The Third Man

Today is 14 October. One hundred and twenty years ago today, Hannah Arendt was born in Linden, now part of Hanover. The question she returned to for a lifetime was not "how does a person become a monster" but a harder one: how does an ordinary person find a justification for what he does inside a system.

Both of tonight's films answer that question, in opposite ways.

The first is a city cut into pieces. In 1949 Vienna is divided into American, British, French and Soviet sectors with an international zone in the middle. Papers matter more than people, the black market outdoes the shops, and a person who does not legally exist can be handed to another occupying power at any moment. This is exactly the post-war Europe Arendt described: not a battlefield but an order that comes after the verdict.

There is an archival reason too. The archive has never held a film noir, and this is the type's definitive specimen; the 1940s previously held only two films (Bicycle Thieves and Spring in a Small Town, both 1948); and the United Kingdom had appeared only twice, both times as a co-production (2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien). The slot has stood empty for a long time.

Tonight's other film moves the camera to a different occupied city: Algiers, 1957. Seventeen years, two continents and two entirely different methods separate them, and they ask the same thing — when power is divided and borders are drawn on a map, is the side a person stands on chosen, or assigned.

1949 年，维也纳。一个写西部通俗小说的美国作家 Holly Martins 收到老朋友 Harry Lime 的邀请，兴冲冲赶到这座四国共管的城市，准备开始新生活。

他抵达时，Harry 的葬礼刚刚结束。

警方给的版本很简单：一场车祸，两个目击者，没有疑点。Holly 在 Harry 的旧居遇到他的女友 Anna——一个证件有问题的女演员，随时可能被交给苏占区当局。两人开始各自寻找答案，而 Holly 很快就发现，葬礼那天在场的人，说法对不上。

有一个证人提到过第三个抬尸体的人。没有人能说清他是谁。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film about partition

1949, Britain. 104 minutes, black and white, English and German, produced by London Films. Directed by Carol Reed from a screenplay by Graham Greene. It is set in a Vienna divided into four occupied sectors — the city itself is the film's first set, and its most honest one.

A tilted horizon

Cinematographer Robert Krasker leans hard on canted compositions and extreme chiaroscuro: wet cobbles, ruins, doorways, shadows on walls. The device has been imitated endlessly, and what it is doing is rarely mentioned — the city is genuinely crooked. Borders turn at street corners; two halves of one street belong to two countries. The frame is tilted because the world is. Krasker won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) at the 23rd Academy Awards in 1951.

One shared sewer

The film's most famous sequence takes place underground. Vienna's sewers are both real civic infrastructure and the film's most precise metaphor: above ground there are sectors, passports and manners; below ground there is a single pipe everyone uses. The climax is staged here, and it is built out of space, not effects.

One zither

The entire score uses a single instrument — the zither of Anton Karas, a Viennese street musician whom Reed reportedly brought into the production after hearing him play at a party. The theme took on a life of its own after release and became one of the most recognisable melodies in film music. A film about division and pretence, scored with the plainest plucked string.

A farewell that refuses to cut

The last shot runs unbroken, turning a goodbye into a distance nobody closes. Reed denies the audience what it wants — the coldest and most mature gesture in the film.

A film ratified again and again

In 1949 it took the top prize at Cannes (then called the Grand Prix, the forerunner of today's Palme d'Or). In 1999 the British Film Institute's poll of the 100 greatest British films placed it first. Its standing has only risen since.