< Back to front page Text size – +

Making mental movies

Print | Comments () Posted by Mark Feeney August 12, 2010 08:34 AM

E-mail

The photograph at left comes from an extremely interesting exhibition at, of all places, Harvard Business School. The show, which runs through Oct. 9, has a real mouthful of a name, "The High Art of Photographic Advertising: The 1934 National Alliance of Art and Industry Exhibition." It has nothing to do with the movies, per se, though a fair number of the photographs in it look as though they could be stills from screwball comedies. Partly that's because we've been schooled to think that glamorously dressed, well-off people from the '30s look like refugees from an RKO sound stage. Partly it's because, then no less than now, the look of advertising fed off the look of movies, and vice versa. The two had, and have, a hand-and-glove visual relationship -- or, in this case, hand and elbow-length glove.

This photograph is different. It does look like a movie still, and from a movie you'd definitely want to see. The mood, though, is anything but screwball. The image has a moneyed atmosphere, all right, but there lurks within it an unshakable sense of mystery, even menace. Why are those two darkly dressed women looking off behind and to the side? What about the not-quite-blank expression on the driver's face -- and is he looking at the same thing the ladies are? A greater fascination has to do with to a very subtle (and completely unintentional) bit of cognitive dissonance. The car and fashions and hair styles clearly belong to the mid-'30s (the photo is dated c. 1934). Yet the very dramatic, high-contrast lighting is pure noir. You'd think John Alton was responsible for the set-up. Only Alton was still working in Argentina then, and Hollywood wouldn't start using such lighting schemes for another dozen years. So there's no way this image could be from any existing movie, yet it looks and feels and resonates so much like a movie we make it part of one in our heads.

This is how Hollywood has changed how we see the world -- or at least changed it for those of us who've seen too many movies (which is also to say never enough movies). Hearing a snatch of music or reading a stray paragraph, we don't start composing the rest of the song or working out a novel's plot in our heads. Glimpse the right image, though, and a mental movie can emerge unbidden. It's a collaboration between our imagination and years of movie-watching experience. That woman on the left looks a bit like Carole Lombard, don't you think? Or maybe even Garbo? Forget period, if you like, and go for Gwyneth Paltrow (she needs something to do these days other than picking up after Tony Stark). Whoever. Whatever. You get to choose. It's your head, after all, and your movie.