silver nitrate notes

Sunset Boulevard and the Dead Narrator

28 jan 2019

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) opens with the body of its narrator face down in a swimming pool. The narrator then tells us, from beyond death, how he got there. This was, in 1950, an unusual enough framing device that Paramount initially refused to release the film with it. Wilder previewed the cut, saw audiences laugh uncomfortably when the body spoke, and was almost forced to remove the opening. He did not remove it. The film was released as shot.

The cinematographer was John F. Seitz, whom we have met on Double Indemnity six years earlier. Seitz was now sixty, near the end of his career. What he and Wilder do with the Norma Desmond house, 10086 Sunset Boulevard, is photograph it as a mausoleum. The house is filled with photographs of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) from her silent-film years. The photographs are everywhere: on the piano, on the walls, on the stair landing, in her bedroom. Seitz lights the photographs so that they are slightly brighter than the surfaces around them, which means the eye is drawn to them before it rests on Norma herself. The living room of the house is visually outnumbered by images of its owner's younger self.

The famous shot is Norma descending the staircase at the end of the film, thinking she is being photographed for a close-up in the film she imagines she is returning in. Seitz photographs her from below, looking up, with key light from above so that the jawline is sharp and the eyes recede. Swanson, who had been a silent-film star of the first rank in the 1920s and had not had a major role since 1934, knew what she was doing. She plays Norma not as mad but as a woman whose entire visual vocabulary was learned in 1920 and whose face still expects the camera to love it the way the camera loved Swanson's face twenty-five years earlier. What Seitz is photographing is a woman who is performing an older cinema. The performance is not broken. The time around it is.

Wilder and Seitz used Erich von Stroheim, playing Norma's former director and current butler Max, as an echo of Norma's situation. Von Stroheim had directed Swanson in Queen Kelly (1928), a film that had never been completed and had effectively ended both their silent-era careers. Seitz photographs von Stroheim in the same vocabulary as Norma: lit from above, with the face in hard contrast, against the dark walls of the house. Two silent-era stars, playing silent-era stars, in a sound-era film about the disaster of surviving your own form.

William Holden, playing the dead narrator Joe Gillis, is thirty-one. He is lit in the modern style. He is the only one in the frame who belongs to 1950.

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sources
[1] Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. Hyperion, 1998.
[2] Staggs, Sam. Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream. St. Martin's, 2002.
[3] Seitz, John F. Interview in American Cinematographer, October 1950.
[4] Wilder, Billy. Conversations with Wilder, ed. Cameron Crowe. Knopf, 1999.