Nine out of ten people who have seen To Catch a Thief will talk about the famous “cigarette in the egg” shot. Would Hitchcock have conceived this very effective gag in black and white?* No, of course not, and yet if you think about it, what does color have to do with it? It’s not the yellow as such, but the egg yolk itself that produces this effect on us, funny for some, powerful enough to nauseate others. But, and this is the crux of the matter, without its color, this egg is only partially an egg. It exists fully only in color. It is only in color that cinematic expression attains absolute realism.

(* The black-and-white equivalent is the jar of cream in which the English tourist in Rebecca puts out her cigarette.)

Éric Rohmer, “Of taste and colors”, Arts 59, March 1956.

Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting.

Hitchcock on his ovophobia

My fantasy double bill of 2017 for MUBI Notebook’s 10th Writers Poll:

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, USA) / Images d'Ostende (Henri Storck, 1929)

In Henri Storck's short, Images d'Ostende [Scenes of Ostend], one of the chapters, titled "L'écume" ("The sea foam"), shows nothing but froth on wintery shores, quivering in the wind. Watching the film recently on a 35mm print, in my mind, the foam was blowing to another beach of one of this year's blockbusters, similarly using natural chapter titles. In a scene in Dunkirk, thick shivering spume is collecting around the legs of three soldiers sitting on a foam-filled beach while they quietly watch a lone man stride out into the waves not to return. It was the only image in Nolan's film that resonated with me, despite the attempt for abstract and visual storytelling (downplaying exposition, backstory and dialogue). Storck shot his silent 'coast symphony' only 27 miles farther and about ten years prior to the actual Dunkirk evacuation. By that time, Storck, who continued to work during the German occupation of Belgium, would be as much questioned for his politics as Nolan is now. 

“What lies before us is the task of marking multiplicities of individual space among humans as processes of foam in which defense and invention merge into each other - as speaking foams, one could say, as immune systems that dream beyond themselves ... via the establishment of a personalized traffic system, to the creation of a customized world picture poem.”

— Peter Sloterdijk in his poetics of plurality, Spheres III: Foams, 2004, p. 232

« Un artiste n'est jamais innocent pour moi, il y a une part de crapulerie fondamentale. » 

Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (Claire Denis & Serge Daney, 1990)