Second #3038, 50:38, Image © Studio Canal

We’re almost halfway through our year-long analysis of The Third Man, but things hardly seem any clearer: after having been chased through Vienna by a mob who has taken him for a murderer, Holly Martins admits to Anna he has no idea what his next step should be. (She astutely recommends informing Major Calloway.) Still no closer to uncovering the mystery of Harry Lime’s death (not to mention the mystery of the criminal activity Harry was involved with in the first place), Holly’s lone-man detective work has so far yielded scant returns: he’s still a stranger in a strange land, but he’s starting to realize his American exceptionalism is no defense against the secrets and treacheries of this city. If that all weren’t bad enough, Holly returns to the Hotel Sacher asking to telephone Major Calloway (though he predictably calls him “Callahan”), only to be whisked into a taxicab by a mysterious driver and a seemingly indifferent concierge. As they go careening through the shadowy streets of Vienna (narrowly missing impoverished people digging through the trash for uneaten leftovers), Holly assumes that the driver has been hired to kill him, or at least take him somewhere at the behest of Popescu and his murderous associates.

The meticulous pacing of The Third Man is hard to ignore here: the movie is about half over, but Holly has uncovered practically no evidence as to Harry’s whereabouts or criminal past. This seems to contradict the plot structure that, according to by-the-books screenwriting guides like Robert McKee’s Story, most classical Hollywood narratives are modeled after: about 15-20 minutes of exposition, then the clear arrival of a conflict, rising action mixed with clarifying exposition for about an hour, then an explosive climax and a denouement to placate the audience before sending them out of the theater. Usually, the narrative resolution of such classically-structured films is paralleled with the romantic union of the hero with his love interest (a union which, at least until the abolishment of the Production Code in the late 1950s, typically carried with it the promise of impending marriage). Meanwhile, halfway through The Third Man, the action is certainly rising but no more answers have been uncovered, the conflict has not become any clearer: as an investigative hero, Holly has revealed himself to be disastrously ineffective, though sympathetic.

This isn’t to say that the first half of The Third Man moves slowly (nothing in this film moves slowly). The dexterous feat required of screenwriter Graham Greene and director Carol Reed is to open with an hour of prolonged uncertainty and anxiety, withholding vital narrative information from the audience for as long as possible. If doubt regarding his longtime friend is now plaguing Holly Martins (while doubt regarding the peaceful interaction between countries and peoples is currently plaguing postwar audiences), the audience is forced to experience the same confusion, an overwhelming lack of knowledge about how this world and many of these characters function. In other words, The Third Man—though kinetically entertaining and catalyzed by magnetic star performances—is no classical Hollywood narrative. From its central mystery (what happened to Harry Lime?) to its romantic tension between Holly and Anna, The Third Man sets up the semblance of a traditional narrative progression only to prioritize themes of uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness, amorality, and desperation. Greene and Reed are gripping storytellers, but stories to them (here, as well as in other collaborations such as The Fallen Idol [1948] and Our Man In Havana [1959]) are typically more about the underlying ideas and character relationships than simply what happens.

But back to today’s still: if, as Jeremy deftly proposed on Tuesday, this taxi driver is a cybernetic figure of urban machinery, then what of the vehicle that houses them? To further the comparison, would the taxicab itself be considered an electronic message, transporting itself through the streets and grids that comprise the modern urban area like the bits of ones and zeroes that speed through computerized networks of cables, satellites, and microprocessors? In this estimation, it’s not only humans themselves who, overrun by the wave of digitization they’ve created, transform into hybrids of humanity and technology, half-androids “evolved” to coalesce into their computerized communities via 21st-century natural selection; it’s also the cities themselves that take on the attributes of a computerized mainframe, in which transportation, communication, and visual appearance all begin to resemble the inner workings of a CPU. Take, for example, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), about a futuristic, galactic urban dystopia ruled by a computerized “logic” at war with thinkers, lovers, and artists. (The opening sequence of Alphaville succinctly draws a visual equation between computers, urban landscapes, cars, human individuals, and digital communication.)

The taxi in which Holly sits is both mobile and confining: it veers wildly through the streets of Vienna, but the bars between Holly and his driver also point out its current function as a temporary prison. As the driver stares ominously forward (perhaps corroborating Jeremy’s hypothesis that he is an automaton), Holly bears helpless witness to his own treacherous predicament. Isn’t this also the function of film-watching: sitting, immobilized, while also being able to transcend space and time in the leap of a single cut, a mobility that surpasses what even cars and trains and airplanes supplied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? This correlation between film-watching and urban transportation (especially cars and trains) has been pronounced practically since the start of cinema, when early innovators such as D.W. Griffith and Dziga Vertov moored their cameras to all kinds of rapid transportation. With the advent of movies, spectators no longer had to stare out of car or train windows to experience this mobile vista; they could simply duck into a movie theater.

The kinetic camerawork in "Man with a Movie Camera" offered a mobility that transcended even urban trains and automobiles. (Image © Kino Video)

Today’s still, in addition to showcasing the low-key chiaroscuro of Robert Krasker’s cinematography, emphasizes the paradox of the moving-picture image: like the thousands of individual frames that make up its illusion of movement, “motion pictures” rely on both stasis and rapid succession. Holly Martins, meanwhile, is imprisoned in a moving cell, barred within a rectangular film frame at the same time that the world blurs by through the windows. Are images of automobiles in movies, then, examples of “the movement image,” as Gilles Deleuze would call them: action shots in which what we see the characters physically performing onscreen transforms the situation? Or are they more conceptual indications of how urban transportation (especially the car) has replaced an immediate relation with our physical world with a more deadened reliance on pre-arranged flows of traffic, giving credence to the Situationist theories of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—for example, the theory that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”? Are the car and the film image forces of liberation or confinement?

