Spring 2010

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an amateur tribute to Film Noir pg. 4

amateur: artist

amateur: photographers

a look at the world in B l a c k & W h i t e

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Featured Article:A l e x a n d e r J . D . F a r r o w

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amateur cartoonist: Tim Dukes pg. 36

Salute to Film Noir

InsIde thIs Issue

Shoot the town III

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Featured Artist

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Featured Article: F i l m N o i r a s G e n r eA l e x a n d e r J . D . F a r r o w

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amateur cartoonist: Tim Dukes pg. 36

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An amateur salute to Film Noir

cast:

cristobal jose prieto inarritudavid timothy lees

karen ruizdesirae kellenbarger

michael fairholmalex farrow

carmen arevelosamara kingselene wilkeshugo amaral

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hugo amaral

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the gamblers

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amateur cartoonist: Tim Dukes

comics

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the world in black & white

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photographers

cristóbal josé prieto iñárritu brent elliott parker david timothy lees

the world in black & white

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photographers

cristóbal josé prieto iñárritu brent elliott parker david timothy lees

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photographer: cristóbal jose prieto inárritu

Night in The CitySan Francisco, CA

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The Steps at Four PointsSan Francisco, CA

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photographer: david timothy lees

The Gatekeeper San Francisco, CA

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dressing up

photographer: david timothy lees

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The dialogue circling film noir prevails: is it a style, cycle or genre? Murkily kaleidoscopically, film noir evades classification, a difficulty reaching into the realm of shadow, unrestrained, yet physical, a physical shadow. Clas-sifying these shadows as ‘a style’ or a time-constrained ‘cycle’ relegates noir to a box, strangling its deepness, its fluidity. The clues show film noir, despite its physicality, most closely resembles a genre. When a composite group of works share multiple conventions, a per-ception of genre emerges. Although conventions need not be mimicries of the other, the base-level rudimentary awareness of convention reminds the viewer of the group. Film noir is one of these groups. It exists beside other groups, for example: horror, the Western, comedy, the musical, the chick flick, the action-adventure/sci-fi thriller, in a long canon of genres. To understand film noir as genre, conventions existent in a cluster of film noirs must be unveiled and juxta-posed to extract a biopsy, a sample of conventional elements intrinsic to genre, evidence – fragments transcending the confines of time, firmly establishing the group due to such evidences of ‘film noir.’ With today’s image-infatuated culture, it would be easy to identify thematic and iconic components of a film noir even if one did not have a developed understanding of the genre. It is like knowing, instinctive-ly, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the sensation of love: the inherent realization of a film as noir or a film encompassing noir elements via a person’s lived psychic connection to noirish themes and iconography rises reflexively with the flick of a fedora behind the brooding smoky shadows of an urban macrochasm. Whether or not the person uses the words film noir coupled by involuntary visio-mental linkage need not be constant, but, at least a good, “yea… I’ve seen that before,” is appreciated. Easily identifiable themes/objects/personas fundamental to film noir (the city, murder, police, cigarettes, isolation, guns, mysterious women, hard-boiled men, fatalism, shadow) serve wonderfully when fused with other genres as the foundation for easy specta-tor recognition because the mass surveillance of these easily identifiable themes/objects/personas (or, aptly: themes+objects+personas) are profoundly etched into today’s movie-going unconsciousness by way of the tsunami-like flood of media-driven gradients of arbitrary referential imagery, post-modern, nameless – yet familiar, latently – for the masses, without label. Contemporary filmmakers take advantage of this spectator recognition and manipulate genres using themes and objects to ripple the audiences’ subconscious pool of imagery whilst allowing room for interest-fueling deviations. Film noir adopts these deviations. The creepy ambiguity of the city can yield many discursions, everything from the glowing red eye of the Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), to the replicant scare of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) all the while retaining a certain taste of shadow, however minimal or extreme. The argument of noir as cycle is partially flawed not only due to the above discussion of image rec-ognition – because one’s recognition of The Image is not bound by era nor time, rather, the moment, lived, seen – but due to the immortal temperament of art. It is impossible to qualify this inborn human need, to create, to emote; but it is a need, rooted in the like of Neolithic cave paintings and branching into rami of Da Vinci and Lumiere. If one strictly views film noir as a cyclic phenomenon of the 1940s/1950s, everything existing outside this epoch cannot be film noir. This period is indeed a classic period, a modernist period, unpastiched and virgin, versus the neo-noirs of present day; however, outside the 1940s/1950s cycle, is it possible for noir to persist as a self-contained entity? Truly, it would be reckless to say an artist is prevented from engaging cubism and classifying her work ‘cubist’ if made outside the era-bound interval of the early

