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  • Loose Ends:The Stuff That Movies Are Made of
  • Rashna Wadia Richards (bio)

One might write: "The whirring blades of the electric fan caused the window curtains to flutter. The man seated at the massive desk finished his momentous letter, sealed it, and hastened out to post it." The whirring fan and the fluttering curtain give motion only—the man's writing the letter and taking it out to post provides action. It is of action that photoplays are wrought.

Frederick Palmer, Technique of the Photoplay

Guided by film, then, we approach, if at all, ideas no longer on highways leading through the void but on paths that wind through the thicket of things.

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film

A Telephone-Bell Rings in Darkness . . .

Out of the fading dust emerge the ghostly paraphernalia of classic noir. The dirt trail kicked up by a dead body tumbling down the hillside is still discernible when the exterior night shot of Miles Archer's murder dissolves to an interior shot of a cluttered bedside table. With only partial lighting from the back and left of the frame, the objects slowly materialize in silhouette: an old stand-up telephone, a pouch of tobacco, a dusty ashtray, an alarm clock balanced on the edge of a book, a newspaper turned to the racing section. Curtains sway from the night breeze in the background, while in the foreground a fumbling hand reaches into the frame to grab the ringing telephone. Even after the telephone is removed, for almost thirty seconds, the camera does not move. Although a slight pan could capture the conversation that will propel narrative action—because "when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it"—it stays [End Page 83] focused on the bedside composition, as if transfixed by a few charmed objects. Bogart's voice is heard off-screen: "Hello. . . . Yeah, speaking. . . . Miles Archer dead? . . . Where? . . . Bush and Stockton? . . . Uh. . . . Fifteen Minutes. Thanks." After he hangs up, the camera pans right gradually to accommodate the star's profile in the frame; he replaces the telephone and turns on a lamp, illuminating the entire shot. Now the objects resume their diegetic function: the alarm clock establishes the time of night, 2:05 am; Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America verifies Spade's status as a private eye; the sack of Bull Durham authenticates his hardboiled character. Action regains precedence over ambience, and the forward momentum will only cease when his partner's murder has been avenged.1

And yet, for a few seconds, the bedside arrangement in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) interrupts the onward advance of the plot. The moment metonymically represents the distinctive style of 1940s Hollywood—chiefly characterized by what Manny Farber has called "puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture" (61). Like the extreme close-up of a visually enormous coffee cup, which succinctly captures the feeling of paranoiac entrapment in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), this virtual still conjures an intriguing world from the waft of mystery, the whiff of noir.

But the pull of the moment when the telephone rings is not only contextual. There is an immediacy in its appeal. Even though the narrative is ongoing, our attention is riveted on the stuff that movies are made of: buzzing telephones, fluttering curtains, menacing shadows. With its sparse interior setting punctuated by a few key objects, the moment looks like an Edward Hopper painting—Office at Night, for instance, which was painted only a year before the release of The Maltese Falcon.2 Hopper's work enables the viewer to imagine alternative narratives invoked by its captivating objects—like the partially visible piece of paper wedged under a desk in Office at Night—rather than explaining what they mean. As the narrative pauses for a moment, the mysterious stuff of The Maltese Falcon similarly retains its substantive presence in the diegesis, but it also intimates beyond it. Or, as Kristin Thompson suggests in her analysis of cinematic excess, "the function of the material elements of the film is accomplished, but their perceptual interest is by no means exhausted in the process" (492). The...

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