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Critical Matrix (1997) - Vanishing Women: Hitchcock, Harlan, and the Politics of Prestidigitation

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Explicit anxiety over Hitler's disregard of national borders in central Europe only appears at the boundaries of the film itself -- the publicity still. External to the filmstrip, the staged publicity still doesn't quite belong to the "whole" of the film. And yet this spare part must somehow encapsulate the film in a single snapshot. Forcing the limits of the whole, such photographs can become the site of excess, the space in which we, the spectators, can glimpse the eruption of the film's repressed material. One such publicity still from "The Lady Vanishes" shows [Gilbert] reading a newspaper. Its partially visible headline appears not in Bandrikan but in German: "Hitler erzählt..." ("[Adolf Hitler] says..."). A fragment excluded from and pointing beyond the whole, the publicity still provides a space in which "The Lady Vanishes" can openly connect itself with the burning question of Anglo-German relations without the "whole" film ever referring to this taboo topic. The movie spectator's eye might miss such a subtle trace if it flashed by within the film itself. As Walter Benjamin remarks, "at the movies, this position [of critic] requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one." But the photograph, like the painting, clipped and suspended in time, allows for closer examination: "The painting invites the spectator to contemplation... Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed."(20) The stasis of the still asks the "absentminded spectator" to be still and pause momentarily on the political fragment.

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