Читать книгу Short Films in Language Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 20

The protagonist comes out of a movie theater which advertises A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE as that night’s feature film. He is being discharged into a dark night and rolling thunder. One last cigarette lit, then the doors close, and the lights go out (Fig. 3). The man strolls past a movie poster of BEN HUR, waves off a taxi and then walks across the street towards the tram stop.

Fig. 3: From the movies into reality (0:00:58)

The intertextual references are too suggestive to be accidental. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is Elia Kazan’s 1951 film based on the play by Tennessee Williams (1947). It is about an aging and fragile woman who in a futile and fatal manner clings to a long lost world of memories and illusions.1 While A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is about an unfulfilled and failed life, BEN HUR is the exact opposite. William Wyler’s 1959 film, a prime example of the sword-and-sandal genre, recounts the life of a man of action (aptly played by Charlton Heston), who endures and prevails by force of will and brain and muscle.

How do these films tie in with our film? For once, our protagonist is the utmost ironic opposite of Ben Hur. He has retreated from reality into the cinema to take in a melancholic melodrama. After the gates to the dream world have closed, he indulges in a cigarette and some afterthought before reality is calling from across the street in the form of a starkly lit tram station, where streetcars are not poetically named Desire but prosaically »No. 3«. The references to A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and BEN HUR thus suggest an interpretation of the main character: Here is a person to whom the cinema and the movies are surrogates for things missing in his life.

That is why the woman coming out of nowhere in the dark is so unsettling. Elegant, debonair, attractive, and self-confident, she looks as if descended straight from a movie screen. Except she is no apparition; she is the real thing. The way she is presented – in black and white, wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, smoking casually, sporting a tattoo – implies yet another intertextual reference, to the Hollywood genre of the film noir (Fig. 4). The classic period of the film noir lasted from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir stories typically center on sex and crime, stock figures of the genre being the hardboiled, cynical detective and a mysterious and lascivious femme fatale. The signal film of the genre was DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) by Billy Wilder, starring Barbara Stanwyck.

Fig. 4: Genre reference to film noir (0:04:19) (right: Barbara Stanwyck in DOUBLE INDEMNITY2)

Clearly, our smoking beauty is a genre reference to the film noir, which once again calls up and deepens the ironic contrast between the histrionic glamour on the movie screen and the trite realities of waiting for a tram. The film references (in combination with the mise en scène) conjure up expectations of tragic romance, rough adventure, and erotic promise in a reality where nothing of all that materializes.