Second #4092, 68:12, Image © Studio Canal

We have often brought up the topic of doppelgangers, doubling, and even quantum mechanics but today’s still brings us into another frame of reference. That of multiple dimensionality. Take a look, for instance, at last Thursday’s still:

Last week’s Still Dots, unusually similar to this weeks, Image © Studio Canal

Here we are presented with a doubling or doppelganger again, in the form of the monolithic object around which our action circles. Holly has drunkenly pursued the (living?) figure of Harry Lime through the streets of Vienna, only to have him disappear somewhere in the vicinity of this mysterious object. Today’s frame presents an identical monolith, this time in the sober company of Major Calloway. While the framing, blocking and general lighting make these two scenes nearly identical, the lighting on the monolith itself changes its inherent character, making our two monoliths slightly dissimilar while identical. While every aspect of the two monoliths is nominally the same, the flat, even lighting on today’s frame reveals it as simply an object, while last week’s shadowy object seemed to hide its secrets around every corner. The two, nominally identical objects have become, again, doppelgangers, but one of a more nefarious nature than the other.

Another of Vienna’s native sons, not Freud this time, but instead Lang, knew the terrors of doppelgangers. In his unbelievably high-budget 1927 film, Metropolis, Lang presented two nearly identical characters with strikingly different characters. Maria begins the film by organizing the workers in the city’s underclass, while the automaton designed to replace her sows seeds of strife in that same proletarian group. Like our twin monoliths, the robot double hides secrets that Maria would lay bare.

The two dopplegangers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Maria, our populist hero, and the automaton that would come to replace her. Image © UFA

But this doubling extends beyond the object that occupies our frame’s center, since the frame itself, indeed the moment it occupies, is doubled too. For Holly, wandering into this square again, he can but wonder at the sense of deja vu that must greet him. Clouded even more by the drunken shock that accompanied him on his last visit to this square, Holly must be wondering to himself whether he has indeed been here before, or if instead he is arriving here again for the first time. To put it more succinctly, Holly must be wondering if he has somehow moved to a plane different from the one he occupied only 62 screen seconds ago. Like the characters in The Matrix (1999), Holly must wonder if he could have somehow slipped into a world in which the rules are slightly different.

And like the cat that Neo sees walking through that hallway, and all of the cats that have appeared throughout this film so far, another cat comes to mind through this interaction, one immortalized in layman’s understandings of quantum physics. In 1935 another Viennese figure, this time philosophical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, wrote this parable to explain quantum physics:

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks (Schrödinger, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik, November 1935).

This thought experiment can be understood in many ways for our film, but there is one understanding that may not be scientifically viable but seems too tempting to avoid. Harry Lime has already in this film been represented by a cat, one who Anna stares at longingly while remembering her late lover, “Harry’s cat,” and his very vivacity is at question as we speak. This man, who has been nominally dead throughout the entire film, has recently appeared to Holly in a drunken furlough through a Vienna alleyway. This pushes the limits of double vision, seeing a man both alive and dead at the same time, but Holly chases this ghost through the streets to where our very frame leaves us today. To a box. Like Schrödinger’s famous cat, our tomcat seems to have retreated inside this box, and by opening it we may or may not find him to be dead. At this moment, Harry, like the cat, is both alive and dead at the same time, necessitating these two possible universes, these two monoliths breaking the horizontal lines of this Vienna square.

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, a book that probes into these very questions of alternate universes, provides us with yet another angle to view this object. As we will know in a few instants, when Calloway throws open the doors of this object, this is the entrance to an underground world, a staircase leading from the surface down into Vienna’s ancient sewer running all the way to the Blue Danube. So, when we open this box, we learn the truth, making Harry living–probably–and not dead, or as Calloway will so eloquently put it, “It wasn’t the German gin.” But 1Q84 begins with a similar excursion down an emergency stairway, one that takes one of its main characters into an alternate world, one lit by the light of two moons. Today’s post will close with a long excerpt from that moment:

“People stared at her in silence as she removed her shoes and coat. From the open window of the black Toyota Celica parked next to the turnout, Michael Jackson’s high-pitched voice provided her with background music. “Billie Jean” was playing. She felt as if she were performing a striptease. So what? Let them look all they want. They must be bored waiting for the traffic jam to end. Sorry, though, folks, this is all I’ll be taking off today.

Aomame slung the bag across her chest to keep it from falling. Some distance away she could see the brand-new black Toyota Crown Royal Saloon in which she had been riding, its windshield reflecting the blinding glare of the afternoon sun. She could not make out the face of the driver, but she knew he must be watching.

Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.

Aomame took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. Then, to the tune of “Billie Jean” she swung her leg over the metal barrier. Her miniskirt rode up to her hips. Who gives a damn? Let them look all they want. Seeing what’s under my skirt doesn’t let them really see me as a person. Besides, her legs were the part of her body of which Aomame was most proud.

Stepping down once she was on the other side of the barrier, Aomame straightened her skirt, brushed the dust from her hands, put her coat back on, slung her bag across her chest again, and pushed her sunglasses more snugly against her face. The emergency stairway lay before her–a metal stairway painted gray. Plain, practical, functional. Not made for use by miniskirted women wearing only stockings on their otherwise bare feet. Nor had Junko Shimada designed Aomame’s suit for use on the emergency escape stairs of Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway Number 3. Another huge truck roared down the outbound side of the expressway, shaking the stairs. The breeze whistled through the gaps in the stairway’s metal framework. But in any case, there it was, before her: the stairway. All that was left for her to do was climb down to the street.

Aomame turned for one last look at the double line of cars packed on the expressway, scanning them from left to right, then right to left, like a speaker on a podium looking for questions from the audience now that she had finished her talk. There had been no movement at all. Trapped on the expressway with nothing else to occupy them, people were watching her every move, wondering what this woman on the far side of the barrier would do next. Aomame lightly pulled in her chin, bit her lower lip, and took stock of her audience through the dark green lenses of her sunglasses.

You couldn’t begin to imagine who I am, where I’m going, or what I’m about to do, Aomame said to her audience without moving her lips. All of you are trapped here. You can’t go anywhere, forward or back. But I’m not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead.

Aomame had the urge at the en to treat her assembled throng to one of her special scowls, but she managed to stop herself. There was no time for such things now. Once she let herself frown it took both time and effort to regain her original expression.

Aomame turned her back on her silent audience and, with careful steps, began to descend the emergency stairway, feeling the chill of the crude metal rungs against the soles of her feet. Also chilling was the early April breeze, which swept her hair back now and then, revealing her misshapen left ear” (Murakami, 1Q84, Knopf, 2011, pg. 11-12).

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 #4030, 67:10, Image © Studio Canal

Where better than Vienna, Freud’s hometown and a “shadowy city of ghosts,” to encounter the phantom of a friend thought dead? Holly Martins, a day away from returning to the United States, has made a shocking discovery: Harry Lime is alive, reanimated by the smirking face of Orson Welles, and apparently skulking around the doorways of Vienna, unseen yet permeating the city like an otherworldly fog. But does he haunt the city, or does the city haunt him? Maybe only in this capital of the uncanny could Holly have made such a bewildering discovery.

