This video essay aims to examine how isolation is portrayed visually within Mark Romanek’s 2002 film One Hour Photo. The film is a psychological thriller starring Robin Williams as Sy Parrish, a photo technician who has dedicated over 20 years of his life to developing film in a supermarket. Sy is a desperately lonely, quiet soul who wishes for nothing more than to feel loved and wanted, leading him to form a perturbing obsession with one of his customers, Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), and her seemingly perfect family. Rather than wanting to replace anyone in this family, Sy simply wants to be included. However, on finding out about Nina’s husband’s affair, Sy takes it upon himself to punish Will Yorkin (Michael Vartan). From here, the film takes a darker turn as we follow Sy’s slow decent into turmoil as he goes to extreme lengths to attempt to avenge his shattered fantasy and lost childhood innocence.
One Hour Photo delves into the intricate depths of the human mind, exploring themes of obsession, voyeurism and particularly isolation, prompting viewers to confront the darkness inside us and the people we encounter daily. However, Williams’ portrayal of Sy, while still evoking a sense of disturbance, elicits a strong sympathy for him. Williams’ heart-wrenching performance carefully builds tension as it peels back the layers of Sy’s fragile psyche, proving Sy isn’t a psychotic, evil caricature but rather a broken human being with no real identity, tragically struggling with no source of help and therefore finding reason to live through the lives of others.
Romanek, being a very visual director, and Jeff Cronenweth, known for his cinematography on David Fincher films including Fight Club (1999) and Gone Girl (2014), skilfully extends Sy’s sense of isolation into the film’s visuals, namely the colour palette, use of frame-in-frame, and spatial composition.
This video essay begins with an exploration of my own footage, utilising it to illuminate how a few changes can make a scene evolve from a warm, welcoming place into an inhospitable, empty space. Initially, I shot the subject in a medium long shot, highlighting her surrounding while staying in close proximity to her, thereby establishing a physical and emotional connection. I directed the subject to stretch out across the sofa, taking up the space around her, showing her comfort in her surroundings. I then adjusted the highlights to emphasise the scene’s yellows while making the midtones a copper orange. This enabled me to introduce a warmth to the shot, further enhancing the cosiness of the space. Comparatively, in the second clip, I filmed the subject in a wide shot, almost losing her in the expansive negative space around her. She is made even more insignificant within the space due to the fact she is sitting upright, rigidly in one spot on the sofa, making her appear uneasy within the room. Additionally, I darkened the highlights while tinting the scene a green tone, resulting in the cream of the walls becoming a murky cyan. Coupled with the fact the subject was framed within the window, I was able to communicate visually a looming sense of emotional entrapment.
Although there was limited movement in both shots, the second seems even more motionless, almost as if frozen in time. Therefore, it is evident these changes can help one perceive the character as lonely because rather than finding a solace in her solitude, she appears to find her physical loneliness to be emotionally confining. This is emblematic of the fact that Sy is never free of his inner turmoil and so never seems to feel comfortable in any of his surroundings.
From the sterile, blinding white light of the SavMart to his own home, Sy is made to appear as if he doesn’t belong. In order to create this impression, Romanek and Cronenweth created living paintings, framing many scenes in a tableu vivant style, depicting events as living pictures where the camera remains motionless matching Sy’s stationary blocking, trapping Sy within the frame. Romanek and Cronenweth seemingly draw inspiration from director Roy Anderson and artist Edward Hopper, both of whom explore what it means to be human by placing an emphasis on solitude.
Hopper’s signature style influenced Andersson’s distinct despondent, minimalistic aesthetic. When stating what drew him to Hopper’s paintings, Andersson claimed “It’s the loneliness. His paintings are beautiful and sad at the same time”, making key reference to Hopper’s The Office at Night (1940) painting (Figure 1).[1] The painting is of a female secretary standing at a filing cabinet, her body turned to face a man sat at his desk, working in the office. While there are indications of movement, the picture itself is frozen in time, with the pair looking as if they’re about to start a conversation which never happens. Similarly, in One Hour Photo in the scenes where Sy is alone, notably in his apartment, despite not being a frozen frame the scene appears frozen in time. This is most apparent in the scene in which Sy is shown standing alone in his kitchen, motionless, holding a glass of water (Figure 2). Sy’s pale, insipid appearance camouflages him into the muted colours of his prison cell of an apartment, insinuating a coldness to his home reflecting his detachment from life and a longing for connection. I propose that this scene and the film as a whole also draw on Song Hwee Lim’s conventions of ‘slow cinema’, dragging out the scene’s duration to heighten viewers’ awareness of time passing.[2] By forcing viewers to endure the scene over a long period, they’re compelled to contemplate Sy’s inner thoughts and feelings. So much of the film is watching, thinking, waiting- we realise Sy is trapped not only in his world but also in his past from which he cannot heal alone.
