Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Lady from Shanghai




The celebrated hall of mirrors sequence at the end of The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) is one of the great visual emblems of film noir. The duplicity becomes so intense that it calls into question the stability of identity; passion leads to death because it disintegrates personality, leading the lover to project and introject the beloved to the point of annihilation. Killing you is killing myself . . .

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