Second #3534, 58:54, Image © Studio Canal

This is a different Holly Martins than we’ve seen before: if our poor cowboy has been, as Jeremy said on Tuesday, “sitting squarely on the fence” regarding Harry Lime’s guilt, he’s now faced with incontrovertible evidence that proves his longtime friend’s barbaric crimes. (Lime’s barbarism, as we’ve mentioned, is a new-fangled sort: one that stems from the all-important accumulation of wealth in modern capitalism, rather than the more brutish power struggles that defined pre-industrial societies.) Holly clung to his boyish belief in Harry’s innocence and Calloway’s corruption for as long as possible, but now he’s been treated to the verifiable proof that he’s demanded for so long: a “magic-lantern show,” as Calloway calls it, comprised of slides illustrating Joseph Harbin (the hospital attendant who stole tubes of penicillin for Harry to sell, and who suspiciously vanished a week ago); Harry’s fingerprints lifted from penicillin vials; handwriting samples analyzed by experts; more fingerprints, more files, a parade of evidence that serves to upend all of Holly’s assumptions about friendship, law and order, criminality, honor, justice. This is all conveyed to us through a wordless montage accompanied by Anton Karas’ angst-ridden zither score, with each pluck of the strings seemingly denoting the obliteration of yet another of Holly’s ethical ideals. If we had any doubt about the efficacy of Calloway’s demonstration, it’s proven to us at the end of this montage, as Holly shrugs despondently to Calloway and asks, “How could he have done it?” The Holly we see in Still Dots 58, in other words, is a man who’s become convinced that his best and oldest friend is a monster.

Holly pores over evidence proving Harry Lime's guilt (Image © Studio Canal)

More evidence against Harry (Image © Studio Canal)

And still more evidence (Image © Studio Canal)

This visual evidence and how effective it is in persuading Holly give credence to the aphorism that “seeing is believing”: now able to trust his own eyes, Holly seems to bear retroactive witness to his friend’s crimes. It’s no coincidence that Calloway opens his demonstration with a “magic lantern show”: both cinema and various modes of crime investigation arose out of an era of positivism in the late 19th century, as technological and scientific innovations proliferated and the belief that it is exclusively our sensory experiences that supply us with knowledge predominated. The world’s first fingerprint bureau was initiated by an Argentinian police chief in 1892—three years before the Lumière brothers gave their first public film demonstration in Paris. The method of cataloguing individuals by fingerprint was itself based on Alphonse Bertillon’s 1879 investigative system of photographing people and developing concomitant physical descriptions, developed a year after Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a series of stills delineating the movement of a horse—a proto-cinematic experiment that sought to scientifically settle a popular debate at the time (whether or not a horse’s four feet all leave the ground while it’s trotting). Seeing was believing, then, both in art and science: crime investigation began relying upon visual evidence at the same time that the movies gave ghostly life to real-world movement. Decades before The Third Man, the linkages between cinematic recording and crime investigation gave thrilling urgency to Fritz Lang’s “urban thrillers” (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922; Spies, 1928; M, 1931; and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1932), as Tom Gunning writes. Particularly through the easily-perturbed character of Inspector Lohmann (who debuted in M and returned to match wits with Dr. Mabuse in Testament), Lang was able to parallel the investigation of crime with the primacy of the (often distorted) cinematic image, gleaning proof by visually perusing the scene.

But can the cinematic image, despite its apparent resemblance to what we see in reality, ever be trusted? It’s a happy coincidence that a map of Vienna figures prominently in the background of Still Dots 58: while maps offer trustworthy visual reproductions of the actual world around us (an abstraction of scientific data, in a way), movies offer imitative shadows of whatever is in front of the lens, distorting reality by their very nature, creating “maps” where the cartographer is allowed (even expected) to ignore the boundaries, embellish the topography, shuffle the dots and lines to make a duplication somehow more vivid than the original. The nature of the cinematic image turns the world onscreen into a paradox: it’s always honest and always lying. Holly chooses to trust what he sees, the photographs and films and data that Calloway finally shows him, and it’s the faith that he puts in his own vision that convinces him to accept Harry Lime’s guilt. But maybe he shouldn’t have believed his eyes; maybe a recorded image is a document not so much of what actually happened, but of something more cryptic and elusive, as Jean Epstein writes in his 1921 article “The Senses I”:

The senses, of course, present us only with symbols of reality: uniform, proportionate, elective metaphors. And symbols not of matter, which therefore does not exist, but of energy; that is, of something which in itself seems not to be, except in its effects as they affect us. We say “red,” “soprano,” “sweet,” “cypress,” when there are only velocities, movements, vibrations. But we also say “nothing” when the tuning fork, diaphragm, and reagent all record evidence of existence…

To see is to idealize, abstract and extract, read and select, transform. On the screen we are seeing what the cinema has already seen once: a double transformation, or rather raised to the power of two, since it is multiplied in this way. A choice within a choice, reflection of a reflection. Beauty is polarized here like light, a second generation beauty, the daughter—though prematurely delivered and slightly monstrous—of a mother whom we loved with our naked eyes.

In other words, as Harry Lime himself—Orson Welles—would flamboyantly suggest in 1973′s F for Fake, the film image is something different, more phantasmic, than what we first assume it to be, and the act of filmmaking is essentially a magic trick. Had Holly pondered this possibility before Calloway’s lecture, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so quick to trust his eyes and cast bitter judgment on his longtime friend. In contrast to the positivism out of which film and visual forms of criminal investigation arose, Epstein would claim that all Holly has seen is “symbols of energy,” reflections of reflections of incidents he has not himself witnessed.

