2H and might have been HB and 6B
Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Friday, December 7, 2012
Vertigo
The opening for Vertigo is "book-ended" with the film's conclusion. They both "hang" there. The film redounds upon itself, like a cyclic force, like vertigo: one of the reasons why some people find themselves returning to this film again and again.
One of the things that's so great about the opening of Vertigo is it doesn't give you any information, then or later, how Jimmy Stewart gets off the rooftop.
The film has a strong moral lesson about obsession.
Donald Spoto's biography of Hitchcock full of lies
When I was eighteen or so, I read Donald Spoto's biography of Alfred Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock. In it, the later Hitchcock is portrayed as a rather dirty old man who, when he was dying, refused to have a priest and to be reconciled in the faith into which he was baptized and raised as a child.
I do remember that in this biography it talked of how the only driving Hitch would do was when he drove his daughter the short way to Mass, which he did regularly, though not attending Mass himself.
Anyways, that biography left me with an uneasiness as to what to think about Alfred Hitchcock the man. I've always loved his films, which made the uneasiness the greater. There's typically a hunch one has when the truth is not being told.
Thus it was with great relief that I just read this article about Hitchcock's last days written by one of the priests who was there.
Do read the entire article HERE.
Good, good God.
God is so good.
H/T: Father Z.
I do remember that in this biography it talked of how the only driving Hitch would do was when he drove his daughter the short way to Mass, which he did regularly, though not attending Mass himself.
Anyways, that biography left me with an uneasiness as to what to think about Alfred Hitchcock the man. I've always loved his films, which made the uneasiness the greater. There's typically a hunch one has when the truth is not being told.
Thus it was with great relief that I just read this article about Hitchcock's last days written by one of the priests who was there.
"After we chatted for a while, we all crossed from the living room through a breezeway to his study, and there, with his wife, Alma, we celebrated a quiet Mass. Across from me were the bound volumes of his movie scripts, "The Birds," "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and others—a great distraction. Hitchcock had been away from the church for some time, and he answered the responses in Latin the old way. But the most remarkable sight was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks."
Do read the entire article HERE.
Good, good God.
God is so good.
H/T: Father Z.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The Farmer's Wife
Take the plot of this film in one sentence and you will see how predictable it is:
A farmer becomes a widower and after wedding off his daughter (at the reception of which he realizes how lonely he is) he calls on his capable, dutiful and attractive head servant to help him make a list of prospective women to woo, each of them being either mannish, frigid, obese and/or wearers of hats that have too many flowers or scary feathers spilling off them.
Say that was not enough to tell you where the film is going, let's drop another hint: throughout the farmer's ordeals with rejection from these eccentric ladies he comes to sit dejectedly again and again in his chair by the hearth, across from which sits another chair, the chair his deceased wife used to sit in; and sitting in it now and helping the farmer with his ordeals and coming up with new prospective names is the capable, dutiful and attractive head servant.
But of course long before this moment we already know. We know within the first fifteen minutes - or even before that.
Then what is it that makes one want to watch the film to its end? This phenomenon in which a film transcends its own predictability, and does so without defying expectations, I touched upon in a previous post a while back. That post actually anticipated this present review, which I've only worked myself to finishing now.
The Farmer's Wife is a surprisingly endearing romantic comedy from Alfred Hitchcock. This is his only slapstick film that is a comedy through and through, and that isn't based in black humour - like The Trouble with Harry, though it abounds in double entendres and innuendoes. There is no other film in Hitchcock's oeuvre like this film; it stands alone, almost like a mysterious island that he never touched again - though there are techniques, motifs, visual structure and themes here that are recognizable throughout all his films.
But one can put it this way: if Hitchcock's silent era is removed even from his early period, then The Farmer's Wife, though a silent film, is removed even from his silent era. It's almost as if Hitchcock did this film just to prove that he could make a comedy, and a good one, then left it at that.
Through visual motif that outweighs the plot, the film speaks a word about marriage, and those things that are concomitant with it: death, loss, loneliness; and of course those other highly resonant things: kitchen tables laden with food, laundry drying by a fire, two chairs by a hearth.
A Hitchcock film is a rare one that doesn't make reference to marriage - usually in dread belief in its objective making of a man and a woman one flesh. He had a highly sensitive feeling for these things concerning marriage; not a perfect feeling, or an always moral feeling, but one that definitely was not indifferent to it.
The Farmer's Wife starts off with a short death bed scene. It is adroitly and swiftly handled; Hitchcock channels, with a few cuts, all the attending emotion of loss at the death of this farmer's wife.
