Texts of Antiquity X: Quiz #1 (TS's "Cinema Depreciation" course, MDCC, 1991)
In 1991 I was engaged by Miami-Dade Community College to teach a semester of their "Cinema Appreciation" course. At the time I hadn't yet earned my BFA; a few strings had to be pulled. After the Fine Arts department head had given her approval, I renamed the class "Cinema Depreciation," and taught it my way. Although I screened mostly B-films, noirs, exploitation potboilers, and a smidgeon of early (1969-70) porn, I only got into trouble after failing a Cuban drag queen at the end of the term. (The fucker never came to class and flunked all the exams. What was I to have otherwise done? Nevertheless, he bitched loudly, and had his grade upped to a D over my objections... Singao!)
I met two fantastic students in that class: Oscar Perez (who performed in the earliest incarnation of TLASILA - he's on 30-minuten männercreme; after graduating from Bard he founded the Pink Bubblebath Film Festival in LA), and Tigra Derougemont (who earned gold records as a teen in pop-rap duo L'Trimm (remember "Cars with the Boom"?); she too appeared with early TLASILA/on 30-mm, and now cuts a serious swath as one of Manhattan's primo club coordinators). Becoming pals with those guys made the experience twice as memorable as it perhaps should have been, and reinforced nascent musings about making it in academe. Sixty-seven years later, and I'm almost there for real...
Here's the full text of the first test I administered to the class. I made it ridiculously easy, yet half the class bombed it outright... (Oscar and Lady Tigra had no such problems.) Beware: "topical" references are firmly fixed in their early '90s (SoBe) milieu...
---
CINEMA DEPRECIATION
TOM SMITH
10/09/91
QUIZ #1
(TWENTY MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS/THREE BONUS QUESTIONS)
(CIRCLE THE LETTER INDICATING THE CORRECT RESPONSE TO
EACH QUESTION)
1. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil opens with an extraordinary six-minute tracking shot. What object do we first glimpse as this famous sequence begins?
a. a small stone lying to the left of a distant shadow
b. a plastic moth flung into the mouth of an industrial blast furnace
c. a giant leech in a herringbone greatcoat sucking the life out of a horrified Hooters waitress
d. a time bomb (about to be placed into the open trunk of a convertible)
2. Guest speaker William Grefé was one of the more prolific exploitation directors of the 1960's and 70's. As a maker of motion pictures his primary consideration was:
a. the furtherance of cinematographic craft
b. the spiritual elevation of the masses
c. delving into mysterious recesses of the human mind
d. completing a picture on time and within budget in order to turn a profit
3. Grefé financed his 1971 Electric Shades of Grey (aka The Jesus Freaks) in which novel manner?
a. he washed windshields at the intersection of 12th and Biscayne
b. dealt stock options for short-term infusions of cash
c. promoted trading stamps to secure small investments
d. arranged for a James Brown/El Puma concert at Pirate's World in Dania
4. In 1934 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) put into strict effect a set of ethical principals known as the:
a. Camp David Accords
b. Warsaw Pact
c. Magna Carta
d. Production Code
5. Although depictions of sexuality were largely forbidden by the MPPDA, treatments of violence were:
a. sniffed at by Back Bay bluebloods
b. generally regarded with lenience
c. quickly manufactured by Hollywood script factory hacks
d. condemned absolutely
6. In the early 1940's cinematographer Greg Toland was instrumental in the artful incorporation of which new optical breakthrough into the filmaker's repertoire of tools?
a. undulatory bifocals
b. X-ray hunk-specs
c. deep focusing lenses
d. full-framed matte projections
7. Which Peter Lorre vehicle is generally regarded as the first film noir produced in Hollywood?
a. Der Verlone (directed by Lorre; aka The Lost One; 1951)
b. The Maltese Falcon (directed by John Huston; 1941)
c. The Conspirators (directed by Jean Negulesco; 1944)
d. Stranger on the Third Floor (directed by Boris Ingster; 1940)
8. The guiding editorial policy promulgated in 1954 by the young François Truffaut in André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinema was known as:
a. the low end theory
b. the auteur theory
c. trombipulation
d. le politique des autres temps
9. The Cahiers editorial staff favored the unpretentious works of then-forgotten American directors. The qualities most admired in the films of these obscure talents were:
a. their consistency of theme and formal style
b. their vague compositional tone and utter lack of depth
c. their vulgarity and numbing vapidity
d. all of the above, and then some
10. Montage derives meaning from the relationship between:
a. Bloodfist, its sequels and their inevitable imitations
b. devil worshipers frightened by motorized sandwiches
c. one frame of film to the next through editing
d. a random selection of images re-arranged in an imprecise order
11. Mise-en-scène, literally "the placing of a scene," emphasizes the visual content of the individual frame. Its proponents see montage as:
a. a groovy, very very groovy kind of L.A. thing
b. y'know, like uhhh, like Marky Mark kind of, but more like Vanilla Ice in a basically uhhh, Gerardo sort of way, y'know?
