Second #1922, 32:02, Image © Studio Canal

We’re no longer trapped in Anna Schmidt’s apartment with a bombardment of police officers, but Anna’s nightmare continues nonetheless: she’s been detained at police headquarters by Major Calloway while they pore over her personal belongings. Interestingly, the cut from the previous scene (set at Anna’s apartment building) to this one does not initially offer us an establishing shot of the new space: before we are offered a chance to acclimate ourselves to these surroundings, director Carol Reed and editor Oswald Hafenrichter provide us with a medium-close up of unknown hands rifling through Anna’s effects. The audience is thus placed in a similar position as Anna: dislocated, confused, focused primarily on the faceless characters investigating her most private possessions.

Today, movie audiences might not be struck by the cut from a more distanced shot scale to a closer perspective: conditioned by the development of film language over about 120 years, we take for granted the ability for cinema to leap through space and time within 1/24th of a second. But at the birth of cinema, what other art form could instantaneously offer us intimate visual access to objects, allowing us to revel in their texture, their shapes, the way that light danced on and around its contours? True, still photography could offer us such close-ups (and by doing so could transform the objects therein into fetishized, larger-than-life icons), but it couldn’t transcend human perspective by cutting between a multitude of angles and distances. By mobilizing still photographs into a fluid stream of pseudo-reality, movies could somehow become more real than reality itself, violating the laws of physics and human sight, transforming and enshrining the landscapes and objects that surround us (and to which we usually pay little attention). Cinematic close-ups could also allow audiences to perceive the flicker of grain and the shimmering of light as it changed from frame to frame, an aesthetic delight borne out of the materiality of the film apparatus itself: not even in real life could light flicker and dance so entrancingly.

This meant that many early film theorists were hypnotized by the allure of cinematic close-ups; while some commentators and filmmakers were comparing film to the theater or to literature (mostly in the storytelling abilities that they shared), other theorists celebrated how cinema departed radically from those forms’ aesthetics precisely through its montage of various shot scales. As filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and Louis Feuillade employed close-ups with increasing frequency, theorists such as Lewis Jacobs, Sergei Eisenstein, and Louis Aragon championed their transformative capabilities. An entire book could be written on the increasing closeness of shot scales during the early years of cinema, but a few quotes should suffice here. In his 1939 book The Rise of the American Film, Lewis Jacobs recounted Griffith’s then-shocking decision to cut to a closer angle in the middle of a scene:

Griffith decided…upon a revolutionary step. He moved the camera closer to the actor, in what is now known as the full shot (a larger view of the actor), so that the audience could observe the actor’s pantomime more closely. No one before had thought of changing the position of the camera in the middle of a scene…

The next logical step was to bring the camera still closer to the actor in what is now called the close-up…

Going further than he had ventured before, in a scene showing [the character] Annie Lee brooding and waiting for her husband’s return [in the 1911 film Enoch Arden, aka After Many Years] Griffith daringly used a large close-up of her face.

Everyone in the Biograph studio was shocked. “Show only the head of a person? What will people say? It’s against all rules of movie making!” (1939, pps. 101-103)

A gut-wrenching close-up from D.W. Griffith's "The Lonedale Operator" (1911) Image © Reel Media International

In response to Gibson’s historical appraisal, Sergei Eisenstein—himself a filmmaker who knew the visceral and connotative power of the close-up—pondered the difference between an American and a Russian utilization of the technique. He concluded that the value of the close-up is “not only and not so much to show or to present, as to signify, to give meaning, to designate” (“Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” 1944; emphasis in original). Close-ups didn’t just astound audiences in their visual immediacy, but also because they granted overwhelming symbolic and emotional value in the objects or people that they magnified (especially, in Eisenstien’s estimation, through the juxtapositions of montage editing).

More examples abound, and they vary wildly in the specific value that the theorist associates with the close-up. On the one hand, you have psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Otto Fenichel who emphasize the fetishistic or scoptophilic nature of the close-up (or at least of symbolically significant objects). Fenichel, for example, in “The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification,” suggests that the fixed gaze which observes an object from a nearby distance is libidinized: “the world does not approach the eye but the person looking makes an onslaught with his eye upon the world, in order to ‘devour’ it… The underlying tendency may be formulated as follows: ‘I wish what I see to enter into me.’ Now this certainly does not necessarily mean that the eye itself is thought of as the avenue of introjection… This process of ‘ocular introjection’…takes its place with oral, anal, epidermal, and respiratory introjection” (The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 1954, 331, 330). Consuming an object or person in a close-up thus has an added erotic value, by which the viewer absorbs (or maybe more accurately is penetrated by) that which they’re looking at.