Holly falteringly begins to step across the cobblestone street to confront this ghost when, in a moment familiar from countless action movies and thrillers, a vehicle crosses between them, blaring its horn at Holly. When the car passes, Harry is gone. Holly stands there, perplexed, doubting his own sanity (or at least his sobriety), until the echoes of Harry’s racing footsteps clack down one of Vienna’s sidestreets back to Holly. A brief chase scene makes powerful use of The Third Man‘s characteristic chiaroscuro lighting and off-kilter compositions, as the distorted shadow of Harry Lime and the reverberating sounds of his footsteps support the possibility that Harry truly is a ghost, a shapeshifting creature from Holly’s own subconscious, suddenly manifested in this eerie nocturnal city. Holly’s pursuit ends in the plaza we see in today’s still: Harry seems to have vanished into thin air, the suddenly wide-open space revealing nothing but the silky-black cobblestone and a monolithic vestibule. (We’ll find out next week that this structure, like 2001‘s own black monolith, conceals its own secrets.)

The Third Man’s vestibule and 2001′s monolith, both visually out-of-place in their surroundings, contain a wealth of secrets. Image © Warner Bros.

If Vienna’s urban areas are typically conveyed to us via a distorted conflux of conflicting vanishing points and impossible angles (a transformation of real-world space that seems indebted to the bold experimentation of German Expressionism), today’s still is something else: composed of rigid vertical and horizontal lines, almost too neat in its separation of distinct geometric spaces, this image is disconcerting not because of its weirdness but because of its normalcy. It appears to be an unspectacular city plaza, so how could it give birth to undead ghosts and allow them to vanish into nothing? Like the Munich open-air plaza in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which proves to be a stomping ground for demonic witches that turn a seeing-eye dog against his master (with gruesome results), this Viennese city square takes on an uncanny, supernatural air.

The Third Man is so closely associated with Vienna (this spectacular BBC documentary about the film rightfully claims that Vienna is one of the movie’s leading stars) that we might assume the movie could have only been made in this hauntingly elegant city. In fact, though, Graham Greene originally conceived the story as taking place in either Rome or Paris; it was actually Alexander Korda, the Hungarian expat who founded London Films in 1932 and acted as The Third Man‘s British producer (in collaboration with Hollywood’s David O. Selznick), who suggested Vienna as the movie’s rightful setting. (Korda had been invited to work for Sascha-Film in Vienna in the late 1910s, by the exuberant yet controlling producer/director Alexander “Sascha” Kolowrat; in fact, it was Karl Hartl, Sascha-Film’s studio head in the late 1940s, who helped Korda arrange The Third Man‘s shooting locations and equipment usage.) The wartorn rubble of Vienna definitely offers an appropriate backdrop to The Third Man‘s intrigue (indeed, given the movie’s thematic interest in the devastating repercussions of war, such a ravaged locale seems integral in conveying the film’s darker themes), but the sad fact is that a number of postwar European cities could have offered a similarly disfigured setting. But if The Third Man wasn’t necessarily bound to Vienna from the beginning, it’s nonetheless elevated to the level of tragic poetry partially by the city’s distinct locales–Schreyvogelgasse, the Reichsbrücke bridge, the Giant Ferris Wheel in the Prater that we have yet to see–and the happy coincidence that Vienna is indeed the city of Freud.

And yet, we have to wonder if modern cities themselves, rather than Vienna specifically, act as sites of uncanny, supernatural events (such as eternal recurrence, doppelgängers, and now apparently the ability to vanish into thin air). The novella that Graham Greene wrote to act as a template for The Third Man‘s script even names London as the potential site for a disconcerting miracle: “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago,” the novella begins, “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.” Whether Holly’s reunion with his “dead” friend Harry takes place in London’s Strand or Vienna’s Schreyvogelgasse, such an impossible event seems enabled precisely by the ability for modern cities to conceal hidden forces within urban architecture and the bustling crowds that roam their streets and sidewalks. True, the majority of horror movies suggest backwoods terrain as the habitat for redneck monsters and deformed murderous families, but another strand of horror filmmaking locates terror and the uncanny in the seemingly normal trappings of modern life in the metropolis. We may think of the cat people transplanted to the modern city in Cat People (either Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 original or Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake), Roman Polanski’s loose trilogy about modern paranoia and urban alienation (Repulsion, 1965; Rosemary’s Baby, 1968; and The Tenant, 1976), George Romero’s bleak zombified social commentaries (Dawn of the Dead, 1978; and Day of the Dead, 1985, not to mention more recent installments), or J-horror standouts like Ringu (1998) and Pulse (2001) which equate modern technology and economic advancement with sinister, otherworldly forces.

The country vs. city binary pops up frequently in horror films, and has been explored by numerous film theorists and critics. Christopher Sharrett, for example, in “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture”, suggests that horror movies began emphasizing the city (rather than the countryside) as the predominant site of horror in the 1960s and ’70s, when more progressive or critical filmmakers started challenging capitalist, patriarchal rule as the “natural” way of being for modern societies. This ideological template suggested that economically advanced cities actually concealed evil or sinister forces, exposing the underlying corruption and greed beneath modern capitalism. (Dawn of the Dead may be the clearest example of this idea.) Sharrett also suggests that such “progressive” urban horror films utilize many tropes from film noir, which actually begs a question that challenges his claim: do modern urban horror films extend further back than the 1960s to the immediate postwar years, when the genre of film noir first emerged? While I can’t think of any horror films from before 1938 that locate the modern city as the site of uncanny horror (most of the classic early horror films I can think of, from Nosferatu to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Frankenstein, Dracula, White Zombie, Island of Lost Souls, and the whole Universal horror canon, posit an exotic, antiquated Other as horror itself), the possibility that such forces might exist in the modern city seems to gain some traction in such postwar noirs as Laura (1944), with its ethereal, melancholy story of fetishization and a return from death, and D.O.A. (1950), with its impending-death mystery and the nearly ubiquitous presence of evil amongst modern urban crowds.

Confronting death in the modern metropolis in “D.O.A.” (1950). Image © United Artists.

The Third Man is decidedly not a horror film, but at least at this point in the movie, as Holly wonders whether he’s truly seen the ghost of Harry Lime (and if he can really vanish into thin air), our beleaguered hero must be asking himself whether this phantasmic city of Vienna is really all that it seems. If postwar films noir began suggesting that modern horror festers not amongst a vilified Other but within the very trappings of modern, industrially-advanced, Western capitalist societies, then maybe The Third Man tangentially belongs to this newly-critical trend. As we’ve mentioned, the specter of war hovers over The Third Man (and, it seems, Vienna itself); given this war-ravaged city, how can modern capitalism and international diplomacy (or lack thereof) not seem vile and destructive? Suddenly stranded in an urban plaza, haunted by ghosts and perplexed by sudden disappearances, Holly is out of place in a city in which uncanny chaos reigns.

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 #3968, 66:08, Image © Studio Canal

For you few devoted readers who haven’t seen The Third Man (though I can’t imagine that you truly exist at this point) we have carefully avoided spilling the beans up to this point, but after this frame, the cat is out of the bag. This is the face of Harry Lime. True, we have spent much of our analysis talking about Orson Welles, and you may have been wondering this whole time “Hey, isn’t Orson Welles supposed to be in this movie?” but Matt and I have done our best to keep from telling you the truth too soon. But now Holly—as we always hoped he would—has dug up the truth. A ghost stands before him, a stark white face sunk into the shadows of a doorway.