Orson Welles' greatest magic trick: "F for Fake" (Image © Criterion Collection)

So Holly has finally given in to reason, accepting the evidence offered to him as proof of Harry Lime’s villainy. This turnaround has me wondering about Anna Schmidt, a character we haven’t seen in a while, whose emotional frankness and outward resilience stand in marked contrast to the film’s other characters. She remains loyal to Harry to the very end, which makes me wonder: how would she respond to the wealth of evidence that Calloway has on hand? Has he already shown it all to her? Has she decided to trust her emotions, her ardent memories of her former lover, more than the visual data that Calloway and Holly find irrefutable? Maybe she trusts her own images of Harry, her own flickering memories, more than this external evidence; maybe she finds them more faithful duplications precisely because they were envisioned by an aching heart rather than a machine.

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.

Still Dots now enters the darker, grittier Vienna as Holly is introduced to the real black market: a secret trade that continues the punishments of war even after the fighting is done. Newton said it, for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and war is no exception, and with such a monumental concept as war, the reactions are ubiquitous. While Harry’s secret Vienna drug trade is one of those reactions, perhaps, this Still Dots will interrogate another; an example from the world of war in literature with a novelist touched personally by war. Kurt Vonnegut was an American soldier captured by German forces who witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. So, uncharacteristic for Still Dots, I would like to introduce this still with a long quotation. This is one of my all time favorites, from Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five.

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging a bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from  an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and the crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. Yet there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote ares. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a Baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed (Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five, Random House, 1969, pg. 93-5).”

The reasoning behind this passage, which may seem oblique considering the compositionally interesting frame above, is evidenced by the words that Calloway is spitting out at Holly, camera right. As Matt discussed last week, this scene brings Holly face to face with the reality of war and the continuation of martial oppression even after the “war” has nominally ended. Calloway is laying all of his cards on the table, trying to get Holly to come over to his way of seeing things. Why? Perhaps it is due to Calloway’s genuine concern for Holly’s well being (Holly did narrowly avoid being snatched up by two of Popescu’s thugs before stumbling into this frame) but Calloway’s tenacity seems to imply more than that. Maybe something in Calloway’s military experience has taught him to trust in his instincts, and maybe, just maybe, Calloway knows that something is coming and that he will need Holly on his side.

Holly’s reaction is not unlike Billy Pilgrim’s for he too is a man unstuck in time. The Harry he knows is not the dirty profiteer that–as Calloway explains it–is responsible for the death or insanity of men, women and children in war-torn Vienna. Holly’s Harry is still a roguish prep school boy, standing up to the authoritative evil of the teacher or the dean. And Holly, too, is still living in that moment, as a delighted chum thumbing his nose at the  authority figure right in front of him, with the “innocent” best friend written all over his grinning face. Meanwhile, though, our teacher’s PowerPoint presentation is beginning to draw Holly back into the present world, where he is an alcoholic friend who is in over his head, and Harry is no longer the man he knew and trusted. Last week, Holly’s self-image still dwelled in that adolescent perspective, but war makes kids grow up fast, and before our eyes, the perspective has shifted. Holly has been reprogrammed.

The conventionality in his change of heart is surprising in a film as complex and multivalent as The Third Man, but Calloway’s last argument works because, like Helen Lovejoy, he essentially yells out “won’t somebody please think of the children?” What is it about children in peril that causes such a consistent change of heart? Whatever that secret is, it is working its clockwork magic away at Holly’s heart, for though he is not truly convinced of his friends guilt, he is now sitting squarely on the fence.

What is most striking, about this passage, though is how it draws me to view. In every instant I wish that I could see war as Billy Pilgrim does in movies. The theory of entropy aside, Vonnegut has written in this beautiful passage a way of seeing the world much different than our own. Can we imagine, for one instant, that instead of technology developing to make more deadly weapons, that it would develop to make more powerful ways of healing–like tubes that suck the bullets and shrapnel out of injured soldiers? It seems that technological development is something driven by money and violence, but this passage makes me wonder about watching every film backwards. The Third Man‘s dive into the dark underworld of Vienna would become a return to innocence. We could see Harry raised from the dead, reunited with Anna, and eventually, go back to the prep school existence he and Harry shared. This imagining is one best left to stoD llitS (Still Dots backwards) but they help to imagine the same utopian world that Vonnegut describes.

Dresden, a city even more devastated than Vienna by World War 2.

The Third Man is not a war movie like Billy Pilgrim’s war movie, though. It presents none of the boom and flash of war, but built into the bombed out buildings and streets is a cinematic history, as if each ruin is begging for a flashback of its own. The grim and dour Vienna that Holly gallivants around is certainly still scarred from Allied bombing, and before writing this passage (indeed even before becoming any type of published writer) Kurt Vonnegut witnessed a similar bombing. As a private captured by German forces in World War II, he was housed in non-maritime-Dresden during the fire-bombing by US forces. Slaughter-House Five can be seen as a book written in protest of that bombing, and similar ones yet to come, but what I find interesting of his descriptions is his focus, not on the horror of the war experience, but of what comes after. Billy Pilgrim and his crew of American prisoners of war are released as the city burns, and they wander through abandoned streets, looting houses of their valuables. The concept of the spoils of war is in no way a Vonnegut original, but what is interesting that even through this terrible experience of unimaginable death and horror, what Vonnegut recants is the story of the looting. Perhaps it is the same for Harry’s nefarious gang, and their illegal doings are really just another coping mechanism for the horrors they have seen. Whatever the case, though Holly is becoming stuck in time again, and his gears are beginning to whir as he discovers that Harry and his gang aren’t the good old boys he imagined.