On the other hand, you have theorists who were more interested in the sheer visceral impact of a magnified object, most notably French Surrealists who lauded the oneiric qualities of objects/figures that were emblazoned within the close-up. Most effusive in this regard, perhaps, was Louis Aragon, who in his 1918 essay “On Décor” celebrated the cinematic appearance of modern consumer goods:

Before the appearance of the cinematograph hardly any artist dared use the false harmony of machines and the obsessive beauty of commercial inscriptions, posters, evocative lettering, really common objects, everything that celebrates life, not some artificial convention that excludes corned beef and tins of polish… Those letters advertising a make of soap are the equivalent of letters on an obelisk or the inscription in a book of spells: they describe the fate of an era. (Le Film, 1918)

By Aragon’s estimation, it is precisely the most mundane objects of modern commercialism—consumer goods, advertisements, products designed to be disposable—that attain mystery and beauty onscreen and encapsulate the modern age. (Aragon also implies here that the close-up itself was the shockingly new aesthetic technique that might be able to convey the turbulent transformations of modernity.) Obviously the onslaught of modern capitalism is closely aligned with Aragon’s theory, but he seems to embrace the transformative power of the close-up because it turns consumer products into so much more than they were originally intended for: icons imbued with great emotional and symbolic power.

It’s common sense to suggest that objects magnified via cinematic close-up attain great symbolic resonance, and there are numerous examples throughout film history: Chaplin’s transformation of ordinary objects into graceful comedic gags in The Vagabond, Pay Day, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, et al.; Citizen Kane‘s Rosebud; the Maltese Falcon itself; the gorgeous tracking shot of jewelry and clothing that opens The Earrings of Madame de…; a similar visual account of a character’s emblematic possessions during the opening credits of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; even that damn ring in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series, accompanied as it always is by a plethora of hisses and incomprehensible cackling.

Chaplin's "dance of the dinner rolls" in "The Gold Rush" (Image © Janus Films)

"Rosebud..." (Image © Warner Bros.)

"The stuff that dreams are made of." (Image © Warner Bros.)

Image © New Line Cinema

Today’s still from The Third Man isn’t technically a close-up, but obviously its intention is to convey the fact that many of Anna’s most prized belongings are now stuffed away in a drawer at police headquarters. Because this still is the first shot of a new scene in a totally new locale (as I mentioned before), it is imbued with even more symbolic weight than if it had been intercut into the scene after an establishing shot: for Anna and for the audience, these objects predominate the scene, at least implicitly. What’s more, they carry the visceral, emotional, and/or symbolic weight that our theorists mentioned before: Anna’s possessions, per Eisenstein, aren’t simply presented to us but carry meaning as well; they signify Anna’s past with Harry, a past that she can never reclaim. (Also like Eisenstein, these objects gain greater power through montage editing: the disorienting cut from one locale to another without providing us with the spatial awareness that most classical narrative films offer dictates our reaction.) On a psychoanalytic register (per Fenichel), these objects certainly carry an erotic value for Anna, as we can see whenever she clutches Harry’s letters close to her breast. It’s almost as though Anna wants to incorporate these things into her body so that they can commingle with her memories of Harry—the only way, it seems, in which she can continue living a life with him. And these objects, nondescript though they may seem at first glance (papers, passports, jewelry boxes, etc.), describe not only Anna’s and Harry’s fate but also “the fate of an era” (as Aragon would say) as they point towards the tense postwar climate in Vienna, ruled as it is by covert black-market dealings and a pervasive military bureaucracy. For now, these objects are melancholy, poignant reminders for Anna of the happiness she once knew. Later in the movie, though, the significance of objects as mere goods to be bought and sold in a capitalist enterprise becomes altogether more sinister and disheartening, the diametric opposite of the love letters and trinkets currently under Major Calloway’s lock and key.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #1860, 31:00, Image © Studio Canal

We find ourselves still mired in the police-infested apartment that we have been stuck in for the last three frames. Here we find ourselves in the eye of the cop-storm. Holly and Anna have retreated into some dark corner of the apartment (the tea kettle in front of Anna says “kitchenette”) for a brief moment of privacy, and the only MP visible is a fuzzy figure whose white helmet could seemingly disguise him as a lamp. In this police-free oasis we see a moment of unaccustomed gentleness from Holly. With no sign of the bravado that spices every interaction between Holly and Calloway, he leans in close and asks if there really is anything wrong with Anna’s papers. They are, of course, fake, and as she has just admitted to Calloway, they were procured for her by Harry, but she neglects to mention their origin to Holly.

