Second #2418, 40:18, Image © Studio Canal

Holly Martins has finally met Mr. Popescu, the mysterious Romanian who was allegedly at the scene of Harry Lime’s death, along with Baron Kurtz and the unknown “Third Man.” (Not to mention Harry’s own driver, behind the wheel of the truck that struck him.) One wonders if Holly is starting to catch on that none of Harry’s “associates” can really be trusted. He greets Baron Kurtz civilly enough at the beginning of this scene, but always seems to eye him with more than a little suspicion (and who can blame him?). He had also been surprisingly antagonistic towards Dr. Winkel in a previous scene, repeating the incorrect pronunciation of his name (wink-el instead of vink-el) numerous times and disparaging his collection of trinkets and artifacts.

Now, perhaps, Holly wants to believe that Harry’s former cohorts are reputable folks but finds it increasingly difficult to do so. His discussion with Popescu turns almost immediately into a no-nonsense interrogation of him, and when Holly doesn’t get the answers that he wants (namely, that Popescu suspects foul play), he takes on an authoritative tough-guy tone. “Who was the third man?!,” demands Holly grimly. Moments later, he accusatorially mentions to Popescu, “Somebody’s lying…”. Holly even asks Popescu about the mysterious Joseph Harbin, suggesting that his allegiances have started to drift away from Harry Lime and his former “colleagues” to Major Calloway and the forces of official law and order.

On Tuesday, Jeremy mentioned how Holly’s “foolish blowhard mouth” is apt to get somebody killed—he’s a privileged American, traipsing cavalierly through a dangerous postwar city that threatens to swallow up everyone else around him (something to which Holly is, of course, completely oblivious). Holly’s brash exceptionalism raises its ugly head during his conversation with Popescu, too. After asking Popescu about the third man, the Romanian evades the question with broken English: after taking a swig of whiskey, he says, “I oughtn’t to drink it. It makes me acid.” (The latter phrase brings to mind the “black bile” that, in archaic times, was thought to cause anger; is Popescu’s solecism a sign of the violence to come?)

Holly, with no consideration of any kind of repercussions for himself or others, proceeds to tell Popescu that it was Harry’s former porter who admitted to seeing the third man in the first place. Popescu deviously replies with the sort of nationalistic cultural stereotyping that seems prevalent in The Third Man‘s fragmented Vienna: “You’ll never teach these Austrians to be good citizens,” Popescu scoffs after learning that the porter decided not to give his testimony to the police. “It was his duty to give the evidence…even though he remembered wrong.” Only moments later, Popescu evades another potentially incriminating question by pointing out cultural differences instead: when Holly says that Baron Kurtz finds it conceivable that Harry was running some kind of criminal racket (a possibility that Popescu rules out immediately), the Romanian blames a sort of Anglo-Saxon insularity for Kurtz’s suspicions. (Turns out Popescu also buys into a certain brand of cultural exceptionalism.) More than a character quirk, Popescu’s willingness to blame cultural discord for unseemly behavior (including that of which he himself is accused) reflects a turbulent postwar Vienna parceled out to an assortment of foreign powers, not to mention the legacy of a devastating global war that ran on jingoism, xenophobia, and genocide. Popescu’s simply modeling his behavior on the way nations and governments conduct their affairs—a tragic psychosocial affliction shared by characters in movies such as Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (1967), and Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995), for example.

Charlie Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947) declares, with eerie prescience, during a courtroom trial, "Wars, conflicts -- it's all business." (Image © Warner Bros.)

"The Firemen's Ball" becomes a microcosm for the Czech Communist state (Image © Columbia Pictures)

Yugoslavian refugees manufacture munitions in "Underground" -- for whatever war might be raging overhead. (Image © New Yorker Films)

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 #2356,39:16, Image © Studio Canal

