1. Rhodes says that allegory is trying to correct old works, and intertextuality is referencing something to "wink at the audience".  It is important to understand Haynes's work because for him, "film history is not just an archive of images, but rather an arsenal of aesthetic and epistemological strategies".  He uses film history as a vehicle to take well-known film and rework them to mean what he wants them to mean.

2.He uses a deep depth of field and long shots which create a double vision within the shot, and takes away the attention from Carol because of the overabundance of stuff cluttering the frame. This relates back to Sirk because he was known to be really detailed with his set designs.

3. The AIDS crisis  was characterized by not being talked about.  Ronald Reagan avoided the subject for years while people died, and the group ACT UP's slogan was "Silence = Death", because nobody talked about AIDS.  And so by not being explicit about Carol's disease in Safe, it was explicitly representing AIDS.

Nick Davis, “The Invention of a People”

There’s some heavy Deleuzian theorizing in here. Do your best and focus on how the relationships between the characters are structured, and answer the following questions.

4. Arthur Stewart serves as a free-indirect surrogate for both Haynes as storytelling agent and the audience as fact-finding spectators, a participant in the film's specularisation of camp identity, and the subject of the film's premier case history of sexual coming-into-being.  He is similar because of his inquiries about Brian, who remains an object of fascination throughout the movie. 

5. The differences between Brian and Arthur become constitutive of the film's overall character.  "Brian seems to be pivotal in how Arthur becomes constituted as Arthur both in how the film regards Arthur and how Arthur regards himself."  Also when he masturbates to the newspaper image of Brian and Curt kissing, he almost produces the 'real' coupling of Brian and Curt.  He uses fantasy in the forms of performativity and impossible fabrication.  He is "both the consummate of the self that never coheres and the very definition of Deleuze and Guattari's schizo: transsexual, both alive and dead. He doesn't confine himself inside contradiction, he opens out."

6. He returns to the scene of the 1960s and early 70s counterculture, played out from the standpoint of the reactionary conservtism of the mid-1980s, viewing his homosexuality with the knowledge of AIDS.

Assignment 8:

1.He went to Bard for a summer, which is a school known for experimental filmmaking, and he had a very influential teacher in high school that introduced him to Stan Brakhage and other avant-garde filmmakers. Superstar fit into the trends in the way that it was screened, a "hybrid position between the more traditional experimental film venues, which had rejected it, and other broader arts and semi-theatrical venues.  

2.  It reminds me of our discussions on Van Sant, who constantly alludes to other works in his films.  Psycho is a prime example, taking it out of context and giving it new meaning.  We distinguished both Van Sant and Soderbergh as directors who cast against type, and so it seems that maybe a way of showing authorship is in the way that they manipulate common images to society and make us see them in a different light.  (However, if this is a quality of all three directors, maybe they're not so unique after all, huh? )

3. MacDonald thought that Sirk's Imitation of Life was ridiculously over the top, but Haynes said that he took them seriously because he wasn't introduced to them until college.  Haynes saw a Lucille Ball show live and was amazed that she could be so governing as director and then play a childish woman.  He also noted that he tried to make Far From Heaven as close to the way that a film would have been made in the fifties, making it a cinematic representation of those times.

4. Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith are all discussed as influences or having similarities to Poison.  Poison stirred controversies because it was reviewed as just being about anal sex in prison, and politicians were angry and wanted to charge him with "inappropriate use of taxpayer money" because he made material that might offend American sensibilities.  

5. His idea of "death of the subject" means that the individual can no longer feel, and goes into the waning of affect.  But "if subjects continue to feel, then they may not be dead".  

6. Post-modern melodrama "considers the workings of emotion in the framework of modern identity and the dynamics of pathos in cultural production", and are centered around the "feeling subject".  Some filmmakers associated with melodrama are Fassbinder and Almodovar for their self-consciousness.

7.  It illustrates the play between postmodern theory and melodramatic pathos and treats them as products of social circumstances.

8. Un Chant d'Amour was an important turning point in his career because it was one of the last things he ever made, it was the only film that he made, and it was the beginning of his "disappearance from the text".  His view of the homosexual life was incompatible with the Gay Liberation movement because he could not "comprehend its affirmation of a gay identity or the demand for gay positive images". 