If we’ve watched her cling to pictures she dug out of the corners of Harry’s apartment and beg imploringly that the police please don’t confiscate her love letters, one can only imagine what it must be like to have her papers confiscated. This little piece of Harry that she has carried with her every day, on her person, will be taken from her forever. Holly’s silence seems to speak volumes about his understanding, yet the gentle lean to whisper into Anna’s ear seems to communicate his real intention. Harry, his best friend and her lover, is dead, and as he tiptoes around the grief, he is falling in love with Anna himself.

In a letter he wrote to architect Bernard Tschumi, Jalal Toufic wrote “All love affairs happen in foreign cities” (Undying Love or Love Dies, The Post-Apollo Press, 2002, pg. 2). If we take this phrase at face value, we can see the implications already spinning into place. Holly is indeed in a foreign city, and though his interest in her has been in no way hidden thus far, it is in this intimate moment that we really see the affection that has grown between them. All of his blustery accusations and bravado aimed at Calloway were simply in service of protecting Anna, like any gallant cowboy would. And his intimate whisper of, “Anything really wrong with your papers?” says within its implications, “you can trust me,” and “we are close enough to share secrets.” While Holly sat with Kurtz at the Mozart Café, was he thinking of how different it would be to sit gazing longingly at Anna? Do the Vienna streets bring up images of the two of them walking hand in hand in Holly’s mind? Whatever his thoughts, Holly is suddenly and truly in love.

Anna, however, is a different story. The truth about her papers, which Holly thinks to mean she returns his affections, is not complete. Her papers, like everything else she holds dear, are reminders of Harry, not sparks of a new love for Holly. And while he is in a strange and foreign place and has set his sights on Anna, she is in her home, thinking about the lover she has lost, and not interested at all in finding a new one.

The frame itself is a striking illustration of the affair. Holly, for whom all of this city is new, has fixed his sights on Anna, while her eyes gaze forward and down, away from Holly. And what is it that she is staring at down there? A shot—from the point of view of Anna’s Landlord—will soon reveal that her eyes are gazing past the tea kettle in her hand, and straight at the windowsill where a kitten lies purring. A kitten that Anna will later say “only liked Harry.”

This moment marks our first interaction with Harry’s kitten, who Anna has been staring at longingly. Image © Studio Canal

And this brings us to a larger topic than the love triangle we have been gradually sketching. After Baron Kurtz’s tiny, bug-eyed, mini-me, dog, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that animals play some important role in the world of The Third Man. Here we are introduced to our second major animal character, already important as a romantic stand-in for Harry, and recipient of Anna’s loving gaze. But considering that this is a story of intrigue, secrets, lies, murders, and everything noir, it should not come as a surprise that those who can see and hear but never speak might be important in this film. As a kitten who loved Harry, this little beast might be the only one who knows his real secrets. What really happened to Harry Lime?

Cats, notoriously aloof creatures that they are, seem like adept secret keepers and spies, and we can be assured that if this kitten could talk, Calloway would certainly have taken it into custody as early as the inquest. But therein lies the question: does this kitten know everything or nothing? Are the secrets that its  vertical-slit eyes hide simply reflections of our own secrets? Jacques Derrida wrote a book inspired by precisely this question, The Animal that Therefore I Am. Inspired by a moment of modesty when appearing naked before the eyes of his own cat, Derrida wrote:

“Since time, therefore.

Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us?

What animal? The other.

I often ask myself, just to see, who Iam-and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment.

Whence this malaise?

I have trouble repressing a reflex dictated by immodesty. Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see. The impropriety [malskance] of a certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point on one might call it a kind of animalskance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant. The gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person. It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed” (This Animal that Therefore I Am, Critical Inquiry, volume 28, no. 2, winter 2002, pg. 372.).

