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. The opening credits appear as 135 roll negatives on a roller transfer inside a minilab. The names appear, a light appears from behind, and the story- which takes the form of a succession of images on a film roll - is assembled in metaphor. The light pouring through the negatives is a recurring theme in the One Hour Photo, though I'm slightly puzzled by what it signifies, other than changing modes - maybe markers between the three acts.
So there are already clever photography-themed gestures and riddles in the credits, when all you have seen is some type with background music. It is tempting to give a play-by-play account of the whole thing - it is such delightful puzzle to pick apart; but that wouldn't be very informative. I'll just describe the first scene to give you the flavor.
The opening shot is a big, imposing camera sitting atop a computer in a Kubrick-spaceship-style interior. It sits there, unmoving, as ominous music plays. There is a shutter release visible on the camera, but it stands there by itself; this is a movie about the camera, not one of its operators. Finally it flashes and the digital image of the hero scans onto the screen in horizontal strips; by the end of the movie it will become apparent that this signifies the end of the hero's usefulness in the outside world.
It immediately becomes clear that this is happening in a police station - the hero is getting booked. After turning for a profile shot, the police photographer, operating the camera via computer remote, delivers a line that is a characteristic double entendre, "That's it, sir, you're done. Please follow the orange line." Orange is one of the many color themes in the movie; it stands for a chain of causation, and is found everywhere throughout the movie from an interrogation room chair to a beautiful woman's lips. The detective in the first scene asks the hero what Will Yorkin (anti-hero/victim) did to upset him - what did he do to provoke all of this? - and the movie is off to a running start, recalling the events from the hero's perspective.
Before I further extol this film as an arty masterpiece, I should point out that it has a fantastic sense of humor. I present as evidence the names of the characters and places in the film. First of all, the hero is named Seymour Parrish, but he goes by the nickname Sy. Seymour is an obvious homonym for ""see more"", but the nickname is a little deeper. Psi is the name of a psychological theory about how cognition and emotion interface with the outside world and are regulated by an emotive agent; the hero's name seems to indicate that his interface is broken, ("Psi perish"), and this is reinforced by the broken-viewing-glass cliche so familiar in thriller movies - in this case the windshield of his car. The word Psi is also applied to parapsychological ideas, both paranormal perception and action. Supernatural action - telekinesis - barely qualifies as a metaphor in the case of the photographic themes in this movie. The hero inflicts violence on people with his camera; in the most extreme case there isn't even any film in the camera - he brings a grown man and his mistress to tears and convulsions by simply making them believe he is photographing them - and Sy's photography has far-reaching consequences. There is also a strong allusion to paranormal perception in the movie - a scene in which a mother and child "send good thoughts" to Sy, which I can only assume is included solely for the sake of exhaustive study of the hero's name. This last idea is not very compelling for people one the lookout for all things photographic, but the fact that it is ambiguous - and that it prompts you to consider what is wrong with general beliefs about photography - makes it a winner in my book. The final significance I came up with for the hero's name is the appearance of the Greek character Psi: it looks like a pitchfork. Seymour was a born visual artist - he was born to see more - but he has become Psi, an icon of the devil, because he has been foreshortened by childhood events we only learn about at the very end of the movie. That's just one name in the movie with a very playful sense of humor. Consider these others:
- Yoshi Araki
- Maya Burson
- Edgerton Hotel
- Mrs. Von Unwerth
- Mr. Siskind
- Detective James Van Der Zee
- Detective Paul Outerbridge
- Even the names of the actors cited on the IMDB page are so apt and funny that they can not be real:
- Robert Clotworthy ... Eye Surgeon
- Jim Rash ... Amateur Porn Guy
- When Sy walks out at the end of his last day of work at Sav-Mart, discovering a big, scary knife that helps to send him on an artistically suicidal mission to execute his masterpiece, he exits via aisle 2b.
The family that Sy most admires is always adorned with a deep, rich collection of perfectly harmonious colors. The wife, who complains of being emotionally neglected by the husband, is colored brown - the most desaturated form of red - but it is a deep, luscious brown, which, though technically desaturated, is still generally perceived as a rich color. Who but visual artists - knee deep in camera histograms and Photoshop - would ever pick up on that? I swear this movie was made for photographers only; it basically gives the finger to anyone who can't follow along - there isn't a lot of help for slowbies. It is apparent reading writeups of this movie in name papers that many reviewers missed most of this movie. Maybe the director explains all this stuff on the DVD commentary - don't know, I didn't look for one.
Another recurring color theme is the sickly green glow of fluorescent light, which signifies Sy's loneliness. This is absent in the conspicuously antiseptic, fluorescent lit Sav-Mart and police station interiors, which ironically would have to be gelled or shot on special film to get a normal white balance - but the ugly green light is present in full force when Sy is driving home. The doorway to his apartment is a thick shower of green light, but once he gets into his apartment the light settles down to a relatively normal warmth; the reason for that change in mindset is one of the most dramatic revelations in the film.
Another, subtler revelation is when Sy's tie becomes suddenly saturated between shots because he perceives that other people are thinking about him, caring about him. There are a number of themes explored in the movie that are really of interest only to photographers and intellectuals who stew over the philosophy of photography. For example, the roles of photography are explored in greater detail than any other movie I know of. The idea of pictures as a door to another world is run through the paces thoroughly and artfully. The technical production of photographs - in the very last seconds of the film age - is explored on all levels, including a very engaging and accurate special effects shot of the inner workings of a sophisticated 135 film point-and-shoot, as well as a montage of film developing and post processing inside a minilab.
Found photographs receive more attention than ever before in a movie, from objets trouves to recontextualized snapshots in a hip gallery type exhibit to phony evidence of a false life; there is even a narrated, rapid fire slideshow of photographs contemplating the roles of pictures - it hardly even relates to the plot. Privacy as it relates to photography is also an obvious theme.
There are other delights for photographers viewing this movie - and probably only for photographers. For example, when Sy is at a low point, he is simultaneously refreshed and impelled toward his tragic fate by the photographs of a little boy, which, it is revealed, are amazingly good renditions of the William Eggleston style. At the very end of the movie we first see Sy's own photographs - not counting the ones he took with obvious ill intent - which are similar but remarkably different in one important aspect from the child's exuberantly colorful art. The dog of the family that Sy admires is from the only breed explicitly associated with art photography [of William Wegman]: a weimeraner.
There is an endless string of photography in-jokes, like a gorgeous woman's inner character suggested by her choice of a Leica camera and Fuji Reala. I kinda suspect that even the title of the film refers to the nature of photography, that the film is itself a kind of One Hour Photo - a moving picture - that lasts a little over an hour and is a segment of Sy's life; a beautifully composed record of a surface that reveals much but conceals more, leaving the viewer to draw his own conclusions.
The most amazing thing about One Hour Photo is that the basic plot as a "psychological thriller" - the simplest level on which the film can be enjoyed - calls on the viewer to consider the nature of photographs. I mean that I don't think you can even understand what has happened, the simple details of the events, without thinking about how being photographed can harm a person. It's not a hard idea to digest, but it is an idea, which is not typically welcome in a big Hollywood movie. I suspect that's why this film was banished to the DVD bargain bins on a shelf below M. Night Shyamalan "classics".
I guess this whole series of blog posts is really a review of the Aperture article extolling Rear Window as a great movie on the meta level of photography. I suspect that Rear Window never was about photography, except as a metaphor for something else.
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