New Thoughts

As I begin to reconstruct the story of "The Black Dahlia" in these new six sequences - I am considering the power of point of view as a structural and emotive story-telling device. Looking at real LAPD crime scene photographs, I was struck by how compelling these visual constructs are, and wondered why. There is a constant tension in these images, between the viewpoint of the narrator (the detective, the crime investigator) and the scene itself. While the photograph is a purely informational, objective view - the subject matter is wholly human and tragic - a murder victim. There is a sense of searching in the eye of the detective, an attempt to quantify what one sees, measure evidence, document the residue of the crime, arrive at some sort of truth. But countering this is the voice (the almost voiceless voice) of the murder victim. She is like a beckoning, haunting melody that sits underneath this enquiring stare of the detective.

I realise every crime/mystery narrative is based upon this tension between the detective and the deceased. In "The Black Dahlia" it is quite a literal tension - the detective Bucky Bleichert is obsessed with the dead girl Elizabeth Short, has almost fallen in love with her. The story is told from the point of view of the detective - all AFTER THE FACT. He is the audible voice, the framer of the story. He records facts and tries to piece together the facts of the murder, of the mystery. The murder victim haunts the entire story, she is the presence the detective seeks out. He attempts to pin down her intangible mystery by piecing together physical evidence.

I am approaching the retelling of this story as a sort of dialogue between these two persons, these two voices. While we as audience only hear the detective, her presence is audible beneath it. The detective seeks to uncover something unseen, the mystery of her murder. She is the obscurer of truth, by virtue of her being dead and therefore, silent. He speaks but she doesn't respond. There is a juxtaposition of objects of objectivity (measuring devices, cameras, notebooks, news clippings, actual frames) with the victim's clues - her still foot, a shadow, a look in her eye two years before her murder.

In this way, the final sequence will embody the tension of every murder mystery.