In the development of the narrative in Usher, I’ve taken a cue from the stoic French crime films of the ’50s. Melville and Carne were both interested in character as plot (rather than characters who were pawns of the plot’s machinations). The film is an open text in which the plot is more anecdotal than causal, meditative rather than illustrative in re the themes.
Grémillon, particularly, another French director from the ’40s and ’50s, is famous for putting themes into play on screen by having characters that are almost literal rhetorical devices more than flesh-and-blood creations. A minimal narrative allows these characters/abstractions to blossom as thematic devices, working within a rhetorical space rather than a geographic location. Yes. This is very French. This is most reminiscent of the minimal narratives of Bresson and Godard in the early ’60s (his self-reflexive surfaces and all). The audience responds to familiar situations with certain expectations - whether or not they’re met is what holds interest and surprises us.
The title is even a faint echo to Bresson’s Pickpocket a simple story following a man who is defined by what he does, and has to learn how to feel.
As to specific references, the film is full of little details that at some point become arbitrary in their identifications, while others have some import and meaning when viewed in context. I’ve never been a fan of directors placing posters of their favorite movies in movies, as they too readily point to the director’s personal tastes. The only really identifiable poster is of Die Laughing in the theatre office, starring Robby Benson. Not what you’d expect to see in a film so clearly predicated on an obsession with movies... or movie theatres.
That same poster is prominently displayed in Vernon
Zimmerman’s Fade to
Black, a thriller/horror film in which a film buff dresses up as his favorite movie characters
(Dracula, James Cagney, etc.) and commits murders. Video Watchdog (the perfectionist’s guide to
film on dvd and video) noted in their review that there won’t likely be another film to display
it so prominently...so I did so, and through a very circuitous route, I manage to reference an ’80s film
about a murderous film fan.
I’ve also been asked about the pineapple on the manager’s desk.
It’s a visual rhyme to the pineapple at the end of Bunuel’s
Nazarin, in which a wandering priest ends up in chains,
falsely accused of heresy. A beggar woman hands him a pineapple while he’s on the chain gang, an extremely
obscure, and almost unreadable symbol, manifesting the surreal futility of the situation.
Ash’s manner of putting his cigarette in his mouth (sideways, then turning it straight with his lips) echoes Yves Montand’s manner in The Wages of Fear, and perhaps his existentialist-fueled cavalier attitude. As Ash walks through town near the beginning we cross-fade from a long shot to a closer view, from the same angle. This is borrowed from Taxi Driver, which Scorcese admits is itself a lift from Shane.
In the first approach to the theatre, we see the marquee for the only time, and see that White Telephone and A Rebours is playing. The first a reference to the classic period of Italian cinema during the Fascist era before and during WWII, when everyone in the films were rich, apolitical, and had, literally, white telephones. (This sanitized and decadent period of filmmaking would be supplanted by neorealism.) A Rebours is the famous decadent French novel by J. Huysmans, which recounts the moral and physical decline of an aesthete nobleman.
The random hands attempting to pry the outside exit doors open during the final run/chase through the theatre are mine (the director’s). This insert with non-diegetic purpose that nevertheless adds some emotional information. In The Third Man the hands that reach through the sewer at the end are Carol Reed’s - the director making an anonymous appearance (with a body fragment) during the final chase.
Mel Gibson apparently read the same reference books, and commits a similar “cameo” in his The Passion of the Christ.
Director’s Statement
I Financed My Movie With eBay
Signs and Meanings
