Content
[97]
At the beginning of the third act of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 film The Black Cat, the camera fades in to an ominous sky behind a rugged mountain range. It is a cloudy windswept night—“the dark of the moon”—and a satanic ceremony is about to begin. The camera cranes down to reveal in silhouette the diabolical Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) as he stands outside his isolated mansion, staring trancelike into space. Then a curious thing happens. At the very moment we reach eye level and Poelzig comes fully into frame, the camera jerkily rebounds as if it accidentally bumped into the floor of the set. The result is cartoonish: a kind of head-shaking double-take, with the camera bobbing up and down for several seconds before finally coming to rest. Produced on a reasonable budget for Universal, and with a high degree of creative control, The Black Cat is perhaps Ulmer’s most polished production. However, the descending shot of Poelzig appears remarkably defective—it is a moment at which the film’s stylistic aspirations collide with the limitations of production (here, a clunky crane apparatus). At the same time, it could be argued that this seemingly accidental moment, in which the camera set-up jarringly reveals itself as such, does not undermine the impact of the shot, but rather enhances it. We get the sense that Poelzig’s (and Karloff’s) ominous presence is so strong that it has seismically disturbed the authority of the cinematic frame itself. The result is not a rupture of [98] realism, but a flaw that, if removed, would render the scene less potent. […]
Whereas the unexpectedly buffeted crane shot of Karloff is an anomaly in The Black Cat, an unusually aggressive free-play with the limitations of production becomes the modus operandi of a number of Ulmers films for PRC—most especially Detour (1945), which many consider to be both the directors masterpiece and a keystone film noir. Specifically, Detour epitomizes what this chapter terms Ulmers parametric style, an aesthetic perfectly in keeping with the petty contrivances of his plot and the liminal status of his characters. As is well known, a number of Ulmers key films were seriously limited in terms of budget and production time. Yet, as is frequently asserted vis-à-vis these same films, the director and his various filmmaking partners seemed uncanny in their ability to parlay these seeming hindrances into positive attributes, especially where film form was concerned. My notion of “parametric style” (or more particularly “parametric mise-en-scène,” “parametric voiceover,” etc.) seeks to reconcile this fundamental antagonism—the idea that budgetary constraints tend always to impede aesthetics—conflating these factors under a single heading, and thus refusing the traditional dichotomy in which Ulmer and his crew fight to maintain artistic integrity against all manner of economic pressures. Orson Welles once remarked that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” and clearly there are certain cinematic artists, like Edgar G. Ulmer, for whom such parameters become a way of life—not a temporary adversity, but a perfectly viable and even desirable source of artistic inspiration. In a strong sense, then, what I am calling parametric style can be understood as a kind of passive-aggressive approach to film direction, or better yet, a stylistic weaponization of the paltry means of production available for any given film, scene, or shot. […]
[104]
Ulmers calculated invocation of true crime imagery at the site of Haskell’s murder is only amplified in the film’s notorious climax. When Vera threatens to turn Al in to the authorities, the telephone cord-—the only avenue of connection between their stuffy Hollywood apartment and the outside world—itself becomes a murder weapon. Grabbing the phone, the drunken Vera locks herself in the bedroom, having stretched the cord under the door and inadvertently around her neck. When Al violently pulls the cord, trying to break Vera’s connection to the police, she is strangled, killing the femme fatale with the very object that could have rendered Al finally detectable, permitting him re-entry into the world. Yet just as Vera thwarted Al’s attempts to communicate with the outside world when she was alive, her unintended death renders this blockage permanent. The connection to the epistemology of true crime becomes clear, however, only in the moments immediately following Vera’s death. Like many other film noirs, Detour creates an auratic sense of pre-reconstruction, as if we are encountering a series of events that will only make sense in light of the news accounts through which the public will receive them. When Al realizes he has killed Vera, the camera tracks around the room in which her body lies, pulling in and out of focus with each of the potential telltale objects it encounters. The sequence is more than a stellar example of Ulmer’s formalist flair, it is one of the most profound and telling moments in all of film noir–a rare moment at which noir tips its hand, laying bare its generic affiliation with true crime. The camera begins with a tight shot of Al’s face, then travels around the room, taking in one object at a time, with each coming into focus only briefly, and the camera remaining out-of-focus while it travels. In order, the objects we see are as follows: Al’s face, [105] Vera’s face, the phone, the surface of the vanity (including perfume, lipstick, and a hairbrush), a fifth of whiskey, Vera’s shoes on the floor, the empty boxes that her dress came in, the black dress on the chair, and finally the junction box connecting the phone to the wall.
This traveling shot of the crime scene is perhaps the ultimate example of Ulmer’s parametric style. Shot with tremendous panache, the shot in fact cost nothing more than the time it took to get a clean take. It is at once the most rudimentary camera trick imaginable, and a shot whose cheapness is inextricable from its complex, multilayered meaning. Al’s voiceover explains the significance of the unusual shot:
What evidence there was around the place had to be destroyed, and from the looks of things there was plenty. Looking around the room at things we’d bought was like looking into the faces of a hundred people who had seen us together and who remembered me. This was the kind of testimony I couldn’t rub out. No, I could burn clothes and hide bottles for the next five years. There’d always be witnesses— the landlady for one, she could identify me. The car dealer, the waitress at the drive-in, the girl in the dress shop, and that guy in the liquor store—they could all identify me. I was cooked, done for.
Given the way Al accounts for the objects—as representing his and Vera’s various encounters with the public eye—the focal manipulation suggests realization, a “coming into focus” both for Al and for the numerous innocent bystanders who, once the murder goes public, will recall the two of them out buying perfume, a dress, a fifth of whiskey, and so on. At the same time, I would argue that the camera technique simultaneously evokes the kind of photographs a broader reading public will eventually see—crime scene photos (usually shot by press photographers after the corpse has been removed) that tantalizingly establish the arrangement and overall look of the death chamber in newspapers, tabloids, and ultimately the true crime pulps. In other words, the very form of the shot represents the mediatization of murder for a consuming public, especially insofar as the shot directs us, in a quasi-focal way, to objects of particular importance.
[…]
Detour not only epitomizes film noir, it cartoonishly outdoes it. […]
[112]
[…] Whether or not this is Ulmers intent, an even more curious problem resides in the film’s opening shot—a detail, like so many in the film, that just begs to be interpreted. Strangely, Ulmer’s credits appear over a bouncy shot out of the back of an automobile, with the road receding as we drive away–just the opposite of what we might expect in a film with this title. In other words, rather than use footage of the road approaching the viewer–suggesting an uncertain road ahead, the whims of fate, and so forth–we get the rear view, the look back. What does this mean?
A clue is afforded in the lyrics of a song written in the same year as Ulmer’s film, and bearing the same title. Penned by Paul Westmoreland in 1945 and later popularized in a version by Patti Page, the song “Detour” suggests a very different reading of the film:
Detour–there’s a muddy road ahead Detour–paid no mind to what it said Detour–oh these bitter things I find Should have read That detour sign