The Rosetta shot: “The Shuttered Room”
You don’t see it in every film, but most films have ‘em - a single shot that sums up the entirety. These shots can communicate vast amounts of vital information about the work in question even to those who are unfamiliar with that work. In an effort to keep some kind of content flowing through here, I’m going to start periodically highlighting these types of shots. And I’ll try to avoid the obvious - if I were to try and find one shot that could sum up, say, E.T., I damn well wouldn’t just pick a shot of E.T.
Having said that, here’s a shot of the shuttered room from The Shuttered Room:
However, my reasons for singling out this shot have less to do with its titular edifice and more with the building as a whole. If you’re like me, the first thing that passes through your mind when looking at this isn’t, “Hey, a shuttered room,” but, “Wow, that room does not belong there at all.” It’s this deliberate incongruity, this sticking out, that interests me, because The Shuttered Room is built on and stuffed to burst with these incongruities. Even beyond the blunt city mouse/country mouse dichotomy of its plot, there’s an element in a good majority of the shots that simply does not belong and draws attention to itself because of it (a strangely foregrounded eagle, a modern car in front of a dilapidated ancient mansion, Oliver Reed peering in any number of windows). This, of course, all feeds into the big Thing That Ain’t Right in the narrative: the resident of the shuttered room. But that’s getting ahead of myself.