As Holly is driven to some mysterious location, a prisoner of this modern machine which epitomized American capitalism, maybe we can ponder some great cinematic antiheroes who have been defined by their cars. From the hitchhiking fatalist of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) to the existential wanderers of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) to the drive-first-ask-questions-later loners in Vanishing Point (1971) and Drive (2011), why do these men find it necessary to define themselves and their existence by the relentless push of the gas pedal? Are their lives catalyzed or destroyed by the boxes of metal and horsepower in which they find their purpose? On the surface their solitary quests seem existential and nihilistic: there’s no enlightenment to be found in modern society, so they simply drive, mechanically functioning until they reach their final destination. But maybe these men are actually unwitting victims of the modern industrial capitalism they pretend to live outside of. More than a hundred years ago, the onset of the Industrial Revolution instigated a world in which humanity, technology, transportation, communication, and the media formed an irreversible superstructure: speed, ideas, images, messages are now more potent possessions than raw materials, goods, products. This is the mindset such automotive loners seem to embrace: wield speed and transportation in order to forsake everything else, escape reality by transforming it into an artificial image that merely passes by the windows. Like Holly Martens and Harry Lime, these men are hapless victims in a world that has inalterably transformed; it simply speeds by in constant, treacherous, accelerated flux.

The world seen from an automobile in "Detour" (Image © St. Clair Entertainment Group)

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 #2976, 49:36, Image © Studio Canal

After inciting a mob and being chased through the Viennese streets, Holly has ducked into a movie theater and parted ways with Anna. Determined to live up to his cowboy/detective role, Holly rushes back to his hotel and asks the hotel clerk to get “Major Callahan” (while he of course means Calloway) on the phone. Holly, for the first time, has dug up some real dirt and he can’t wait to report it to the authorities. A real murder may go far to alleviate the boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon that has plagued Holly since he first declared that Harry had been murdered. But as Holly bustles through the door, it is clear that this frame’s nefarious central figure is lying in wait for him. The clerk and this dark stranger have just conversed in German, every word going over my head aside from the name “Martens”. Holly will of course be directed to go with this shady figure, a cab driver who has been waiting for him. In what be his most naive act yet, Holly gets into the back of the man’s cab without question and is swiftly jerked into the reality of the situation–this nameless cab driver is taking him somewhere he doesn’t want to go.

But what of this shadowy cab-driver? From his posturing and his costume (the low-turned brim of his cap and the high collar of his coat) we can tell that he is a man hiding from something, if only the cold Vienna night. Bur his posturing tells us yet more. His face, half illuminated, leans across the desk mimicking that lamp right behind him–even the dark cone of the lampshade and the dark cone of his brim echo each other. This man is certainly operating in service of some higher power who has ordered him to pick up Holly and take him somewhere, but beyond that his function in this story is as a tool. He is a sophisticated tool, one capable of chatting with this clerk, operating a cab, and putting Holly at ease enough to corral him into the back seat, but his function is as a part of a larger machine. Were this man an automaton instead of a man, would he be any less menacing or any less shady? The answer is of course no, and though I think it likely that the character was portrayed by a flesh-and-blood human actor, the figure of the taxi driver has within it an inherent robotic nature.

Inventor C.A. Rotwang built of the world's first automatons in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927), Image © Kino Lorber Films.

Are all taxi drivers in films robots? Of course all taxi drivers operates as a part of the small machinery (their individual cab) that operates as a part of the larger machinery of the city, but that could be said of nearly any driver in a city. As a purely urban profession, taxi drivers are a product of the modernization that created robots in the social consciousness. To imagine the terrifying cyborgification of humanity is a modernized notion; pre-modern cities lacked the industrial machinery to sketch the image of human as device, and the cab driver is that uniquely urban profession that leads the imagination toward a purely automated future. In that sense, the cabbie is the first robot, or more specifically, the first proto-robot which can serve until a viable automoton can be invented, perhaps by C. A. Rotwang. In a rapidly advancing world, the concept of mechanized humans seemed too imaginable not to lie in the near future, and perhaps human taxi drivers also imagined they might soon be replaced by robotic counterparts.

Robert Deniro tests his homemade robotic appendage in "Taxi Driver" (1976) © Columbia Pictures

Many of the cabbie’s necessary tools of the trade are mechanized, from the gearbox that shifts as if a part of the driver’s own body to the meter ticking motion and time into dollars. Even the rigid mandates of roads, traffic lights and cab stands form a mechanical, if not quite digital, understanding of motion, movement and transportation. Perhaps cinema’s most famous taxi driver is Travis Bickle, the eponymous protagonist of Taxi Driver (1976). Fed up with his job, or people, or society, or injustice (it’s really not all that clear), Travis build his own jury-rigged mechanical gun, reminiscent of the built-in weapon of Paul Verhoven’s conventionally cybernetic Robocop. As our cabbie today leans his way into the exact center of the frame, he is evidencing his own cybernetic nature. Even extremely futuristic cities seem to maintain the taxi driver role, like the roguish Korben Dallas in The Fifth Element (1997):

Donna Haraway would of course argue that simply by existing in contempory culture we all demonstrate elements of the cyborg. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway put forward the concept of the cyborgian as the eventual product of science and culture, one that exists in fiction, but also in life. In her later book, When Species Meet, Haraway would go on to demonstrate what she calls her “cyborgian wound,” an assertion that humanity has itself gone beyond flesh to become the cybernetic “hybrid of machine and organism” that science fiction has long foretold.

