Ken Kimmelman, Emmy award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant, says about this upcoming class in his course “If It Moves, It Can Move You”: Opposites in the Cinema:
Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson have been portrayed on the big screen. What’s the attraction of gangster films? Many of them (maybe most) exploit and romanticize the violence of the underworld—appealing to contempt in audiences. But a good gangster film, even as it’s about cruelty, has aesthetic form. And through this aesthetic form—with its oneness of dark and light, high and low, junction and separation, inner emotion and outward action—we feel evil criticized, opposed. And the best thing in us is strengthened.
Some of the films I’ll be discussing are: Underworld, Little Caesar, White Heat, Rififi