Holly Martins has arrived at the home of Harry Lime, after a mandatory stopover with some international military officers at the train station in Vienna. Finding the apartment vacant, Holly is told by an endearingly disheveled landlord (who speaks only a smattering of English) that Holly is ten minutes zu spat—Harry Lime has just left the building. In the still above, the Austrian landlord has…

Here’s our man, Holly Martins, the author of such notable western pulps as The Lone Rider of Santa Fe and Death at the Double X Ranch. His mission here has been doubly introduced in the soundtrack. The introductory voice-over which constructs the film’s Vienna, ends on a lighter note, with the voice of the director, Carol Reed, adding as if an afterthought: Oh, I was gonna tell you, wait, I was gonna…

We’re now past the opening credits of The Third Man—which already have presaged a number of themes and ideas that permeate the film (not to mention foreshadowed some of the concepts that will arise from a structured analysis of its still images)—and are thrust headlong into its diegesis. The postwar Vienna in which the movie takes place is a capital of contradictions: elegant and seedy, fueled…

If last week’s frame focused our kino-eyes on temporality and duration, with its stark juxtaposition of film and clocks, here we see its culmination. This is our first interaction with movement in the film, an abstract oblong shape cleaved by horizontal lines reveals itself as a  zither soundhole when the strings stir to life with the seemingly synchronous soundtrack. The vibrating strings…

How fortuitous that the logo for Alexander Korda’s London Film studio—a gorgeous image of Big Ben with heaps of silky deep-gray negative space on the right side of the frame—visualizes the concept of time right from the beginning of The Third Man. Pacing is key in Carol Reed’s film. The first two-thirds are comprised of build-up and anticipation (albeit one of the most rapidly-paced periods…

The “A” on The Third Man‘s official rating certificate is meant to stand for “Adult” and by 1949 no young people would be allowed into the theater, making The Third Man the British equivalent of an R rated movie. At the time there were only two ratings in the UK, Universal and Adult, but the British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC) would introduce Horror and EXplicit in the next few years. Filmmakers…

Herewith: the inauguration of “Still Dots,” a project entailing 102 blog posts written by the Walker’s Film & Video staff over the next 51 weeks. Inspired by Nicholas Rombes’ “Blue VelvetProject” at theFilmmaker Magazineblog, “Still Dots” will analyze a series of cinematic still images. Each Tuesday, Jeremy Meckler will post his analysis of a single frame fromThe Third Man, beginning with the very first still image from the film. Each Thursday, Matt Levine will post his analysis of one frame 62 seconds later. One of the most evocative and multilayered postwar British films,The Third Man(one of the holdings in the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Film & Video Collection) is readily available on stunning Criterion Blu-Ray or DVD, and is also available to stream instantly on Netflix; we hope the first installment of this project is a valid enough reason to (re)visit this infinitely entertaining masterpiece. What happens when this 104-minute movie is extended to a timeframe of 51 weeks? How will our conceptions of time, composition, and visual readership transform over…

Of all the films I have seen throughout this “And Yet She Moves” series the documentary, Shulie was the most unique one for me. The first aspect of my unique experience of the film was the way in which it was produced. The discussion prior to the film made me believe that Shulie was an unintentional masterpiece. The mundaneness of the subject that is being filmed fascinated me because this must…

While Felix Gonzalez-Torres remains revered in the art world — he posthumously represented the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his work made up the thematic basis of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial — what may be starting to fade in our collective memory is the context in which he worked: the height of the AIDS crisis. Asked last year to do a talk on Gonzalez-Torres’ billboards, artist…