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March 13, 2003
From Portland With Love, The Student Who Came In From The Rain, etc.
Well, the term's almost over. The most interesting class (at least in terms of how much information was imparted or factored in across a number of disciplines) was probably the '60s spy film class (entitled "Sex, Spies, and Semiotics").
I made a PDF of my final paper, which seeks to explain how a genre wrapped up in political understandings and rooted in a period deeply concerned with ideology can be a vehicle for non-ideological messages. Fortunately, the instructor was more interested in the content than the less formal approach. So here's the paper 
(70k), and here's a list of my pocket summaries of the films mentioned (I'm still missing a few from late in the course, including Hitchcock's Topaz and The President's Analyst):
- The Third Man (1949)
- From Russia With Love (1963)
- The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965)
- Funeral In Berlin (1966)
- The Quiller Memorandum (1966)
- Modesty Blaise (1966)
- In Like Flint (1967)
The paper references pomo lit wildman Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author". There's a passing reference to Vladimir Propp, as well, who wrote Morphology of the Folktale, an attempt to create a universal narrative structure. It's not available online, either (except in Russian), but there's a summary of his basic outline and a fun fairytale generator based on his ideas.
The last three films in the list go down better with a reading of Clement Greenberg's "The Avant Garde and Kitsch," which I can't find online. Had we been given a less strict page limit, there would have been a lot to say about how the depoliticized spy movie detaches its content from any concrete cause, making for an Orwellian anti-history of meaningless image fragments. Greenberg saw kitsch in its context as a tool used by Stalin and his bureaucrats to create ersatz folk culture out of the residue and scraps of authentic folk expression. It works pretty well for a Hollywood establishment that feels perfectly comfortable airbrushing the World Trade Center out of the background, too.
Posted by mph at March 13, 2003 08:11 AM