Jekyll and Hyde
Mamoulian's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is widely regarded as the greatest film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886. Much of the success of the film is the result of Mamoulian's technique. The film is full of both obvious and not so obvious point of view shots, allowing the viewer to get a sense of the subjective view of certain characters as well as allowing us to view the scene through a camera freed from some of the forced restraints of limited movement that are typical of early sound filmmaking and classical Hollywood cinema. It is in this respect that the film is often most complex. The opening shots of the film take us from Jekyll playing piano in his house, through the streets of London, and into a lecture theatre. All of these shots are subjective: the edges of the frame are fogged giving us the idea of a kind of 'true' optical viewpoint; other characters directly address the camera; and we don't directly see - except as a reflection in a mirror
Hyde is both a technically and conceptually ambitious film. The most appealing and unsettling instance of this occurs in the first scene between Ivy and Jekyll. At various points, we seem to see the perspective of another character or observe, as a character looks straight back at us. First, it helps us recognize the esteem within which Jekyll is placed (as policemen, colleagues and servants all bow or respond to him respectfully). This opening performs a number of key functions. Hyde is a dark and ultimately disturbing film (just think about why Hyde must transform to Jekyll in death). Second, by using this point of view initially the film suggests a degree of involvement between Jekyll; and us as if the future of his fate and his strange behavior might not be so different from our own. It attempts to find techniques to help communicate specific ideas and complicate easy moral positions. Time and the uncertainty between various states of physical and psychological being are themes which run through the film and which are given many clear illustrations. This final pull back might seem like a calming endpoint, a return to order, but the relentlessly boiling pot in the foreground, with all its primitive overtones and undertones, suggests that what has been disturbed cannot be bottled back up through the death of one man. In particular, the sexual frustration experienced by Jekyll in relation to his fiancee, Muriel and its connection to the freer sexuality of working-class Ivy, is visually communicated through this technique. The film's final shot begins close to the dead Jekyll and pulls back to a position behind a pot that is boiling over This camera movement is in disagreement to one that recurs many times in the film; where the camera starts out wide and zooms or tracks into an image much in the way a microscope might.
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Acceptance Essays