9. She notes that the structure is made up of three stories: Horror, Homo, and Hero.  She notes that he changes between them, and she creates parallels between them such as the spit motif, and their similarities with their treatment of death.  By paralleling the stories, it becomes like a cinematic montage, which is how Genet's writing style has been characterized, and this parallel story relates back to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.  Also, it goes back to the theory of montage by Soviet theorists in the 1920s: cinematic meaning is not contained in a single shot, but in relation between shots.

10. Michael Laskawy says that abuse as a child leads to criminal activity and homosexuality, which leads to AIDS. 

Assignment 7: Traffic

1.It weakens the traditional hero-centered narrative this way because there are multiple "good guys" working on different planes of the drug situation, and succeeding to varying extents, which disperses the sites of focus.  There is not a single hero, there are multiple heroes of all races and positions. It also enforces the idea, with Wakefield stepping down, that no one man can solve the drug problem, and therefore there couldn't possibly be one hero.

2. Because all of the traffickers are Mexican, the distributors are Latino, and the dealers are African-American. She says that he may have only thrown in the "positive" characters to "detract from criticisms of negative stereotyping".  She also states that Frankie Flowers having an American name and his Mexican name (Francisco Flores) shows that he is a negative entity in Mexico and America, suggesting that Mexican infiltration in America is a negative thing.  She reinforces this by mentioning the fact that Flores is gay, and since he is so one-dimensional, this comes across as homophobic and a way to make him more unlikeable. Also, there are no Mexican or Latino users, which she thinks says that they are not victims of the drug culture.  And there is no mention of corruption in the US law system.

3. Anglo-Saxon America is given a blue tone, which gives it a connotation of being cold and metallicized.  Mexico is given a sepia look, and the yellows suggest a parched, lacking, underdeveloped country.  She said that the shifts in color suggest 1st and 3rd world, completely disregarding Mexico's modernity. She notes how unrealistic this is because there is a shot when one character is looking through binoculars at Mexico, and through the binoculars it is sepia-toned, but when we see him he is in full color, which shows that it is not the light in Mexico, it is the American view of Mexico.

4. He shares many of the characteristics of a Mexican bandit: violence, psychopathic tendencies, involvement in illegal exploits, sadistic, and power-hungry. He also reinforces the idea that the US government is not corrupt, yet the Mexican system is corrupt because he is a drug trafficker, and his counterpart Wakefield is not.  Javier's role to show Mexico as a country in need of US guidance is conveyed in the way that he only becomes successful when he tells the US that Salazar is involved with the drug war.  It suggests that "the good Mexican cop can only get results if he works for the US agency". It also suggests that Mexico does not have an effective way of persecuting Salazar, and only the DEA can do anything to stop him.

5. It advocates DEA intervention in Mexico.  Mexico is portrayed as corrupt and unable or unwilling to take care of its drug problem, so it reflects America's projected need to go in and have jurisdiction in Mexico.

6. He learned that it is important to want to be on a film set.  When he was working on The Underneath, he had forgotten what it felt like to be excited about making movies, and Richard Lester helped him realize where he was in his career. So by making Schizopolis, he branched away from what he had been doing, and just made a movie the fun way, which reignited his love.

7.He defines "personal filmmaking" as making a film that you want to make, essentially.  It is not necessarily a film about you, or a film about your life.  He says that he only does movies that he likes, he wouldn't work for a year and a half on something that he "doesn't give a shit about".  He says that with his earlier films it was like he didn't go out of the house, and kept the blinds closed.  He liked Erin Brockovich because it was someone else's story, not his own.

8. There was much less time between set-ups so actors could stay in the moment.  He said there would only be about two minutes between shots, which made it a day where you were mostly shooting.  He said that he couldn't even leave to go to the bathroom until lunch, because they were always on task and getting things done.  He also didn't rehearse much on set because he says that it takes away from the magic of just going for it and seeing what you get.

Assignment 6: Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Alisa Perren, “sex, lies and marketing”

1.1989 was considered a transitional year for independent distribution because many independent distributors that started in the beginning of the 80s with the introduction of video overextended themselves and began spending a larger budget on in-house productions, creating a fear of the death of independent distributors.  An indie blockbuster is a film that replicates the "exploitation marketing and box office performance of major-studio pictures" but on a smaller scale, with a similar cost-to-earning ratio. This caused many big production companies to create a smaller division to produce smaller-scale productions, such as Fox Searchlight and Miramax.

