People On Sunday 2010

Prof. Lisa Gotto: Screening and Close Analysis of Detour (USA 1945), June 22, 2 pm – 4 pm.

Edgar G. Ulmer was the “King of the Bs”, the “King of Poverty Row” – a director whose work was shaped by the confines of economic constraints. If you examine his films, you will discover a labyrinth: you will run into mysteries, you will be faced with oddities. Ulmer’s films look dirty, rough and shaky; they seem to be full of mistakes. However, they often come closer to truth or authenticity than Hollywood’s illusions. By dramatising fissure and fragment on a formal level, Ulmer succeeded to create a particular brand of filmmaking; a style recognizable even in the cheapest of cheapies.

Detour, one of Ulmer’s most celebrated movies, is a film that plays with its own restrictions. Tending to ignore virtually all laws of standard Hollywood perfection, it delineates an idiosyncratic vision for that which strives against the accepted.