Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns by Nicolas Pillai | Part 4: The Bedroom

 

The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and decency.
The Motion Production Code of 1930.

Bedrooms are always significant in film. Whether characters are dreaming, making love, going to sleep or waking up, bedrooms are always significant.

Maybe it’s because they are such private places, and the things that occur within them are often hidden from us in life. And so scenes in bedrooms hold a special kind of thrill, permitting us access to intimate moments of the characters. Once Hollywood studios began to implement the Hays’ Office’s Production Code in the 1930s, it became common to show married couples occupying separate beds. It was as though America was becoming ashamed of itself.

I was uncomfortable with all of the handwringing, tutting and sneering over conspicuous consumerism and cultural imperialism in this summer’s reviews of Sex and the City 2. It is, I think, noteworthy that the same critics failed to muster the same level of outrage for The Expendables. There are two snobberies at work there, one concerning (excuse the revolting term) 'chick flicks' and one about TV shows that get above themselves. While I’m not interested in defending Carrie & co. here, I do think the film had some very interesting bedroom scenes. And none of them had anything to do with sex.

In the New York sequences of the movie, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) begins to feel that conjugal life in her new apartment is growing stale. The final straw comes when her husband John James Preston (one-time Mr. Big, Chris Noth) buys her a big screen TV for the bedroom. To Carrie, this is the end of romance. He only wants to watch black and white movies, whereas she wants to live in them.

Watching the hitch-hiking scene from It Happened One Night (a film in which attraction begins with lines drawn across a motel bedroom), Carrie worries over her ability to lead an exciting married life. At the end of the film, in the living room again, the couple watch the conclusion to The Talk of the Town, as Cary Grant runs back to kiss Jean Arthur. Carrie has reordered domestic space to her satisfaction.

What’s so wrong with watching TV in bed anyway? In Sex and the City 2, the bedroom becomes less the arena of sexual satisfaction and more the assurance of mutual content. The way this is measured is through the absence of a TV. The bedroom becomes the last refuge from the moving image.

Keep dreaming. Keep watching.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Part 3: The Automobile

In his later films, Hitchcock shot car interiors in front of such alarmingly fake rear projection that it seemed to be his new cinematic signature.
John Waters.

You’re driving through the night. Through the blur of your windshield, the headlights pick out signs for long-forgotten towns. You don’t know where you’re going, but you know what you’re leaving behind.

What’s that up ahead? Palookaville, 5 miles.

Rear projection is one of Hollywood’s most familiar special effects, and one of its most ignored. Confronted with a back projected shot in an old movie, modern audiences usually react in two ways. Some will ignore it, passing it off as a technical limitation of the time. Others will laugh at it, their chuckles hovering somewhere between affection and derision.

Filming car scenes in the studio was largely down to camera size. The bulky equipment needed to film on location was complicated immeasurably in driving scenes. You just couldn’t fit a camera on the front of a moving car. Very occasionally set-ups were used that filmed from trailer platforms, but this was an expensive and time-consuming process. Far better to have the scene shot in the studio, where you could remove variables like weather, wind and the dubious driving ability of your hungover leading man.

What’s rarely mentioned with regard to rear projection is the level of meaning it can bring to a scene. In County Hospital, Stan Laurel is driving Oliver Hardy home in an open-topped car. Through a series of misadventures too complicated to detail, Stan is feeling the effects of a tranquilizer and Ollie’s leg is in plaster. As the sleepy Stan veers their car from lane to lane and Ollie flails around in the back seat, we see the oncoming traffic as back (and front) projection. What’s interesting here is the problem of scale – the surrounding traffic is much larger than in life, dwarfing the hapless twosome. The grotesquely enhanced surroundings make the scene more terrifying than funny. The sequence takes on the imagery of nightmare.

A less dramatic, but equally disconcerting, effect is felt in Vertigo. As James Stewart tracks Kim Novak through San Francisco, his delusional state seems to be reflected by the hazy scenery passing by. Later, in one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated shots, Stewart seems to know this when he kisses Novak, as the camera circles them, transporting him back to the stables of the Mission San Juan Bautista.

For drive-in audiences, back projected scenes must have offered an eerie mirror image. Sitting stationary in their cars, slurping at their shakes, looking up at Hollywood faces clutching steering wheels as they moved through virtual scenery.

Drive careful, now.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Part 2: The City

It’s only a movie, Ingrid!
Alfred Hitchcock, on the set of Spellbound.

