Richard Smith: Space & Action & the Kinematic Field.

Dr. Richard Smith’s seminar analyses Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” (1945) with interests to how the cinematic apparatus exemplifies the consequences of movement through temporal space which is tied in together with actions within the anterior field. He began by summarising that “The Lost Weekend” is a film about action and that elucidates the comic in the field through the action of the hand and lips. Smith evaluates that Wilder locates the action mainly in the anterior field; the act of drinking occurs when the hand and face comes to the lips and when Don prepares to write, his ideas are expressed through his lips, rather than channelled through his hands, nonetheless, the lips are taken over by having and drink and writing is quickly abandoned. Smith states that there can be no identification of both such actions but rather the falsification of the natural because writing consists of the act of the body.

Smith offers numerous examples of how meaning of these actions are expressed by the cinematic apparatus through a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of the film's opening sequence and other stills. Smith distinguishes the two kinds of spaces in the film and that these spaces of action are divided by competing motor movements of a drinker who writes and a writer who drinks. In the opening scenes, Don is packing his luggage with the ‘intention’ of going away for the weekend to write but the movement of his eyes points towards the bottle of alcohol hanging outside his apartment window. This division of motor movements determines the geography of our point of view/our ‘gaze’ because Don’s body is both ‘here’ (in the room packing his luggage) and elsewhere (gaze at the bottle of alcohol). The alcohol bottle becomes his object of desire, which is constantly shown through his ‘gaze’. The cinematic image is positioned in a way that we the viewer meets the cinematic subject, in this case, the rye Don wanted to purchase at the bottle shop. This infinite loop of action in the anterior field is a temporal paradox where there is no identity between the writing and the writer or the drinking and the drinker. We are only reconciled with the act of drinking and writing when the cinematic image reaches out of space (drinking) or dissolves in the space (when Don sobers up, he has written).

Smith critiques that action used in Wilder’s works in a different way, it is outside of melodrama in American film theory. Although able to only hear part of his research, it can be understood that Smith draws on various theories to help deconstruct his analysis on Billy Wilder’s film, The Lost Weekend, in regards to his interest in the space, action and the form of cinematic objects done through the cinematic apparatus without any reference to the ‘act’.