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Three fairgrounds in three important films of the 20th century:
- Fernand Leger's erratic rides in his 1924 "Le Ballet Mecanique" where man and machine fuse as one, even during man's most abandoned and playful moments.
- The 1920 German Expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" directed by Robert Wien, in which the protagonist, Dr. Caligari, uses a carnival to introduce his somnambulist Cesare.
- Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 "Strangers on a Train" has both a murder and the identification of a murderer occur at a fairground.
Leger uses fairgrounds to wax poetic about machines. Robert Wien makes the expressionist fairground into some kind of unearthly place full of macabre fantasies.
Hitchcock's carousel juxtaposes the horrors of the crime committed by the deranged criminal full of his internal fantasies, with the speed and distorted figures of the wooden horses, to finally evict the murderer through the centrifugal force of the mechanical carousel onto stable ground, where he can be identified and convicted.
Hitchcock took a little of each of the two previous films to make his approachable, human film where man is separated from machine and fantasy, and made to pay for his sins.
I'm always surprised at how moralistic Hitchcock is. After all, his films for the most part are about murder and crime. But, I think he really separates man from other things - nature, machine, psychosis (which is an inferior version of rational, sensible man.) Hitchcock has trust in man, despite his ambiguities and insecurities.
Unlike the other two filmmakers, whose protagonists are outside of the human (machine or fantasy), Hitchcock stays grounded in his portrayals of his fellow being.