The Underground in Film Noir

Underground infrastructure seems to be ignored by most film critics studying film noir and the city. Instead, when critics examine what have been defined as noir films in relation to the city and its modern foundation, they highlight the spaces above this underground, especially in relation to cultural context rather than filmic history. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, for example, Edward Dimmendberg explores “How … film noir illuminate[s] the late-modern spaces of the 1940s and 1950s to which it provided unique access…. [and] What lessons might its spatial representations offer in the present” (3). Dimmendberg concludes that film noir does not fit into the filmic history that comes before and after the noir period and argues,

the nonsynchronous character of film noir is best apprehended as a tension between a residual American culture and urbanism of the 1920s and 1930s and its liquidation by the technological and social innovations accompanying World War II, as well as the simultaneous dissolution of this new social compact of the 1940s and 1950s by the society emerging in the 1960s, in which the simulacra and spectacles of contemporary post-modern culture are clearly visible in retrospect. (3).

For Dimmendberg, although nonsynchronous with filmic history, film noir and its representation of the city stand out as a transition between a modernist urban (centripetal) world and a post-modern fragmented world that grows out of post World War II “innovations.” In the film noir world, bifurcations remain, so good and evil is more easily discerned. In the post-noir world, “the dark cities of film noir” are “eclipsed by the dispersal of space in the suburbs and the geographic ubiquity and impersonality of the large corporation and the more opaque social and economic relations developing in its wake” (Dimmendberg 4).

    Dimmendberg’s argument makes sense from an architectural perspective, where prior to the Interstate Highway System of the 1950s, the city center served as the space of focus in wartime and post-WWII U.S. cities—thus a centripetal urge. Centrifugal (outward) forces stimulated suburban growth and, in film noir, action moved outside the city from the 1950s forward, according to Dimmendberg. But Dimmendberg begins from the perspective that the cityscape and its evolution are a given, a “natural” response to changes in social and cultural conditions rather than an environmental adaptation that effects change at the level of ecosystem. Instead of simply an element of the mise-en-scene, we suggest that film noir’s cityscape is a constructed space resting on the sewer system and underground infrastructure below it. We argue, then, that in He Walked By Night (1948) and The Third Man (1949), the heroes both adapt and are adapted by an underground built to sustain the city above them, all in response to a war-torn world around them.
    Underground rail systems play a big part in film noir. Subways, like the underground sewer and water drainage systems in other films, are first constructed and then reconstructed to serve the needs of the films’ protagonists. In Pickup on South Street (1953 Sam Fuller) and Dark City (1998 Alex Proyas), for example, a noir underworld becomes a literal underworld in scenes shot in a dark angled subway used primarily as a hiding place for protagonists and/or their enemies. In film, the underground serves as a cinematographic wonderland, an aesthetic as well as ecological space that serves both function and form for films noir like He Walked by Night and The Third Man. 

    He Walked by Night (1948) and The Third Man (1949) examine the idea of the city as a social and cultural construct. They also highlight how and why social, cultural and historical forces construct “gangsters,” not their genes. But what sets these films apart from other noir films is the attention they give to the urban infrastructure hidden below its progressive construction. By foregrounding sewers as constructions, escape routes, and seemingly safe havens for noir characters, He Walked by Night and The Third Man demystify what seem like givens and call into question the idea of the city as natural.  

    For example, the storm drains built to stem floods and control the Los Angeles River are further transformed to assist He Walked by Night's Roy (Richard Basehart) in his crime wave and produce a suspenseful noir. The low-ceilinged and low-lit round and square drains serve as sinister frames for Roy’s escape attempt. They foreground how trapped Roy has become—both literally and figuratively. But they also remind us that the urban space of Los Angeles has become transformed twice, first from a natural fertile basin to concrete, and now from a drainage system to an escape route.  Harry Lime (Orson Welles) constructs the sewers of Vienna in similar ways in The Third Man, highlighting how 

film noir suggests through its visuals that a constructed urban environment may both literally and figuratively trap characters in a chaos they seek to escape.