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 #3410, 56:50, Image © Studio Canal

“The eyes are the window to the soul,” says the old English proverb; or, as the American sculptor Hiram Powers elaborated much later, “The animals look for man’s intentions right into his eyes. Even a rat, when you hunt him and bring him to bay, looks you in the eye.” Given The Third Man‘s predilection for animal symbolism, this hypothetical encounter between Holly Martins’ soul and an animal’s piercing gaze has some significance: if Baron Kurtz’s weaselly dog, Harry Lime’s cat, or the random cockatoo that Holly somehow enraged were to look into his eyes right now, what would they see? Put simply, a soul festering with uncertainty, a self-made wall of armor crumbling down. So far in The Third Man, Holly has assumed that he knows all of the roles these characters play: he’s the renegade cowboy protecting his dead friend’s honor, Harry is the misunderstood rogue whose murder has remained unexplored, Anna is the damsel in distress in need of protecting, and Calloway is the heartless, bureaucratic policeman only concerned with brushing this case under the rug. The fact that all of Holly’s assumptions are wrong is starting to become clear to him; it may not be too hyperbolic to claim that all of Holly’s attitudes towards morality, justice, right and wrong, are brutally upended in this very scene.

Major Calloway is revealing Harry’s true racket to Holly at the same time it’s revealed to us: as in most detective stories (if we can get away with calling The Third Man that), we’re aligned with Holly’s perspective throughout most of the movie, so even if we’ve suspected there’s some legitimacy to Harry’s persecution, we’ve been unsure until now. Then the bomb drops: Harry’s racket was penicillin. He developed a scheme whereby his gang of racketeers would steal penicillin from military hospitals, dilute it with water to make it go further, then sell it back to afflicted patients. Holly holds onto his allegiance to Harry (and his animosity towards Calloway) for as long as he can: “Are you too busy chasing a few tubes of penicillin to investigate a murder?” Calloway’s reply could unsettle the ironclad resolve of even the most stoic listener:

Calloway: These were murders. Men with gangrened legs. Women in childbirth. And there were children, too. They used some of this diluted penicillin against meningitis. The lucky children died. The unlucky ones went off their heads, you can see them now in the mental ward. That was the racket Harry Lime organized.

It’s the mention of children in mental wards that causes the devastated, despondent look on Holly’s face in today’s still; his naive loyalty to Harry has him feebly telling Calloway that he’s offered no proof of Harry’s heinous crimes, but that’s exactly what Calloway will provide in next week’s Still Dots posts.

To look into Holly’s eyes in the still above is to witness a man sliding into a nebulous moral abyss. He still thinks of murder as the plot contrivances in his Western paperbacks: a man shot, stabbed, beaten by another, with a clear victim and perpetrator, a mystery to be solved. He’s not used to institutionalized, large-scale murder: not only a moneymaking scheme to turn a medical necessity into a capitalist commodity, but also, of course, World War II itself, murder at its most pervasive.

On Tuesday, Jeremy delineated the connection between capitalism and religion: briefly, that the tenets of the Protestant Ethic coincide with the capitalist ethos, which allows the accumulation of wealth to become a religion in itself. “Man is dominated…by acquisition as the ultimate purpose in life,” argued Max Weber. Yet there is, perhaps, an equally strong connection between capitalism and war, especially considering the periods of industrial boom that coincide with capitalist economies during wartime (munitions manufacturers and defense contractors make for lucrative national businesses, after all). In the case of World War II, that wartime and postwar prosperity extended to America while much of continental Europe and Japan were leveled—an essential step in allowing the United States to become modernity’s foremost global economic power. Though World War II is often seen as a “just war” (i.e., there were moral and ethical reasons for the US to intervene), it was also an economic one, inevitably if not intentionally.

"Rosie the Riveter" helped recruit more than 2 million women into the American workforce from 1942 to 1945, helping to create an internationally dominant postwar American economy.

The extreme view of capitalism-as-war (or vice versa) is that capitalism needs war to survive, and that the introduction of industrial capitalism to global politics instigated an ongoing cycle of international war as a means of attaining value and wealth. One interpretation of this is that global capitalism is itself a war of products, images, media, ideas, in which America can become a modern empire not (solely) through military might, but also by the international ubiquity of Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Hollywood movies, and so on—cultural invasion, in other words. Another, more literal interpretation is that the United States has repeatedly instigated violent conflicts in other nations throughout the 20th century—supporting guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi in Angola in the 1980s; installing the violent dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973; thwarting Iran’s constitutional movement and installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, beginning in 1953; supporting El Salvadorian death squads in the 1980s; and so on—in order to create pro-American capitalism systems that would benefit us economically.

The most recent (and, maybe, most damaging in a longterm sense) manifestations of this capitalism-as-war are the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enterprises that serve to further strengthen the United States’ already-towering military-industrial complex. As Jonathan Nitzen and Shimshon Bichler write in “Capitalism and War,” capitalism needs war in order “to expand its geographical reach; it needs it to open up new markets; it needs it to access cheap raw materials; and it needs it to placate opposition at home and pacify rebellious populations abroad.” Nitzen and Bichler argue, furthermore, that the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the clearest indicators of the role that capitalism plays in war, and indeed have transformed war itself into a capitalistic enterprise that aims for inflation, relative prices, and redistribution (in/of oil, in this case). So if Holly Martins is suddenly devastated by his realization of the linkages between war and capitalism in today’s still, we should realize (with a great deal of concern) that that process has been rampaging unimpeded since World War II, so much so that the nature of war itself has transformed entirely.