Last week, Matt divined an unbreakable connection between this nightclub, the “Casanova Club,” and the famous “Rick’s Café Américain” in Casablanca (1942). The similarities do not end at the similarity of names–Casanova to Casablanca–nor at the decor, style or position. Indeed, these nightclubs are in some ways direct mirrors of one another, settled on opposite sides of World War II. Casablanca is set in early December of 1941, in the week before Pearl Harbor pulled American forces into the Allied side of the war, and Humphrey Bogart’s morally ambiguous Rick lives in Vichy-occupied Casablanca. Meanwhile The Third Man‘s Vienna takes place in 1949 post-war Vienna, a city with its own morally questionable American ex-pat, Harry Lime. What’s more, both cities present a cosmopolitan European diaspora: Casablanca was filled with Europeans and Americans trying to escape the war, while Vienna is full of Europeans and Americans occupying the city and enforcing postwar agreements. The brusque entrance of the police brigade, seen in today’s frame is even reminiscent of a famous moment in Casablanca, seen here:

While these officers may be just as crooked as Casablanca’s Captain Louis Renault, they don’t show it off quite so brusquely, and Holly seems less able to accept the inustice he sees than Rick’s cynical shrug, but both men attempt to stand up to these entering policemen. Our frame here catches Holly as he yells out “Who are you looking for now?” and Anna pleads quietly for him to shut his foolish blowhard mouth. This scene will come to demonstrate a large part of Holly’s selfish ignorance. As Holly yells at the four incoming police officers (one for each occupying sovereign nation), and Anna covers her face, glares at him, and whispers, it becomes infinitely apparent how oblivious he is of the danger that everyone is in. Anna, with her papers confiscated by Calloway, is essentially an illegal immigrant who, if captured by any of the four policemen standing over her shoulder, would be in even more danger of being deported to the Russian zone. Yet Holly, impervious to Anna’s position, yells out at the cops, receiving for his effort a disparaging look from the American officer and an excuse to turn back to his drink and mumble “silly looking bunch.”

Holly’s relative immunity, or indeed Rick’s relative immunity in Casablanca, can be traced back to the same essential understanding that allows Holly to behave in such a way. That understanding is simply the assumption of American exceptionalism, a concept that for better or worse can be linked back to German theorist Carl Schmitt (no relation to Anna Schmidt as far as we know). According to Carl Schmitt, the power of the sovereign, or indeed the power inherent in any system of government, is the power to decide the insaturation of the “Ausnahmezustand” or literally, the “state of exception.” Whether this be martial law, executive order, or in the case of World War II Germany, Hitler’s assertion that “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (The leader defends the law), the state of exception is the exercise of executive power. For Schmitt, every government, in order to have power, must have some element of dictatorship/sovereignty and this element holds the power to decide the exception. As Holly strides effortlessly through police lines, thumbing his nose at the British officers, and living for free on the promise of delivering a lecture on the modern novel, he is the picture of privilege and exception.

American involvement in World War 2 is no exception to American exceptionalism. While the rest of the world and especially Europe was still staggering from the horrors of The Great War, they were unwittingly embroiled into this terrible conflict, but it was years before the US took a side. While the United States’ geographic separation certainly permitted some amount of political separation, even after years of increasing aggression in Europe, it took a direct attack on a US military base to initiate American involvement in the war. The presumption that the United States does not exist as a part of the same world as the more cosmopolitan Europe is the same heart of American exceptionalism that has infected Holly’s behavior.

This perspective can be traced back even as early as the early 1800′s, with the Monroe Doctrine dictating that European Imperialism in the nations of the Americas was over, but that American involvement  in those same nations was permitted. Talk about exceptionalism, yet the great blue expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific ocean have long served as a metaphor for the emotional and political separation inherent in American sovereignty. Holly, blustering his way through postwar Vienna with the bravado that we have so often called cowboyesque, is nothing but a visualization of this exceptionalism.  What would make Holly think that a cowboy, or even a hard boiled California detective like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, could have the right to do as he please in this downtrodden European city? Holly is the imago of American exceptionalism staggering in and out of shadows on these cobblestone streets.

And in his meandering, Holly is continually endangering the lives and livelihoods of the people around him. In addition to drawing unwanted attention to Anna, a woman without viable papers, Holly’s big mouth will soon (as we will come to see) pull the strings that endanger the life of another character. In his haphazard western/detective investigation, Holly will let slip something that he shouldn’t have. And why? Holly is trying to prove his friend’s innocence, but more simply he wishes to exercise the near limitless power of his personal blend of American exceptionalism–an exceptionalism that, more often than not, harms those who are not swathed beneath its protective red white and blue cloak.