An underground first seems to provide safety for post-war noir heroes in He Walked by Night (1949) and The Third Man (1949), as it did for civilians during World War II; it also serves as an ideal aesthetic space for post-World War II film noir. Adapting an already transformed concrete space into both an escape route and a quintessential noir setting, Roy and Lime seem to construct (or at least adapt to) a setting devoid of nature where lone anti-heroes escape the urban wilderness above them. Building on the already de-naturalized environment—a concrete covered river and valley in Los Angeles and a bombed-out and segmented version of Vienna—He Walked by Night and The Third Man suggest that in such an unnatural world, human nature also suffers. Instead of saving them, the sewers Roy and Lime reconstruct trap them and ultimately serve as their graves. Constructed as criminals seeking success after World War II, Roy and Lime meet the only fate an underworld and underworld culture can provide, especially in the noir world of the late 1940s cinema—death.

 

 

Ecology,Place and Home

The NY Times Sunday magazine (April 24) ran an interesting piece by Edward Wong in their You Are Here page. Wong covers the use of former "Air Defense Basements" as living quarters underneath the city of Beijing. The practice has been going on since the late 90's and Wong states that nobody has a firm grasp on just how many people live there. These are the manual workers who cannot afford to live above ground. The spaces are cheap, cramped, lacking most amenities and may soon be banned by the government. Until then people adapt to living in crowded urban areas, exploiting spaces most people would never consider as "liveable". Wong points out that these spaces have been granted to "landlords" by government officials. These are arrangements for profit.

All this brings me back to our examination of how a film like Dark Days (2000) explores similar issues. In this film, which we examine in our text Ecology and Popular Film:Cinema on the Edge, the homeless have found a way to live and survive in the tunnels of New York City's train lines. The living is not pretty, but proves that humans will readily adapt to the safest and most secure shelter they can find under extreme conditions, and exploit it to the fullest in order to make their lives bearable.

Finding living spaces underground is a long standing habit of human beings and the building of train tunnels in major cities, beginning in the 1840's, immediately attracted the homeless. It was far better to endure the dark tunnels than to try and exist outside. Dark Days succeeds in showing us how people down on their luck have found ways to be new kinds of homesteaders. They are determined, clever, communal and able to live off the "land". They find ways to acquire water, electricity, food and "trash" that they are able to recycle for money. It is a grim life, but it is better than being helpless, as one man points out.

Dark Days was Mark Singer's first effort and he produced a film that is hard to forget for all the right reasons.

Drowning the Earth, Designing Environmental Destruction: The Dam Busters

Drowning the Earth, Designing Environmental Destruction:

The Dam Busters

U.S. involvement in multiple wars got me thinking about not only the human loss, but also the environmental disaster associated with warfare, disasters that are recreated in documentary and feature films. In The Dam Busters’ (1954, Associated British Picture Association), for example, a climactic raid in Germany takes thirty minutes of screen time, cutting back and forth from the attacks to anxious ground control in Britain following every radio signal. The film’s re-enaction of the May 23, 1943 raid on three enormous dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley is so spectacular, it is hard to imagine that it was based on fact. The four-engined Lancaster heavy bombers, flying at 100 feet or lower, provide the audience with spectacle, excitement, adventure, and tension, succeeding so well that one audience member faithfully recreated this scene in his own film, Star Wars (1977 Episode IV, A New Hope). In both films, aircraft fly low under wires and through small spaces to better reach their targets in outer space, while staff officers wait in the equivalent of ground control for news. One of the pilots asks, “How many guns d’you think there are?” and is answered, “I’d say there’s about 10 guns—some in the field and some in the tower.” Suspense is built and a spectacular battle ensues.

