THAS: The Art of the Exquisite Visual Dialectic, aka Patterning and Matrix-Making

The Exquisite Visual Dialectic

"Without breaking from the scene's rigorous pattern of singles (Eaten Alive a film about isolated spheres of different personages, Hooper's cinema in general about dialectic - the explicit contrasting between things, such that ideas and suggestions are created), the entrance of Buck is signaled simply, eloquently by Marilyn Burns's turn of the head toward the sound of a car radio playing another wistful country tune, the car belonging to Buck, a new player in her and the film's fleeting, interconnected, serious drama of life." - From THAS: Eaten Alive 2 post.

Hooper's rigorous patterns.  The visual nature of the camera set steadfastly in a hardened matrix of contrasting subjects and opposing - or simply different, yet adjacent - frames.  Hooper's thick and lulling as molasses willingness to stick to the low-excitement, but high-mannerist, routine of aesthetically demonstrative frames, caught in a grid of interplay, used in emboldened repetition.  It is not naturalism.  It is a dodgy (in the most complimentary sense of the word) and jolting mannerism, that when held over to commercial filmmaking can be confused for a soporific deficiency of inspiration, or a "failure" to attain that overbearingly butter-smooth, persuadable New Hollywood naturalism.

That Hooperian tone of heightened theoretical expression and ideated visual performative -- it is created through this constant creation of mannerist frames, without recompense but to jut into each other in anticipated interplay, and harmonize alongside each other in Hooper's (undiscerning of naturalism) sequence of alarmingly beautiful and theoretical frames.  The willingness for repetition of his theoretical frames is what creates the sense of pattern (patterning within scenes the most straightforward cinema analogue to poetry's meter, in their creation of rhythm and accentuation within a sense of internal structure)...
 
Hooper creates drama through the aesthetical aspect of the drama.  Naturalism is sacrificed when the frame is so clearly felt, the image's performative communication so clear, the tranquilized and matrixed patterns of repeating the same old frames so willingly sustained.  Gained, of course, is meaningful aesthetics.
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Night Terrors (1993)

Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper
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Tobe Hooper

The Heisters (1964)

Tobe Hoope
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hoope
Hooper's dialectical "matrix-making" is all over The Heisters, which is conceived with the visual economy of scrappy early cinema (that time when the performative visual was the common tool to the telling of those silent, archetypical tales).
The visual separation here of the three archetypes of heisters is fundamentally clear.

 Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

 Tobe Hooper  

The Heisters (1964)

One need not put The Heisters's sophistication of visual dialectic or of moral aptitude into question when we see how sharply it demonstrates that dialectic need not simply remain between persons and persons... that the bold, mannerist matrix-making can be expanded to include communicating the chasm that exists between people and their very own - effective or rather ineffective, as we see below - extremities...
(Accountable or mostly unaccountable extremities, with regards to the caped heister, who, in this scene, places a look of conciliation on his face all while his off-screen hands continue to pocket the largest jewels...)

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

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Poltergeist (1982)

Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper
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A scene of ambiguous singles... enmeshed in a scenic web, in a "matrix" of interplay, placed together they effectively create a functional scene via mannerist images.