Featured Article: F i l m N o i r a s G e n r eA l e x a n d e r J . D . F a r r o w

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20th century, efforts and products dictated by the naissance of a movement. Yes, art movements do begin at a specific time, rise to popularity, and decelerate to near extinction, but it is a movement, nonetheless, a motion subsisting, however leisurely, moving. But partially true, noir, a physicality unknown, not a cycle, but a cyclic genre infused with the blood of the Eternal Genre: Tragedy. Proponents of noir as cycle are correct in isolating one fundamental truth: noir would not have spawned if specific cultural and political phenomena failed to take place, or took place differently, in the years preceding the war and the years after. Should the events of WWII be plucked from history’s memory, surely, film noir would go with it, like a writhing earthworm attached to a clump of dirt, par-ticles floating downward exacerbated by the worm’s undulation. But film noir, like cubism, or really any art movement, although deeply embedded in the socio-historic fabric of era, is composed of thread attached to previous eras, previous movements, which are thus attached to others like a mirror tracing infinity, concentric circles of patchwork inside spaces of present and past histories, the aide-memoire of what was. It is impossible to quarantine one chain in this chronic reaction without giving credence to the billions of former chains responsible for what is now viewed as the reaction, or part of the reac-tion, because the reaction itself is multifaceted. If film noir is a cycle of 1940s/1950s American history, then it must likewise be a cycle of 1930s/20s/10/s/1800s/1700s histories – and not just American, the chains interlinked, the reaction film noir, all components homeostatic in the face of a historical delicacy capable of transmutation with the slightest mnemic variant. Genre, with all its time-defying machinery resurrects the atomic shadow-imprint of noir, even after 1956, ignoring the cumbersome need for a network of era to explain the conception of phenomena. Style, like cycle, must equally be debunked whence considering noir as genre. In lieu of film-making, style is the technical, the aesthetic feel of the film: lighting, photography, mise-en-scene, editing, location. Although it is tempting to classify film noir as style, given the stylistic similarities present in many film noirs, it is obvious the incident of noir exceeds a topical understanding of ‘how it looks.’ One must remember ‘how it looks’ is related to ‘how it makes us feel,’ that ‘how it makes us feel’ is related to ‘what it is’ (‘what it is,’ of course, is subjective, yet truth, for art-truth resists existence absent of the individual). A known commodity is produced in the act of viewing, of looking, catalyzing a response in the viewer, producing an immediate “yep, that’s a film noir” (or “Western,” or “musical,” or “chick flick”). The viewer’s reaction to what is seen resonates with subconscious (cultural) clues present in the film provoking him to discern genre. Style does play an important part in this unsaid equation, it is a constant locked into the quotient of noir; but the deepness of noir is not dependent on it, just as a quotient is not dependent on a constant given the relationship of the constant with other variables and invariables. Style is not as flexible as genre. Although the execution of style is endless, reliant only on the individual decision-making agent, that is, the filmmaker, such an agent must play by the rules, per se, using a unique style their own making yet adhering to the Style of the methodology, the interwoven system indigenous to genre. Fritz Lang’s use of shadow may be different from Orson Welles, but it is shadow nonetheless, an unavoidable convention, a Style manipulated by style. For example, in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950) numerous scenes depicting criminal action take place during the day, some unfolding in the countryside. Through a strict stylistic rendering of film noir (and ignorance of genre) these scenes should have been shot at night, in the city. Correspondingly, in The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), the bulk of diegesis takes place in the Mexican-border outback with crucial plot swells rising in the bright sun, albeit several disquieting night scenes; yet, it is the outback, even so, the Mexican outback, quite the venture from a typical New York or San Francisco metropolis! This