The attack on the Death Star is a direct homage to The Dam Busters (1954), and George Lucas was probably aided by the fact that his cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, was the special effects cameraman for the earlier film. Also featured in Pink Floyd’s The Wall in a clip seen on a television in Pink’s room, The Dam Busters (1954) and the raid it represents have proven so spectacular that they have generated at least four documentaries and countless books and articles, even as late as summer 2005. Whether recorded on film or in texts, the raid and its aim—to bomb dams and flood the Ruhr Valley—stand out as an historic and a cinematically spectacular mission rather than an argument against ecological destruction.

It should come as no surprise then that the purpose of the dambusting mission—environmental destruction—is masked by filmic and textual artifacts of the raid. In spite of the blatant goal of the dam bombings—drowning the earth—glorification of the raid and the spectacle it produced are still the primary concerns of all of the films and historical documents highlighting the raid. All the later films and articles, too, endorse what the original docudrama, The Dam Busters (1954) illustrates, with the addition only of more detail to explain that the actual planning was an integrated and collaborative effort. Since 1954, follow-up films and texts contribute few if any moments comprehending the kind of environmental catastrophe they had planned and partially produced in the 1943 raid.

The Atomic Submarine

The Atomic Submarine (director:Spencer G Bennet) was released in 1959 and is available in a Criterion Collection 4 disc set called Monsters and Madmen. I remember seeing it as a kid at the Avenue D Theater in Brooklyn and later on tv.

The film boldly imagines the world of 1968 where the North Pole is no longer an impediment to efficent world travel. Enormous submarines now carry passengers and cargo underneath the polar ice caps. Suddenly many of these subs are disappearing and the US Navy has to send out its top atomic submarine with its crack crew to investigate.

What they find is an alien spacecraft populated by enormous one eyed long necked hair orbs and their mission is to melt all the ice and drown all their human competitors and claim earth as their own new Seaworld. Since I am here to write this post it is clear that the Navy triumphed and the aliens were repulsed.

But why does The Atomic Submarine feel so contemporary to me? It is clear that parts of the Polar Ice Caps are now melting. In the grand tradition of "if you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs" tradition, many conservative voices are now saying that this kind of eco disaster can have positive effects. Now we will have the always treasured northern sea routes that will make navigation quicker and cheaper plus we will get to exploit the mineral wealth of the whole sea floor. Polar bears will just have to learn to share.

But Republicans aren't just content with accepting the scientific measurements of such global climate change with their omelet theory. They insist no such scientific measurements exist and even if they do they will not be accepted as facts. They simply choose not to believe them. Or as GOP Congressman John Shimkus (Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy) stated in 2009: God told Noah that he would never flood the earth again, so there is no way global climate change or rising temperatures can produce these effects. Done and done.

The next time I watch The Atomic Submarine I will be reassured that those one eyed orbs are not from any other solar system. They're us. The GOP us.

Earth Day 2011

During the first Earth Day I remember, my family joined a community project to clean up a branch of the Grand River in Eaton Rapids, MI. I was nine, so my memory is blurred, but the river branch may have been drained, so we could access trash more easily. Wearing rubber boots and gloves, we picked up old cans and bottles as we walked over a rocky river bottom. 

My goal for Earth Day 2011 was to lower my carbon footprint for the day. I successfully avoided driving, but I spent too much time online. Ironically, fossil fuel-driven media provide much of the information we have regarding Earth Day and the envrionmental movement. See for example, the Green Light Earth Day Film Festival, Earth Day Television (http://www.earthdaytv.net/) and the web stories below (the first from The Earth-Day Network, and the second from Eastern Illinois University's newspaper, the Daily Eastern News).

Green Light Earth Day Film Festival:

http://www.communitymediacenter.net/watch/videosontheweb/greenlight.html

From The Earth Day Network:

About Us > Earth Day Network > Earth Day History

Earth Day: The History of A Movement

Each year, Earth Day -- April 22 -- marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

The height of hippie and flower-child culture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Protest was the order of the day, but saving the planet was not the cause. War raged in Vietnam, and students nationwide increasingly opposed it.

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.  Although mainstream America remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson's New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962.  The book represented a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries and, up until that moment, more than any other person, Ms. Carson raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and public health.

