sharon
(sharon)
#1
are evil, but soon finds that he is unable to judge with certainty. The saint
turns out to be a demon doing the devil’s work. It is a fantastic story that
carries within it a reflexive meditation on the differing accounts of time
and mortality at work in the moving and still image. The wild premise
ought to make it an exception in Rossellini’s otherwise soberly realist
œuvre. Even so, cinematic realism is based on a strong faith and rever-
ence for the photographic image as a trace or ‘death mask’ of the subject
before the camera.The Machine for Killing Bad Peopleadheres closely
to this tenet, if only to exaggerate it, rather than put it to work in a
realist aesthetic.^5
Cinema tends to dwell on the photograph as a mute and intransigent
object from the past. Not surprisingly, the types of photograph to which
cinema is attracted are those that already emphasize these qualities on
some level. Police, forensic, news and family-album pictures are the
most obviously ‘cinegenic’. Not all film genres understand photographs
in this way, but it is obvious which ones do: films noir, detective movies,
melodramas, mysteries and histories. If one-fifth of all films noir feature
photographs, it is because so many of the traits of the genre have an
obviously photographic potential (the troublesome and haunting past,
the totemic status of evidence, betrayal, blackmail and so forth).^6 When
photographs have featured in more recent cinema, more often than not
the films are ‘neo-noirs’. Think of the fake childhood photographs given
to the ‘replicant’ cyborgs as tokens of a past they never really had inBlade
Runner(Ridley Scott, 1982 ); or the Polaroid evidence accrued by the hero
inMemento(Christopher Nolan, 2000 ), the idyllic family snaps at the
heart ofOne Hour Photo(Mark Romanek, 2002 ) or the hired killer who
is also a Weegee-like photographer recording his deeds inThe Road to
Perdition(Sam Mendes, 2002 ).
When the policeman in Fritz Lang’sM( 1931 ) holds up to the massed
crowd a studio portrait of a recently murdered young girl, the image
does more than present her likeness. It implies her innocence and igno-
rance of her death. Twenty-five years later, Lang reversed the idea.Beyond
a Reasonable Doubt( 1956 ) shows us how easily crime scene photos can
be faked and that the hero has been framed. Lang’s films demonstrate
the two competing claims made on behalf of the filmed photograph: 97
