the blinds

"You can't eat the venetian blinds, Curly.
  I just had 'em installed on Wednesday."
-- Private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) admonishing an anguished client who's just seen photographic evidence that his wife has been screwing another man; the first words spoken in Chinatown (1974)

Why are venetian blinds such a fixture in film noir? Simple: 1) They cast neat shadows -- the vivid stripes and emphasis on distorted diagonals lend visual tension and an air of instability, ambivalence, or imprisonment (at times suggesting cage or prison bars) to a scene; and 2)whether the light streaming in through the window is from the sun, a streetlight or a neon sign, the light through the blinds creates the impression is that it's always darker and more claustrophobic inside the room, where the characters are confined, than it is outside.

Blinds also suggest a filter through which we, and our noir protagonist, is seeing and interpreting events.  It's equal parts light and shadow, transparent and opaque, so really only about half the picture is visible through a blind at any given time.  That's particularly significant in a world of treachery and deceit, where nearly every movie is some sort of epistemological quest, and where even private eyes who've seen a lot have a tough time taking in the whole picture -- until it's too late...

"The biblical injunction 'Thou shalt not kill' is one that requires qualification, in view of our broader knowledge of impulses behind homicide..." Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson)  finds himself entangled in his own theories about crime -- and caught in a web of shadows from the blinds -- in the brief prologue of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944).
	Upset by seeing photos of his wife in sexual congress with another man (courtesy of the associates of private eye J.J. Gittes), Curly (Burt Young) vainly attempts to "eat" the venetian blinds only recently installed in Mr. Gittes' place of business.
Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang's brutal The Big Heat (1953).  The composition of the image, with him looking down a diagonal shadow at her, suggests he dominates the scene.  She turns her back, and the disfigured part of her face, from him, suggesting she may be concealing something from him. A dark shadow looms behind her, perhaps the spectre of a terrible event in her (recent?) past...  (Obviously, this moment comes sometime after one of the most shocking and famous scenes in noir, involving Grahame, Lee Marvin, and a scalding pot of coffee.)
	A beautiful specimen of a pre-noir shadow-spun spiderweb, courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock's wonderful  Suspicion (1941).  Joan Fontaine suspects her husband, Cary Grant, may be trying to kill her -- here with a poisoned glass of milk.  The whole movie is filtered through her paranoid vision.  Are her suspicions justified or not?
By shooting through the headboard of the bed in The Killing (1956), director Stanley Kubrick achieves a vertical effect similar to the shadow-stripes of blinds, ominously placing the movie's racetrack robbery conspirators behind bars.
	Vertical blinds add visual tension to, and suggest the fractured structure of, John Boorman's existential neo-noir Point Blank (1967). A brutal and bewildering jigsaw puzzle of murder and revenge starring Lee Marvin (right) and Angie Dickinson, the film uses cool, flat, rigid geometric designs to reflect the alienation and sterility of modern life.
The window and blinds in the Dark Room, although treated as separate noir elements, were both digitally based on this image of Victor Mature in Kiss of Death (1947).

back into the dark room