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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (2 Disk Special Edition): Commentary by Mike Nichols. Dir. Mike Nichols. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2006.  The commentary track on the special edition DVD provides perhaps the most insightful perspective of the film as far as the on-set culture and interactions that occurred daily during the production of the film.  Nichols gives a very in depth explanation of each scene, which includes filming techniques, lighting issues, relationships between actors and cameramen, as well as script censorship issues.  For instance, Nichols explains how the studio forced them to change the explicative used by Martha as George opens the front door to greet the arriving guests. It was Nichols first feature film and was much different than the documentary style he was used to working with.  It was very interesting to hear about the different challenges that the crew faced depending on the scene.  Nichols also explains some of the back and forth battle that occurred between himself and the playwright Edward Albee as they attempted to adopt the Broadway play to the big screen.  It is a valuable resource for examining the mindset of the filmmakers as they challenged the PCA in order to present the film as the artist intended.

This Film is Not Yet Rated. Dir. Kirby Dick. Perf. Kirby Dick, Jack Valenti, Kimberly Pierce, Alison Anders, and John Waters. IFC, Netflix, and BBC, 2006.  This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an independent documentary film about the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system.  It is an in-depth discussion about the current rating system, adopted under Jack Valenti's tenure as president of the MPAA, and attempts to challenge the system as unfair to the artists and filmmakers of independent films.  The main argument is that the review board of the MPAA is an unfair representation of the general public and that often times filmmakers receive unfair ratings that cost them millions of dollars in studio funding and box office sales.  It shows how an NC-17 rating can be a dreaded rating to receive to filmmakers because it often means that the release of their film is doomed to fail.  It also attempts to derive trends in the rating system that implies unfair judgments including: homophobia, female pleasure, and certain sexual movements.  Criticizing the reasoning behind these trends, Kirby points out the fact that violence in films is not poorly received by the board and often skates by without scolding.  This documentary is an excellent examination of the current rating system and begs the question of whether the MPAA is just a tool for serving the big budget studios rather than protecting the public from inappropriate content.

Lewis, John. Hollywood V. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York and London: New York UP, 2000. 135-191. 

            Chapter 4, titled Hollywood v. Soft Core, examines arguably the most influential year of film censorship to date.  In this year, MPAA president Jack Valenti issued a press release to stating that a new production code/ move rating system would be put into place.  The same system is still used today to rate films.  The chapter does a good job of outlining the events of how this code came into place. The author explains how the "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" was denied by the PCA but began production anyway, anticipating that change was to come.  It talks about the controversy over the language such as "screw" and "hump the hostess" were debated and the issues Valenti faced with content regulation.  In the end of the meeting, Warner Brothers appealed the PCA's preliminary ruling to deny Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the film was released.  Because of the films amazing success, it marked a point in history where the industry was beginning to understand that the Production Code was a dated system.  The film was released with a warning stating "for adults only" and ranked third in the box office list in 1966 behind two other mature-themed pictures. This chapter is very useful and entertaining in its explanation of the pressures and challenges that Valenti faced when negotiating the new rating system. It offers a very in depth perspective and takes the reader on a film by film journey of the controversy.

This article gives a fairly good description of the life of Jack Valenti, who arguably had more power over the motion picture industry than anyone who ever lived.  Paragraphs 9 through 16 are particularly useful for formulating a perspective on the era in which Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was released. It explains how there was a compromise in which three out of four vulgarisms were cut. It also gives credit to the film Blowup for using Woolf's momentum to cause its own controversy with brief nudity and sexual themes.  Fearing that censorship power might return to the individual states, Valenti acted,” I knew I had to move swiftly, and I did,” he later recalled. “I was determined to free the screen from anything like the Hays Code. But I also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.”  Some interesting notes are the fact that the movie Gremlins inspired Valenti to add a PG-13 rating to the initial rating system.  Also, the X rating was changed to NC-17.  The author then touches on one of the downfalls of Valenti's rating system, "distributors have mostly spurned [NC-17 ratings] for commercial reasons, leaving many filmmakers to make wrenching cuts to adult-themed films in pursuit of an R rating."  This explains some of the controversy over the rating system that still goes on today.  The rest of the article continues to elaborate on his incredible life but is less valuable for examining film censorship.

