silver nitrate notes

Brief Encounter and the Platform That Does Not Move

5 jun 2011

David Lean (1908-1991) directed Brief Encounter (1945) from a Noël Coward one-act, Still Life, that Coward had expanded into a full screenplay. The cinematographer was Robert Krasker (1913-1981), whom we have met on The Third Man four years later. Brief Encounter is Krasker's first major collaboration with Lean and, on my personal list, his best work outside the postwar Vienna film.

The plot is domestic. Laura Jesson, a married housewife, meets a married doctor at a railway station tea-room when he helps her with a piece of grit in her eye. They meet weekly over several weeks. They fall in love. They realise they cannot leave their marriages. They part, not melodramatically but decisively, at the same railway station where they began.

Krasker's photography is almost entirely interior. The railway tea-room, the doctor's rooms, Laura's living room, a cinema, a borrowed flat. What Krasker does in the interiors, particularly the tea-room, is use a practical single-source lighting (the overhead pendants) as the dominant light and let faces go into considerable shadow at the edges of conversations. Laura (Celia Johnson) in close-up is lit from directly above, which flattens her features and makes her look slightly tired in a way that is exactly the right register for the character.

The famous shot is the one on the station platform when Laura, after parting from the doctor for the last time, considers stepping in front of an approaching express train. Lean and Krasker shoot the shot in her close-up, with the train's headlight swelling in the frame behind her. Lean tilts the camera at the moment she decides not to step forward. The tilt lasts perhaps two seconds. Then Laura is back in her normal frame. The tilt is the only formal visual break in the film. It is completely effective.

Coward, who did not like the film, nonetheless recognised what Lean had done with his material. Laura's marriage, in the film, is not unhappy. This is not the story of a woman trapped in a bad marriage. This is the story of a woman who discovers, in passing, that a different life had been possible and must now return to her actual life with that knowledge.

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sources
[1] Brownlow, Kevin. David Lean: A Biography. St. Martin's, 1996.
[2] Coward, Noël. Brief Encounter screenplay (from the stage play Still Life, 1936).
[3] Drazin, Charles. The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s. André Deutsch, 1998.
[4] Dyer, Richard. Brief Encounter. BFI Film Classics, 1993.