Narrative Conventions

Alienation VS Identification

Identification Alienation

Cinematic Pleasure
Denial of Pleasure
Loss of Self Awareness
Self Awareness
Almost infant like
Intellectual engagement
Emotional Engagement
Why was that Weird?
 Elements of Film
Mise en Scene:
staging’. Describes everything in
the image which has been placed
in front of the camera for filming:
set design, location, costume,
make-up, props, actors, acting style
and lighting effects.
Cinematography:
film stock, Lens, film speed,
Exposure, Focus, framing (ie the
distance, level, height and the angle
of the camera) and camera
movement.
Shot types:
List on Page 38
 Production Audio

Microphones

Diegetic

Non-Diegetic Sound
 Editing

Continuity Eyeline Match/Match on Action

Shot Reverse Shot real time vs. story time
Kuleshov effect Flashbacks
180 Degree Rule Hollywood Montage
30 Degree Rule
 Post-Production

Editing

Special Effects

Transitions

Audio Editing and Sound

Design
Imitation of Life 1959
Douglas Sirk
 Hans Detlef Sierck
German born son of Danish parents

Bremen Playhouse (1923-1929) Artistic Director

Old Theater in Leipzig 1929-1936

 Beginnings as Film Director

Fled Nazi Germany in 1937

Arrived in US in 1939

Hitler’s Madman, 1943 (1st American Film)

Assigned only B-movies to work on

Until he began working for Universal Studios in 1950

He directed comedy, westerns, and war films

Most noted for complicated melodramas that showed a dark side

to upper middle class life
1954 Magnificent Obsession

1955 There’s Always Tomorrow

1956 Written on the Wind

1958 All that Heaven Allows

1959 Imitation of Life

 McCarthyism

• U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy

• increased fears about communist

influence on American institutions and
espionage by Soviet agents QuickTime™ and a
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• During this time many thousands of
Americans were accused of being
Communists or communist
sympathizers and became the
subject of aggressive investigations
and questioning before government
or private-industry panels
 Hollywood Blacklist

• entertainment industry blacklist,

mid twentieth-century list of
screenwriters, actors, QuickTime™ and a
directors, musicians, and TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
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other U.S. entertainment
professionals who were
denied employment in the
field because of their political
beliefs or associations, real
or suspected as Socialist
• Artists were barred from work on the basis of their alleged
membership in or sympathy toward the American
Communist Party, involvement in liberal or humanitarian
political causes that enforcers of the blacklist associated
with communism, and/or refusal to assist federal
investigations into Communist Party activities; some were
blacklisted merely because their names came up at the
wrong place and time
 Presented a dangerous environment for
politically subversive work

Imitation of Life seems to present a conformist or

accomodationist stance.

Story focuses on two women

Laura who is ambitious

Annie who lives in two worlds (as an African American maid in

the middle class white world and as a community leader in her
own)
The film seems to recommend that its female
characters can find happiness by conforming to
“more natural” domestic roles as mother and wife.

For the women who rebel against their limitations it

recommends the path of least resistance

Acceptance of society’s view of women and

women of color as different or inferior
 Sirk’s Women’s Films
Dismissed as soap operas until the
60’s and 70’s

Subversive possibilities in mass

culture accepted medium

Genre study

Feminist revision

New German Cinema

Cahiers du Cinema

Considered Kitsch/Bad Taste

Within the Hollywood Studio

Subversive and transgressive text

Distance, self critique

Response to the repressive Eisenhower era

 Kitsch

Appealing to popular taste in a bad way

Low-Brow

Often of poor quality

 Dialectic
Subject Matter/Genre

Artist’s Direction
 Baroque Visual Style
Over the Top

Elaborate Sets

Garish Colors
 Melodrama as social
commentary
Brechtian (avant garde theater: Three Penny Opera August, 1928)

Distanciation or Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarization effect)

Self-reflexive

theory of theater called the epic theater

spectator shouldn’t identify emotionally with characters

Climactic catharsis leaves the audience complacent

His audience would have a critical perspective

recognition of social injustice and exploitation

effect change in the world outside

stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality

and creating a sense of astonishment about them
 Conventions Subverted
Breaking the 4th wall

harsh lighting

songs interpreting action

explanatory placards

speaking the stage directions out loud

 Ranier Werner Fassbinder on Sirk

Saw him as a European artist who worked in

Hollywood and made anti-American films

Expressive lighting (garish colors) and strained

happy endings

This writing is considered by some to be

narcissistic and Anti-American and a simplistic
reading of Sirk’s work
How can melodrama be critical?

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 Conventions of Women’s
Pictures subverted

Ice Blue Color Scheme

Central Character “Laura” becomes emotionally extraneous to

the story

Secondary Characters (minority) fill the emotional vmondy oid

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