One striking thing I find about this is that, like the porter’s death, the discovery of Harry can also be tied directly to Holly’s big mouth—that and a cat. Holly, on his way out of town and back to the US, has left Anna’s apartment scorned and heartbroken. He has professed his love to her, and like much of his life, has found himself playing second fiddle to Harry. Even in the supposed grave, Harry can outcharm any woman Holly might be interested in, and with the recklessness that come with having nothing left to lose, Holly decides to confront his spook. This spook, who turns out to be Harry, has truly only been revealed by Anna’s cat, who “only liked Harry,” cuddling his way up into the interlopers shoelaces. But Holly, with no fear for his life bursts out to the shadowy figure:

Holly: What kind of spy do you think you are, satchelfoot? What are you tailing me for? Cat got your tongue? Come on out. Come out come out wherever you are. Step out into the light and let’s have a look at you. Who’s your boss?

Tony Danza jokes aside, this string of accusations annoys a neighbor enough that she turns on her light and starts to yell at Holly in German (something like “what’s the commotion? What are they yelling about?”). But both men seem to ignore her, since in turning on her light, her well placed window illuminates the supposedly-dead Harry’s face and the two meet eyes, Holly staring back literally slack-jawed.

Holly, who has already attended Harry’s funeral and spent days (weeks?) trying to honor his friend’s memory, is looking into the eyes of a dead man, a ghost, a phantom. Harry has risen from the dead only to haunt these streets again, and like some kind of phantom, he melts his way out of the darkness behind him. Something in the extreme lighting—diegetically motivated by an angry neighbor turning on her light—makes his face unnaturally white, even luminescent against the shadowy background. And like any number of Draculas, Harry’s face seems to sink into darkness its edges indiscernible from the shadows he has—up to now—occupied. Take for instance, Klaus Kinski’s terrifying visage in Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre (or its German-language doppelganger Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht):

Nosferatu’s face, luminescent in the shadowy doorway that surrounds it, Image © Gaumont

How could Holly’s response to such a ghastly face from beyond the grave be met with anything but terror? Holly’s response can only be explained by this terror. His goal since he first set foot in this shadowy city of ghosts has been to find out the secret behind Harry’s mysterious death, and who better to elucidate these secrets than the murdered man himself? Yet Holly stands rooted to the spot as this face from his childhood stares out, vampirically sunk into its own doorway.What thoughts could be heading through Holly’s head? Truly he could be imagining that he is seeing some creature of the night, a vampire or ghoul that has come to stalk him, or from a more Shakespearean bent, he could imagine that Harry’s ghost might be visiting him to send him a message. Let’s not get into the hypothesis that Holly sees himself as the Hamlet of our story, but only imagine the myriad understandings that are whirling through his head.

Perhaps our most believable hypothesis for Holly’s thoughts lies in one of the most traditional cinematic tropes, the flashback. And indeed, both of our lead actors may be linked to our contemporary understanding of the flashback, since Citizen Kane so shaped our understanding of the technique. But for Holly, standing in a Vienna street and looking at Harry, he may be thinking not of his present-day legally dead racketeer of a friend, but instead of the friend he knew and loved. Holly may see Harry here, admittedly after a few swigs of whiskey, and find himself disoriented and wondering where he is, if he might just be back at the boys school where their friendship was forged. He may find himself, like Billy Pilgrim, temporarily unstuck in time, and wonder, not about Harry, but about himself as he stares at this face that has literally swum up out of his past. We recently consulted with Nietzsche on the presence of animals in this film, and again we must seek his guidance for Holly. In The Gay Science he writes:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again, and again and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, University Press, Cambridge, 1882, translated in 2001, section 341, pg. 194)

This is Nietzsche’s first introduction of the concept of eternal recurrence, something that would become essential to his later, more unhinged, philosophical works, but as we look into today’s Still Dots and temporarily become Holly Martens we must wonder, how does he feel? Is it the essential terror of self doubt that glues his boots to the floor, worrying that he must again live in Harry’s shadow, write novels, and come to find him dead again or is it some personal holy feeling? Is this moment the tremendous moment that Nietzsche describes, finding a friend he thought was dead alive and staring out from a Vienna doorway? Holly seems like he could go either way, and both could explain his suddenly sticky soles.

Ironically, it is something positively boyish that breaks the spell. It is only after Harry’s face twists into a charming boys-will-be-boys smirk that Holly can shake the terror from his frozen joints and chase him. Unfortunately for us, our regimented analysis didn’t catch this exact frame, one I personally consider to be one of the greatest closeups in the history of the artform, but I will show it to you anyway, off the record. In fact, I am so enamored with this elusive smirk that I tried to reproduce it myself, with middling results. Orson Welles is doubtless one of the great artists of our time, and this smirk may well be counted among his masterpieces.

But about the face we see here, sources differ. Orson Welles got his start in radio, but in his case the old adage may be wrong, he didn’t have a face for radio. But is this stunning face really Welles? Though lit with a ghostly glow, and certainly much more of a pure white, he looks a lot like the young man he played in Citizen Kane eight years earlier. But of his face in Kane, Welles said in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich:

Orson Welles: But the thing that’s never been printed is the truth about me as a young man in that film. I was then twenty-five, twenty-six—I’ve forgotten how old I was—but I had my face lifted up and wore corsets for the scenes as a young man.

Peter Bogdanovich: Why? Were you heavier than you looked?

Orson Welles: Of course. Not only heavier, but I always had that terrible round moon face and it was all faked up with fish skins and tucked under the hair. Everything. Just as though I were some terrible old leading man at the end of his day [laughs] So I was just as heavily made up as a young man as I was as an old man! I could hardly move for the corsets and the fish skin and everything else. I read once—Norman Mailer wrote something or other—that, when I was young, I was the most beautiful man anybody had ever seen. Yes! Made up for Citizen Kane! And only for five days!

Orson Welles as the young Citizen Kane, with Joseph Cotten as his best friend Jedidiah Leland. Image © Warner Bros.

So today’s still again presents a bizarre image, one seemingly out of the past. Joe Cotten has certainly aged in the eight years since Kane, but Welles’s own face seems nearly identical to Kane’s. What’s more, that face never existed in the first place, since it was all held together with corsets and fish skins. Yet somehow, we are looking on that same face again. Though it may not be quite as striking for us viewers, who don’t have the personal connection that Holly and Harry have (or even Joe and Orson, for that matter) but the face that stares out at us from the shadows seems oddly out of place. We, in 1949, might have found our stomachs twisting inside as this face first flashes on the screen, and depending on how steadfast our grip on reality, we might wonder if it really isn’t closer to 1941. If turning the wrong corner on one of these winding Vienna alleys, we might have ended up in a different time, the same feeling that doubtless runs through Holly’s mind.

This face is a good example of what Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum, a copy of a copy of a copy with no original. Baudrillard would write of the simulacrum: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” And so Harry’s/Welles’s face is a truth which reveals that there is none, that face has never existed any more than any noble image of Harry has ever existed. It’s all just been a case of smoke and mirrors.

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 #3906, 65:06, Image © Studio Canal

Holly Martins has despondently exited the apartment of Anna Schmidt: he’s leaving the following day on a flight bound for the United States, resigned to the fact that the woman he now loves is smitten with the memory of his onetime friend and bona fide criminal mastermind, Harry Lime. There are two faltering relationships that anchor The Third Man emotionally: between Holly and Harry Lime, whose friendship we’ve only experienced through bitter, secondhand accounts; and between Holly and Anna, who, in another world, might have become dear and everlasting friends, if not something more. (Which relationship is more poignant? It’s hard to say; both are seemingly doomed because of the cruel and violent twists of fate that the world hands us.) Holly doesn’t seem the cowardly type (after all, he’s been blundering his way through a vigilante investigation throughout much of the movie so far), but when he is faced with painful heartache and longing, he seems to find it best to retreat to a world of drunken, carefree insularity (a world markedly different from the one he experiences in Vienna).

