Welcome to what is, I hope, the first of many history articles on Wonderbread. In completing a double major in cinema and history I’ve learned many interesting things and would love to share some of them with you. Some of my fellow history students will also be contributing articles, so keep your eyes on the History category. I’d like to open with an article I wrote earlier this year for a class on Ancient Israel. It explores the similarities between the Ancient Israelite creation and flood stories and those of the Babylonians before them. Ultimately, we can see that there is common mythic tradition in the Ancient Near East.

-Morgan

When we examine the narrative and thematic structure of Genesis 1-2:4a we can see a structural and thematic core which appears to originate from a broad mythic tradition which existed in the Ancient Near East, long before the Israelites codified their scripture in writing. The central parallels exist in the Babylonian texts of the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis epic. We can find elements of each of these ancient stories present in Genesis, however, it is the differences (rather than the similarities) in these narratives that reveals to us the details of the philosophy of the Iraelites which distinguished them from their contemporaries. It is worthwile, however, to consider the similarities because these provide us with useful information about the collective experience of life in the Ancient Near East. Read the rest of this entry »

The cinematic phenomenon that would retroactively be known as film noir began in a world without television. This fact has several bearings on the issue of discussion, but the main focus of this essay will be to show how this film cycle, its traditions and its sentiments, has integrated itself not only into a world with television, but into television itself. As television programming has moved steadily toward an easier, cheaper and more accessible form of entertainment than the movies, many televisual genres have been born, from the classic soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful, Dallas) to quirky drama-comedy (M*A*S*H, Northern Exposure) to simple horror shows (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The questions before us are, what of television noir, how has it happened, and does it succeed? Read the rest of this entry »

Critical couple David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, in their jointly authored textbook Film Art, argue that the concept and physical actualization of ’setting’ is key to the art of film-making. Far more so, in fact (they claim), than in the realm of the theatre to which they so directly compare and contrast the cinematic, in doing so arriving at the conclusion that “[cinema settings] need not only be a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.” (pg. 179)

It is ironic, then, that the methodology of the ‘restricted field’ of action or setting is, if anything, based on an explicitly theatrical convention that plays to the limitations of the stage: many famous plays are set entirely in one room or area so as to capitalize on the intimate and generally static nature of the stage area, including Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer-winning 1958 play J.B. (set entirely in a circus ring), Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men (adapted into a single-set Academy Award-nominated ensemble film, directed by Sidney Lumet) and Patrick Hamilton’s Rope’s End (adapted into the single-set film Rope, famously directed by Alfred Hitchcock), to simply name a few. Establishing a restricted field to mean the restriction of the narrative to the fewest possible settings and the least amount of physical space, why, then, does a restricted field of action still work in a cinematic context? Read the rest of this entry »

Traditionally, New York and Los Angeles have formed (and informed, with their distinctive architectural sensibilities) the environmental backbones for any number of films noir. Chicago, too, has had at least a little exposure in its time, on account of the masses of gangster lore directly associated with the Windy City. Boston, however? Read the rest of this entry »

When Dashiell Hammet’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, was first published in 1929 it was heralded as a revolution of the detective fiction genre. The Outlook and Independent claimed it to be “the best detective novel [they had] ever read” and The New Republic noted that it transcended the “tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine” (qtd. in Marling, Dashiell 87). The exclusive and “aristocratic” Town & Country magazine presented a glowing, 1,500 word review of the novel (Marling Dashiell 87). Hammett had gained the acceptance from the literary intelligentsia he had craved from the beginning of his career (Marling, Roman 105) and, more significantly, had galvanised the Hard-Boiled detective genre as a legitimate literary pursuit. Read the rest of this entry »

“We sat two hours in front of the room where the censors were looking at the film…and finally they came out and they said, ‘Mr Lang, this film has practically everything about which we disagree and which we cannot accept but it is done with such integrity that we don’t want to make any cuts.’” — Fritz Lang, interviewed by Powers, Reed and Chase in 1973 – (“Fritz Lang: Interviews”, 171 [note that, unless otherwise indicated, all references to interviews with Lang come from this text, being as it is the authoritative compilation])

When one tracks the progress of the German Expressionist movement as it relates to the development and refinement of means of cinematic expression, the progression unearthed is undeniably one that trends towards integration and consolidation with more classical and conventional forms of aesthetic articulation as they directly related to the medium of celluloid: augmentation, rather than demonstration, discretion rather than ostentation. Read the rest of this entry »

The world of early cinema is a murky and contested landscape of disputed claims to fame and innovation. The classic example of this is the continuing debate over the inventor (or inventors) who ought to be credited with the creation of cinema; Thomas Edison or the Lumière Brothers. Each invented a contraption that captured and repeated moving images in the 1890s and each saw the potential in these moving images as a future form of entertainment (though Edison’s early patents suggest that he saw a greater industrial opportunity in film than the Lumière brothers, who considered film a new sideshow novelty that would last about a year). We can see, even from this brief description, where the coming heartfelt rivalry between the Edison and Lumière camps originated, though we must always be very careful when making claims about the early days of cinema. The records and surviving films from this time are both patchy and incomplete: like the Lumière Brothers, nobody expected film to be anything more than a short-lived novelty. It is with this caveat that we will explore the creative works of Georges Méliès and what it is that he contributed to the early days of cinema. Read the rest of this entry »

Wonderbread is currently experiencing a shortage of regular material, due to the overwhelming academic responsibilities that must claim all university students in the middle and end of every year. Rest assured, within a few weeks, these responsibilities will be fulfilled and there will be a surplus of subsequent material to post, including pieces on Georges Melies, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. I, for one, can’t think of anything more exciting.

I was having a bed-time gander through Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson the other night, and I came across his chapter on Bart as Punk Icon. Turner’s observations are astute, and more than valid (his basic contention is that Bart Simpson rekindled for the West a sense of jubuliant individualism and anarchy that had most notably been achieved in the past by the likes of Joey Ramone and Johnny Rotten), but reading his argument, I came across the quote that both spawned the conception of this jotting and gave it its title. I found the idea interesting, so I thought I’d write it down real quick, float it, see what people make of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, America, I want to play a game.

-Tagline, SAW III

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

-H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

If we examine American horror films from the 1950s leading up to the present day, we can see that, broadly speaking, decade by decade the fears which they exploit in their audiences have an undeniable root in the contemporary socio-political fears of the American populous at large. The 1950s saw a spate of so-called B-grade horror films which terrified people with their strong undercurrents of Cold War paranoia (with a particular focus on invasion by ‘the other’), such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Donovan’s Brain (1953) and, most notably, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The 1960s, on the other hand, saw a transition of focus from the Cold War to the more domestic issues of distrust of the establishment, the changing face of the American way of life and a condemnation of the Vietnam War with City of the Dead (1960), The Birds (1963) and Night of the Living Dead (1969). Read the rest of this entry »