Film in a War-Torn World

This week was probably the most emotionally taxing of the weeks we’ve had so far.  We started the week by talking about the effect WW2 had on cinema as a whole, and how Hollywood really mobilized during the war.  All of the films we watched were emotionally powerful, and though I’ve seen “The Thin Red Line” before, it was still just as powerful on the second viewing.  We also watched “WWII In Color”, a profound documentary that absolutely does not pull any punches when it comes to showing the gritty and often disturbing side to the biggest and costliest war to ever occur.  I could tell that the whole class was actively glued to the screen, partially out of interest and partially out of disgust.  The scenes from the death camps were impossible to look away from, but you really wanted to.  Something about seeing it all in color really made it seem even more profound.  It’s easy to see some tragedy in black and white and shrug it off because it happened a long time ago, but when it’s in color, it’s like being there.

We then went on to talk about Film Noir and “Casablanca”.  I’ll talk about “Casablanca” first.  This has to be my third or maybe fourth viewing just in the past few years (it’s my mom’s favorite drama!) so it wasn’t as enjoyable for me as it was for most other people I’m sure.  I might have seen it one too many times in recent memory, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good film when I see one, and “Casablanca” is nothing short of a masterpiece.  Even with the repeated viewings, I notice small details that I didn’t before.  A great example of this is the searchlight that is seen throughout the movie.  What seems like a really clever way of lighting the seedy city of Casablanca is actually a light searching for refugees committing crimes, but the really interesting attention to detail is on full display here as the light never finds anything in the crime ridden city, mirroring the corruption of the police force.  The tone of the film is dark and mysterious, with just a hint of humor.  By all rights, it should be a Noir film, but it isn’t.  That’s what we talked about as well this week, Film Noir.

Film Noir was a reaction to the aftermath of WW2.  The world would never be the same, and many men saw horrors that couldn’t simply be put in the past, leading to a response from Hollywood in the form of the Noir flick.  These movies were very different from what audiences had seen before.  They usually involved some sort of a crime, a poor sucker who’s down on his luck, and a femme fatale.  There was mystery, and a distinctly hard edge to the films of this era, most of which didn’t have a happy ending.  Noir sort of died out in the late 50’s to early 60’s, but it lives on in the form of Neo Noir.  It kicked back off in the 80’s and is still seen in films today.

This shot is from one of my favorite scenes in “Blade Runner”, a Neo Noir Sci-Fi picture.

Also here’s a shameless plug for my favorite movie ever! Maybe you guys will watch it if you haven’t seen it.