Images and Metaphor

When a director’s images become metaphor. One thinks at once of Tarkovsky*. When one knows the director has truly expounded the image. In a tight narrative context an individual image may rise to a higher level of meaning: poetic, metaphorical substance. These images are definitely not ‘uninflected’. They are part of a greater stream of images, but instead of building up to meaning in a relatively rapid chain of images; certain frames take on the feeling of epic poetry: becomes monumental, because it recalls a previous image. But the accumulation happens over a long space of time. Echo of montage. The writer’s ‘plant’ and ‘payoff’, to put it crudely.

-Lee’s silhouette against the window, looking out to Manchester Harbour. His past, him alienated within it. He later punches his fist through the window: through this present, into the past which is destroying him.

-Lee packs away the three framed photographs of his children. His nephew later comes across them in Lee’s room and is greatly disturbed by them. They have the power of icons. It is too much for him to bear. Patrick begins to understand the pain and guilt his uncle Lee is struggling to live with.

-The line of a wall separates Randy and Lee during their painful chance encounter: a deep rift which can never and which love and time cannot heal.

-By inferring, but not entirely showing someone’s presence. Patrick’s drunk, perhaps naked mother as Lee’s brother Joe comes in and throws a blanket over her. She is enough in frame for us to know it is her, but by not explaining her presence there, we know there is a problem, and this discomfort fills the frame.

*Tarkovsky understood the nature of the very shallow relief of the cinema screen. He knew how to make everything happen in that narrowest of margins. He didn't overuse camera movement but trusted to the mise en scene. He was a poet because he was capable of generating metaphor. The characters examine themselves in the screen which is a mirror which is only as thin as itself.