THE OBJECT OF NEW EMOTIONS
From object to symbol to metaphor. Film’s hidden protagonist.
‘Persona’ by Ingmar Bergman, 1966
Film has the unique ability to animate the material world and use its abstractions to evoke new emotions. Angle, cut, focus, scale - the architecture of a scene serves as a vessel to place us in the vicinity of feelings we know and the alienation of the new we are about to experience. Early in ‘La Notte’, Michelangelo Antonioni sets a stage that establishes feelings of disenchantment by juxtaposing the protagonists’ urge to break their paralysis with brutal angles of Milan’s modern cityscape.
‘La Notte’ by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961
The magnificent ‘Pauline at the Beach’ by Éric Rohmer uses subtle identifiers to have the viewer co-discover the intimate, first time experiences of a teenager’s coming of age. The singular object of an ordinary garden gate serves as a device to separate Pauline’s summer vacation adventure from the rest of the world. Only once it closes at the end of the film, our characters’ realizations become clear and their intimate puzzles are solved, and with that our shared journey comes to an end.
‘Pauline at the Beach’, Éric Rohmer, 1983
Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’ uses focused close-ups and blurry portraiture to objectify the film’s characters’ emotional instability, and Wong Kar-wai’s ‘Chunking Express’ explores love’s awkward ambiguities through details like time-stamps, disguises, and misplacement. The sea, sculpture, and empirical structures emotionally frame love and tragedy in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’.
Clockwise from top left: ‘Chunking Express’ by Wong Kar-wai, 1994; ‘Persona’ by Ingmar Bergman, 1966; ‘Le Mepris’ by Jean Luc Godard, 1963
In Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece ‘Suspiria’, colors, particularly red, take centerstage and drown the story in a surreal, foreboding atmosphere. Much like the works of James Turrell or Brain Eno, light is used as an alone standing device and not just set design. Color takes on a role, turns into a character, much like a halo or guide that follows the protagonist in the story. As the film proceeds, we start to identify with red and we come to live inside of it too, transferring a feeling of unease to us, and through that elevating the film’s provocation of horror.
‘Susperia’, Dario Argento, 1977
In Tom Ford’s haunting ‘A Single Man’, we are able to sense the intensity of our protagonist’s memories and reflections through an array of vignettes of juxtapositions that use objects and short scenes to draw us in.‘Woman in the Dunes’ by Hiroshi Teshigahara takes a similar effect to the ultimate level. Physical and metaphysical realities become indistinguishable in a labyrinth of the senses.
L to R: ‘A Single Man’, Tom Ford, 2009; ‘Woman in the Dunes’, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964