Yet before we turn to the warped view of Vienna that today’s still offers us, I’d like to point out that the territory between Still Dots 63 and 64 is some of the most emotionally resonant in the entire movie. True, part of the point of this project is that we’re forced to analyze single frames and fleeting moments in a semi-arbitrary manner, scuttling ahead every 62 seconds in order to shed transient light on those undervalued snippets of cinema that don’t, at first glance, seem altogether significant. This may leave some dramatic, visceral, or otherwise intriguing segments of film unexplored, but that’s the tradeoff in emphasizing how each minuscule part of the cinematic whole contributes to its overall shape—venturing through a proverbial forest by turning a magnifying glass (or telephoto lens) upon a number of seemingly unspectacular saplings along the way. So, really, the flyover country between Tuesday’s and today’s Still Dots should be off limits for my analysis, but I’m going to respect Holly and Anna’s fraught relationship and recount what happened between Anna’s wonderfully off-kilter expression on Tuesday and Holly’s current stroll through Vienna’s cobblestone streets. Furthermore, I’d like to present this by inhabiting Holly’s mindstate momentarily, offering a hypothetical first-person account, in what may or may not be an accurate substitute for paperback writer Holly Martin’s own words, of his feelings for Anna Schmidt:

“A person doesn’t change because you find out more,” Anna said, naively yet sweetly shaking her head at me as she approached with the brilliant white flowers—my flowers—blossoming from the vase she held in her hands. The petals seemed somehow less vibrant as Anna spoke from behind them; they paled in comparison to the hands that held them.

But my drunken haze was giving way to a throbbing weariness, not at Anna but at the world that existed between us, its wars and MPs and illegal passports and, even and especially, its Harry Limes. I waved my hand dismissively at her lecture, absentmindedly playing with the bandage that was wrapped around the birdbite on my right hand. “Look,” I said, “I’ve got a splitting headache and you stand there and just talk and talk and talk…” I trailed off as Anna smirked at my irascibility, so clearly exacerbated by the whiskeys I had imbibed not half an hour beforehand. She let out a begrudging laugh as she turned away, and for a moment, the ghost of Harry Lime (not to mention those of the women and children who died without the penicillin they needed) were whisked away by the beauty of her smile. I approached, not realizing I was smiling too, drawn forward by the warmth of her fleeting happiness.

“That’s the first time I ever saw you laugh. Do it again.”

And in an instant, her smile soured, her eyes darted from me to the ceiling to the floor, as though she were ashamed of escaping, if only for a second, misery. With Harry’s whirlwind exuberance now forever unavailable to her, maybe she took on heartache as her new companion, replacing Harry’s love with its polar opposite: the sardonic cruelties that a bemused universe extends to the humans who occupy it. I could see all the joy flee Anna’s body in a sudden whoosh, her shoulders drooping towards the ground. She collapsed on the nearby bed.

“There’s not enough for two laughs.”

Her hands entwined themselves on the golden bedknob. I approached as silently as possible, wanting to touch her, yet unwilling to pierce the shroud of despair that enveloped her. I sat next to her. Her eyes avoided mine, but I was unable to look at anything but her somber beauty. I spoke, and even I was surprised by the aching, gravelly tones that came out.

“I’d make comic faces. Stand on my head and grin at you between my legs. Tell all sorts of jokes. I wouldn’t stand a chance, would I?”

Her answer was a tear, a single honest tear, sloping along the gentle contours of her face. It fell and left its trail on her cheek. I smiled sadly; asked myself if I had ever felt such love. She looked away.

The soft wind of Vienna floated through the window and I thought I could hear a lonely zither chord in the distance.

“You did tell me I ought to find myself a girl…”

Image © Studio Canal

Like I said, this indulgence violates the self-appointed rules of this project, but hopefully I can be forgiven in honor of Holly and Anna’s plight (and in honor of one of the most powerful portrayals of unfulfilled love that I can think of in the movies).

But on to today’s still: Holly has said goodbye to Anna and now wanders Vienna, overwhelmed by loneliness and longing and confusion (and probably still drunk). Still Dots 64 is a perfect illustration of what Richard Misek calls The Third Man‘s “Wrong Geometries,” an idea that Jeremy summarized last week. Essentially, writes Misek, director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker utilize low-key chiaroscuro lighting, emphatic use of line and shape in the mise en scène, off-kilter camera angles (especially canted or “Dutch” angles), and a mostly immobile camera to create compositions with numerous offscreen vanishing points, essentially disorienting the onscreen space and turning Vienna into a nightmare vision of a real-world space, a la German Expressionism. The bold sectioning of space in today’s still and the numerous diagonal lines it creates are reminiscent of the groundbreaking set design in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), for example.

'The Third Man''s "wrong geometries" echo those of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," which featured a bold use of line, shape, lighting, and composition to disorient viewers from a seemingly real space. Image © Kino Video

 Misek even cites today’s very still as an example of wrong geometry. He writes of Still Dots #64:

The disorientating potential of multiple vanishing points is taken to an extreme in [this shot]. Like much of Vienna’s innenstadt, Schreyvogelgasse, the street in which this shot was filmed, is built on a steep gradient. On one side, a row of houses resists the incline of the hill and clings to horizontality; on the other side, there is a sheer drop to another street with a different gradient. Krasker’s cinematography transforms this improbable place into a seemingly impossible space. Mise en scène and lighting combine to emphasise multiple orthogonals, directing the eye to multiple vanishing points simultaneously, as if the image were a collage of irreconcilable perspectival environments. The effect, exacerbated again by the use of a wide angle lens, is closer to the psychotic spatial overcrowding of Max Beckmann’s Die Synagoge (1919) than the placid linearity of Crivelli’s Annunciation (1486). The startling image of Schreyvogelgasse highlights the fact that even the basic standard of spatial orientation, a stable horizon, is absent from The Third Man.

What’s more, the removal of that “basic standard of spatial orientation” in The Third Man serves an emotional and even thematic purpose: as the world must seem disorienting and disfigured to Holly Martins given everything he’s been through in Vienna (and as much of Europe itself seems literally disfigured after World War II), so does this particular intersection seem impossibly distorted even to the eye of the film camera. For reference, here are the two paintings that Misek cites:

"Die Synagoge" by Max Beckmann. Collection of the Stadelmuseum, Frankfurt.

"Annunciation" by Carlo Crivelli, 1486.

And, just for good measure, an image of the same intersection in today’s still, Schreyvogelgasse, taken from the opposite viewpoint in 2009:

"Panoramic view southeast down Schreyvogelgasse from the intersection with Molker Steig," John Schwenkler (Panoramio)

Clearly, the 2009 snapshot of Schreyvogelgasse resembles the neat vertical and horizontal lines of Crivelli’s “Annunciation,” with its fairly central perspective, minimal vanishing points, and neat sectioning off of geometric spaces. This very same location as seen in The Third Man, however—as Misek writes—has more in common with Beckmann’s “Die Synagoge,” with its jarring diagonal lines, contradictory vanishing points, and malleable perspective, which all serve to disorient the viewer and make an ostensibly real space look and feel hallucinatory. Again, in the context of The Third Man, this spatial dislocation—courtesy of the shot’s low-key lighting and canny use of composition to emphasize line and shape—serves to place us in Holly Martins’ shoes, reflecting the overwhelming loneliness that he’s feeling given the emotional frankness of his goodbye to Anna Schmidt. If Holly were indeed to return to America the following day, would his hometown—wherever that might be—appear to him in the same disorienting conflux of jagged, converging lines and angles? Are the things we see, the cityscapes we encounter, always transformed by the emotions coursing throughout our senses? Or is there another reason that Holly’s view of Schreyvogelgasse is so nonlinear and distorted, perhaps an unknown, phantasmic presence somewhere on these Vienna streets, a figure which Holly Martins may soon encounter in one of the city’s darkened doorways?

