Film

Empty Suitcases

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We, like the rest of the world it seems, loved The Queen’s Gambit but there is a small, but oh so significant in our house, caveat.

Why would Beth would arrive back from one of her many chess triumphs (during which, especially in Paris,) she was wearing some amazing outfits, was she carrying small – and more importantly – empty suitcases.

Inside the House From Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit"

She is not alone, I have to say.

There are empty suitcases being carried by actors in hundreds of films – indeed we rarely watch a film without the Best Beloved harrumphing at a clearly empty suitcase.

Recently, on a wet afternoon diverted from gardening to binge film watching, Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson played about with empty suitcases in As Good As It Gets.

Previously, in To Catch A Thief when a youthful Leonardo di Caprio, who surely could manage to carry a suitcase with a little bit of stuff in it, swung an empty case as he strode along.

And that is to name but two.

(So, our film watching is punctuated by a combination of who can spot the empty suitcase first and name that actor.

‘Oh, that’s the woman who ran the antiques shop in Three Billboards, isn’t it?’

‘He was in that thing we watched, you know that thing with what’s her name from that thing based on JK Rowling’s book, Strike, that’s what it was – what was she called?’ )

It turns out we are not the only people to note empty suitcases – mentioning this to my good friend on a dog walk this morning, she was, well I can only say, enthused, that the BB was the other sensible soul in the universe who got outraged at an empty suitcase.

So, why when film makers expend a great deal of time, energy, effort, thought and money on making something look so real, do they fail to manage to get even a few clothes in a suitcase?

I stated to google about and looked up the role of continuity. I am no film expert but I would have thought this issue might fall into that bag (or case.)

Apparently, I was wrong and if you want to wade through some of the more arcane/academic explanations of continuity you could go here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3208769/ where you can find sentences like this: 

‘These camera shots are often filmed at different times and locations and may have little feature overlap, and as such, flow of information across shots often bears little resemblance to the perceptual flow of information as we interact in the real world.‘

But just in case you don’t, here is a short version, ‘Continuity in filmmaking is the practice of ensuring that details in a shot are consistent from shot to shot within a film scene. When there is continuity between shots, then audiences have a greater suspension of disbelief and will be more engaged in the film.’

Now, the problem with blaming continuity, is that you don’t get a shot with a proper heavy suitcase and the next time you see it, it is as light as a feather – they are always like that.

Presumably can’t be props as they must just supply the suitcases….

So, who knows who is responsible?

I googled ‘empty suitcases in films.’

It turns out I am not alone in trying to find an answer:

From The Guardian in 2013 in a section described as

‘Readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts’

John Benseman, from Auckland, New Zealand asked,

‘Given all the care that film-makers take to make things realistic, why do they never seem to put any weight in the bags and suitcases that actors carry?’

I am really hoping that John Benseman got his answer eventually because no one, not one reader answered his question on The Guardian’s site. 

(And I am tempted to ask him as I found him on Google too but that, dear reader may be going a step too far….)

Likewise Mavieen Rows asked on her blog ,where she described herself as a spending life watching movies,

‘This drives me crazy.  What is so hard about actually putting clothes in them?  Hell, even putting pillows in them would give an extra dimension of “full” that doesn’t exist in a sides-caving-in typical Hollywood suitcase.  I want answers!’

As far as I know, she didn’t.

The rest of that google page search is full of references to a film called Empty Suitcases by Bette Gordon and should you need a review:

The “empty” suitcases can be inferred as letting go of all the unnecessary thoughts and feelings of a person’s past. After the film was over Bette Gordon talked about her desire to work with the empty spaces of the frame and put in items outside of the frame of view.

Mmmm, well it will have to be a very long wet Sunday afternoon before I pick that over a re-run of The Railway Children.

So, dear reader I would love to be able to answer the question of empty suitcases but I have found out nothing.