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stylistic faux-pas of light may cause some to overlook Gun Crazy’s and The Hick-Hiker’s noirness; however, what renders these films as noir are deeper generic rep-etitions surpassing the buttress of Style for genre has no Style, but, yes, style. To classify noir as style, and only ‘a style,’ cloaks the viewing experience with a facade unbeknownst to the fluid physique dwelling on the surface and beneath, the infinitely avisual space of time. The femme fatale is one of these generic repeti-tions. She is the essence of film noir, highlighting a sense of duality present in the genre, a physicality of shadow discounting the limits of time. She need not be evil, as demonstrated by Alice in Woman in the Win-dow (Fritz Lang, 1945), nor enigmatic like Christina in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955), although a malevolent and deceptively sexy femme a la Double Indemnity’s Phyllis and Kiss Me Deadly’s Gabrielle is most common, much less straight up bitchy-evil like Fay from The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956). Con-trastly, she can be devoid of apparent sexuality like Nancy in The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) plagued by recollections of man, of herself, memories synchro-nized to strip her of sexuality and lock her in the center of two other (male) reminiscences. But Nancy’s recol-lection, lingering in the center of the narrative, is the nucleus, the core – without it the orb deflates. Further, as is the case with the non-entity wives of The Hitch-Hiker, the femme fatale can be physically absent, but plays the preeminent role in driving the narrative and deciding the male protagonist’s fate and the fate of the viewer’s lived and retrospective ponderings of what was seen and what was thought of as seen. This fate can be positive (the protago-nist does not die), as is the case with The Maltese Falcon (Josh Huston, 1941), Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) or negative (the protagonist either dies or is maimed and humiliated, ‘castrated’ as Freud would have it, disrobed of masculinity and power of diegesis). But it is fate, attached like a symbiote to the woman and the photons saturating the frontal side of sitting humans in front of a screen, enveloped by shadow. Regardless of her disposition, a primordial trait of the femme fatale is her duality, the most vis-ibly discerned and archetypal of which is found in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Phyllis is beautiful, sexual, and despite her mystery, the protagonist is hypnotized by a lull of material human-ness tied by a nuance of otherworldly origin. Suddenly, she transforms, fertilizing dormant genre-eggs of hybridized beauty/woman/monster, a siren-type of familiar conventionality: she fools the male pro-tagonist with her beauty and changes into something that copulates, eats, and regurgitates back into the hallucinatory birthplace existent as a limbo of eye and screen. Gabrielle in Kiss Me Deadly follows this formula with an emphasis on poison-laced timidity. Laurie from Gun Crazy is the reverse – she starts off bad, becomes good.

The Siren by John Waterhouse. A fatale not of noir origin, but a sister joined by convention.

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Alice, from Woman in the Window, presents another genus of duality. Despite an inadvertent connection to a cov-er-up murder, she is neither evil nor treacherous. The viewer likes Alice and roots for her as she tries to rid herself of a potential threat. She is altogether good and does not undergo a sweeping change in personality; yet retains duality, most of which is understood upon the conclusion when it is realized Alice is not real. What is presented is a dream concocted by the male protagonist who dreams of “Alice” based on a paint-ed picture he saw of a woman. So, her duality is understood as 1) a picture, and 2) a dream, the dream of man, forever plagued by woman, however good, however evil, the Pan-doran ghost navigating the distance betwixt dream and real-ity, shadow and tangibility, double, surrounded by the domin-ion these worlds, but singular upon the synthesis of two: is it woman who naturally wields mystery? Or is it man who proj-ects such mysteries, such evils, upon woman? The femmes fatales of Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) and Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), similar to Alice, are good, but the viewer does not fully understand their goodness till the end, and through the temporality of viewing, of looking, momentary perfidy is discerned. Rachael in Blade Runner, while always good, maintains an ever-present duality in her humanness and superficial non-human replicant biology, emotions like a human woman, but produced by a scientific farce. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945) offers a highly negative, almost disturbing figure, difficult to identify with and distinct from the femmes fatales listed previously. Ellen’s superlative screen time and role as narrative-driving protagonist forces the viewer to identify with her due to the constant exhibition of her perspective, regardless of its skewed nature. Various Ellen-point-of-view shots are displayed, such as Danny drowning, Richard writing, Richard and Ruth laughing, and the stairs she (Ellen) throws herself down, the function of which, like all POV shots, is to displace the viewer’s vision with that of another, eyes relinquished for a prosthetic vision, but distant, binary. El-len is the viewer’s Charon in this realm of narrative unreality amalgamated by a strained identification with her, on the viewer’s part, adding to her power and cinematic ascendancy, the power brandished in like of a guide, our guide. Divergent from a noir-typical male protagonist, Leave Her to Heaven puts woman in the position of active spectacle, versus the passivity of the fatales in Woman in the Window, Laura, and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). What is more, Leave her to Heaven was shot in Technicolor and takes place in the countryside of Main, two anomalies of classic noir replaced by woman in hue, that is, woman in control of hue, excelling the black and white, an environment hers, in color, Amazonian. The soul of noir remains, ‘how it makes us feel’ is mutated, but sealed, of course, noir. It is this soul, hidden – but seen – resurfacing with the name Genre and guided by a woman of nebulosity. The femme fatale is dangerous due to the power of fate she wields. Many allusions to Pandora, Eve and the wife of Lot are made as she systematically leads the man (and herself [in most cases]) to his end – intentionally or not, conventions analyzed in Kiss me Deadly via the male villain’s conclud-