While it makes little difference for Holly, something in our cabbie’s eyes makes me think that a little robotic heart is beginning to tick where his human one once beat. Beguiled by this man’s robotic eyes, Holly will jump into the back of his cab and be at the man’s mercy. The inherent personal trust built into the cabbie-passenger relationship is put to the test when it is unclear whether said cabbie is a human or an android. But whatever his organic persuasion, this shadowy man is a threat to Holly and he has leapt out of the frying pan and into the cyber-fire.

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 #2914, 48:34, Image © Studio Canal

A crowd has become a mob, and they have Holly Martins in their sights: Holly and Anna have arrived at Harry Lime’s former apartment, only to find that the porter (who has promised to divulge more information to Holly in secret) has been killed by one of Popescu’s associates. A throng has congregated in front of the building, peering at the authorities who are wheeling out the unfortunate porter’s corpse. They give credence to the fact that human beings can’t help gawking at violence, a macabre bloodlust that takes on tragic undertones considering the global war that Vienna (not to mention much of Europe) had recently undergone.

In other words, it’s Freud’s death drive in action. His theory, first espoused in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), that human beings have an innate instinct towards self-destruction and a return to an inorganic state (an impulse usually sublimated by the libido) would seem to be corroborated by the succession of two world wars within decades of each other. We’ve discussed Freud on several occasions already; indeed, though The Third Man is hardly a psychoanalytic treatise, it’s hard not to conjure the specter of Freud in the context of the film. Vienna is, as Jeremy has previously pointed out, “the city of Freud” — both the analyst’s hometown and a seemingly phantasmic manifestation of the dream states with which Freud was fascinated. Furthermore, Freud’s later theories were heavily inflected by the Great War that raged in Europe from 1914 to 1918; indeed, it was his analysis of soldiers’ fixation on wartime traumas that partially led to the hypothesis of the death drive in the first place. The Third Man may be as infused with the haunting legacy of World War II as Freud’s death drive was with the first world war. Whether humanity’s latent desire for self-destruction is borne out of a natural capacity for aggression or (as Freud suggested) a desire to return to the inorganic state of the world before the dawn of man, it does seem manifested through the behavior of both Holly Martins (in his reckless, cowboy-styled machismo) and Harry Lime (who, we’ll find out later in the film, seems to hold a bleakly existential view of how human beings spend their short time on this earth, not to mention the relative insignificance of people’s lives in the whole cosmic spectrum).

If this capacity for destruction is what makes these Viennese bystanders gape at the porter’s lifeless body, it’s also what shortly causes them to turn against hapless Holly Martins, forming a mob that becomes rashly convinced that Holly is a murderer. Holly, an American outsider unable to comprehend the smatterings of German and Dutch being spoken around him, doesn’t initially grasp the seriousness of the situation: little Hans, whom we’ve met before, believes that the porter was murdered by Holly himself. As the toddler gleefully shouts ”Mörder! Mörder!,” the crowd turns its accusatory stare collectively at Holly, in a series of striking, shadowy medium-close ups that imbue the “wrongfully accused” trope with great tension.

Image © Studio Canal

Image © Studio Canal

As Jeremy mentioned on Tuesday, this standby of suspense movies recalls similar sequences from M (1931) and The Wrong Man (1956). But the earliest composition I can think of that arranges (in fact, superimposes) a multitude of leering faces in a harrowing assault on the protagonist is from F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), a film about the social ostracization of a hotel doorman after he’s fired from his job (one of the few things that gives his life value). This bewildering Kammerspiel (or “chamber drama”), one of the finest examples of interwar Weimar cinema, employs dynamic mobile camerawork (and a near-absence of intertitles) to illustrate the knee-jerk persecution of an entire community towards a man simply for losing his job and suffering economic displacement. Whether it’s the Viennese community turning on an outsider in The Third Man or a German neighborhood ridiculing one of its own in The Last Laugh, these dynamic confluxes of peering faces visualize the concept of mob mentality.

"The Last Laugh" (1924) Image © Kino

Of course Holly Martins didn’t kill the porter, but in a way he’s indirectly responsible. As we’ve mentioned, Holly’s brash recklessness — or, if we’re being especially judgmental, his inability to consider that his own actions will have repercussions for others around him — led him to blurt out to Popescu that the porter had offered a contradictory testimony regarding Harry’s death. Thus the wheels of murder were set in motion. Does Holly feel any guilt regarding the lethal chain of events that he instigated? Is he even aware of his culpability? If so, the faces leering at him above may act as outward manifestations of Holly’s own guilt; if Holly could exist outside of his body, perhaps he would be glaring at himself as accusatorily as the Viennese folks above.

In any case, Holly and Anna find it wiser to escape their sensitive position than to stay and try to explain their way out of it; Still Dots 48 shows the two of them hightailing it through Vienna’s mazelike cobblestone streets, with a shrieking Hans in hot pursuit. The mob behind them calls out for an explanation, then follow after Holly and Anna in unison. After a brief but thrilling series of shots details this pursuit in a number of shadowy canted angles, Holly and Anna duck into a movie theater to avoid capture, à la Bonnie and Clyde in the 1967 film, or Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (1960). (This familiar concept probably isn’t meant to be self-reflexive, but film scenes set in movie theaters always seem to me to set up an intriguing disjunction between the supposed “reality” of the diegetic world versus the mise en abyme artifice of the movie-within-the-movie.) As Holly and Anna begin to recognize the mounting tension and danger of their predicament, it seems apt that they find escape in a movie theater — modern culture’s shorthand symbol for escapism.