c. destructive to the psychotropic inertia experienced by all moviegoers
d. disruptive to the psychological unity of man to his environment
12. By employing deep focus, thus dispensing with editing or the need for obtrusive camera movements, directors may comment visually on relationships between:
a. bowlers and their concentration between frames
b. characters and cut-ups seated at opposite ends of a bar
c. chairs and ottomans, tabletops and polished marble flooring
d. characters and events situated at different planes
13. Which psychologically suggestive devices most successfully convey the film noir?
a. a dark, sombre tone and a cynical, pessimistic mood
b. shallow, distracted laughter and scenes of compulsive handwashing
c. seething frenzies followed by bouts of boozy introsepction
d. long shots of sausages and close-ups of graded cheeses
14. Joseph H. Lewis' daring 1949 crime film Gun Crazy articulated which of the following Code-prohibited themes?
a. the peculiar relationship between a cross-dressing Vatican cardinal and a 700-pound carnival organist
b. the eroticism inherent in violent crime
c. the wacky goings-on at a Stalinist political interrogation unit
d. the then-unexplored link between Color Me Badd and cervical cancer
15. John Parker's remarkable 1955 film Daughter of Horror depicted a noir-ish univerise where gross prandial gluttony, dismemberment, murder and resurrection are:
a. basic American values
b. acceptable under a variety of circumstances
c. the hallucinations of an insane mind
d. more fun than windsurfing but less intense than Scrabble
16. In Samuel Fuller's 1964 gutter-trash epic The Naked Kiss, a prostitute attempting to escape her past encounters characters inhabiting the sordid underbelly of small-town America. Just
what the hell is a "naked kiss"?
a. the ritual greeting used by Clarence Thomas and Senator John Danforth during their recent meetings with members of the Missouri Knights of the Klu Klux Klan
b. no tongue and all mouth
c. the sign of a pervert
d. recording engineers' slang for a lip-synch session
17. Stanley Kubrick's 1955 Killer's Kiss told the story of a boxer who protects a nightclub singer from an underworld thug. The film's climatic scene takes place in:
a. the cockpit of a disintegrating P-47 prop fighter
b. the uppermost rim of the mouth of the Sixth Circle of Hell
c. a miniaturized gladitorial arena secretly constructed on a pentagram-shaped mole found only on leggy supermodel Iman's left buttock
d. a warehouse containing department store mannequins
18. Robert Aldrich's brutal noir masterwork Kiss Me Deadly presents a sub-universe of greed, violence and Cold War paranoia. In that 1955 film, detective Mike Hammer's secretary Velda makes a reference to the "Great Whatsit". What is the "great whatsit" sought by the film's peripheral characters?
a. Frank Gorshin's Riddler costume from the mid-'60's Batman show
b. a box containing a dangerous radioactive isotope
c. a box containing a dangerous chili recipe
d. the Willets list
19. Salvadore Dali and Luis Buñuel collaborated on 1927's rabidly anti-clerical Un Chien Andalou. This infamous short is filled with startling imagery; which of the following images is not found in the film?
a. ants pouring through a man's pierced palm
b. a razor slicing through a beautiful woman's eyeball
c. a priest playing cards with a suggestively garbed floozy
d. a gentleman harnessed to two dead mules, two pianos, and two somnambulant clerics
20. Russ Meyer's groundbreaking 1959 nudie The Immoral Mr. Teas opened the floodgates for both softcore and hardcore films. Which object was the film's titular protagonist seen delivering
from office to office?
a. a problem bra designed for full-figured gals like yourselves
b. a full-scale mechanical dental model
c. super see-thru babe specs
d. shipments of orange, oversized utilitarian overalls
B1. Orson Welles' 1958 sleaze masterpiece Touch of Evil combined high noir aesthetics and lowbrow sensibilities. Welles directed the movie for infamous exploitation producer Albert Zugsmith. Identify the non-Zugsmith-produced title in the following list of films.
a. On Her Bed of Roses
b. Sex Kittens Go to College
c. The Naked Zoo
d. Movie Star, American Style or: LSD I Hate You
B2. William Grefé considered which of his productions the most artistically successful?
a. Racing Fever (starring: Joe Morrison)
b. Cease Fire (starring: Don Johnson)
c. Stanley (starring: Chris Robinson)
d. Whiskey Mountain (starring: Christopher George)
B3. Grefé's The Checkered Flag returned more than ten times its initial investment. By contrast, Tony Scott's Days of Thunder, budgeted at $65 million, returned to its financeers less than twice the cost of its production, even though it earned over $80 million in domestic rentals. The budget for The Checkered Flag was just under $13,000. Which of the following films performed statistically better at the boxoffice in relation to its cost than The Checkered Flag?
a. Terminator 2 (gross: $200 million)
b. Robin Hood, Prince of Theives (gross: $190 million)
c. The Hunt for Red October (gross: $150 million)
d. 101 Dalmations (1991 re-issue; gross: $51 million)
---
Answers will be posted tomorrow.
