Category: Conference

Transcript:

…and then we get you know Marty gets into the Italian films and he starts kind of mimicking it but he never quite gets there I would say. I would say of all his films “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” gets there because it’s a bleak story about a woman who is hoping to be a singer and but as she’s driving across the country to get to her singing career she has no money. So she has to get a job as a waitress. Many people know there was a TV show in the 70s. It’s based on this film but it was much more comedic and didn’t go into the sort of sadness and essentially the melodrama of her life. In the end, she meets Kris Kristofferson. They fall in love. Do you give up your dream for the love because she has a son who needs a house and security and so she’s going to make a choice. I won’t tell you what. You have to see the movie but it has the bleakness to it. Again now we’re in the non-African-American world. So I think Marty’s doing that but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t take off. There’s too many other styles in the quote-unquote, you know, white Cinema if you want to call it that.

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Charles Burnett who wrote”Killer of Sheep”. There you go and this is kind of an amazing really good example of taking neo-realism and bringing into the African-American storytelling. This is in many ways– people who now look at it say this is truly a perfect example of transmitting from one culture to another a style of film and you can see very similar not just – and this is in the scripts, by the way not just the visuals–  Always written down but the idea of having children deal with the rubble. The trash The leftovers of society, not a beautiful lovely playground as we’ve seen walking through town here. So completely mimicking what we see in “Rome Open City” and also there’s this idea that there’s got to be some beauty in that. One of the things that is considered brought into black Cinema is that you still have to say that there’s struggle but you have to have hope. Otherwise, what’s the point of just showing the struggle. So I think it’s really beautiful. There are moments where the couple is dancing in their home. It’s a very barely furnished home but you can still see that there’s love involved. So that’s an element that black filmmaking brings into this neo-realistic feeling.

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…and then “Claudine.” I always have to credit my students. I have a list of films they watch in every of the four semesters we do the history of screenwriting – all chronological from science to modern day – and people come to me and say how come this film wasn’t on the list and sometimes it’s a film I’ve never seen. “Claudine” was a film like that. I’d not seen it. It’s a lovely story about a woman with several children who’s on welfare – so again we’re seeing what happens in the cycles of poverty and when you’re not allowed to get a decent job to move out of that – and she falls in love with James Earl Jones. Early James Earl Jones. So pre-star Wars and he has to decide. He’s a man with a job. Does he want to take on a family and this much obligation and that’s going to get in the way of their love story. So it’s a beautiful love story that has to deal with the issues of poverty but that – just like “Marty” – ugly people can be in love. In this case, people who are so like why can’t you have love if you’re a poor person and how come the issues you face every day are in the way. So this is a beautiful film that I have to credit my students for bringing to you. Written by a male husband and wife team, Tina and Lester Pine but she died young so we don’t see a lot more work from her. Which again is how women fall out of this the history. Many of the women of the early days died in their 40s and the men went on to live to their 80s and did the oral histories and talked about their own world. So the same thing. We lose Tina early on.