Perhaps because the entertainment industry is at least tangentially related to the military-industrial complex, depictions of war as capitalistic enterprises are not common in American movies: the only semi-mainstream example I can think of is Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War (2005), which casts Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, an amoral arms dealer who exploits global unrest in order to become obscenely rich. (It’s an admirable attempt at sociopolitical commentary, though Cage playing a Russian is like Charlton Heston’s Mexican border cop in Touch of Evil.) A better illustration of the war-as-capitalism theme might be the Australian movie The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), directed by Yugoslavian expat Dusan Makavejev (W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie), in which a global marketer from the titular company carries out a semi-hostile takeover of a local soft-drink manufacturer in a remote Australian region. (No wonder the movie wasn’t made in the US.)

A still from "The Coca-Cola Kid" (1985) Image © Umbrella Entertainment

Or, outside of the realm of cinema, we can see this theme illustrated repeatedly by underground artists such as Banksy and Ron English:

Banksy graffiti art in Bristol

Ron English's "Cowgirl McDonald's," 2005 (Image © Ron English)

To return, circuitously, to The Third Man: Holly’s realization that murder and criminality can take on more widespread forms than the cops-and-robbers sort (especially when applied to the global politics of his, and our, home country) can be tied back to penicillin itself. The United States played an important role in initially mass-producing and distributing the drug: while there was only enough penicillin in June 1942 to treat ten patients, experimentation at a lab in Peoria, Illinois allowed the US to prepare 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in 1944. As a result of the war and the necessity of supplying the drug to Allied troops serving in Europe, over 646 billion units were being created per year as of 1945; an estimated 12-15% of soldiers’ lives were saved thanks to the availability of penicillin during amputations.

And yet, in the immediate years after World War II, the United States used penicillin for more sinister ends: from 1946 to 1948, US researchers in Guatemala had prostitutes infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually-transmitted diseases in order to test the efficacy of the drug. Approximately 1,300 people, including orphaned children, were infected as part of the study, and 83 of them ultimately died. If the economic, scientific, and military resources of the United States initially saved the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers, those same resources also endangered the lives of more than a thousand others in Guatemala only years later. While Holly Martins, in today’s still, undergoes shock and despondency after learning that his dear departed friend stole penicillin from terminally ill patients and sold it on the black market, he could just as easily be outraged by the ruthlessly capitalist behavior of his home country. We don’t know exactly how Holly Martins feels about the United States, although we know he at least embraces a form of American exceptionalism, blundering through Vienna with alarmingly little regard for the people who actually live and work there. I wonder if his patriotism, his loyalty towards his homeland rather than his best friend, would be similarly eviscerated if he knew what it was capable of for the sake of money.

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.

Today’s frame falls smack dab in the middle of what is Calloway getting something off his chest. Its sharp tenor is worth including:

Calloway: I told you to go away, Martins. This isn’t Santa Fe . . . I’m not a Sheriff, and you aren’t a cowboy. You have been blundering around with the worst bunch of racketeers in Vienna . . . your precious Harry’s friends, and now you’re wanted for murder.

Holly: Put in drunk and disorderly, too.

Calloway: I have. What’s the matter with your hand?

Holly: A parrot bit me.

Calloway: Oh, stop behaving like a fool, Martins.

Calloway goes on to tell Holly that he needs to be careful because he was “born to be murdered” (an insult I wish made it into more films). All of this is not to say much in terms of analysis. I am simply in awe of the snappy writing and performance. Calloway, in two elipsis-linked sentences, voices all of the frustrations with Holly’s character that have plagued us for the entire length of this project. He does all this, and flourishes with a couple of stunningly sharp admonishments. As much as Holly is our hero and our eyes through which we see the film,  one cannot help but  be impressed with Calloway here. We must remember, too, that in the original novel that this film is based on, the story was told from Calloway’s perspective, and a bit of that main-character stink might still be on him.

That, of course, brings up the question of heroism in this film. This is not a film with one shining hero, nor is it one with a definite villain. As a sophisticated noir, its chiaroscuro gradient extends to the characters as well as the images, portraying most everyone in some shade of gray (or since it’s a British film, grey). Holly is a flawed  figure, we have seen, but he seems to be a genuinely good person. He is certainly interested in preserving his own morality even to the point of self parody–thus his bizarre devotion to solving the mystery of his friend’s death at all costs. Our counterpoint, thus far in the film, would be the slimy Baron Kurtz, who seems to be suffering from some sort of genetic mutation that left him without any scruples. In between these poles we have the thuggish Popescu, the brusque and arrogant Doctor Winkel, and our harsh and paternalistic Brit, Major Calloway.

Our other main characters may be harder to qualify. Anna, whose courage, intelligence and strength we have praised again and again, has little of the moral code that defines Holly’s heroism. It seems that Anna, complex person that she is, is more interested in mourning the loss of her lover, Harry, and staying out of trouble than she is in finding out the truth. So though she is certainly better than Holly in so many ways, she may be less heroic, at least in the conventional sense.

