strange days

 

        Continuing on the topic of voice-overs in movies and TV shows, I was re-thinking what I thought before about what Alfred Hitchcock's opinion of voice-overs might be.  I had thought he wouldn't like them because his thing is "pure cinema" -- visual storytelling.  And he rather looked down on "photographs of people talking," as he termed it.

But then I remembered his first film in Hollywood, when he and his wife and daughter moved to America from England, had a voice-over right at the beginning.  And voice-overs are not photographs of people talking because you don't see the person who is speaking, you only hear them while watching scenes and activities on-screen.

My original idea was not thought-out.

voice-over at the beginning of Rebecca (1940)

------------------ Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.  It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter . . .

for the way was barred to me.

Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers . . .

and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

        The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done.  But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it.  Nature had come into her own again, and little by little had encroached upon the drive . . .

with long, tenacious fingers.

On and on wound the poor thread that had once been our drive, and finally there was Manderley.

Manderley--secretive and silent.  Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls.  Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows.

And then a cloud came upon the moon . . .

and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.

The illusion went with it.  I looked upon a desolate shell . . . with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

We can never go back to Manderley again.  That much is certain.  But sometimes in my dreams . . .

I do go back to the strange days of my life . . . which began for me in the South of France.

________________________

        It's a woman's voice telling this -- a theater-trained, lilting voice, which rises and falls, at times dropping nearly to a whisper, and speaking with perfect diction.

Before the movie begins, you see words on the screen:

Rebecca

SELZNICK INTERNATIONAL

presents its picturization of

DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S 

celebrated novel

"picturization"

_______________________

("The Indictment" - Continued)

96.

The underscored statements and representations above were false, as NAUTA knew, because (1) NAUTA did in fact know that the boxes in Pine Hall had come from the Storage Room, as NAUTA himself, with the assistance of Trump Employee 2, had moved the boxes from the Storage Room to Pine Hall; and (2) NAUTA had observed the boxes in and moved them to various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club.

All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001(a)(2).

JACK SMITH

SPECIAL COUNSEL

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

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