2. Miramax distributed films that were quality pictures (had artistic value), nonclassical and focused on nonconventional subjects and styles, and they found marketing hooks that would help films transition from the arthouse to the multiplex. They also limited their spending and aimed for acquisitions rather than actual producing, and restricted their releasing schedule.

3. RCA/Columbia Home Video and Virgin financed it, but allowed Miramax to distribute it because they thought that the word "videotape" being in the title would make people think it was low-quality and shot on videotape, so they didn't approve of it.  Miramax pursued the rights so aggressively because it won awards and had a great turn-out at Sundance Film Festival, and they were determined to market it.

4. A key promotion strategy was to promote it as if it were a big-budget, mainstream film.  Also, they "found their audience", not hope that the audience found them.  They appealed to niche audiences by using a high degree of control on the marketing of the film, and in careful construction of their ads, including award listings for the arthouse niche,and reviews such as "intense comedy" for the college students.

5. Their films complimented, rather than competed with, what the major studios were producing.  They would release their films in only a few theaters at first and allow it to spread, so that it was advertised by word of mouth and built on positive reviews.  That way it combatted a lack of quality product when the blockbusters began to lack.

6. Because if an event film flops in the US, such as a film with Sylvester Stallone, it will still do pretty well in the foreign market.  These middle class films use universal marketing hooks, such as star power, to appeal to wide audiences, and can span the globe, rather than an indie film.  Malin's foresight also comes from his mention of sex, lies, and videotape being higher "quality", which distinguishes these films from industrial films, and yet making them similar because they were marketed with "all Hollywood has to offer and then some" because they have more sex, violence, and risky subject matter.

7. "Independent" eventually came to be not so different from Hollywood films because, like Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, they used major stars, scripts from established screenwriters, and featured classical filmmaking, and so "independence" served as a tool of the press and the industry.  The "Year of the Independents" at the Oscars was ironic because although 4 of the 5 films nominated for best picture were independents, they were all produced by subsidiaries of major production companies. Some repercussions of the bifurcation of the industry are that Hollywood versus independents established their own looks: Hollywood was glossy with high production value, and independents were gritty and full of edgy content. Also, the films needed a specially-defined niche audience.

Assignment 5: Elephant

1. I thought that what Van Sant said about heterosexual white male directors was interesting.  As a gay director, he is the underdog, which is a recurring theme in his films.  I think his reasoning for keeping the kissing scene was good, because he took into consideration the reactions it  would receive, and he did not take it out specifically for that reason, because he didn't want to take it out for the wrong reasons.  I think it's cool that he thinks of it primarily as a high school movie, about disconnections between people, rather than just a school shooting film.  

  I also enjoyed reading his opinion of Psycho.  He thought it was completely different from Hitchcock's, which is interesting since it was a shot for shot, and explained that he treated the actors as humans and Hitchcock used them as "archetypes".  He also mentioned throughout the interview how audiences read into his films at times, which we touched on in class, so maybe meanings are constructed that he did not originally intend.

2. He said that when you're writing a screenplay there's not "a lot of room for the fun stuff", and you are following the strict parameters of what is in the script, so for Elephant, he did not write a script, he just had a storyline, characters, and had the actors improvise on the set. This was relying on "ordinary conversations, not scripted conversations". This allowed him to concentrate more on the visual style, and his story line turned into a map of the high school.

3. It is different because it moves back in time to show crucial events for later in the story. The temporal structure is very complex.

4. The unrecognized aspect of Elephant's time frame is that right before the shooting, the timeframe "closely approximates real time". He observes that the long, continuous tracking shots emphasize a long duration of the events. The third act has a lot of shorter cuts, twice the amount of shots in each of the other acts, which make the events of the third act feel more intense and chaotic.

5. It is different because not many character traits are given. He reveals little, with tracking shots we are able to view the character, but not dig down and know what they are thinking or how they are feeling. These strategies relate to the high school experience because Van Sant is saying that the teenagers are in disconnect, just how high school creates disconnections between the teenagers, and there is a disconnect between the students and the authority figures.

Aaron Meskin, “Authorship”Skepticism about (cinematic) authorship
6. Stephen Heath's criticism of authorship is that you must also take into consideration the context in which a film is made, so the reception of the viewers and the context of the time all come into play on how a film must be analyzed, not just base it on what the director put into the text. Edward Buscombe agrees that one must look at the context in which a film is made to analyze it. This will contextualize our discussions of Van Sant, and plays into our discussion on Psycho, and how his was different because it did not have the shock factor that the original Psycho had because it was made in the 60s, before everyone knew that she was stabbed in the shower.