Harry too, is an interesting figure. A martyr in the bloody aftermath that is Vienna after World War II, Harry is constantly being badmouthed by Calloway (his first introduction of the character was to say that dying was “the best thing that ever happened to him”) and constantly being defended by Holly. If we were to use our moral spectrum to determine who is more right, clearly Holly is our most moral figure, but his blind trust in his friend leads us to believe that at least some of what Calloway has to say must be true. Still, Harry dominates the story as a figure of questionable morals, reminiscent of a certain Tycoon that we are already familiar with:

So, despite its traditionalist setup with gangsters, cowboys, detectives, and cops, The Third Man portrays a distinctly complex code of character morality. And why is this morality so different from the forms so commonly portrayed in Hollywood Studio pictures from the same era? Certainly part of the reason is the strict censorship laws in place in Hollywood, but another part must be the moral code of the world in which such a film can be produced. And perhaps, it has something to do with the film’s setting.

Postwar Vienna is certainly not a part of the boisterous and productivist American capitalist system, nor is it one of the many Socialist communities developing in the postwar state, but it lies somewhere between the two; even legally so, since it is governed by an international coalition including (in order of Capitalist structure) America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. And, in this economic system, lies the secret to this film’s more complex moralism. In Max Weber’s most notable work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Morality, he breaks down the distinction as a religious one. Weber analyzes the key tenets of Protestantism (the Protestant Ethic) and finds that, in practice, they are directly linked to the tenets that Capitalism is based on. Or as Weber put it:

“In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid  of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture . . . Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose in life” (Weber, 53).

But if we take this understanding the other way, since taking Weber’s point to heart, both economic systems and religious/moral systems influence each other, then we can see that a non-capitalist system would not be able to impose the same strict Protestant moral code as our hyper-Capitalist American system. And with a cast of characters nominally coming from all over the western world, a pair of English screenwriters, and shot on location in bombed-out, recovering Vienna (under multiple authorities both Capitalist and Socialist), it only stands to reason that this moral code would be much more complex.

We will soon see more moral complexity and ambiguity developing around this film’s world, but suffice it to say, neither of the characters pictured in today’s frame are truly heroes. But neither are they villains, or really even anti-heroes. They are just complex characters embroiled in something complex.

And, as a sidenote I’ve been meaning to include for a while, one completely unrelated to the rest of today’s post, I’d like to draw your attention to the similarities between our western novelist, Holly Martens, and the western novelist in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Eli Cash–portrayed by co-writer Owen Wilson. Eli Cash and Holly Martens are both men trying to fake their way into being something they are not. Eli is trying to be a literary novelist, a cowboy, and a member of the Tenenbaum family, and Holly (at least since last week’s stills) is trying to be a literary novelist, a cowboy, and a detective. It’s hard not to see the connection when you see self-serious Cash talk about his work.

Eli Cash’s Introduction:

And Eli’s drugged out interview, reminiscent of Holly’s drunken speech:

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 #3286, 54:46, Image © Studio Canal

Holly Martins is a blur: having been met at the British Cultural Centre by two of Popescu’s murderous goons, Holly hightails it through an exit door and up a rickety spiral staircase. On Tuesday, Jeremy illustrated this pursuit by employing stills from other films throughout cinematic history; today, we have a still from this actual chase scene that seems to represent nothing at all. Sure, we can make out the ghostly blur of his right hand and the upturned brim of his hat, but mostly this image is comprised of line, shape, light, shadow, grays and whites and blacks. Most of the stills in this project, even if they don’t necessarily spell out the storyline in one frozen image, at least offer representational forms for us to analyze: people, settings, objects, things we can relate to The Third Man‘s story at large. Still Dots #54, however, seems to emphasize the non-representational register of the cinematic image, its existence as a purely formal assortment of chemical-suffused film grain with a physical ray of light shining through it. (Yes, I choose to overlook the fact that we’re looking at The Third Man via DVD, not via film projector; but let’s avoid that whole can of worms for now and pretend we’re members of The Third Man‘s inaugural 1949 audience, viewing it in its original and ideal habitat.)

The Third Man clearly belongs under the immense umbrella of narrative filmmaking: despite its numerous complex undercurrents, its primary focus (at least on the surface) is to relate its story, viscerally, clearly, from beginning to end. Yet even the most straightforward narrative film is, obviously, a formal entity at the same time: a mediated text comprised of light, grain, shadow, color, whose aesthetic properties can be (but usually aren’t) viewed on an entirely different plane than the narrative. The conceptual aim of experimental works such as Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is to slow down or distort original footage from narrative, representational films until it transforms into pure abstraction, revealing the formal endoskeleton that lies within all cinematic stories.

Similarly, when looking at Still Dots #54, the narrative context of this image—the fact that Holly, pursued by two assassins, is slipping through a side door for sheer survival—concerns me less than its abstract, formal arrangement. The bold black lines cutting diagonally through the frame, most at the same angle. The beautiful, strong blacks and whites in the windowpane that sections off the right side of the screen. The shadows and gentle shades of gray. I can imagine an abstract film that, like Tscherkassky’s, could pulverize this very image, perhaps extending a few frames of footage into minutes of screen time, brushing aside the narrative and taking a magnifying glass to the mediating structures that lie underneath. It would be The Third Man as experimental animation; like the films of mid-20th century avant-garde innovators Len Lye and Norman McLaren, the representation of objects, people, and places would explode into pure line, shape, color, and movement.

