Ida Z's Film Class Notes: October 2020

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

FILM SCREENING - DAYS OF HEAVEN & DISCUSSION & QUIZ

Days of Heaven

Hollywood Renaissance: 1964-1976

Film scholar Adrian Martin review
Adrian Martin recalls seeing Days of Heaven upon its theatrical release:
1)"I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering
this work,
2) which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!)
with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away 3)before the mind could fully grasp their plot import;
4)what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear.
5)Yes, there was another “couple on the run”
6)Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby,
7)he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill,
8)she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of
the twentieth century
9)but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic.
10) And there was so much more going on around these two characters,
11) beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer
(Sam Shepard)
12)now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it,
13)the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it,
14) the daily miracles of shifting natural light
15)or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place
16). . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film.

17)Above all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days of Heaven was signaled to its first viewers
by its most fragmented, inconclusive, “decentered” feature:
18) the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz as Linda, Bill’s actual sister, who is along for the
ride, often disengaged from the main action but always hovering somewhere near.
19) It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Spacek’s “naive” viewpoint from Badlands,
20) but Manz’s thought-track goes far beyond a literary conceit.
21) It flits in and out of the tale unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times
everything,
22)veering from banalities about the weather to profundities about human existence.
23)Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in midair.
24)In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight
25)—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make
and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over
and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or “characters.”

Introduction to the clip:
The following clips of the locust plague in Days of Heaven demonstrates the unique meditative style of Malick: the depiction of nature as philosophy against a world torn apart by jealously, greed, war, and chaos.

Days of Heaven (1978) - The film was shown.

Here's the assignment she requested- i did the best I could...The assignments are getting tougher and tougher, I should have seen his other films like Badlands - but I thought the assignment would be too long.

· Please choose one scene or shot from Days of Heaven and embed a screenshot or clip into your post.

· Please explain how Malick's style

· reflects his status as an auteur of the Hollywood Renaissance.

· You may wish to focus on Malick's composition,

· the voiceover narration of Linda Metz,

· Ennio Morricone's score etc.

· You also may wish to include a clip of another scene from Malick's filmography to show the class how his style has progressed over the past few decades.

Here's my essay:

I changed my essay, Here's the new one:

Ida Z. daRoza
Hollywood Renaissance

In Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) I saw many of the themes of the Hollywood Renaissance. This new era was no longer controlled by the studio system that had chosen the directors, cinematographers, editing and actors in the past. Directors could now be in control of their vision for a film. Mast and Kawin (M&K) said that now a film was “frequently labeled by or of its director,”

Another characteristic that emerged was “The offbeat antihero protagonists” M&K. We are sympathetic, or can understand the reasoning of the killer Bill in Days of Heaven just as we are to Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). There is psychological complexity in the storylines of these characters on why they have done wrong but for good reasons. The antihero films also show more graphic violence than in the past. It shows a break with the old Hollywood Code of not having sex and violence.

How these things were represented in the directors’ films and the style that they brought out in these films was unique. Mast and Kawin describe the differentiation between city and country films. Where city films relied on editing and country films relied on composition or mise-en-scene. Film shooting as with the French New Wave moved to shooting outdoors and using the natural light.

This was the first country film that I fell in love with, I almost wasn’t paying attention to the film plot the cinematography was so beautiful consistently from scene to scene.

The use of the golden wheat in most of the composition was done in a way that created a golden stage for the actors. It reminded me of Van Gogh’s many wheat pictures which I always thought were his dullest work. Now I can see the beauty through the Malick’s eyes. The landscapes of John Ford didn’t take my breath away as this did.

We saw the land as a living character during different times of day and the entire year of seasons. From the harvest to snow, summers playing in river and hunting in the fall. Within each of those seasons we saw the beauty of the properties of the day. As we saw the sun over the workers, the moon, smoke and fire. It was like a visual poem of the seasons and natural earth.

The unique landscape trait that I learned from Malick’s work was the filming during the “magic hour.” Besides the golden wheat below as a stage, the sky was always had consistently beautiful rich color achieved from filming in the dusk. I wasn’t familiar with the term “magic hour” and learned from a cinematography magazine The Beat in their 11/16/2017 article by Jourdan Aldredge that "If you’re not familiar with the term, “magic hour” in film and video production, it is the period just before sunrise or just after sunset when the sun is not visible, yet its light is diffused evenly. In the world of cinematography, magic hour filming creates a “magical” effect that makes it easy to light subjects evenly and quite beautifully." The article explains that a true magic hour can last only twenty-five minutes and provides tips on some ways cinematographers can maximize this time with camera work. https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/4-cinematography-tips-magic-hour/ (Links to an external site.)

