One Twenty Fourth: An Affair to Remember

I finally saw Leo McCarey's half-silly, half-sophisticated An Affair to Remember (1957) last night, and aside from the troupe of plucky multicultural youths who regale a bedridden Deborah Kerr with shrill holiday songs, the thing that stands out most is the movie's use of offscreen space. Examples abound throughout the film. Significantly, the artworks painted by Cary Grant's character, impetuous lothario Nickie Ferrante, are never seen directly onscreen: we receive only glimpses of them cut off by the edge of the frame, and even when we catch sight of the most narratively crucial painting (which finally reveals to Ferrante how the titular affair was impeded), we only see it reflected in a mirror as the camera pans slightly, subtly to the right. The death of a major character takes place entirely offscreen, and the accident that cruelly injures Deborah Kerr's character is suggested only by Kerr racing offscreen to the right, followed by a screech of tires and a plethora of screams on the soundtrack. There are actually several considerable pleasures that the movie offers—among them Kerr's and Grant's heavily-improvised rapport, which does seem remarkably different from the scripted banter that characters in romantic comedies from the 1950s were too often forced to recite—but this suggestive use of offscreen space may be McCarey's and cinematographer Milton Krasner's finest achievement with An Affair to Remember.

While the canny use of offscreen space could simply be passed off as a concession to censors at the time (the more carnal aspects of the affair of course could not be depicted onscreen, nor could the movie's most violent moments), it in fact ties in closely to the emotional states of the two main characters. For them—or, at least, for Kerr's character, an aspiring singer engaged to a prominent businessman—tact and a sense of domestic obligation are primary concerns. Though both characters are engaged to other people when they first meet, it is Kerr's singer, Terry McKay, who initially resists Ferrante's advances, unwilling to betray her fiance's trust. And although Ferrante is a notorious playboy who, though engaged to one of the richest heiresses in the United States, flirts unabashedly with beautiful women, he tries to keep these romantic conquests out of the public eye, maintaining a show of marital fidelity that practically everyone knows is a sham. So both characters, unable to resist their attraction to each other, still hope to keep their relationship “offscreen”—hidden away from the voyeurs around them, the public audience.

Which brings us to the still on which I'd like to focus (placed above): the moment at which Ferrante and McKay consummate their affair (sweetly, innocently), with a kiss. We don't see this kiss: on the deck of a cruise ship, the two characters begin to descend a staircase, only to retreat a few steps and pose mid-embrace. Ferrante's left leg hovers diagonally as he leans in; McKay's right arm rests at the same angle on the railing; the beams and angles of the ship provide an almost-abstract backdrop, and the lightbulb burns behind them suggestively; a lifeboat is suspended behind them, suggesting both the refuge that their affair currently offers them and foreshadowing the extent to which their affair will capsize. Throughout their kiss, the camera—which, throughout much of the movie, tracks and pans gracefully through the scene to accommodate the movements of characters (practically any shot set at the Italian villa of Ferrante's grandmother is a perfect example of this)—is here resolutely static. Even within the context of the film, then, the moment is a still image: the romance between Ferrante and McKay, which beforehand had been rushing forward so swooningly and irresistibly, now halts itself in mid-motion for that sublime first kiss.

Aside from its narrative and symbolic significance—or, to refer to the Barthes article which inspired this series of analyses of stills, the first and second meanings—this image strikes me for several reasons (“obtuse” reasons, Barthes might say). I briefly mentioned a few of them above: the architecture of the ship, which looks fairly artificial but somehow more beautiful because of it, in that distinct Golden Age of Hollywood way; the sweet and intimate way that both Kerr's and Grant's bodies are angled parallel to each other; the contrast of the single lit bulb against a void of blackness.

But this still may be especially striking in the way that it is placed along An Affair to Remember's “diegetic horizon,” reflecting, playing off of, and foreshadowing what has come before it/will come after it. For example, immediately after this moment in the film, Ferrante and McKay decide to act completely platonically aboard the ship, greeting each other as they pass by in the manner of aloof, cold acquaintances, in order to keep their affair from the other passengers on the ship and conceal their infidelity. One such exchange takes place on this very same stairway (or one exactly like it). McKay stands in the middle of the stairway, slightly below her position in the above still, as Ferrante dizzyingly wanders around the stairway below her, wanting to talk to her but unwilling to get too close while other passengers are around. While the above still is about stasis, about time standing still while lovers embrace, this subsequent scene is all about movement, anxiety, desire, uncertainty. The first is romantic, darkly (but evenly) lit, and takes place primarily offscreen; the second is farcical, bright, and plays out in full view before us. Both scenes take on added effect when we compare them to each other, and while the effect of the second scene could not really be approximated in a still image, the effect of the first is neatly encapsulated by the still I have included above.

In “The Third Meaning,” Barthes claims that the obtuse or third meaning of film stills is, to an extent, counter-narrative: “disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms (technical or narrative)—an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'” What does this mean for the still above? How is its temporality different from that of the image as it is placed within the context of An Affair to Remember, as a moving film? In some ways, the temporalities are similar—stasis, stillness—but in some ways, it is true, they are different. As we see this still now, here, outside of the movie, we have bodies that are placed in a pleasing graphic alignment; the emotion of the interaction as it exists in the still may be confrontational or intimate or awkward. The power of the image is really only discernible when placed within the context of the film, when it is suspended or “stilled” in the midst of many other rapidly moving images. But in this particular case, it is powerful precisely because of its stillness. This, in fact, would (it seems) entirely correspond to Barthes' claim that the still is “a fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other” (his emphasis).

But maybe the still is most powerful because it disrupts the phenomenon of cinematic time so completely. The temporality of cinematic images is incorruptible: they are projected at twenty-four frames per second (in most theaters, anyway; I'm going to brush off the existence of 16fps or 32fps projection speeds for now) in order to maintain persistence of vision, so whether or not the images are in slow-, fast-, or “real-time” motion, they operate according to their own rules. Not so of the still, which operates at one frame per...minute? Hour? Eternity? So the still above somewhat benevolently allows Ferrante and McKay to indulge in their kiss without any obstacle or interruption, basically forever. If, however, we wanted to cruelly overtake their lives, we could capture a film still at the moment later in the film in which Ferrante and McKay meet in the audience after a show, wanting to speak volumes but able only to utter “hello,” still burning from desire, but also now from anger and confusion and desperation. Now forced to live out these combustible emotions for an eternity, Ferrante and McKay would be imprisoned in a film still that would not benefit (nor would it suffer) from the sweetness that preceded it nor the reconciliation that followed.