Hi everyone,
Another one of my writings, this time from my Contemporary Film Theory course. For the class, we read (Middlebury’s very own) Chris Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, which offers a fascinating model for historical writing about film: the cinephiliac anecdote. The model’s power lies in its ability to move beyond the deep, metaphorical “meaning” of film texts in favor of ephemeral surface details – cinephiliac moments – that reveal unexpected insights that conventional historical discourses about film tend to dismiss. These insights often take the form of metonymic connections between separate film texts, and I attempted to use a kind of metonymic technique in writing my anecdote.
I should note that I first noticed the moment in question while taking Professor Keathley’s senior seminar in film, and that it was the subject of some discussion – the juiciest bits of which may have subconsciously influenced my writing, so I apologize to anyone who took The Surfaces of Cinema in 2007 whose comments or ideas I am unable to credit. While I am still trying to refine this particular mode of critical writing (with more of an emphasis on the critical), I have found that it can be incredibly liberating in illuminating what it is many people love about the cinema, and why they engage with it the way they do. As a theoretical approach, I am also attracted to the fact that writing a cinephiliac anecdote is a spectator-centered activity whereas many of the approaches of “Grand Theory” essentialize and totalize our viewing of films. Anyway, here’s the beef:
In Otto Preminger’s 1944 film Laura, Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), suspects the titular character (Gene Tierney) of murder and brings her down to the station for a taste of the third degree. Preminger’s mise-en-scene here is striking; Gene Tierney looks as if she’s being lit by an arc lamp from the silent era. My favorite moment in the film, however, comes as McPherson begins to move to the other side of the table where Laura is seated and awkwardly runs into a wooden chair before quickly moving it out of his way. The moment strikes me like an arrow—Dana Andrews seems genuinely surprised at the chair’s presence, as if he had not anticipated it when blocking out the scene. In many ways it’s a moment, however ephemeral, of pure realism—the kind of moment Bazin would have reveled in and that cinephilia seeks out, but made more perfect by its double significance. Dana Andrews is playing McPherson, who is in turn playing the “bad cop” in this scene within a scene, and the chair in question temporarily impedes both of them. My own pleasure here is also two-fold: first, in anticipating the chair, and second, in seeing Andrews and McPherson deal with it.