These movies suggest a sort of abstract chase scene in which dots and shapes (rather than people and vehicles) pursue each other frenetically. Intense, rapid movement is integral to Lye’s and McLaren’s films as well as to the whole action-movie trope of the chase scene in general; at their most extreme, they turn characters and story events into mere speed and movement. Action movies are typically seen as the antithesis to avant-garde abstraction, but they do come closer to the “cinema of attractions” kinetics that were championed by so many Surrealists and film theorists in the silent age (such as Robert Desnos and Sergei Eisenstein). They may not be experimental in intent, but chase scenes like these allow us to ignore the plot temporarily and enjoy cinema for its non-representational, purely abstract qualities.

Silent-comedy chase scenes, such as this one from Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr." (1924; Image © Kino Video), allowed audiences to temporarily ignore plot and revel in movies' purely visual qualities, not unlike later avant-garde films.

But there is still a story working itself out in The Third Man: Holly races to the top of the stairs, ducks out a window after being attacked by a cockatoo, slides down some rubble, and eludes his two pursuers by hiding in a gutted, seemingly bombed-out car. He realizes that his own story is becoming more perilous, implying darker consequences, and is no longer merely the cowboy adventure he had begun to enjoy. In the next scene, Holly will turn to the organization that he has regarded with the most disdain and antagonism since his arrival in Vienna: the police.

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.

Like a stealthy criminal escaping from a crime in one of so many heist films, Holly has escaped danger into a crowd, this time by delivering a lecture to them. As the last two posts drew out, the lecture stunk, but nonetheless, Holly has been able to escape the near certain danger that seems to be closing in on him from all sides. Of course, this respite has been short-lived, and as the safety in numbers fades, Holly’s wary gaze begins to scan the back of the room like a lone gazelle at the edge of a field of tall grass. And as Holly’s eyes lock onto the two thugs who flank the nefarious Popescu, his legs begin to skitter toward an exit, even at this canted angle. Crabbin, seemingly ignorant of the fact that his audience has left, continues to blather about the honor of having an American novelist visit their fair city. He is apparently also ignorant of the poor quality of the speech itself, but around this doddering academic, Holly’s ears begin to twitch and hidden in a dark canted corner of the frame, we can see the staircase that will be his salvation. What comes next is a masterful use of tropes of suspense, for how else could Holly escape from this Literary purgatory than through tropes?

Today’s Still Dots operates on a slightly different formula than most. Seeing this frame as both a punctuation mark and a starter’s pistol, we must now focus on the space between the dots. The illusion of cinema itself is the deception that lives between the film frames, that conceptual jump that transforms a series of still images into a living and moving shot, and that magic lives in the formless darkness that flashes itself between the frames. Lacan might call that meaningless space that makes our artifice a whole, The Real, but for our cinematic purposes we will call it the space between the frames. This week’s Still Dots will try to emulate that life-making space, by occupying the space between this post and the next.

But of course, to do that would be to break the rules of our project, since the collision points of our project are the intent of this analysis. This method approximates the methodology of film, by creating meaning with a series of still images presented sequentially, and to break that rhythm would break the illusion of our coherent analysis. So instead of using images from this space, and because of the profoundly cinematic nature of this scene, I present highlights from the next 62 seconds of film time approximated from other moments in cinema history.

Three shadowy figures, two henchmen and a major villain, block our hero's exit and threaten him with implied violence in The Matrix (1999), Image © Warner Brothers

Our hero, with no allies at his side, walks to face up to almost certain doom in High Noon (1952), Image © United Artists

Making a run for it, our hero hits the spiral stairs in Vertigo (1958), Image © Universal Pictures

Two thugs pursue our hero up a staircase in Casino Royale (2006), Image © MGM

Hiding in a dark room, our hero comes face-to-face with a bird in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Image © Warner Brothers

The cockatoo (Orson Welles put it in to "Wake 'em up!") startles and attacks our hero in Citizen Kane (1941), Image © MGM

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 #3162, 52:42, Image © Studio Canal

The British Cultural Centre in Vienna has arranged a lecture by Holly Martins, yet Crabbin—the esteemed head of this cosmopolitan organization—is only now realizing his mistake: Holly is a self-professed scribbler of dime novels, not the literary artiste his audience expects. Compared to a murderous gang of shady racketeers, Holly’s current predicament may not be too life-threatening, but it’s still hard to watch Holly unsuccessfully try to evade the literary-theory questions that are flung in his direction. Crabbin’s head-in-hand demeanor says it all: Holly Martins is an embarrassment.

Asked his opinion on “the stream of consciousness,” Holly simply stammers until the audience starts filing out of the exit doors; asked which writer influenced him most, he mentions the pulp Western writer Zane Grey, which Crabbin assures the audience is simply Holly’s idea of a joke. The last straw, apparently, is a question about James Joyce (a name Holly doesn’t seem to recognize at all), and it is at this point that Holly is put out of his misery by the sudden arrival of Popescu. Initially, Holly had assumed that his taxi ride from hell had been courtesy of Popescu and his gang, perhaps to escort him somewhere that a body could be easily disposed of; after Holly’s brief (and unpleasant) stopover at his literary lecture, Popescu and his assassins have caught up with the adventure-loving American after all.

