‘Jade’: The Backdrop Viewers Don’t See : Movies: Director William Friedkin says he has inserted ‘subliminal’ clues in the murder mystery. The issue raises questions about ethics.

If audiences watching the murder mystery “Jade” think they can sense plot twists ahead of time, that may be because of the “subliminal” clues director William Friedkin says he has inserted throughout the Paramount Pictures film.

By inserting images that flash for only a split-second amid the film’s normal sequencing, Friedkin says he hopes to induce a jarring effect in the audience, as well as portend certain clues.

“Most people watching a film are unable to perceive a twelfth of a second,” Friedkin says. “But they do seem to affect people even though they’re not conscious of what they’re looking at.”

Friedkin says he made his cuts in the images during the editing process. At normal film speeds, 24 frames of film run past the projector each second. The subliminal images used in “Jade” are usually two or three frames.

“A person can’t see that,” Friedkin says. “But what happens is a jolting effect occurs. The more frames you use, the clearer the perception. It’s meant not to show something but to suggest.”

But experts in the field of subliminal research say Paramount may have a tiger by the tail in releasing a movie if it doesn’t warn audiences about the subliminal images.

“It really is an invasion of privacy,” says psychologist Gerald Rafferty, adding: “It’s fraught with danger.”

Rafferty, president and founder of the Institute for Subliminal Studies in Santa Monica, says that even at a four-hundredth of a second, “your mind would get it, especially if it were tied into what you would be expecting anyway.”

“It would embed the expectation for you in the subconscious mind and you might start reacting emotionally,” Rafferty says.

“For example,” he adds, “if there were a picture, let’s say, of a beautiful, young, innocent girl on the screen for a long interval of time, and if you are flashing her being brutally murdered, the viewer would get it and probably have an emotional response to that. You’d start feeling uneasy and worried for her.”

Friedkin dismisses the idea of placing a warning on the film, which opens Friday. “Why would they put warnings? It’s a cinematic device,” he says. “It’s no different than a dissolve, a flashback. They’re not going to put a warning on it saying, ‘Beware, this film contains flashbacks.’ It’s completely uncalled for.”

Subliminal means below the threshold of awareness or consciousness. That threshold varies in each individual, but experiments usually begin with images lasting just 1/1,000th of a second.

Rafferty says subliminal messages, like hypnosis, cannot induce people to do something they wouldn’t normally do. But he added that a backlash could be triggered in some moviegoers if they believe they are also being bombarded by other kinds of subliminal messages.

“Once people get suspicious that that is happening, they’ll say, ‘If I can’t see it, how do I know what it is they’re telling me?’ Are they now going to say, “Buy our popcorn” or “Come back to the movie theater”?’ You’ve got a blockbuster problem here.”

Friedkin, who also used subliminal images in two prior films--”The Exorcist” in 1973 and “Cruising” in 1980--says “Jade” will have “the most extensive use of sub-cutting” he has ever attempted.

Friedkin declined to say specifically what subliminal images he has inserted in “Jade.”

But in “Cruising,” another murder mystery set in gay leather bars in New York, Friedkin says he inserted subliminal images of sexual scenes too graphic to get by the ratings board.

“The film was severely cut in order to get an R rating,” Friedkin says. “But there are in that film a couple of extremely sexual frames and the ratings board never saw them because they’re too short. It was frankly a subversive [effort] on my part then. . . .

“I’m not trying to use it to sell products or twist minds,” he says. “To me it’s a device I found that’s useful in telling a story.”

Friedkin says he was influenced by the classic 1956 documentary “Night and Fog” by French filmmaker Alain Resnais, which used long tracking shots of concentration camps in Germany interspersed with quick cuts of what had taken place there.

Friedkin noted that director Sidney Lumet also made extensive use of memory flashes in his 1965 film “The Pawnbroker.” In that movie, pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (played by Rod Steiger) is a concentration camp survivor who has quick flashes of memory.

“In one sequence, as he leaves his store one night, Nazerman passes a chain-link fence, behind which some boys are beating up another kid,” Lumet writes in his recent book “Making Movies.” “Images of a relative caught by dogs against a concentration camp chain-link fence start to crowd in on him.”

Lumet used inserts of varying numbers of frames, some as short as two frames--one-twelfth of a second.

“Even if people didn’t quite understand the image the first time, they would after it had been repeated two or three times,” Lumet wrote.

Within a year after the picture opened, Lumet wrote, “every commercial on television seemed to be using the technique. They called it ‘subliminal’ cutting. My apologies to everyone.”

Gene Reynolds, president of the Directors Guild of America, said he was not familiar with the subliminal cuts in “Jade” but noted that there are no guild rules prohibiting directors from using such techniques, saying he himself has used cuts of three to five frames.

“We certainly don’t have a policy [against it],” Reynolds says. “It’s up to the individual director.”

Asked what the ethics are of using subliminal cutting, Reynolds said: “I don’t know the ethics behind it, but I can imagine somebody saying, if you could actually do this, you could manipulate the audience in some way.”

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has no rules banning the use of “subliminal projection” but broadcasters are obligated to tell viewers if they are being subjected to subliminal advertising.