Database & SOFTWARE CINEMA

**Images of Imaginations ：On the Experimental Collage Noir The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Péter Lichter, 2023)**,

by Clone Wen ( cw4295@nyu.edu)

As part of the Collage Noir Program of Spectacle Theater in Brookyln, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (dir. Péter Lichter, 2022) is a experimental “stream-of-consciousness” visual adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1920 murder mystery of the same name with Poirot’s monologue. The Hungarian director Péter Lichter mentioned that the film’s experimentation with images came from a very simple approach: the image and the content of Poirot’s mind. He found that all of Poirot’s (Agatha Christie) adaptations were very conservative and had vintage cinematic tones, regardless of the fact that Poirot actually had a very structural mind. So, a “real” Poirot movie would be structural footage that has been put into pieces.

In this way, the found footage of the film is related to the found evidence of Poirot, and the juxtaposition of images of the film is related to Poirot’s moodboard. It is then constructed with extremely fragmented video footage on segmented screens from over 110 film noirs from 1895–1933, 11 games from 1986–2002, and a number of new media excerpts, such as desktop videos, 3D-scanned models, and Google Street Views. It is an extremely fast-paced split-screen narrative featuring detective Hercule Poirot, a desktop cinema overlaid on the split-screen narrative, and an interactive movie overlaid on the desktop cinema.

Geometrical Segmented Screen

The film is collaged with a formalism aesthetic like Piet Mondrian’s paintings of geometric elements, reflecting Director Péter Lichter’s aesthetic of geometric fractals in the 16:9 frame. Among the eight chapters, except for the chapter titles, which are not presented on a split screen, all the other images appear on a geometrically segmented screen with circles, squares, and triangles. At a minimum, there were 2–3 images splitting on screen, 8–9 images at times when Detective Poirot was gathering evidence on the six suspects, and more than 20 images in different segments in the final reveal scenes. Moreover, there is constant cross-dissolving of 2-3 images in one small segmented frame, as well as the recurring black-and-white Harris Shutter effect, re-exposing the same piece eight or ten times. The fractal aesthetic is also reflected in the margins left above and below the 1.78:1 frame, as the split-screen frames for all the scenes are only used in the middle portion of the 2:35:1 in the 1.78:1 frame, and the subtitles are placed in the blank margins (this is a Hungarian movie with English subtitles).

The geometric split-screen format switches very quickly, with 2-3 different fractals in each sentence of Detective Poirot’s monologue. The segments are nearly non-repeated until the last (eighth) chapter, in which it unravels the mystery and flashbacks the split-screen images of the first seven chapters. I was surprised that I could recognize the flashbacks by the geometric structures of the screen rather than the content of the images in each segment itself. The geometrically segmented structures are so unique that they have become the “protagonist” of the shot in place of the content of the found footage.

Desktop Cinema

A new type of desktop cinema is explored with keying video of computer screens overlaid on top of the geometrically segmented images. The film resembles a computer desktop with multiple windows open, which relates to a moodboard of clues used by Detective Poirot to solve puzzles. Although the film has no close-ups, the mouse dynamics and cursor blinking significantly direct the viewer’s eye. These Desktop Cinema interfaces for Excel, Word, and Java programs were the only ones that could go beyond this 2.35:1 frame border displayed in a whole 1.78:1 frame. Notable are the dotted lines and arrows on the image for visual focus, the round and square graphic segments of office software drawn on the screen before the images appeared within, and also the program coded that fills the whole screen to represent Detective Poirot’s processed thoughts. There are even keying videos of the post-production editing software juxtaposed with reels of rolling films. The approach of desktop cinema seems to simulate the subjective puzzle-solving scenarios, which look like an AI-generated Cyborg Detective Poirot scouting on the internet, but with 1920s voiceovers.

Game Videos

Game video recordings have also been juxtaposed with the old footage in the geometric fractal. There is a sense of game-like simplicity to the content in each of the small segments. Each segment is looped like a gif in a game design practice by playing it forward and backward to ensure that actions of different durations in all frames can be completed on the same page. For example, the interface for selecting small keys and props juxtaposed with a problem-solving moment; a floating 3D chemical atom when introducing the composition of the poison; a 3D floorplan view online juxtaposed with a suspect entering a room Also used are the little clouds in Mario games, Google Street View, and even “The CAPTCHA test” image on the internet. Although director Péter Lichter honestly admitted that he hadn’t watched practically every piece of film footage and hadn’t played every piece of the game, he still captured the beauty of the internet aesthetic of spectacles overwhelmed by screens and videos.

The rationale behind Director Péter Lichter’s approach to integrating game graphics, desktop recordings, and old films is to preserve a perception of dynamic motion, even when footage and images appear static. Dealing with a still image, Péter Lichter adds recordings of the image cropped, duplicated, and moved in Photoshop to maintain consistency with other moving images. Dealing with a fixed shot with no motions, it is overlaid with one or two empty motion shots, enhancing its fluidity. Waves, running horses, pigeons, trains, and explosions are a few elements that encompass almost all of the overlaid motion shots. These elements seem to have occurred so frequently in cinematic history that they can be used generally to increase visual motion in found footage.

Images of Imaginations

The focus on the spirit and stream-of-consciousness emphasizing “inner realism,” as Péter argued, can date back to Hiroshima Mon Amour and Tarkovsky’s films. In film noir, or left-bank filmmakers, the voiceover always provides more content, fulfilling the background of the image. While in Péter Lichter’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the image provides a deeper psychoanalysis stream into Detective Poirot’s voiceover. The separation of visual narration and voice (Poirot’s) narration reminds me of a 1998 correspondence between experimental filmmakers R. Bruce Elder and Stan Brakhage. “An image differs from a word (at least most words). The tendency to think of words and images as essentially alike since both belong to the genus of representations has pernicious effects.” What followed was a discussion that seems to be caught in a phenomenological and linguistic dilemma, one that may be open to some new ideas of resolution in Péter Lichter’s experimental collage noir.

Throughout the film, which is structured by multiple different actors in the found footage, there is no single character with a shown face. In this way, it breaks the signified and signifier, that is, with no fixed characters come no symbols or everything symbols. With the absence of a specific face, Péter Lichter breaks the audience’s attention further with the fractal and discrete frames, reinterpreting the relationship between words and images. It also reflects that the important purpose of the geometrical fractals and the fast-paced visuals is to cut out the faces in the found footage. Sometimes the eyes of characters are blacked out with a paintbrush or block with a dark square; sometimes eyes are cropped out horizontally or vertically in the frame and replaced with other images in their original spot. Sometimes the person is cut out of another frame from the neck down, replacing what is above the neck with a hand or a flower. Péter Lichter also argued that this absence of the character’s face in a way restores the original feeling of reading an Agatha Christie novel, forcing the viewer to imagine the many possibilities of the character. Although there are many arrows and smears pointing to certain images in the geometric fractal frames, the absence of faces and expressions robs off the details being pointed to. The faceless imaginations put the viewer into the primitive question of cinema: “Where and what should I look at when I watch the film”. This approach, which requires the viewer to relearn to accept a visual narrative, reflects a new possibility for interactive cinema.

Some photos from the screening and Q&A with filmmaker moderated by Stephen Cappel