Set the Stage for the 80s

The 1970s has been remembered for a plethora of things: disco music, women’s rights, The Vietnam War, which led to the spread of love and kindness, and various films. Many of the films that emerged in the 70s are still recalled to this day as being some of the most influential and memorable films to ever grace the big screen. Kicking off with movies such as Arthur Hill’s Lover Story (1970) and George Seaton’s Airport, and ending with the beginning of what viewers today remember as “classic horror” films, this decade carried major change for the film industry that still heavily influences movies of today (679).

A couple of the most notable films that still have a fan following to emerge from the early 70s include The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) (679). These films still uphold in front of modern day viewers — who are used to seeing CGI heavy films such as Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Avatar (2009). They are known for their ingenious camera work, profound societal implications, and slow storyline build up that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats. However, the films from this decade that continue to carry the largest fan following into the 21st century is, hand down, the first Star Wars (1977) film (681). This movie set the stage for the science fiction genre that we all know and love: space battles, love drama, aliens, and heroic characters that every child can learn a few life tips from. This cinematic marvel began its own franchise (currently 8 films, comic books, and an entire Disneyland exhibit) that has grown so massive, it has become impossible to find someone who hasn’t heard of the series. It was this success that enlightened producers to the benefits of creating something that could carry on for multiple installments — leading to the making of Superman: The Movie (1978), Jaws (1975), Alien (1979), and the outpouring of cinematic series to follow in the 1980s.

The 70s bowed off stage with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) which opened the door for the classic science fiction horror films of the 80s; The Thing (1982), The Twilight Zone (1983), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Friday the 13th (1980). The powerful female roles of the 70s now become the strong female lead roles of the 80s. Horror and action flicks revive Hollywood from the grave of the romance genre. Societal movements become fantastic storylines, all of which provide film enthusiasts of the 21st century with a library of classic films to analyze and enjoy.

Letting the New Wave Hit

The New Wave that hit French cinema throughout the 1950s to the 80s, was an artistic movement that (perhaps unintentionally) set out to tear down the stringent set of rules that had previously controlled France’s film industry.  Rather than trying to make the audience forget that they were watching a film, New Wave filmmakers believed, “that film must constantly call attention to the process of its own making and to the medium’s own unique language” (356). Although only temporarily successful (1960-64), the mindset toward cinema was, and still is, greatly affected by this movement.

Francois Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) is one such film that captures the ideals of the New Wave movement. Just as the filmmaker was rebelling against the rules of cinema, this film depicts two young French boys rebelling against the rules of the society they live in. Antoine isn’t shown to be a particularly bad kid, just a little mischievous, tired of sitting in class all day, ready to grow up – a personality that could be compared to the New Wave filmmakers. They feel trapped by the rules, unable to freely express themselves and be truly artistic. Truffaut even expresses this feeling with the scenes that take place around authority: most of the time that Antoine is in the presence of his family or school teachers is depicted in the confines of a relatively small, or unfriendly, space with poor lighting. At home, there’s barely enough room for the family of three to move around. At school, Antoine is constantly being punished or students are being rude to each other and the teacher. However, when Antoine and Rene are out on their own, it’s always in a big, spacious area with plenty of light and everything appears to be going well. Comparatively, when filmmakers are permitted to work outside of the rules set up for them, things go okay and everyone gets to be happy as they stretch their artistic limbs.

Adults and authority figures in this film appear indifferent; Antoine’s parents blatantly talk about getting rid of him while he’s still in hearing distance, his mother begins being nice to him only because he saw her kissing another man besides her husband, Rene’s father flat out turns a blind eye to spotting Antoine’s feet hiding beside the bed, and the school teacher completely disregards the class destroying one of the student’s goggles as he answers a question. Whereas the younger students appear to pay attention to the details of everything going on around them. Antoine and Rene spend their time working on thinking up a better plan for their lives, while all the adults continue their crappy lives in suffering silence. Perhaps this could be seen as a comparison between the old and new cinematic forms of thought.

Hitchcock, You’re Making Me Dizzy

The famous Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958), does more with the concept of the word than just make the viewer feel dizzy. By comparing the film to the provided text book definition, we can see that Hitchcock not only played around with the visual effects to create the sensation of vertigo (as in the constantly spinning introduction), but also with the way he lays the story line out in front of the audience.