While this passage paints a moment of self-inquiry, of seeing one’s own nakedness reflected in the eyes of a non-comprehending animal, it is also a portrait of the Derrida side of the interaction, and not of the cat. As he says, his cat stands in, not for itself, but for the other, or even The Other. The other (and The Other) is a figure that is, by its own definition, unknowable. If one could understand the mind of the other, then they would cease to be an other, and so Derrida’s cat and his embarrasment at being seen naked, and even his embarrasment at that initial embarrasment are all a part of Derrida, not the cat.

Harry’s cat, however, is as real a character as any that have been written in a screenplay and portrayed by actors. This cat is written by the same human hands that wrote Harry, Holly, Anna, Kurtz and this city of Vienna itself. Since this is a character that is a cat, rather than the supremely unknowable and other animal, we can know his secrets just as we can know the secrets of Milo or Felix. He is only a mute to us, not an other, since this cat figure is just the human image of a cat and we, the viewers, are humans. But still, the nude/naked secrets of Harry’s life might be hiding somewhere behind this cat’s eyes.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #1798, 29:58, Image © Studio Canal

Our thirtieth still from The Third Man immerses us in a moment of visual pandemonium: so many human figures are clashing with each other directionally and compositionally that it just seems like a throng of people have wandered aimlessly in front of the camera. If we were to chart each individual’s eyeline in this shot, we would have a messy grid of disconnected angles, visually conveying a total lack of communication between them.

Some filmmakers (like Jean Renoir, William Wyler, Jacques Tati, and—maybe most pertinent to our case—Orson Welles) compose lengthy, typically static shots from a more distanced perspective, allowing the viewer to “democratically” peruse the frame, following the action yet absorbing a great deal of supplementary visual information as well. (This has been called “editing in the camera”: guiding the audience’s attention through composition and mise en scène rather than cutting between shots.) But this instance from The Third Man is something else; director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker seem to be aiming for visual chaos, filling the frame with figures that don’t seem to have any kind of spatial relationship to each other.

This kind of composition—a tableau setup in which there doesn’t seem to be one focal point or organizing structure—might be familiar to us from very early (pre-classical) cinema, about 1895 to 1910. Before the institutionalized “rules” of Hollywood narrative filmmaking set in (according to which filmmakers “invisibly” cut between shot scales to present the story information as clearly as possible), cinema was caught between a spectacular vehicle for visceral attractions and a storytelling medium. This often meant that busy, elaborate scenes would play out in a somewhat distanced tableau setup, offering the audience little guidance as to where their eyes should be focused (think of the Edison Company’s Life of an American Fireman, the opening to Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, or early D.W. Griffith shorts like Those Awful Hats).

But today’s cluttered frame from The Third Man suggests something else: whereas pre-classical cinema utilized a tableau setup mostly for technological and logistical reasons (given the size of cameras, it simply wasn’t feasible at the time to set up numerous different perspectives for a single scene, especially since the visual style of the theater still held sway), Reed and Krasker momentarily convey this semi-chaotic nature for a psychological reason. So Still Dots #30 isn’t so much a case of “editing in the camera” as much as it is a lack of editing entirely, in the sense that the viewer’s attention (visual and otherwise) isn’t being directed towards a specific individual or action at this particular moment. Instead, we get the impression of a preponderance of meddling officials, so numerous and uncommunicative that they turn the frame into a slapdash, messy amalgamation.

This visual approach is meant to reaffirm the police’s callous treatment of poor Anna Schmidt. Anna and Holly Martins have just returned to her apartment, only to find it overrun with officers and patrolmen combing through her belongings for any evidence (love letters, forged passports) pertaining to Harry Lime’s disappearance. Jeremy and I have both discussed the brusque tactics employed by the military police and the tense reactions they elicit; on Tuesday, Jeremy pointed out that Anna (a seasoned Viennese) seems more well-equipped to deal with the MPs’ bureaucracy than Holly is (he keeps on playing the brash, cowboy-esque American). In other words, no one seems to be on the same proverbial page in this scene; even Holly and Anna, who have been acting something like cohorts in the previous scenes, have a sudden rift open up between them (Anna barely responds to Holly’s interventions in this scene, and then only grudgingly). The fact that we still don’t know which crimes Harry allegedly committed suggests that the police truly are invading Anna’s privacy for no reason, persecuting innocent individuals in a nightmarish police state. (Only later in the film will their justification be revealed.) Today’s frame, then, visually manifests this complete lack of communication, this tightening web of investigation and persecution, as Anna’s apartment teems with a mob of individuals mostly disinterested in her plight.