We get the usual pastoral pictures of the farm. The handyman, Churdles Ash (Gordon Harker), who turns out to be the comedic foil, enters the house. Two beagles follow him up the stairs. We don't follow the handyman to the upstairs room, but the two beagles stop at the top stair, resting both their heads on the floor.
Then the handyman comes back down the stairs, goes back out into the daylight, where he looks up at the top open window whence a man is looking down. The man in the window sadly and slowly shakes his head at the handyman below who is frowning, and he turns away, presumably to do some farm work.
The man in the window goes back to what's taking place in the room, and then there's the cut: we get the very still and composed shot of the head servant and a couple others around a bed and a woman in the bed.
The structure after this scene basically runs: the farmer gives a wedding for his daughter. The wedding we don't see, but only the distant bell swinging in a distant church spire and the joyful expression of the head servant in the kitchen, which informs us that the wedding ceremony has been completed. The ensuing wedding feast, which we do see, provides the frame for the farmer's deep loneliness in his widowhood; it gives us also the three prospective women, all in attendance at the feast, that the farmer decides to woo.
Next is the "courtships". Courtship is inaccurate since the farmer doesn't waste his time but simply states, after some rather saucy innuendoes ("I be coming up here like a fox to snatch away one of your fat hens!"), that "I be marrying again."
Suffice it to say, the three "wooings" provide the comedic heart of the film. After all those have failed, there is a peculiar fourth; a sort of last resort; a very beefy barmaid who at one point grabs the farmer by his arms and shakes him so violently that he is reduced to something like an over-boiled asparagus. (By the way, Jameson Thomas who plays the widower farmer, Samuel Sweetland, is expressively brilliant in this film)
But we don't see the result of this fourth "wooing" played out. Not yet. Hitchcock does something much more interesting and structural.
The farmer comes back home, and as he nears the open bottom window of his house he stops to listen to the handyman giving one of his rants to Minta, the head servant. The handyman goes on about how he can’t stand to see his master become so wretched, coming back each time like a dog with his tale between his legs, and so on.
Now, the farmer comes into the house with a beaming blissful smile on his face. Why, we are not really sure. Did he really meet with success with the beefy barmaid or is he just trying to defy Churdle's expectations and prove him wrong, if only for appearances?
Minta seems devastated as she backs behind the rocking chair and grapples and fondles the back and front of the chair with her hands.
But after the handyman leaves to do some work, disappointed that the farmer is going to be enslaved yet again, the farmer sits in his chair by the hearth - and he completely deflates. He has met with failure again.
Now Minta, being encouraged, starts coming up with new names, whether sincerely or not we don’t know, while the farmer scratches out all the names of the women that he had written on a pad of paper, and from whom he got rejected. He sits back in his chair and gazes into the empty chair across from him. Now comes the masterstroke.
Hitchcock overlays living images of the three once-prospective women on top of the empty rocking chair, like ghosts. Each one fades into the chair, shaking their heads, laughing in mockery, or however they acted when the farmer asked them for marriage. One after the other, as one fades out another fades in to take the other's place. Then after the third one fades out, we see the fourth one, the beefy barmaid, fade into the chair; and we see her as she acted when she was rejecting the farmer's proposal; the rejection which we never got to see. Genius.
Then comes the next masterstroke. When the beefy barmaid begins to fade out, just as her image is about to vanish completely, Minta, the head servant, in the flesh, real and present Minta, sits in the chair, still thinking distantly about some other names for the farmer.
And after a few gazing, half-comprehending beats, the farmer's eyebrows lift higher than Vincent Price's.
And then what happens next…well, I don't want to spoil the movie for you.
A farmer becomes a widower and after wedding off his daughter (at the reception of which he realizes how lonely he is) he calls on his capable, dutiful and attractive head servant to help him make a list of prospective women to woo, each of them being either mannish, frigid, obese and/or wearers of hats that have too many flowers or scary feathers spilling off them.
Say that was not enough to tell you where the film is going, let's drop another hint: throughout the farmer's ordeals with rejection from these eccentric ladies he comes to sit dejectedly again and again in his chair by the hearth, across from which sits another chair, the chair his deceased wife used to sit in; and sitting in it now and helping the farmer with his ordeals and coming up with new prospective names is the capable, dutiful and attractive head servant.
But of course long before this moment we already know. We know within the first fifteen minutes - or even before that.
Then what is it that makes one want to watch the film to its end? This phenomenon in which a film transcends its own predictability, and does so without defying expectations, I touched upon in a previous post a while back. That post actually anticipated this present review, which I've only worked myself to finishing now.