Ellen, the hue hers, yet intrinsically femme noir

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ing aside to Gabrielle and personified by the tarot reading Zeena in Nightmare Alley (Edmund Gould-ing, 1947). The fatale, like fatalism, is a commodity one looks for when viewing a film noir – she is not a stylistic technicality nor bound by the period of classic noir, just as the Harpy and Siren are not bound by the confines of Greek mythos, much less a type evocative of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. The femme fatale is seen in films, even today, understood and dissected inside the sphere of a generic noir. As mentioned, from Eve onward, there has always been a fatale present in the milieu of cultural lore, a dangerous femininity with metamorphic potential, changing the male’s inner space from good to mixed shades of grey, to death. She exists outside and inside of cycle, omniscient, and in some cases non-existent, replaced by a unique filmic entity, that is, the homme fatale, seen in Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948), and Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958). Genre likewise encompasses these shades because it is the shade, the gradation knowing not one hue, but a plethora of hues encapsulated by the set of Kind and the artist’s imagination. The duality of noir is highlighted yet again: the blurred boundary between good and evil testing the viewer’s sensitivity to inverted social morality. In Kiss Me Deadly, the hard-boiled Mike Hammer is not the typical hero: he is selfish, vain, hot-tempered and cheats women out of money. An antihero par excellence, Hammer wins the viewer not due to his oozingly suspicious behavior, but in his mas-tery over such behaviors. Amid this socio-persona dilemma, specifically, liking a figure unlike widely distributed representations of moral goodness, the viewer finds herself contemplating the darkness lingering within, a polar concurrently her own yet property of a grander humanity plagued by duality. Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff bestows a similar dilemma, although unlike Hammer the viewer gets acoustic meta-insights into Walter’s interiority by way of narration. Walter is a murder, an adulterer – but the protagonist – and as he sits dying in the concluding seconds of the film, a sadness is experienced as the main character breathes his last, a parallel sadness occurring upon the conclusions of The Killing and The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) illustrated by a conniving Sterling Hayden meeting his end only after attempts at racketeering and robbery have proved unsuccessful. An interesting sensa-tion, for the viewer, an emotional response (sadness) for destructively negative personalities? When, if ever, do emotions like these escalate while viewing TV news stories about the denunciation of social deviants as malignant tumors useful only for elimination and punishment? The investigations med-dling in the above mens’ affairs are not portrayed as positive inside the narrative world notwithstanding broad-spectrum acceptances of the process of investigation as a positive action used to uncover hidden facets of social cacophony. Because of the viewer’s defaulted connection to the protagonist and his affiliation with corruption, however ambiguous, like Ellen, inversions of law, order, and criminality are replaced with an upside-down representation of morality: law is something to be feared, order, twisted, and criminality, an ambassador for humanity. These structures, underlying and shadow-cast, present an apparent futility akin to the unspoken corners of real life adjoined by an awareness of the ugliness that does, in reality, exist, solely consigned to real life, but in the real person. Real life is not contained by cycle nor style; rather, a fact, the incident of a fact (and many other facts) surviving with mankind since the time of Cain. The bad as good structure is a staple characteristic of film noir. When one sits down to watch a film noir, he almost expects to be escorted into a dappled, threatening world not with shadowy lighting and creepy urban nighttime exteriors, but psychologically. The viewer identifies with the characters, but the characters, oftentimes, are bad people that kill. The viewer equally expects to feel a certain taste of filth as he leaves the viewing experience, wanting it, choosing it, expecting it. This is noir, a sensation produced by the collective uppercut of themes, style, everything, a whole, the umbrella, genre.

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On the topic of the male protagonist, a deathblow is had upon the cranium of film noir as genre opponents: the revivification of Philip Mar-lowe in The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). Obviously outside the period of classic noir, The Long Goodbye yanks Raymond Chandler’s trou-ble-fraught hard-boiled detective from filmic in-carnations The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) and Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) injecting him with color and a gloomy Malibu beach house riddled with sin and mystery hitherto an aura all too Marlowe, all too noir, wit and cigarettes, echoes of the invincible specter of Bogart. Marlowe, a convention of classic noir, arguably the archetypal male detective/protagonist of noir (al-though, like the femme fatale, no absolutist costume can be tailored to and fitted for a shadow physical-ity), materializes like the Phoenix piercing the edifice of distance, the horizon of classic noir and into the setting moon of contemporary film. These conventions are few amongst many with countless examples, countless films and histori-cal manifestations of convention. But, within these few, a familiar thread is strung between several films, intertwined, but distinctive, bringing together an enclave of sameness, even if sameness is un-derstood as a metamorphoses, like shadow, morphing into shapes dictated by light. As seen with the versatile nature of noir, no singular representation of the femme fatale, for example, serves as a clear-cut definition of the femme fatale, duality, or noir in general. No definition can wholly give weight to the multifaceted phenomenon of noir. But, when viewed through the angle of genre, many noir constituents are understood absent of era or style and preserved over many films regardless of differ-ences in style, era, shadow, or physicality. It is this whole, this collective, the echoes of a collective, that produces a guttural, “yep. That’s a noir.”

