We just saw “Ray” last night, and I couldn’t help noticing that in the scenes of his childhood there were one or two trees around his home where someone had hung up scores of brightly colored bottles. They looked almost like Christmas tree ornaments. What’s more, they seemed to be a sort of visual motif, because you saw them frequently–and they were shown as the last thing he saw before losing his sight.
Did anyone ever hear of someone hanging bottles in trees? Is there a purpose to it, other than a decorative one?
Could it be a peach tree? If so, empty bottles were placed over the peach buds, and the fruit would grow inside the bottle for the novelty of a full-grown peach inside a bottle of peach-flavored brandy or schapps. I’ll see if I can find an example.
Nice guess, but they weren’t arrranged in any way so as to encase a fruit. They were just colored empty liquor bottles hung on the tree like ornaments. I was wondering about this too. They had way too many shots of the tree for it to be merely a colorful decoration.
Is it so that when the wind whistled over the necks of the bottles, Ray could tell he was close to home? Not having seen the film, I assume this scene occured after he became blind.
My guess is “found art.” The community was dirt poor, and the bottles were pretty to look at and to hear, so they got hung in the tree as something pretty but free. As for the prominence in the film, I took it as a visual and auditory sign that Ray was thinking about his childhood.
Was it a bottle tree? Here’s a picture of one. They have one of these on display at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina (a first-class sculpture garden with excellent art exhibits). They describe it as African-American folk art.
