Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1946) “My pleasure will be to make him suffer,” Edwige’s creepy voice springs from a tape recorder. It all amounts to the subconscious imagining, shaping and violent, forceful unleashing of the guy’s self-esteem issues and fear of humiliation. On ‘discovering’ Edwige’s secret sexual peccadillos, Dan thinks she’s out to get him. The conflict within Dan captures the patriarchal dissonance of the mother-whore dichotomy – her agency, her desires, her ‘unknowability’ taken as a threat, because it means he isn’t the focus of her existence. In Dan’s dream, his missing Edwige is both a duplicitous destroyer like Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Elizabeth Short – aka ‘The Black Dalia’ – the victim of an unsolved 1947 LA murder (her nickname a spin on George Marshall’s noir, The Blue Dahlia, 1943). Strange Colour also feeds on the estrangement, male anxiety, and fear of women central to Freudian thrillers and dramas as Dan Christensen (Klaus Tange) projects his dreams and nightmares onto others (real and imaginary). The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2013) Our mind and memory are compartmentalised into rooms and if we can only open the right one, everything can be explained. Coming on like the finale of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La prisonnière (1968) wedded to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Cattet and Forzani’s puzzle is typically and reasonably understood as indebted to gialli, but underneath lies a film deeply influenced by the aesthetics of psychoanalysis seen in American’s Freudian thrillers and film noir. All rooms lead to explanation: a primal scene from his boyhood. From here Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani take us on a mind-manifesting kaleidoscopic journey into a man’s desires, grudges, memories or psyche. ![]() The jet’s ambient hum is mixed as if suggesting a person entering a hypnagogic state – imagining what the outer limits of consciousness might ‘sound’ like – and the swirling hum’s abrupt stop is the cinematic equivalent to the hypnotist’s command: “And sleep!”Ī border has been crossed. The opening shot sees a man asleep aboard a plane the camera closes in on his fluttering eyelids as the frame begins to violently shake. The industrial rumbling develops into a rhythmic swirl, vertiginously approximating a sense of falling. ![]() The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears begins with droning noise over production company credits.
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