Movies being negative

Films usually tend to feature inverted imagery only in their camera negatives, but some movies do make an exception. All kinds of movies, ranging from Man Ray's experimental films from the silent era to today's mainstream Hollywood have created interesting inversions. Weirdly enough, none seem to use the technique (intellectually) to convey something being its actual opposite; what a negative image is in relation to a positive. But still film-makers have utilized this slice of filmic vocabulary in other intriguing routes. This very first posting gives a brief celebration of this.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse,1959

The wildly eclectic U.S. experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage made this short film as an autobiographical summary of the first months of his marriage, starring himself and his wife. This is one of Brakhage's more, ahem, figurative films, but still quite abstract and impressionistic in terms of its narrative content. A couple inhabits a gloomy house and we witness their mysterious, tension-filled everyday (or rather night, as the film has no moments set during daytime) moments. There are instances of graphic visuals of lovemaking, that have been inverted into negative. This makes the moments of sex to be very explicit, and yet shrouded and suggestive at the same time. Still, this is incredibly racy stuff for its time.

Nosferatu, 1922

Murnau's silent film is an interesting adaptation of Dracula; the scene, recreated numerous times in subsequent films, has Jonathan Harker being escorted to Dracula's castle by a sped-up carriage. To convey that we're entering into a zone that is esoteric indeed, the image turns to negative to bizarr-O effect.

  

Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer), 1954

This Finnish horror fantasy, lauded by Jean Cocteau on its release, is set in Lapland and dwells on Sami mysticism. The negative shot marks the first appearance of the mythic white reindeer, to which the heroine of the story is magickally transformed. To underwrite the mystic quality of this moment, the film-makers shot a dark reindeer galloping against a snowy white background, and inverted this, making the reindeer white (this gives it a kind of perverted kinship to Black Gestapo, featured up a head). I double-dare you to try to find another mainstream Finnish film of this era that uses such a thing as negative imagery, let alone in such a way that at least strives towards artfulness.

El gran amor del conde Drácula (Count Dracula's Great Love), 1974

This deliciously violent (although many minutes of gore and sexy depravity was scissored before the release) movie by Javier Aguirre  from (S)pain is perhaps the best of Paul Naschy's horror efforts, which isn't saying much, folks. The film has several vampiric scenes printed in negative because... well... OK, who knows why, but they're pretty interesting, nonetheless.  The film's claim to fame has been its beginning, which officially has been heralded as The Greatest Opening Credits Sequence Ever, where we see a person falling down the stairs dead... and then we see it again. And again. And again. And again... and again.

Alphaville, 1965

Jean-Luc Godard's arthouse-scifi is unusually restrained for the director - or is at least to some degree. As the futuristic world around lead dick Lemmy Caution starts to crumble near the end, so seems the filmic language itself, as the image aimlessly turns into negative and back. Godard did a similar trick in his later Weekend, when a car wreck unleashes a wreckace on the film image itself.

Devil Doll, 1964

Lindsay Shonteff's quite impressively creepy horror flicker (which has some interesting plot parallels to Cronenberg's later Scanners) has a riveting scene of hypnosis near its beginning. A sinister magician (Bryant Haliday) puts a man from the audience under his spell; the man's falling onto the magician's mental grip is conveyed through a close-up of Haliday's eyes which turn to negative. The negative image used here was apparantly a still frame, as Haliday's face is utterly static even though he starts to speak - this goof lends the scene some surprising supplemental creepiness. Yummy mummy.

The Black Gestapo, 1975

The film is a sort of paranoid interpretation of the militant 1970's civil rights organization The Black Panther Party (for Self-defense), portraying them as a bunch of hypocritical, criminal black nazi-like thugs. The wonderful concept is completely wasted to a stunning degree in this boring outing, which has almost nothing going on politically or in terms of blaxploitation cinema. The "almost" being the opening credits, which are a juicy wet dream of political incorrectness. Newsreel footage of Hitler and the nazis are shown to us, and as the title comes up, a sight of Hitler turns to negative to... well, you know, make his skin seem like it's black. A standing ovation to exploitation veteran Lee Frost for this particular touch, which makes for a potentially fun Youtube clip. But shame about the rest 0' this cinematic calamity.