The Aviator

There are some unbroken shots of tremendously courageous length in the opening scenes of The Aviator, masterful enough even to call to mind the wonderful scene in which the nightclub and, by extension, the world unfolds itself in front of Henry Hill in Goodfellas. Many of The Aviator's similar scenes also take place in a nightclub, but they are shots of a different sort, where the camera seems to soar, swerve and swoop through the action like an airplane, like Howard Hughes himself as he films the dogfight scenes of his Hell's Angels from the cockpit of his own plane, miraculously darting and dodging his way through the ensuing chaos. Yet we note, in these long shots, how often the long, lazy, sweeping curves of the camera lengthen into circles, dizzying, intoxicating swirls of colour and movement, and how much smaller and tighter these circles become, eventually seeming to spiral downwards and downwards and downwards like a wounded bird.

Hughes is an obsessive compulsive; he is trapped in the illusory security of ritual and repetition. He keeps doing the same things, utilising the same strategies, having the same conversations over and over again with the same people for most of his life, in which he directs them to do the same as they did before; except when, overwhelmed by his neuroses he is incapable even of progressing along through the circle again, and jams on the same spot repeating the same words over and over and over again. ("Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints.") And, of course, the movie's final scene returns to its first scene. Even the screen in Hughes's projection room is constantly showing the same scenes from the same movies in one long loop. Circular motion is secure, but not perpetual. It loses with each turn, closes in around itself. By the end, the smooth roundness of the curve has entirely gone, and all that is left is the sickening lurch of a spinning-top's last throes.

Thomas Clark