"Zane Grey's Western Magazine," February 1950 (the same month 'The Third Man' was released in the U.S.) Image © Dell

There’s a lot of gentle satire going on in this scene, but towards whom exactly? Is screenwriter Graham Greene poking fun at Holly’s literary ineptitude, or at the cultured attendees who bombard him with highfalutin questions? It’s hard to tell since Greene himself is positioned at the crossroads of critical respectability and popular appeal: he wrote thrilling suspense and mystery novels that were as prescient and complex as they were exciting. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1961 and deemed “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety” by William Golding, Greene himself often separated his works into two categories: thrillers or “entertainments” (albeit often with philosophical subtexts, such as Ministry of Fear) and literary works (The Power and the Glory, for example). Yet critics often noted that it was difficult to distinguish between the two, and Greene apparently agreed by the 1970s (after which time he no longer used the label “entertainments” to describe any of his works).

The Third Man, while an original screenplay, was transposed from a novella that Greene wrote in 1949 as the “raw material” that would give the screenplay its shape. According to Greene, the entire idea sprung from one sentence he conceived from the outset: “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, amongst a host of strangers in the Strand.” That tone of droll, macabre uncanniness is an apt precursor to the film itself, which finds plenty of dark humor as well as nightmarish intensity in its story of death, greed, and corruption.

Carol Reed (L) and Graham Greene (R) circa 1949

Greene’s novella differs from the finished film in some fascinating ways. The line written above is actually courtesy of Major Calloway, who acts as the story’s narrator in the novella (the voiceover that opens the film, supplied by Carol Reed, is actually a snippet of Calloway’s narration from the book). Furthermore, both Harry and Holly are British in Greene’s original treatment, while the villainous Popescu (a Romanian in the film) was originally an American named Cooler—which makes you wonder if these particular alterations were made in order to secure a wider American audience. (The movie was, after all, intended as a diplomatic collaboration between David O. Selznick’s Hollywood production company and Alexander Korda’s London Film studio.) The novella also reveals the insignificant but wonderful fact that Holly’s nom de plume as a Western writer is Buck Dexter.

Most interesting in my opinion is the difference between the endings: originally, in the novella, Greene has Holly and Anna end up together, walking off into the sunset with arms entwined, while the movie ends on a considerably bleaker, unhappy note (we’ll save those specifics for when the time comes). There was much dispute during production on which ending the film would employ: Greene actually wanted the movie to retain his original happy ending while Reed and Selznick adamantly refused to end the movie on an artificially positive note. (Obviously, the producer and director won out in the end.) Usually when it comes to film adaptations it seems to be the other way around—with the producers pushing for a crowd-pleasing happy ending and the author fighting to retain a darker or more ambiguous conclusion—but Greene’s desire for a happy ending points out his nimble combination of escapist entertainment and morally ambivalent social commentary.

One brief sentence in Greene’s novella may or may not provide a shorthand for decoding some of The Third Man‘s themes and styles: Major Calloway’s narration tells us that this is “an ugly story if you leave out the girl: grim and sad and unrelieved, if it were not for that absurd episode of the British Council lecturer.” Apparently (if Calloway is speaking for Greene), The Third Man was originally conceived as an ugly, grim, sad, unrelieved story, disguised by a happy romantic union (a respite the movie doesn’t offer us), some jarring absurdity, and an undercurrent of droll world-weariness. But if the crux of the story (the “spirit” of it, as Greene might say) is primarily bleak, the focus seems to be the spiraling, damning repercussions of war, the bitter sting of lost friendship and betrayal, the moral fickleness of human beings, and the prioritization of economic security above all else. Fortuitously, this quote also brings us back to today’s scene, the “absurd” episode of the British Council lecturer, which is allegedly meant to relieve some of the story’s underlying tension. It is, in other words, Greene the comedian coming out, providing a comic interlude while self-reflexively satirizing some of the hangups of the literary world to boot.

Obviously, then, Greene is neither Holly Martins’ escapist hack nor a stream-of-consciousness-loving James Joyce acolyte (his brilliance lies partially in his rapprochement between these two extremes), but I’ll close with some revealing linkages between Greene and Joyce, since both authors influenced twentieth-century literary fiction in wildly different ways. Based on their texts there seem to be almost no similarities between the two writers—except, perhaps, an interest in vividly evoking their settings, whether it be the meticulous (if cryptic) recreation of Dublin and its surrounding areas in Joyce or the gritty description of exotic locales from Vienna to Vietnam, Panama to Sierra Leone, in Greene. Biographically speaking, though, there are uncanny parallels. In addition to both writers’ affinities with cinema (Joyce launched Ireland’s first cinema in 1909 and strived to become a filmmaking magnate in the early 1910s), both writers also had brief run-ins with psychoanalysis (a topic that hovers over The Third Man, as it’s set in the city of Freud): Joyce was diagnosed with schizophrenia by none other than Carl Jung himself (a diagnosis supposedly based primarily on Jung’s reading of Ulysses), while Greene was sent to London for six months of psychoanalysis in 1920 (when the treatment was still radically new) after suffering severe depression and attempting suicide numerous times at boarding school.

In addition to both authors’ psychological turmoil, they were plagued by questions of religion and faith. This was even the ostensible subject of the literary lecture that Holly was supposed to give: “we want you to talk on the Crisis of Faith,” Crabbin had told him. Joyce’s grappling with Catholicism is well-known: though he served in the Sodality of Our Lady while at the Jesuit boarding school Belvedere in Dublin, Joyce purportedly abandoned Catholicism by the time he was 16, and even refused to pray at his mother’s bedside while she was dying, comatose, in 1913. (Whether or not Joyce ever reconciled his faith is a subject for debate; some critics claim that he never actually abandoned it and that many of his works are testaments to his guilt for having wavered in his commitment to Catholicism.) Greene, meanwhile, though initially an agnostic, converted to Catholicism in 1926 in order to marry; though tentatively pious at first (primarily due to his distress regarding the possible nonexistence of God), he became more devout over time. (He explained of his newfound faith after converting to Catholicism, “I had to find a religion to measure my evil against.” I wonder if this quote would give Harry Lime any consternation, if he were aware of it.)