The first half of the film (after the roof scene) creates a sense of “the tension between the desire to fall and the dread of falling” as Scottie follows Madeleine (Judy) around the city, befriends her, and consequently ends up falling in love (110). Since everyone has been made aware of the fact that Madeleine is (supposedly) crazy, watching their love story unfold creates a feeling of uneasiness in the viewers—sure they seem to go great together, but what about her “insanity”? or the fact that she’s the wife (mistress) of the man who hired Scottie? or that she not only comes off as aloof, but also as though she isn’t being completely honest with Scottie (reasonable feelings considering we discover her true identity later in the film).

One of the scenes that adds to the rising tensions is the sequence of shots where Scottie is tailing Madeleine throughout the town. These elongated car scenes build up the suspense as we watch Scottie attempting to put the pieces of the puzzle together with each new stop or discovery. We learn of the information just as he does and try to come up with our own understanding as the story progresses—a well used detective tale strategy. By giving us no more information than what Scottie has, Hitchcock has almost made the story personal, in that we are just as surprised when we learn what’s really been going on, and feel a sense of victory when Scottie overcomes his acrophobia.

Hitchcock uses “vortical” editing to trap us in this story’s confusing emotions, which are also going on within Scottie’s head, “his psychological entrapment by a manufactured romantic goddess–becomes our own” (213). This traps us in a desire for the love story to work itself out, but, confusingly, an equal desire for the murder accomplice to see justice (which she does). Since the audience spends the duration of the film trapped in this unsure emotional state, when Judy gets the end that she undoubtedly deserves, we are left feeling empty; “all the pain and death have meant nothing” (213).

Unexpected Effect of WWII

Just as France, Germany, and most other European nations went through a depressing time in their cinema histories, so did the United States. Being that the U.S. has continually been isolated from much of the fighting that goes on—due to its geographic location comparatively—this depression took a little while longer to reach them. It took the tragedy of World War II, following the Depression, to drop Hollywood into a time of questioning humanities instincts. This questioning brought on a movement in cinema similar to (and inspired by) German Expressionism, known as film noir (294).

John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon fits perfectly into the dark, depressing, cynical films that characterized this new era of the 1940s. For starters, every primary characters spends the duration of the film in search of this coveted falcon, only to discover that the one they’re chasing is a fake. This reflects the sentiment that much of humanity was feeling when WWII began—the world had just encountered the most devastating war in all its history (if the falcon were to represent something here, it represents peace), just to plummet back into a similar dispute a couple decades later (the falcon being a fake and having to start up the hunt again). It makes perfect sense that Hollywood would reflect what viewers are feeling—everyone has been effected by this event, so the darkness that many are feeling inevitably seep into the films being made at this time.

Another characteristic of film noir that is plainly exhibited in The Maltese Falcon, is lack of faith in humanity. This is personified on the screen by the woman Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In the end we discover that she was the one who killed Miles Archer all along, taking away from her the womanly, motherly, softness (that was generally portrayed in Hollywood’s women up to this point), and causing viewers to question how someone—especially a woman—could be capable of committing such an act. This reflects how many may have been feeling upon committing, or witnessing, the horrific acts of war that were going on: Why is this necessary? Why is humanity doing this again? How could we be doing this again? Something must be wrong with human nature. All questions that could easily run through a post-WWII mind, and what draws so much cynical thought into Hollywood’s films of the 1940s.

Borrowed Point of View

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is an interesting experiment in the use of POV. Rather than giving the main character the space to create an image of himself for us, Welles has the story told in a way that entirely removes the main character from the scene. Although we frequently see the character Charles Foster Kane throughout the film, we only see the actual character in the opening scene when he dies. From that point on the viewer never again sees Kane, but rather is fed a series of stories that other people have about him – each one describing him through their own filtered lens.

Each series of stories is full of the opinion of the one telling the tale: Thatcher cares for Kane, but clearly doesn’t approve of his business tactics, “Their antipathy for each other – both ideological and personal – is apparent” (260). This gives the viewer the sense that Kane was rich and smart, but also a little careless and full of himself. Mr. Bernstein seems to have cared for Kane very greatly but found him to be a troubled man. This recalling of Welles’s main character makes him come off as more loveable and friendly – that perhaps he really was trying to run an honest newspaper and was just struggling with those who opposed him along the way. This recollection is in complete contrast with Thatcher’s memories. The remaining two interviews of those who had been close to him, Leland and Susan Alexander, are similarly affected by the teller’s opinion of Kane. By telling Kane’s story through the lens of another person, Welles has achieved the effect of talking about a person to someone that’s never met them – rolling through memories and, perhaps unintentionally, sprinkling your own opinion as you go along.

