The setting in film Noir movies of Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s, portrayed the cynical attitude and dark motivation of the characters. The “Wrong Man, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Maltese falcon, The Woman in the window, Scarlet street, Detour, Touch of Evil, Diabolique (French), The Stranger, The Innocents (British), Woman on the Run are examples of the film noir genre. The movies are peopled by characters who are the inhabitants of a cloistered psychological space and often this encircling is physical. Even the investigating officers as a rule appear to be tense and anxious, dragging away continuously on their cigarettes or pipes. Why are crime investigators always on the high? (Sherlock Holmes has his pipe for constant company.)Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Rublev makes use of mediaeval settings and arcane backdrops to portray the mystic insight and intuitive power this character carries. A similar effect is created in the film ‘Ivan the Terrible.’
Coming back to fiction, one of the best evocations of setting I can recall is from the novel ‘The Name of the Rose.’ As he describes the complexity and secrecy of the Benedictine monastery which radiates both piety and terror with its figurines and murals of God and other Biblical scenes, one is assiduously led into this medieval world of mystery, theocracy and heresy by the wonderful dexterity of Eco’s prose. Isabel Allende’s ‘The House of Spirits’ and Gabriel Marquez’s ‘Love in the Times of Cholera’ also carry a strong sense of place. In the novel Isabel Allende narrates the unbridled richness and luster of Trueba’s hacienda at Tres Marias, which signifies the family’s prosperity and well being. In Love in the times of Cholera, and Of Love and other Demons, Marquez evokes a fleeting but lasting vision of the Caribbean with its convents, Nuns, Pine-apples and labyrinthine alleys as Florentina Ariza furtively searches for possibilities to convey his love for Fermina Daza.
Jane Eyre and Villette are two novels which draw strongly from their setting. The Moor or the Wilderness that dominates the setting enters the cerebral space of the characters giving them an eerie, ragged touch. Of course setting to a large extent derives from the social, cultural, geographical milieu in which the characters are placed. Thus we see the Tribal chieftains Dousika in ‘Segu’ and Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things fall apart’ in their native African village deliberating the catastrophe going to befall them in the form of Islam or the marauding force of the colonizing West. (To be continued)