Intermezzo: Show Me Again

An Intermezzo opens exploration of the “multiplied narrative,” a form traceable back at least to William Hogarth, in which depictions or accounts are matched with one or more successive others in a work, the narrative position changing and our view of the diegetic events shifting in accompaniment. The discussion here ranges from Marriage a la Mode to Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) to Dutch flower painting to Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), a pair of sequences from which are analysed in great detail. This chapter explores the pleasure of narrative accumulation, a process of layering in which delight derives from witnessing as, in some deeply rooted and poetic sense, many stories become one.

A Barbaric Rose

This chapter works through the color-printing process of the Technicolor Corporation, used in the mid-1940s, to explore the contradictory registers of dream and practicality to which film-watching moments offer entrance. It provides an analysis of a key color effect in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which a transition from the monochromatic to the vibrantly colorful emphasizes the use of cinematic color beyond the perfunctory. It is argued, with reference to oil painting, that the brilliant and radiant pink of a single rose in this scene represents the potential of color to emotionally penetrate the viewer, not by supplementing the narrative, but by intruding upon and beyond it.

Beyond the Sea

This chapter works to use Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as a way to open thought about what film is and can be as it is experienced. It provides a detailed analysis of the film’s “sanatorium” sequence, in which its protagonist, Scottie, has been immobilized by grief. It is argued that the efforts of his closest friend Midge to bring Scottie “back to life” with the music of Mozart is part of a motif that links these two principal characters to a classical “past,” conflicting with the dominating social order of the modern present in which they find themselves. A conceptual link is offered between the presence of the color “blue” in the scene, and the various psychological states and identities that Scottie adopts and experiences throughout the film.

Walk on the Wild Side

This chapter considers various cinematic deployments of the stroll, promenade, and walkabout to consider how characters walk through their narratives, as well as if and how the cinematic camera walks with them. It examines how the practice of finding leisure in strolling, linked to the nineteenth century flâneur, gives shape, boundary, and social meaning to the organized act of walking. A reading of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002), in which mobility is linked to peril and mortality, is contrasted to a moment in Vertigo, in which characters stroll through sublimely pleasurable surroundings for the sake of the act itself, one which provides unique respite from the bleakness and hopelessness that otherwise largely engulfs the film.

Rhapsody in Green

This chapter examines the presence of the color green in several films, notably Call Me by Your Name (2017) and The Boy with Green Hair (1948), to suggest how, of all colors, green has a special—transparent and provoking—capacity to come alive in the temple of thought. It is argued here that cinematic green, with its immediate and uncultured presence, often states its force without direction or signification, existing before, or even in place, of any symbolic meaning. A central example of green grass in a sequence from Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) is conceptually linked to the color’s presence in the paintings of Jan van Eyck, suggesting color in cinema, as elsewhere, affects us, palpably and directly, in and of itself—not because of what it signifies, but because of what it is.

A Million Things

This chapter provides a substantial consideration of Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016) to explore the problem of cinema’s relation to time and our own temporal movement through existence, including the experience of watching a film. The difficulties of maturing, the challenges of relationship between persons of different ages, and the idea of a Life Voyage all bring light upon a significant history of travel and its foundational aspect for thinking about these films. This chapter moves back in history to examine the voyages of Captain James Cook as exemplary of the conceptual problem of exploration. In Clouds of Sils Maria, two “navigators” are divided temporally, and exoticism is invoked because of movement across that division. In Personal Shopper, the protagonist’s sensitivity has made her into a phantom wanderer.

Introductory

Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure. Serge Daney “We awaked from sweet repose after the luscious fatigues of the night. I got up between nine and ten and walked out till Louise should rise. I patrolled up and down Fleet Street, thinking on London, the seat of Parliament and the seat of pleasure.” So, on Thursday, 13 January 1763, rhapsodized James Boswell in his London diary (140), reflecting upon a night of amorous encounter—one of his first—and his prospects and hopes of achieving some position of consequence either in the army or in government. Here was a man making his way in the world and finding its stimulations and treasuring and reflecting back upon them, as through his days he lived out the ...