Gardner, Gerald. The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters From the Hays Office, 1934 to 7968. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987. 198-200.This part of Chapter 17, Dramas From Broadway, offers a very informative look at the process of the PCA when reviewing the script of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It tells of the meeting between Jack L. Warner and chief censor Geoffrey Shurlock.  After reading a copy of the play by Edward Albee the censor gave a list of all of the explicatives and phrases that would be considered unacceptable by the PCA, which the chapter lists completely.  This is a great example of the strictness of the PCA and its discretion towards strong language and sexual themes.  When the film was actually made, many of these phrases are omitted or altered.  The chapter goes on to explain how the Warner Brother's film held faithful to the Albee play.  It was denied by the PCA and was appealed to the MPAA board.  The chapter then lists the reasons why the MPAA decided to release the film after all.  The reasons were: The film was not designed to be prurient; Warner Brothers has taken the position that no person under eighteen will be admitted unless accompanied by a parent, and that the exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open for language or other material. This chapter is very useful for getting an inside look at the appeal process of the time and the drastic exceptions made on behalf of who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 319-346.The twelfth chapter of Pre-Code Hollywood examines the Hollywood Cinema during an era when Joseph I. Breen and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America began to enforce what is known as the Hays Production Code.  The chapter gives accounts of events leading up to the adoption of the code and how it was recieved by filmmakers and the public.  It gives a good representation of the extent that the Roman Catholic Church and the "National Legion of Decency spearheaded a renewed and more aggressive crusade to clean up [the film industry."  Going into detail, the authors explains many of the church's tactics to try to curb its followers away from the film industry, going as far as to station people outside of theaters to make sure that Catholics weren't going to see movies that the church deemed objectionable.The NRA Code is the next turn of the chapter.  Bringing up the court case ruling in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, where the government considered the film industry as purely a business and not a tool for public opinion.  This marked the beginning of more federal power over censorship, rather than relying on local state regulation.  One trade press manager summed the situation up by stating, "the whole world has gotten the idea that Hollywood is Hell's home office and Hays is the District Manager.” In order to lessen the influence of the Catholic Church the MPPDA granted the Production Code Administration autonomy and power.  This meant that the PCA would have to approve of a film before the banks would fund it.  Joseph I. Breen was put in charge and effectively enforced the Code, even reportedly stating, "I am the Code".  Many movies that carried the tones of pre-Code Hollywood were refused by the Breen Office.  The chapter goes further into explaining the effect it had on Hollywood film budgets and box office sales and gives an overall impression that films were more boring post-Code. The end of the chapter briefly explains how the 60's marked a period where the Code was considered dated. This chapter is a good indicator of the type of censorship environment that the country was used to before the making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It puts the era into a good context for considering the challenges that faced Mike Nichols and Ernest Lehman when the film was being made and released.

This article covers the history of film censorship in the United States extensively.  It begins by explaining the different factors that lead up the self-regulation of the motion picture industry.  Then it goes over every detail of the MPAA rating system, fully explaining the G,M,R, and X ratings.  The article takes a turn when Bates attacks the rating system for its unconstitutional implications. He argues that films should not be limited in content because that would violate the filmmakers' First Amendment rights.  He then goes into detail the vast differences between government censorship and the MPAA system which "lacks procedural safeguards that would be required of a state classification scheme".  He then proceeds to attack the MPAA for their claims of not being a censorship agency.  Towards the end, Bates makes strong arguments for the implementation of state action concepts to MPAA film classification.  He explains the governmental-function, government-enforced, and state-inaction theories as possible alternatives to the current problem.  He also examines the theoretical scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Bates overall perspectives are very insightful for delving into the controversy of the MPAA system and the solutions he offers are very interesting and intuitive. His words serve to challenge the MPAA and any other organization that has seemingly unlimited power over people with little to no government intervention.

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McCabe touches on Pabst passim. Of particular interest is her discussion of "H.D.'s unremitting admiration of Pabst--from Joyless Street to having 'vanquished the border-sphere' in Secrets of a Soul" (162). McCabe suggests that H.D. was attracted to Pabst's "feminine" film style which influenced her own film aesthetic.