The Farmer's Wife is a surprisingly endearing romantic comedy from Alfred Hitchcock. This is his only slapstick film that is a comedy through and through, and that isn't based in black humour - like The Trouble with Harry, though it abounds in double entendres and innuendoes. There is no other film in Hitchcock's oeuvre like this film; it stands alone, almost like a mysterious island that he never touched again - though there are techniques, motifs, visual structure and themes here that are recognizable throughout all his films.
But one can put it this way: if Hitchcock's silent era is removed even from his early period, then The Farmer's Wife, though a silent film, is removed even from his silent era. It's almost as if Hitchcock did this film just to prove that he could make a comedy, and a good one, then left it at that.
Through visual motif that outweighs the plot, the film speaks a word about marriage, and those things that are concomitant with it: death, loss, loneliness; and of course those other highly resonant things: kitchen tables laden with food, laundry drying by a fire, two chairs by a hearth.
A Hitchcock film is a rare one that doesn't make reference to marriage - usually in dread belief in its objective making of a man and a woman one flesh. He had a highly sensitive feeling for these things concerning marriage; not a perfect feeling, or an always moral feeling, but one that definitely was not indifferent to it.
The Farmer's Wife starts off with a short death bed scene. It is adroitly and swiftly handled; Hitchcock channels, with a few cuts, all the attending emotion of loss at the death of this farmer's wife.
We get the usual pastoral pictures of the farm. The handyman, Churdles Ash (Gordon Harker), who turns out to be the comedic foil, enters the house. Two beagles follow him up the stairs. We don't follow the handyman to the upstairs room, but the two beagles stop at the top stair, resting both their heads on the floor.
Then the handyman comes back down the stairs, goes back out into the daylight, where he looks up at the top open window whence a man is looking down. The man in the window sadly and slowly shakes his head at the handyman below who is frowning, and he turns away, presumably to do some farm work.
The man in the window goes back to what's taking place in the room, and then there's the cut: we get the very still and composed shot of the head servant and a couple others around a bed and a woman in the bed.
The structure after this scene basically runs: the farmer gives a wedding for his daughter. The wedding we don't see, but only the distant bell swinging in a distant church spire and the joyful expression of the head servant in the kitchen, which informs us that the wedding ceremony has been completed. The ensuing wedding feast, which we do see, provides the frame for the farmer's deep loneliness in his widowhood; it gives us also the three prospective women, all in attendance at the feast, that the farmer decides to woo.
Next is the "courtships". Courtship is inaccurate since the farmer doesn't waste his time but simply states, after some rather saucy innuendoes ("I be coming up here like a fox to snatch away one of your fat hens!"), that "I be marrying again."
Suffice it to say, the three "wooings" provide the comedic heart of the film. After all those have failed, there is a peculiar fourth; a sort of last resort; a very beefy barmaid who at one point grabs the farmer by his arms and shakes him so violently that he is reduced to something like an over-boiled asparagus. (By the way, Jameson Thomas who plays the widower farmer, Samuel Sweetland, is expressively brilliant in this film)
But we don't see the result of this fourth "wooing" played out. Not yet. Hitchcock does something much more interesting and structural.
The farmer comes back home, and as he nears the open bottom window of his house he stops to listen to the handyman giving one of his rants to Minta, the head servant. The handyman goes on about how he can’t stand to see his master become so wretched, coming back each time like a dog with his tale between his legs, and so on.
Now, the farmer comes into the house with a beaming blissful smile on his face. Why, we are not really sure. Did he really meet with success with the beefy barmaid or is he just trying to defy Churdle's expectations and prove him wrong, if only for appearances?
Minta seems devastated as she backs behind the rocking chair and grapples and fondles the back and front of the chair with her hands.
But after the handyman leaves to do some work, disappointed that the farmer is going to be enslaved yet again, the farmer sits in his chair by the hearth - and he completely deflates. He has met with failure again.
Now Minta, being encouraged, starts coming up with new names, whether sincerely or not we don’t know, while the farmer scratches out all the names of the women that he had written on a pad of paper, and from whom he got rejected. He sits back in his chair and gazes into the empty chair across from him. Now comes the masterstroke.
Hitchcock overlays living images of the three once-prospective women on top of the empty rocking chair, like ghosts. Each one fades into the chair, shaking their heads, laughing in mockery, or however they acted when the farmer asked them for marriage. One after the other, as one fades out another fades in to take the other's place. Then after the third one fades out, we see the fourth one, the beefy barmaid, fade into the chair; and we see her as she acted when she was rejecting the farmer's proposal; the rejection which we never got to see. Genius.
Then comes the next masterstroke. When the beefy barmaid begins to fade out, just as her image is about to vanish completely, Minta, the head servant, in the flesh, real and present Minta, sits in the chair, still thinking distantly about some other names for the farmer.
