"All the sounds have faded away."
In a hot Summer night of 2007 I've seen first time Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) in a friendly open-air cinema in Vienna. Even if I've found out the trick of its twisty plot, I had to realize that in 1944 its way to mislead the audience was quite unique among the more and more complicated noir films' languages (Bordwell constant argument ("Nothing comes from nothing" – in. The Way Hollywood Tells it, p.75.) on the continuity of the classical film language exeplifies from the '40s the origins of contemporary films' obligatory twisted stories).
But the choosen (and uploaded for you) scene isn't from Laura, but selected from a less known Preminger-noir, Whirlpool (1949). The film's story is rather silly (a quack hypnotist exploits a psychoanalyst's wife to commit a crime...), so let's focus only on the well tempered hypnotic situation and its cinematic execution. The sequence shows the charlatan's first hypnotic try on Ann (after Laura's role we have again Preminger's – and my – favorite Gene Tierney). The shifting states and the differences between the film's reality, the moments of the hypnosis, the hypnotic act, and the coming-back-to-the-reality are told very moderate (almost as undefined way as it was in Laura – remember the misleading moment when Dana Andrews is falling asleep with a booze in his hand...).
Anyway, here the case is more simple: according to the above, there are 4 indistinguished different states within one sequence:
1. before the hypnosis
2. during the hypnosis
3. under the spell of the hypnosis
4. after the hypnosis
The shifts are visually almost invisible (small changes with the light and the focus), but are well divided with the help of the sound! See how:
1. before the hypnosis: diegetic music (the party's live music)
2. during the hypnosis: silence
3. under the spell of the hypnosis: extra-diegetic music
4. after the hypnosis: the diegetic music fades back.
Preminger's ability to change character objectivity and subjectivity back and forth makes him one of the most exciting directors of his age (it would deserve another post how Tierney's acting supports this tricky shifts: Tierney is as mechanical that sometimes you are not able to recognize the difference between her normal behave (with her guilty kleptomania she is sick anyhow) and her actions under the spell of the hypnosis...). About other examples (without Preminger) of this cinematic shift you can read here.
9/10
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