Earth Day 1970 capitalized on the emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns front and center. 

The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.

As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, andEndangered Species Acts. "It was a gamble," Gaylord recalled, "but it worked."

As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995) -- the highest honor given to civilians in the United States -- for his role as Earth Day founder.

As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to spearhead another campaign, this time focused on global warming and a push for clean energy. With 5,000 environmental groups in a record 184 countries reaching out to hundreds of millions of people, Earth Day 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. It used the Internet to organize activists, but also featured a talking drum chain that traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, and hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Earth Day 2000 sent world leaders the loud and clear message that citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy.

Much like 1970, Earth Day 2010 came at a time of great challenge for the environmental community. Climate change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and a divided environmental community all contributed to a strong narrative that overshadowed the cause of progress and change. In spite of the challenge, for its 40th anniversary, Earth Day Network reestablished Earth Day as a powerful focal point around which people could demonstrate their commitment. Earth Day Network brought 225,000 people to the National Mall for a Climate Rally, amassed 40 million environmental service actions toward its 2012 goal of A Billion Acts of Green®, launched an international, 1-million tree planting initiative with Avatar director James Cameron and tripled its online base to over 900,000 community members.

The fight for a clean environment continues in a climate of increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more manifest every day. We invite you to be a part of Earth Day and help write many more victories and successes into our history. Discover energy you didn't even know you had. Feel it rumble through the grassroots under your feet and the technology at your fingertips. Channel it into building a clean, healthy, diverse world for generations.

Earth Day at Eastern Illinois University

Earth Day tree to be planted

By: Tenicha Hudson/Staff Reporter

Posted: 4/22/11

The year is concluding and the student government will be planting its last tree of this academic school year today in honor of going green. 

Jenna Mitchell, a sophomore political science major, said she was glad she became a member of the university development and recycling committee.

"There will be a little green space being in between Klehm and the Life Science Building," Mitchell said.

Zach Samples, a freshman history major with a teacher certificate, said he is glad the Student Senate members made the decision to plant a tree this year.

"As the chair of university development and recycling, it shows how we are committed to going green," Samples said. 

Facilities Planning and Management will be in charge of planting the Earth Day tree, Samples said. 

"It's a great way to show the campus that student government is all for a green campus," Mitchell said.

The tree-planting ceremony will take place at 1 p.m. today in the South Quad.

Samples said he hopes the tree planting will give students different ideas to go green.

"The Office of Facilities Planning and Management have drawn up the available trees to give us," Samples said.

Mitchell said she believes the South Quad is a great place to have the tree planted because a lot of people hang around in that quad. 

The committee will be planting an oak tree. 

"The tree will work to beautify the campus that students walk past everyday," Samples said. 

There will be a plaque that will have the year of 2010-2011 and say this year's student government co-sponsored the planting. 

"The tree benefits us since Eastern Illinois University was known for being one of the greenest campuses," Mitchell said. 

Tenicha Hudson can be reached at 581-2812 or tshudson@eiu.edu.

Water Rights in Film--a beginning

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace, with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.”  These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155).

            Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009). All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films grounded in America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. Although this grounding in environmental law is most explicitly illustrated by the documentary Tapped (2009) and an animated feature, Rango  (2010), it reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in the 2008 James Bond action adventure, Quantum of Solace (2008), an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right

            Water rights are steeped in environmental history in films with water at their center. Chinatown explicitly highlights the continuing influence of the 1877 Desert Land Act and the doctrine of prior appropriation. Water rights in America respond to at least three political, historical, and economic perspectives, all of which have throughout U. S. history addressed water distribution during times of both drought and abundance of water. The first of these, the riparian doctrine, connects water with the land adjacent to it, so that “Riparian land owners can access water for a ‘reasonable use,’ so long as downstream users are not adversely affected” (Donohew 90). A second approach, the appropriative doctrine, grounds legislation that opened up the West to pioneers. See, for example, the Desert Land Act (1877), the General Mining Act (1872), and the Homestead Act (1862) which rested on the doctrine of prior appropriation: “Water rights with older priority dates are more likely to receive their full allocation and hence are more valuable” (Donohew 89). A third perspective focuses on groundwater rights, which are more difficult to define and measure, so specifications differ from state to state. For example, “In some states, including parts of Texas, unlimited ground water pumping is allowed by a landowner so long as it is put to a beneficial use” (Donohew 91), but in others, state or local agencies regulate groundwater usage more closely.

