Do you mean the scene toward the end where he's standing there and the blind's shadow scrolls up the wall? I guess it was just to show he stood there a long time contemplating his situation.
shareThe blinds seemed to play in a lot of scenes in the movie.
Probably just a stylistic choice because it looked cool.
Blinds, especially the shadows they make, appear often in film noir. Often, they are used to highlight a doomed figure.
shareI think the blinds are used to make the scene more visually dynamic than ordinary lighting through naked windows.
DIGRESSION:
Consider these two shots from The Conformist (1970): In both scenes, the light comes in through blinds, like diagonal stripes criss-crossing the scene and the characters. It is meant to give the scene more visual energy, but also to reflect their chaotic emotional state.
CONFORMIST 1:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/4e/4f/6d/4e4f6d862f4e5158998fe2dca5dc48a8.jpg
CONFORMIST 2:
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d1/0c/63/d10c63dbfb657cae17d9e05524b945d0.jpg
In the movie, Jean-Louis Trintignant is a man tormented. He is about to accept a mission to kill his former professor. But also, he is struggling with long-buried fears after a childhood encounter with a homosexual chauffeur; he fears that this encounter may have made him a latent homosexual, so he tries to stifle it with a growing attachment to fascism. His exterior is calm, but his interior is seething, and the lighting shows that he is uneasy. (Directors have resorted to using sharp diagonal composition, or tilted camera angles, to suggest emotional disorder: for visuals, think of the old silent movies Dr. Caligari or Battleship Potemkin. For tilted cameras, think of The Third Man (of course) or the climactic scene in Brief Encounter, where Celia Johnson's character impulsively runs out to commit suicide on the platform.
I believe Schrader was using the blinds to show Julian's growing dissatisfaction with his life; but also, there is a moment of realization in the film with the bars of light coming through the blinds glide over Gere while he is standing still. The effect is disorienting, because no natural light source (except a descending aircraft or UFO) is going to create that movement of light. But to me, it suggests that he's thinking, and putting all the pieces together, without dialog. (After all, do we really need a line of dialog here like: "THINK, Julian, THINK! You're smarter than they are! You can do it!"
Nice job, thx!
"You work your side of the street, and I'll work mine"
Shadows through blinds and caused by rotating ceiling fans were fashionable lighting motifs in 80s cinema, pop videos and style photography ? partially inspired by this film. When the light is scrolling up through the blinds it gives the impression he is moving down, like being in a lift. Perhaps a metaphor for how his situation is sinking too.
share