Seeing, believing, and `knowing' in narrative film: Don't Look Now revisited
1995; Salisbury University; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoIn both its narrative and narration, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now explores the theme of vision while exploiting an ineluctably visual medium to undermine confidence in what sees. Early in the film, of the central characters, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland), says, Nothing is what it and, a little later, seeing is believing. Between these opposing and familiar attitudes, the film examines the dangers and rewards of different kinds of vision. On level the film is about the spiritual and psychological dangers, particularly as Carl Jung conceived them, of a narrow insistence that seeing is believing; by fixing on the material and believing only in what he sees or thinks he sees, John Baxter rejects hidden forces of whatever sort, and ultimately his rational mind betrays him. Pride of intellect, the insistence that nothing lies beyond the rational, is his downfall. On another level, both ironic and reflexive, the film exploits the tension between the attitudes expressed in the two maxims to comment upon the nature of narrative film, particularly narration's codes of association that films and their audiences depend upon. Such codes are, of course, necessary to the process whereby a film's fragments become an integrated whole, but, as Don't Look Now makes clear, they can be manipulated in the discourse in unconventional ways that leave an audience uncertain about how to associate and interpret the images before them. Indeed, in Roeg's film may wonder if anything is what it seems. One's customary confidence in interpretation is undermined by competing codes of association, trompe I Oeil effects, and images from both past and future whose narrating source is unable to discern with certainty. Moreover, the film's images (as well as its characters) raise psychoanalytic questions of the kind addressed by Don Frederickson in his important but neglected study of Jung's distinctions between sign and symbol, and between a semiotic attitude and a symbolic one (167). At the level of story, Don't Look Now is a contemporary Gothic thriller in which the solution to the mystery explodes into another, deeper mystery. In elegant and often unsettling images, the film looks at the unknown, the mysterious, the awful, suggesting that to see only with one's eyes is hardly to see at all. Evoking a disturbing sense that the visible is both more and less than it seems, that physical reality seduces us into a misguided reliance upon what we only think we know, the film suggests that beyond what conven- ' tionally sees and hears there is another world that can be apprehended not so much by sight as by vision. In the remarkable density of relationships among its fragments, their symbolic possibilities and particularly their narration, Don't Look Now gives form to what seems formless, to one's sense of a larger, perhaps ultimately spiritual reality of which the that lies around us is only an incomplete image. The two main characters, John and Laura Baxter (Sutherland and Julie Christie), come to · Venice some time after the death of their young daughter, Christine, who drowned in an accident at their English country home. As an architect-artisan-scientist, John is engaged in restoring the structure and religious artifacts of a sixteenth-century church. In a restaurant, he and Laura, who has been emotionally distraught since Christine's death, encounter two vacationing English women, Wendy and her sister Heather, a blind visionary or psychic. Heather tells Laura that she has seen Christine in a vision. After her initial shock, Laura embraces Heather's vision, but John is outraged. When a phone call from England tells them their son has been injured, Laura hastily departs. Later that day, John apparently sees Laura with the two sisters on of Venice's canals. Surprised and fearing for her safety, in part because of a mysterious killer loose in the city, John goes to the police. As a result the sisters are arrested. …
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