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 #2294, 38:14, Image © Studio Canal

An image that will now be permanently (wondrously) imprinted on my memory, Still Dots #38 captures a particularly bizarre moment at the Casanova Club (or maybe it’s simply business as usual in this establishment). The Casanova Club offers a swanky refuge from the scarred postwar streets of Vienna, a sort of five-star oasis of stiff drinks and fine dining (they don’t even accept Holly’s army money!). The name is obviously meant to evoke Casanova’s romantic allure, but one wonders if it’s also supposed to resemble Casablanca (1942), one of the most famous American films made during World War II, in which Rick’s Café Américain serves a similar purpose: an upscale haven for a beleaguered city’s upper class as well as for international expatriates.

Rick's Café Américain in "Casablanca" (1942; Image © Warner Bros.), the Moroccan equivalent of the Casanova Club

Holly and Anna, now reunited, have come to the Casanova Club to follow up on a lead: Anna has just been informed by Major Calloway that this haunt used to be (and apparently still is) frequented by Harry Lime’s shady cohorts. After stopping at the bar for a few whiskeys (which Anna likely needs after her run-in with the military police) and a trip down memory lane provoked by Anna’s snapshot of Harry, Holly looks over and spots the semi-absurd vision immortalized in today’s still. Likely intended to provide a moment of comic relief (especially after the bleak interaction we’ve just witnessed between Anna and Major Calloway), the shot pairs Baron Kurtz’s gargoyled visage with this somewhat embonpoint Viennese woman, well-attired and accoutered and single-mindedly enjoying the broth before her. (She seems to not even notice the musical accompaniment that Kurtz and his violin are providing.)

How has Kurtz wound up as a violinist-for-hire at the Casanova Club? Kurtz himself offers the simplest (and therefore least likely) answer, as he makes his way over to Anna and Holly and sheepishly says (while gesturing with the violin), “You found out my little secret. A man must live…” The irony here is that the manner in which Baron Kurtz actually makes a living is considerably more scandalous than his gig at the Casanova Club; when Anna and Holly really do find out Kurtz’s “little secret,” the depths to which he and his accomplices sink in order to make a comfortable living become disturbingly clear. (The irony is paralleled moments later, when Holly and Anna are introduced to Mr. Popescu, another of Harry’s former friends who allegedly helped carry his dying body to the Josefplatz statue. Popescu just happens to be idling at the Casanova Club as well this evening, and he confesses to Holly that he helped Harry forge Anna’s identification papers as a gesture of kindness. “Humanity is a duty,” Popescu says in self-exoneration—though we’ll eventually come to realize that a humane regard for one’s fellow man is less important for Popescu than monetary well-being.)

But there seem to be a few additional explanations for Kurtz’s gig as the Casanova Club’s resident violinist. For one, the position would allow Kurtz to spy covertly on Vienna’s elite upper class and on the wealthy globetrotters who make their way through this fine establishment. (This possibility is reified by Kurtz’s cryptic pluck of the violin’s strings, which acts as a secret message to Popescu that Holly Martins has entered the building.) Indeed, the unexpectedness of Kurtz’s side-job (it’s a surprise in itself that Kurtz even knows how to play the violin) brings to mind some of the ludicrous disguises that Inspector Clouseau dons in the Blake Edwards Pink Panther films.

Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in "Revenge of the Pink Panther" (1978; Image © MGM)

Inspector Clouseau in "A Shot in the Dark" (1964; Image © MGM)

Clouseau in "A Shot in the Dark" (1964; Image © MGM)

Clouseau in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (1976; Image © MGM)

