Nothing comes intuitively in The Lady from Shanghai. Welles' control of mise en scene is never in question - it's too lush, too moody - but there's a rough angularity to the edit that ensures no filmmaking technique is taken for granted. It's all contrivance, struggle, as though Welles is telling himself 'if only I can light this scene, then it will all mean something'. Genre and cinematic language form stepping stones of legibility, and beneath them runs a furious river, ever threatening the whole. Of course the whole survives. It even makes it through the volatile fun house and hall of mirrors sequences, carrying us through to the end of the noir. But this doesn't mean a victory for cinematic coherence - rather it claims coherence itself as an instability.
In the opening scene, Welles' narration tells us what the camera's looking at, what to look for in the frame, and to wait for the moment the narration joins the diegesis in conversation with Elsa. Now we're sutured in. The camera glides horizontally as it follows Elsa, and then latches itself to the front of the coach, tilting vertically with each exchange between the two. It's a kind of shot-reverse-shot, only it's scared of breaking the flow of conversation with a cut, in case it doesn't like what's on the other side. These long takes seem to exist just to dread the uncertainty both of what's directly outside the scene, and what's to come: what's left to the edit. Ultimately Welles' Michael reveals a hatch that allows him to exist in the same shot as Elsa without asking any more activity of the camera. Maybe this is something like peace. A similar gliding movement is used on a scene on the yacht, here tracing Elsa's reclining body. Michael descends into the crew mess, among them a guitarist picks aimless, and with the arrival of Elsa's voice he climbs the opposite side, agape. Outside the tranquillity of the reclining Elsa at the centre is an unnecessarily frantic, ugly montage - the dreadful uncertainty made manifest.
Little about The Lady from Shanghai's story makes sense, and it's hard to buy the convictions of the characters as they speak and act. Declarations of love, faith, and betrayal all ring hollow when spoken - conspiracies either don't register or appear self-evident. The unnecessary violence of the edit points to emotional intensities within the fabric of the film instead, like a shadow on the written word or a horrible outline to the figure. A simple two-shot of Michael and Elsa on the pier is made uneven by the presence of George, watching towards us in the distance. A closeup of George throws us disoriented into the background, and when we return to Michael and Elsa in the fore we're at a broken angle. The axis is disturbed, the symmetry is gone, and they now appear hunched over and exposed.
Much has been made of the hall of mirrors sequence, and for good reason. The psychological disturbance of the doubling is one thing, but the effect of having so many mirrors simulates The Lady from Shanghai's central concern: its own coming-apart. Each mirror captures the actor, and placed next to one another they look like individual frames in a filmstrip. The tilt in each mirror though reveals each frame of the actor at a different angle, such that there is no central correct frame through which we can orient ourselves. Even the frontal angle betrays the radical incoherence of any cinematic space. The funhouse sequence that precedes it unveils this incoherence as genealogy: it quotes directly from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, itself a "self-conscious return to the major features of the primitive cinema" (Noël Burch). Here the deep space of the film is flattened into a series of tableaux. Each oblique angle, rather than guiding the eye further into a receding space, announces that it is painted directly onto the surface of the set, that distance begins and ends here.
This is a deeply unstable film - nothing comes easily and no technical decision is taken for granted in The Lady from Shanghai. The aquarium scene might be my favourite, both for its tonal whiplash, and for its demonstration of struggle. The sea creatures appear magnified against the glass, vying for dominance with the figures in the fore. Maybe this strange compositing is a compromise born of Welles' resistance to close-ups. And maybe this is a nod to Méliés who, to accommodate his compulsion to long shots, would make small things large in the same frame, deranging space as such. And then it's the saturation of darkness in Michael and Elsa's profiles, from people to silhouettes. Every cut, every lighting change on the way there demands a leap of faith from the viewer, both to make sense of what appears so haphazard, and to recognise haphazard was all it could ever be.
Written 4 Jul 2024