One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
The Lubitsch throwaway, it’s fleeting, two seconds. A fugitive joke. Nicole (Claudette Colbert), deco-tropique on the French Riviera laments these times to her pal, Albert (David Niven): “Right in the middle of a manicure the proprietor came in and presented me with last month’s bill.” “Did you pay?” “What do you think?” In a gap of dialogue, her half-manicured hand. Flung into purely pictorial space, transported off the beach, the visual field flattens, figure abstracts. The punchline: an optical passage in rapport with contemporary Surrealists. Alongside the moody and erotic disembodiment of Dora Maar’s Main-coquillage and Magritte’s playful paratext resides this destabilizing frame. The invisible hand of Lubitsch. A touché. A “This is not a —.” These artistic interrogations of language and reality responded to heady anxieties of the time. This is 1938, the wax/wane of the Depression, rumbling undercurrents of WWII in Europe, the year of Box Office Poison in Hollywood. Colbert was immune to that latter curse, but Nicole, about to become Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, is the European aristocrat in decline, broke, her title suddenly an empty signifier. The closeup cinematic hand, contrarily, infinitely signifies. It is the actress’s hand— Colbert directed her own image, the angles from which she was filmed, her lighting and makeup. At the same time, in the severing spirit of montage, it is no body’s hand. Like Julian of Norwich’s medieval envisioned palm grasping a tiny hazelnut, the hand-image contains “all that is made.” Billy Wilder, whose first screenwriting collaboration with Charles Brackett produced Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, made a film centered on the cinematic hand. His late career Fedora (1978), appropriately surreal, revisioned the disembodied hand as an infinite sea of gloves. Describing Lubitsch’s comedic je ne sais quoi as “an à côté,” “a throwing it away,” Wilder returns us to this hand. A basic unit of cinema, the gesture, the gap, a subconversation, fleeting non-sequitur, profoundly and exhilaratingly frivolous.