Jean-Paul Belmondo finds solace in a movie theater in "Breathless" (Image © Rialto Pictures)

We’ll have plenty of opportunities in future Still Dots posts to discuss what Richard Misek calls The Third Man‘s “wrong geometries” (essentially, a complex use of line and shape in order to disorient and make abstract the city spaces of Vienna), but today’s still is a fine example of this concept. The narrow passageways and alleys of the city are made into threatening, looming figures via a surplus of diagonal lines; indeed, The Third Man may be one of cinema’s finest examples of diagonal lines connoting danger and unease, converging into a distant vanishing point far beyond the confines of the screen space. In an already-surreal scene (thanks to Hans’ morbid glee and the stonelike faces of many of the lookers-on), today’s still makes Anna and Holly’s plight seem even more nightmarish by trapping them in a narrow space that seems to shut itself off abruptly in the background. This corner of Vienna is somehow both claustrophobic and immense as it flanks Anna and Holly with seemingly endless stone facades. The strange foreboding of this space reminds me of the enormous/sinister public areas that Dario Argento used to especially unsettling effect in Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977).

"Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)" (Image © Reel Media International)

"Suspiria" (Image © Blue Underground)

As if the cavernous space of Vienna itself weren’t creepy enough, we of course have the ghostly silhouette of Hans on the right side of today’s frame as well. In this nocturnal city, it seems even children pose a perpetual, ominous threat, their shadows dancing over the cobblestone streets and disfigured buildings like phantoms unleashed, perhaps, by the violence of war. Given Hans’ morbid fascination with murder and conflict, maybe even this little boy has, tragically, become inured to a world that functions according to war and aggression. (The death drive is alive even in this little one.) This reminds me of yet another parallel in the film world: the red-cloaked “child” in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), a movie as much about its own city (Venice, in that case) as The Third Man is about Vienna. The mysterious figure that reappears throughout Roeg’s film, skittering along the canals and alleyways of Venice as a disturbing reminder of the protagonists’ deceased daughter, is (like Hans) a combustible mixture of precociousness and death: the young and “innocent” providing still more danger in a corrupt and deranged world. (Warning: there are spoilers in the clip below!)

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 #2852, 47:32, Image © Studio Canal

Holly (with Anna standing safely off-screen) has left Anna’s cozy apartment in order to go meet the porter at Harry’s old apartment, only to find a mob gathered outside of the building. Holly, a frequent visitor to this apartment struts into the crowd demanding (in English of course) to know what has happened here. Two men, one speaking Dutch and one German, explain to Holly what we viewers already know, that the Porter is dead. Holly is surprisingly nonplussed at the news, shocked of course, but he is buried so deep in his hard-boiled persona that an expression barely crosses his face. Then, as this small man clutches his shoulder and runs his finger across his throat and whispers “kaput,” his son Hansel—the “precocious toddler” we last saw in Still Dots 26—starts crooning “Papa, papa.” In today’s still, a reverse shot to one revealing that ball-carrying toddler, the boy’s offscreen voice yells in delighted German: “Papa, der ist der mörder” (Papa, there is the murderer).

Little Hansel yells "Papa. Papa." Image © Studio Canal

The excited tenor in the boy’s voice as he begins to yell out “Mörder! Mörder!” makes the scene all the more surreal, and the man will soon turn to Holly and mention (in a German that Holly will again fail to understand) that he heard they were having an argument. While Holly’s continued American exceptionalism keeps him out of the loop as to what the crowd around him is saying, something in his expression shows that he can feel the tension building around him. Perhaps he should have figured it out, the German boy yelling the german word for murderer (Murder) over and over and pointing at him, but Holly won’t really know what is happening until Anna steps in, tells him what the crowd is screaming and pointing about, and pulls him away from them. Holly is made helpless and ineffectual by his American monolinguality, and Anna comes to the rescue again. We of course know that Holly is innocent, but for the bloodthirsty crowd he has all the trappings of a murderer.

Henry Fonda and Vera Miles in "The Wrong Man" (1956), image © Warner Bros.

Film noir cinema has a history of using this moment, perhaps most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956). The film centers on the police confusing Henry Fonda’s character with a bank robber, though we the audience know his innocence the whole time. This “wrong man” moment is essentially the definition of suspense–since all of us hapless viewers gnash our teeth at the thought of our hero being wrongly accused–and maybe that’s why it has cropped up again and again through film history. The wrong man motif arrives as early as 1931 in a  famous scene from Fritz Lang’s M. Dusseldorf is plagued by a serial murderer who preys on little girls, and an innocent little man is accosted by an angry mob for literally giving the time of day to a small girl. That scene bears a remarkable resemblance to The Third Man‘s, but perhaps that is not surprising since the masterful cinematic expressionism in Lang’s early films have influenced nearly every part of this film.

Perhaps the most famous “wrong man” in contemporary cinema is Richard Kimble of the 1960′s TV series and 1993 film, The Fugitive. Kimble is, again, on the wrong side of the law, suspected of murdering his wife but, as usual, we know it wasn’t him. “It was the one-armed man!” yells Kimble again and again. Through the series and the film, he must continually dodge his police pursuers while he in turn pursues his wife’s killer. The figure of the one-armed man became so powerful it became a cinematic reference of its own in such varied locations as Charles Russell’s The Mask (1994) or David Lynch’s 1990′s TV Series, Twin Peaks.

Mike, a one-armed man, is arrested for the suspected murder of Laura Palmer in "Twin Peaks" (1990-1), image © American Broadcasting Company.

