Hasta La Motion!

What I noticed in „Cat people“ were two things: The presence and absence of light and creatures that are trapped and released from cages: Including people. The people in the movie spent a lot of time switching on and off lights and walking through doors. Turning on the lights in the first part of my essay always puts the characters back into the secure realm of reality, entering rooms in the second part traps them and most of the time introduces them to Irena’s shadow world: Her appartment. Another motive is people who put animals into cages or boxes and keep them there. These scenes have almost symbolic quality to, considering that Irene tries to keep her inner nature trapped inside throughout the movie. Irena herself is like an exotic animal, who is confronted every day with her otherness: also as opposed to American culture. The central point of my essay, which reverses everything I tried to show so far in the essay, is the image and the temptation of the key, which haunts Irena. In the next step, animals are being released: As well as the people, who leave the rooms which they entered in the first place. Turning off the lights, they are once again left in darkness, the natural habitat of Irena. The light and closed doors are things which separate the world of the conscious and the world of the dream, the world of the beasts and the world of the humans. I wanted to show entrapment of the animals in the film and the central aspect of the key. Very soon I realized that the people in the movie were entering and leaving rooms through doors very frequently, as if these were cages, too, often entering or leaving Irena’s apartment, which is in many ways the equivalent to the cat cages in the zoo. Cages and doors separate animals from people and people from people. So I looked for the motive of the door, as well as the one of the cage and the key. Then I searched for moments when people were switching on and off lights, as a way to introduce the sequences of entrapment and release. And also images which separate Irena’s culture and American culture. I created some sort of symmetrical pattern, with the key in the middle and the other aspects around it. Because I wanted to keep the atmosphere of the individual clips, I used audio transitions.