Rear Window

Rear Window is one of the most celebrated movies dealing with the nature of photography, though it was decades too late to be the first, and decades too early to be informed by the disciplined, codified philosophy of photography. It is nowhere near being the most profound comment on photography in the history of cinema, but it remains a landmark for all the normally cited reasons: it was the last big movie-about-photography made when photography was still the dominant medium in consumer culture (1954), it is a masterpiece of set design and cinematography, the composer's piece that develops throughout the film is novel, Grace Kelly was gorgeous, and it remains a sturdy survey of modern courtship.

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One Hour Photo

This movie is very much in the Kubrick universe in the way that it explores a single theme - in this case the roles of photography in the average Joe's life - in a stylized reality. I think this film excels anything by Kubrick, however, because of its elegant simplicity, its depth of coverage on a difficult and specialized subject - obviously of great personal interest to the filmmaker - and its intellectual honesty.

One Hour Photo is a great film. The fact that it was written off as a mere psychological thriller is probably a clue as to why nobody with the talent bothers to make movies like this.

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Memento

The current issue of Aperture includes an article called "Re-Viewing Rear Window" by David Campany, in which he gives a few thoughts on what the Hitchcock classic movie means to photography today. In the article he casually mentions two other movies, both from the new century, in which photography is placed historically by now-quaint references to antique photographic technology. So of course I watched "Rear Window" again for the first time since I was a teenager and it was better than ever. Robert Burks was a killer photographer, and Grace Kelly was painfully gorgeous. But it didn't seem to have much depth in its commentary on the nature of photography.

Fast forward to the next entry in the suggested para-photography film festival, "Memento", which the Aperture article mentions as a mere curiosity for its use of Polaroid 600 film as a plot device at the time when this format first started to wane noticeably toward extinction. In my opinion, this movie contains much more probing inquiry into the nature of photography than the celebrated "Rear Window." It seems only natural that a movie with a quarter of century to chew on the philosophy of photography would do better than a movie that predates the progenitor of the field, Susan Sontag's On Photography.

Memento is the story of a Leonard Shelby, a former insurance claims investigator who, as a consequence of a home invasion in which he sustained a severe head trauma, is not able to form any new memories since the time of his injury. The events depicted in the movie's timeline span a few days; it is uncertain how long after his head trauma these events are unfolding, or ultimately, how many times he has already gone through a similar series of events.

Memento touches on the predatory nature of photography. First of all, the hero wears his Polaroid instant camera like shoulder-holstered gun, over his shoulder under his jacket. Also significant is the way that he uses his camera as his primary tool in hunting his quarry, the man he thinks murdered his wife. And, intersecting with other themes, the violence he inflicts on others doesn't become real to him until he photographs the aftermath of that violence.

This leads to another theme that was first introduced [AFAIK] in Sontag's On Photography: photography is the perfection of Surrealism. The hero of Memento lives in a parallel world constructed from his Polaroid photographs. He even has a map of this world over the bed in his noir-prescribed cheap motel room, with lines and arrows making the associations that his broken memory cannot. The nature of the photographs themselves are explored at a level of detail that cinema cannot usually manage. Leonard repeatedly says - and his saying is recited back to him - that he likes to look people in the eye when he talks to them. He doesn't do well on the phone. He asks the standard noir femme fatale, Natalie, to remove her sunglasses so he can... [gestures a connection between his eyes and hers].

Because of his inability to form new memories, when he meets someone he is forced to consult his stack of Polaroids and their captions - he needs to place them as friend of foe - and that methodology is extremely frustrating to him. This is a beautifully elegant illustration of photography's maddening, seductive ability to depict the surface of anything in gorgeous, exhaustive detail - but only the surface. I am reminded of a quote from Philip-Lorca diCorcia, from the BBC television series The Genius of Photography: "There is such a thing as photographic truth, but the truth is rarely relevant to the specifics of the image... that person is probably not what you think they're like, but what you think they're like is probably true - just not about them."

Pictures suggest things about people, but not necessarily their quiddity, and never enough. There is no number of portraits - snapshot or Avedon - that can reveal the person to you half as much as a good, alcohol-assisted conversation spanning ten minutes. But photos can illustrate a commentary point with greater economy than words. For example, the photo of Teddy, the hero's friend with dubious motives, shows him with his screwed up reflexively, as anxiously anticipating some consequence. It is about the time that this photo is taken that Teddy's standing as a friend is coming into serious question, and this informs the Polaroid portrait of Teddy that has been shown throughout the movie.