7. Barthes and Foucault think we'd be better off without authorship because it limits art, and without it there would be more freedom, art would exist in a "free state". Meskin disagrees, he thinks that the extent that authorship controls a work is overstated, and that too much freedom would be negative, and would take away from the work as a whole. Too much information can be destructive or distracting.

8. One argument is that the director makes the decision of what elements to use, and by choosing what goes into a film he is controlling the essence of the film, even if it is in the mainstream film system. Arguments against solo authorship in commercial filmmaking are that the director does not have as much control as he or she is believed to, and that the control a director has may not be seen as authorship, and you must evaluate the meaning of authorship. This debate relates to our discussions on Van Sant because a few of his films are considered more mainstream, such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, and also has mainstream producers.

9. The shift is meant to distinguish from the "empirical author" and the author as effected by the text. The shift is meant to address the idea that a film is made by a group but has the stamp of one "author". An argument for this concept is that the author construct gives an explanation for the coherence we sense in a collaborative film. Arguments against it are that a group can organize itself to produce a unified product, it is not necessarily the doing of one individual person. Also, we cannot assume what a person produces reflects on that person. This debate relates to Van Sant in many ways. He is gay, is that why some of his films incorporate homosexual themes? He is from Portland, is that why his films are mostly set in Portland? How much does Van Sant's life have to do with his films? What about Elephant, does it reflect him, too? I don't think so, so to what extent does he, as an individual, come across in his films?

Assignment 4: Psycho

1.Van Sant's Psycho is unusual because it is not trying to be better than Hitchcock's, it is simply a homage. Also, it does not hold the shock value that the original did in killing off the heroine in the first half.  It also copies Hitchcock's line-for-line and shot-for-shot. The "yawning fallacies" suggested by his approach are that it is such a literal remake it would not work with any creativity, but it is practically forgery or counterfeit.  Also, it raises the question how can a film be identical to its original, yet different.  Some logistical problems included all 1990s license plates, and the difficulty of finding a car with one large front seat to slide on, rather than two separate seats (with a center console, making sliding across difficult).

2. In Van Sant's Psycho, Marion is not killed in the shower, she is only spied on.  This is different Hitchcock's because the audience expects the shower scene murder, many people know about that without having seen the movie, so they are expecting it, which is why Van Sant snubs those expectations.

3. Naremore thought that Robert Forster's performance gave the psychiatrist more authority, that the Bates house looked too modernized, and that Van Sant ruined one of the "most famous dissolves in film history".  He uses the story of the royal cook to say that even if Van Sant made a film identical to Hitchcock's, it would not be good because it was not part of the contexts of the original, just like how the king's mulberry omelette wasn't as good because it did not have all the meaning that it did when the king was a child.

4. Rothman says that since the shots copy Hitchcock so closely, but are not HItchcock's, they don't work.  His authorship is so unique, and Hitchcockian shots cannot mean all the things that his do.  Leitch questions Rothman's assumptions that Hitchcock is an author and Van Sant is not, saying that he bases his arguments on five of Hitchcock's films, but undermines Van Sant saying that his shots aren't even gestures. Timothy Gould objects to Rothman, saying that Rothman has no authority to decide whether Hitchcock or Van Sant is an author.

5. Because he was the last author.  Psycho was terrifying for 1960s audiences, and Leitch says that if he showed his students this film back then, they would ask to leave because they were afraid.  Now, they say "is that it?" because it was so influential because of the shock of it, and then the shock sets new standards, so old films are not as scary anymore because scarier things have come after.

6. Because in assuming that everyone had seen Hitchcock's Psycho, he he could "regulate the interpretation of his homage because its classic status and the reactions of its original audience could be universally stipulated".  

7. He has an interest in "rendering the subjective experience of troubled, disaffected youths and young adults".  Other thematic concerns that he mentions are the idea of leaving home to escape controlling norms and ideals, and searching for intimate relationships. In relation to Psycho, it involves troubled youths, Marion leaving home to escape her troubles, and the use of inserted subjective shots (such as Arbogast's vision of falling down the stairs).