But back to Holly, whose “one-armed man” remains a more ambiguous creation born out of the conspiracy between Kurtz, Popescu, Winkel, and some unnamed fourth man (who is also the third man); in the background of today’s still, one can see the faces of the crowd that surrounds Holly. Each hat-clad Viennese man has their face turned away from Holly, but in seconds those heads will all swing toward him and begin to hurl accusations. Whatever attitudinal difference that differentiates a crowd from a mob will flicker, and soon little Hansel will lead the men after Holly and Anna, yelling “Murder!” Their dark shadows will stalk Vienna’s stone walls. Unlike Richard Kimble, Holly’s first intent is not to find the real killer nor is it to prove his innocence. His first priority is escape, but what Holly escapes into may be even more life-threatening than the angry mob that currently surrounds him.

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 #2790, 46:30, Image © Studio Canal

In a matter of moments, Holly and Anna will be plunged even deeper into an abyss of murder and corruption, but for now they’re offered a melancholy moment of togetherness and reflection. The subject of their revery, of course, is Harry Lime, the unseen phantom who reigns over The Third Man, guiding the action without even appearing onscreen. As Jeremy noted on Tuesday, “Harry is the man that brought this unlikely pair together, but it is Anna’s erstwhile feelings for him that are keeping them apart.” That bitter irony, which is surely tormenting both Holly and Anna, may be more powerfully conveyed in this scene than any other in the film. Their platonic relationship gains great emotional depth as they share in each other’s loneliness, even while both of them are doubtlessly aware of Holly’s unrequited love for her. After Anna drearily professes that she doesn’t ever want to fall in love again, Holly — ever the gentleman — suggests they drink away their troubles. But the suggestion only makes Harry’s absence-as-presence more deeply felt, as Anna says that was always his go-to solution.

Holly has, up until now, been patiently understanding towards Anna’s all-consuming loneliness, but now he becomes visibly exasperated. “Well, I didn’t learn that from him,” he flatly says as he walks away from Anna, towards the door. His frustration grows a few moments later as Anna, hoping to brighten Holly’s mood and tag along with him to visit the porter (already dead, unbeknownst to them), admits, “We’re both in this Harry.” Holly pauses emphatically before he corrects her: “Holly… Might get my name right.” The look on Anna’s face once she realizes her mistake is heartbreaking: she recognizes Holly’s heartache even as she finds herself unable to escape her maudlin memories of Harry. She behaves towards Holly the way a loving sister might towards a sibling, a fond intimacy that likely gives Holly no comfort. This all leads to one of The Third Man‘s sweetest lines of dialogue: before exiting, Anna teasingly tells Holly, “You know, you ought to find yourself a girl.”

Visually, there’s nothing overtly striking about this scene: it forges an “invisible” style that the Hollywood system of narrative filmmaking prioritized, devoted to characters and dialogue and linearity of space and time. Mostly, the scene is comprised of medium shots (or medium close-ups) that allow us to discern the actors’ facial expressions fairly clearly (save for an unexpectedly powerful close-up of Anna after Holly’s suggestion that they get a drink reminds her, once again, of Harry). But the scene is still stylistically powerfully thanks to its mise en scène, the term applied to cinema by a number of French theorists to describe the arrangement of visual elements before the camera (composition, set design, props, the blocking of actors, costume design, and lighting). Though the Viennese vista visible through Anna’s window provides a semi-romantic backdrop, director Carol Reed includes subtle visual elements — the bare, dying flowers on Anna’s windowsill (indicators, perhaps, of Anna’s apathetic neglect of the immediate world around her following Harry’s death); the heavily scarred wall visible in today’s still, a figurative sign of violence that presages the danger that Anna and Holly will experience in the following scene — in order to convey the impression of foreboding doom. These elements might be subtle, and the viewer may pick up on them only subconsciously, but they nevertheless serve an emotional and even thematic purpose.

As such, Carol Reed and The Third Man reflect the emphasis on meticulous composition espoused by French critics such as André Bazin, who, in his 1948 essay “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing,” defined the utmost purpose of mise en scène: this “styleless style” achieves a self-effacement in which “the story and the actors are at their clearest and most powerful” (Bazin at Work, 2). Bazin used Wyler’s masterful 1941 film The Little Foxes to argue that “the highest level of cinematic art coincides with the lowest level of mise en scène… It is the camera itself that organizes the action by means of the frame and the ideal coordinates of its dramatic geometry” (4; The Third Man‘s “dramatic geometry” is something we’ll be addressing very shortly in Still Dots). A year after Bazin wrote this essay, Carol Reed would utilize both a “styleless” mise en scène as well as a plethora of striking cinematographic tricks (canted and distorted angles, deep focus, low-key chiaroscuro lighting) to alternate between emotional/narrative clarity and visceral impact in The Third Man. Our current scene displays Reed’s skill with subtle mise en scène at its most effective.

The Third Man is, as we’ve discussed before, quite the genre chameleon: it’s both comedy and tragedy, film noir thriller and fast-paced whodunit, breathlessly entertaining and utterly serious in its existential commentary on postwar dread. Underlying all of this is another strand: The Third Man is also a romance tinged with sadness. Holly, Harry, and Anna form a doomed love triangle, their passions and emotional yearnings smoldering beneath the movie’s more overt genre trappings. (Indeed, the last shot of the movie — one of the most emotionally resonant in the history of film, I would wager — powerfully brings this tragic romance to the surface.) As Anton Karas’ zither score reflects this dynamic shuffling of tones and styles, Holly’s spurned love for Anna (and her pained attachment to Harry) deepens the movie’s angst-ridden deconstruction of postwar amorality (and counterbalances its more comedic moments). The fact that The Third Man‘s male and female protagonists don’t end up together aligns their non-romance with the doomed relationships in such films noir as Laura (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), In a Lonely Place (1950), or Orson Welles’ own The Lady from Shanghai (1947), not to mention the classic non-union that closes Casablanca (1944, with which The Third Man has a few other things in common). If it’s true that, as Bazin suggested, utilizing the subtle mise en scène style in The Third Man‘s dialogue and dramatic scenes allows “the story and the actors [to be] their clearest and most powerful,” maybe that’s why the romantic intrigues pulsing beneath the surface are so emotionally devastating; we become convinced that Anna and Holly are fully-formed lost souls, sharing an intimate kinship over their loneliness, confusion, alienation, and moral anguish (the very torments that ultimately keep them apart). In a better, alternate world, maybe Anna and Holly would have ended up together after all.

Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame as lovers who seem to know their relationship is doomed, in "In a Lonely Place" (1950) Image © Columbia Pictures

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 #2728, 45:28, Image © Studio Canal

Today’s still places us in a small oasis–away from the high-octane intrigue of Vienna at large. Holly takes a few minutes to reminisce during a brief cigarette break. The action will of course pick up again soon, but for this brief respite we are allowed into a more intimate moment in Anna’s apartment. Holly helps Anna rehearse for a new stage role (I had almost forgotten she was an actor, since she seems to be a full-time sleuth) and the two reminisce about clever old Harry. Harry is the man that brought this unlikely pair together, but it is Anna’s erstwhile feelings for him that are keeping them apart. This very evening (in screen time) Holly and Anna will make the trek to talk to Harry’s porter for a third time, but as we know, he has already been murdered. Somehow, though, this pleasant evening in makes us forget the murder of an innocent man that these two are about to stumble upon. While Holly lights his cigarette, we viewers are given a reprieve from the suspense, and somehow allowed to relax ourselves, as if that nicotine is pumping through the camera, the printer, the projector, and then reflecting gently off the screen onto our enthralled faces.

In a film about an American drunk wandering through Vienna while intoxicated, pretending to be a detective, we haven’t seen too much of Holly actually imbibing. Aside from his drunken row with the british cops way back in Still Dots #9, Holly has stayed on the wagon. Still, something in his demeanor has caused critics the world over to think of Holly as a drunk (Ebert classifies him as an “alcoholic author of pulp Westerns”). But really, what is Holly to do? Dumped in a city where he knows no one at all, jobless and penniless (aside from the monopoly money he’s been fed by the British authorities) Holly has to cope with the fact that his best friend has died. And beyond that, he really doesn’t have much else to do. Speaking no German, French, Russian, or Czech, Holly is left to his own devices which seem to be wooing Anna, hunting the conspiracy behind Harry’s killing, and drinking.

It is in this first category that Holly is currently engaged. His tact is charming if misguided, but here is a brief sample of their tête-à-tête:

Holly: When he was fourteen, he taught me the three card trick. That’s growing up fast.

Anna: He never grew up. The world grew up round him that’s all . . . and buried him.

Holly: Anna, you’ll fall in love again.

Anna: Can’t you see I don’t want to. I don’t ever want to.

This dialogue is tinged with more than a hint of melodrama, but that is to be expected in the circumstances. What is striking about this dialogue, though, is how quick-witted it is without feeling quippy. Anna’s descriptive imagery is sharp, and it flows off their tongues quickly, bantering back and forth like it’s nothing. A lot of studio pictures of the 1940′s had a tendency to be chock full of clever and witty repartee, but The Third Man achieves the same level of wit without the stagey performance that came along with such films. Holly and Anna deliver these lines with a solemn, soulful disposition which lends credence to their intelligence as well as their emotional depth.

Films like His Girl Friday had hours of sharp dialogue, but the performance–though very impressive–lacks the social and class consciousness that weighs the words of Holly and Anna. In the same review I quoted above, Ebert called The Third Man the “exhausted aftermath of Casablanca” since the characters both live in the aftermath of war, but The Third Man‘s heroes are not “bathed in the hope of victory.” But in these tender, distinctly non-noir moments, the back and forth between Holly and Anna is reminiscent of the exhausted aftermath of 40′s Hollywood. Maybe years of unfulfilling marriages and jobs would leave Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson as low as Holly and Anna.

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 #2666, 44:26, Image © Studio Canal

Adrift amongst melancholy memories, Anna sits fiddling with one of her bedknobs (which Jeremy surmised might contain hidden secrets) until Holly Martins interrupts her reverie. Holly seems to have a chipper air about him, perhaps because the porter had promised to divulge more secrets regarding Harry Lime’s death later that evening—a promise that’s nullified with the offscreen murder of the porter by one of Popescu’s associates. At first, Anna too seems jovial, even playing along with Holly when he offers to fumble through some of the German dialogue that Anna must rehearse for her next play. This leads to the following exchange:

Holly: Is it a comedy or a tragedy?

Anna: Comedy. I don’t play tragedy.

[...]

Holly: [reading the script] Well, um…’Frau Hausmann…’

Anna: No, no. It’s no good.

Holly: Bad day…?

Anna: It’s always bad about this time. He used to look in around 6. I’ve been frightened, I’ve been alone, without friends and money…but I’ve never known anything like this.

The “he” in this case is, of course, Harry Lime, whose purported criminality is constantly at odds with Anna’s sentimental, rose-colored memories of him. It’s too soon to conjecture about the motivations underlying Harry’s behavior (since we still don’t know the full extent of it), but the reason Harry is such an entrancing and mystifying character without even having encountered him is because of this irreconcilability between his tenderness towards Anna and his alleged inhumanity towards many others. Was Harry a good or a bad man? This question—perhaps unanswerable in the context of any individual—is becoming trickier for Holly to ask himself the more he discovers, and it certainly won’t become any easier to answer.