Best,
TS
I met two fantastic students in that class: Oscar Perez (who performed in the earliest incarnation of TLASILA - he's on 30-minuten männercreme; after graduating from Bard he founded the Pink Bubblebath Film Festival in LA), and Tigra Derougemont (who earned gold records as a teen in pop-rap duo L'Trimm (remember "Cars with the Boom"?); she too appeared with early TLASILA/on 30-mm, and now cuts a serious swath as one of Manhattan's primo club coordinators). Becoming pals with those guys made the experience twice as memorable as it perhaps should have been, and reinforced nascent musings about making it in academe. Sixty-seven years later, and I'm almost there for real...
Here's the full text of the first test I administered to the class. I made it ridiculously easy, yet half the class bombed it outright... (Oscar and Lady Tigra had no such problems.) Beware: "topical" references are firmly fixed in their early '90s (SoBe) milieu...
---
CINEMA DEPRECIATION
TOM SMITH
10/09/91
QUIZ #1
(TWENTY MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS/THREE BONUS QUESTIONS)
(CIRCLE THE LETTER INDICATING THE CORRECT RESPONSE TO
EACH QUESTION)
1. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil opens with an extraordinary six-minute tracking shot. What object do we first glimpse as this famous sequence begins?
a. a small stone lying to the left of a distant shadow
b. a plastic moth flung into the mouth of an industrial blast furnace
c. a giant leech in a herringbone greatcoat sucking the life out of a horrified Hooters waitress
d. a time bomb (about to be placed into the open trunk of a convertible)
2. Guest speaker William Grefé was one of the more prolific exploitation directors of the 1960's and 70's. As a maker of motion pictures his primary consideration was:
a. the furtherance of cinematographic craft
b. the spiritual elevation of the masses
c. delving into mysterious recesses of the human mind
d. completing a picture on time and within budget in order to turn a profit
3. Grefé financed his 1971 Electric Shades of Grey (aka The Jesus Freaks) in which novel manner?
a. he washed windshields at the intersection of 12th and Biscayne
b. dealt stock options for short-term infusions of cash
c. promoted trading stamps to secure small investments
d. arranged for a James Brown/El Puma concert at Pirate's World in Dania
4. In 1934 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) put into strict effect a set of ethical principals known as the:
a. Camp David Accords
b. Warsaw Pact
c. Magna Carta
d. Production Code
5. Although depictions of sexuality were largely forbidden by the MPPDA, treatments of violence were:
a. sniffed at by Back Bay bluebloods
b. generally regarded with lenience
c. quickly manufactured by Hollywood script factory hacks
d. condemned absolutely
6. In the early 1940's cinematographer Greg Toland was instrumental in the artful incorporation of which new optical breakthrough into the filmaker's repertoire of tools?
a. undulatory bifocals
b. X-ray hunk-specs
c. deep focusing lenses
d. full-framed matte projections
7. Which Peter Lorre vehicle is generally regarded as the first film noir produced in Hollywood?
a. Der Verlone (directed by Lorre; aka The Lost One; 1951)
b. The Maltese Falcon (directed by John Huston; 1941)
c. The Conspirators (directed by Jean Negulesco; 1944)
d. Stranger on the Third Floor (directed by Boris Ingster; 1940)
8. The guiding editorial policy promulgated in 1954 by the young François Truffaut in André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinema was known as:
a. the low end theory
b. the auteur theory
c. trombipulation
d. le politique des autres temps
9. The Cahiers editorial staff favored the unpretentious works of then-forgotten American directors. The qualities most admired in the films of these obscure talents were:
a. their consistency of theme and formal style
b. their vague compositional tone and utter lack of depth
c. their vulgarity and numbing vapidity
d. all of the above, and then some
10. Montage derives meaning from the relationship between:
a. Bloodfist, its sequels and their inevitable imitations
b. devil worshipers frightened by motorized sandwiches
c. one frame of film to the next through editing
d. a random selection of images re-arranged in an imprecise order
11. Mise-en-scène, literally "the placing of a scene," emphasizes the visual content of the individual frame. Its proponents see montage as:
a. a groovy, very very groovy kind of L.A. thing
b. y'know, like uhhh, like Marky Mark kind of, but more like Vanilla Ice in a basically uhhh, Gerardo sort of way, y'know?
