I was talking to a friend today, and they mentioned that they enjoy finding out about other people’s visual language, or exploring their visual libraries; it’s interesting, looking at what people notice, they said. What do you enjoy looking at, and why do you seek it—what does it say about what you appreciate?
For them, they enjoy the look of the crowded, the ‘aggressive use of negative space’. They showed me pictures of the everyday that had stood out to them—an old concrete building adorned with the various add-ons from decades of existence, the deep blue tiles of an MTR station, the smears of light in a dark room, a lone microphone in the foreground.
They talked me through their collection; I began to realize why they wanted to get to know people through this medium. I’m not in the habit of understanding things visually, and I don’t have the same practice in talking about what catches my eye—I don’t necessarily mean beautiful, because I’m not always drawn to things that are beautiful, and to say I think something is interesting is too vague. ‘Worthy of attention’ might be a good descriptor, but it attaches too much in the way of value. The alleyway that I stopped to take a picture of isn’t valuable, but it draws me in, even if for a minute.
So what’s in my visual library, then?
The latest entries come from ‘The Night of the Hunter’, a 1955 film which has been knocking around in my mind for a few weeks. It helped that I watched it alone, late at night, and that it affected me in a way I hadn’t anticipated; of course it did, or else it wouldn’t have endured for seventy years, but I was still surprised.
‘The Night of the Hunter’ is the story of a preacher that is also a serial killer—he marries himself into a grieving family, made up of a recently-widowed mother and her two children, a son and a daughter. They all have names, but you have the feeling that it doesn’t really matter; they’re recognizable by their roles in the story—it’s important to know that there is a villain who terrorizes innocent children, and that eventually a hero enters the story to save them.
The preacher is trying to find a stash of money that he knows has been hidden somewhere near this family; no one except the brother can see what’s happening, because everyone is too enthralled by the preacher’s charisma. As a film, it’s so visually striking that there are whole essays out there that examine its stark, unreal aesthetics; the director (Charles Laughton) and cinematographer (Stanley Cortez) didn’t chase verisimilitude, and it’s all the better for it.
‘The Night of the Hunter’ also verges on the unreal in its black and white morality—it’s not meant to be a portrayal of something that may happen. Instead, it follows the beats of a fairy-tale, with the good characters being good and the evil characters being evil. The side characters, the townspeople, aren’t people as much as a symbol of the themes that the film wanted to explore.
There’s only really one ambiguous note in this, and that’s the mother, Willa Harper.
She’s brilliantly played by Shelley Winters; she’s fragile, and frustratingly human, someone to pity and to judge as she’s taken advantage of by a man that hates her, then swept up in a self-hating fervor that compels her to essentially abandon her children. My first instinct would be to look at Willa through her place in the story and in the dialogue, in how she talks and how other people in the film talk about her, how her actions move the plot and what she symbolizes.
But visually?
There are two scenes that I stored away in my visual library. The first of these scenes takes place in their bedroom, when the preacher decides that he must kill Willa. Their bedroom takes on the appearance of a chapel, bright and symmetrical, and it becomes the stage for her murder—in the foreground, the bed that Willa is lying on is almost completely in shadow, but Willa herself is spotlighted; her murderer’s face is in shadow too, but his outstretched arm isn’t. It’s an unsettling act of violence, carefully composed to disrupt.
The second image is probably one of the most famous from the film. We are shown the aftermath of the killing—the camera pans across an underwater scene, the lake where the preacher has dumped Willa’s corpse, tied to her car. She’s sat upright, still in her white nightgown, and her long hair drifts in the water, moving just like the plants that surround her; her hair and the weeds are the only things in motion. The use of negative space makes the scene loom large—can an image echo? I think this one does.
If I had only seen them, without watching the whole film, I think they would’ve still made an impression—I’m not sure what it means, that these two scenes have entered my visual library. I think that it means I’m fascinated by discord, and that in the absence of color, I’m struck by light. Beyond that, I don’t know. If I keep at it, maybe I’ll find out.