THE SCENES PROJECT

In collaboration with New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival and Deptford Cinema, the Scenes project was developed to explore psychological and emotional responses of audiences to film.

Participants were invited to talk about a moment in film, from the iconic to the obscure – a memorable image, a haunting performance, or simply a cinematic scene that they admired. After the festival, I continued to collect film scenes in conversation with volunteers at Deptford Cinema. Being so small and intimate, the cinema was conducive to these kinds of conversations.

It was my aim to give people an unhurried space to think and talk about a film and its associations. Some were spontaneous recordings with people who knew exactly what scene they wanted to talk about. Others needed more time to narrow down their selection from the hundreds of scenes filed away in their visual memory and we would meet to record their chosen scene later in a Deptford café. These one-to-one recorded conversations brought out a different retelling of a scene, perhaps more quietly reflective than the usual post-film discussion. Some participants shared a personal view of an iconic scene, while others chose scenes that were little-known gems. The individual and subjective meanings derived by participants from these scenes were often surprising, always unique.

Recordings of the conversations were transcribed, edited, and later presented as a limited-edition publication. A small selection of films discussed in the Scenes project were also screened at the cinema in 2019. I will be showcasing some of the scenes in a series of Journal posts.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

Dir. Jack Arnold

1957

The following scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man was recorded in conversation with Sam B., a visitor to Deptford Cinema during the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival in 2018.

When asked to recall a moment in a film, this scene struck me immediately. I didn’t have to think at all. Not because it’s a particularly great film, it’s not a great film, a science fiction B movie from the 50s, but because I saw it when I was very young, and it has stayed with me.

Like many B movies of the time, they were born of a fear of technology and what it can do, probably due to nuclear weaponry and the dropping of the atom bomb. It was a dawning of a new age and, as usual, humans hadn’t caught up with the new technology. And they never will.

The film follows this man as he shrinks. At the beginning, he is exposed to some toxic cloud when he’s out on a boat, and over the following weeks and months, he gradually shrinks. At first, he doesn’t think much of it, but then over the course of the film he gets smaller and smaller. There comes a point where he is quite small and living in a doll’s house in the living room of the family home. One day his wife goes out. She’s still a loving and devoted wife despite her husband’s diminutive proportions. They don’t have any children, but they do have a cat.

So, what happens is that as she goes out, the cat comes in and it tries to attack him. He escapes from the doll’s house and whilst running away from the cat he ends up in the cellar. He falls off the step into the washing basket or something, can’t remember exactly. He ends up in the cellar and he’s so small now. When the wife comes back, I think she assumes the cat has eaten him. Even when she does go down to the cellar, his voice is so small that when he’s shouting, ‘Hey! Hey!’ she can’t hear him. So, the last fifteen minutes of the film are inside the cellar and it leads up to the particular moment, the scene that I recall.

In the cellar he’s just surviving, fighting a spider, making clothes out of rags and a weapon out of a pin that he kills the spider with. There is a stale piece of cake which is enormous to him. During one of the cellar scenes he goes to the grating that leads into the garden, but he’s too big to climb through the holes. Later, after he has killed the spider, he comes back to the grating and he’s now small enough to climb through. That moment is the end of the film. It’s the moment he is entering a new world by himself. It’s transitioning from the world he knows. However much changed it is by his size, the cellar is still a known world, but now he is moving on to something unknown. He won’t be able to even see over the grass. There is also the prospect of never being found.

There was still hope while he was in the cellar, but it was over this time that he gradually began to lose the hope that he would be found by his wife. I am not sure whether he knows, but his wife has given up on him and she’s got a new man and is moving out. She doesn’t hang about.

I hadn’t thought about why it strikes a resonance with me now, but perhaps there is a sort of a similarity that you can feel in a big city. Although you have human contact, you can feel at times that you are just shrinking, and the sheer scale of numbers diminishes your own world.

The film is based on a book by Richard Matheson, a 50s Sci-fi writer. He also wrote a book called I am Legend, also made into a film. I am Legend is similar in its ending, but nothing like the ending of the film version. It’s not a bleak ending, but not an easy one either. There are three possible endings: 1. He is found, they find a cure and make him big again. 2. He is found, and he is not cured. (I don’t know if that’s worse than the ending he did have) 3. The ending that he does have is the tough one. If you see a film as a little kid and it hasn’t got a happy ending, it presents you with quite a difficult thing to accept. This guy is just going to get smaller and smaller; he’s never going to see anyone again and then he will probably be eaten by a centipede.

It’s the last scene of the film, the garden scene, set at night-time. There’s a lot of looking at the clouds going by, and his narration, an inner monologue. I can’t remember exactly what he says, but he’s looking at going into a world that is completely unknown and there is no way back. No more human contact, no more possibility or prospect of human contact. The drive to survive is raw now. It’s just the raw instinct to carry on, to survive.

His approach to the philosophical problem of living his life is touched on at that moment. Up until then, it’s been all about survival, about killing the spider, getting food, getting water to drink – the water heater is dripping, dum, dum, the sound amplified. That’s all he is thinking about – survival. But the moment he steps through the grating, that’s when it turns philosophical. It may be a bit religious or something, I can’t quite remember, but he definitely talks about or refers to God and gets all philosophical about how to carry on going. He has to dig deeper in himself. It’s not how to survive, but why you survive.

Maybe what he says is really trite, but in a way, it doesn’t matter what he says because it’s the moment of all the moments that precede it. He has this moment where he has to address the philosophical moment of where he is now. What he concludes is of no consequence to me. But the fact that he is addressing it, at this point in the film, is what is interesting.

Sam B.

SCENES: The Incredible Shrinking Man