James Joyce - with whom Graham Greene has some revealing similarities

Broadly, then, we can say that both Greene and Joyce were plagued by doubt, in both their lives and their writing: doubt concerning the workings of the mind, the moralism of the physical world, and the existence of an eternal afterlife subject to a divine judgment. If The Third Man is, as Major Calloway sees it in Greene’s novella, suffused with ugliness and sadness, maybe this is why: it is overwhelmed by moral uncertainty, unsettled (like the numerous canted angles in the film) because of a dawning awareness that faith-based strictures regarding human morality (justice, benevolence, mercy, honor, loyalty, etc.) have no bearing in a world governed by war and greed. We have no codes, no schemas, no structures telling us how to live and behave. Still Dots #52 offers a telling image: the scene it’s taken from is comedic and lighthearted, but looking at the facial expressions of both men in the frame, all we can see is fatigue, frustration, and uncertainty.

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 #3100, 51:40, Image © Studio Canal

Today’s still brings us to our halfway point, as hard as it is to believe. It seems that only days ago Matt and I were barely beginning this project, but now we’ve been at it for six months. While we’ve been gradually uncovering more and more of the secrets buried in this film’s graveyard, we have yet to uncover any of the truth about Harry Lime. As we move closer to those hard truths, today’s frame thrusts us into another world entirely: Literary fiction.

Let’s back up a bit first. From where we stood last week, this seems like a surreal transition. Holly was imprisoned in the back of a taxi speeding through the poverty-stricken back alleys of Vienna, and he was panicking like nobody’s business. As his cab careened dangerously close to dumpsters and alley walls and he rattled at the bars like Buster Keaton, Holly yelled out to the cabbie (who clearly speaks no English) “Have you got orders to kill me?” This may be one of those panicky moments when words spill out before their meaning can be fully pondered, but it seems to me that if the cabbie did have orders to kill Holly, a car accident might be one of the least practical ways to go about it. Not only would Holly’s death be uncertain, since many people have survived car crashes through the ages, but this would be assassin would be putting up his own life as forfeit, a supposition that only makes sense if we accept that the cabbie is indeed an un-feeling and repairable cyborg. And to make this thought even more ludicrous, there is no one watching out for Holly (he has no friends who would miss him) so it seems unlikely that they’d need to cover up his murder. So why would a careening taxi be preferable to a loaded gun?

Just like Holly trapped in the back of a cab, Buster Keaton looks out forlornly from behind his own prison bars after becoming a (scape)goat for a murder he didn’t commit in Goat (1921), Image © MGM

Whatever the reason, though, Holly’s panic is so viscerally portrayed that as viewers we panic with him. The fast cutting from close-ups to extreme long shots disorients while the zither soundtrack has been replaced with one made entirely of tire squeaks, brake squeals and engine roars. By the time the cab pulls into a tight courtyard, and the brusque cabbie (courteously) opens the door for our hero, the sensation of panic that permeates Holly has been transferred easily via eyes and ears into our observing minds. When Holly ducks behind the car door, about to make a run for it, his post-verbal panic makes complete and total sense, but when the doors open his revelation makes even more sense. The breakneck speed of the cab was due, not to some intent to increase the “danger” of a murder, but because he was very late to a lecture he was scheduled to deliver.

This moment illustrates, as strikingly as any other part of this film, how fully we inhabit the mind of our focalization character. Like Holly, we have been told on several occasions that this literary event is coming, indeed it is this event itself that has allowed our penniless hero to stay in Vienna, since Crabbin (the central character in today’s frame) is fronting the bill at the Hotel Sacher in anticipation of this event. Not only have we (and Holly) known it was coming, but in our last interaction with Crabbin, which came “yesterday” in diegetic screen-time, he told Holly:

Crabbin: Hello—Mr. Martins, we tried to get you at your hotel. We have arranged that lecture for tomorrow.

Martins: What about?

Crabbin: On the modern novel—you remember what we arranged and we want you to talk on the Crisis of Faith.

So, not only should we (and Holly) have known it was coming, but we should have known it was tonight, and known to prepare a little speech about the crisis of faith. But we have been so fully encased in the mystery story that we have completely forgotten about this avenue.  And, of course, so has Holly. With nothing prepared and recovering from having almost peed his pants with terror, our hero lumbers onto the stage and begins to deliver a speech, which of course goes too atrociously for our eyes. The camera cuts away to another storyline (one that I would imagine is a bit more interesting) immediately after Holly mutters his first husky “Well . . .”

We will leave the particulars of this speech itself for another post, but suffice it to say, Holly is not well suited for this duty. He is a writer of cowboy westerns, not an author of literature, and his lack of preparation and adrenaline-induced derangement only makes that dichotomy all the more clear. And who better to elicit this split than the now-canonized literary mind who wrote this screenplay, Graham Greene.

The Third Man is Holly’s story much more than it is Crabbins’, and though it was penned by Greene, it begs a question, which I’ll leave you with today: Is this a pulp genre film like the novels that Holly churns out or is it a literary masterpiece?

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.