|
The recurrent maps representing a passage from Hong Kong to San Francisco via Honolulu are nice but just a pretext for this post. I watched the film after reading Roger Leenhardt's 'Eros, the Pen and the Camera', a contribution to the 'Amour' issue of the journal Artsept. It opens on a note of nostalgia: Does anyone remember Tay Garnett? I imagine that from time to time the Cinémathèque puts on his One Way Passage. I would really like to know whether today when, at the beginning of the film, in ‘the biggest bar in the world’, the hero and heroine – God, Kay Francis was beautiful – exchange their first glances, young cinephiles respond to these two crossed close-ups as we did in the days of the Studio des Ursulines, that is, as an overwhelming manifestation of Eros, as the certainty that a beautiful tale of love and death had just begun. It was the golden age of the American screen. Speech had just rid films of all that visual rhetoric, while preserving the image’s potency of dream. In this cinema, love was essentially love at first sight, the predestined couple, fatal attraction, where desire is idealised and passion is absolute, in brief, the incarnation on screen of the old myth of Tristan and Isolde, that Denis de Rougemont has rightly called the major myth of the Western psyche. - Roger Leenhardt, 'L'eros, la plume et la caméra', Artsept 3 (1963), p.37 (my translation) Here are the two close-ups Leenhardt refers to:
The beauty of the incipient tale of love and death is above all that of Kay Francis in close-up - 'mon Dieu! qu'elle était belle':      More beautiful still are the close-ups of embrace:      The most erotic of these is the scene on the beach where William Powell lights Kay's cigarette from his, and then they kiss: The moment ends with first one then the other cigarette discarded, still lit, and a later shot of the two cigarettes, now reduced to ash, tells us that the erotic promise of smoking together has been fulfilled:  Another pair of discarded objects emblematises their relationship, as they take to smashing the glasses from which they have drunk cocktails and putting the stems together on the counter of the bar:       The charge here is more pathos than eros; the film finishes on two glasses smashed on the counter of the bar at which the lovers had made a New Year's Eve rendez-vous, each knowing they would be dead and unable to be there. The glasses break of their own accord and then disappear from view in the final shot: Leenhardt doesn't comment on the film's many close-ups on objects, hands and other details:           The Bressonian quality of some of these inserts may just come from there being a pickpocket among the supporting characters:   Another feature of Garnett's film unconnected to Leenhardt's eros-centred reading is the mobility of the camera in set pieces. To end, as illustration, here is the closing shot (with no sound):  You've got the date, here is the place.    I'm not good at geography. Where is this?  Let's look at the map.  It's in the middle of the Pacific, at a place where there is nothing.    Those are exactly the coordinates of Easter Island.   I'm leaving straightway.  
A different ocean, the Pacific, at the line between North and South. And the two other maps in the film. 
 The only maps in The Birds are those you would expect to find in a schoolroom, alongside all the other usual accoutrements:   For a map of the locations, go to cine-touristic websites such as this:  Or see those provided by the 'Making of...' documentaries in dvd editions:  The film itself provides no map of the area, but does enjoy a map-like birds' eye view of Bodega Bay:  The change in the aspect of the logo from beginning to end may occur with every Universal film at the time, but it seems to correspond to the dark mood at the end of The Birds:   |