The intentional evocation of visual chaos has been a distinguishing characteristic for some filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard and Dusan Makavejev come to mind), but the most closely aligned to today’s still might be Robert Altman. Admittedly, Altman would seem to be one of the last directors to come to mind in comparison to The Third Man. But for this 1/24th of a second at least, when the seemingly spontaneous movement of individuals through the frame conveys a nebulous ensemble moving in and around the central storyline, Altman comes fleetingly to mind.

Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975) Image © Paramount Pictures

Altman's "Gosford Park" (2001) Image © Universal Studios

With his penchant for master shots that roam, via leisurely zooms and pans, throughout entire scenes with apparent spontaneity, Altman conveys a dynamic, remarkably rich world that’s both electrifying and compromising in its chaos. (The wealth of extras whose bodies and voices appear momentarily in Altman’s films somehow take on both a vivifying and an alienating tone.) Even United Artists’ promotional materials for The Long Goodbye (1973) seemed to realize this:

Poster for "The Long Goodbye" (Image © MGM/United Artists)

For whatever reason, I can’t look at today’s Third Man still without imagining the camera panning slowly, in raw and improvisatory fashion, through Anna’s apartment while officers’ meaningless background chatter becomes barely audible on the soundtrack. While Altman’s films often create a polyvalent world wherein groups of people can be both harmonious and corrupt (think of the ambivalent ensembles portrayed in MASH or The Player), Still Dots #30 suggests an altogether more sinister conflux of unknown lawmen entrapping Anna within a shapeless mass of sorts. True, only a few frames after today’s still, several characters vacate the screen and the camera focuses more directly on Holly and Calloway’s interaction, so the momentary analogy between The Third Man and Altman dissipates almost as soon as it emerges. This linkage (which may not actually be a linkage at all) is interesting because it seems to have been made possible thanks to our durational project, a fleeting (and perhaps illusory) idea forged from the petrification of an image meant to last only a fraction of a second.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #1674, 27:54, Image © Studio Canal

Anna Schmidt has journeyed into the uncanny, and what she finds there is a nightmare world of cold, impersonal “justice.” A plethora of policemen ramble around Anna’s apartment—even Anna’s unkempt, Cat Lady-esque landlord makes sure to point out that, while the Austrian police are nowhere to be found (is there even such a thing?), American, British, and Russian officers make themselves at home, rifling through Anna’s drawers, tossing about her personal belongings, committing an almost Kafkaesque breach of privacy. (In this scene at least, the policemen with whom Anna pleads—including good old Major Calloway—are as evasive and cryptic as the hellish bureaucrats that detain Josef K in The Trial, a work that has already connected with The Third Man in a roundabout way.) Why does Sergeant Paine have a stack of intimate love letters written between Anna and Harry Lime? Why do Calloway and Paine smile twistedly while poring over Anna’s identification papers? (The snide, gloating smirk Calloway gives Anna when he asks, reading off of her passport, “Your parents were born in Graz, Austria?,” is positively withering.) All these officers can do (for the time being) is offer a receipt for the belongings they’ve confiscated and tactlessly revel in Harry’s death, all while Anna looks on, barely containing the pain and tears.

These officers are in Anna’s apartment because of Harry Lime, although we’re still not aware of the crimes that Harry has committed and how they could be ruthless enough to warrant such relentless investigation. Holly and Anna still fight for his honor: Holly (predictably) admonishes Calloway, claiming that he’s too busy to have figured out that Harry was murdered, while Anna admits that the only disreputable thing Harry ever did was a small favor for a friend. (That “small favor” happens to be her suspicious passport, which Calloway holds in his hands.) Will Anna be proven wrong? Will the heartless tactics of the police be vindicated, unfortunate means to a justified end?

One of The Third Man‘s recurring themes is conflicting modes of justice—not only Holly’s cowboy vigilantism (which he considers nobly stalwart, even though the movie itself pokes fun at it) as opposed to Calloway’s callous, calculated policing, but also the apocalyptic “justice” of world wars and of soldiers who believe they are killing for a righteous cause. Given these unfavorable modes of law and order being practiced, one might very well assume that societies’ ostensible guardians of well-being and morality are not really much better than those they try to persecute. The movie’s depiction of flawed vehicles of justice becomes tempered later on, as the police’s vigorous investigation of Harry Lime turns out to be mostly justified. In today’s frame, though, we have a nerve-wracking snapshot of a frighteningly impersonal police system, what with Calloway’s condescending half-smirk as he detects the forgery of Anna’s passport, not to mention the MP in the upper-right-hand corner of the frame, needlessly casting Anna a distrustful glower.

