Filmmakers

David Lynch

The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet (1986)

The Elephant Man– (AWESOME film) in black-and-white Cinemascope, infusing the mise en scene with terrifying shadows.  The soundtrack throbs with weird, forbidding industrial rumblings.

Blue Velvet (1986) masterpiece ‟dream of dark and troubling things” …he continually juxtaposes the false domestic jollity seen in bad commercials with overwhelming flashes of nightmarish evil.

  • Lynch seems to work primarily from the subconscious, dredging up images and inchoate concepts with very little intervening mediation from an ordering intelligence.

WATCH: CLIP – ELEPHANT MAN

The Elephant Man clip – CC

WATCH: CLIP – LOST HIGHWAY

https://youtu.be/qZowK0NAvig

With closed captions

David Cronenberg

Videodrome (1983) The Fly — succession of set pieces on the subject of grotesque physical transformations.  Unfortunately, they also deteriorated into narrative incoherence. The Fly–concentrated on the humiliation wrought on a human being gradually becoming something else…something less. …transformation as fatal illness, analogous to cancer, or AIDS.

Oliver Stone

Wall Street breathlessly informed the audience that desperately climbing the greasy pole of material success leads to failure and dishonor.  It’s a message that needed to be stressed in the 80s, but Stone’s sober seriousness proved inadequate and superficial.

It’s clear that Stone is unafraid to milk melodrama; he can be powerful, but he can also be heavy handed.  Too often he uses his splashy tabloid style to reduce complex problems to glib, left-wing certainties.

WATCH: CLIP – WALL STREET

https://youtu.be/o-jOAmy4DIU

Wall Street clip – CC

Spike Lee

Do the Right Thing (1989) is an unsentimental critique of bigotry, both black and white.  The film shows off Lee at this best: the rich sense of behavioral detail and humor, the idiosyncratic, often very funny dialogue, the ability to orchestrate and work with a large, expert group of actors.  It is also marked a quantum leap forward in his style. Do effortlessly utilizes the entire arsenal of film technique with a skill bordering on virtuosity.  Mixes style and content.  A confrontational artist, unafraid of offending racial hypocrites of any color.  His world is layered, polemical, and intensely political: sex as politics, inner-city turf as politics, and politics as politics.

WATCH: CLIPS – DO THE RIGHT THING

With closed captions

 

With closed captions

Conclusion

Into ’90s: the industry had once again solidified into a group of major companies that controlled the mass audience perception of what was and was not entertainment.

It was apparent that the 1990s would involve fewer films, with budgets that would slowly escalate to meet audience expectations of ever more spectacular effects.

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