Figure 1- Edward Hopper’s ‘The Office at Night‘ painting.
Figure 2- Sy in One Hour Photo standing alone in the kitchen of his apartment, barely moving and insipid against the colours of the room.
I intended to underline this idea that Sy feels ill at ease, prominently in his own company, by displaying how this is visually depicted within the film’s colour palette. The colour spectrum (for which I determined the prominent colour from each scene and laid them out in chronological order) reveals a contrasting palette consisting of brown and white. When looking at the scenes each colour reflected it became apparent that the warm tones, comprised of browns, oranges and yellows, mainly reflected the Yorkins and their world, evoking feelings of comfort and unity, while Sy and the environments he inhabits were left to be reflected by the distinctly cooler colours, such as white, grey and green, most prominently white, signalling an emotional detachment and alienation, thereby spotlighting his loneliness. White is a cold and depressing colour, representing Sy as this numb, blank slate secluded from the world. Sy hides within his colour scheme, representing how he is trapped in his own world and by his past. By shifting between these contrasting colour schemes, Romanek highlights the dynamic tension between emotional closeness and distance, using a desaturated, muted palette to visually reinforce Sy’s isolation in relation to the world around him.
Notably, in some scenes the colour palette appears to be discordant with the rest of the film. The most prominent colour deviances to Sy’s colour palette are red, green and blue. These three colours make up the acronym RGB which is a digital colour model used to create colours on screen. By combining red, green and blue light in their purest forms white light is made, which is the colour coded to Sy. Therefore, even the brighter colours overlaying Sy contribute to portraying his isolation as they work together to remind us of his white colour motif.
Throughout the film there is also a motif of photographs which is extended into the cinematography. Sy is unable to engage with the dynamic, unpredictable nature of real relationships and life three-dimensionally. Therefore, to cope, he reduces them to flat, two-dimensional snapshots. Many scenes mirror Sy’s emotional paralysis, meticulously composed to mimic photos by playing with negative space, focal points, symmetry, and frames. By organising scenes around Sy like a static photograph, Sy becomes trapped within the frame, stripping away the spontaneity and vibrancy of human connection. Although he is often positioned central to the frame, a position commonly reserved for the protagonist, he could not be more visually insignificant. Surrounded by copious empty negative space, Sy is visually and physically separated from the warmth of others.
I selected various stills from the film in which Sy seems to blend into his surroundings and then digitally manipulated the images by erasing Sy entirely. As a result, this created an uncanny reality depicting empty sets inhabited by Sy’s ghostly presence. This resembled the fact that Sy hides within the safety of the frame, camouflaging into his surroundings, reflecting his detachment from life. Sy is in a stalemate within the world, moving purposelessly through life like the walking dead. Within the starkness of his surroundings, just as in the narrative of his own life, Sy seemingly takes up no space, obscuring him so far within the visuals that he might as well be non-existent.
The video essay may also be een here:
Bibliography
Hopper, Edward, The Office at Night, oil paint, canvas, 56.4 cm (22.2 in) × 63.8 cm (25.1 in), Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1940.
Lim, Song Hwee, ‘Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness’ in De Luca, Tiago and Jorge, Nuno Barradas (eds.) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 87-98.
Ratner, Megan, ‘The “Trivialist Cinema” of Roy Andersson: An Interview’, Film Quarterly, 69:1 (2015), pp. 36-44.
Filmography
Fight Club, Dir. David Fincher, Prod. Fox 2000 Pictures, USA, 1999. Main Cast: Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden), Edward Norton (The Narrator), Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer).
Gone Girl, Dir. David Fincher, Prod. Regency Enterprises, USA, 2014. Main Cast: Rosamund Pike (Amy Dunne), Ben Affleck (Nicholas Dunne).
One Hour Photo, Dir. Mark Romanek, Prod. Catch 23 Entertainment, USA, 2002. Main Cast: Robin Williams (Sy Parish), Connie Nielsen (Nina Yorkin), Michael Vartan (Will Yorkin), Dylan Smith (Jake Yorkin).
Watch the audiovisual essay here: One Hour Photo Video Essay.mp4
[1] Andersson quoted in Ratner, Megan, ‘The “Trivialist Cinema” of Roy Andersson: An Interview’, Film Quarterly, 69:1, (2015), p.42.
[2] Lim, Song Hwee, ‘Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting: Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness’ in De Luca, Tiago and Jorge, Nuno Barradas (eds.) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
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