as he endures

Tom Ripley’s Talent

This chapter elaborates on the notion of the performance in Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Minghella’s beautifully photographed and exquisitely composed film not only encourages the recipient (along with the protagonist) to fall in love with Dickie Greenleaf’s luxurious lifestyle, it also suggests that performance may be the only way out of his circumstance, condition, and history. It is Ripley’s ever-shifting, mendacious performance that makes him a high priest of Baudrillard’s ‘cult of the ephemeral’ and thus a reflection of contemporary man.

Introduction: The color of our eyes

Many years ago, I came across a tiny postcard shop in which I felt it would be ideal to make a shot for inclusion in a gallery show I was preparing. One of the postcards in particular struck my attention. ‘Who needs full color,’ it said boldly, ‘when real life is so black and white?’ In the image as I composed it, this black-and-white card, ‘stark’ and ‘real,’ was surrounded by dozens of absurd and hilarious vividly colored others of many sorts. The irony of the composition somehow dulled the question that card posed, yet it continued to riddle me: ‘Who needs full color when real life is so black and white?’ There was no doubt in my mind that I, for one, needed color, and not only as an artistic medium; nor that the real world, the world of equality and inequality, power and powerlessness, luxury and hunger – not to say a world of race and racism – was in many ways, at least theoretically, black and white. I needed to know then, and persistently need to be asking myself now, what it is that color is for – for me, anyway, because I know it is of the most supreme value, as important as the flavor of air. To speak of it from an esthetic point of view, an esthetic and technical point of view, color operates, I think, in two different, divergent ways, both on the screen and in our real-world experience. Screen color is the more provocative, however, because it is bounded, composed, subjected to an artist’s laws of balance, gravity, and pulse. Cinematic color is representational and it is evocative but, I would argue, not both of these at the same instant. Our readiness to be informed is not the same as our readiness to be touched. As representation, color calls up a perception of ‘the real.’ That is, it offers us a version of the world congruent with what the normal (non-colorblind) eye sees in looking at ‘reality,’ thus a view that indexes and substantiates ‘real life,’ a view in which lipstick is, roughly, red (Cate Blanchett in Carol), and trees in the spring are green (Boyhood), the sky can be blue (The Tree of Life), a horse might be chestnut brown running across a lush green, grassy field (Sense and Sensibility). Or, to see a less elite corner of the world: an out of luck street person might inhabit a dull, browny-gray

Bells Are Ringing

[S1] 2x Syncopated Back-Lock-Back, Rock Back-Recover, &, 2x Syncopated Twinkle, Fwd Rock-Recover, & 1&a Step R back, Cross L over R, Step R back 2&a Step L back, Cross R over L, Step L back 3 4& Rock R back, Recover weight on L, Step R beside L** 5&a Diagonally cross L over R, Side rock R, step L beside R 6&a Diagonally cross R over L, Side rock L, step R beside L 7 8& Rock L fwd, Recover weight on R, Step L beside R

A Taste of Steven Spielberg

It is illogical to conclude from his being the most financially successful filmmaker of all time that there is little or nothing of philosophical and social value in the work of Steven Spielberg. Yet, exactly because he has had such intensive popular appeal and perhaps also because when, infrequently, he has spoken of his career he has been so articulate (if not glib), Spielberg has proved anathema to widespread serious interest, achieving at best the status of a man who can be written about because he has made a number of provocative or beguiling films but never quite managed to become the sort of auteur, with the recognisable style and coherent obsessions, who merits inclusion in a directorial canon.

