Sterling entrance
Click images to enlarge
In her DVD audio commentary of John Sturges’s Mystery Street
(1950), Elizabeth Ward — co-author (with Alain Silver) of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style— describes Jan Sterling’s entrance “as close as we can come visually [to] Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.” At first I thought Ward was cuckoo, but upon comparing the screen grabs with the painting, I can see where she’s coming from.
Nude Descending a Staircase
Labels: Art
posted by Ray Young at
9:35 AM
3 Comments:
That seems like a strange comparison, considering that Duchamp's Nude was intended to capture in a static image something of the quality of a figure in motion. So, really, any movie of a woman descending a staircase should be at least slightly reminiscent of the Duchamp painting in some way.
Moreover, the painting and the film have entirely opposite treatments of time in relation to motion -- film spreads out time across subsequent frames, while the most inventive aspect of the Duchamp painting is the way it condenses a longer period of time into a single "frame," showing the woman at different times in her descent all in one image. It's very difficult for film to achieve the same effect, although time-elapse photography has a hint of that approach to it. Probably the closest I've ever seen would be something like Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango or Kurt Kren's Asly, both of which condense long times into a single image.
It sounded like a reach when Ward said it on the commentary -- my initial reaction was similar to what you say: any shot of a woman descending the stairs could be interpreted the same way. For what it's worth, the whole commentary had a few more such "observations" that were good for a chuckle.
I still kick myself for not sticking around when Jan Sterling visited my place of employment in 1972 (camera counter at a department store), promoting the fancy new SX-70 camera for Polaroid. At the time, my boss could barely contain his excitement, while I blankly asked, "Jan who?"
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