Uses of Theory by Richard Smith in Space + Action + the Kinematic Field

Richard Smith conceives of cinema as a text that integrates structures of space, temporality, movement, and image sequence in order to illicit meanings, narrative, or a series of affects. In his presentation titled Space + Action + the Kinematic Field, Smith analyses Billy Wilder’s articulation of these concepts within Wilder’s 1945 film, The Lost Weekend.

The basic story is that of Don, an alcoholic writer, or inversely, a writing alcoholic, who is subject simultaneously to both writers block and the circular logic of addiction. The relationship between Don’s competing identities is complex and ambiguous. Seeking an insight into this convoluted relationship, Smith undertakes a visual and kinetic analysis of this film using Motion-Action Theory to reveal Wilder’s strategic montage construction. This theory affords Smith the ability to identify/recognise spatio-kinetic structures and patterns as a meaningful code that is fundamental to the progression of the films narrative.

What Smith discovers is that styalised sets of binaries operate throughout the film in such a way as to cultivate tension, confusion, and compulsion. And that these are the primary drivers of both the narrative and temporality within the film. Each of these binaries, be they actions, objects, body parts, gestures, posture, or the use of the interior field, alternately relate to one or the other facets of Don’s character (i.e. the writer or the alcoholic). For example, Smith conceives Don’s hands are usually those of the alcoholic, whereas his face is that of the writer. He recites a sequence:

Don’s hands reach out to type> they grasp a drink> he brings the drink to his mouth> and words, his story, come tumbling out...

This careful maneuvering of binary symbols structurally establishes a bewildering, illusiory, and cyclic temporality that visually articulates Don's cognitive states, as well as demonstrating the compulsive flux between mental activities and motor habits. These divisions, says Smith, determine the montage of the entire film.

If we are, as Smith suggests, to approach the reading of action as a kind of philosophy of language, then Don’s paradoxical movements and the dis/location, or 'confusion' of objects, such as the bottle with the typewriter, highlight the duplicity of Don’s reality. In light of this visual, spatio-kinetic analysis Smith is able to suggest that Wilder employs a “comic structure” in The Lost Weekend.