(based on the photograph Window Opens to the Snowfield Far Away)
This Snowfield Far Away reminds me of that most famous of snowfields far away, the white field of snow traversed by the parallel tracks of skiers, in the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film, Spellbound. The Salvador Dali-inspired snowscape in the film (Dali had been hired as a consultant who was expected to provide the right psychotheraputic innerscape for the hallucinated plot) is strangely prefigured in the same film by a small dinnertable snowscape made of a tablecloth with ski-trails drawn there by the tynes of a fork. A quite similar model snowscape appears in the Irving Berlin musical, White Christmas (1954) when the film’s principals, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, sit up all night in the club car on a train to Vermont, fantasizing about the snowy days ahead—which they picture with the aid of a tabletop snowscape made from a napkin. There’s a not bad snowscape, as well, in the Barbara Stanwyck–George Brent film, My Reputation (1946).
