The Carpet Turns Because Carpet Comes In Strips

There is a moment about two-thirds through this documentary — nine hours, three parts, an enormous amount of work — where the narrator freezes on a hallway and says, with real feeling, that the carpet's hexagonal pattern reverses direction between shots.

It does. It really does, and the film-makers have found it, and I want to give them full credit for the looking.

Carpet is laid in strips. Broadloom has a pile direction. A strip laid the other way up looks different under a light, and any hotel corridor in the world will do this to you if you photograph it twice from opposite ends.

The four that are true

I am going to be fair before I am unkind, because this documentary is the product of somebody's four years and the internet will be unkind enough.

Four of its twenty-two claims are, as far as I can establish, correct and not previously well known. A prop appears in two rooms it should not. A continuity error in a doorway is real and is not on any of the published lists. A costume changes buttons. And a piece of set dressing in the background of one shot is, verifiably, a period-incorrect object that the production designer's own papers show was queried and kept.

That last one is a genuine find. It is worth a paragraph in a book about the film. It is not worth ninety minutes.

The three that are interesting

Three more claims are unresolvable and interesting because of it — the sort of thing where the honest answer is that the archive does not say and the people who would know are dead.

The documentary's treatment of these is its best work: it lays out the evidence, notes what is missing, and declines to conclude. For about eleven minutes it is a good film about not knowing things.

The fifteen

Then it goes back to the carpet.

The remaining claims are all one claim wearing fifteen coats: that a thing which is there is there on purpose, and that purpose is a message.

A film set is a room somebody built in a hurry for money. It contains a chair because you cannot photograph a room with no chair. It contains a poster because the wall was empty and the art department had a poster. The director was famously exacting, which the documentary treats as proof that nothing is accidental, when in fact an exacting director produces a set full of decisions about how a room should feel, which is not the same category of thing as a message and is a far more interesting one.

The thing it gets right without noticing

The documentary is, without intending to be, an excellent film about attention.

Nine hours of somebody looking very hard at a hallway is not nothing. I came out of it noticing doorframes for a week. Its makers have taught themselves to see production design the way a cinematographer sees it, and then, having acquired a genuinely rare skill, they have spent it entirely on the least interesting question available.

There is a version of this film — the same footage, the same obsessive looking, a different narration — that would be one of the best things ever made about how a room gets built for a camera. I would watch that one twice.

Two stars out of five, and one of them is for the carpet.