Desperate for a distraction from her loneliness, Anna pleads with Holly to share something (anything) about his former friendship with Harry. As he does so, we get a sense of both Holly and Harry as headstrong young men who hold the illusion that the world is within their grasp: they drink, cavort, womanize, amuse themselves with carefree abandon. As a boy, Holly tells Anna, Harry was both mischievous and clever: he knew how to raise one’s temperature to get out of a school exam, how to play cards, how to avoid punishment (and perhaps, later, arrest). Anna relates this resourcefulness to the harsh truths of postwar Vienna, as she mentions that Harry was able to doctor Anna’s passport and papers at a time when the Russian sector was repatriating Viennese residents who had fled Czechoslovakia (as Anna had done).

The image of Harry Lime as a charming troublemaker who used theatricality and brazenness to overcome a harsh life is uncannily (and, one presumes, intentionally) reflective of Orson Welles himself. Despite his family’s relative wealth (Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin to a concert pianist and an inventor who had found success with a popular bicycle lamp), Welles’ youth was turbulent: after his father succumbed to alcoholism, Welles’ parents separated in 1919 (when he was four years old). His mother supported herself and Orson by providing musical accompaniment to lectures at the Chicago Art Institute (Orson’s older brother Dickie had already been institutionalized for learning difficulties). Orson’s mother, Beatrice, died of jaundice in 1924, when he was only nine years old; about a year later, he and one of the daughters in the foster family that had taken him in ran away from home, and they soon took to singing and dancing on the streets of Milwaukee for money. Orson’s father died a few years later, when he was 15. Most accounts seem to trace the burgeoning of Welles’ artistic career to a stunt he pulled while touring Europe in the early 1930s: Welles reportedly strode into Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1931, proclaiming himself a Broadway star and attracting the attention of the theatre’s manager, Hilton Edwards, who was wowed by the young man’s boldness.

A young Orson Welles

An extensive biography is unfeasible here, of course, but there seem to be limitless anecdotes about Welles’ outsized personality, penchant for spinning opulent (often untruthful) tales, promotional braggadocio, and sly resourcefulness as a filmmaker throughout his later career. (A lot of this is swiftly recapped in the introduction to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Discovering Orson Welles.) Welles’ mercurial nature even affected the making of The Third Man, as he traveled Europe for weeks, evading the filmmakers while he was scheduled to be shooting on location in Vienna; when he finally did arrive, he refused to shoot in the city’s sewers, necessitating reshoots at studio-built sets back in England. In any case, there are undeniable parallels between the lives and personalities of Welles and Harry Lime: while Welles’ larger-than-life nature contributed to his bold artistic experimentation (“I’ve never been interested in success,” he was once tellingly quoted; “I’ve always been interested in experimentation”), Harry Lime’s savvy understanding of the ways of the world (not to mention his self-acknowledgement as a mere human speck amidst an apathetic cosmos) eventually lead him into the morally questionable territory that Holly Martins will soon uncover.

Anna Schmidt has told Holly that she only “plays” comedy, not tragedy; maybe the same is true for Harry. After all, according to Holly’s appraisal, Harry “just made everything seem like such…fun.” We’ll soon understand just how tragic and ruthless is the business that Harry Lime was mixed up in, but somehow (we’ll also soon realize) he has the perverse ability to make it seem insignificant, even playful. Maybe both Anna and Harry have encountered so much tragedy that they’ve become inured to it—they simply won’t accommodate it. This gets to one of the primary questions lying beneath The Third Man‘s surface: is the movie itself comedy or tragedy? Its author, Graham Greene, himself called it a “comic thriller,” an apparent paradox that’s actually conveyed from the very first scene (in which a droll voiceover, contributed by Carol Reed himself, regards the corruption and violence of postwar Vienna with bemused world-weariness). For a movie (partially) about the eradication of previous moral codes and the devastating precedent of slaughter instilled by World War II, The Third Man is also remarkably light-footed and entertaining.

But to ask whether the film, or Anna or Harry themselves, are “comedic” or “tragic” is to assume that these two forms are diametrical opposites, which may not in fact be the case. After all, if we return to origins, both comedy and tragedy derive from Dionysus, the twice-born son of Semele and Zeus. The tradition of tragedy grew out of dithyrambs, group lyric praises that were delivered to Dionysus; comedy, meanwhile, grew out of komos, which were bands of male revelers that would sing bawdy songs in honor of the two-faced god. (In psychological terms, this would be considered as the duality between the telic/serious and the paratelic/comedic modes.) But both functions served the same purpose—either sacred or profane social invocations created for Dionysus for the sake of rebirth, fertility, and the protection of youth—and were therefore flip sides of the same coin. In fact, the well-known masks of tragedy and comedy associated with ancient Greek drama (in particular, with Melpomene, the muse of tragedy; and Thalia, the muse of comedy) were commonly used in ceremonies honoring Dionysus. An origin story such as this suggests that both comedy and tragedy are merely dialectical ways of reacting to the same event or responding to the surrounding world, a Dionysian hybridity reflected (at least implicitly) by comedic works of art that attempt to deal with sadness, bleakness, violence, or other unpleasantries through dark, cathartic humor.

Comedic and tragic masks, or "personae," from Greece circa 500-300 B.C.

It’s an aphorism that most great comedians, and perhaps even many great comedies, contain an element of the tragic or disturbed within them, if only in the theoretical sense that comedy entails a breakdown of social mores and institutions and, in this sense, lays bare some kind of societal disrupt. (In fact, many of these cathartic or palliative functions of comedy are addressed by Rod Martin’s The Psychology of Humor.) But the comedy in The Third Man often takes on an explicitly bleak tone, presaging some of the later, politically-oriented, morbid humor practiced by Pietro Germi, Lindsay Anderson, and Dusan Makavejev, among others.

