A Film Canon

Although it would have been scandalous to present such a demystification of Hollywood on the eve of the studio system, the more striking innovations of this film occur in stylistic terms. In particular, Florey and Vorkapich create a series of sophisticated, silhoutted vignettes, which present a world entirely composed of film equipment: girders and other elongated structures suggest celluloid strips; vague spinning objects could either be vehicles or projecting devices. These subsume all the glamour and exoticism of the actual footage of Hollywood, thereby reduced to a series of blank, empty spaces, devoid of any intrinsic significance (or, alternatively, to the mask-like facelessness that the extras are required to assume). The common denominator between these realistic and imaginary domains are the insidious spotlights, whose omnipresence is mirrored in the vertical movement of light required to bring the silhouettes into full relief. Appropriately, the actual footage of spotlights occurs close-up, at ground-level, replacing the depiction of their combined impact and play with a deindividuating, suffocating sensory flatness that threatens to extinguish us as it does the protagonist (if he can ever really be called that).