Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Education / LGBT / Film Preparing for a Whale of a class
Posted by Ben Sachs on 09.05.12 at 11:10 AM
When Show Boat screened at the Film Center in July, I wrote of Whale, "Consistent across the director's work is a bemused self-awareness about the storytelling process: his characters always seem to be putting on a show . . . His films delight in performance for its own sake, as an activity that transforms the mundane into something special." At present, I don't have much to say about Whale in addition to what I wrote in that blog post, except that it's remarkable how someone so fixed in his tastes could move so fluidly between radically different genres. I expect to have fun looking at so much of his work in such a concentrated period, something I haven't gotten to do since Doc Films presented an excellent Whale series in 2008.
This class will double as a history of Universal Pictures in the 1930s. Whale made all but a few of his 20 features at Universal, which was known in this era for taking some of the biggest risks of any major movie studio. In the early sound era, Universal vacillated between great financial triumphs and periods of near bankruptcy—often from one year to the next. The studio's unpredictable progress mirrored Whale's, as the director was never satisfied working in the same genre twice. Yet his work displays a consistent worldview, one that's wry, delicate, yet also defiantly independent. Were there only more like him in Hollywood today.