And after a few gazing, half-comprehending beats, the farmer's eyebrows lift higher than Vincent Price's.
And then what happens next…well, I don't want to spoil the movie for you.
-----
I checked at youtube without hope to see if the film is on there, and - would you believe it - somebody posted it! For some reason though the music is completely different from the version I saw on dvd. The music on the youtube version is unfortunately rather boring. The music on the version I saw was amusing and was made fit to the scenes.
I checked at youtube without hope to see if the film is on there, and - would you believe it - somebody posted it! For some reason though the music is completely different from the version I saw on dvd. The music on the youtube version is unfortunately rather boring. The music on the version I saw was amusing and was made fit to the scenes.
-----
Image source: http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Lillian_Hall-Davis
Thursday, April 2, 2009
A little more art, and less entertainment, wouldn't hurt
I remember learning in English class in high school how the Elizabethans were informed of the things that were going to happen in a play before the play started. So the play they were about to watch and listen to was already, in a rough manner, in their minds. I don't know if this was the same practice for plays before that time period, but wouldn't be surprised if it was.
They would do that for reasons other than by way of introduction. Perhaps it could be likened to walking fully around a building before entering it, as though they were getting something out of the way before biting to the meat of the matter.
Or take the scop who composed Beowulf. Many a time he betrays, albeit in dim portents, what is about to suddenly happen. And then after the event has happened, like say a battle with a monster, the event is retold numerous times, by one character to another. The event is not revisited per se (not a double-back), but is re-set, like a tree growing longer, stronger roots - or wider and wider rings around its center.
It is the additive layering in a work of art (not always strictly in the abovementioned form, but in many forms) that suddenly hits you with the jolt of the reality of its living center. Being merely devoted to what is going to happen next - though not in itself an impediment - gets conquered.
I dread to think that what they were getting out of the way is what we today as a modern culture have taken up as the main constituent of our diet.
If I might make a harsh transition from theater to film: I think it's important for someone not to know what is going to happen in a film of course - SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT - but what level of shallowness have we attained when simply not knowing what's going to happen next is concomitant with what film is all about?
There's a difference between not knowing what's going to happen next simply adding to the enjoyment of a film, on top of which something yet better subsumes it, and not knowing what's going to happen next being something like the sole point of a film. (Whether it is defying expectations through deliberate shock, twist in plot, or the more unpronounced wanting to be not predictable.)
I guess when the showing times for movies are classified under "entertainment" they aren't lying. The filmmaker is reduced to mere performer. We know that merely defying expectations is one of the lowest, lamest levels the artist can hit. It's one of the things that I don't like about Hitchcock's aesthetic, not to mention career; though I am a big Hitchcock fan. No, the filmmaker is not just to play the audience "like a piano".
And of course film, with its ever present "cut", so often abused and so often mistaken as to what stitches a film together, is prime turf for the "defying of expectations".
The cut (which in the fully developed film aesthetic is not what pieces the film together but is rather a necessary evil, to be couched and drowned as much as possible in the film's totality, which paradoxically has the effect that the cuts employed become beautiful) has been the bane of both film and film-viewing, enslaving both in a deadening, one-eyed shallowness.
I wonder: if a film's quality is diminished to the degree that it's plot or otherwise is known beforehand, then is it all that great of a film? That is to say, if a film is good only on first viewing, and is either weak or boring after that; if we always follow the story of a film at the behest of its cuts, then what is the point?
Again, I do think a film can be ruined for someone by being told everything, whereas if they watched the film without knowing anything they could then return to it often afterwards and enjoy it more and more. But really though: if you were told the whole plot of Terminator 2: Judgment Day beforehand would it be any less of a film when you actually watched it? No, not really. You wouldn't mind watching it again as well.
On a lowest common denominator scale: can a film be both predictable and compelling? My answer is yes. My answer is yes because the art of film does not depend on being unpredictable. Of course, neither does it depend on being predictable. The point of film simply rests somewhere else.
Which brings me to the film I was going to review, but will have to wait until later. A Hitchcock film.
They would do that for reasons other than by way of introduction. Perhaps it could be likened to walking fully around a building before entering it, as though they were getting something out of the way before biting to the meat of the matter.
Or take the scop who composed Beowulf. Many a time he betrays, albeit in dim portents, what is about to suddenly happen. And then after the event has happened, like say a battle with a monster, the event is retold numerous times, by one character to another. The event is not revisited per se (not a double-back), but is re-set, like a tree growing longer, stronger roots - or wider and wider rings around its center.
It is the additive layering in a work of art (not always strictly in the abovementioned form, but in many forms) that suddenly hits you with the jolt of the reality of its living center. Being merely devoted to what is going to happen next - though not in itself an impediment - gets conquered.