This picture I believe captures the magic hour and composition of the two characters proportionally in the shot. I liked the frequent use of the house to give a vertical rise within the flat landscape.

day magic.png

Edited by Ida Daroza on Oct 30 at 11:34pm

Grade 3/3

No Feedback from Denah

Citlaly's response:

Hello Ida, I agree with everything you said! We can tell that the director had more liberty with his characters; we witness murder, ambition, and deception. Bill is definitely the anti-hero in the story, and I think we don´t view him as the villain due to his attractiveness. But we have to acknowledge the fact that he is a criminal. The cinematography was gorgeous just like you said. The colors in each frame were so concise and the composition carefully crafted. I read a similar article explaining the filming process for a shot in the golden hour, thanks for this article. Overall, amazing review, you talked about a lot of aspects of the film.

Response: Christopher Nathan:

Ooo - I love the idea of the golden wheat creating a Van Gogh-like stage for the actors!

Response: Miguel Villicana

Hey ida

The cinematography here in this film is amazing and beautiful and looks so relaxing to live in a area like that. The changing of season with the visuales was magnificent here Also it was interesting in how you were saying about the paintings of Van Gough in the film which they do kinda look like making it a great art between Van Gough and the Cinematography here. It was such a epic movie with these elements .

Response: Andrew OConnor Watts

Interesting points here, Ida! The use of landscape as a character is something I really loved about Days of Heaven and the screenshot you chose is stunning. I really appreciated how that character is treated with the same shifting dynamism of a human character by showing the landscape during different seasons and times of day, as you mentioned. As I was watching, I noticed how the vastness of the landscape seemed to parallel the characters' moral emptiness, an emptiness that also seemed to be accented by the frequent shots of scarecrows in the empty fields.

Citlaly's essay:

Hollywood Renaissance

Terrence Malik´s Days of Heaven (1978) follows the story of two lovers who disguise their romantic relationship as passing for brother and sister. When meeting wealthy dying farmer, they plan a way to inherit his wealth. Nevertheless, things don’t go as planned. In the scene I choose to analyze, Bill (Richard Gere) enters the room of the farmer (Sam Shepard) and finds him laying down with his lover Linda (Brooke Adams). He wakes her up and the scene cuts to them escaping to the fields during the sunrise. When they return from their short scape, Linda finds the farmer upset and looking for her. In the first part of the sequence we witness Bill opening a forbidden door, the shot is quite tight, slow and dramatic. Then Bill observers how Linda is hugging her “fake” husband and the tension is suddenly more intense in a different way; has Bill become the intruder of the relationship? Nonetheless, after the discouraging scenario for Bill and the confusing shoot for the audience, Linda goes out to enjoy a romantic yet risking sunrise. The composition completely changes to wide shots that capture the magnificence of the landscape and its colors. They go to what has been a safe place for them, the lake. They enjoy wine and ultimately their company. Bill drops his glass to the water, symbolizing that what they were doing wasn’t right, and at some point the lie would drown them too. When they return, we now witness a worried farmer looking for his wife Linda. The audience wonders whether he saw them or whether he will believe what Linda tells him. Malik does a magnificent job at capturing the farmer´s desperation and build a scene that continually changes its tone. When the Hollywood industry started to value directors more and promote films under their names, audiences would consume films because of who directed them. To achieve this, directors had to have a style or quality that would represent them as filmmakers, and the audience would expect these conventions in each of their films. Terrence Malik appears to have achieved this through the perfection in his composition, the showcase of nature and man, a philosophic view of life, a constant battle with morals, and perhaps a unique way of editing.

Captura de pantalla (90).png Captura de pantalla (89).png

Captura de pantalla (91).png Captura de pantalla (95).png

We can observe in his following films how the composition is similar. Wide shots with man facing their emotions in the raw nature.

My Response

I agree with your assessment of the psychological tension in this three way relationship. Malick portrays it in mostly a visual style and very subtly with lots of vignettes of Bill seeing Abby's face with The Farmer (I don't think we ever get a name) and the Farmer seeing Abby and Bill. The second time The Farmer looks out and sees the couple speaking closely and having a quick hug and kiss. We see the pain in his face and its all done visually. We do not hear the conversation the lovers are having and there is no dialogue of The Farmer yelling or telling his thought. It's psychologically deep but done in Malick's own way of restraint and not overacted or with huge dramatic scenes.

Edited by Ida Daroza on Oct 30 at 11:33pm

Old Essay:

Ida Z. daRoza
Hollywood Renaissance

How these things were represented in the film directors’ films and the style that they brought out these films were unique. Mast and Kawin describe the differentiation between city and country films. Where city films relied on editing and country films relied on composition or mise-en-scene. Film shooting as with the French New Wave moved to shooting outdoors and using the natural light.

This was the first country film that I fell in love with, I almost wasn’t paying attention to the film plot the cinematography was so beautiful consistently from scene to scene.

