Allegorizing cinema: word, image, and motion in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard

Abstract

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a striking example of how a major feature film makes use of allegorical personifications. Wilder incorporates three filmic characters to represent Image, Word, and Motion as the metacinematic cornerstones of film after the advent of talkies. On the surface, the film deals with the major paradigmatic change in the media landscape that took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the introduction of sound. However, on a more coded and subliminal level, Wilder thematizes a similar landslide of media change that was taking place at the time of the release of Sunset Boulevard with the advent of television. Making recourse to older media constituents, such as writing, sound, and movement, is a leitmotif in moments of media changes in general. For example, in the 1890s emerging film evoked older media, such as literature, photography, painting, sculpture, or tableaux vivants, in order to conceptualize the new medium and self-reflexively fashion its own media theory. Subsequent changes within the medium of film followed this very logic by reprojecting and grounding these ruptures through evocations of previous media shifts. This article examines how Wilder allegorically discusses the advent of television under the guise of a debate about the transition from silent movies to talkies.