Home movies

Home movies viewed within a film are traditionally used to evoke the past, usually with a sense of loss, as in the home movie Charles (Michel Duchaussoy) watches of his dead wife and son in QUE LA BÊTE MEURE (Claude Chabrol, 1969), or the one the middle-aged Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) watches of his lost love, filmed when both of them were teenagers, in CINEMA PARADISO (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988).These are strong examples of the motif: we are being told a great deal about the man who obsessively shows himself the films, and both scenes are very poignant.

Neither example, however, approaches the complexity of the scene in REBECCA, when Maxim and his young wife watch the home movie of their French honeymoon. Here the sense of loss is present in a more astringent way: the contrast between the couple's happiness in the movie and the tension and unease between them in the present. The tension arises from a number of factors, but one is the consequence of Maxim's contradictory behaviour towards the heroine. On the one hand, she is supposed to be sweet and self-effacing (as in the home movie) and not dress in a glamorous evening gown (as in the present) and so remind him of Rebecca, his first wife; on the other, she is supposed to be the mistress of the house, and handle domestic matters with Rebecca's control and savoir faire, which she has just failed, rather embarrassingly, to do. As I will argue in detail later, here a motif which was unfamiliar in 1940, but is common today, is employed with a sophistication which has possibly never been bettered.

Cigarette case / lighter

Although there are nuances to the way each of these objects functions in films generally, depending on whether it is a case or a lighter, for the purposes of the discussion here they may be combined. The essential point is that the case or lighter is originally a gift from a woman to a man. In most such cases, the gift signals the woman's – frequently rather possessive – desire.