Word: ulmer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...quick zoom up into windows at the end of the prison hall, and continues in zooming in and out of the hall. Though Rossellini in both cases uses devices which intensify emotion, he becomes in these shots more concrete, more closely engaged with the physical world. In Murnau or Ulmer a shot of plain walls would have cosmic significance. The truths Rossellini pursues are immediate...
...Harvard Film Study--"Bluebeard" by Edgar G. Ulmer and "I've Always Loved You" by Frank Borzage, Carpenter Center Lecture Hall. Admission...
...personal change have long toyed with extreme metaphors for psychological and moral progress. Poe and Hawthorne, for example, used poison and death in connection with love and self-realization. The moral weight they put on psychological experience resembles Freud's--whose ideas are so dear to American screenwriters. Ulmer is certainly Freudian--see Ruthless or Murder is My Beat. But his stylization moves him beyond Freud in his view motivation and personal development. The rapidity of the changes he puts his characters through makes these changes seem ambiguous, part of an ill-defined weird atmosphere. They...
...general way" is Black Cat's spooky atmosphere. It comes from Ulmer's constant shifting of weight, moment by moment, within scenes--continually presenting a new view of the situation, new moral positions and psychological experiences for the characters within the situation. Every successive shot in an early train-compartment sequence is a new camera angle; each takes in a new field of vision and a new set of characters and back-grounds. Any easy stability in the moral relations between characters is destroyed by constantly evolving changes of position. A feeling that Lugosi influences the young couple comes from...
...these are in one sense just good film-making; they exploit a given dramatic situation. Choosing a certain camera angle or a certain lighting merely extends the expressive possibilities which the script offers the director. But in Ulmer's case exploitation becomes flights of pure imagination. In one scene Karloff goes to put out the cat. He walks down a dark hall into a gallery lined with glass cases. Passing from one, in which a blonde woman in a white frock is suspended, to the next, his reflections in the glass and the woman's frame each other and make...