But in terms of tragedy and comedy commingling and intersecting (like successive pages in the same flipbook), the greatest cinematic example must almost certainly be Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), a caustic satire that was met with scathing reviews, bans, and riots upon its release. A film in which the elegant farcicality thinly veils rampant social corruption, petty squabbles, and tragic passions, Renoir’s masterpiece manages to wear both theatrical masks (tragic and comedic) at once. Indeed, one of the movie’s most famous quotes (uttered by Renoir himself, playing the character of Octave), both humorous and despairing, can be revealingly applied to Harry Lime and the injustices he commits: “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.”

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 #2604, 43:24, Image © Studio Canal

Were zither chords visible, a jangly milleu would still hang over this frame from the chord marking the end of our poor porter’s life. His clear eyes turn and look to an unknown assailant, and hang suspended behind Anna in cross-dissolve limbo. Is it one of the four men who met on the bridge last week? Or perhaps some dastardly assassin hired by the group? Whoever it is, the porter’s eyes tell us that he recognizes his end has come, just as the zither crescendo cues us to see trouble brewing. In seconds, the last twinkle of the porter’s eyes will disappear, never to be seen again, but for now they linger like the Cheshire Cat’s smile gazing through a fascinated Anna.

In a scene hidden between this Still Dots and the last, we see Holly passing by Harry’s old apartments again when the porter leans out of the window and tells Holly “I am not a bad man. I would like to tell you something.” Holly’s fierce excitement is met by a shushing from the porter and an invitation to come back that night, when the porter’s wife has gone out, to hear the rest of the porter’s story. Just after promising to help Holly in his mad quest–for the third time–the porter shuts the window behind him and turns to meet his zither-clanging assailant. But remember, this assailant is a direct product of Holly’s meddling. Had Holly not carelessly dropped the porter’s name to Popescu, the man would not be facing this trouble at all. Whatever secret it was that the porter had to share will now be lost to the ages, and it only becomes another of the loose ends and mysteries that plague this city the Matt called “a night city if ever there was one.”

Superimposition in Fritz Lang's "M" (1931) demonstrates Hans Beckert's (played by Peter Lorre) mental instability, Image © Kino International Films.

As the porter is quietly murdered off screen on the other side of the city, Anna should have no clue, but something about her fascinated yet sullen expression seems to suggest a chill running through her. Perhaps some element of their superimposition suggests a spiritual or possessional connection, and since this is the last image we see of the porter, this gaze is his last chance to claw at screen-life. This is a less deliberate association than the image itself suggests, since it is a quick dissolve between shots rather than a sustained superimposition. Cross-dissolves are not unusual in almost any type of film, but something in the lingering glimmer of the porter’s eyes suggests that this is more than a smoothing between shots. In the shooting of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles–a student of stage theater–did his fades and cross-dissolves outside of the traditional editing method. Instead of editing filmstrips in the studio to create dissolves, Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland gradually dimmed all of the lights on set until his actors and sets faded into blackness. This method maintained control of exactly which faces or figures would remain lit the longest, leaving their ghostly projection burned deliberately into viewers’ minds. While The Third Man is definitively not Orson Welles’, his shadow looms large over it, and today’s cross-dissolve carries with it some of that Wellesian intentionality.

The spirit of the porter may indeed be captured in this frame, though, the dissolve is no more than a fleeting superimposition. Superimposition has long been used as a meaning-making cinematic trick, almost as long as montage itself. Georges Méliès was known to pass the same film through the camera as many as seven times to create the cinematic tricks that made his short films so enchanting. Fritz Lang’s expressionistic collage created complex meaning through multiple exposures and superimpositions. Though perhaps less deliberate than the Fritz Lang examples, and less magical than Méliès’, today’s Still Dots captures a subtle combination of characters visually, that harkens back to the silent era.

A multitude of faces and eyes superimposed in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927), Image © Kino Lorber Films.

The other thing I find fascinating about today’s still, is Anna’s activity. She semi-obsessively fiddles with the decorative piece on the head of her bed, peering down into the space beneath it. What could be seen as a fiddly nervous habit could also present itself as something more suspicious. A knock will come at the door and Anna will quickly replace this metal piece and pull her hand away, as if she had never touched it, before beckoning them in.

This bed becomes a set piece in other moments of the film yet to come, becoming a unique yet unassuming signifier of “Anna’s apartment.” Holly and Anna will both drape themselves over its art-deco lines. But if Anna’s actions can be read literally, there might be something hidden inside this innocent bed, stuffed into a post and covered with the decorative piece she holds in her hand. If this is so, if Anna has some secret thing–a document? a photograph? some piece of evidence?–stashed in this secret compartment, it will literally never be mentioned outside of this six-second shot. Were this a film that followed traditional rules of storytelling, such a secret would have to lead to some payoff, even if it was revealed so subtly. Hayao Murakami’s IQ84 sets up this binary more eloquently, in two passages.

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.”

“Meaning what?”

Tamaru stood facing Aomame directly. he stood only an inch or two taller than she was. “Meaning, don’t bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away withh all useless ornamentation.”

 . . .

Aomame nodded. “Meaning you want me to break Chekhov’s rule.”

“Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired,” Tamaru said. Then he frowned as if recalling something.

(1Q84, pg. 325, 352-3)

The object that Anna may or may not have stashed in her bedpost, is the pistol entering this story. Perhaps our close reading will tell otherwise, but it seems that this gun will never be fired.

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.