Tuesday, September 16, 2008

September's Screening: Bunny Lake Is Missing


I Like to Watch is back, apologies for being slow on the blog, but please come back to Heathers on Monday September 29th, 7pm as usual. This month’s film Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965, 107 min) was directed by Otto Preminger, and is coming to us by way of Lisa. The movie is starring (Sir) Laurence Olivier, and Carol Lynley, with Noel Coward and The Zombies. Lisa’s description: A woman reports that her young daughter is missing, but there seems to be no evidence she ever existed. IMPORTANT NOTE: I highly recommend you DO NOT Google this movie, because pretty much everything I’ve seen about it includes major spoilers. I’ve never seen this movie, so that’s all we have to go on, folks. Complicating things a bit more, I’m realizing just now that I have seen almost none of Preminger’s films. Therefore, I’m falling back on Bordwell once again, (well, BordwellThompsonStaiger, that holy trifecta of film history, from here on: BTS) I’ll crib a bit for all of us from the lengthy, wordy, heavy and kind of expensive The Classical Hollywood Cinema. BTS characterizes Preminger’s style as kind of cinematic pokerface. BTS put forth Hitchcock as a counterpoint to Preminger’s style: Hitch being the kind of director who draws attention to his hand in a film. Hitch uses very visible and intentioned camera movements, and careful framing to bring your attention to details he wants you to see, and sometimes to make a show of the details he doesn’t want you to see. (As an example BTS use the scene in Shadow of a Doubt when Uncle Charlie is reading the newspaper, and discovers article he doesn’t want his family to see, tearing it out of the paper. The audience sees the article eventually, when young Charlie goes to the library, but Hitch makes a point of drawing the audience in by witnessing Uncle Charlie tearing the paper, but then keeping the most vital information from the audience until it is discovered by young Charlie.) In comparison BTS suggest that Preminger “planes classical narration down to a flat, almost inexpressive ground…” and through his visual style demonstrates an “unwillingness to specify character psychology…” Combined with Lisa’s cryptic description, I can only surmise that we’ll all be kept guessing until the last moment of Bunny Lake.


A secret, a mystery, or a twist is one of the most satisfying narrative devices, and the often quite difficult to pull off successfully. With the widespread dissemination of all kinds of important information on the internet (like that most vital information: the twists and turns of our favorite movies and TV shows) it’s becoming harder and harder to keep a narrative twist a secret. But learning the secret of a plot doesn’t always destroy the pleasure of a film, if that film has something more to offer than the simple thrill of the twist.