EXISTENTIALISM IN FILM
I could not say where or how existentialist themes first emerged in film. Often times, critics will point to the work of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini as early examples. Indeed, these two men are titans in their art, and they will be discussed in this essay. However, it occurs to me that a certain genre of film being made in America during the late forties and early fifties perhaps deserves credit for treating very early, if not for the first time, subject matter and themes that might rightly be called "existential" while perhaps not directly inspired by formal existentialist thought. These films were shot in rich black and white, draped in shadows spliced by neon light bleeding intermittently through Venetian blinds, peopled by hard-boiled characters whose speech was tough and witty, who were hard drinkers and fast livers. They smoldered with a barely sublimated intense sexual tension. The French critics of the day were the first to hail the new style, which they called "film noir". Before I proceed, let me be quite clear as to how film noir might qualify as a genre worthy of our consideration in connection with existentialist film. As I said, I do not necessarily assert that the film noir genre is
It seems ironic at first that we are a bit strapped for philosophical filmmakers in America, this most populist of nations and home to the world's largest film industry. The very size, though, of our film industry, and its need to be populist, makes it restrictive and pandering. Hence in recent years we have seen a solid group of quality independent works spring up in the fallout of the film school generation's creation of the global blockbuster movie. Eschewing all desire for fame and fortune in favor of creative control, the independent filmmakers of our nation have been much freer to handle dark and contemplative subject matter that owes its origin to existentialism proper or its related ideas. For the second part of this essay, I would like to give terse accounts of a crop of recent films that give artistic expression to such ideas. The true film noir of the late forties and fifties were radical innovations. They were nothing like anything that had come before, and they were certainly nothing like anything that was being produced at the time. Two films, Detour and Force of Evil, are often called the definitive film noir. A host of others like them would follow the example. Detour was terribly controversial in its day, depicting a returning war veteran who aimlessly wanders around the country and eventually is involved in a murder scheme. It was shot on a low budget, and in only six days' time. The censorship board refused to allow its release because the main character was never punished for his crime. A final scene in which he is picked up by the police had to be added. The film capitalized on the historical situation emerging in the United States after World War II. Men were returning home to find America very different from how it was when they had left it. Behind the facade of the suburban middle class was the seedy world of the disenfranchised. The cities were increasingly crime ridden. The economy was in a slump and Mom-and-Pop businesses were being swallowed up into faceless conglomerates. The atrocities of the Holocaust were being discovered. The bomb had been dropped. There was a growing awareness of racial inequality while women remained in the work force. Film noir would be driven by a concern for the dark shadow cast behind the new American dream. a direct result of the popularity of existentialist philosophy in America. Film noir does, however, represent some of the first serious confrontation with truly dark subject matter, much of which was provoked more by film makers' insight into the contemporary American scene than by their third reading of Being and Nothingness. Film noir does not treat existentialism per se, but it does concern itself with the dark, the absurd and disturbing, the amoral and the severe; in short, it handles material that has come to be thought of as "existential". Their films are "existentialist" not necessarily because they treat existential themes, but because they benefit from the impact of existentialism on popular culture. As has been indicated many times, existentialism, more than any other philosophical movement, would come to pass out of the hands of the privileged elite and would be claimed by the common man. In so far as this movement took place, film benefits, in that as a medium open to the common man, it is able to continue to bear highly conceptual subject matter to a wider thinking community. Thus while film in the wake of existentialism may not be existentialist, it is often at the least deeply philosophical in a medium accessible to thinking individuals who may not be formal students of philosophy. Whereas the "existential" films prior to Bergman and were inspired not so much by existentialist thought but by post-war shifts in culture, the "existential" films that follow Bergman and Fellini are not necessarily inspired directly by existentialist thought, but are certainly inspired by Bergman and Fellini and by what existentialism in part stands for, namely, th
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4078
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)
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