Bad Influence and Neo (not so) Noir

One of the interesting features of neo-noir, probably following in Chinatown's footsteps, is the use of light, in place of darkness. Bad Influence follows that trend -light plays a key role in its look, throughout. It begins in darkness, and certainly, shadows and dark are significant in the film - but it is remarkable how much emphasis there is on light.



Its key spaces (Michael's workplace and his apartment) are bright, airy places, with white walls, bright lighting, windows, white decor.






When he moves outside, much of the story takes place under the brilliant LA sky:



Meanwhile, as the deeds grow darker, darkness enters the film, as well - though light remains significant. The robbery spree the men go on leads them through dark streets, but the actual crimes occur in the light.



And light itself is a significant part of what is seen. The light of the TV screen is a recurring motif, the TV and camera are integral to the plot; plot points also depend on a tail light, the light of a refrigerator door opening, etc. Even incidental details like the dance routine at one of the underground clubs are built around lights:



And here is darkness, framed in light:



It's a strong pattern throughout the film, and helps establish a theme, maybe: that light hides our bad impulses - darkness reveals them. That may overstate it - the film does fascinating things with what it shows and hides, puts onscreen or off... but its use of light (and whiteness, and glass, surfaces, etc.) is quite remarkable.

Questions on High Concept

The complex color palette of lighting

I have to admit Absolute Beginners was a little inscrutable for me. It was not quite like any other film experience I've had. For starters, it was tremendously busy visually. Tonally, it straddles camp, nostalgia, and bathos. Its reference and sensibility is distinctly British. (I still haven't figured out what Teddy boys were about.) To my eyes at least it's neither popular cinema nor art cinema, but some in-between. 

So let me just toss out some assorted ideas, some of which dovetail with what others have been saying here and in the comments.

The Lost Decade. Ignatiy refers to the 1980s as a lost decade. I think he diagnoses how cinephilia has tended to overlook it. I don't think Absolute Beginners solves that for me entirely (it lacks the formal and narrative rigor I've come to love), but it does remind me that 1980s cinema had a remarkable complexity - visually, narratively, and politically. For the film historian, there's the exciting possibility that we can draw connections between filmmaking practices (Hollywood, art film, British television) previously thought separate.

Genre. Absolute Beginners seems to tap into a wider British nostalgia film (Terrence Davies) and the subgenre of pop-music nostalgia film (The Commitments, for instance). How would people classify this film? How did contemporary viewers classify it?

High Concept Art Film. Justin Wyatt has argued that a high concept approach defined post-1075 and particular 1980s Hollywood, distilling down the visual style and simplifying narrative structure and subsuming both to the logic of marketability. Arguably, a similar transition affected European art and popular cinema, such as in France's cinema du look. Here, too, there's a hyperstylization that exploits the saturation of newer film stocks and borrows from music video and advertising, only without the clear marketing hook of the Hollywood narrative.

The visual language of music video.

Pop Music. David Bowie and Ray Davies both reprise their star images in this – and contribute to the soundtrack – but the pop musical influence seems to run deeper. There's the nostalgic bent in 80s UK pop (Tracey Ullman, the Bluebells, Madness, the Smiths, etc.) And, too, sophistipop had a similar combination of jazz and pop music idiom that seems to inform Absolute Beginners. I kept think of Simon Frith's terrific essay "Art Ideology and Pop Practice"... I don't his reading of 80s British pop music fully explains this film, but it goes a long way.

Ideology. It's probably cliché to read all of 80s British cinema as about Thatcherism, but Absolute Beginners seems to be about, well, Thatcherism.

Wolfenden meets Handsworth Riots: the specificity of British history.

Popular (Silent) Film History

Brian has started off the discussion with a detailed and useful consideration of the continuity editing in The Golden Chance. I want to step back to reflect on how we (as cinephiles) approach a film like DeMille's. Popularly, silent film, most of all early silent film, does not fare well; just witness the Netflix stars or imdb ratings. Meanwhile, a popular cinephilia often falls prey to the "Griffith narrative": American cinema fumbled through awkward, one-reeler melodramas til D.W. Griffith refined a more supple film language and invented classicism. I myself have subscribed to this understanding, until I have watched a little more 1910s cinema. Crucially, I have to credit Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film History textbook for breaking me of this lingering historical picture. For they point out Birth of a Nation's importance in elevating the social status but seem to isolate the formal innovations elsewhere, either in Griffith's early work or in other films of the mid-to-late 1910s. And once one starts to look closely, one can begin to draw a different picture.

The Golden Chance, for example, lacks the epic scope of Birth of a Nation, the tracking shots, or the touches like the activation of off-screen space. But it feels to me closer to the direction in which Hollywood films would follow in the 1920s: continuity editing to give studio sets an illusion of 3-dimensionality (what Noel Burch calls haptic space), true yoking of dual-subplots, and most of all expressive use of artificial lighting. Meanwhile, 20s Hollywood arguably would forsake some of the Griffith traits, such as the schematic, naked parallel editing, a practice to find a more subdued existence. Thompson and Bordwell use The Cheat as an example of this pioneering use of lighting, but The Golden Chance revels in the new effects as well, even from the credit sequence, in which lighting reveals then conceals the drunken husband against the backlit window backdrop.

Also, arguably, while racism and white privilege remained a strong, dominant current, I'd venture that The Golden Chance is closer to Hollywood's key ideology than Birth of a Nation. Crucially, the Cindarella narrative taps into an ur-narrative of class transcendence (conflict meanwhile is external in BoaN). I've always been struck at how often in Hollywood films, to borrow and revise a phrase from Laura Mulvey, the glamorous impersonates the ordinary impersonating the glamorous. What's still missing in The Golden Chance is the complementary class transcendance: in mature classicism, the rich (here the millionaire Roger Manning) would themselves be breaking free of the stifling social roles and class traditions to truly experience life. Undoubtedly, films drew upon popular theatrical, melodramatic, and literary precedents in these narratives and ideologies. I would love to explore this period more, to watch more, and to read exactly what led to Hollywood's ideological formula, which seems established by the 1920s.

Moreover, not being a specialist in the period (and early classical film is really only beginning to get a fraction of the scholarly attention that early and transitional cinema has generated), I find myself asking: is The Golden Chance typical of what an American studio picture of the mid-1910s looked like? Or is De Mille exceptional? Maybe some film-of-the-month clubbers can help answer these questions.