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.

Anna’s compassionate smile and odd mismatched gaze, not to mention the bouquet of flowers that masquerade as a furry cat in front of her, present today’s still with a stirringly fake image. Far from most images in this complex film, we see Anna standing in front of a wall with a decorative curtain as a backdrop. While this may not actually be shot on a set in London, since this film was reportedly shot almost entirely on location in Vienna, its composition suggests much of the photo studio. One can imagine a cheezy photography studio, the kind you see in malls or amusement parks, but in lieu of the wild west/victorian era costumes and props, this particular studio would advertise “Decimated Post-war Europe Photos.” Families could pay a fee to slip into the grandeur and imagination of the time by slipping into velvet jackets, grabbing strange bouquets, and standing in front of dingy, past-their-prime curtains just like Anna is here. But of course, were this a cheezy photo booth, she would have selected one of the many other pictures to represent herself, not this one, which cuts off the top of her head and in which the two sides of her face seem to be engaged in different expressions.

But this frame, like many others we have interacted with so far, brings some of the stink of the uncanny. Perhaps it is the chiaroscuro lighting, or the frequently canted angles and perspectives, but many shots within this film come across as off kilter in some way, and this frame is no exception. Anna’s ambiguous expression is certainly linked to that uncanny sense, since we seem to have caught her in a moment between two looks, but something in that inhumanly frozen ambivalence brings to mind the disharmony in a variety of portrait popular in the Victorian era: the post-mortem portrait. When photographs were such an unusual (and expensive) novelty–not like today’s image-saturated world–families would often take their portraits immediately after the death of a loved one to capitalize on their unrotten lifelike visage. What came from a warm and loving place, making a photograph to remember someone as they lived, produced some unsettling images of families hanging out with corpses.

A victorian era family poses with their deceased daughter. Something in Anna's impossible expression is reminiscent of these images.

In the image above, the clarity and sharpness of the deceased girl is a direct result of the photography process, which lasted several minutes. While this girl had no problem staying still, her slightly blurred parents couldn’t help but move and breathe, making her stand out, almost as if her presence in the photograph is more real. How does this parallel our frame today? Not with Anna, since her uncanny visage is not an actual sign of her death, only reminiscent of it, but within the whole structure of the film itself. Our frame finds us with would-be lovers Anna and Holly embroiled in a discussion of a man who is dead–Harry Lime. Harry has lain at the center of this story since the beginning, and like our deceased girl above, he stands out as a more carefully etched–and a more important one–than any other in the film. As Holly, Calloway, Anna et. al. circle the streets of post-War, post-Lime Vienna, they are in a sense memorializing Harry just after his death. This film is his post-mortem photograph, and like our girl above, he smiles unmoving in its center while the characters around him and viewers puzzle over what lies within his deceased mind.

Like Harry Lime’s life, this post will be cut short too soon. But I’ll leave you today with a section from Poe’s The Telltale Heart, which digs demonstrates the power of the dead to effect the living. Remember Anna, for today, as she hears the beating of Harry’s lifeless heart, not from her guilt but from his.

The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct: –It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness –until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears. No doubt I now grew very pale; –but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased –and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound –much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath –and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly –more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men –but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed –I raved –I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder –louder –louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! –no, no! They heard! –they suspected! –they knew! –they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now –again! –hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

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 #3782, 63:02, Image © Studio Canal

On Tuesday, Jeremy dissected The Third Man‘s “wrong geometries,” a skewed visual perspective instigated by some unknown, massive anomaly haunting the streets of Vienna; today, courtesy of a slightly canted angle, we have another distorted perspective that suffuses Anna Schmidt’s apartment with uncanny tension. While the unseen phantom haunting Still Dots #61 was more amorphous, we know exactly who is causing the tension in today’s still: Harry Lime. Holly and Anna have both seen evidence of Harry’s guilt (courtesy of Major Calloway) and now face off with each other, batting moral uncertainties back and forth, divided by an ethical chasm that has them in disagreement over who Harry Lime actually was. The deep focus and distanced shot scale of today’s still places us in Holly’s shoes: he returns Anna’s stare, still in a drunken haze, bemoaning Harry’s corruptibility while Anna professes he’s still the same complex, dynamic, self-made man they always knew him as. How could he steal penicillin from dying men, women, and children and sell it on the black market? Their debate has a strong bearing on The Third Man‘s morally complex underpinnings, so it’s worth recounting their dialogue in this scene:

Anna: He’s better dead. I knew he was mixed up, but…not like that.

Holly: I knew him for twenty years. At least I thought I knew him. Suppose he was laughing at fools like us all the time?

Anna: He liked to laugh…

Holly: Seventy pounds a tube! He wanted me to write for his “great medical charity.”

Anna: I’ll put these flowers in the water.

Holly: Perhaps I could have raised the price to eighty pounds for him.

Anna: Oh, please! For Heaven’s sake, stop making him in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your friend and my lover. He was Harry.

Holly: Well, don’t preach wisdom to me. You talk about him as if he had occasional bad manners… I am leaving Vienna. I don’t care whether Harry was murdered by Kurtz or Popescu or the Third Man. Whoever killed him, there was some sort of justice. Maybe I would have killed him myself.

Anna: A person doesn’t change because you find out more.

In addition to proving how great a screenwriter Graham Greene really was, this sequence gets to the heart of one of the major ambiguities that lies within The Third Man: the feasibility of moral judgments when applied to a real world dominated by war, violence, and money. If there is a “massive, invisible body” disfiguring the visual reality of Vienna, maybe it’s this gap between philosophical precepts about morality and the difficulty in applying them to real people’s behavior. A self-professed hack writer, Holly’s Western paperbacks operate by a black-and-white code of heroes and villains. But he’s never been a soldier in war, and one would imagine that his cowboy loners simply wage their own individual wars of solitude and frontier absolutism. If any of his heroes participated in the Mexican-American War (which Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”) or massacred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek in 1864, how would Holly respond to their cruelty? With the same ironclad, merciless notions of right and wrong that he applies to Harry, one would assume, and yet Harry too is a man surviving in the aftermath of a global war. How and why would he operate according to preconceived codes of morality when it has become obvious that the world at large has no interest in following such a code?