I dread to think that what they were getting out of the way is what we today as a modern culture have taken up as the main constituent of our diet.
If I might make a harsh transition from theater to film: I think it's important for someone not to know what is going to happen in a film of course - SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT - but what level of shallowness have we attained when simply not knowing what's going to happen next is concomitant with what film is all about?
There's a difference between not knowing what's going to happen next simply adding to the enjoyment of a film, on top of which something yet better subsumes it, and not knowing what's going to happen next being something like the sole point of a film. (Whether it is defying expectations through deliberate shock, twist in plot, or the more unpronounced wanting to be not predictable.)
I guess when the showing times for movies are classified under "entertainment" they aren't lying. The filmmaker is reduced to mere performer. We know that merely defying expectations is one of the lowest, lamest levels the artist can hit. It's one of the things that I don't like about Hitchcock's aesthetic, not to mention career; though I am a big Hitchcock fan. No, the filmmaker is not just to play the audience "like a piano".
And of course film, with its ever present "cut", so often abused and so often mistaken as to what stitches a film together, is prime turf for the "defying of expectations".
The cut (which in the fully developed film aesthetic is not what pieces the film together but is rather a necessary evil, to be couched and drowned as much as possible in the film's totality, which paradoxically has the effect that the cuts employed become beautiful) has been the bane of both film and film-viewing, enslaving both in a deadening, one-eyed shallowness.
I wonder: if a film's quality is diminished to the degree that it's plot or otherwise is known beforehand, then is it all that great of a film? That is to say, if a film is good only on first viewing, and is either weak or boring after that; if we always follow the story of a film at the behest of its cuts, then what is the point?
Again, I do think a film can be ruined for someone by being told everything, whereas if they watched the film without knowing anything they could then return to it often afterwards and enjoy it more and more. But really though: if you were told the whole plot of Terminator 2: Judgment Day beforehand would it be any less of a film when you actually watched it? No, not really. You wouldn't mind watching it again as well.
On a lowest common denominator scale: can a film be both predictable and compelling? My answer is yes. My answer is yes because the art of film does not depend on being unpredictable. Of course, neither does it depend on being predictable. The point of film simply rests somewhere else.
Which brings me to the film I was going to review, but will have to wait until later. A Hitchcock film.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Film thoughts
I was watching Kevin Reynold's The Count of Monte Cristo last night, and it occurred to me that if Alfred Hitchcock were alive today and making films, he would have snatched up Jim Caviezel and used him in more than one of his films. He plays an excellent innocent wrongly accused. And more than that, he has the film actor's ability of making his face hold up well for the camera; that almost stolid state of facial expression that seems about to take on any number of emotions.
I don't know much about acting, but I've seen enough films to know there is quite a difference between the film actor and the actor on stage. There has to be a kinship between the actor's face and the camera and both must go into serving a pinnacle point, like two bottom points of a triangle: the pinnacle point is the invisible but very real character of the scene itself. The scene runs into all the other scenes to form the running time of the film; and this running time is an unveiling; the most real aspect of the film.
Hence Hitchcock said infamously, "Actors are cattle to be herded". A rather harsh and cynical statement, but one that points to a truth nonetheless. The film actor must be able to attain to this doughy, stolid state; this state which Sir Alec Guinness was a master of. Guinness said that in preparing for a role, he focused on what his legs were going to do - nothing else, at that moment. Once he knew what his legs were doing, everything else fell into place. I wonder if the same could be said for the film actor's eyes. If the film actor does not know what to do with his eyes he is lost.
Anyhow, I got to wondering also about Caviezel's film career leading up to The Passion of the Christ; especially watching the scenes in The Count of Monte Cristo where Edmond Dantes gets annually flogged at the prison Chateau d'if. Then I thought about his role as Private Witt in The Thin Red Line; a sort of far-seeing and serene Christ-type figure. Is it possible that God was preparing Caviezel through these roles for his role as Jesus?
I think it more than possible. I find it amazing how God, the Holy Spirit, works in all aspects of the Culture.
I don't know much about acting, but I've seen enough films to know there is quite a difference between the film actor and the actor on stage. There has to be a kinship between the actor's face and the camera and both must go into serving a pinnacle point, like two bottom points of a triangle: the pinnacle point is the invisible but very real character of the scene itself. The scene runs into all the other scenes to form the running time of the film; and this running time is an unveiling; the most real aspect of the film.