The Wedding That Never Was

Aside from the fact that they constitute sterling examples—perhaps limiting cases—of the patently false decorated as the patently authentic, cinematic wedding scenes hold interest because as dramatic constructions, and much like wedding scenes in real life, they iconize and apotheosize a ballad of romance, resolving the tension inherent in the unification of a pair of different lives and bringing to a ceremonial climax some implicit story of mounting and unvanquished “love.” Whether or not they transpire completely onscreen (very typically in narrative cinema, they do not) diegetic weddings tend to be designed to be interpreted as occurring in their narrative worlds in a fulsome and complete way: that is, we are usually expected to imagine the fullness and completeness of a ceremony only parts of which we see, and to think of cinematic interruptions as being purely of the extradiegetic sort, serving the needs of the editor and the producer rather than reflecting actual ceremonial breaks in the fictional event. Interrupted weddings, as in The Barbarian (1933)—where a bourgeois white tourist (Myrna Loy), having been proposed to by an Egyptian guide (Ramon Novarro), “[gives] herself over to a lengthy and transcendent native marriage ceremony in which holy waters are brought for them to drink; but when the sacred goblet is in her hand, she throws the ceremonial liquid into his face and arrogantly walks out” (Pomerance 35)—in The Graduate (1967; where the bride is stolen), in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994; where the bride is found hopelessly wanting), or in Prelude to a Kiss (1992; where the bride is accidentally transmogrified) are infrequent. Thus, in films from Sunrise (1927) to The Lady Eve (1941) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), from Father of the Bride (1950) through Armageddon (1998) to The King of Comedy (1983) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), in a magically shortened space of time, ideal for filling only a single movie scene, the process of wedding, however elaborate it is when seen through the lens of religion or philosophy, can nicely be contracted and displayed, and some of its more complex elements—such as the legal documentation and/or blood testing—deftly elided. Sometimes, as in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), a wedding is all promise (and nothing but); sometimes, as in The Philadelphia Story and The Lady Eve (1941), the wedding process is represented by only the most curtailed depiction of ceremonial action, or indeed

Young body on the beach

In cinema, the beach often becomes something beyond the kind of luscious but perfunctory site suggested in classical painting and in the complexities of eighteenth-century therapeutic discourse. It is a setting for notable drama, emphatic, romantic or apotheotic. Screened beach scenes go beyond nature by showing the sands as a heightener of dramatic effect. The beach often sets the display of a particular body, powerful and young but also, like the sand, part of the cycle of history. The young body on the beach is the object of distanct adoration in Death in Venice (1971), a metaphor for commercialization in Jaws (1975), a sign of the immortality of romance in Pauline à la plage (1983), and an outgrowth of ego confronting its reality in The Beach (2000).

“Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel”: François Truffaut’s “Trilogy”

The voice of the narrator in Francois Truffaut’s L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977) summarizes the happenings of that film in a little poem, which Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, long-time compatriots and collaborators of Truffaut’s, choose as a concluding epigraph to their collection of his Letters. Posed modestly against a portrait of the filmmaker, which bears the caption, “Francois Truffaut died in hospital on 21 October 1984,” it reads: Out of all of that, something nevertheless will remain, a trace, a testament, a rectangular object, 320 bound pages. What we call a book.

Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Maldwell, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008

There were moments in reading the book when I wanted to know more about Jordan’s actual life, though you can glean that by reading and re-reading the interview with him by Pramaggiore, which contains some information about his background as first a novelist, his “accidental” entry into the movie business, and some fun anecdotes and insights about his time in Hollywood. Those are editorial calls, however, and the format may have been set. Still, it couldn’t hurt or diminish a scholarly patina to have the briefest of biographical statement. Maybe just a page or so to flip to on occasion to get his personal chronology. It wouldn’t have made it a coffee table book. In general, however, I am convinced and enriched. Pramaggiore’s informed analysis enlightened and enlivened my memory of the Jordan films I have seen, and made me want to get to the others. She finds a critical theory for his movies, while not perverting them to her own authorial ends. It is perhaps to be expected, but most of the book is devoted to a lengthy analysis of the major films. I would have liked a bit more about some of the smaller labors of love which Pramaggiore (and Jordan) refer to (and since this is a scholarly publication, why not?) to see how Jordan’s concerns were developed in those mainly independent incubators. When a book makes you want to read more about it subject, that’s a very good sign indeed. And though it’s reviewing hubris to criticize one specific “omission” that one has in mind, I wish somebody would explain to me the scene in Mona Lisa where terrible looking props of rubber gloves, scissors, and other S & M-looking objects come out of a doctor’s medicine bag in preparation for a session with a hooker, Cathy (played by Kate Hardie) if memory serves. Perhaps however it may be more horrible—gothically horrible as Pramaggiore would have it—to have the imagining be worse than the literal reality.