Richard Smith – Space and Action and the Anterior Field

Dr. Richard Smith (University of Sydney) investigated the temporal and spacial nature of film by utilising Billy Wilder’s 1945 film “The Lost Weekend”. Smith argues that Wilder placed heavy importance of action and the mechanics of the actor within and outside the anterior field. The way Wilder constructs his shots allows the main character Don Birnam to interact with the time and space and Wilder adopts a comic nature towards action in the film. Birnam is both a writer who drinks and a drinker who writes and Smith argues that Wilder locaters the action within this writer/drinker relationship.
Smith showed the opening scene to demonstrate these ideas. In it we can see the disequilibrium between hand and face. Birnam’s hands are reaching outside the anterior field and his hand is calling for the bottle of rum he craves. Instead of thinking with his fingers, his fingers are outside his thinking. This particular division generates the montage for the entire film. The imposture within the opening scene is carried on throughout. Smith argues that the very first show we see of Birnam the action being played out emphasises the constant battle between drinker and writer.

This movement of the hands and movement of the lips is a total automation of the face and body emphasising the auto. The Lost Weekend stands outside the classic paradigm of American action cinema because the in The Lost Weekend action is falsification.
Richard Smith uses studies on the Anterior Field to see the nature of the temporal paradox within the Lost Weekend. This is a movie that is full of conflicts, parallel divisions and infinite loops. The action never restores identity. Don Birnam is a writer who keeps forgetting he is a drinker and a drinker who keeps remembering he is a writer. However we never see much writing or drinking within the film. We only ever see Birnam wanting a drink or having had a drink. This plays out as a temporal paradox. Once the drinker features the screen fades to black and we wake to the face of the writer who wakes lost in time. Action never restores identity. The action of bringing the hand to the lips becomes its own form of writing that needs no typewriter. Birnam the writer is only a writer when he is drinking and Birnam the drinker is only a drinker when he is writing. Smith calls this constant conflict between Birnam’s two minds or personas a “geometry of the false”. The more the images divide, the more they unify. This is a “reconciliation of opposites”. The different don’s are like different gestures which are then reflected on to different sets of actions. This is most apparent in the opening scene where we view Birnam packing his suitcase for a holiday. His hands are focused on the clothes in front of him while his eyes are staring past the camera to the bottle of rum that is hanging outside the window.