But here is a nice ending:

Apparently, it is a tradition in Colombia to carry around an empty suitcase on New Year’s Eve in the hope that the next year is full of travel and excitement and that over the year those cases will be filled with precious memories…….

The Night Manger and the Cold War

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I would like to suggest that we spend all day on productive, useful, creative activities and then have something for supper made from some organic veg box – and across the dinner table we discuss Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the finer passages of the Iliad.

But actually, we have supper in front of the telly more times than not – and that can be re-runs of Lewis if one of us has had a particularly hard day, or recordings of what is making the ‘culture’ news.( And we don’t have an organic veg box delivered.)

And recently, like everyone else ( or at least everyone else like us,) it has been Happy Valley and The Night Manager.

We are of an age to have read John Le Carre avidly as ‘young people ‘ and to still enjoy a ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ‘ DVD with Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

I was raised in the Cold War and those stories seemed all too believable. I still like them. In our recent cull of some of our books (we still have many, many, left) all the John Le Carre were protected as they will be re-read.

(Now, I could do a list of books that I will always want to lay my hands on when a current book is finished/boring, I have a stinking cold and need to be tucked up with a good book or things are bad and I need to be sure my book will be escapism of the best order – but that is for another time.)

Some young person came in the Oxfam shop the other day and asked for any John Le Carre as she had seen The Night Manager and wanted more. Sadly, we didn’t have any, but I explained (in great detail) which she should read and why. She backed out of the shop, nervously…

My favourite is still The Little Drummer Girl which is about a young woman who is ‘recruited’ both by Mossad and the Palestinians and is pulled in one direction and then the other.

Surely, it would make for an excellent follow up to The Night Manager but international political sensitivities, or put it another way, the Israeli sensitivities, might put paid to that.

But, it was the Cold War spy stuff which resonated from my youth when I visited Berlin.

What I expected were steamy cafe windows with unshaven men looking unhappy or furtive and passing slips of paper or a few words between them, and eating hurriedly.

Sadly, I didn’t make it there until after the wall was well and truly down – and so what I found was more or less a city like any other European capital.

My friend, who is German, and I visited the Jewish memorial at dusk and found it eerie and impressive – lots of narrow tunnels between blocks which look like raised graves and it is a brilliant, thought-provoking place to be.

But of steamy cafes, there were none.

She was too young, too German ( as in, not raised on British spy novels) and too pleased to see a united Berlin, to understand my disappointment.

Since then, I have been back and now can see signs of the old left in the new. Berlin is a really big city with no real historic centre and lots of areas in which you can see signs of whether they were east or west, American, Russian or British – just about.

And the flea market in Berlin had lots of shadows of the older Berlin. (I bought a very welcome sheepskin coat which was very welcome when I was walking the very long distances between a and b which you find out about in Berlin.)

But back to the time when John Le Carre was writing the first stuff and I was young, and it was the Cold War.

We had a very real feeing that nuclear war could break out at any time.

I am too young to remember the Bay of Pigs and the brinkmanship around that, but I do remember growing up with the feeling that this issue was live and it only took someone nervous or mad to spark off a nuclear holocaust.

I clearly remember going on holiday to Cornwall and before we left there was some issue – I forget what – between the USSR and the Americans.

This was in the day, of course, of no mobile phones and, indeed, in that place there was no phone, tv or radio – we were cut off from news.

I was walking on the coastal path and thinking – as we did in those days – do you want to try and survive a nuclear fallout or do you want to to be killed by the first bomb. I always came to the decision, the first bomb.

There was a television series at that time about survivors of the nuclear holocaust and part of it was filmed where I grew up in Malvern – I remember the station being a location.

And for people of our age, if you are lucky, you can still catch The Day of the Triffids on Radio 4 Extra. Now, I know that is not a nuclear war story as such but the aftermath story is very similar.

But we, like John Le Carre, have moved on to issues which now face us and the next generation after us have no points of reference to the Cold War.

The Night Manager could start me on a riff about BAE systems ( but that is for another day.)