Friedberg introduces her article with a look at the twin birth of psychoanalysis and cinema and argues that "Freud's theory of the unconscious. . .was, from the start, a theory in search of an apparatus. Yet the cinema, an apparatus which could reproduce and project specular images, from its beginnings, an apparatus in search of a theory" (41). Drawing on Chodorkoff and Baxter, Friedberg offers a reading of the history of the making of Secrets of the Soul, including Freud's rejection of the project. She calls the film the first 'that directly tried to represent psychoanalytic descriptions of the etiology of a phobia and the method of psychoanalytic treatment" (45). Friedberg points to the various ironic name puns having to do with Freud's lack of involvment in the film: that Pabst, the director of Joyless Street--Die FREUDlose Gasse (my emphasis) was asked to direct a film "mit Freud," when Freud refused to be involved; and that the actor who plays the pshychoanalyst in Secrets, Pavel Pavlov, shares his name with "Freud's mightiest theoretical opponent, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov" (46). Friedman goes on to describe and analyze the film, which she notes is separated into five parts: Pre-Dream; The Dream; Post-Dream; Analysis; and Cure. She notes that the happy ending of the film works as a kind of advertisement for psychoanalysis, arguing that Abraham and Sachs in consulting on the film, intented to "extol its curative virtues" (51).

Chodorkoff and Baxter provide a detailed historical account of the making of Pabst's Secrets of a Soul, taking it as an important example of post-World War I German film, which offers a "significant by forgotten aspect of the history of psychoanalysis" (319). They include a brief reception history as well as a look at the film's form and structure and the experimental nature of presenting dream on the screen in an historical context. They also quote extensively from the letters of Karl Abraham and Freud on the subject of the making of the film and film in general to show Freud's lack of interest in the project--Freud was concerned with protecting psychoanalysis from exploitation and delegitimation. Chodorkoff and Baxter's treatment of the dynamic between Abraham and Freud over film offers context to Freud's often-quoted assertion that "satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible" (323). But the authors find that despite Freud's notion that psychoanalysis could not be captured on film, the resulting film is better at representing psychoanalysis "plastically" than "verbally"--the film uses an excess of text in the form of titles (sub- and inter-), which take away from the film's successes. Finally, the authors read Secrets of the Soul as an historical document that sheds light on early psychoanalytic practice, and they end with a note on the repressed homosexuality in the film, which they suggest is exemplary of Weimer cinema.

Bergstrom examines the differences between Lang and Pabst's uses of "psychological explanation" in their films in order to show the wide spectrum of Weimar film's emphasis on psychology. She notes that while Pabst in such films as Pandora's Box and Secrets of the Soul emphasizes "'realistic' characters who are carefully individuated through psychological depth," Lang's characters are abstract types set up in contrast to institutions (163). Bergstom is not interested in psychoanalysis but in "how psychology is used at the narrative level" (164). Bergstrom reads Secrets of the Soul as didactic/educational film whose project is to legitimate psychoanalysis by showing how it works to diagnose and cure the film's central character. But she notes that the film is the least satisfying of those she examines because, while the main character is shown to have great psychological depth, the secondary characters are devoid of such depth.

Harrison, Stephanie.  Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005.

Harrison’s book neither deals directly with Roeg’s film, nor with du Maurier’s short story that inspired it, but it is essential to any analysis of Don’t Look Now.  The process by which a director adapts a short story into film is important, because a short story is just that, short.  A director must take something that rarely lasts over fifty pages and turn in into a film that usually lasts over two hours.  A director must take the story and ‘run with it;’ in some ways making the story his own.  Harrison analyzes 35 short stories and the films they spawned.  She separates the films and analyses into sections based mainly on genre (Horror, Western, etc.).  Don’t Look Now is a hybrid film, so it would not snugly fit in any of the genres that Harrison chooses, but it does have horror, drama, erotica, and auteur elements to it.  Harrison describes four different auteurs (Altman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Kazan) and their individual styles of adaptation.  She calls Altman, for instance, the “translator” (3), because he attempted to stay as true as possible to the original story.  There is little to no literature written about Nicholas Roeg, so it is impossible to know whether or not he would fit in with any of the different auteurs.
    One point I found very interesting in Harrison’s analysis is her idea that audiences are less hard on films based on short stories for being true to their source material, because “few short stories are embedded in the public’s consciousness in a way that popular novels are” (xvi).  In the case of Don’t Look Now, both the story and the film seem to have been lost from the public consciousness (due, in part, to the success of The Exorcist, which was released the same year as Roeg’s film).  Harrison’s book, as I said above, never mentions Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but by looking at the process by which other writers have adapted short stories, we can get a sense of the different approaches to it and how Roeg many have gone about doing it.  Roeg took a fifty-four page short story about a man’s blindness to his abilities and his fate and refashioned it into an unsettling drama/thriller about a married couple and ...

