Gaslight

Happiness is better than art.

One of the classiest things in my memory.

Somehow I wanted/expected this movie to be the origin of the catchlight effect, and it doesn’t make you wait for it. In the arts or technology it’s not straightforward to make claims about origins, so it is more about personal experience. In my experience, Dracula (1931) features the idea in a single stark shot. Then this movie develops the idea and has that artistical consistency, so it seems to put the idea at the core of the movie.

The objective timeline does not matter because you could entertain ways to produce the effect in the theater. Yet subjective experience can only be evaluated from the point of following actions. Here subjective experience leads to some exploration of expressive mechanisms and it’s fun.

The Shining can also be echoed in the movie. One can see how it develops visual language of roughly speaking all previous movies in the genre. So I should stop mentioning it.

Also, calling movies imaginative becomes repetitive, so I’ll economize on that from this point. If things go this way, I’m going to be forced into appreciating acting at some point.