Dreams and Dead Ends by Shadoian Jack;

Author:Shadoian, Jack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2003-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

The genre in the fifties has an almost fanatical tightness. The films are extended statements of rigidly interlocked parts. No one can speak a line without it echoing with significance. Every shot is calculated; nothing is inadvertent. Dialogue is heavy, weighted, thematically resonant by design. Visuals are blatant, assaulting, undisguisedly filmic, as if to declare openly that verisimilitude reveals nothing anymore, that people must be made to see what in looking at reality or its illusion they cannot see. Realism and illusionism, for all their seductive pleasures, have numbed our eyes and minds, have made us immune to the real, and so they either must be intensified to a point where they can be noticed as functional modes—as one or another deliberate choice out of many—or abandoned as useless to the task of jolting the eye out of its idly gratified torpor.

It is impossible not to notice Fuller’s camera in Pickup on South Street or that its movement and placement are aggressively leading us to see things in specific ways. The Big Heat uses sets to keep the action deliberately unreal and pointedly symbolic. Phil Karlson, in The Phenix City Story, closes the division between firm and actuality by using a real story as his base and by framing his fiction with real footage at the beginning and end. Illusionism gives way to emotions in the viewer that do not end with the film. The gap between our actual realities and the emotions undergone in the theater are bridged. We go out to meet a world that is an extension of the one we have just seen. The film does not allow us to expend the feelings it has created but leaves us full of them, giving pertinence to their vicariousness. The Big Combo’s stylized lighting puts us in the dark throughout the whole film as a fresh test to our vision. Kiss Me Deadly, from beginning to end, is an utter abstraction of reality. The visual scheme of 99 River Street is in close conjunction with the problem of seeing that the film and its characters are occupied with. The “realism” of The Brothers Rico is kept deliberately “unquestioned” to make gradually evident the breadth and insidiousness of the veneer that must be sloughed off to get at the horror of reality.

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