This picture I believe captures the magic hour and also how the characters are composed shown close up but the gorgeous landscape is not lost in the shot in a long shot.

days of heaven.jpg

My mandatory reply to another student's essay:

quiz:

Attempt History

	Attempt	Time	Score
LATEST	Attempt 1	1 minute	5 out of 5

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese
1) Scorsese began his career in the late 1960s after graduating from NYU.
2) He made his film debut in 1967 with Who’s That Knocking at My Door
3) before making some of the most important films of the 1970s and 1980s including:
a) Mean Streets (1973)
b) Taxi Driver (1976)
c) Raging Bull (1980)
4)His films often feature Italian Americans and center on the theme of redemption.

Mast and Kawin point out that:
1)As fast and violent as Scorsese's films often are, they are also intensely meditative.
2)Many of his films also have thoughtful voice-over narrators.
3)Scorsese is knowledgeable about film history and it shows in his film technique.
4) He constantly refers to classic directors like
a)Michael Powell - The Red Shoes
b)Rossellini
c)Welles
d)Hitchcock
e) and even D. W. Griffith - (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) The Birth of a Nation
5) His characters are often isolated (sometimes within the limits of an obsession).

Introduction on Mean Streets

At the beginning of Mean Streets, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) observes in voice over: “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets; you do it at home.”
Charlie is torn between his devout Catholicism and his mafia ambitions.

The following scene from Mean Streets showcases one of Scorsese's trademark devices: scenes of brutal violence set to the music of the 1960s and 1970s:

Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973):

This guys a mook - pool hall scene Click Here
Clip we saw in class - pool hall fight with a pay off to the police at the end.

An article on Scorsese's three film motifs
Click Here

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick
1)Stanley Kubrick began his career as a photographer in New York City and
2) began directing feature films in the early 1950s.
3) Kubrick was a perfectionist and decided on every detail of his films himself,
from scripting to editing.
4)He worked very slowly.

Mast and Kawin point out that an essential Kubrick theme
1) is man's love affair with death.
2) He worked in many genres including:
a) literary drama (Lolita, 1962),
b)film noir (The Killing, 1956),
c)the war film (Paths of Glory, 1957
d)Full Metal Jacket, 1987),
e)political satire (Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
f)horror (The Shining, 1980)
g)sci-fi (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).

Clockwork Orange (1971)
1) Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian crime novella A Clockwork Orange
depicts youth gangs in a dystopian Britain.
2) The film employs disturbing, violent images to communicate social and political commentary.
3) In the United States, the film was released with an X rating.
4) After Kubrick replaced 30 seconds from two scenes, the film was released with an R rating in 1973.
5) The film employs a distinct visual style and classic soundtrack composed by Wendy Carlos.

Introduction to film clip:
1)The opening shot of A Clockwork Orange shows Kubrick's visual mastery.
2)The camera begins on the face of Alex (Malcolm McDowell)
3)and slowly moves backwards to reveal an elaborate mise-en-scène.
4)The shot introduces us to a world of violence and hopelessness in a unique way.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971):

Arrancia Mecanica (in Italian)

Clip we saw Click Here Artistically beautiful and perfectly symmetrical composition and original

An average review but puts things in context Click Here

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick
1)Malick only directed three feature films in his first three decades as a director.
2)Between his debut feature in 1973's Badlands and 1998's The Thin Red Line,
3) Malick only made one other feature: Days of Heaven in 1978.
4)Malick studied philosophy at Harvard before becoming a Rhodes scholar.
5) His films reflect a meditative philosophical style,
6) often employing voice over narration over shots of nature and animals.

Days of Heaven
1)Days of Heaven stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as a couple pretending to be brother and sister
in 1916.
2)Gere’s character Bill is on the run after killing his boss in a steel mill.
3)He and Abby flee with Bill's younger sister Linda to the Texas Panhandle where they meet a rich
farmer (Sam Shepard) who falls in love with Abby.

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978):

The Locust scene Click Here - This is what we saw for class

Small bit on the cinematographer Click Here

Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola
1) Mast and Kawin explain that Francis Ford Coppola is central to the American film industry during
the Hollywood Renaissance period.
2) Coppola began as an assistant to Roger Corman before writing scripts for other directors such as
Patton in 1970.
3) He founded his own independent company, American Zoetrope in 1969 and began to direct his own
features in the late 1960s.
4) He is perhaps most well-known for his films of the 1970s including:
The Godfather (1972),
The Godfather Part II (1974),
The Conversation (1974)
Apocalypse Now (1979).
5) For a time, The Godfather was the highest grossing film ever made
a)Won three Oscars in 1972 for Best Picture
b)Best Actor (Marlon Brando)
c) Best Adapted Screenplay.
6)Although gangster films had been made before, no one treated characters with the psychological depth
and complexity that Coppola does in the first two Godfather films.
7) During the 1980s, Coppola made some modest films that allowed him to experiment more with film
style.

