English 4650: Metafiction, Abstract Expressionism & Film Noir—Brian Kiteley
Winter 2007
Email: bkiteley@du.edu
TEXTS:
Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus; Counterpoint, 1887178554
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories;
Penguin Classics, 0142437395
Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories; Penguin Classics, 0142437816
William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country; Godine,
0879233745
William H. Gass, On Being Blue; Godine, 0879232374
Grace Paley, Collected
Stories; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 0374530289
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants; Grove Press, 0802136672
Mary Ann Caws, Robert Motherwell: with pen and brush; Reaktion Books, 1861891415
Arthur Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays; University of California, 0520229061
The Introduction to the Film Noir Reader, by
Alain Silver
The Simple Art of Murder,
Raymond Chandler
An essay on pulp fiction
We will also look at these films: Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, and The Big
Sleep
COURSE
SCHEDULE:
ABOUT THE
COURSE:
The title should say a great deal. The three parts
of the course are not equal. The fiction will predominate, and Donald
Barthelme’s short stories will dominate the fiction we’ll read. We will also
look at film, slides, and some art and film criticism. This will be a course of
associative collage. We will make
attempts to connect the dots between the three parts, but I don’t expect the
connections will be all that binding. Guy Davenport’s essay “Civilization and
Its Opposite in the 1940s” is the egg or packet of chromosomes of the course.
At the very end of the movie Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (played by
Fred MacMurray) says, “You know why you couldn’t
figure this one, Keyes? I’ll tell ya. ’Cause the guy you were looking for was too close, right
across the desk from you.” His friend and colleague in the insurance company
Keyes (played by Edward G. Robinson) says: “Closer than that, Walter.” Neff
replies, “I love you, too.” Neff tries to light a crumpled, bloody cigarette he
has pulled from his jacket. Throughout the film, before this moment, Keyes has
always been the one who did not have a match, and Neff would light one by
flicking his thumbnail against the match head. At this moment, Keyes produces a
match, and he lights it for his dying friend.
This was the third movie Billy Wilder directed,
and it is often spoken of as the first Film Noir. It was co-written by Wilder
and the great American noir writer, Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M.
Cain. This was Chandler’s only screenwriting experience, and he hated working
with Wilder. Like another European expat in Hollywood, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder
did a great deal to invent what is thought of as a purely “American” film
genre, taking a good deal of the style from Expressionism in German films of
the 1920s. As William Rothman said, film noir was as American as apple strudel.
Both Wilder and Lang seem to observe American city life with alien eyes. Wilder’s
cinematographer John F. Seitz should get some of the credit for the style of
Film Noir—especially the use of dusty light coming through Venetian blinds. Credit
should also go to war-time restrictions on the very use of lights. Many scenes had to be shot with the bare
minimum of electricity, hence a new “style” emerged.
The Second World War influenced film noir in many other ways, not the least of
which was the sense of authentic despair in the handful of originating movies
of the genre.
Stanley Crouch, in Slate, talks
about the influence of the Third Reich and Hitler on the form:
A number of its most
influential directors were European Jews like Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and
Billy Wilder, all of whom had escaped the Nazis. The enthusiastic support of
the Third Reich by the German people had convinced such artists that conformity
always had to be questioned, ridiculed, and perhaps resisted. Another
assumption was that corruption hid behind images of a gilded civilization,
high-class refinement, uplift, and thorough social improvement. So, in one
sense, Adolf Hitler was a major player in forming the sensibility of film noir.
That Austrian boy whom Chaplin accused of having made off with his mustache had
done it again but, as usual, not in the way the paperhanger intended.
Like Film Noir, Abstract Expressionism is
supposed to be the first great homegrown American art movement, although it too
was heavily influenced by the arrival, during the Second World War, of dozens
of great European painters, particularly the Dutch abstract painter Piet
Mondrian, who was not well-known in the US before he arrived in New York in
1940. Abstract Expressionism did signal that
Metafiction is the American
approach to narrative that grew out of the same impulses that created Dadaism,
surrealism, the theater of the absurd, and magic realism, and yet it feels
peculiarly native to our soil, with fascinations for high and low culture that
few European or Latin American practitioners of similar fiction had and very
little interest in magic or fantasy.
This American postmodernism shares with Film Noir a cynicism, a
hard-boiled prose style, and a very dark humor. Only Donald Barthelme of these
writers had any sustained contact with the Abstract Expressionists
(particularly when he was curator of a museum
of contemporary art in Houston, during the year he
edited the art and literary journal Location
in New York with Clement Greenberg, and at the
Cedar Tavern a few blocks from his apartment, where many of these artists held
court). All
of these movements are considered the first purely American approaches to their
arts and yet each grew quite naturally out of European aesthetics and the close
contact between exiled European and American artists during and after the
Second World War. Two began in the 1940s. Metafiction
reached its heights in the 1960s, and we might more comfortably pair it with
Pop Art and the New Wave of French cinema. We’ll explore these tenuous
relationships and see what we find on the dark alleys and rain-soaked streets
of our sunny American cities.
