Tuesday’s still from The Third Man introduced us to a confused, dead-eyed, grief-stricken Holly Martins—a stranger in a strange land, with the world against him. At the funeral for his longtime friend Harry Lime, Holly finds himself surrounded by a small group of strangers, most of whom cast suspicious glances at him whilst “paying their respects.” The preceding scene, in other words, introduced us…

When we asked our Film/Video Curator Sheryl Mousley for a list of her Top 10 Films of 2011, she had a hard time. Even when we narrowed it down to “Films in Theaters.” This is why. In addition to her list on our Top 10′s blogpost, she provided us with the massive list of all of the films she watched in 2011. These are films seen in cinemas, movie theaters or at festivals . This list does not include…

This week’s Still Dots begins with a reading from the Noir bible, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: “Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curled back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose…

Here at the Walker Art Center, we asked staff members from all over the institution to assemble a top ten list. This is what we got. *spoiler alerts throughout* To judge this “giallo” (colorful, sensual, psychedelic murder mysteries) for its authenticity is to miss the point completely. While many die-hard minions of this already annoyingly obscure genre call this a bastardization of the genre, I…

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…