Favorite shots

I thought I’d try something different, though hardly unprecedented. Other film blogs take full advantage of image and video hosting capabilities. Ours, though rich in humor and ideas, is pretty stale visually. So here goes. What are some of your favorite shots? (no, Michael, Hackler is not what I had in mind). Dig around online and see if you can images of your faves!

Marnie

This one comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). It’s the first shot of the film. It begins with a close-up of the yellow purse, and the camera remains still as the woman (whose face we never see) walks away from us along a thin red line. After about 25 yards or so, she stops and waits, becoming a vanishing point in the distance. There’s no music, and hardly any diegetic sound (just the clicking of her high heels on the concrete platform). She just stands there, and the shot lasts another 10 seconds or so. It’s pure formalism (why aren’t there other passengers?). But it also sets the tone for the entire film: Marnie is an anti-realist film. It’s a totally artificial world Hitchcock constructs, though the feelings of the characters who inhabit it are certainly real. A lesser-known Hitchcock film, but certainly full of terrific moments like this one.

21 thoughts on “Favorite shots”

  1. thanks, john, this is really nice, and a great idea. it might be cumbersome for a group blog to stick all the pictures under this one thread. maybe we can have a top-level post picture once in a while, and keep the tread to discuss the pic? i mentioned marnie only yesterday. why do these things happen? now i want to watch it again, maybe even today if it’s available at “watch instantly.”

  2. It took me a while to figure out what the hell you were talking about, John. I thought, Chris Hackler….who was she? Then I remembered her name is Hackel. Or is it? Finally I realized you meant the Irish vodka. well, just as I don’t buy Polish wool, I don’t buy Irish vodka. Are these nations trying to upset my stereotypes? My favorite shot is currently Don Julio Anejo. I also like “Is that your nose, or is your face eating a banana?” as for movies I’ll have to give that some thought.

  3. I’ve been thinking about this since your post came up, John. Gio’s probably right that we shouldn’t clog one thread, but maybe bump such images up to more central places on the blog, more frequently.

    Michael’s also right about Irish vodka.

    But despite Gio’s wisdom, I spent too much time pondering shots (the mirrored Jonathan Pryce seeming to struggle with himself in Brazil? some perfect fourth-wall-disrupting glare from Oliver Hardy? Ethan standing silhouetted in the small bright rectangle outside the darkened interior at Searchers‘ end?)… And I’m throwing up this one less for its standalone relation to the film or to filmmaking than for how it illustrates what I love about great compositions.

    Oldboy

    Certainly there’s much love to be lavished on the sense of texture in this one shot–texture in every sense of the word, but most literally in the waterstained fractal complexity of the walls surrounding, trapping, defining the characters.

    But it’s more than this film, or its thematics. I sink into Oldboy, get lost in the sense of depths, the tension between a sense of constraint and the liberating rush of such elaborate aesthetic order. I see a gorgeous shot and it feels rigidly defined and yet, paradoxically, I feel unencumbered, freed to slide along the wall, away from the “point” to find my own sense of order. I’ve mentioned before my love of films about the impossibility of escape, and Oldboy is a distilled gut-punch of such plotting. I think my love of the beautiful composition is akin to my delight in such overdetermined narrative closure: I find an aesthetically baroque object–something rigrously ordered and controlled–a vehicle for my own imaginative escape. Engaged by the clean geometry of sightlines, the stark contrast of man looking painfully up and woman looking painfully down, the sense of the visual/narrative object as a closed box heightens my own engagement with its indeterminancies….

    Vague, but true. Don’t ask me to do more work explaining. It’s the lord’s day.

  4. There’s a website I’ve followed for years now which posts one image from a movie and one song every day. Plus they don’t tell you what movie it’s from, though sometimes someone does in the comments. The juxtaposition between song and image is sometimes funny, ironic, perfect, or seemingly unconnected whatsoever.

    I love this website.

    Here’s one minus the MP3 (only cuz I don’t want to hotlink to their big file – bad form.)

    You know this one?

    Check em out daily here:

    http://x818.blogspot.com

  8. I have never had the ability to embed links or images, or any code at all, in the comment box. I only get the visual editor if I create a new thread. But perhaps that is a deliberate denial of access…

  9. When reynolds mentioned the final shot of The Searchers, I began to think about all the wonderful shots that one finds in a truly great Western. This shot is from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). After a botched attempt to get the upper hand on Billy in a standoff, Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) accepts the inevitable. So where does a man go to die? I don’t know what more I can say about this image (which I’ll have to figure out how to embed), except that Peckinpah gives us the ritualization of the moment of death and finds in it extraordinary grace and beauty.

    http://www.cofc.edu/~brunsj/peckinpah.htm

  10. chris, everyone gets only the plain text editor in the comment box. the thing to do is to post a comment and then click on “edit this”. the edit window is the rich editor with all the tags.

    john, try linking to the image that’s now on your cofc page. many sites prohibit “hot linking” (other sites displaying images or other files hosted on their servers) to prevent bandwidth “theft”.

  11. see how nice it would be if we had one image per post? i could now talk about Marnie and have it make sense. cuz, upon seeing john’s picture and reading his descriptions of it, i decided to watch the movie, and i just finished it, and i would very much like to know why it is considered one of hitchcock’s weakest (read it somewhere. maybe john himself says it). me, i thought it was great. its use of psychoanalysis, for one, and the embracing of the theory of childhood trauma (which is much discredited now, and already became such soon in freud’s own time, and freud himself repudiated. but also the intense critiquing of the violence of the husband/analyst/healer. and the non-resolution at the end, “i don’t want to go to jail, i want to be with you.” cool stuff.

    i also had trouble some time ago posting a pic (my cat, reynold’s dog). arnab attributed it to the italian soccer team, but my code, which was identical to his, would not yield the picture. arnab said it had something to do with the set up of my browser. anyway, there you have it. marnie, good film. beautifully shot. beautifully written. sinister as hell.

  12. John, I love that shot. It literally brings me to tears, and has done so several times viewing after viewing. It blew me away even when I saw just the scene out of context, before ever having seen the movie, when it was excerpted in the Z Channel doc.

    But in this case, I think that it’s impossible to ignore the song – Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Here’s a song that for years was utterly awful to me. An easy cover done, redone, and done to death by bloated bands like Guns N Roses, The Dead, Clapton, and Avril Lavigne. Frankly, I didn’t even ever care for Dylan’s version of it.

    But when I finally saw it put back into the moment it was originally made for – well, it’s not only one of my favorite shots, but one of my favorite moments of music in a movie.

  13. By the way, I can’t help playing the game: Of the three shots I posted, two are fairly easy to recognize if you’ve seen the films, but the first – of the feet – anyone recognize it?

  14. I figured it was a teen film, and was thinking about recent stuff–but the image seems older (color tone)–Animal House? Fast Times? Or it’s a fetish flick: Feets, Don’t Fail Me Now!

  16. Arnab, I deleted a line from my comment (“well, let’s try this”) and WordPress took the image with it. WTF??? Can you replace it?

    and if nobody minds, I’d like to nuke the test post, as well as any unnecessary comments in this thread (like this one).

  17. that’s weird, and would suggest that it is somehow permissions related. i.e it won’t accept an image tag in a comment when posted from your account. yet you have the exact same permissions as mauer. anyway, let’s keep the thread clear of all this, as you say. i’ll try to sort it out over the weekend.

  20. It looks like the Nevver.Daily site (see Mauer’s comment #4) has stopped functioning. A pity. I checked it, and enjoyed it, every day.

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