Still Life With Telephone

Figure 1.

Opening shot of Illicit (A. Mayo, director, 1931).

Illicit, the 1930 production starring Barbara Stanwyck as Ann, a hopelessly modern woman, opens with this shot—a bizarre, yet appropriate establishing shot for the movie. Rather than zoom into the apartment building from a wide shot of the city, the film opens with this shot displaying a telephone off the hook. The telephone, high-heeled pumps, and cloche mimic the traditional composition of a still-life painting. The “stillness” of the shot becomes readily apparent—a couple has taken the telephone off the hook to enable a moment of respite from the demands of society.

Anxiety over the telephone’s increasing importance in Americans’ daily lives was adroitly exploited by Hollywood—movies of the twenties and thirties frequently emphasized the switchboard operator’s role in inciting narrative dilemmas, while postwar film noir exploited the darker side of the telephone in such films as Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and Call Northside 777 (1947). Popular anxiety over the telephone’s capacity to curtail leisure was captured by an American sociologist’s 1929 lamentation that “[w]e are largely at the mercy of our neighbors, who have facilities for getting at us unknown to the ancient Greeks or even our grandfathers. Thanks to the telephone … our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions” (Fischer, 1992, p. 225). The telephone’s potential for interruption formed the entire premise of the 1933 film I’ve Got Your Number, which opens with a clumsy montage of telephone madness—a shareholder sells his plummeting stocks just in time, a father learns his child has been in an accident but is safe at the hospital, a prisoner is granted a stay of execution, and so forth. An inevitable narrative catalyst, the telephone becomes indispensible to Hollywood narrative—hence the significance of Illicit’s establishing shot.

The disabled telephone establishes the illicit nature of the couple’s relationship. Evading the consequences of bourgeois society, they are momentarily “off the hook.” Their relationship in this pre-Code film is notable for its twist on gender norms. The male desperately wants to marry Ann, but she holds strong to her “theories … that marriage is disastrous to love.” The ensuing plot is predictable enough: Ann’s modern ideas about love and marriage inevitably backfire on her, and by the end of the movie, her “natural” femininity is restored and she assumes her place as a selfless caregiver and homemaker.

The narrative denouement thereby negates the establishing shot’s emphasis on freedom, leisure, and sensual indulgence, in favor of commitment, purpose, and self-discipline. Yet like so many moralistic tales of classic Hollywood, the bulk of the movie indulges the viewer with the scandalous details of the “illicit” relationship, only to censure it in the last few minutes—in effect, restoring the telephone to its functional position and enabling the voice of convention (both narrative and societal) to interrupt with the final word.

But consider the cinematic potentials of leaving the telephone off the hook for the entire movie—precisely the possibility that avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein imagines in the early 1920s, as he develops a theory of photogénie to describe cinema’s unique capacity to defamiliarize the everyday. He writes that true cinematic drama occurs not with a narrative event, but “in the curtain at the window and the handle of the door” (Epstein, 1988, p. 242). Cinema achieves its fullest effect by purposively focusing our attention on familiar objects, rendering them strange and over-ripe with poetic possibilities. He describes the cinema’s magical metamorphosis of the furnishings within a room: “The carpet emits venomous arabesques and the arms of the chair tremble. … One sees nothing as yet, but the tragic crystal which will create the nucleus of the drama has begun to form somewhere. Its ripples spread. Concentric circles. It advances stage by stage” (Epstein, 1988, p. 242). Likewise, the objects within the still from Illicit are alive with possibility. The cord of the inoperative telephone trails...