Holly feels the need to apply ethical interpretations to Harry’s behavior, treating his crimes as though they were merely pieces of evidence compiled in a laboratory, divorced from human action (which, for him, given the presentation Calloway offered earlier that afternoon, they are); Anna, however—whose calling as an actress requires her to occupy the turbulent minds and souls of the strangers she portrays—believes that her history with Harry gives her a greater sense of his nature, his goodness, than the admittedly distressing information Calloway has supplied. It’s tempting, then, to suggest that Holly is thinking too much with his head and Anna too much with her heart—he bitterly chastises his former friend without a consideration for the actual, dynamic life that Harry led; and Anna seems to dismiss the very real and lethal consequences of Harry’s crimes, preferring instead to embrace her lovelorn memory of him—but maybe Holly responds to Harry’s guilt so caustically precisely because he feels that his friend, with whom he was once so intimate and open, betrayed the memory of their friendship. Even Holly, then, responds to Harry’s crimes with emotional vitriol, though he tries to disguise his soul-sickened pain with sarcastic, world-weary moralism. Like numerous protagonists in Ingmar Bergman movies, the bourgeois family in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden), or the passionate rivals Karl Jung and Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method, a veneer of cold, logical rationality is ultimately revealed as a cover-up for submerged emotional longings and bitter disappointments.

Married couple Marianne and Johan, a lawyer and college professor, employ heated philosophical debates to conceal their deteriorating marriage in Ingmar Bergman's 'Scenes from a Marriage' (1973); Image © The Criterion Collection

A seemingly ordinary bourgeois family conceals its own emotional skeletons (even when they're blatantly displayed on mysterious videocassettes) in 'Caché (Hidden)' (2005) Image © Sony Pictures

Psychoanalysis—perhaps the most frequently used conceptual framework employed in the 20th century—may come down to intense personal rivalry and unimpeded lust in 'A Dangerous Method' (2011) Image © Sony Pictures

Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, a 1987 novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, suggests that it is the heart, not the head, that sets humanity apart from the animal kingdom (if we are in fact separate from it at all). In the words of a French soldier who bears witness to seemingly limitless horrors during the Napoleonic Army’s Russian siege, it may be the heart and the fervent emotions that bleed from it which influence human behavior and guide us to behave like semi-ethical creatures:

Watching my comrades die was not the worst thing about that war, it was watching them live. I had heard stories about the human body and the human mind, the conditions it can adapt to, the ways it chooses to survive. I had heard tales of people who were burnt in the sun and grew another skin, thick and black like the top of overcooked porridge. Others who learned not to sleep so that they wouldn’t be eaten by wild animals. The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked place.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside for ever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times…

If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.

When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.

Whether or not Holly’s claim that his friend’s murder constituted “some kind of justice” emanates from a coldly rational philosophy or from his bruised and battered heart, it seems clear that Holly cannot (or will not) weigh his own compassion for Harry against the lethal crimes he obviously committed. Henri, the poor French soldier from The Passion, also suggests that war eviscerates and subverts conventional notions of morality: “Nowadays people talk about the things [Napoleon] did as though they made sense… Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.” Yet words that do not hold water in reality; war is senseless, not something that abides by traditional philosophies. But if World War II itself inspired a spreading cancer of amorality, this is a possibility that Holly is unable to consider. Anna, on the other hand, unable to ignore the throbbing sadness of her heart, has only her vivid memories of a life with Harry to keep her company.

As a final illustration of the intersection of war, morality, and philosophy, perhaps we can take a look at a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), a foreboding pseudo-apocalyptic treatise on the onset of World War III. Though The Third Man and The Sacrifice could hardly be more different, both movies are (partially) about the patterns of destruction instigated by war and the inefficacy of moral philosophies to do anything about such barbarism. Maybe Holly Martins, mired in his existential crises and continually engaged in an attempt to alleviate those doubts via hard-and-fast moralistic concepts, will decades later become The Sacrifice‘s Alexander (the journalist/actor/philosopher seen in the clip below)—which may be the most unsettling hypothesis we’ve posed so far in Still Dots.

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 #3720, 62:00, Image © Studio Canal

Holly still sits in Anna’s apartment trying to get her to love him as he loves her, but the cat Holly was playing with, Harry’s cat, has jumped the coop and our camera has tracked outside to follow. But outside, craning his face toward us, is a figure in a dark hat and coat who scuttles into the darkened doorway behind him when he sees the cat (or our camera?) tilting his way. For this brief moment, and a few others in the film, we know something that Holly does not. Here we see this mysterious figure watching Holly while he is too drunk and lovelorn to notice. Could this be the third man that carried Harry across the street? Some other spy in the employ of the Popescu-Kurtz-Winkel conspiracy? Could it be the same man who met with that coven on the bridge to organize the porter’s murder? Or perhaps some other kind of spy; one working for Calloway, or the Russians or the Americans? While a real spy, is big news and worth looking at in our analysis of the story, I would like to take today’s frame as an opportunity to look at something that has occupied the Viennese world since our leap into the fray. Today’s framing exemplifies it distinctly, and that is the distorted and bent view of the city that is presented here.

Richard Misek calls it Wrong Geometries in his article by the same name. As Misek puts it:

The above examples draw attention to the fact that the lines in The Third Man do not create a graphic, two-dimensional aesthetic like that of a comic book drawn in black ink on white paper. Rather, they exist in three dimensions. The film’s diagonals are also orthogonals.

Or to put it in a visual language:

This distortion is of course built into every frame of every film, since the medium attempts to represent three-dimensional space within the confines of the screen. The lens bends a visual span—one existing in a three-dimensional world—and compresses it onto a two-dimensional negative, literally taking the world and representing it in one less dimension, while maintaining the often overlooked dimension of time. Just as a two dimensional map can be extrapolated to real-world space through the use of keys, scales, and contours, so too can this filmic representation be extrapolated to represent a living and moving space across time. But also like maps, a flattening of what exists as a curved world creates distortions, enlarging, skewing and modifying the world to fit it into a two-dimensional schema.

Through traditional cinematic tricks like strong diagonals, short depth of focus, and harsh contrast, The Third Man‘s 2-D image confidently represents this depth as a visual illusion. The glow emanating from the distant alleyway cues us to understand it as an existent space even without seeing it on the screen, and the darkened doorway toward the right side of the frame achieves the same illusion, just like the small bright blotch of a European face in front of that dark doorway shows us more of its textured scale. All depth in the film image falls subject to this type of illusory deceptions; even stereoscopic technologies which offer more convincing portrayals of dimensionality are utilizing technological and artistic tricks to represent depth.

Renaissance artists developed a mathematical system of painting that allowed painters to portray three-dimensional space through a system of codes that mimicked the function of the eye. This painting, “Las Meninas” painted by Diego Velazquez in 1656 and retouched several times later, creates the illusion of a deep space through traditional rules of perspective and heavy contrast. The complex space extends in all directions, with the stairs leading beyond the back of the painting, and the mirror reflecting the king and queen whose perspectives we occupy.

These perspectival tricks, inherent in the design of the photo camera and film camera alike, can be traced back to a time long before either of them were invented. Based on 11th-century optical theories, early renaissance artists in Europe used (at the time) revolutionary mathematical theories to represent two-dimensional images, mostly in painting, as if they were viewed from a single perspective. A big change from earlier painting and imaging styles, perspective turned art on its head. Paintings had before existed with a more celestial perspective, with all aspects equally in view and their size determined by their importance to the painting. Understandably, this change made a big splash, since paintings had been painted up to now for the perspective of god. As Orhan Pamuk’s characters dramatize it in his 1998 novel, My Name is Red about illustrators in Istanbul during the European Renaissance:

“‘Do you think this is what we’ve been doing?’

