WHY DID 60S FILMS LOOK SO BAD?

Something that needs to be explained is why color films of the early 60s were so badly photographed and composed.  Every shot in the films of this period seemed geared to producing good lobby cards.  Telling the story seemed to be secondary.

It's doubly puzzling because only a short time before, in the black and white era, Hollywood had no difficulty shooting dramatic scenes (above) in a convincing way. 

Sometimes I think Technicolor was to blame. The color was gorgeous but lighting it may have been so difficult that studios opted for simplistic set-ups.  Maybe wide screen was to blame. Maybe flattening long lenses. 

Another possiblity is that the minimalist aesthetic had set in and art directors simply thought that less was more. Look at the Hanna Barbera cartoons (above) from this period. Some of them are mind-numbingly bleak and arid, but I doubt that many people complained.  

Here's (above) what we would call today "TV lighting" and staging applied to a feature film. The characters are reduced to simple shapes. The background is generic, made a little dark in one spot to make Doris Day pop out.  The whole look is flat. Probably the technicolor was beautiful, but so what -- the composition and modelling are lifeless.

 
Here (above) human beings are reduced to cardboard cut-outs; just shapes and colors. It's scary because you get the feeling that the stories were simplified and streamlined to fit the clunky photography. 

Me, I prefer lighting that brings out the gritty humanity of the characters. I also like to see lots of extras, like in the scene below.  That doesn't work at all in animation, but it makes live action spring to life.  

THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

"I think I'll check my emails before I turn in.  Boy, the house is spooky this time of night."

"I'll tell you something you probably didn't know.  Two of the people who owned this house in the past were murdered. No kidding! They were axed in this very room!"

"I know what you're thinking: 'Why did you buy a house where murders took place!?, ' and I just shrug. It was cheap; what can I say?  It's not so bad.  You hear weird sounds in here sometimes, but it's OK, you get used to it."

"Like that! Did you hear that!?  What do you think that was?"

"It sounded like crying behind the walls, but that couldn't be."

The story they tell about this place is that a husband decided to do away with his wife and hide her body in the space between the walls.  Those are the walls behind me.  He dragged her dead body up into the attic then dropped it into a space between the walls of the first floor. What he didn't know was that she wasn't really dead, and that she woke up inside the sealed-up wall." 

"Um....the  next part's pretty gnarly.  Are you sure you want me to tell you about it?""

"OK, you asked for it!  Well, they say she woke up in there and couldn't get out.  She couldn't scream because her throat had been damaged by the near-strangling.  The only way she could survive was to eat the occasional roach and twist the heads off rats.  The rats resisted and would savagely bite her hand as she strangled them."  

"After  a year in the dark eating rats,  she went insane.  All she could think about was vengeance, vengeance against the horrible man who had done this to her.  Imagine her in there, covered with mildew and bacteria, wearing a tattered dress soaked in her own waste products! Every once in a while she'd reach a point where she couldn't take it anymore,  and she'd howl and bang her head against the wall."

  

HOOOOOOWWWWLLLLL!!!!!!! BANG! BANG! BANG!

"Um...er, something like that. Don't worry it was probably just the wind."

"They say that once a year, she'd get so intolerably angry that she'd manage to crawl up out of the wall into the attic, then down into the house, where she would kill the occupant of this room. The first year she killed her husband, the second and third years  she killed the next guys who bought the house."  

"It never occurred to her to leave here. In her deranged state she got used to living in the wall. After she killed her latest victim, she would always tortuously drag herself back to the comfort and security of the rat-filled dark. The police could never figure out who the murderer was. It never occurred to them that it might be someone living in the wall, at least that's the story people around here tell."

HHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

"Good Grief! It's bad tonight!"

"You don't suppose that this is the night she'll crawl out, looking for vengeance?"

"They say there's an axe hidden behind a trunk in the attic that she uses to....."

"Naaaaw! That's just a story!  Don't think for one minute that I...."

HHHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!       (Continued in the next post, below)

PART, THE SECOND

"I hear something moving behind the wall!  Whatever it is, it's climbing up to the rafters!"

"It stops, maybe to pick up the axe from it's place behind the trunk!"

"It's a woman,  a frail woman, painfully dragging herself across the floor, driven to lunatic exertion by a mad desire for revenge!  She reaches the trap door and lets herself down into the house!"

HOOOOOWWWLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Oh, my God....she's..... she's IN  THE ROOM! She's actually IN THE ROOM!!!"

"I can SMELL her TATTERED,  URINE-STAINED DRESS!"

"I hear the BREATH escaping from her TOOTHLESS, MILDEWED lips!! I feel WHITE-HOT RAGE!  I sense her BONEY, RAT-BITTEN FINGERS tightening around a DIRTY AXE HANDLE!  "

"It's now or never! I gotta get outta here!  I GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE!!!!!"

"Wait minute! If I go, I'll never get another place this cheap."