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Technic is the result of a
need—
new needs demand new technics—
total control—denial of the accident—
States of order—
organic intensity—
energy and motion made visible—
memories arrested in space,
human needs and motives—
acceptance—
—Jackson
Pollock, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of
Paintings, Drawings and Other Works
In Watt
(1953) the protagonist totally replaces the world with his verbal constructs
when he realizes the impossibility of transcribing it. In attempting to grasp
the meaning of phenomena, he enumerates every possible combination and
permutation he can think of for each set of circumstances, in an attempt to
construct a system which will offer him a stable identity. However, as Mr Nixon
tells Mr Hackett, “I tell you nothing is known. Nothing” (p. 20). The human
mind is a fallible instrument of measurement and the external world a chaos.
Knowledge derived from human calculation or generalization can only demonstrate
the epistemological distance between consciousness and objective reality,
however exhaustive the account.
—Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory & Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
David
Amfam, in a review of Michael Leja’s
Reframing Abstract Expressionism in Art in America in 1994 (here is a link to the whole
review), notes the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir:
Leja discusses Rothko’s Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea and its noir-like combination of the tragic and the comic but does not note its similarity to the cinematic representation of dreams through slow motion and out-of-focus effects. The connections between Willem de Kooning’s work and film noir go beyond noir-ish gender stereotypes of that artist’s imagery, which Leja mentions, to the more subtle manner in which film noir made ways of seeing its actual subject. De Kooning’s repertoire of dislocated presences and slipping glimpses, beginning in his work of the 1940s, corresponds with themes in film and roman noir where an “I” is also an “eye” that either sees, fails to see, or is itself being seen. Leja asserts that the excess of subjectivity in Abstract Expressionism is an attempt to support the category of “self.” But he does not consider the possibility that it may instead be a critique of the limits of the self.
This
is link to a wonderful essay, “Exorcising Beckett,” by Lawrence Shainberg.
A Timeline
of Abstract Expressionism, by Stella Paul at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The new abstract painting,
an Art News piece.
Here is Jessamyn West’s wonderful page on Donald Barthelme—a
quick reference. And here is a link to Helen Moore Barthelme’s memoir of her
marriage to Donald Barthelme (this is available only to DU students and
faculty). And here are David Gates’ explanatory notes
for Sixty Stories.
Here is the complete screenplay
of “Double Indemnity.”
Take a look at these self-portraits William Utermohlen
painted as he descended into Alzheimer’s (from The New York Times Oct 24, 2006): Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4. I don’t mean to
imply that Abstract Impressionism and brain dysfunction are comparable, but
it’s interesting to see the movement from orderly self-portraits to these
darker, more stripped down images of the face, even as the self begins to
dwindle and disintegrate. William Utermohlen said he
painted the way he painted, as the disease progressed, because he could see no
other way of representing himself.
Here’s a link to a Norman Rockwell painting
of a man looking at a Jackson Pollock painting.
David Usborne, in The Independent:
One day in 1950 [Hans Namuth] arrived at Springs after
arranging with the painter to take pictures of [Jackson Pollock] in the barn.
On his arrival, he was put out to find Pollock standing over a canvas in the
barn that apparently was already done.
"A dripping wet canvas covered the entire
floor," he later recalled. "There was complete silence ... Pollock
looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush
and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the
painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became
faster and more dance-like as he flung black, white, and rust-colored paint
onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not
seem to hear the click of the camera shutter ... My photography session lasted as long as he
kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop.
How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is
it'."
From The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights,
True to an alternate name for
Abstract Expressionism, “action
painting,”
Franz Kline’s
pictures often suggest broad, confident, quickly executed gestures reflecting
the artist’s
spontaneous impulses. Yet Kline seldom worked that way. In the
late 1940s, chancing to project some of his many drawings on the wall, he found
that their lines, when magnified, gained abstraction and sweeping force. This
discovery inspired all of his subsequent painting; in fact many canvases
reproduce a drawing on a much larger scale, fusing the improvised and the
deliberate, the miniature and the monumental.
“Chief” was
the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from his childhood, when he had loved
the railway.
Many
viewers see machinery in Kline’s images, and there are lines in Chief that imply
speed and power as they rush off the edge of the canvas, swelling tautly as
they go. But Kline claimed to paint “not what I see but the feelings
aroused in me by that looking,” and Chief is abstract, an uneven framework of
horizontals and verticals broken by loops and curves. The cipherlike
quality of Kline’s
con-figurations, and his use of black and white, have provoked comparisons with
Japanese calligraphy, but Kline did not see himself as painting black signs on
a white ground; “I paint
the white as well as the black,” he said, “and the white is just as important.”
And
here’s a link to this
painting, at MoMA.
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