A Film Canon

Hypocrites never quite coheres into more than the sum of its frequently excellent parts, largely because of Weber's relative disinterest in cross-editing, and the sensitivity to changes in focus that it entails - ultimately crucial for a film that moves between present and past, reality and allegory, in an attempt to expose problems with conventional religious morality. As with Suspense, however, she compensates with her extraordinary aptitude for internal editing and montage, clearest in a series of pans that move beyond the mobile camera's tendency, in early silent cinema, to provide a short-hand link between framing positions, instead embodying and nuancing the movements that it depicts - most spectacularly in a (briefly broken) two-minute shot detailing the impact of an unveiled statue upon a crowd, whose increasing outrage, as well as its more reflective minority, are respectively encapsulated in the camera's illusion of acceleration, and the impassivity with which it is paired. However, this gift for dynamic conclusion arguably reaches its apex in a series of still shots depicting the allegory of the "broad road and narrow way", rivalling Bertolini's Inferno in its juxtaposition of vulnerable human bodies and imposing landscape.