And yet, maybe there’s an even simpler reason for Kurtz’s gig as a violinist. The surprisingly blissful expression on his face in today’s still—the closed eyes, the oblivious smile (which looks markedly different from what Jeremy called the “used-car-salesman smirk” typically painted on Kurtz’s face)—suggests that he truly is a music lover, a man who can disappear into the beautiful sounds he creates with the instrument crooked between his neck and shoulder. There’s a lot to suggest that Kurtz is a shady, disreputable fellow, but maybe he is simultaneously a lover of the arts (after all, he professes to be an avid reader of Holly Martins’ books as well—a claim which seems like a dubious attempt at ingratiation, but maybe Kurtz truly is a fan). Could Kurtz be more ambiguous, more paradoxical, than we initially assume him to be: a realist who exploits the sick and dying on the black market, yet who also finds refuge in the transcendental nature of art and creativity? Maybe Jeremy was right when he posited, months ago, that Kurtz is a kind man at heart, a softie underneath his cynical, duplicitous exterior. If this is the case, it makes Baron Kurtz surprisingly akin to the ambiguous character of Harry Lime: a villain, perhaps, but one who is still ultimately vulnerable and human, with a surprising capacity for compassion.

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 #2170, 36:10, Image © Studio Canal

With the police detainment of Anna Schmidt, she and Holly Martins became separated for the first time since they’ve joined forces (or, maybe more accurately, since Holly roped Anna into tagging along for his investigation). While Anna paces the military office of Major Calloway, cutting slightly angular paths through a succession of canted frames, Holly is once again playing the Lone Vigilante, solely tracking down and interrogating the highly suspicious Dr. Winkel. Today’s frame brings us back to Calloway’s lifeless office (after a dissolve that temporally bridges the two scenes). The military bureau in which British and Russian (and, perhaps, French and American) officers share occupancy is nothing like the numerous examples of Romanesque and Baroque architecture to be found in Vienna: it’s a stuffy, officious building defined by the enormous military maps and sheaves of bureaucratic documents that litter the offices. In other words, an environment that uneasily parallels what Anna is going through: anxiety and loneliness, bolstered by Major Calloway’s brusque distrust of her.

We’ve just come from Dr. Winkel’s apartment, a scene in which Holly is pitted against the slyly evasive doctor. Still Dots #36 denotes another one-on-one standoff of sorts: Anna Schmidt’s naked, all-too-human emotionalism (she’s vulnerable and steely at the same time) versus Major Calloway’s callous punctiliousness. The disparity between them is conveyed by the following exchange:

Major Calloway: Miss Schmidt, you were intimate with Lime, weren’t you?

Anna: We loved each other. You mean that?

Of course that’s not really what he means; he’s a coldly rational MP who assumes that their sexual past makes Anna a collaborator of sorts, or at least a crucial witness. Human passion and fallibility don’t enter into the equation for him, at least not yet. Anna, meanwhile, is still convinced that the military police are entirely wrong about Harry, that he couldn’t possibly have committed the injustices (whatever they are) of which he’s convicted. If the previous scene—Holly Martins vs. Dr. Winkel—waged a battle between dogged moral absolutism and oily, pernicious amorality, then this scene (Anna vs. Calloway) pits tempestuous human emotion against the cold, calculated machinations of justice. (Holly and Calloway are more alike than they think: both men believe in a clear moral righteousness and are attempting to defend that as swiftly as possible, though at this point they’re doing so in contradistinctive ways.)

Calloway presents another piece of evidence that hints towards Harry Lime’s alleged criminal activity: a photo of a doctor in a military hospital named Joseph Harbin. In today’s still, Calloway sternly presents this photograph to Anna, who responds that she’s never seen him. Calloway is exasperated, distrustful: “It’s stupid to lie to me, Miss Schmidt,” he says. “I’m in a position to help you.” Turns out that Harry, in one of his letters, had asked Anna to telephone Harbin at the Casanova Club, passing on the message that Harbin was to meet Harry at the latter’s apartment. “Harbin disappeared the day you telephoned,” Calloway informs her. “We have to find him. You can help us.” All Anna can do is respond meekly that Calloway has it “all upside-down.”

