Lucidno
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Harry is on the stairs below Ann with her back turned, who is leaving. The atmosphere is filled with dense fog that covers in clouds the actors alternately. In the places of highest density of clouds in the shot, there as overlappings as, perhaps, the only possible editing transition. Harry is here in the role which is the counterpart of the role in real life. He tries to confess and to establish a personal contact with Ann. He discovers everything that falls into the"personal unconscious", the events from the childhood, animosity towards his father, as well as a life-threatening disease that he barely survived. "Listen! Listen! My name is Harry Caul. Can you hear me? I know you don't know who I am, but I know you. There isn't much to say about myself... I was very sick when I was a boy. I was paralyzed in my left arm and my left leg. I couldn't walk for six months. One doctor said that I'd probably never walk again. My mother used to heal me by placing me in a hot bath. Once, the doorbell rang and she went down to answer it. I started drowning. I could feel the water, it started coming up to my chin, to my nose. When I woke up my body was all greasy from the holy water she put on my body. I remember being too disappointed I survived." {niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=360px} Considering the fact that Harry, in his professional world, identifies himself in the position of the exteriority, that sort of identification leads to the inner conflict with his real mental condition marked by intersubjectivity. In his personal life, Harry is not able to find the support in "another", who would be an extension to his exteriority, which manifests itself in the profession of eavesdropper.{/niftybox} We also see Harry in front of the hotel room number 773, where crime will happen. "When I was five, my father introduced me to a friend of his. For no reason, I hit him in the stomach.." Finally, we see a flashforward of what will ensue in the final sequence. "He'll kill you if he gets a chance...." Then, we "hear" Harry's subconsciousness. "I'm not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder.."
Considering the fact that Harry, in his professional world, identifies himself in the position of the exteriority, that sort of identification leads to the inner conflict with his real mental condition marked by intersubjectivity. In his personal life, Harry is not able to find the support in "another", who would be an extension to his exteriority, which manifests itself in the profession of eavesdropper. The presence of all these visual motifs ( stairs, smoke, the symbolism of numbers ) points to a possible inspiration from the early work of Slavko Vorkapic - The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra (1927.). e/Final sequence Anticipating the place where the crime will happen, Harry comes to an adjacent hotel room with the intention to reveal the actual turn of events. Faced with the use of various expressive means of film language, we experience the full range of Harry's states - from professional curiosity to a nervous breakdown. This sequence can be analytically divided into three segments : 1. The beginning of the plot is edited linearly, according to the content that is close to the work process. Harry prepares equipment for eavesdropping in order to record auditive course of a possible outcome from the adjacent room. We follow the course of actions almost continuously (cut-away shots of adjacent terraces and photo wallpapers as ellipses ) to the shot in which we hear a few replicas accidentally from the ongoing argument. He goes out onto the terrace and attends the scene of the violence seen through the blurred glass. At that point, continuity is disrupted (though a series of jump cuts) ) in which Harry loses control of himself for the first time. In the complete contrast to his vocation, he tries to isolate himself from the sound by putting his pillow on ears in search of silence. The stylistic noticeable heritage of "godardian" aesthetics of discontinuity-jump cuts completely corresponds to the protagonist's emotional state, his "split personality", and to the expression that receives its exterior manifestation for the first time, which makes a counterpoint to the earlier "underplayed" acting style of Gene Hackman. {niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=360px} The stylistic noticeable heritage of "godardian" aesthetics of discontinuity-jump cuts completely corresponds to the protagonist's emotional state, his "split personality", and to the expression that receives its exterior manifestation for the first time, which makes a counterpoint to the earlier "underplayed" acting style of Gene Hackman.{/niftybox} |
2. The scene begins with svenk from tv screen to medium close-up of Harry Caul, which has a function of montage of analogy in the series of following shots. These are details from the screen of shot inserts from animated movie The Flinstones, several Harry's close-ups on the bed, shots of the hovering curtain. The sound comes from TV and motivates the protagonist to the next action, with a series of replicas taken from the content and with appellate message, from the Fred Flinstone's monologue : "How can she be so calm when she knows what I'm going through? My wife is in the hospital and she is having a baby. I don't know what to do. " Thanks to the use of trivia and pop – artistic expressive means and editing of complementary angles of Harry with the characters from the animated movie, we can forebode the denouement in the next scene. Motivation for the protagonist's action gets an instinctive character. 3. Harry's entrance in the room 773 begins at a slow pace and represents an introduction to the surreal scene in the bathroom. Follows the shot, interesting by its editing process – montage-within-th-shot, which is one of the two examples of this type in the contemporary film. After flushing, from the toilet begins to flow red liquid similar to blood, associatively a very clear symbol. The brutality of the scene is emphasized by repeating the last shot – detail of the toilet hole to which the camera approaches forth with slow zoom, from which the now gushing liquid is threatening to flood the entire floor of the hotel. This surreal visual motive has been varied in several movies lately (ex. Barton Fink by Coen brothers (1991.) and Bound by bother and sister Wachowski (1996.) f/Final sequence 1. Coming back to the scene of the event, Harry attends a drama turnover in which the potential executor becomes a victim. Within this sequence we see a series of flashbacks that reveal relationships between the protagonists that we have not seen so far and which resulted in murder. A psychedelic effect, as in the previous sequence, is accentuated by the subliminal editing as well as by the use of electronic atonal music that varies a simple motive. Particularly interesting is the relationship between the last shot in the scene in front of the hotel and the next scene – it is the shot of the ensanguined body of Harry's employer who became a victim of collective conspiracy – this shot is juxtaposed with the medium shot of Harry Caul who plays saxophone along music matrix (in playback) in his apartment and has the nature of the associative connection with the following shot. 2. The film's ending arguably represents a cyclic return to the beginning. It is a condensed sequence of the work process in which Harry becomes self-destructive character. He directs all his professional talent towards finding a bug in his own environment and we, guided by the principle of entropy, witness a "regression" of one perfect content-analyst to a man who reacts by a basic instinct for self-preservation. With an already impaired integrity, he physically demolishes the entire apartment and stays alone with the saxophone entangled in an "ear membrane". This scene is deprived of any syncopations in a rhythmic sense; in the editing sense, it reflects the state of a paranoid mind that, by being involved in an ethically suspicious business, came to the point of indifference, internalizing his action towards self-introspection. In this way, the barrier that he himself set between the private/public, the personal and the collective crumbles for the first time. Harry, in an ironic twist, returns to the state of a silent harmony, in which his identity remains unimpaired. He becomes the victim of a superior ear that goes beyond his own ability. This is strengthened by the shot in which Harry finally, after the demolition of his own apartment, finds the figure of the Virgin Mary, which is the memory of his mother. Smashing it, he finally and symbolically breaks up with his past, through paranoia that everything in his surroundings is the source of an invisible eavesdropper. This thought is materialized with the sound of a voice from the telephone headset: "We'll be listening to you." The last shot is made with the strongly accentuated high angle in a total suggesting the relativity of exteriority and interiority of a personality often leaning more, due to the kind of work, towards the private and even the intimate. Now, he is the one who is under the surveillance from the outside and that position upsets him. "Thus, the only mistake of Harry's is shown in the form of his persistent refusal to accept the relativity of auditive domination of a discourse, which can be applied to every subject." References : ● American film now; James Monaco, Oxford University press, 1979. Igor Toholj |