Last year, I flew to Detroit for an academic conference, two months before Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive on a NWA flight. It was my first trip to the USA and, jet-lagged, I stumbled around a city that bore no resemblance to my idea of the American metropolis. This was a city where trees grew up through the roofs of forgotten buildings, where skyscrapers stood derelict as a sad reminder of more luxurious times.

On that first night, I walked through the heart of Detroit’s Metro district, along wide empty streets, feeling eyes watching me from shadowy alleyways. I realized I was lost. I started to panic. Then I turned the corner and stared down the barrel of a tank rumbling towards me. Soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders were marching alongside.

I hadn’t seen a newspaper in two days. I thought martial law had been declared.

Stunned, I backed around the street to a group of onlookers. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. They smiled pityingly and explained, ‘They’re shooting a movie.’

I’d stumbled onto the set of the remake of Red Dawn. But in that eerie environment, it could just as well have been invasion. I was in a war movie or a zombie movie. I was in Detroit, the abandoned city. I suppose what I’m getting to here is that the city is an entity endlessly recreated in movies. Haven’t you ever walked home at night under the streetlamps and felt that you were on a film set?

One of my few pleasures in Detroit was walking through the steam that came up through manhole covers. Why on earth should I find this pleasurable? Restrain the urge to answer, 'because you’re weird.' I think it’s because I was (okay, tragically) entering into the iconography of the film noir city. That film noir city is entirely a construct of the cinema, the product of a visual expressionism that Hollywood’s émigré directors brought over from Europe. It is a city of night, of shadows, of sin.

The death of Tony Curtis brought these thoughts to the forefront of my mind. In his finest film Sweet Smell of Success he plays Sidney Falco, the weaselly press agent who runs around town doing the dirty work of celebrity columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Incredibly, given that it is one of the sleaziest movies ever made, it is directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the Scot from Ealing Studios. New York is an expressionistic nightmare of neon, wet sidewalks and exhaust pipes.

A drunk gets kicked out of a nightclub. Striding toward him, J. J. Hunsecker booms, 'I love this dirty town!'

So do we. That’s why we keep dreaming about it.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Introduction

 

Introduction

Part 1: The Frontier

Part 2: The City

Part 3: The Automobile

Part 4: The Bedroom

Written by Nicolas Pillai, Illustrations by JH

  

The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Don DeLillo

You’re sitting in the dark, surrounded by strangers.  For two hours, you and your companions are subjected to a series of stimuli designed to induce common responses.  Your bodies tense as you feel fear; they relax as you laugh. You are aroused, elated, involved.

Then the lights come up and you find you’ve got a lap full of popcorn.

Going to the cinema has always seemed a perverse occupation to me. Perhaps it’s because I never went as a child. Or perhaps it’s because when I was a child I was taught never to stare. Never mind that they’re fictional, there’s something weird about obsessively ogling people who can’t look back at you. And yet I’ve spent a good proportion of my adult life watching and rewatching films. Our reality is enriched, and significantly affected, by the worlds we observe onscreen.

When moving pictures were first exhibited, the public’s excitement over the new technology drew the concern of moralists. This was an art form that reframed reality, not posed but captured. A commonly repeated, and possibly apocryphal, story is that the first cinema-goers panicked when shown a train approaching the screen. True or not, it speaks to that thrill engendered by cinema: that it can extend beyond its frame, enveloping us in its fictional space.

In Panorama du Gran Canal vu d’un Bateau (1896), we see the moving camera being invented. Shot for the Lumiere Brothers by Alexandre Promio, the film consists of just one simple forty-second shot of movement down a Venetian canal. By placing his tripod in a gondola, Promio redefined movement in film. The camera was no longer static – now when the train rushed toward the screen, the camera hopped aboard.

Promio’s camera moves from left to right, taking in the facades of houses on the canal. Another gondola comes into frame from the right, crossing the field of vision and giving a sense of contrasting movement. We are assured of a world going on beyond the parameters of the image. Unlike its contemporaries, the film is less about pointing the camera at a subject and more about articulating that subject’s relation to the surrounding world.

We fall under a spell when we’re at the pictures. Entranced by the dance of light and shadow, our bodies confined, we open our minds to virtual worlds. In this series of short essays, I want to think about how we interact with the spaces created by film. So please turn off your mobiles. The lights are going down.

As Tony Curtis used to say, I’ll see you after the main feature.