Does the visual evidence of the man who Harry seemingly made disappear unsettle Anna’s loyalty towards him? Are doubts, suspicions beginning to sneak into her romantic, melancholy memories of Harry? It’s hard to know at this point. It’s interesting, though, that the strongest card Calloway has played so far is this still image of Joseph Harbin. Though we don’t see much of the photograph in this scene, Calloway’s use of the still as a tactic to gain Anna’s trust points towards the apparent incontrovertibility of the visual image (“seeing is believing,” to put it simply). Anna is not yet convinced, but Calloway will use photography/cinema once again later in the film as a means of proving Harry’s criminal acts to his former best friend, Holly. Calloway seems to realize that visual evidence is a potent way to convince skeptics, to illustrate uncomfortable truths. (The intensity with which he’s looking at Anna look at the picture in today’s still seems to emphasize the power of looking as a way of ascertaining the truth.) It’s the same kind of understanding that David Hemmings’ character Thomas comes to in Blow-Up (1966): still images contextualized, transformed, refracted, or magnified beyond their original composition (for example, a number of still images placed in succession and catalyzed into cinematic movement) may reveal a hidden truth that underlies the still photograph (though Thomas understands too late that that truth may itself be misleading or incomplete).

David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" (1966) Image © Warner Bros.

The veracity of the photographic and/or cinematic image has been notably commented upon by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, among many others. Barthes in Camera Lucida, for example, bemoans the inability for still photographs to capture the essence of things, or (in his words) “the impossible science of the unique being.” He found this especially true while flipping through photographs of his recently deceased mother: “I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her entirely… straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false” (28). Obviously, the photograph that Calloway displays to Anna in The Third Man denotes only what Joseph Harbin physically looked like (what Barthes deemed the studium), but not the essence of the man himself or what happened to him after the photograph was taken.

Sontag seems to agree with these concepts throughout much of On Photography: by noting that still photographs turn reality into a “mental object,” “miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire,” she seems to say as well that photographs can’t incorporate the subjectivity or full range of experience that inflects reality with Barthes’ “impossible science of the unique being.” Photographs turn subjects into objects, she says—objects we can acquire and own. While she recognizes the extent to which photographers interpret and transform the reality around them, Sontag nonetheless concludes that “photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.” (In fact, this is corroborated by one character in The Third Man and disproved by another—a point to which we’ll return later.) But that evidence contains a more “innocent” relation to reality than other mimetic objects, argues Sontag; a relation that provides a narrow transparency of the world in which subjectivity, or truths beyond the mere visual appearance of things, remain concealed.

So how does Anna respond to the seemingly simple, but possibly incriminating, photographic evidence that Calloway shows her? Does it indeed “furnish evidence,” suggesting to her that her former lover Harry Lime may indeed be a heartless criminal? Or does the photograph’s very lack of subjectivity, of humanizing context, fail to persuade her of Harry’s injustices? Perhaps Anna simply responds with the ambivalence with which most people view photographs, or even (especially) watch movies: the visual information is persuasively immersive (we do in fact feel like we’re watching a certain reality unfold before us), yet we’re also perpetually aware that we’re seeing an illusion, rays of light and chemical reactions (or binary information) that necessarily transforms reality. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing.

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 #2108,35:08, Image © Studio Canal

Today’s frame pairs the elusive Doctor Winkel with one of the many small sculptures dotting his home. Both frozen in this frame, both avoiding our camera-eye and looking off screen, their carved faces seem to offer us equivalent amounts of knowledge. The secretive and plainly elusive/dismissive Winkel is pushing his way through his conversation with Holly much the same way as this statuette would, providing no new information; the only truth to be drawn here can be found studying the lines of these two whittled faces. Winkel’s harsh temperament is, in itself readable, but only to detect some underlying sense of hostility, like a statue holding a sword or mounted on horseback. In many ways, Winkel and this hardwood idol are more alike than either might know.

The presence of this idol, though, may tell us even a little more about Winkel–and Vienna–than we already know. In 1949 Vienna was like much of Europe: overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. A census in 1961 found that more than 90% of the population was Catholic, and yet we have not stumbled upon a church, a priest or nun, or really any type of religious iconography thus far. In a city literally full to the brim with Catholics, one would assume that finding a cross hung on a wall or around one’s neck would be so ordinary as to become invisible, yet in The Third Man‘s Vienna, it has become literally invisible. Some of this might be connected to this film’s tenure. The antipathy between the Anglican and Catholic churches is no secret (in fact Orson Welles played a cardinal in a film about it in 1966) and that self-same anti-pope sentiment was very strong in the United States until the election of JFK in 1960. But yet, in a film so deliberate in portraying the gritty underground and black market in postworld Europe, it seems antithetical to ignore religion completely.