Hutchinson, Tom. Horror & Fantasy in the Movies.  New York: Crescent Books, 1974: 13-36.

Hutchinson goes beyond merely mapping out the history of horror cinema, and dedicates the first chapter of his book to revealing the deeper meanings beyond certain horror films.  Behind the blood and monsters, Hutchinson sees social commentary and much more, which the average viewer is completely unaware of.  He events of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and concludes that its underlying message is, “that we ought to co-operate or else” (23).  Hutchinson writes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), another 1950s sci-fi film, “carries a warning about loss of identity, an all-too-grim idea in a world where individuality is ironed out into uniform characteristics of thought and yes-saying” (23).
Hutchinson begins his analysis with the birth of cinema and the fantasy shorts of George Meliès.  He moves into German Expressionist films, such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) (19-21).  He also refers to Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) as further examples of horror films with social messages (23).  Hutchinson argues though, that one cannot simply voice these messages, or warnings, to the audience directly.  As he says, they must be “wrapped up in trappings of tinsel before they will be accepted” (28).
Don’t Look Now (1972) is one of those films whose meaning is “wrapped in trappings of tinsel” (28).  Hutchinson explains that, “[Donald] Sutherland here carries the seeds of his own destruction within himself, but will never know it” (29).  Reflexively, we are placed in the same position as Sutherland, because we are also unable to interpret the signs to recognize the future (e.g. our doom).  Hutchinson’s argument is that, “[Sutherland] is time-trapped in the way that we all are, unable to move beyond his three-dimensional context” (29).  Hutchinson ties into a theme explored in other sources I have encountered, that of time and space (in Don’t Look Now).  He, unfortunately, does not give the theme an adequate explication (quickly moving to the next film), but he does place the film in relation to other horror films that do more than just scare.  One is easier able to understand Don’t Look Now, when placed in the context of other horror films...

A short film to watch.

"Machinima is the making of animated movies in real time through the use of computer game technology. The projects that launched machinima embedded gameplay in practices of performance, spectatorship, subversion, modification, and community. This article is concerned primarily with the earliest machinima projects. In this phase, DOOM and especially Quake movie makers created practices of game performance and high-performance technology that yielded a new medium for linear storytelling and artistic expression. My aim is not to answer the question, “are games art?”, but to suggest that game-based performance practices will influence work in artistic and narrative media." -Lowood

 This article was a primary source for my paper. Althogh Lowood focuses almost entirely on the FPS culture which emerged out of Id Software's original 3D shooter trilogy: Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake, it also covers a good deal of general info about machinima...

Provides basic information on many facets of the film industry. Strictly informational, nothing theoretical or persuasive.

Descibes all the aspects behind film marketing, primarily independent movies in Europe. Includes general information on trailers.

Dissertations on the American movie market and methods of distributions and exhibition. Discusses topics from the Paramount litigation to television to rentals.

A history of the American movie business, including information about nickelodeons, theaters, studios, and alternative operations.

Analysis of many aspects that influence the film industry and how it influences others, such as theaters, current events, blockbusters, color, and advertising.

A theoretical approach with examples to American movie trailers. Provides reasons for why audiences like them and why they work. Views trailers as their own rhetorical cinematic narrative form and divides the book into the three eras of cinema.

Explains the idea behind "high concept", which describes today's movie marketing method of creating on simple image for each film. Shows how every aspect of marketing from music to distribution to trailers is bundled into this model.

Explains the Hollywood culture during the Golden Age (classical era) and how it made impressions on the general public. Includes information about the studios, magazines, star aura, agents, and advertising and promotion.

Explores how Hollywood's movies can influence human behavior and popular culture and vise versa. Includes information about marketing techniques, trailers, etc.

Beginner's handbook on the business aspect behind making movies. Includes information about profits, trailers, contracts, etc.

New York Times article by film critic Caryn James which reminds us that trailers exist because movies are simply consumer products. They distort the actual content of the actual films in order to market them to the potential audience.

New York Times article written by critic Caryn James which compares several movies and their trailers, proving the point that trailers can give inaccurate impressions of the story and quality of it's full-length movie.

