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Murder Call – Black Friday (1997)

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clip The breakthrough

This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

At home after work, Detective Tessa Vance (Lucy Bell) pores over documents relating to the Trevor Parkin murder. She has a breakthrough. The next day, Tessa interviews neighbours of Trevor Parkin about her hunch, which leads her to a new interview with a suspect.

Curator’s notes

by Kate Matthews

In the tradition of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Murder Call presents Tessa Vance as an eccentric, gifted sleuth with a keen eye for clues that others might miss. The impressionistic montage in which she 'joins the dots’ communicates these character traits. Her workaholic loner qualities are also on display as she toils into the night in her solitary apartment.

Stylistic techniques are foregrounded in this sequence. The layered, disjointed images of Tessa’s thoughts contrast with the sharp cuts from doorstep to doorstep as she investigates. The wide static shot through venetian blinds is an interesting opener to the suspect interview and the closest the sequence comes to using an establishing shot. The editing condenses the passage of time from Tessa’s revelation to its result, focusing on the idea of her breakthrough rather than the detail. It’s a fluid, economical approach to communicating a turning point in the plot.

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