Content area
Full Text
SHADOW OF A DOUBT belongs to a popular genre in Hollywood film: the coming to consciousness of an adolescent, or of the representative of an Edenic community (childhood, nature, the small town). He is cast out of this community, either because it can no longer exist or because it must become conscious of itself, and of its relationship to the exterior world, for him to survive. He comes into violent conflict with the world such as it has become (the city, technological society), a conflict resolved in various ways: the forging of new relationships which imply the reintegration of old societal norms within the current one (Ford, Hawks), the affirmation of alienation with the adolescent as tragic hero (Nicholas Ray), or the repression of that which menaces the community (Lang, Hitchcock).
We see first the city, an itinerary of deso- lation. The camera pans over barren waste- lands, through shabby streets to rest fi- nally on the snake who is soon to enter Eden: Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). He lies like the effigy of a dead king on his tomb at the center of the junk yard repre- senting the dry, yet his very catatonic im- mobility and strange delphic utterances read as energy and will. His refusal to react to or even look at anyone or anything in the frame accentuates the power of the profile close-up to abstract and objectify its object, to insist upon a point of view outside of a reciprocal exchange of glances, and seems to ascribe this power to Uncle Charlie. Even when the camera shifts to the other side of the bed it is only to frame Uncle Charlie's unreadable profile between the bewildered landlady and the equally bewildered spectator, craning to decipher on a horizontal eye-level plane an enigmatic expression which could only be deciphered (and that with difficulty) on a vertical or higher-angled plane. Almost whimsically, Uncle Charlie stresses his option to keep the spectator in his highly uncomfortable position as long as he chooses; his remarks to the landlady supply perfect verbal counterpoint to the visual mystification practiced by the camera placement
When he does act, when he smashes the glass, his face is no longer visible, separating identity and action. The camera re- cords...