Hence Hitchcock said infamously, "Actors are cattle to be herded". A rather harsh and cynical statement, but one that points to a truth nonetheless. The film actor must be able to attain to this doughy, stolid state; this state which Sir Alec Guinness was a master of. Guinness said that in preparing for a role, he focused on what his legs were going to do - nothing else, at that moment. Once he knew what his legs were doing, everything else fell into place. I wonder if the same could be said for the film actor's eyes. If the film actor does not know what to do with his eyes he is lost.
Anyhow, I got to wondering also about Caviezel's film career leading up to The Passion of the Christ; especially watching the scenes in The Count of Monte Cristo where Edmond Dantes gets annually flogged at the prison Chateau d'if. Then I thought about his role as Private Witt in The Thin Red Line; a sort of far-seeing and serene Christ-type figure. Is it possible that God was preparing Caviezel through these roles for his role as Jesus?
I think it more than possible. I find it amazing how God, the Holy Spirit, works in all aspects of the Culture.
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Lady Vanishes
I hadn't figured Alfred Hitchcock - widely known to be attentive to detail - was one of those who didn't put stock into how many bullets a single handgun held. As one of the cricket-obsessed English characters on the halted train shoots the gun out the window at the enemies, "suspension of laws" takes on buffoonish proportions, report after report after report after report, like a kid blowing off his cap gun with unceasing relish, having discovered the chamber to be miraculously endless. This is not diminished by the fact the gun he is shooting belonged to one of the enemies, and therefore has no further bullets lying around. But then you realize something: Hitchcock surely was aware of it; he simply didn’t care. And then you realize something else: neither, come to think of it, do you care.
And not because the movie makes you indifferent. Not only do you want to see how the movie ends, how the plot resolves itself, and what happens to the characters, but you have to watch the movie because it is more than watchable; it is effortless. The bullets are like the details of plot. You don't care that they are implausible if they become passable under the film's own interior reality. This interior reality, this internal logic, gravitates towards you and pulls you in, not with the "realistic realism" of a news report, but with the asymmetrical displacing of a promised story arch with a continuing concrete, "small" veering direction; with the shot of a certain face we thought we knew; of yet another door being opened onto another train car; of an old cheery English woman asking the waiter for tea, then giving him a package of tea from her purse because she only drinks that kind; of two men trying to choke and throttle each other in the lonely caboose.
Hitchcock, with his writers, got through the details of the plots of his films very much like that kid firing off his miraculous cap gun. Motivation? Schmotivation.
Bang, bang, bang. The two previously indifferent English blokes are now all into it, but with the same ruled corking of affection of their breed. Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. Then, just when the plot demands it, the Englishman with the bottomless gun declares: "There's only one bullet left", forcing the scene to its necessary next stage - while prompting a kind of double incredulity in the viewer; once, for the gun being bottomless; twice, for the bottomless gun suddenly having only one bullet left.
The Lady Vanishes was the U.K.'s biggest grossing film up to that point in time, which was 1938. It was Hitchcock's second-to-last film before leaving for the U.S. to make movies there. It was a popular, greatly acclaimed film that came after two lesser Hitchcock films. It is the most comedy-filled of his thrillers, at times literally slapstick. It is one of the most thriller-filled of his thrillers. It is one of the great "next-to-no-budget" movies that make magical, invisible use of its limited resources.
It is also a display, as intimated above, of Hitchcock gripping you with a certain quiet but growing suspense, an inexplicable mystery, while at the same time seeing how much silliness he can cram (with the Englishman's understated dryness) in your face.
Case in point: the two men in the caboose caught in a grapple fight. The heroine of the story is there too, and she tries, ineffectually, to do something to help the hero. All featherweight kicks and hits, horribly limp, she moves energetically about. The hero who has asked her for some help, in between gasps and starts and the bad guy's hands going for his throat with the mechanical persistence of Gollum, says in the most nonchalant manner, "Anytime now would be nice".
There are animals in the caboose, and they look on, sometimes ducking, such as the rabbits that go back into their basket one at a time. The shots of the animals looking on, as the two men fight, make the scene so light and airy, and so rather creeping and disquieting. The bad guy fighting in the caboose, who by the way is not the main villain, is a pudgy-faced Italian with eyes that linger on yours too long when he's smiling at you. At one point the heroine uses some weighty cylinder to bang his head with while the hero is trying to find some evidence, thus knocking him out for short periods, from which he rises, only to be conked out again by the frightened heroine. It is comedic; the timing is so fluid and goofy, yet every time he comes back-too it is menacing.