The Third Man is one of the best (and most exciting) explorations of the shifting, elusive shapes of justice that I can think of; another is John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, made 13 years later (in 1962). That film focuses on the antagonism between Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart), a brilliant lawyer from the East who journeys by stagecoach to the small Western town of Shinbone to start a law practice; and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a local rancher who resembles one of the gung-ho cowboys we might see in a Holly Martins paperback. The town of Shinbone is being torn apart by a bandit named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his unruly posse; to protect the town and put an end to Valance’s reign of terror, Stoddard advocates justice under the law (the arrest of Liberty Valance and a fair court trial) while Doniphon advocates justice under man (renegade justice that would likely end in Valance’s murder). Even the casting of the film—sophisticated, composed Jimmy Stewart versus the reckless, brawny Duke himself—points towards its exploration of contrasting forms of law and order. It’s a small leap, but for our purposes we might equate Holly Martins to Wayne’s Tom Doniphon and Major Calloway to Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard: manifestations of frontier and civilized justice, respectively.

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (Image © Paramount Pictures)

The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are typically seen as Ford’s best pictures, or at least his most thematically complex, because they refute the simpler, more black-and-white portrayals of law and order, justice and criminality, that he espoused in earlier films (especially Rio Grande from 1950). Maybe The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance act as Ford’s self-rebuttals, deeper explorations of familiar territory. In any case, both The Third Man and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance question which kind of justice is more effective, not to mention which is more ethically defensible. In Ford’s film, Stoddard and Doniphon eventually compromise on a myth, a complete fabrication, that both of them conclude is more socially beneficial than what actually happened: when the lie becomes a tool for maintaining civil law and order, the truth becomes somewhat moot. In The Third Man, Holly Martins’ assumptions regarding the no-nonsense efficacy of renegade justice versus the bureaucratic machine of the police, the military, etc., will also become subverted. He eventually discovers that who initially seem to be heroes and villains may in fact be quite the opposite, and finds it increasingly difficult to lie to himself in order to reaffirm his preconceived (and somewhat naive) notions.

A tenuous link between John Ford and The Third Man (via Orson Welles) was raised recently in an article by Kristin Thompson. Essentially, she refutes the notion that How Green Was My Valley is an overrated Best Picture Oscar-winner because it beat out Citizen Kane in early 1942, asserting that she’s “going to be heretical and say that How Green deserved to win over Kane.” (Full disclosure: I’ve never seen How Green Was My Valley. I never particularly wanted to until I read Thompson’s article.) As a matter of fact, Welles was heavily influenced by Ford (as Thompson makes clear), stating in a 1967 interview that the films of “old masters” like Ford “lived and breathed in a real world.” Welles even watched Ford’s 1939 classic Stagecoach fifty times (by his own admission) before cutting Citizen Kane in order to learn how to make movies. Nonetheless, despite the deeply affecting pathos of Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1965), Thompson claims that the general difference between Ford and Welles (and thus between How Green and Citizen Kane) is the middlebrow sentimentality of the former and the dark, modernist cynicism of the latter: Ford wasn’t afraid to jerk a few tears unabashedly from his audience, while Welles typically emphasized ambiguity and despair. (Thompson’s appraisal seems mostly accurate, although I’d add that Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai both convey moments of incredible emotional resonance.)

What does this have to do with The Third Man? I think it’s interesting to ponder which wavelength this film belongs on: a more Fordian sentimentality or a dark Wellesian cynicism. Or is The Third Man precisely about the inability to reconcile these two contradistinctive worldviews? Holly Martins storms into Vienna like a John Ford vigilante, thinking he can better the world by upholding justice and honor and defending the legacy of his fondly-remembered friend. But he soon comes face-to-face with the realization that morality is not absolute, that memories can distort and obscure, that relationships can come apart at the seams, that the world can become bitter and dark almost without one noticing it. True, The Third Man is lively, humorous, and deeply emotional, but it corresponds closely to the cynicism and existential darkness displayed by Welles in Citizen Kane, The Stranger (1946), The Trial (1962), and Touch of Evil (1958). Certainly in The Third Man, Welles’ character provides a great deal of thematic complexity and wry despair. As a director, Carol Reed seems perfectly inclined to fuse the populist sentiment of Ford with the unsettling ambiguity of Welles, making The Third Man as entertaining as it is profoundly disquieting.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #1550, 25:50, Image © Studio Canal