The undying Marlowe

Nestled between the dusty homes on the busy street there is a sign: “Fat Chance Belly Dance”. I push the button and am buzzed in....I bound up the stairs and as I do, I become aware of the heady scent of incense and the sound of female laughter....At the top I push through curtains to a tiny lounge where women with flounced skirts and ample naked torsos recline on couches.... there are racks of clothes and etageres with sundries for sale. Through an-other curtain I see women bending and swaying in unison to exotic music... somewhere within is my cousin...I quickly sign in, and a wom- an pulls the curtains closed behind me saying “the class is now closed! Any more is a fire hazard!”Indeed, the ochre walled en- clave has barely room to stand and I furtively sneak into the back of the class and train my eyes on the in- structor, a kindly voiced woman with a dramatic scar on her naked left lower abdomen...at times folding into her rippled muscles so as to disappear...

I do the warm up stretch, in my cotton work dress and tights, and marvel at the costuming of the students...silk flowers in their hair, strange stretchy tops that look like part of a leotard...open backed and tied tightly under the bosom and ending there...and the skirts! The skirts with their yards of fabric and colors and sequins! Every figure eight of the hips was grand performance in those skirts!There were a few women in exercise pants...yet they had sequined scarves tied around their hips! HOW DID THEY KNOW? I was well aware that this was a be-ginners class, yet every women had an accoutrement. I catch my cousins eye, and comfortingly she was in cargo pants and a white shirt....not a sequin to be seen...Suddenly we are doing the arm movements...I stare at the lily white yet tattooed back of a student in teal...her hair is the most remarkable color of red...something like a maraschino cherry...it looked striking with the teal skirt and cropped leotard thing. She is moving her arms so gracefully! Do I look like that?...There are too many women between the mirror and I, and I have no idea how I look.....and yet, I don’t care one whit....

amateur: w.o.r.d.s.m.i.t.h

B e l l y D a n c i n g

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“Now I am going to show you the toxeem.” The instructor swivels her hips effort-lessly, the scar appearing and disappearing with each undulation. “This is a beauti-ful movement.”I don’t imagine it’s quite as beautiful when I do it, but I am beginning to feel fluid and sensuous, despite my sensible dress and fully covered tummy.The tummies! Or should I call them midriffs? They were all exposed....and all col-ors and sizes and various degrees of tone. Some were quite remarkable in their substantialness and yet somehow they seemed to be proud to be undulating above a sequined skirt...“This is the Egyptian.” I raise my arms overhead and pull apart the imaginary taffy and let my hip swing with the arm pulling back...the sequin skirts swaying in the room around me sound like a river and the bare feet on the floor squeak in har-mony.We learn the Arabic, the Shimmy, the Egyptian, and the strangely named Toxeem. We are grouped in to quads...and learn to turn and cue and take the lead from each other...like “flocks of birds”. The quartets of girls that all have those spectacular skirts on do indeed look like birds....flying together in a colorful avian dance of femininity and uninhibition.My cousin laughs like a child as we turn clockwise around and around....we are somehow sliding into this world of mystery, of female exclusivity, of sensory de-light.Suddenly, the class is over. My cousin leads the appreciative applause and we tum-ble out into the lounge. A bespectacled grey headed woman with her hair in a bun finishes our paper work and tells us to ‘drop in’ when we want to take the other classes we signed up for. She is soft spoken and of a delicate build. I fear she might be crushed by the students exiting behind us. She wishes us a friendly goodbye and smiles at us as if she has a secret.As we head down the stairs I noticed framed poster sized photographs on the stair-well walls.I stop at one....the woman is swirling in a magnificent skirt, she has fire in her eyes and strength in her arms. Her hair whips around her flushed face and she controls the maelstrom of movement around her. I am fascinated by this dancer and look into her face...and i catch my breath...I know that face.....she is the bespectacled little woman with the grey bun......

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