14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts 281
tion on a DVD, where it would be possible to switch from the compilation
film with verbal commentary to the filmic examples themselves, as one
might do with footnotes in books (see ill. 36). The Institut National de
l’Audio-visuel, the INA in Paris, produces this kind of works. They show
film material on writers, clips of conversations that were recorded at various
times with that writer. In an appendix, one can select the conversation in its
entirety, just as in a book. In my contributions to a collection of filmic terminology
I would also like to include the film from which I quoted in its entirety
in the appendix. It is always in the interest of the reader to be able to check
whether the quote captures the spirit of the film in general, or indeed what
the relationship between the quotation and the film as a whole is. When reading,
I have often been irritated by examples from films being named, which
indeed do support the argument made in the text, but do nothing else but
localise the argument within film history. Let me elaborate: I personally
would not want my first acquaintance with a film such as Fuller’s Pick up on
South Street to be as an appendix in a text on hands in close-ups. One sometimes
says of books: we read that in school. One must first give the films one
refers to in one’s thoughts their own space.
In Pick up on South Street by Samuel Fuller we see a pickpocket who is
about to steal something from a woman’s handbag in the New York subway.
He only wants money but steals a piece of paper which contains military secrets
as part of a communist spy plot. In the dubbed German version of the
film, the paper has been transformed into the formula for a particular drug.
Two plainclothes police officers who have been following the woman are not
quite sure what has just happened. The man approached the woman and carefully
opened the handbag. The woman reacts to the proximity of the thief as
she might to an erotic advance; she tilts her head back and spreads her lips.
The thief’s hands do something entirely different from that which is expressed
on his face. His face totally conceals the fact that he is committing a crime by
coming so close to a strange woman, an act that is only apparent to the two of
them in the crush of the subway. In the compression of the montage it looks
like the man has opened the woman’s lips with his hands, or as if the opening
of the handbag underscores the opening of the lips, like a musical motif. In this
sense, the woman opened the bag with her lips. What I am getting at here is
that much more is happening than one can tell from the basic structure of the
narrative. This scene is constructed to maximise ambiguity – certainly it suggests
the complicity of the victim, a morally very problematic stance. But it is
essentially true with filmic montage that one is never sure who is in possession
of agency. A chase scene functions in a similar fashion – one always sees it from
alternating perspectives.