            Contemporary films with water at their center illustrate the ongoing power of this environmental legal context, as well. Some water rights films focus on the ramifications of riparian rights, especially when they are less effectively regulated by organizations such as the EPA and the 1972 Clean Water Act. In A Civil Action (1998), for example, water rights are represented as the right to clean, drinkable water, and a clear legal solution is provided—EPA intervention. In GasLand  (2010), however, filmmaker and activist Josh Fox reveals the negative externalities attached to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for natural gas, a new oil and gas extraction process seemingly condoned by legislatures in both the Western and Eastern United States. Other contemporary feature films explore water rights in relation to water not as a resource but as a commodity. In Battle: Los Angeles (2011) and Rango (2011),  water is exploited for personal gain and constructed as a product to be stolen or bought and sold. Rango demonstrates the consequences of usurping riparian rights with an appropriative doctrine. Tapped illustrates both the dangers of an appropriative doctrine in conjunction with groundwater rights. Both films effectively reveal the long-term ramifications of commodifying water, turning it into a product that can be owned and sold. They both also propose a viable alternative that returns water to its democratic community roots. Quantum of Solace makes similar arguments, but within an action-adventure genre that amplifies the message, not only with near-death car chases and maximum explosions but with a narrative grounded in current affairs documented in contemporary water rights documentaries released the same year, Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008) and Flow: For Love of Water (2008).

That's All Folks? The Ecology of the Animated Feature

That’s All Folks?

Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press

Although some credit the environmental movement of the 1970s, with its profound impact on children’s television programs and movies, for paving the way for later eco-films, the history of environmental expression in animated film reaches much further back in American history, as That’s All Folks? makes clear.

Countering the view that the contemporary environmental movement—and the cartoons it influenced—came to life in the 1960s, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann reveal how environmentalism was already a growing concern in animated films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. From Felix the Cat cartoons to Disney’s beloved Bambi to Pixar’s Wall-E and James Cameron’s Avatar, this volume shows how animated features with environmental themes are moneymakers on multiple levels—particularly as broad-based family entertainment and conveyors of consumer products. Only Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated Fritz the Cat and R-rated Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, with their violent, dystopic representation of urban environments, avoid this total immersion in an anti-environmental consumer.

Showing us enviro-toons in their cultural and historical contexts, this book offers fresh insights into the changing perceptions of the relationship between humans and the environment and a new understanding of environmental and animated cinema.

Robin L. Murray is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Joseph K. Heumann is a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University. They are the coauthors of Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge.

Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge

Our first book, Ecology and Popular Film, examines representations of nature in mainstream film while also looking at film itself as a form of nature writing. Considering a selection of mainstream movies that embrace a wide variety of environmental themes, from the Lumières'Oil Wells of Baku (1896) to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Murray and Heumann explore such themes as environmental politics, eco-terrorism, ecology and home, tragic and comic eco-heroes, the spectacular, and evolutionary narrative, in a manner that is both accessible and fun. Other films discussed include The River (1937), Soylent Green (1971), Pale Rider (1985), 28 Days Later (2002), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). The book also includes a comprehensive filmography of films that deal with environmental themes and issues.

"The authors discover something like an `ecological consciousness' at work in popular film, finding that movies as diverse as Pale Rider andEight Legged Freaks bring to light large-scale concerns about ecological well-being, and what might be called ecological trauma--opening up a space for hope and change." -- James Morrison, author of Roman Polanski