The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. (Also see Keathley's 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008)

 Richard Brody on Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1967)

Auteurism got film studies into the academy, but it was 1970s “semiotic” theory (with its amalgam of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) that secured film studies a position as a discrete discipline. With this critical shift, however, the obvious became obscure: for in effect, the semiotic approach rendered in need of interpretation many films that appeared transparent. But while films by directors like Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli seemed tailor-made for this method—with their implicit interrogation of the social relations of post-war life in America (bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual, capitalist)—Preminger’s films aren’t, due to their both narrative and stylistic approach. While Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli mounted their critique of American capitalist society indirectly, through their carefully designed mise-en-scène that communicated visually things that couldn’t then be addressed directly, Preminger took the opposite approach: addressing controversial social issues (sexual affairs, drug abuse, homosexuality) head- on, so that any “symptomatic” interpretation was rendered superfluous. The social issues under interrogation in Preminger’s films were not subtextual—they were the manifest content. Indeed, to point out that there is a subtext of incest in Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Bunny Lake Is Missing is merely to state the obvious. As a result, since the early 1970s, Preminger has been a severely under-examined filmmaker.  [Excerpt from Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Christian Keathley's video essay on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, part of an impressive body of scholarship on this director's films by this US based academic, that it immediately set to work on assembling an accompanying collection of direct links to other high quality and openly accessible studies of this filmmaker's oeuvre, as well as to one or two other interesting discussions of other directors' work which mention Preminger's films.

And below you have it. That is all. 

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985

• Michael Buchler, '“Laura” and the essential ninth: were they only a dream?', Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, v. 17, n. 29, julho a dezembro, 2006

• Mary Ann Doane, 'Scale and the Negotiation of “Real” and “Unreal” Space in the Cinema',NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 1, Number 20 (December 2008), 1-38

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Otto Preminger', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Noah Isenberg, 'Script Doktor', Bookforum, Jan/Feb 2008

• Oscar Jubis, 'From Suspicion to Trust: Biegler and Manion in Anatomy of a Murder', FilmLeaf, June 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 2007

• Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, 'Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality', Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 

• Ronny Loewy, 'Pure Flight or Exodus: Otto Preminger's film about Israel', First published in: Filmgeschichte. Newsletter der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Nr. 13, Juni 1999

• Miguel Marías, 'The Head and Eyes of Otto Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze', Undercurrent, Issue 3, 2006

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Camera Movement Revisited', 16:9, 2, 2009

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'The Shape of a Western- Visual Design in Winchester '73 and The Man from Laramie', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007 

• Martha P. Nochimson, 'Betty Grable Finally Dances... (That Lady in Ermine, Otto Preminger, 1948), Senses of Cinema, 5, 2000

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• David Ray Papke, 'From Flat to Round: Changing Portrayals of the Judge in American Popular Culture',  Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 31, 2006-2007

• Luca Prono, 'Whatever Happened to Nelson Algren ?: Otto Preminger’s Adaptation Of The Man with the Golden Arm', Links and Letters 6, 1999

• Dahlia Schweitzer, 'Who is missing in Bunny Lake?', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Valerie Stulman, 'Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions', Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, January 2007 

• Boris Trbic, 'Where the Sidewalk Ends', Senses of Cinema, 8, 2000