Rumble Fish (1983)
1) Coppola directed Rumble Fish in 1983, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton.
2) The film is notable for its avant-garde style with a film noir feel.
3) Rumble Fish is shot on stark high-contrast black-and-white film
using the spherical cinematographic process with allusions
to French New Wave cinema and German Expressionism.
4)The film is about two brothers (Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke) involved in gangs while living a
Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Writer Glenn Kenny recounts the history of the film (Rumble Fish and The Outsiders) :
"Rumble Fish (1983) is a movie that is almost painfully personal, in ways both direct and indirect. It was a companion film to the higher-profile one that preceded it, The Outsiders—the two were shot practically back-to-back. But for followers of Coppola’s work, both projects were almost entirely unexpected, unlikely literary adaptations of young-adult novels by S. E. Hinton.

The Outsiders is based on Hinton’s first novel, about alienated boys in the Midwest fighting and loving and losing and finding themselves. Hinton wrote it in 1965, before YA fiction was a thing—and she did it while she herself, for “S. E.” stands for Susan Eloise, was still a teenager. As a result, The Outsiders resonates with a kind of plainspoken sense of both romantic yearning and confusion; it’s a book that doesn’t have everything figured out. That’s a salient feature of all Hinton’s early work.

What brought Coppola to it? He took on The Outsiders, he has frequently recounted, after it was suggested to him by a group of middle-schoolers. Certainly, for a filmmaker who had earlier adapted the best-selling writer Mario Puzo and the classic chronicler of colonialism and its discontents Joseph Conrad, Hinton did not seem an author he would turn to entirely of his own volition. But the affinity was there, and the deeper affinity was there with Rumble Fish, which he decided to make while he was still shooting The Outsiders. According to Jon Lewis’s valuable Coppola book Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . ., he once described Rumble Fish as the carrot dangling at the end of the stick that he came to see The Outsiders as.

Out of Hollywood
The work on both films got him out of Hollywood (figuratively), San Francisco (where he ran his Zoetrope Studios), and, yes, himself, in a sense. Just before, he had made One from the Heart at his facility, and it was an unexpectedly troubled production; in this period he had also worked himself into a frenzy over Wim Wenders’ Hammett, which he executive produced and which underwent considerable reshooting. (The experience was harrowing for Wenders and inspired his 1982 movie about moviemaking, The State of Things.)
“It was chaos incorporated at Zoetrope,” Coppola told New York Times writer Aljean Harmetz. “Like fighting a war.” The extent to which his crises were of his own making is arguable; in any event, he was once again, as had been the case after Apocalypse Now, in dire need of respite. “I used to be a great camp counselor,” he joked to Harmetz, “and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It would be like a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs again.”

Rumble Fish
1)Rumble Fish is a movie that takes place in the past, the present, and the future.
2)Its visuals are defined by that.
3)Time is always on its mind and not on its side.
4)(Clocks are often prominent in this homage to youth,
5) a nice rhyme with their near omnipresence in Ingmar Bergman’s film on old age, Wild Strawberries.)
6)Shots in the opening scene include fast-motion views of clouds passing in the sky,
7) the sun speeding across the skyscrapers of the part of Tulsa none of its characters ever get to.
8)The movie is full of ghosts.
9) In the diner/pool hall called Benny’s Billiards, the boys—Rusty-James, his tough-guy pals Smokey
and B.J. (Chris Penn), and the more straight-arrow Steve (Vincent Spano), who wants to be the gang’s
Homer—hop and jump and slide around on the furniture like phantoms, or maybe wannabe
phantoms (the drive to self-destruct is strong in adolescents), or maybe future members of a modern
dance troupe.
10)The proprietor, Benny (Tom Waits), admonishes them to watch their language;
11)his voice is strangely disembodied, like maybe he’s not even there, and for all the attention the boys
give him, maybe he’s not.
12)In strides a tall fellow named Midget (Laurence Fishburne, the boy gunner of Apocalypse Now, all
grown up and rather intimidating) to announce, “Biff Wilcox is looking for you, Rusty-James.”
13)The dialogue seems as ritualized as the movement: “Bring it down, bring it down, cool it off.”
14) Fugitive shadows of West Side Story accompany Rusty-James and his sad little gang to the rumble,
where Rusty-James gets a Christlike wound in his side."

Film Clip Introduction:
The following scene displays the noir and German Expressionist influence on Rumble Fish's visual style.

Review from Roger Ebert Click Here Not such a great review but puts it in context of his work.

The Rumble Fish Fight Scene we saw Click Here