Bellour Reading

Like everyone else, I had a very difficult time with this reading. I felt that the way he wrote this was actually more conducive to a lecture based discussion rather than a paper. He focuses solely on a 12 shot segment within the film "The Big Sleep," and makes the unfortunate error of discussing it as if the reader is sitting watching the scene with a remote to pause it at ever instance he wants to discuss. As a result the reader becomes lost in the unfamiliar. While I have seen the film more than once, I still have no idea which scene he is actually talking about. One side note that he makes however, I did find interesting because I noticed it upon watching it as well. Bellour notes that "Hawks [the director], we might note, is one of the Hollywood Directors who has most profoundly reoriented the Hollywood tradition of the woman-object". While watching the film I had noticed that it utilized a significant amount of front a back lighting to not only highlight women's faces, but also make their hair glow. Not only this, but their characters were also highly sexualized, which had seemed unusual to me considering this is not a modern film.