The Maltese Falcon Discussion Notes
- Dash O'Hammen - known for Thin Man, created the continental operative character (detective)
- The Maltese Falcon book - convoluted
Identify First Noir
- Moral ambiguity - all characters have slinky morality
- Manipulation
- Ends on a low note and loose ends aren't tied up
- Pessimistic tone - darker Hollywood ideology
- Existentialism - Spade's "when a man's partner gets killed you need to do something" speech Clip
- Surrealism - Spade getting drugged at Gutmans Clip
Noir Elements
- Crime
- Murder
- Moral Ambiguity
- Lower Detective (PI)
- Femme Fetale
- Pessimism
- Cynical
- Subjective quality when Spade is drugged
Thematic Features
- Hopelessness
- Despair
- Web of Fate
Stylistic Features
- Water/Rain/wet streets - evoke a sense of personal despair
- Venetian blinds - Dynamic Lighting effects
Other Versions of the Film - Other Titles
- Dangerous Woman
- Satan me a Lady
- The Black Bird
- The Maltese Falcon
- Different ending between Maltese Falcon (1941) and the 1931 version Clip
Discussion on 1941 vs 1931
- Bounces camera between both phone conversation partners
- Camera focuses on the speaker, a bit disconcerting - Extreme focus
- Light is softer
- Femme Fatale seems more cornered animal "considered bad"
- 1930 - action oriented - what is happening - individual
- 1941 - character driven, focus really on the characters interaction
- Very different acting styles
The Maltese Falcon Doesn't Have...
- Voice Over
- Rain
- Emphasis on low key lighting
- Emphasis on subjective (no voice over, only slight moment of dreamlike subjectivity when he's drugged
Lenses
- 1941 uses shorter lenses
- Greater depth of field, deep focus
- Sharper harder images
Movie Discussion
- Doesn't Care about Archer or his wife
- No real good person in the film
- Bridget's a bit confused in her actions, caught in her own web
- Love between Spade and Bridget at the end seemed to come out of left field
- Spade is self-serving
- Music brought along a heightened sense of suspense
- Bogart: Maltese Falcon vs Casablanca - both jaded but one has a moral code (Casablanca)
- Cairo: homosexual -code: perfumed handkerchief, hooked cane play Clip
- Interesting names: Cairo, Gutman, O'Shanase, Spade
Timeline
- '46 Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Clortier named Film Noir
- '55 Borde and Chaumeton publish the Panarama du Film noir American
- '70 Durgnat attempts to categorize noir (Mentioned by Schrader pg 582)
- '72 Schrader writes essay on noir in Film Comment
Dergnat Family Tree
- Prison
- Gangsters
- Boxing
- Spy
- On the run
- Private Eyes/Adventurers
- Psycho
- Horror/Fantasy
- Mid class Murder
- Sexual Pathology
- Hostages to Fortune
Problems with category? too broad, many noir films don't relate
Borde and Chaumeton
- Series/cycle
- Nightmarish/weird/erotic/ambivalent/cruel
- Response to Western mood to WWII
- Crime - most common characteristic
- Disorients the audience
For Borde and Chaumeton
Noir is a series of film noir with presence of crime as its common denominator, the aim of which is to create alienation in the audience (not from film)
Schrader
- Noir - not a genre
- Should be defined by tone or mood
- Calls it a style
- Compares it to other film movements
- Historical time period
- Takes Durgnat's 11 categories and tries to unify them, ideas of the 30's become paranoia
Influence - Schrader's Identifiers
- Post WWII disillusionment
- Post war realism
- German Expatriates who brought chiaroscuro lighting, expressionist lighting
- Hard boiled detective fiction
- Missing theme - passion of past and present but fear of the future
- Noir - anti-American dream
Phases According to Schrader
- 1941-1946 Wartime Period
- 2945-1949 Post war realistic - grey melodramas move to the streets (Double Indemnity)
- 1949-1955 Lots of "B" noirs with psychotic protagonists - loss of integrity and heroism
- 1955 Kiss Me, Deadly - Masterpiece of film noir
- 1958 Touch of Evil - the Epitaph
Dominant French International Movement
- Surrealism 20's to late 30's, early '41s
- Existentialism supplemented Surrealism after WWII, late '40s and '50s
Surrealism
- Avant garde artistic movement after WWII
- Attack or bourgeois values
- Rebellion of Catholic Church
- Skeptical of art
Surrealism (continued) on Noir
- Fascination with unconsciousness
- Fascinated with human sexuality - Freudian ideas
- According to Naremore, mostly Men - ideas of sexuality mostly male fantasy
Existentialism
- Post WWII
- Philosophical movement
- Jean-Perral Sartre devises idea of Existentialism
- Good is Dead
- We create our own values
- existential stories about existential choices (Spade's Existential speech
- has positive and negative sides
- Positive: emphasizes freedom, authenticity, responsibility
- Negative: emphasizes meaninglessness and nothingness
- Considers with artistic modernism
Modernism
- Key 20th century art movement
- Reaction to and rejection of 18th century Enlightenment thinking
- Response to horrors of WWI (trench warfare and the lost generation)
- Features self consciousness:
- Non-representation painting
- Stream-of-consciousness novel
- Atonal music
- Absurd drama
- Narrational uncertainty [and post-modernism]
- Self-consciousness emerging through original art, not been done before. Post-Modernism based on earlier traditionalist art subconsciously - combination of old and new reactions to Modernism
- Post-Modernism is playing around with Modernism ideas
Artistic Modernism
- Artists: James Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso
- Mend novel emphasizes narrative discontinuity, experience with time
- 19 - omniscient narration - novel
- 20th - subjective narration - novel
- Influenced by Freud
- Suspicious of myth of capitalism
- Characters with moral ambiguity, world no longer ethically understandable
Mode Cinema
- Post WWII European cinema
- Self-conscious
- Draws attention to itself
- Reject certainties of Enlightenment thinking
- Challenges status quo
- Narrative uncertainty
- Breaking with past
- Discontinuity of editing
- Artistic Modernism is consistently in conflict with Hollywood melodrama