‘Never,’ I said with a smile. ‘However, this is what Elegant Effendi, may he rest in peace, began to assume when he saw the last painting. He’d been saying that your use of the science of perspective and the methods of the Venetian masters was nothing but the temptation of Satan. In the last painting, you’ve supposedly rendered the face of a mortal using the Frankish techniques, so the observer has the impression not of a painting but of reality; to such a degree that this image has the power to entice men to bow before it, as with icons in churches. According to him, this is the Devil’s work, not only because the art of perspective removes the painting from God’s perspective and lowers it to the level of a street dog, but because your reliance on the methods of Venetians as well as your mingling of our own established traditions with that of the infidels will strip us of our purity and reduce us to being their slaves (Pamuk, My Name is Red, Knopf, 1998, pg. 178-9).’”

The re-assessment of the world from the perspective of the human (or street dog) rather than God made ripples throughout the world at the time. Certainly this serious reframing was connected to the Reformation, which refocused religion onto the individual’s relation to God, the Enlightenment, which rethought the world as something understandable by humanity rather than a miracle of God’s making, and the birth of Capitalism, which imagined the individual as the ultimate unit of satisfaction through the “pursuit of happiness” and accrual of worldly goods. Perspective may not be the match that lit off this powderkeg, and might be only a part of the enormous conceptual shift that precipitated all of these changes, but it is certainly tied to the massive rethinking of the world and universe.

Two opticians and lens-makers of note played into this debate as well. Building off of the heliocentric theories of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei built the first effective telescope and defended the Copernican conception of the universe, which eventually led to him being found “vehemently suspect of heresy” and put under house arrest until his death. Baruch Spinoza was also a lens grinder and optician by trade, but is known for his philosophical work. Spinoza put forward the surprisingly atheistic conception that God is not a being but a substance which makes up everything, “Whatever is, is in God and nothing can be or be conceived without God” (Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, Part 1, Proposition 15). After this radical claim which invalidated much of the Torah’s claims on the actions of God-as-being, Jewish authorities issued a cherem, essentially excommunicating him from the Jewish faith. Of course, these two figures important in science and philosophy, also led their way specifically to the film we see today. The work of opticians and lens-grinders led eventually to photographic cameras, and then to the Lumiere Brothers’ moving picture designs. So we can trace the perspective built into today’s frame all the way back to the early Renaissance both stylistically and technologically, and we can claim a couple of 1600′s bad-boy thinkers as a part of our cinematic camp. One can only hope that Spinoza and Galileo, if alive today, would be filmmakers.

But as far as perspective is concerned, today’s still continues to bend the rules. Operating beyond the traditional filmic styles of 1-point or 2-point perspective, today’s still operates on a three point grid, only comprehensible on a three-dimension axis. It is exactly this which throws the whole in The Third Man‘s bends and twists seems even more distorted than necessary. And even in a 3-point system, the fish-eyed distortions in the curves and twists of straight lines seem to shine through.

If we take our astronomical metaphors even further, we can think of the Vienna streets (as they exist through the 104 minutes of screen time) as their own sort of space-time continuum. And, as we know from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the path of light—and thus the visually perceived shape of objects—is bent in a gravitational field. As a beam of light, say the one bouncing off the corner of some Viennese building, passes by a massive body, it is deflected toward that body instead of in the straight line it would travel in a vacuum. This will create distorted perspectives, and in extreme cases, doubling, accounting for the many doppelgangers we’ve encountered in this city. Extremely massive objects can bend light to produce gravitational lensing, which presents multiple images of objects seen from the other side.

In the formation known as Einstein’s Cross, four images of the same distant quasar appear around a foreground galaxy due to strong gravitational lensing.

So these twists and bends in the visual reality of The Third Man can be attributed distinctly, to some massive—if invisible—body occupying this Vienna. It could be the looming remnants of World War II, which we have already seen twisting and distorting the architecture of the city, but I prefer to think that this massive body is the massive figure of Harry Lime still lurking in some shadow of this ghost city. Whatever it is that distorts the world of The Third Man, it seems particularly apparent in this frame, and may even be localized to the darkened doorway and the barely-visible figure standing in front of it. This spy, stalking Holly or Anna, may be a personification of the massive dark-matter object bending and duplicating the streets of Vienna, and as we discover more about this figure soon, we will see why.

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 #3658, 60:58, Image © Studio Canal

After drinking away his sorrows at a Vienna strip club and forsaking carnal pleasure for the company of Anna Schmidt, Holly shows up at her apartment distraught, lonely, and at least three sheets to the wind. As Holly arrives at her door, we see Anna in a gorgeous moonlit close-up (covered by a bedsheet embroidered with the initials “HL”), wide awake and troubled for the same exact reason as Holly: she’s also visited Calloway earlier that day and received the same disheartening information about her former lover’s criminal activities. (Her response to Harry Lime’s guilt is markedly different than Holly’s, but we can save a comparison of Anna and Holly’s ethical interpretations of Harry’s guilt for later posts, as this creates a rift between the two characters that may be irreconcilable.) Holly knocks on Anna’s door and, after she asks who’s there, he responds in a ghostly, desperate whisper, “Me…it’s me.” In today’s still, after he informs Anna that he’s returning to the States the next day, he tries to distract himself by playing with the asocial kitten who was only friendly towards Harry Lime. Immediately thereafter, the cat absconds through Anna’s window and down to the cobblestone street below, towards…something.

As we’ve mentioned before, The Third Man has a thing for animal symbolism. First, we had Baron Kurtz’s weaselly little dog, whose beady eyes and strained whimper seemed to correlate eerily well with Kurtz’s duplicitous character. Then we were introduced to this very kitten, which Jeremy surmised is a fully-formed character in itself that may know crucial information about Harry Lime (his actions, his personality, his behavior, maybe even his thought processes). Thirdly, there was the parrot that attacked Holly while he was escaping from Popescu’s goons, itself a parallel to the cockatoo in Citizen Kane that Orson Welles threw in to startle the audience into rapt attention. (Since we never see The Third Man‘s violent parrot again, it’s safe to assume that Carol Reed or Graham Greene included it for a similarly visceral reason.) If the feline character we see in today’s still may be a complex character keeping its own secrets, Holly is attracted to it for the opposite reason: for its moral simplicity, its inability to betray others or present a false appearance of itself. Forced to reassess his twenty-year friendship with Harry and struggling with his unrequited love for Anna (which he blatantly admits to her in this very scene), Holly seems to want a friendship with a creature that is exactly what it seems, unable to lie or mislead. Like the horses in White Mane (Albert Lamorisse, 1952) or The Horse (Charles Burnett, 1973), who appeal to their young, beleaguered protagonists precisely for their loyal, uncomplicated companionship, Harry’s cat will respond to Holly’s company without treachery or hidden motive—or at least Holly assumes. Yet it turns out Jeremy’s interpretation of this cat may have been correct: as the animal flees from Anna’s apartment and Holly’s playfulness, we get the sense that the cat is indeed an enigmatic character with its own unknowable desires and allegiances, not simply an unthinking “Other” that can help Holly alleviate his loneliness and angst.

