Simon, Richard Keller. "Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and movies of the 1930s." Modern Language Quarterly. Vol. 54 Issue 4 (Dec. 1993). EBSCO MegaFILE. 9 Apr. 2008. <http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2055/ehost/detail?vid=11&hid=117&sid=a84a42de-5c72-4186-8e63-be5141727d64%40sessionmgr102>.

 

            This article traces the method Nathaniel West utilized in the creation of his novel The Day of the Locust.  The author identifies West’s employment as a screenwriter as the birthplace of the method he utilized to write The Day of the Locust.  In order to produce marketable screenplays, West was forced to “rearrange conventional film material rather than invent anything new.”   He later used this method of montage to create his novel, as nearly every element borrows from Hollywood films of the time.  The majority of the story he owes to Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, his characterization borrows from B movie cliché’s of the time and other characters and themes come from other contemporary movies.  However, West’s success came by not merely adding these elements together, but reworking each one as a parody that attacked what West saw as Hollywood fantasy.  Further, West took revenge on the limiting Production code of the time by including scenes that could never appear on the screen, namely the cockfight and visits to a whorehouse.   While some commentators of the time thought that real life should be more like the movies, West effectively makes the movies more like real life.   The latter part of the article examines contemporary philosophical schools of thought that may not have directly influenced West, but observed the same elements of mass culture West satirizes. 

            This article is fascinating as it provides strong evidence for all of its assertions.  It leaves no doubt that the main elements of the story of West’s novel are a subverted version of Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and it shows how West attacked what he saw as not only the artifice of the movies but their power as well.  This only further adds to the interesting concept of West using that which he satirizes as direct subject matter as he not only weaves a tale about Hollywood movies but also uses the movies themselves in the creation of story elements.  As West collects from contemporary films for the creation of his novel, his novel is likewise harvested for the creation of the film that bears its name. 

 

Orr closely examines Memento's film fabric as well as its broader cultural implications, presenting it as the result of a natural progression in a decade marked by the transformation of classic film noir into a low-budget identity noir. Nolan's dis-linear identity noir opens a black hole of perception, making the audience share the same amnesiac quality with the beleaguered, lost protagonist. This creates an intensifying suspicion of what the truth is and whether it actually exists. Orr deconstructs Memento as an intersection of popular film genre and experimental montage, discussing Nolan's mise-en-scene reduction to pure image. The author examines the narrative loop of the film as a subject to disorientations, playing forward and backward in time without a serial return to the present. Orr juxtaposes this approach to the fast-forward culture of today, calling it a perverse culture of the rewind. that plays on electronic culture's fatal flaw of .impatience with the slowing image. Nolan makes this perverse reverse dependent on the art of simple montage, creating a protagonist strikingly independent of electronic paraphernalia Leonard does not use the tools of the contemporary investigator, such as bugs, camcoders, computers, or mobiles, but is instead reliant on text and image. This, Orr argues, makes him a fable for the information age, his lack of memory storage both a match and a metaphor for the disaster bound to strike if all the world's electronic technology were to crash. Leonard is thus reduced to pure hard copy, from the tattoos covering his body to the multitude of notes lining his inside pockets. In this respect, Nolan.s protagonist becomes the antithesis of the Kubrickian cyborg monster, a de-programmed humanoid whose retrograde amnesia mirrors this technological retrograde evolution.

Dempsey, Michael.  “Review of Don’t Look Now.”  Film Quarterly 27(3) (1974).

Dempsey begins his review by comparing Roeg’s film to the source material, Daphne du Maurier’s short story.  He blames the film’s “creaky plot” on Du Maurier, who (he claims), “specializes in romantic sludge” (39).  Dempsey understands that the film’s weak plot is not the fault of Roeg, so he is not too harsh in his criticism of Roeg’s handling of the plot.  He states that, “too often the gears grind when Roeg tries to shift from this old-hat storyline to the subtext of fear and uncertainty that he has built into it” (39).  Dempsey actually compliments Roeg for creating a fascinating film from a plot, which he is admittedly not fond of.  The saving grace of the film, according to Dempsey, is Roeg, more explicitly, his style.  Dempsey writes that, “Roeg’s style pitches us headlong into [John and Laura’s] disorientation” (40).   Dempsey allocates most of his review to explaining of Roeg’s style, which Roeg achieves through editing.  Dempsey goes so far as to compare Roeg to the famous Russian montage filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, because Roeg too “lean[s] heavily on editing for his effects” (40).  The effect that Roeg produces with montage is the same effect described by James Palmer in his essay, “Seeing, Believing, and “Knowing” in Narrative Film: Don’t Look Now Revisited.”  Using montage, Roeg “undercut[s] our total allegiance to reason” (41); in effect, making us mistrust out vision the same way that John mistrusts his.  Roeg’s use of montage has the opposite effect of Eisenstein’s, undermining the action, instead of reinforcing it.  Dempsey describes, “Roeg’s montage does not say that two shots are connected; it says that they might be” (41).  The idea of not knowing, of being forced to puzzle it out, is the essence of Don’t Look Now and is the same theme discussed in Palmer’s essay.
Dempsey’s review, unlike any other analyses of Don’t Look Now that I discovered, features an in-depth analysis of the love-making scene, which is probably the most well-known scene in Don’t Look Now.  He argues that, the intercutting of sex shots with shots of the couple getting dressed, “makes the sense doubly erotic-yet also melancholy” (41).  We get the sense, from the intercutting, that, “no matter how intense their love or how satisfying their sex may be, John and Laura still cannot save themselves” (41)...