Maltese Falcon

Intro

To be honest, the movie that have showed and to let us study this week is basically regarding the lecture we had on 14/07/2017 which is the theory film noir. The goal for me to study about this film and the theory is to understand what is film noir fully by finish watching this film. I tried my best to finish watching it and to apply every part that I have learnt into this movie.

Theory discussion

Still I will break the genre part into semantic which as known as visual, and syntax which as known as them. To make sure a certain kind of genre of films, both of this aspect must be used complimentarily as both in front of screen and behind of the screen is very important.

As for the evolutionary part that we have discussed in class, I guess every genre also need to know where and how each genre should be at and stay, but production teams must have extremely creative ideas even if they are making the same genre kind of movies again and again in order to attract and lock the audiences. No matter how time changes, the genre will only increase but not decrease and the ideas must be keep being innovative and unique unless films these days will have no improvement at all. There is always universal traits for each genre to be passed down generations by generations because they are to keep the origin and meaning of each genre.

Synopsis

This noir classic film is all about a detective at that time, called Sam Spade, has bad will which is to get more than he bargained. When the character Miss Wonderly a.k.a. Miss Leblanc a.k.a. Brigid O'Shaughnessy shows up, a lot of incidents happened to both Sam and his partner. Sam then involved himself into a mysterious series of crime and in the end he got to realise that he was destined to find out a thing which is the  soon realizes he must find the one thing which is Maltese falcon.

Analysis

About film noir, for what I have understand apart from copying the definition in lecture notes, as I have studied it, I think that film noir is a kind of genre for film that generally portraying sadness, emotional, hopeless and pessimistic feels throughout the whole film. As I have learnt from lecture and also done my research online, film noir basically is black and white film as it was started early 40’s and black and white films were the trend that time. I think that the high contrast of black and white and fully describe each feeling that the director wanted to transmit.

To analyse the whole film, I would like to discuss about the themes that I found in this film into three, which is cynical, darkness, and femme fatale.

For the cynical part, I think I found it out through the scenes where the why those detectives were interrogating Spade for any sorts of incidents that happened in the film.

For the darkness theme, I find that German expressionism was used and it was perfectly expressed visually has this film required super high contrast as it is a black and white film. The lighting for this film is also extremely important because it can portray a lot of feelings for each scenes, for instance the shadows in some scenes that produced vertical and horizontal lines for sets and costumes brings out different kind of feel such as mystery, terrified, depressed and so on. Also, for the scene where Spade was followed by Wiolmer, the technique used of darkness where Spade was immerging out of the darkness in the ally was perfectly describing that Spade was being followed and tried his best to hide or get away from Wilmer.

For femme fatale, it has important role in the genre film noir. Femme fatal was directed translated from Frech which has the meaning of deadly woman. I find this description perfectly fits the female lead character in the film Brigid O'Shaughnessy, as known as Miss Wanderly. She made full use of her beauty and sexual appeal to men efficiently, which I find she was an expert in this to be honest. She is smart enough to make use of her women advantages to fool men to get what she wants, literally whatever that Miss Wanderly wants. Also, I find she is an expert for lying to others, good at manipulation of a lot of things and skilful making people believe in her lies. Miss Wanderly is really good at covering up her skilful inner by making her surface look perfectly weak and innocent.

Conclusion

As to summarize this film, my after thought for this film is that I finally get to understand what is film noir and also I find this film is so far the most boring and I find least interest in. The storyline of this film made me think a lot of how the production team would want to produce this kind of film at time. I find this film boring but still I salute to the production team that they able to portray the characters, the feelings, and the themes or ideology well by using great amount of techniques of film.