A compassionate bond between boy and horse, free of human racism and cruelty, in Charles Burnett's "The Horse" (1973) Image © Charles Burnett

We’ve already mentioned the graying of previously iron-clad moral codes in The Third Man, which begs the question: are animals ethical creatures? And if not, does that make them inferior or superior to us? Maybe humans’ desire to ascribe moral judgments to our behavior is, though ostensibly well-intentioned, a distorting prism, one that replaces common sense with a self-satisfied attempt to fathom the world. This is essentially what Friedrich Nietzsche meant in The Gay Science when he wrote, “I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense—as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.” If Kurtz’s dog, Harry’s cat, or that angry parrot do observe human behavior with a capacity to interpret it, maybe they respond with the bemused pity that Nietzsche suggests: a sense that humans have betrayed nature by imparting a self-made moral code onto it. In other words, maybe the kitten in today’s still loves only Harry because he—while seemingly morally reprehensible—actually acts in the most animal-like way of any character, unwilling or unable to apply moral presumptions to his own actions. As future monologues in The Third Mansuggest, Harry may indeed be aware of outraged ethical judgments of his behavior, yet he may find no value in them, or in any moral strictures that humanity has constructed in order to explain the world and their place in it. (Regarding Nietzsche and animals, let’s remember the event that supposedly instigated his mental breakdown: his desperate shielding of a horse from its owner’s whip in Turin in 1889, which in itself suggests his preference for the natural purity of animals over the existential delusions of humans. This respect for animals’ place in the natural world and humans’ corruption of that nature is hauntingly conveyed in the already-famous opening shot of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse.)

http://youtu.be/v32n4lCG0OA

It is, in part, the amorphous nature of human morality that torments Holly in this scene: he’s unable to reconcile his own intimate friendship with Harry Lime with his knowledge of Harry’s greed and inhumanity. (Anna’s response, meanwhile—while it seems reductive and condescending to call it “animal-like” or more natural—may be free of the distorting ethical precepts that Nietzsche bemoans. As Anna says to Holly after he says that Harry’s murder had a certain justice to it, “A person doesn’t change because you find out more.”)

We shouldn’t forget, also, that Holly is completely soused in this scene, as is his wont. As Holly himself says, “I’m just a hack writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.” (After a pause, Holly further clarifies his meaning while peering at Anna: “You.”) But does his inebriation make it easier or harder to understand and interpret what Harry has done? Does the cloud of drunkenness distort Holly’s judgments, making him both more emotional and less forgiving regarding Harry’s crimes? Or have Holly’s numerous whiskeys lifted the veil of over-rationalization, allowing him to judge his longtime friend with greater directness and clarity? Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, among many other writers, would support the latter conclusion, making the case that drunkenness paradoxically enables the drinker to comprehend the world with apposite volatility. And, perhaps, so would the poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose “Morning of Drunkenness” will close out this post with sympathy for Holly Martins’ current drunken plight:

O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.

Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.

 

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.

Between last week’s Holly and this one, all doubt has been drained from his body and he sits in this Vienna strip club, draining glass after glass of whiskey to fill the void that Harry’s guilt has left inside him. Harry is definitely a criminal, and now Holly–suddenly forced to be a grownup–must reevaluate his friendship, and indeed his entire reason for staying here in Vienna. If we see Holly as a truly dynamic character, as I think we will by the end of the film, then we can watch his progression along a spectrum that has Harry and Calloway as its poles. While Harry wandered into this city with much of the do-as-he-please bravado of the outlaw, Harry Lime, he is now being quickly slid toward the opposite end of the scale. Calloway’s cold and calculated evidentiary files have swung Holly over to his end of the spectrum, and now like Calloway–and unlike Harry who brought him here in the first place–Holly is having second thoughts about staying in this city. On his way out of the major’s office, before he wanders into this house of ill repute, Holly asks Sergeant Paine for that plane ticket back to the states that he was promised long ago.

It seems that Holly might be headed home, where things are safer and he has family and friends (we can assume) to get back to. But as he sits in this strip club, his gaze flits between his drinks and the three groups in front of him. As he drinks up his remorse and tries to face up to these new truths, his gaze plays between a shirtless dancer in front of a jazz band, a line of young women who all seem to be eying him romantically from the bar, and an old Viennese flower-seller peddling her wares for romantics like him. Knocking back the last of his whiskey, our Holly, ever the romantic, brushes past the flirtation sitting at the bar and the lust dancing in front of the band and buys out the entire supply of flowers before leaving the bar for Anna’s apartment. Holly has chosen love over all else, and although he may think he is leaving on the next plane, we know better. Anna is still in danger of being deported, and even without Harry’s innocence left to prove, Holly still can’t leave Vienna without trying his hand at being Anna’s knight in shining armor. As he leaves the bar and the carnal pleasures it offers, he all but pushes a small boy from a window and mutters “the things I do for love:”

What is perhaps even more interesting to consider than Holly’s conventional love story, is the series of thoughts that lead Holly to abandon his best friend entirely. As we have discussed before, The Third Man is a war story and though the fighting may indeed be over, Vienna is still a wartime city. Calloway, a Major in the British military, is acting as our main conduit of justice, and nothing says martial law more than military leaders in positions of authority. Indeed, when this film was in theaters, the United States was under its own form of military rule, with Harry Truman who led his batallion through German forces without losing a single man and rose to the rank of Colonel, before rising to the rank of Commander in Chief. American military personnel in the white house would continue all the way up until Clinton’s presidency in 1993, with Eisenhower (a five star general in the Army), Kennedy (a lieutenant in the Navy), Johnson (a lieutenant commander in the Navy), Nixon (a lieutenant commander in the Navy), Ford (a lieutenant commander in the Navy), Carter (a lieutenant in the Navy), Reagan (a captain in the Army), and Bush (a lieutenant in the Navy). So, for the entire length of the cold War, the United States was led by a military (white) man, but nonetheless, Vienna’s martial rule is even a bit more immediate. War times can do much to transform the world around them and the truth and untruth of what might exist in that world, that I am surprised that Holly is so trusting of the facts he is presented. In Chris Marker’s lyrical 1983 film, Sans Soleil, he promises us to only show images of war in an alternate universe he refers to as “The Zone.” Of this, Reverse Shot critic Andrew Tracy writes:

“in Sans Soleil “the Zone,” his friend’s image device which renders the political struggles of the Sixties as abstract images of colored electronic movement, creating an impression of struggle, an emblem which Marker says is “more honest” than the traps of context and explanation. Material and metaphor: the Zone is both an active transformation and intervention into the image and a representation of the operations of time—a relentless process to which Marker blissfully consigns his own images at the end of the film.”

But Holly’s mind has not been opened to these possibilities. As his own series of movements and lights, magic lantern shows and documents, parade their way across his vision, all he can sense and all he can understand is those very traps of context and explanation. This is a war city, and like anywhere at war, Holly should know that this Vienna exists in The Zone, a realm beyond the reach of such connotations. To put it another way, the truth that exists in war cannot be the same truth that exists outside of it. As Tim O’Brien put it in his remarkable collection of stories, The Things They Carried:

“You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen–and maybe it did, anything’s possible–even then you know it can’t be true because a true war story can’t depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blase, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true story that never happened (O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Penguin, 1990, pg. 89-90).”

Our dear Holly, though, takes these war stories for their pedestrian truth value, perhaps because he has spent his whole life imaging wars (cowboys vs. indians) and he cannot discern the fictional war truth from the real war truth from the day-to-day truth. Were Holly himself more privy to this information, he might be less likely to dive into his depression and acceptance. Holly should remember those words of another cop, in the Coen Brothers’ 2007 No Country For Old Men, “Well… uh… a true story? I couldn’t swear to every detail but it’s certainly true that it is a story. ” Of course a real dive into the complex issues of truth and war is much too large a subject for this short post, but today I’ll leave you with yet another cinematic meditation on that very issue, from the 1992 Rob Reiner film, A Few Good Men:

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.