8. He uses subjective shots and voice-over narration to bond the audience to the protagonists' inner thoughts. He compares being murdered to an orgasm, a drug high, and a narcoleptic seizure, which are all moments in Van Sant's other films that contain similar subjective shots of visions.

9. How does Van Sant’s typical strategy of casting against expectation suggest new or different meanings in Van Sant’s Psycho? (Specifically the casting of Marion, Norman, and Lila?)

The casting of Marion was interesting because she is a woman living in a man's world, and is unfulfilled, and he chose to cast Anne Heche, who was known to be a lesbian. Norman was originally cast as Anthony Perkins who was suspected to be gay, and is portrayed as effeminate in Hitchcock's Psycho, and Van Sant cast against this expectation by choosing Vince Vaughn who is known for his heterosexuality.  He also included a scene where Bates masturbates while watching Marion enter the shower, which contrasts with Hitchcock's Bates who looks at her with no emotion.  This suggests that Bates kills her because she is indifferent to his heterosexual advances. Also, Julianne Moore's portrayal of Lila is that of a powerful, liberated woman who helps capture Bates, which contrasts to Hitchcock's meek, helpless Lila.

Assignment 3: My Own Private Idaho

1. The dialogues and characters are similar or parallel to those in Shakespeare's Henry IV, such as Bob Pigeon who is a parallel to Falstaff, Scott is equivalent to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, and Van Sant has modernized and placed Shakespaere's dialogue into Portland, with Scott's line to Bob about how he he would only look at clocks if they were lines of coke.

2.They represent the conventional(old) and the unconventional (young)Falstaff, and the link between the characters is established from the very beginning when Mike is wearing a shirt that says Bob on it. When I watched it, I actually thought Mike's name was Bob for the first couple scenes. Chimes at Midnight is significant because Van Sant comments on it in My Own Private Idaho, with the character Mike, and draws parallels and dissimilarities from it in this film. He reverses the role of Scott and Mike in the prank on Bob from what it was in Chimes.

3. It emphasizes the relationship of Scott and Mike as equals, as brothers.  The rejection of the Falstaff characters in this context makes Scott more heartless than Prince Hal is in the play, because it is not necessary for him to reject them, he does not need to erase them from his past like Hal does in the plays. 

4. He becomes a crueler character, one who throws away relationships and is fickle. He conforms to heterosexuality and the world of his father's politicians at the end, abandoning Mike and Bob, and the film remains centralized on them, forgetting Scott, because its focus is on the usually-forgotten Falstaffs.

Michael Newman, “Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic Autonomous Alternative”

5.He says that the "indie" movement "challenges the mainstream" and that in doing so, it creates another consumer audience for which it is produced.  He believes the tension is that indie cinema has created a group that is straying from the mainstream to be non-commercialized, but in doing so they create a commercialized product, just for a different, prosumer audience.

6. Independent was known to be contemptuous of the mainstream, purposely straying from it, believing that modesty is virtue, and low budgets can be an aesthetic choice.  Not only is it present in film, but also in music such as Green Day, with audiences that are constantly rejecting "sell outs" because they have given up artistic integrity for money or conformity. Independent filmmakers maintain credibility by keeping consistent with their indie style, even if they just so happen to become popular, but will lose it if they change to appease the masses.

7. There was a shift when TV commercials began using indie bands, but this was not seen as selling out, it was seen as getting good, interesting music out there since it could not air on major label-controlled MTV. It challenges the idea of mainstream being anti-indie.

8. He says that indie music creates its own audience of a certain type, usually urban, white, and male, who are given a group to join that is above the mainstream. The "imagined audience for indie culture is a cliche' of liberal elites".

9. The film stayed authentic by keeping in the scene that Universal did not like, therefore they did not distribute it. Solondz was disappointed by the box office sales though, and blamed it on Good Machine for not being an experienced distributor. But he still accepted the money that Universal gave him under the table, in case the film made money. This makes the artistic autonomy questionable because they still took money from the company that tried to change it, and then wouldn't distribute it because Solondz didn't do what Universal wanted him to do. 

10. He says that indie culture is not autonomous because there is no contradiction between "consumer capitalism and that of alternative cultural movements", and it depends on the maintream to be anti-mainstream. He also says that the mainstream culture has in a way "bought in" to the indie culture, making indie culture no less credible than mainstream culture because that culture's participants are the ones who ultimately decide what is and isn't credible, within the context of their culture.