c. destructive to the psychotropic inertia experienced by all moviegoers
d. disruptive to the psychological unity of man to his environment
12. By employing deep focus, thus dispensing with editing or the need for obtrusive camera movements, directors may comment visually on relationships between:
a. bowlers and their concentration between frames
b. characters and cut-ups seated at opposite ends of a bar
c. chairs and ottomans, tabletops and polished marble flooring
d. characters and events situated at different planes
13. Which psychologically suggestive devices most successfully convey the film noir?
a. a dark, sombre tone and a cynical, pessimistic mood
b. shallow, distracted laughter and scenes of compulsive handwashing
c. seething frenzies followed by bouts of boozy introsepction
d. long shots of sausages and close-ups of graded cheeses
14. Joseph H. Lewis' daring 1949 crime film Gun Crazy articulated which of the following Code-prohibited themes?
a. the peculiar relationship between a cross-dressing Vatican cardinal and a 700-pound carnival organist
b. the eroticism inherent in violent crime
c. the wacky goings-on at a Stalinist political interrogation unit
d. the then-unexplored link between Color Me Badd and cervical cancer
15. John Parker's remarkable 1955 film Daughter of Horror depicted a noir-ish univerise where gross prandial gluttony, dismemberment, murder and resurrection are:
a. basic American values
b. acceptable under a variety of circumstances
c. the hallucinations of an insane mind
d. more fun than windsurfing but less intense than Scrabble
16. In Samuel Fuller's 1964 gutter-trash epic The Naked Kiss, a prostitute attempting to escape her past encounters characters inhabiting the sordid underbelly of small-town America. Just
what the hell is a "naked kiss"?
a. the ritual greeting used by Clarence Thomas and Senator John Danforth during their recent meetings with members of the Missouri Knights of the Klu Klux Klan
b. no tongue and all mouth
c. the sign of a pervert
d. recording engineers' slang for a lip-synch session
17. Stanley Kubrick's 1955 Killer's Kiss told the story of a boxer who protects a nightclub singer from an underworld thug. The film's climatic scene takes place in:
a. the cockpit of a disintegrating P-47 prop fighter
b. the uppermost rim of the mouth of the Sixth Circle of Hell
c. a miniaturized gladitorial arena secretly constructed on a pentagram-shaped mole found only on leggy supermodel Iman's left buttock
d. a warehouse containing department store mannequins
18. Robert Aldrich's brutal noir masterwork Kiss Me Deadly presents a sub-universe of greed, violence and Cold War paranoia. In that 1955 film, detective Mike Hammer's secretary Velda makes a reference to the "Great Whatsit". What is the "great whatsit" sought by the film's peripheral characters?
a. Frank Gorshin's Riddler costume from the mid-'60's Batman show
b. a box containing a dangerous radioactive isotope
c. a box containing a dangerous chili recipe
d. the Willets list
19. Salvadore Dali and Luis Buñuel collaborated on 1927's rabidly anti-clerical Un Chien Andalou. This infamous short is filled with startling imagery; which of the following images is not found in the film?
a. ants pouring through a man's pierced palm
b. a razor slicing through a beautiful woman's eyeball
c. a priest playing cards with a suggestively garbed floozy
d. a gentleman harnessed to two dead mules, two pianos, and two somnambulant clerics
20. Russ Meyer's groundbreaking 1959 nudie The Immoral Mr. Teas opened the floodgates for both softcore and hardcore films. Which object was the film's titular protagonist seen delivering
from office to office?
a. a problem bra designed for full-figured gals like yourselves
b. a full-scale mechanical dental model
c. super see-thru babe specs
d. shipments of orange, oversized utilitarian overalls
B1. Orson Welles' 1958 sleaze masterpiece Touch of Evil combined high noir aesthetics and lowbrow sensibilities. Welles directed the movie for infamous exploitation producer Albert Zugsmith. Identify the non-Zugsmith-produced title in the following list of films.
a. On Her Bed of Roses
b. Sex Kittens Go to College
c. The Naked Zoo
d. Movie Star, American Style or: LSD I Hate You
B2. William Grefé considered which of his productions the most artistically successful?
a. Racing Fever (starring: Joe Morrison)
b. Cease Fire (starring: Don Johnson)
c. Stanley (starring: Chris Robinson)
d. Whiskey Mountain (starring: Christopher George)
B3. Grefé's The Checkered Flag returned more than ten times its initial investment. By contrast, Tony Scott's Days of Thunder, budgeted at $65 million, returned to its financeers less than twice the cost of its production, even though it earned over $80 million in domestic rentals. The budget for The Checkered Flag was just under $13,000. Which of the following films performed statistically better at the boxoffice in relation to its cost than The Checkered Flag?
a. Terminator 2 (gross: $200 million)
b. Robin Hood, Prince of Theives (gross: $190 million)
c. The Hunt for Red October (gross: $150 million)
d. 101 Dalmations (1991 re-issue; gross: $51 million)
---
Answers will be posted tomorrow.
Best,
TS
Comments
TS