the chase (1946)
Arthur Ripley keeps us suspended in limbo during The Chase, his Dada journey into the space between here and there. The Chase is a surrealist feat, it’s noir cinema’s answer to Schroedinger’s Cat. Throughout the film, Ripley keeps us frozen in superposition; in moments that occupy two states simultaneously without becoming either of them by virtue of our suspension. Extrapolate that out for a moment and you find the very nature of “suspense” in art, or as it pertains to filmmaking; a unique place of adrenaline-fueled anxiousness whereby we are neither in a place of calm safety nor have we arrived at the danger we feel is lurking just out of sight. We are, in a word, frozen, much like the cat which is neither living nor dead and is somehow both living and dead. Ripley is so good at creating this dual space that we begin to realize his deconstruction of suspense through a chase sequence in and of itself. A chase, in cinema, is a state of non-being whereby the hero lingers between the states of escaping and being caught simultaneously. The longer our suspense lasts, the longer the chase goes on. Ripley’s film contains many such moments including a kind of exquisite corpse of collaborative chauffeuring. While the passenger controls when the car will accelerate and brake, as well as its speed, the driver is left to control the vehicle’s direction, never knowing how fast nor the duration of the journey. In fact, Ripley highlights the nature of a chase as a state in which we are only in control of half of it at any given time; how long we flee or how long we pursue.
The film begins to swirl around symbols of meaningless stimuli to which we assign meaning. When the telephone rings its meaning is entirely decided by what happens after we make the choice to pick it up. Until that point of answering, the ring is both meaningless for its lack of context and meaningful for its infinite possibility. It could be anyone, it could mean anything, and as we see in one of the film’s final scenes our heroin sits idly without leaving the state of suspension, which has at this point become a place of comfort. “Why don’t you answer it?” her domineering husband asks. Because to answer it would be to assign it meaning, and to assign it meaning results in a moment of hope potentially becoming hopeless. Our hero wakes from his dream comprising act two and ties a deep significance (one which he is not sure of its meaning) to a specific time on a clock face, though time of day and numbers on a clock face are inherently meaningless until we attach and greater significance to them and contextualize them into a concrete agreement between two persons. Ripley simultaneously rectifies the convergence between avant garde and kitsch by making a film that is, all times, both and neither. In tone and tropes the film is far too tied to genre mainstays and narrative arcs to be an abstraction and yet is filled with thematic depth, expressionist dream-logic and dense frames of surrealist mise en scene to the point that it fully transcends the B movie that it is. Meaning is constantly attached to objects be they uniforms, medals, a wallet, a rare bottle of brandy, and usually it is torn down or destroyed (like the brandy) before the scene is through. Where Ripley chooses to depart from his narrative to indulge an alternative dreamscape narrative, is simultaneously when the film diverts to be taken more seriously. Suddenly emotions and connections are real and meaningful rather than aloof and distant; there are consequences and loss and death rather than the film’s ‘real world’ logic of the preceding act in which hungry people magically find wallets, or jobs as chauffeurs.
What the film does best in its third act is to introduce a series of scenarios whereby the hero and heroin’s plans are about to be discovered at near-minute long intervals. Finding a brochure about Cuba, our villain being acquainted with the very same doctor who is drinking with our hero in the very same bar, or the man in the white hat who overhears the lovers’ travel plans at the boat. Each present a moment where the narrative is given latitude to collapse and yet our suspension between states of missing and found continues to unfold. Our suspension between narratives is wisely not done away with even by the end. Yes, we know the chase is over, our complete uncertainty was finally done away with when our antagonists explode in their car; but do we know that a man with a monkey knife does not await them in their Havana bar, under orders to kill with no one alive to call him off? We will never know. Ripley leaves us with one final contradiction: as our hero cites “forever” we fade to our end credits, effectively leaving the characters in limbo “forever” as all films do when they conclude, never to be visited again. The chase examines thesis and antithesis and cinema in equal measure; it finds a place where the state of being as well as the state of non-being overlap to form an infinite present. This infinite future as well as the infinite present, of course, are killed relentlessly as time passes and we find ourselves with a concrete definition of the past. The chase attempts to shatter that definition and display the vastness of the moment.
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