The way a back story influences a photograph really comes into play on another level with the portrait of Natalie. Her picture shows her form mostly in shadow, backlit by two windows. She is moving away from the big, warm-looking window toward a tiny window in sections that has a sharp point at the top - it does not look at all friendly. The design of the photograph is highly suggestive that she is moving - leading Leonard - toward some confinement or violence, or both. However, the meaning of the picture's composition changes when we later see the photo being taken, and it is seen that the small window is actually on the front door of Natalie's house, which is standing open into the front room - she is moving/coaxing toward an open door, escaping. The captions on her Polaroid are similarly changing in context: one caption is written first, "Don't trust her," which is later scratched out and replaced with "She has lost someone, too. She will help you out of pity." It turns out that both captions are based on ill-advised misreadings of the surface depicted in the photo.

Much is made of Leonard's memory of his dead wife. In a scene where the noir woman prods him to remember his wife, he is more alive - more in tune with and in command of the world, albeit a distant world - than any other time in the movie. He doesn't carry a photo of her, which underscores this inadequacy of pictures to capture an essence in time. He does carry some mementos from their life together, including a hair brush, a brasserie, a bedside clock, and a book. In a flashback he has a conversation with his wife about why she is reading the same book again, for the umpteenth time, for which she offers simply, "I enjoy it." She likes going over and over a beloved story, just as Leonard is doing by recalling that conversation. In the flashback, the cover has fallen off the pedestrian paperback book, supposedly from overuse, but as a cinematic device it serves to make the story in the book - the beloved memory that is enjoyable to relive again and again - contrast all the more starkly with photographs. The whole reason for the wife to exist on the plot level is to drive the hero's motives; but the reason for the wife to exist on the level of themes is to illustrate that photographs have little interface with real memory.

Memento does a good job of dramatizing/illustrating the way in which photographs serve to at first fix the memory of a moment, then to replace it. Throughout the story Leonard is faced with the problem of trying in vain to recall the actual memories for which his photos are supposed to stand as placeholders. The best authoritative quote I can think of on this subject is from Peter Galassi, New York MOMA's curator of photography: "That picture [LBJ being sworn in aboard Air Force One] belongs to the class of pictures that now stands for the event. The event is long gone. The whole process of discovering what had happened and learning what was going to happen next - that's all passed into history now. The picture stands as a kind of emblem - almost an abstraction that stands for that time."

In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Memento screenwriter Christopher Nolan gave an additional insight to how this phenomenon played out within the universe of the movie. Even the audience, taking in all this criticism of photography, when asked at the end of the film to replace what they have learned about Teddy from the photograph that the now-suspect hero has both taken and captioned, were unwilling to let go of the explicitly false memory presented in that photo in exchange for what was happening in the real world of the film: "Audiences seem very unwilling to believe the stuff that Teddy [Pantoliano] says at the end – and yet why? I think it’s because people have spent the entire film looking at Leonard’s photograph of Teddy, with the caption: 'Don’t believe his lies.' That image really stays in people’s heads, and they still prefer to trust that image even after we make it very clear that Leonard’s visual recollection is completely questionable. It was quite surprising, and it wasn’t planned."

Because he builds his reality up from photographs, Leonard comes to represent photography. It is a sobering - but accurate - indictment of photography that he doesn't ascribe much importance to his current state of being. When he is asked why it matters whether he avenges his wife's murder, he responds, "Just because there are things I don't remember doesn't make my actions meaningless." I.e. not being photographed doesn't drain events of meaning. He adds to this conversation the fact that he can easily photograph the results of the murder he will commit and then he will remember.

This movie uses photography's familiar monochrome/color dichotomy as a storytelling effect. The famous chronology of the film is not in continuous sequential order; there are two segments of a single timeline unfolding in parallel. The monochrome scenes happen chronologically before the pivotal event that sets the plot of the movie in motion, while the color scenes are presented starting with the conclusion of the plot, working backward in time to the pivotal event. The monochrome scenes are more or less narration - Leonard's extremely skewed perspective. His view is traditionally photographic - monochrome. The events in color offer a more objective view, and ironically, are truer to noir tradition, in which the viewer is led on a treasure hunt of motives and allegiances. As Stephen Shore suggests in The Nature of Photographs, because color pictures look more like the real world, there is less of a barrier for the viewer to enter the world of the photograph. The two timelines intersect as one of Leonard's Polaroids is developing, becoming visible at a rare moment of clarity during which he understands - just for a moment - that he has spent years of his life doing evil. The action fades from monochrome to color in a single shot. He then drives off into the future we have just watched, drawing conclusions he will obviously soon forget.

Ultimately Leonard is a type for the contemporary American, living in a world of contextless images. He is hostile toward text, in fact has become incapable of processing any complex train of thought on a subject because of the nature of his photographic world. Leonard's world - ironically set forth in a movie - is a brilliantly drawn dystopia as set forth in doomsayer tomes like Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Unreality Industry.

When I first saw this movie I was all geeked up about it. I watched it twice so I could put together the chronology and plot. It resonated with me and with just about everyone I interacted with regularly at the time. Everyone was talking about it. I suppose it is a validation of the movie's most abstract theme that now Memento is all but forgotten.

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