What lurks beyond the open door? The porter points his thumb in the direction of the ominously half-closed passageway, the threshold between one space and the next, made unsettling by its visual inaccessibility. In this way, doors and windows act as stand-ins for the cinematic screen itself, a rectangle/square (depending on the aspect ratio) that offers a limited vantage point into a separate world, yet one that’s abruptly, tantalizingly cut off by its rigid borders.

Actually, in our still for today, the porter is simply gesticulating frenetically, having been agitated by Holly’s suggestion that they call the police for help. The porter has informed him that there was a mysterious third man present at Harry’s death—a cypher who, like the porter, declined to give his testimony at the inquest. Holly is now more convinced than ever that foul play is afoot, that Harry’s death was not an accident—a supposition that sends the porter into a frenzied German diatribe (with a smattering of English): “I should have listened to my wife! She said you were up to no good…”

So the porter doesn’t seem to be indicating the doorway at all; his gesture seems mostly unintentional, but it’s revealing nonetheless. Why is the porter frightened? Is it the police? Possibly, although as a native Viennese and a mere eyewitness, he seemingly would not have to worry about having the correct citizenship papers (a nightmare that will soon torment Anna Schmidt, who lives in the city’s Russian sector) or criminal charges. It seems likelier that the porter knows something about Harry Lime’s former cohorts (who may or may not be members of Vienna’s criminal underclass) and does not want them to think that he’s been ratting to the authorities.

In a way, then, the porter is right to nervously gesture towards the half-open doorway, for somewhere out there in the shadowy, maze-like streets of Vienna lurks something treacherous. The foreboding nature of the unseen threat—the villainous entity that remains offscreen (just beyond the doorframe or the windowpane, perhaps)—is suggested several times throughout this scene. First, immediately after the porter tells Holly that he didn’t get a good look at the third man—he seemed an ordinary-looking, enigmatic figure, spotted from a distant high-angle vantage point—Holly looks out the very same window in an effort to recreate the moment. I have to bend the rules of our self-appointed 62-second timeline here, but it’s worth including Holly’s view from Harry’s window:

Image © Studio Canal

“He might have been…just anybody,” the porter says precisely when we cut to this image; Holly even repeats those last two words with a touch of existential anguish. Just anybody—maybe even the two silhouettes making their way through the diagonal shaft of light cutting between these buildings, providing yet another shard of visibility that plunges a good chunk of the frame into murky blackness. This sense of both anonymity and pervasive villainy, in which any random passerby could be a source of treachery, suggests the alienation, rampant corruption, and moral degradation instilled by World War II (which, The Third Man suggests, torments both Holly Martins and postwar European populations as a whole). In terms of cinematic space, Harry’s apartment and this atmospheric cobblestone street are separate worlds, demarcated by a cut to Holly’s point-of-view through the window that exists between them. Figuratively, too, Holly’s world and postwar Vienna are distinctly alien to each other: Holly’s previously iron-clad morals and assumptions about justice and honor in the world are shattered by his rocky introduction to this city. His gung-ho, American heroism has no place in this brutally realistic world.

That window, then, serves as a pseudo-cinematic frame, turning Holly into an audience observing a reality that exists separately from him. The same thing happens with that aforementioned doorway, prominent in today’s frame. The open doors run parallel to the human figures of Holly and the porter, emphasizing the figurative space between them: they’ve been speaking for the last several minutes, but they’ve hardly been communicating (and language barriers are not solely to blame). Indeed, today’s still seems remarkably complex, stuffing the frame with visual information in order to accentuate the gap that exists between these two characters. Flanking them near the edges of the frame are two light fixtures which (by acting as extensions of the two men’s bodies) make the distance between them even more pronounced. More importantly, that open doorway provides a stark vertical section that boldly bisects this composition, splitting the screen into distinct halves. There’s even that monstrous white bust barely visible on the landing outside, as though passing silent, bemused judgment on Holly and the porter’s agitated conversation. Again, then, this door, like the window above, does not serve to connect or unite two worlds; it serves to separate them, its limited visual frame more haunting in what it obscures from us than revealing in what it shows. (To further the cinematic analogy: its offscreen space is more significant than what is provided within the frame.)

