Wonderwall (1968)

Directed by Joe Massot
Story by Gérard Brach
Screenplay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The set up of this nearly silent movie is rather simple. There is a typical absent minded Prof. Oscar Collins, played by Jack MacGowran. He spends his days at the lab looking at microbes through a microscope. Apparently he is consumed by this, by the tiny life forms that are his work. He is shown right away to be unaware of much else. When the work day ends at 6pm his co-workers head out the door. He doesn’t look up as they depart, he says goodbye to the woman by the man’s name and vice versa. He consults post-it notes in his pocket to remind him how to leave the lab, to shut things off, to feed the lab mice, and at home to remove his socks before soaking his feet. He fails to do the last.

His dark apartment is cluttered with stacks of old newspapers. He sits there and again looks through a microscope. This is his world, clearly the only one he cares about.
This world is intruded upon by noise from the apartment through the wall behind him. He bangs on the wall and it stops. But then another musical piece begins. (The music for the movie is effective and unobtrusively done by George Harrison in his first adventure into movie soundtracks.)
The scene culminates with a slick idea of a projection on the professor’s wall of what is in the next room. He sees a circular light on his wall with an upside down image of a woman’s body. He is fascinated by this and says, “Camera obscura.”  The hole in his wall and his darkened room have produced the ancient magic of a camera obscura.

This is a movie about voyeurism. The professor becomes obsessed with watching through the wall. Peeping through the wall is the new peeping through the microscope. Jane Birkin plays the model living next door. She is on the surface the object of the peeping. This could have been a simple girlie show soft sex movie, but it is not. It is much better than that and viewers coming to it for that would be likely disappointed.

We don’t particularly see that the old professor is getting a sexual kick out of the looking. We can assume that is what he is after presumably if that is what we are looking for. There is a glimpse of nudity, but the room next door more seems to represent the movement of life and youth. One moment he looks through the hole and sees a young man in a skiing scene. This is for a photo shoot. Penny’s (Jane Birkin) apartment is being used for photoshoots for glossy fashion magazines. What goes on in there is staged artifice. And Penny is a very unhappy object apparently not feeling loved for herself.  

The movie can do to the viewer exactly what it does to the professor character. Though the wall of our screen we are lured in to be voyeurs  with the notion of the girlie show in a psychedelic wonderland. That world beyond the wall is colorful and inviting on the surface, but it is actually fake, commercial, and the characters, hired to act as the joyful young, feel exploited, unseen, and unloved as themselves.

Little wonder that the film is so little known and was not widely distributed and seen 50 some years ago.

It is a subtle artful contemplation of media in our lives and not something with much appealy to the popular audience trained to expect sex, violence, and plotty conflict.
This is a really good little movie.