This kind of grace fills the entire movie. The "small veering direction" of the film has as its keystone, of course, the MacGuffin. It has a beginning that, in itself, is also a kind of displaced veering. The film starts with the array of characters flooding some small foreign inn because their train has been caught in a landslide. We don't see the train or any outside, aside from some street musician playing outside one lady's window; just the world inside the inn. This beginning takes up close to twenty minutes. The characters assorted throughout the inn…the man making too much noise upstairs, the two Englishmen trying to find some food, the three bright young things, the hotel manager whose accent veers between Hungarian, German and Italian…and then - the next day, we're off, on the train, even to the complete removal of characters we thought were going to be part of the film: and the movie seems to be beginning. And here I thought it was going to be some kind of Fawlty Towers film.
Hitchcock's thrillers were never of the bent of, say, Tom Clancy. They always took up some secondary story, over and behind which there was some larger unseen story going on; and the one intimate piece in the film that connected to that larger unseen story was the MacGuffin. And we never get past the MacGuffin; and it makes the world of the characters who encounter it scarily real.
I don't feel any hesitancy to say that Alfred Hitchcock, in his thrillers and other films, employed a principle of Distributism: smaller is better. And I regard it as significant that Hitchcock was an avid reader of Chesterton's Father Brown stories. I'm not saying his films are veiled sponsoring of Distributism; that would be ridiculous. I just point out some good things.
Most of Hitchcock's films employ the MacGuffin, but in The Lady Vanishes, just when the MacGuffin is about to cease to be a MacGuffin - that is, just when we are about to be inundated with "realistic" details of government conspiracy and espionage and so forth, key to the plot of the film - a train coming in the opposite direction blares over the lady's revelatory words to the heroine; just as in North by Northwest the unraveling of the MacGuffin by the government agent to Cary Grant is plastered over by the running propellers of a landed airplane as the two men walk past it.
What is Hitchcock's intent in employing the MacGuffin? Is he merely being an obfuscator? Hitchcock's mysteries are never merely confusing; his mysteries are as enthralling as their unraveling. And his use of the MacGuffin points to something more in his artistic approach.
It is an intention of divestment. He is divesting himself of the indignity of gracelessly concerning himself with extracurricular details of plot, as if giving them attention would make the film better. It is a concern with elevation: the film, while intimately concerned with the details of the mundane (the "secondary story of the image"), is above plodding plot detail, just as a silent film is above sound.
The one word "MacGuffin" is the better explanation though. Because it is a name. And if a name exists, there must be a person to the name - a character.
Somebody, somewhere.
And not because the movie makes you indifferent. Not only do you want to see how the movie ends, how the plot resolves itself, and what happens to the characters, but you have to watch the movie because it is more than watchable; it is effortless. The bullets are like the details of plot. You don't care that they are implausible if they become passable under the film's own interior reality. This interior reality, this internal logic, gravitates towards you and pulls you in, not with the "realistic realism" of a news report, but with the asymmetrical displacing of a promised story arch with a continuing concrete, "small" veering direction; with the shot of a certain face we thought we knew; of yet another door being opened onto another train car; of an old cheery English woman asking the waiter for tea, then giving him a package of tea from her purse because she only drinks that kind; of two men trying to choke and throttle each other in the lonely caboose.
Hitchcock, with his writers, got through the details of the plots of his films very much like that kid firing off his miraculous cap gun. Motivation? Schmotivation.
Bang, bang, bang. The two previously indifferent English blokes are now all into it, but with the same ruled corking of affection of their breed. Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. Then, just when the plot demands it, the Englishman with the bottomless gun declares: "There's only one bullet left", forcing the scene to its necessary next stage - while prompting a kind of double incredulity in the viewer; once, for the gun being bottomless; twice, for the bottomless gun suddenly having only one bullet left.
The Lady Vanishes was the U.K.'s biggest grossing film up to that point in time, which was 1938. It was Hitchcock's second-to-last film before leaving for the U.S. to make movies there. It was a popular, greatly acclaimed film that came after two lesser Hitchcock films. It is the most comedy-filled of his thrillers, at times literally slapstick. It is one of the most thriller-filled of his thrillers. It is one of the great "next-to-no-budget" movies that make magical, invisible use of its limited resources.
It is also a display, as intimated above, of Hitchcock gripping you with a certain quiet but growing suspense, an inexplicable mystery, while at the same time seeing how much silliness he can cram (with the Englishman's understated dryness) in your face.
Case in point: the two men in the caboose caught in a grapple fight. The heroine of the story is there too, and she tries, ineffectually, to do something to help the hero. All featherweight kicks and hits, horribly limp, she moves energetically about. The hero who has asked her for some help, in between gasps and starts and the bad guy's hands going for his throat with the mechanical persistence of Gollum, says in the most nonchalant manner, "Anytime now would be nice".
