Gem/Ã¥ben hele nummeret som PDF - 16:9

with the out-spread fingers of both hands in a melodramatic gesture ofhorror and exhaustion" [*6]My suggestion is that both the tears and the blocking of the eyes havebeen anticipated palindromically in the imagery of the opening.I want to avoid imposing on the film a more precise patterning than thatoffered by Ophuls. An inventory of sights and sounds in the openingand closing sequences would yield more unmatched than matchedelements. (Strict palindrome could only be absurd in a fiction movie.)But there is a sufficiently pronounced matching in the content and orderof some major moments to give a suggestion of palindrome. The effectis to lend weight to the containment of Lisa's story within Stefan's, andso to balance our sense of Lisa's letter as the frame within which theevents of the past are accessed. Viewpoint is important in Stefan'sreading as well as in Lisa's writing. (If we share Stefan's reading,learning about the past at the same time as he does and within similarlimits, our involvement is of a different order since only Stefan isreading, perhaps seeing, himself within Lisa's account and isexperiencing its impact both as a revision of his life-story and as achallenge to his memory.)A major distinction between Stefan's story and Lisa's - against Lisa'sdesire to insist that the two stories are one - is that Stefan's story isongoing and unresolved whereas Lisa's is at an end. Hence theemphasis on the delivery of Lisa's letter as a sealed packet of a certainbulk and weight. It is from another place. It is the past; there is no moreto come. So Stefan's reading is of a narrative already concluded. Therewas an evident opportunity, refused by the film, to develop thesymmetry in the framing of Lisa's tale. When Stefan started to read,and the voice of Joan Fontaine repeated the opening sentences, wecould have been taken to Lisa as she began to write the letter in thehospital, adding another layer to the flashback sequence. That wouldhave naturalised the use of the voice (which many filmmakers wouldhave thought useful) at the cost of bringing the moment of Lisa'snarrative into a present and uniting it with the moment of Stefan'sreading. The film's 'irrational' procedure prevents these moments frommerging and allows them to approach one another only in the letter'send at Lisa's death, imaged in the black blot that halted her script. Thenew discovery here, revising the sense of the sealed packet, is that theletter's story is not complete. It is instead no more than over, becausethe reading is finished though the writing could not be.There is a significant advantage in the refusal to balance the flashbackstructure, showing us the end of the writing but not its beginning: thefilm can present Lisa's life in strict chronology, taking her by stagesfrom her "second birthday" to her maturity and death. That makes itless difficult for Joan Fontaine to convince us as the schoolgirl Lisa ofthe early sequences [*7]. The corresponding problem for Louis Jourdanis eased by delaying his appearance in each of the flashback sectionsso that he is not immediately juxtaposed with his reading image. Still,the alternation is eloquent: we see various stages of Stefan's life inrelation to the recurrent framing image of the middle-aged roué. Thealternation in Stefan's image, as against the steady development ofLisa's, gives formal expression to the dissonance between their storiesand their attitudes.Whereas the structure of the flashbacks would tend to depict Stefan'slife as a series of incidents in Lisa's, the framing scenes insist on hishaving immediate and urgent predicaments of his own. To observesymmetries here as elsewhere is not to resolve the question of theirfunction and effect, since patterning can serve both to create orreinforce order and to give the emphasis of contrast to the unmatchedaspects.