Out of the Past: A look into a genre

This week, Duke University’s writer-in-residence, Howard Norton, visited my creative writing class. When asked about habits as a writer, he revealed that he often draws inspiration from the performances and one-liners found in film noir movies shown on the Turner Classic Movie channel late at night.

And his certainly work reflects this: in the paragraph he read to us, the narrator announces he has murdered someone within the first few sentences.

This is the essence of film noir: the celebration of crime, love, death—the extremes and dark “noir” sides of human nature. All of these are wildly present in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of The Past (1947), a film traditionally thought to be exemplary of all the genre has come to represent.

But it is not only plot or thematic elements that have contributed to this film’s being classified as a classic of the “film noir” genre. There are also cinematic factors that cause it to be associated with the genre, like the usage of shadow imagery and low lighting.

Thomas Schatz, by applying Ferdinand de Sassaure’s canonical linguistic explanation of communication to the art of film, makes the claim that these are the “words” of the “language” spoken by a genre.

He proposes that film genres speak in particular languages, using various techniques and conventions that have become identifiable to anyone with a fair amount of movie-watching under his or her belt. “To discuss the Western genre is to address neither a single Western film nor even all Westerns, but rather a system of conventions which identifies Westerns films as such.” So certain elements convey the intent of certain films to belong in certain genres the same way certain words belong to the vocabularies of different languages. If you see a man on a horse in front of a desert scene you know you are watching a Western just as when you hear a person say “bonjour” it is safe to presume he or she is will be speaking French.

He raises this point to assert that, oftentimes many viewers come to see all genre films as the same--at the mention of a genre, they picture a montage of images from many films that fall into that category. However, he reminds us of the individuality of each film as its own separate entity. “We should be careful though, to maintain a distinction between the film genre and the genre film.” That is to say, even if many films speak in the same singular language of a particular genre, each has something unique to say.

In the case of Out of the Past, it may seem slightly difficult to see past the multiple love triangles, betrayal, murder, bribery and nighttime visuals that constitute the film’s oh- so “noir” soul. However, I think there is something very interesting to be drawn out of the character of Jimmy's deaf handyman.

The way his disability is portrayed struck me as very dark, as if there was something eerie or supernatural about it. He never smiled, he constantly wore a cryptic expression, he slipped in an out of secret spaces. He seemed to be an omnipresent, omniscient observer--a silent recorder of information. In this way, it seemed to me that his character fulfilled the same roll as the camera, constantly capturing the sinfulness of human nature.

While the customs of film genres provide building blocks for films to effortlessly convey bits of information to viewers, the success of each individual genre film depends on its ability to create its own meaning beyond these internalized conventions.

Film: Artifice in Truth's Clothing?

“Photography is truth.
Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
-Jean-Luc Godard

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
-Jean-Luc Godard


Cinema is complicated--so complex, in fact, that just talking about it can make a hypocrite of even one of its most revered contributors, as was the case with the apparently fork-tongued Godard.

However, his contradictory remarks actually pinpoint a duplicity that is inherent to film: although it is accepted as our most accurate means of generating a true representation of the physical world, its usage is often manipulative. In what was likely a response to Godard’s oft-quoted maxim (once-quote above), director Michael Haneke made this declaration: “A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.”

A comparison of Heneke’s Cache (2005) and Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle (1993)--two films driven by very different motives and methods—illustrates the very different ways in which cinematographic choices are used to fulfill entirely divergent aims.

Traditionally, creating a convincing visual scenario is one of the major hurtles a director needs to clear in order to engage viewers. From this necessity has emerged a myriad of cinematographic tricks devised to cover the camera’s tracks and create a picture that is seemingly self-generated--what he French call have termed “suture”—literally, sewing viewers into the scene, and what film students call “continuity editing.”

As Mark Garrett Cooper explains in his essay “Narrative Spaces,” certain camera angles are typically used to convey information about the relationships between onscreen characters and the worlds around. By successfully creating a fictitious space that seems rationally sound, the film establishes a relationship between the narrative and the universe as a whole, luring the audience into the mentality that if the action makes visual sense, it can be taken as an extension of reality.

According to Wynn Hunter, this is what leads us to wholeheartedly believe the slightly contrived plotline of Sleepless in Seattle. In his blog entry entitled, “Why is Sleepless in Seattle so Effective?” : HYPERLINK "http://1wynnhunter.blogspot.com/" http://1wynnhunter.blogspot.com/ , Hunter posits that the answer to his question is rooted in Ephron’s careful creation of a specific narrative space.

The main characters’ exchange of yearning-filled cross-country “looks” seem to render the inconveniently unlikely storyline--that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s characters have fallen in love over airwaves from different coasts of the country--mere grounds for even more swooning. Because the characters continue to meet each others’ eyes frame-by-frame onscreen, and because the directions of these glances are designed to place them in the context of opposite coasts, we are sucked into a visual representation of space that leaves us convinced that this is plausible. We viewers eat those eyeline matches out of the palm of Ephron’s hand.

It is this respect for spatial information, this implied delineation of off-screen terrain that is markedly absent in Henake’s Cache. Shots are largely static, and we are never really given a vantage point that might make us sympathetic to a certain character.

While Ephron’s work demonstrates a conventional example of suture, Haneke’s work seems to be intentionally void of it—an experiment in the exposure of film as an artifice. Technically he never actually breaks the fourth wall, but rather provides us constant reminder that it is there.

The film’s very plot lends itself to a cognizance of the production process: we greet the protagonist when a cassette tape containing surveillance footage of his life is anonymously left on his doorstep. As we watch him watching his life on tape, we cannot help but become hyper aware of the parallel trajectories of our behavior. Further self-reference to the film follows. We watch him record a television show and then edit it. We see him watch the evening news. One visual motif throughout the film is what looks like walls and wall of floor to ceiling shelves filled with what appear to be books or dvds, but are easily associated with surveillance tapes. And over and over we watch him as he screens, rewinds and pauses countless minutes of film footage of his own life.

We are constantly made aware of the camera’s capabilities, and with no cinematographic evidence to the contrary, we cannot be connected to what we are watching on anything but the “filmic level.”

Sleepless in Seattle, however, creates a sense of intimacy that allows us to relate to the fictitious aspects of the film. Hunter also notes the way that Sleepless in Seattle, “utilizes narrative space to create suspense.” He describes how the film’s allure is in large part the deference of a particular visual goal. In this case, viewers are yearning for the would-be lovers to share a frame. “The suspense of Sleepless derives from the insistence on separating Annie and Sam until the last possible moment… This brilliant use of physical and spatial barriers which obstruct their ‘looks’ effectively juxtapose their discrete spaces and produce the feeling of separation which serves as an effective source of suspense for the audience.” Of course, the couple does get together in the end and viewers are satisfied by the two-shot they have been craving all along.

In Cache, however, we are given no such relief. The title of this film, translated from the french as “hidden,” might suggest that viewers will spend the duration of the film sniffing out what has been hidden. We are made eerily aware that there is a videographer occupying the off-screen space. However, this voyeur is never given a face. Furthermore, we are led to believe that this stalker has always been filming the protagonist and always will. I would venture to say that what is so ultimately unsettling about this film is the fact that after long a exercise in suspense, we are never granted that Sam-Annie two-shot.

Both of these films provide evidence of the pliability of film as a form. However, the fact that one camera technique as opposed to another can enhance both a warm and fuzzy crowd pleaser and an isolating thriller is a testament to the fact that truth in film lies in the eye of the cameraholder.

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