Orson Welles plays a cardinal in "A Man For All Seasons" (1966). The film centers on Henry VIII's separation of England from the Catholic church.

But to ignore religion and discount it is not to take away its power, or the power of the religious morality to infect secular morality. Indeed, many of the moral decisions in this film stem from positively religious starting point. Holly’s crusade to discover the secrets behind Harry’s murder can be linked back to the ten commandments, specifically his distaste with someone breaking the “though shalt not kill” prohibition. Holly also seems particularly peeved by those who “bear false witness”, whether it’s Kurtz and Winkel’s concocted series of alarming coincidences, or the Porter’s unwillingness to bear witness at all, it is the breaking of this commandment that rankles Holly’s moral code. Even the uncanny feeling implicit in today’s frame can be traced back to that ancient pair of stone tablets, since we see Winkel’s posturing reinscribed in the form of a “graven image” or perhaps a “false idol” built into the frame itself. So, despite its marked lack of explicit religion, this film is full of an invisible religious fervor, directing aspects of the plot from some internalized location within.

Another Viennese man pondered the way that religion wormed itself into every aspect of civilization. Sigmund Freud, raised an orthodox jew rather than a catholic, wrote this of religion:

“Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner–which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion spares many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.(Civilization and its Discontents, Norton, 1961, pg. 34)”

Perhaps this was meant to be as contemptuous as it seems, but it is possible to read another way. For if we imagine The Third Man it stripped of its religious potency it becomes plain that it is a recipe for neurosis. Imagine Holly, stranger in a city where he knows no one and understands nothing, with his only link to this world (Harry) killed before his arrival. Without his wild drive for justice, retribution an honesty–those things granted him from his decidedly religious morality–Holly would be a friendless victim awash in this lonely city, and would be primed to start losing his mind. So in a sense, Freud’s words ring very true. It is exactly his religious “infantilism”–that “mass-delusion” to which he knowingly or unknowingly subscribes–that saves him from an individual neurosis or psychosis.

Back to our frame today, and its inherent religiosity, we can see those two figures as almost allegories, Winkel for bearing false witness and the statuette for worshipping false idols, but the empty space between them is occupied by the invisible presence of religion. It is this invisible presence that holds today’s frame together and it is that selfsame moral code that holds The Third Man together. What appears on the surface to be a completely secular film is simply one that has internalized its religious code, and by hiding it that code becomes even stronger.

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 #2046,34:06, Image © Studio Canal

On Tuesday, Jeremy described the home of Dr. Winkel (that’s vink-el) as “tchotchke-stuffed”; even Holly himself disparagingly notes that the good doctor has “quite a collection of…collection.” Holly is in Winkel’s apartment following up a lead: he’s learned from Anna the name of Harry’s former doctor, who (according to various testimonies) just happened to be strolling by at the time of Harry’s death. A number of things throughout this scene suggest Winkel’s villainy, or at least his highly suspicious character: he’s carving a turkey at the very moment that Holly arrives and asks about Harry Lime (the glinting blade of the carving knife, shown to us in close-up before we even meet Dr. Winkel, makes a fairly clear symbolic association); he owns a shrill little black dog that, if not the same one that Baron Kurtz clutched in his paws earlier in the film, at least looks exactly like it; he tries to shoo Holly out the door basically as soon as he arrives, claiming he has guests waiting on him; he evades Holly’s questions with remarkable poise, claiming that the evidence regarding Harry’s death was simply too insubstantial; and, maybe most incriminatory for Holly, he corroborates Baron Kurtz’s suspicious account, contradicting the porter’s agitated testimony. In today’s still, an over-the-shoulder two-shot identifies us with Dr. Winkel, as we coolly observe Holly’s seemingly calm interrogation. Holly has entered alien territory (Winkel’s apartment) playing the role of the dogged vigilante, but this is Winkel’s home after all, and he manages to control what happens therein: he wrests the authority of knowledge away from Holly by refusing to offer him any concrete, telling evidence.

