High and Low

Most of the time when we think of a meticulously detailed frame we think about set design about the colours the interplay of shadows and of course high and low has all these aspects but it’s most importantly a showcase of how to frame actors and their movements. How the vastness of the POST WAR MIDCENTURY living room can impact how an audience receives information. In one corner we have a business man ruined by the cruel happenstance and in the other a poor man with a stolen child writhing with an energy we don’t see in any other situation. And then in the front of the frame are the police attempting to stay busy. A story of a nation told within a frame. The camera never lingers long enough to be overtly “arty” but it is purely cinematic. The editing choice of when to cut to signifying these deep emotional changes set it apart from what we could expect from a similar theatrical play or even on tv. TV would be unable to capture all that cinema can.
The vastness of this castle overlooking the poor is a thru line throughout the movie once we begin our descent into “hell”. Where we slowly drift from castle to the openness of fields to train with the ability for escape to the flophouses, cramped bars and heroin alleys of the city. One where it can be easy to see how money and mostly lackthereof can rot your brain. When the human spirit isn’t nurtured properly politically and socially it’s easy to end up in situations like our kidnapper is in. But there’s obviously an alluring nature in the modern audience to what happens away from the castle. The want to feel humanity to embrace all the brutality and wonder that comes with it vs the sterile and new ultra consumer culture nature of those in the castle and their friends. The bitter irony being that of course the films tension originates with the modern consumer issue that would mainly impact the working class in that items that once had care are made like trash designed to be bought and thrown into a garbage incinerator. The dichotomy of the end scenes to where we began couldn’t be more stark the tightness of the prison cell that could fit in the kitchen of the castle but it’s one where the kidnapper the poor driven mad by capital is finally at level with the rich man he’s brought down. Where the camera cuts between both sides of the prison table and fades to create an image of both of them as one solitary man. A madness and punishment beset by capital. One idealist and one fated to die as he always was. The torturing cruelty that architecture can inflict on the human psyche. In the age of constant gentrification we are forced to reckon with it every day. Even the cops realize this while solving the crime. A procedural that has been endlessly copied for generations and for generations to come.