![]() Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans une glace et vous verrez la Mort travailler commes les abeilles dans une ruche de verre.” (Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes and goes. “Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la Mort va et vient. THE MIRROR AS PORTAL PART 1 – ORPHÉE (1950) I’ve often wondered how THAT marriage worked out. And that past begins to exercise a baleful influence on his personality… Googie Withers tells us how she bought an antique mirror for her fiancé, only for him to see reflections of the mirror’s past in it, not its present. Robert Hamer’s short film about a haunted mirror is one of the highlights of Ealing’s deliciously scary portmanteau horror film in which guests at a house party relate their uncanny experiences to the assembled company, including an architect who is beginning to feel an uncanny sense of déjà-vu. “When I was dressing this evening, just as I was tying my tie, I suddenly realised that the reflection was all wrong.” THE HAUNTED MIRROR PART 1 – DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) But of course the best and creepiest magic mirror is the one in Disney’s 1937 animated film. Magic mirrors can be seen in Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). ![]() There is always someone younger and prettier. Vanity, thy name is Older Woman Worried About Losing Her Looks. No list of movie mirrors would be complete without the mother of all fairytale looking-glasses – the ego-boosting device in Snow White which goes horribly wrong when it reveals to the Evil Queen that she is no longer the prettiest person in the land. “Magic mirror on the wall Who is the fairest one of all?” THE KNOW-IT-ALL MIRROR – SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937) In fact, they already have – in 1988’s Big Business (see below). Now they would do it with special effects. Split second timing, reversed expectations and surreal visual gags add up to a comedy classic that has no need of dialogue or music. The mirror gets broken right at the beginning of this brilliant Marx brothers sequence in which Harpo pretends to be Groucho’s reflection. They also make for some spectacular images. But what parts! Chief among them are the much-copied tryst in the aquarium (very fishy) and the demented final showdown set in a funfair hall of mirrors that prove as deceptive as Elsa herself. It’s a familiar tale with Welles – studio interference leading to a film deemed by some to be less than the sum of its parts. He gets a job on her wealthy husband’s yacht and finds himself market out as the patsy in a convoluted murder plot. Welles wrote and directed it, and also plays the leading male role of an itinerant sailor with an absurd Irish accent. Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth were already on the verge of divorce when he made her cut and bleach her trademark red hair to play Elsa Bannister, the femme fatale in this film noir. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.” “With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. THE MULTIPLE TARGET PART 1 – THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947) Here are twenty-three memorable mirror moments. They can be talked to, and they can talk back. They can expose the truth, or hide it behind a veil of deception. They can be symbols of ageing and death, madness and corruption. They can bewilder and bewitch, distract and disturb. They can function as a portal to other worlds, or as a door to admit otherwordly creatures into our reality. ![]() They can display the soul, reflect psychological damage, or show things that aren’t really there. But he wrote that in 1872, when the movies were still no more than a twinkle in the eyes of the Lumière brothers, Woodville Latham and other early pioneers of the cinema.īecause mirrors in the movies reveal more than just “appearance”. “Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only,” wrote Samuel Butler.
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