Last week, we took a look at the significance of objects (magnified via close-up, or in this case medium close-up) in the history of cinema, from an emotional, visceral, conceptual, and psychoanalytic perspective. Conveniently, Still Dots #34 reiterates the prominence of non-living objects on film, though this time from a more Marxist perspective. Herr Winkel is indeed defined by the preponderance of trinkets and souvenirs he owns: whereas many Viennese folks after the war relied upon the black market in order to procure and sell goods (in other words, for mere survival), Winkel’s apparent economic superiority allows him to waste expendable income on items he doesn’t need. (Compare the feast Dr. Winkel is preparing when Holly arrives to the small bag of tea Anna offered him earlier in the film, which she says was thrown to her onstage by a British audience member.) Thanks to some canny mise en scène and ominous low-key lighting, all of these possessions take on a sinister air, poised and ready to strike like the stuffed birds in the dining room of the Bates Motel.

Norman Bates' experiments in taxidermy, from "Psycho" (1960) Image © Universal

We’ve brought up Marxist dialectics before, but Winkel’s wealth and the arsenal of possessions he’s built up in order to flaunt his cushy lifestyle raises the theory once again. (We’ve also brought up Citizen Kane numerous times; doesn’t Winkel’s proclivity to buy a superfluous number of items, essentially creating an archive of his own extravagance, mirror Charles Foster Kane’s obsession in buying and owning everything around him, people included?) Lest one think Marxism has no place in The Third Man, it will eventually become clear that the movie offers a sickened (though light-footed) critique of how capitalism, with its underlying philosophy that the attainment of goods and wealth is the clearest marker of an individual’s value, dehumanizes us and replaces peaceful coexistence with cutthroat competition. (Capitalism is, in fact, the motivator that has indirectly led to the police’s investigation of Harry Lime.) Doktor Winkel’s wealth, especially in contrast to the lives led by, say, Harry’s porter or Anna Schmidt, demonstrates Marx’s principle that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (The Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, 1978; 4). As a doctor, Winkel would presumably lead a life of comparative wealth that would inspire him to value that economic superiority above all else, thus allowing him to maintain the political and economic machinery that elevated him to his superior social position in the first place. (Without giving away any spoilers, it’s interesting that the conspiracy in which Winkel, Kurtz, and others are embroiled is clearly working against the medical establishment—in other words, Winkel is forced to betray his profession for what he seems to consider the more valuable endpoint, namely the accumulation of wealth.)

It’s convenient, too, that the trinkets which loom behind Holly in Still Dots #34 are crosses denoting Christianity. Most likely Dr. Winkel is Roman Catholic, as that’s the denomination most prevalent in Austria since the Habsburg Empire (especially following the mass emigration of Jews out of Austria from 1938 to 1941, followed of course by the Holocaust during the Nazi regime). One wonders if Winkel is a devout Christian or if he simply treats its iconicity as yet another consumer good. In either case, the linkage between consumerism and religion raises Marx once again, as the theorist famously compared the alienating effects of both by deeming religion the “opium of the people” (54; emphasis in original). In Marx’s view, religion serves the same purpose as capitalism by isolating human individuals from each other and instilling egoism and self-worth as man’s primary motivators: religion “has become what it was at the beginning, an expression of the fact that man is separated from the community, from himself as other men. It is now only the abstract avowal of an individual folly, a private whim or caprice” (35; emphasis in original). To be sure, Winkel has isolated himself from his community, devaluing human life (as we’ll eventually see) for the sake of economic gain. While Winkel’s ruthless self-importance derives more from capitalism’s greed than from the insulating effects of modern institutionalized religion, it’s still telling that the props so prominent in today’s frame conflate the two processes which (according to Marx) have alienated human beings from each other as well as from themselves. Of course, Holly’s not thinking about all of this as he questions Dr. Winkel about the death of his friend; he may find the doctor’s memorabilia tacky, but for now he has no reason to believe that the perfidy he’s mixed up in goes any further than the possible murder of Harry Lime. By the end of The Third Man, though, the Moloch of capitalism will make itself all too clear to Holly, our poor, naive scribbler of mass-produced paperback Westerns.

