"you saw nothing at shutter island..."

Martin Scorsese's long over due Shutter Island masks murder mystery through the complexity of the human mind. Elegantly photographed, the film sets finite spatial definitions contrasted with the illusive expanse of the psyche. From the preview, one would anticipate a "psychological thriller," constantly awaiting twists and turns, jumps and bumps around every creepy corner. And to a certain aesthetic sense, the film delivers just that. Audiences will get their surprises and "ah hah" moments, accompanied by the stylistic violence of any Scorsese film. But I'd like to offer a different take on what could be considered a film on par with say, Se7en or Silence of the Lambs. I would argue that this is Scorsese's Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

A film that is well know by the director who so often attributes his love of film to rise of Modernist European Cinema, like that of Italian Neorealism and the New Wave, it is an easy connection to be made between the director and his product. For at the very core of Shutter Island is the deeper issues of trauma, memory and the deconstruction of the lucid image. Like Resnais' Hiroshima, Scorsese seems to playing with question of the "truth of the image" and our own retrospective perception of events. The film centers on Teddy (Leonardo DeCaprio), a marshall, sent to Shutter Island to investigate the escape of a patient. Naturally, being confined to the psychologically traumatic space of the confined mental institution, we see a paranoid downward spiral of our protagonist. Since I don't want to ruin the film for all those who haven't seen the film, I won't go too into detail. But this deconstruction of the notion of defined spaces, memory and a parallel image of trauma (which we receive through repeated parallel editing sequences between events on the island and Teddy's experience as a U.S. soldier liberating a Nazi concentration camp) are akin to the experience of Emmanuel Riva's character in Hiroshima (the drop of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, paralleled through her experience in Nevers). The two images in present and past blend to create a doubled representation of memory, especially collective memory. For as we continue on with Shutter Island we are asked to constantly rethink the just-passed. Images, and verbal cues serve to dislodge our conception of memory and time, and subsequently those events of a further past. And like Hiroshima, the film utilizes a collective memory (WWII) to deconstruct our seemingly lucid images of the past in the present, just-passed. For if one cannot cognitively reconstruct even the present moment, one must question all images of memory itself.

Scorsese seems to be referencing this issue of traumatic memory through the poetic gaze of the camera, whose point of view is unclear. We as the viewer are not in a privileged position, the action is neither determined by our gaze nor dependent upon it. Instead the psychology of the character takes over the frame, to construct an image of memory that extends beyond the flash back sequences. By the end of the film, the soft focus and elegant photography become an entirely mental phenomena. Like Hiroshima, Mon Amour the fragmentation of the narrative through parallel editing sequences, flash backs and disconnected point of view shots, Shutter Island's image is one conceived of through the reconstruction of memory through another. And ultimately our temporality becomes entirely dismantled through the course of the film. It becomes unclear what is collective and what is subjective. Instead, like Hiroshima, we are left with the deconstruction of present reflective bearings to bring about a reconstruction of the cinematic image and suggestive "reality."

Now, without having proper comparisons between the two films, I by no means suggest that Scorsese's film copies Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour. I would rather call it a homage to an effect, as he reflected in his acceptance speech of the Cecil B. DeMille Award at this years' Golden Globes: "the past is never dead, it is never even past."