![]() ![]() Warren’s chambers, where she lies bedridden, while another flight of stairs descends into the pantry located in the basement of the house. Located inside the house, the spiral staircase serves to connect as well as distinctly dissociate the politics of spatiality within the house. Kennedy’s 1985 ekphrastic piece, Nude Descending a Staircase, tells us how the preoccupation with Duchamp’s painting and the staircase, in general, was central to the modernity of the 20th century. The constant climb and descent of morality, the use of the landings with fitted mirrors, and the climactic scene are central to the development of the main plot. Further, the staircase and its many significances find echoes in the film, The Chess Game of the Wind (1976) by the Iranian director Mohammad Reza Aslani. ![]() The staircase in this book also serves a primary role in the execution of the murder. Not to forget, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) had long established the staircase as a space of possibilities in literature, wherein Raskolnikov makes the most important decisions. The vertical gaze at the nude and its cascading promenade down the stairs with the light and shadows playing on the human body has served as a marker in the early years of the development of cinema. 2 revolutionized the concept of space in paintings, portraying dynamic motion in art. One of the most popular uses of the staircase in the early half of the 20th century is the Cubist painting, Nude Descending the Staircase No. Before we go on to discuss how the film utilizes the trope of the titular spiral staircase as a protagonist, it is important to know the temporal significance of the same. From Sunset Boulevard (1950) to The Truman Show (1998), films in the second half of the 20th century found the staircase metaphor becoming integral to the cinema. Indeed, staircases are one of the perfect vessels in cinema used to amplify a scene using visual metaphors. A couple of minutes long, the prologue to this narrative establishes right at the start of the film, The Spiral Staircase, directed by Robert Siodmak, that the titular spiral staircase will be a protagonist as important as Dorothy McGuire’s Helen. She is afraid – it is stormy outside, the shadows of trees lit by the lightning form hungry shadows on the glass window along the staircase – but she makes it to the landing despite her fears. We watch a woman attempt to descend the staircase. At the beginning of the film, the camera hangs precariously from the top to give us a bird’s eye view of the spiral staircase in all its glory. ![]()
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