Having achieved a “narrative [that can] flow poetically from image to image in a manner analogous to human memory”, with the layout of the story, Welles furthers this mimicry of human perception by using a deep field of focus (252). Rather than forcing the audience to focus on an area of a scene by having the camera focus on it, Welles keeps the back and foreground in equal focus, placing and moving characters or objects within and between these areas, thereby allowing the viewer’s eye to focus as though they were in the very same room as the unfolding action – naturally focusing on Leland as he walks from the back to the foreground once he becomes close enough to Kane at the typewriter. Another way Welles imitates human perception (in the same scene just mentioned) is by utilizing sound. He has Leland’s footsteps become louder as he reaches the foreground – just as the human ear would hear it if Leland were to walk up to them.

By intelligently utilizing narrative, camera focus, and sound in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles has effectively, and memorably, made human perception a large proponent in his work.

Hollywood, flex it!

Once the infamous D. W. Griffith revealed just how influential a film could be on the public, it wasn’t long before American directors found slick ways to slip their opinions into their productions. Being that film was a rapidly growing, new media to the world, no one really took the time to develop a baseline of rules for what was allowed and what wasn’t – so film creators just did whatever the public seemed to enjoy. Unfortunately for the film industry, as the content that sold the best proved to be more and more raunchy, conservative groups (Roman Catholic Church mostly) got riled up and refused to allow such debauchery to be shown on the big screen—where easily influenced young minds might be led astray from what was good (183 – 84). This political up-rise forced studios to censor themselves in the 1930s before the American government intervened.

This change in representation within films didn’t stop directors/producers from subtly commenting on political issues. Howard Hughes’s 1932 film, Scarface, sort of sticks to the censorship rules laid out by the Hays Office, but is intentionally grisly in its implications since it is, in fact, following the life of a gangster (Al Capone loosely). The new censorship push strictly didn’t allow for “evil” to be presented in a positive light, hence Tony Camonte getting shot to death in the streets at the end; nor for killing to be shown on screen, hence all deaths being implied off screen. However, this entire film comments on the social corruption that allows such mob bosses to thrive in the city of Chicago. The mob wants something? They arrange business deals that allow strings of businesses to make a profit while giving the mob a cut of it. They want the police to leave em be? Certain people can be paid off, lied to, or killed. If the people of Chicago didn’t falter under the offer of money in exchange for doing someone else’s bidding, then these mobs wouldn’t exist and Tony wouldn’t have been able to rise to such a position of social power. Hughes’s portrayal of this waterfall effect within his movie is a way of  commenting on how it takes the decision of joining a gang out of the hands of the individual. In the world of Scarface, if someone wants to make it, or live happily, they have to pick a side – making the decision a collective one of society.

Postwar Germany Inside “Metropolis”

After the loss of World War I, the society of Germany was left with an extremely pessimistic mindset – which openly presented itself in their cinema industry. Everything about German Expressionism portrays an air of morbid darkness by playing with the psychological terror that the German people were feeling in the 1920s (72). One of the best examples of this portrayal is Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis. 

Throughout Metropolis, we see how Lang’s special effects photographer, Eugen Schüfftan, utilized camera angle with miniature sets to create a tight, urban or underground environment (77). These two environments serve as a visual representation of the separation between the upper and lower class Germans; showing off how great the divide is between the two and how impossible it is for one to understand the other. Society, in general, tends to idolize those who are able to live in the hustle and bustle of a big city, so of course this sort of environment is used to portray the wealthy within this film – they don’t work (unless in an office), go out to one part of town to party, and are always well dressed and surrounded by beautiful women. Similarly, the lower class is visualized as a caveman hoard – working underground, many falling to their deaths without any of the higher ups batting an eye, seen shuffling into elevators and operating jobs that typically could be done with a simple series of gears. The wealthy are portrayed as the Future, the poor, as the Past.

In tandem with the portrayal of obvious social divide (which Germany was definitely feeling after the massive inflation in their currency post-WWI), the wealthy characters are typically seen as not caring about the poor. Their indifference is blatantly portrayed in Joh Fredersen’s continual emotional indifference to what’s happening until his son is at danger. Even after the whole mess comes to an end and the leader of each social class is standing face to face, it still takes his son intervening to show Joh that there is a serious problem, which can only be fixed by Joh coming off of his high horse. Metropolis succeeds in showing the turmoil the people of German were going through after losing the first World War and its this dark, morbid, societal and emotional struggle that they were going through which makes up much of the cinematic content from German Expressionists in the 1920s.