{"id":20,"date":"2006-10-11T12:58:02","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T19:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2010-07-22T18:05:15","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T23:05:15","slug":"one-more-on-the-departed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2006\/10\/11\/one-more-on-the-departed\/","title":{"rendered":"One more on THE DEPARTED"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I forgot to mention in yesterday&#8217;s entry that the same issue of <em>American Cinematographer<\/em> (October 2006) reports that Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus worked a cross motif into the architecture, lighting, and set design of <em>The Departed<\/em>. &#8220;These crosses, which the crew dubbed the &#8216;X motif,&#8217; appear whenever a character is in mortal danger,&#8221; explains the article&#8217;s author Stephen Pizzello. He quotes gaffer Andy Day: &#8220;We even had grips and electricians saying, &#8216;Hey, we could put an X here!&#8217; Michael was always very excited if someone found another place to put an X. He and Marty did it partly as a homage to the great noir films, and also to create a sense of imminent doom&#8221; (p. 47).<\/p>\n<p>Two comments: (a) I noticed it a couple of times; I wonder if viewers catch it explicitly or sense it intuitively? (b) Ballhaus says that it refers to a motif in <em>T-Men<\/em>, which I confess I never noticed. But the same motif was used in Howard Hawks&#8217; <em>Scarface<\/em> (1932), as Hawks himself explained in interviews. It&#8217;s quite heavily stressed in that film, most memorably during a sequence in a bowling alley, when a pencilled X records a strike just before a crook is gunned down on the lane!<\/p>\n<p>DB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I forgot to mention in yesterday&#8217;s entry that the same issue of American Cinematographer (October 2006) reports that Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus worked a cross motif into the architecture, lighting, and set design of The Departed. &#8220;These crosses, which the crew dubbed the &#8216;X motif,&#8217; appear whenever a character is in mortal danger,&#8221; explains the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,2,1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-scorsese","category-film-art","category-film-comments","category-film-technique"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8970,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/8970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}