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 #1984, 33:04, Image © Studio Canal

Again we are thrust into a new space. After miring ourselves in the world of Baron Kurtz and the inside of Anna Schmidt’s apartment, the story seems to be suddenly picking up speed. We will soon be popping in and out of Vienna spaces at an alarming rate. Today’s frame shows Holly taking his first few steps into the tchotchke-stuffed apartment of Harry’s Doktor Winkel. Holly has spent the first half of this film calling Major Calloway “Callahan,” a major insult to a proper Englishman, and he continues his brusque American trend of mispronunciation by addressing the doctor with an Americanization of his name (wink-el) instead of the German pronunciation (vink-el). This is by no means unusual, and something in Herr Doktor’s begrundging tone as he corrects Holly’s pronunciation says that he must get it all the time. This would be an easy mistake as an English-speaker looking at the name on paper, but what is unusual is that Holly has already heard the correct pronunciation. Holly only knows of this doctor from being told his name (aurally) by both Anna and Kurtz, so what would be an honest, if ignorant, mistake had he simply looked up a local doctor in the phone book is transformed into a deliberate act. But Herr Doktor, having never met Holly before, has no way of knowing this, so Holly is the only one aware of this intentional disrespect.

This frame itself offers a depiction of what Holly will learn from this encounter. We see our shadowy hero striding into an antechamber where in front of him wait yet another set of doors. Through those doors, Holly would assume, lies our Winkel, yet from our perspective we can see only the tiniest sliver of what lies inside that room, too brief and abstracted to construct into the space at large. Holly begins his haphazard investigation with little guile or pretense, simply asking what immediately comes to his mind, like a visitor coming through the front door, and from that investigatory perspective, he can glean only a sliver of what might be at play. The story that Winkel will deliver is completely identical with the one delivered by Kurtz and the one that Anna reported hearing at the police inquest. Holly can learn little or nothing from this, except for that small sliver glanced through the door, that Winkel, Kurtz, the police, and presumably Popescu have all been providing the same somewhat improbable series of events. So, depending on how deep this conspiracy goes, Kurtz and Winkel (and Popescu) are in cahoots, and telling their cockamamie story to the cops, or the whole lot of them are in on it together. The only person who hasn’t professed this exact yarn is the porter, who didn’t give evidence at the inquest, but whose contradictory story has put the fire under Holly’s investigation. Either way, by the end of this conversation, Holly knows that it is him against the world.

Another very obvious clue to their collaboration is that mid conversation a tiny dog, looking so remarkably similar to Kurtz’ little dog that Holly asks a dumbfounded, “Is that your dog?” Clearly by the end of the conversation Holly (and we the viewers) know that the dog must be Kurtz’s and that means that Kurtz and his fellow collaborators must be in the next room plotting. Holly seems unworried by this discovery, but perhaps he should be. He is digging into a conspiracy that has already killed at least one person, and they are starting to take notice. That little dog should be more than a tell for Kurtz’ presence, it should be a warning that Holly is in danger. But our unabashed American hero soldiers on with his investigation, unworried and unafraid. He will reveal the truth one sliver of light at a time.

This marks the first of three instances throughout The Third Man of a pet betraying a character’s presence. Perhaps a storm is brewing and the animals know before we humans can see the signs, or maybe like Paul the psychic octopus, these animals just have a powerful ability to interfere in human affairs. Whatever Carol Reed’s motivation, these three animals may come to transform the lives of the humans around them.

Paul the "psychic" octopus interferes in human affairs by predicting world cup wins before they happen.

One side note. Our last scene, including Still Dots #32, marks another milestone in the film. Since meeting Anna, the two have been inseparable, but after separating, we see a scene of Anna that Holly does not. Like most suspenseful Noirs, The Third Man, generally shows us only what the detective can also see, in this case Holly. That way, when the mystery is finally pieced together it will have the same emotional satisfaction for us as it does for the detective character. But our previous scene throws us in a room with Anna, Calloway, and Paine but no Holly. Suddenly, we are allowed to embody more than just Holly, and can embody and identify with Anna as well, but before we can come to terms with that, we are dragged back to Holly at Winkel’s house. Meanwhile, for those of us identifying with Anna, she is presumably still with Major Calloway, but not arrested and free to go. Though, with her false papers in police custody and only a receipt to cross the countless borders of postwar Vienna, she won’t get far without the authorities finding out. She is being watched.

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.