The Third Man's ending: the final scene nobody forgets
The closing shot of The Third Man, Anton Karas's zither and nearly half a century without copyright: how a myth was built.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The ending of The Third Man and the music that made it immortal
What is it about the final shot of The Third Man that still moves audiences decades later? The classic starring Orson Welles closes with Joseph Cotten standing on a Vienna road while the woman he loves ignores him and vanishes among the trees. No artifice: just the breeze, the leaves, and the certainty that there is no going back. That scene, with Anton Karas's zither or without it, distills a kind of filmmaking that is no longer made.
Part of the spell is the music. Karas's score became so legendary that some argue it took over the film. Others, however, maintain that the final shot would work just as well in silence, with nothing but the sound of footsteps. It is a false dilemma: the zither is The Third Man, but the power of the frame outlives any score.
The film also has a history of its own: it was free of copyright in the West from 1965 until 2012, which triggered, in the early 2000s, a flood of shoddy editions in newspapers and magazines. Pure German expressionism in a British version, and for some, covert English propaganda. It doesn't matter: the collector who bought his DVD thirty years ago to preserve it knew that digital, too, disappears. In the end, the shot always remains.
What is it about the final shot of The Third Man that still moves audiences decades later? The classic starring Orson Welles closes with Joseph Cotten standing on a Vienna road while the woman he loves ignores him and vanishes among the trees. No artifice: just the breeze, the leaves, and the certainty that there is no going back. That scene, with Anton Karas's zither or without it, distills a kind of filmmaking that is no longer made.
Part of the spell is the music. Karas's score became so legendary that some argue it took over the film. Others, however, maintain that the final shot would work just as well in silence, with nothing but the sound of footsteps. It is a false dilemma: the zither is The Third Man, but the power of the frame outlives any score.
The film also has a history of its own: it was free of copyright in the West from 1965 until 2012, which triggered, in the early 2000s, a flood of shoddy editions in newspapers and magazines. Pure German expressionism in a British version, and for some, covert English propaganda. It doesn't matter: the collector who bought his DVD thirty years ago to preserve it knew that digital, too, disappears. In the end, the shot always remains.
Also available in: Deutsch
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (16 replies).
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