A sombra do mundo: excesso e aprisionamento em Diomedes: a trilogia do acidente, de Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

In a scene at the beginning of Detour, a classic film noir, Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal, is in a diner somewhere in Nevada when one of the customers turns on the jukebox. The song that starts playing brings up painful memories to Al, who stares in front of him in anguish. The lighting of the scene changes, and a streak of light is projected over his eyes, leaving the rest of his face deep in shadows. Our own gaze shifts to a close shot of a mug -half of which is brightly lit, while the other half remains in shadows -then gets closer to the jukebox and finally rests on the surface of a drum, white as the moon or a searchlight, already part of Al's remembrance of the past, as he starts telling us his story, which includes the loss of the girl he loved, his involvement with a psychopathic woman and two unintentional murders.In this scene, as in many other films noirs, ordinary objects become the focus of especial attention by framing, editing and lighting techniques. They are charged with meaning, becoming projections of the characters' psychology or moral and metaphysical musings. The change in lighting marks the passage from a realistic register (although already exceedingly somber) to another one, extremely subjective. The beam of light on the character's eyes stresses their expressiveness and ushers in the dimension of memory: from this point onwards, the film turns into a flashback showing Al's increasing isolation and his inability to control his own fate. But this lighting effect is not only expressive, it is also clearly artificial: first, because it does not match the ambient light of the setting, being motivated exclusively by the inner movement of the protagonist's mind; and second because the beam of light is not immediately fixed on the character's eyes, but climbs up his face, as if searching for its target. As James Naremore (2008/1998, p. 147) points out, here we can feel the undisguised presence of a technician behind the cameras trying to aim the light correctly. In other words, the scene purposefully reveals its own artificiality. The blown-up image of the mug, in its turn, transforms an ordinary object into an almost surreal apparition, setting the stage for the nightmarish atmosphere of the flashback (Naremore, 2008, p. 147-8