While the text doesn’t make many outright references to Ikiru (there are only two), the story of Kurosawa’s life allows for a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the directorial choices made in Ikiru.  The autobiography is divided up in a few different ways; one of which is a division into “eras” in the life of Kurosawa, such as “Rashomon,” which focuses on the making of the film and the enormous critical success it achieved overseas (it won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film).  The autobiography is also interspersed with memories from Kurosawa at from various points in his life, like the chapter, “Calligraphy,” which tells how Kurosawa learned the art from his teacher.  The autobiography ends with his thoughts on Rashomon, so Kurosawa never goes into detail about Ikiru (because Ikiru was filmed after Rashomon), but we get the groundwork for what would cause his interest in the subject matter of the film.
Discussing the film Drunken Angel, Kurosawa recounts, “As background to the characterizations, we decided to create an unsightly drainage pond where people threw their garbage” (156), which is an image that returns in Ikiru, although it has a different allegorical meaning.  Many plot elements and images from Kurosawa’s films were taken straight from his life (a point made by Goodwin in his book ), and Ikiru is no different.  Kurosawa says of the studio he began his career at, “Management theory at P.C.L. regarded the assistant directors as cadets who would later become managers and directors” (95).  The bureaucratic elements in the management system at P.C.L., that Kurosawa criticizes, has echoes in the stagnant and immutable Japanese civil service in Ikiru.
Events from his life also influenced Kurosawa in the existential themes he deals with in Ikiru.  Kurosawa recounts, in the chapter “A Horrifying Event,” an early scene from his childhood, when he and his brother walked around the city looking at the death and destruction caused by the Kato Earthquake.  His brother uncomfortably forces him to look at the hundreds of dead bodies, but when Kurosawa goes to sleep, he does not have any nightmares.  When the young Kurosawa asks why he didn’t have any nightmares, his brother responds, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened.  If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.”   This message has deep significance to Ikiru, because Watanabe is only able to live when he confronts his cancer head on.  When he lies in his bed at home and cries himself to sleep, when he goes with the writer to experience the decadence of modern Tokyo, he is, in effect, trying to ‘shut his eyes’ to the cancer and ignore its existence.  Only when he faces it head on, does he realize that he has the power to give his limited life meaning.  There are many other events in Kurosawa’s life that have relevance to Ikiru, because it is a film about life itself and the search for meaning in life.  Kurosawa’s past offers insight into not only why the author chose to write about this subject, but also why he comes to the conclusions that he does.

Anderson and Richie separate the book into two parts; the first focusing on the “background” of Japanese Film, such as the development of editing techniques, camera angles and techniques, and sound.  The latter part focuses on the “foreground,” which is made up of the directors, techniques and actors that gave Japanese Cinema its international (and national) identity.  The book first mentions Ikiru, which it calls Living  after its English translation, in the chapter on the development of atmosphere in Japanese cinema from 1949-1954 (Chapter 10) .  The authors give a brief synopsis of the film and mentions that “the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television […] called [Ikiru] “one of the greatest films of our time.””   Ikiru is described as an example of Kurosawa’s humanist cinema,  which is encapsulated by its mood and atmosphere.  The authors actually do criticize the film, which the other authors I read did not do, saying, “The film’s fault is perhaps that Kurosawa’s genius flows unchecked and that sometimes he carries things too far.”   This quote underlines the strategy taken by Anderson and Richie in their analysis of Kurosawa’s films (as well as the films of other Japanese directors).  Instead of delving deeply into the meaning of various shots and sequences in films, the films are analyzed more in terms of the authors’ views.  Films are listed in relation to the given topic of the chapter, but not much space is given to actually explaining, for example, what in the film creates the atmosphere.  A few interesting facts about Ikiru, learned from the book, is that Watanabe was Takashi Shimura’s only lead role in a Kurosawa film  and that the film was the first film that Kurosawa edited solely by himself.
While the book doesn’t have as much relevant information to Ikiru as other books I read, it does present some new information concerning the film in its own right, not on its aesthetic principles or themes.  The book is able to ground the film in relation to other Japanese films of its time, which no other book does, which is valuable in a complete understanding of the film beyond its importance as an Akira Kurosawa film.

Goodwin’s analysis of Ikiru centers on the film’s use of “codes.”  He defines “codes” as “structures that, through their coherence, make a text perceptible and comp