This symbolic, disturbing function of windows and doors becomes even clearer when, at the peak of the porter’s heated admonishment of Holly (he basically tells him he’s no longer allowed inside the building), an intruder bursts unexpectedly through the door. Again, I have to break the rules we’ve set for ourselves in order to demonstrate the figure who suddenly appears onscreen/in the doorway:

Image © Studio Canal

Image © Studio Canal

A ball bounces innocently enough into the frame, followed by this precocious toddler, observing Holly and the porter’s altercation with astonishment (and maybe a little morbid glee). If we think this ball can be easily equated with childlike innocence, then perhaps recalling the horrifying opening to Fritz Lang’s M (in which a ball gently rolling into the frame conveys the murder of a young girl no longer able to play with it) makes us reconsider. What’s more, this little boy is not as sweet and innocent as he might look: later on in The Third Man, he almost singlehandedly instigates a witchhunt against poor Holly Martins. (More on this when the time comes. In a way, this young boy is a darkly sardonic reversal of young Philippe in The Fallen Idol, the first collaboration between Carol Reed and Graham Greene, from 1948. A movie about a very young boy witnessing the unfolding dramas of immoral adult characters, The Fallen Idol suggests childhood innocence and purity as diametrically opposite to, and unable to sufficiently comprehend, adult behavior; meanwhile, The Third Man presents this adorable young boy who jumps to the most horrid conclusion and, in a darkly comic turn of events, eventually sics a Viennese mob on the American outsider.) In any case, this door once again sets up a stark border between separate worlds; when the two leak into each other (as when Holly undertakes his vigilante quest in Vienna) the results may be disastrous, or at least distressingly ominous.

Doors and windows framing (and obscuring) the action in a screen-like fashion has been featured in cinema basically since its advent: think, for example, of the prominence of windows in several of Louis Feuillade’s crime serials from the 1910s, most notably Fantômas (1913-14) and Les Vampires (1915-16). In those serials, sundry criminals, terrorists, anarchists, and supervillains lurk, barely visible, behind open windows, spying on other characters with foreboding omnipresence. The Vampires, an anarchist-terrorist gang, even use the same trick repeatedly throughout Les Vampires: armed with a noose on the sidewalks of Paris, they lure their prey to an open window several stories above, then lasso their unwitting victim as they lean outwards, yanking them to the concrete below.

The danger of open windows in "Les Vampires" (Image © Gaumont)

Scenes such as these (in which villains utilize urban architecture to conceal themselves and prey on their victims) reflected the changes in city life that had begun transforming the topography of urban areas in the mid-19th century. As metropolises became more heavily condensed around the fin de siècle (thanks in part to modernized forms of transportation and communication, such as trains and telegrams), there arose the sense that everyone was instantaneously connected, in perilously close proximity both literally and figuratively. Windows and doors, then, became treacherous tools for criminals, who exploited new forms of urban architecture in order to provide swift access to their victims. The screen-like portals of windows and doors, simultaneously exposing and concealing separate spaces from each other, fascinated not only early filmmakers like Feuillade and Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset (whose Zigomar serial reflected many of the same anxieties) but also early surrealist writers like Robert Desnos and Louis Aragon, who appreciated the newfangled art form of cinema as an oneiric passageway into an alternate reality. It all comes together (in a way) with a 1922 text by Desnos entitled “Pénalités de l’enfer ou Nouvelles Hébrides,” which equated the movie screen with a tantalizing though perilous entryway into another space:

Furiously, I wanted to take a closer look. I climbed toward the screen. I was blinded by the light coming from the projector and saw in the screen two holes that were big enough to allow passage. I put my head through one of them. A panorama of the city spread out before my eyes. [Surrealist writers Louis] Aragon and [Jacques] Baron were trussed up through their bellies on two cathedral spires.

I understood that they too had wanted to see what lay behind the screen and the very beauty of their suicide was revealed to me.

Two holes in the screen, like two windows or doors, revealing a new world to film audiences—yet a world that ultimately sacrificed anyone who dared to venture to the other side. The Third Man, meanwhile, though hardly a surrealist film, provides doors and windows through which Holly Martins comes to know the alien world of postwar Vienna. Will his journey through these portals destroy him like it did Aragon and Baron, impaled as they were on cathedral spires within the screen-space? Stay tuned to find out…

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.