Wonderwall: Voyeurism Meets Psychedelics

Wonderwall (1968) revolve around a voyeuristic man who drills holes in his walls to watch the model and her boyfriend who live in the apartment next door. While the ploy may leave a bit to be desired, the aesthetics don’t. The entire film is a dreamlike flooding of colours and vignettes see through the eyes of this man. Without this plot it would have made a great extended music video. But the vagueness of this plot is what allows for the film to be so free in its exploration of aesthetics. 

 

While the film mostly revolves around seeing into the model’s (played by Jane Birkin) life, there is lots to be seen in the portrayal of the man watching her. The opening sequence of the film is a psychedelic, multi media introduction that morphs into the cells he is examining in his lab where he works, however he soon abandons his work in pursuit of his voyeurism. His life is juxtaposed with hers, as his apartment is cramped with papers piled to the ceiling, yet there are paintings on the wall of fantasy like characters and writing, with heavy religious imagery. The wall which he ends up drilling and eventually peeling the wallpaper off of has an image of a woman resembling the Virgin Mary, with her hands held in prayer. Paintings play a key role in the representation of his life. The painting The Son of Man (1964) by Magritte is referenced in the scene in which he runs into the models boyfriend in the hallway. He wears a bowler hat and carries a bag of green apples. While he may be the part of this film that is meant to be plain, even he includes nods the surreal. 

His neighbor’s apartment on the other hand is not full of traditional looking paintings, but instead seemingly flooded with lights. Every time he looks in there is a different scene, whether it be her dressed up for shoots, parties, or even the couple being intimate. He sees into every facet of their lives through this one wall. While his scenes are dim, these show up in bright technicolor, a futuristic, psychedelic dreamscape he can barely access. However surreal these scenes are, there are also dream sequences, such as him imagining her sat on the table in his lab. There are also title cards used, which match up with her life and the hippie flower power aesthetic asking things such as, “are you in a hole?.” The perspective also shifts from just his, with one scene involving “what he doesn’t see”, “what she doesn’t see”, revealing the boyfriend’s infidelity and her pregnancy.

 

This film has so much aesthetically that I find inspiring, including a scene that involves animated butterflies flying around his apartment. I plan to try and recreate a version of this in my own experiments, to reverse engineer how this was done and how I may adapt this to my own work. As mentioned a few posts ago I also plan on conducting more lighting experiments to understand the techniques used her. In a later post I will discuss my title sequence and how a few of the techniques seen in this film will heavily influence how I plan to make that.