Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)

So, what the heck is feelm no-wahr, anyway? Tonight’s screening of Double Indemnity inaugurates our year long introduction to both classic and neo- noir. We’ll be showing seven films, and you get to decide what the heck noir really is. Until then, here’s a brief discussion of the matter.

First, the term film noir is French for “black film,” which is kind of ironic because in many ways film noir is a unique American style. Second, film noir isn’t really a genre of film, like westerns or romantic comedies or action flicks; rather, it’s a mood, a style, applied to a variety of film types. But even this is a bit misleading because it suggests that the classic films we now describe as examples of noir, films like The Maltese Falcon, Shadow of a Doubt, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past, The Big Clock, The Set-Up, D.O.A., Asphalt Jungle, and Touch of Evil, were made by people who knew they were making noirist films. And they didn’t. The term itself didn’t even come around until 1946, and while some critics date the advent of the style from the end of WWII, others see it beginning as early as 1927.

Instead, these filmmakers simply captured a mood, a feeling that was in the air. It’s an urban feeling, a paranoid feeling, a feeling that everything has gone to hell, no one’s on the level, and everyone is guilty. It’s a world of moral ambiguity, and according to film archivist Hayden Guest, the hero, if one exists, “is not necessarily grounded in any sense of right or wrong.”

There’s also a look to film noir, and you’ll see it in Double Indemnity. Darkness, filtered light sliding through blinds, creating odd angles of light and dark across rooms and characters, trenchcoats, cigarettes, rain slickened streets. Really, though, the best way to get to know and to enjoy this particular style of film is to watch some. When we get to neo-noir, noirist films made after 1979, we’ll see the style make a serious comeback until we can almost find elements in every movie currently coming out of Hollywood, if not other countries. (The current cinema of South Korea, stuff like Oldboy and Shiri, is seriously noirist.)

In the meantime, you’re sitting in front of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (from a novel by edgy crime writer James M. Cain and a screenplay by hardboiled fiction writer Raymond Chandler) with Fred MacMurray and Barabara Stanwyck. Stanwyck is the classic femme fatale (“dangerous woman”), another frequent convention of noir. Watch her twist MacMurray’s character around, until he has agreed to help her murder her husband.

In the end, and we won’t give it away here, MacMurray’s character Walter Neff, is a great example of crime writer James Ellroy’s definition of film noir: “A righteous, generically American film movement that went from 1945 to 1958, and exposited one great theme and that theme is: you’re f---ed.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006)

Normally, we talk about the evening’s screening in this space. But because SPA’s German class is going to have a few words tonight about topics related to Herr von Donnersmarck’s film, we thought we’d take a moment to discuss this evening’s animated offering: Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s “Balance.”

We choose animated shorts for a number of reasons. One is to offer an entertaining intro to the scheduled movie while providing students a few extra minutes to get to the movie before it starts. We also try to find short pieces that are, in some way, related to the feature film. And so we introduce Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), about an East German secret service agent who becomes intrigued by the lives of a couple he is assigned to observe, with a stop-action puppet animation about five men on a platform in space trying to maintain their balance when one of them pulls a heavy box onto the platform.

What’s the connection, other than the fact that both works are German? You might want to consider the effect that an oppressive system has on the individual as one theme. In “Balance,” the five men have organized themselves into a highly efficient society. (The fact that it is the product of oppression is suggested by the numbers each man wears on the back of his coat and by the pervasive grayness of the film’s palette.) Yet the arrival of the box, a red box that plays faint music, disrupts not only the balance of the platform but the balance of their culture. They go from working together to working against one another.

Das Leben der Anderen, which takes place before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also reflects a society that is, in one sense, highly ordered. A powerful government. An efficient information collection system. People who know their roles. Yet it is all disrupted by a single human emotion. In “Balance,” that emotion is greed; in Das Leben der Anderen it is, perhaps, love. Now that’s an interesting concept – the emotions that make us most human are also the things that will disrupt our attempts to form efficient systems. When the system being disrupted is an oppressive one – and one doesn’t get much more oppressive than the Cold War visions reflected in these two films – we seem to be celebrating the triumph the human spirit. We suspect, however, that even a benignly efficient system is vulnerable, a message that Gene Roddenberry drove home repeatedly every time Captain James T. Kirk dismantled a utopian society in the old Star Trek series.

But gosh, you’re saying, this is just an animated short. In fact it’s just a short piece meant to illustrate a particularly intense irony. After all, the balance depicted at the end of the film is radically different from that suggested at the beginning. How do we end up thinking about all this deep Cold War and culture stuff? Easy. “Balance” is designed to encourage us to think below its surface story. It has no dialogue, so we must interpret its action without intervention from onscreen explanations. It takes place in a hypothetical universe where the rules are metaphorical – to survive, the men must maintain the balance of their platform (one could even read that as an environmental message, no?). And the Lauensteins load the brief minutes of their piece with key visual images. The box, for example, is red, while everything else is gray. Does the red suggest anger? Is it anger that destroys their world? Does the red suggest life, passion, love? The viewer must interpret, or translate, the images. And in doing so, we construct a meaning.

“Balance” is a beautiful film, perfectly balanced in its storytelling and imagery. We hope it encourages you to think a bit, and that you’ll draw some connections between its story and the feature film. And we ask the same of every animated short we show, even if it’s “Iddy Biddy Beat Boy” or “Officer Pooch.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser