The Great Acting Blog: “The Transformational Magic Of Art”

The Great Acting Blog: “The Transformational Magic Of Art”

I recently watched an old, Italian giallo from the early 1980s, called A Blade In The Dark. It’s about a sound artist who is holed up in a country mansion in order to work on the soundtrack for a new movie. Strange things start happening, two of his neighbours go missing, he starts to hear strange, whispered voices amid his sound recordings. The acting isn’t great in this film, but the suspense is almost paralysis-inducing at times.

What struck me though, was how the filmmaker gives us pieces of information about the killer. Specifically, there is a scene where the camera focuses on the hands and the clothing but we never see the face. At first, we see that the finger nails are varnished in red and that the killer is wearing a dress – clearly a woman then. However, the filmmaker dwells on these details for so long that we begin to understand that the killer is not in fact a woman, only someone dressed up as one.

The point is that the clothes and fingers are given so much attention that we begin to question their meaning  – if they were being shown as mere literal information, then the filmmaker would not have dwelt on them for so long. The significance given to them, suggests something hidden.

In Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming, two characters spend so long talking about a glass of water, that it’s meaning suddenly goes beyond merely the possibility of quenching thirst, to being a symbol of power. In David Mamet’s film, Spartan, a childhood broach becomes a signifier of trust, and in Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance, a man repeatedly hits ping pong balls to the extent that it goes beyond playing a game to being an obsession. In A Blade In The Dark, the focus on the nails and dress create the notion of subversion.

Here we see the transformational magic of art, that ordinary, every day objects can become expressions of complex ideas and deep meaning.

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