Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Richards, Rashna Wadia

Titel

Loose Ends: The Stuff That Movies Are Made of

Ist Teil von

• The Arizona quarterly, 2007-12, Vol.63 (4), p.83-118

Ort / Verlag

Tucson: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• With only partial lighting from the back and left of the frame, the objects slowly materialize in silhouette: an old standup telephone, a pouch of tobacco, a dusty ashtray, an alarm clock balanced on the edge of a book, a newspaper turned to the racing section. Now the objects resume their diegetic function: the alarm clock establishes the time of night, 2:05 am; Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America verifies Spade's status as a private eye; the sack of Bull Durham authenticates his hardboiled character. With its sparse interior setting punctuated by a few key objects, the moment looks like an Edward Hopper painting-Office at Night, for instance, which was painted only a year before the release of The Maltese Falcon.2 Hopper's work enables the viewer to imagine alternative narratives invoked by its captivating objects-like the partially visible piece of paper wedged under a desk in Office at Night-rather than explaining what they mean.