There are animals in the caboose, and they look on, sometimes ducking, such as the rabbits that go back into their basket one at a time. The shots of the animals looking on, as the two men fight, make the scene so light and airy, and so rather creeping and disquieting. The bad guy fighting in the caboose, who by the way is not the main villain, is a pudgy-faced Italian with eyes that linger on yours too long when he's smiling at you. At one point the heroine uses some weighty cylinder to bang his head with while the hero is trying to find some evidence, thus knocking him out for short periods, from which he rises, only to be conked out again by the frightened heroine. It is comedic; the timing is so fluid and goofy, yet every time he comes back-too it is menacing.
This kind of grace fills the entire movie. The "small veering direction" of the film has as its keystone, of course, the MacGuffin. It has a beginning that, in itself, is also a kind of displaced veering. The film starts with the array of characters flooding some small foreign inn because their train has been caught in a landslide. We don't see the train or any outside, aside from some street musician playing outside one lady's window; just the world inside the inn. This beginning takes up close to twenty minutes. The characters assorted throughout the inn…the man making too much noise upstairs, the two Englishmen trying to find some food, the three bright young things, the hotel manager whose accent veers between Hungarian, German and Italian…and then - the next day, we're off, on the train, even to the complete removal of characters we thought were going to be part of the film: and the movie seems to be beginning. And here I thought it was going to be some kind of Fawlty Towers film.
Hitchcock's thrillers were never of the bent of, say, Tom Clancy. They always took up some secondary story, over and behind which there was some larger unseen story going on; and the one intimate piece in the film that connected to that larger unseen story was the MacGuffin. And we never get past the MacGuffin; and it makes the world of the characters who encounter it scarily real.
I don't feel any hesitancy to say that Alfred Hitchcock, in his thrillers and other films, employed a principle of Distributism: smaller is better. And I regard it as significant that Hitchcock was an avid reader of Chesterton's Father Brown stories. I'm not saying his films are veiled sponsoring of Distributism; that would be ridiculous. I just point out some good things.
Most of Hitchcock's films employ the MacGuffin, but in The Lady Vanishes, just when the MacGuffin is about to cease to be a MacGuffin - that is, just when we are about to be inundated with "realistic" details of government conspiracy and espionage and so forth, key to the plot of the film - a train coming in the opposite direction blares over the lady's revelatory words to the heroine; just as in North by Northwest the unraveling of the MacGuffin by the government agent to Cary Grant is plastered over by the running propellers of a landed airplane as the two men walk past it.
What is Hitchcock's intent in employing the MacGuffin? Is he merely being an obfuscator? Hitchcock's mysteries are never merely confusing; his mysteries are as enthralling as their unraveling. And his use of the MacGuffin points to something more in his artistic approach.
It is an intention of divestment. He is divesting himself of the indignity of gracelessly concerning himself with extracurricular details of plot, as if giving them attention would make the film better. It is a concern with elevation: the film, while intimately concerned with the details of the mundane (the "secondary story of the image"), is above plodding plot detail, just as a silent film is above sound.
The one word "MacGuffin" is the better explanation though. Because it is a name. And if a name exists, there must be a person to the name - a character.
Somebody, somewhere.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Time and things
Last night I watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time - though I have watched it at least twenty times before. Film is like that sometimes. It was the same for when I watched Hitchcock's Rear Window and Psycho, having seen both numerous times before, and then watching them after not viewing them for some time. I think it has to do with more than Chesterton's maxim:
"...if you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe, but if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
For we are not simply talking about "a thing" when we talk about a film, but a number of things - images - relaying in sequence before your eyes; relaying mechanically, so that there is, for want of a better word, a voyeuristic element to it. That is to say, your eyes are taking in material before the retrospective brain can catch up. Alfred Hitchcock knew this well about film, and not incidentally many of his films pursue that very theme: the voyeur; and the getting caught up in something that you cannot control and which puts you and others in extreme danger or in a vulnerable spot, very often in part due to the fault of the one who looks where he ought not to look.
This element of film is also one of the reasons that Andrei Tarkovsky was so adamant (in his book Sculpting in Time and elsewhere) on how necessary it was for the filmmaker to recognize how huge a responsibility he had. Tarkovsky stressed the need for this responsibility to what some would call an exaggerated, blowhard, overbearing stance. But Tarkovsky saw. He knew, and said as much, that film was, in itself, a lumbering mechanical beast; and as such it requires heroic, untiring, vigilant measures of continual threshing and taming.
The power of film is evidenced in this 'ever new' phenomenon, whereby one can return to a certain film (one that is well made) and see it again as though for the first time, or even better than the first time. For film is time. Tarkovsky said that is why people go to see movies. To regain lost time.
And we cannot approach and apprehend eternity except through time.
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