"Hmmmm.... the housing market being what it is......"

WHY EXISTENTIALISM SUCKS!

Yes, I really do think existentialism sucks, but that doesn't mean that I think existentialists are  stupid.  They're not. I considered myself one for years. They're simply victims of the shallow thinking that engulfed Western philosophy since the time of Rousseau.

BTW, that's Sartre in the left foreground above, and his colleague Simone de Beauvoir on the extreme right.  I love the way Sartre is so often portrayed in cafes, surrounded by beautiful women.  You have to admit that it's an appealing image.

 

 
I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the philosophy.  My admittedly limited understanding is that it says life is meaningless, and if it has no meaning, then we'd do best to give it meaning by choosing to value the things we love. Our choices may be objectively valueless,  but they mean something to us, so for us they have value.  Happiness consists of deliberately valuing lots of things.

  
Well, that's not a bad idea, particularly if life really is meaningless, but is it? It seems to me that all living things are born with a strong will to survive, eat and reproduce. In addition to that, we humans are born with a desire for friendship, comfort  and understanding.  That doesn't sound like meaninglessness to me.  Sartre seems to be describing the properties of rocks when he talks about meaninglessness.  As vulnerable living things, we are by definition "meaningful."

OK,  life is more meaningful if we value more things, but do we need a philosopher to tell us that?

Sartre's ideas about "bad faith" and "things in themselves" seem derived in spirit from Heiddeger,  who resisted logic and attempted to piece together a philosophy from unrelated enthusiasms he had.  Bertrand Russell refused to concede that existentialism was a real and consistent  philosophy, and I agree with him.  It's a literary creation.  It reflects a feeling of futility and a yearning for heroism that we all feel sometimes, and that's it's true value.  

 

 (Blogger just dropped my final picture so I'll have to struggle on without it)

What existentialism doesn't do is provide answers.  Sartre was a long-time communist in the era when Stalin was murdering people right and left.  During Mao's Cultural revolution, when millions were killed and sent to gulags for thoughts that no reasonable person would consider a crime, Sartre proudly wore a Mao button.  This from the reputed champion of freedom.  What was he thinking of?  

What I do like about Sartre is the nifty images he comes up with in his biography and plays.  "Nausea" contains an unforgettable description of the world as a gigantic warehouse filled with a black ocean where floating objects randomly, pointlessly,  bump each other in the darkness.  Wow!  Bleak, but beautiful!

VAMPING TIL I GET TO KNOW HOW MAC WORKS

"Hi, everybody!  It's just me, Uncle Eddie!"

"This isn't my room, it's my son's. He's a baseball guy and a philosophy major."

"He's a stoic, so the decoration in the room is pretty minimal.  I begged him to let me decorate it! I'm an artist...think of what I could have done with it! We could have been in the LA Times! In Architectural Digest!!! This could have been a big deal!!!!!"

"But like I said, he's a stoic.  He likes Heidegger too. I can't stand Heiddeger!  At least he's not an existentialist.  That's such a shallow philosophy."

 

"Good Grief!!! My hand turned white!!!!!"

"Hmmm, can't go around with white hands! You know what I'm gonna do about that?"

 
"Yes sir... I'll tell you what I'm gonna do about that....I got the solution right here.  Lemme see....yeah, here it is...right...here..........."

"SMELLY SHOE!!!! SMELLY SHOE!!!!"

Sniff! Sniff!

"Good Lord and Tarnation!!!!!!!!!!"

"That was gross! Sorry! I kid! I kid!"

UNCLE EDDIE'S DAD ANSWERS THE MAIL!

"Um...hello! It is I who am Uncle Eddie's father!  John's dad answers his mail sometimes, so my son  thought I should do this thigamajig, too!  Heh, heh. My son's a card, no?"

"Ok,  let's take a look at these letters....."

"What's all this Mac vs. PC stuff?"

"I hate to tell you but my kid's converting to being a Mac fan!  Mac isn't always faster or better...but Eddie says it's more fun."

"I don't know, I don't get all this computer stuff."

"It's good for pictures of girls, though!  Some of them have two-piece bathing suits!"

"OK, that's all for now!"

"No, wait a minute!!!"

"I forgot to say that, according to Eddie,  there's another Mac operating system called "Camino." He said Camino's  a Linux-based system that's easier to use than Safari.  He'll try that out after he posts this."

"Well that's it for real this time! Be seeing you!  Eddie, if you're reading this, be sure to take out the trash!  Your place was stinky last time I was there!  Um...bye!

Eddie says:  Whew! This was my first post on my new Mac. It took me FOREVER to do this,  but I guess it'll get easier.

Also, a plug for ace girl-artist Katie Rice's latest ebay auction!  I'm afraid to link to her site  because I'm probably just one electron away from exceeding my bandwidth here.  I didn't know how to reduce my pictures so I posted them all huge.  Anyway, to see Katie's pictures, just Google "FunnyCute!"