THROUGH THE CAMERA’S EYE - Film Noir Foundation.pdfVIP

THROUGH THE CAMERA’S EYE Experiments with Subjective Camera in Film Noir Jake Hinkson 92 NOIR CITY I FALL 2011 I Audrey Totter plays to her costar—the camera—in Robert Montgomery’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake n 1939, Orson Welles rolled into Hollywood promising to revolutionize the art of filmmaking. One of his first ideas was to shoot an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark- ness entirely from the point of view of the main character, Marlow, as he travels up the Congo. In other words, Welles I explained, we would never see Marlow because we would be looking through his eyes. The camera, in effect, would be the main character, thus reflecting the first-person narrative of the novel. While the di- rector eventually abandoned the plan as unworkable and moved on to Citizen Kane, the idea of an entire movie told with a subjective camera was just crazy enough to keep floating around Hollywood. Of course, the subjective camera shot itself (or POV shot) had been around for years. Deployed sparingly in films like Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), it helped add emphasis and shift the emotion of sequences, acting in writer J.P. Telotte’s phrase as a form of “narrative punctua- tion.” Alfred Hitchcock was particularly a fan of the technique, us- ing it to great effect in his 1927 silent film The Lodger and famously using it to frame a suicide in Spellbound (1945). As deployed by these and other directors, the POV shot was just another tool in Leon Ames (left), Totter (center), and the rest of the cast stare down Marlowe in the kit. In 1947, however, the subjective camera achieved that most The Lady in the Lake