The Thinking Machine

Agnes Moorehead, The Magnificent Ambersons, 1941

‘What the camera does, and does uniquely, is to photograph thought. That’s my profoundest conviction in this business of moviemaking: the camera is not so much a lie-detector as a Geiger counter of mental energy. It registers something only vaguely detectable to the naked eye, registers it clear and strong. Every time an actor thinks, it goes right on the film.’

- Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich from This Is Orson Welles

Classic Scene #23

As it's started snowing heavily again outside I suppose it's time for some more snow-related movie scenes. The most famous, of course, is little Charlie Kane and that sleigh in Citizen Kane, not to mention the snowflakes skittering through time in the smashed snow globe as old Charles breathes his last. Welles returned to snow as an emblem of lost innocence again the following year in this lovely scene from The Magnificent Ambersons. But in Jim Jarmusch's blank-generation hipster classic Stranger Than Paradise , snow becomes a white-out metaphor for the empty nothing of the characters' lives as they stare out at what's supposed to be Lake Erie, but is really the bleak reality of their future lives. Surely one of the worst tourist visits ever.