Film Culture (Spring 1963)

Jamaica Inn. 1940—Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent. 1941—Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Suspicion. 1942—Saboteur. 1943—Shadow of a Doubt. 1944 ifeboat. 1945—Spellbound. 1946—Noterious. 1947—The Paradine Case. 1948—Rope. 1949—Under Capricorn. 1950— Stage Fright. 1951—Strangers on a Train. 1952—I Confess. 1954—Dial M for Murder, Rear Window. 1955 To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry. 1956—The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man. 1958—Vertigo. 1959—North by Northwest. 1960—Psycho. 1963—The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock is the supreme technician of the American Cinema. Even his many enemies cannot begrudge him that distinction. Like Ford, Hitchcock cuts in his mind, and not in the cutting room with five different set-ups for every scene. His is the only contemporary style which unites the divergent classical traditions of Murnau (camera movement) and Eisenstein (montage). (Welles, for example, owes more to Murnau, while Resnais is closer to Eisenstein.) However, Hitchcock seldom receives the visual analysis he deserves in the learned Anglo-American periodicals devoted ostensibly to the art of the cinema. Pages and pages will be expended on Resnais’ synchronized tracks in Last Year at Marienbad, but the subtler diminuendo of Hitchcock’s crosstracking in the American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much will pass by unnoticed. Resnais, Truffaut and Chabrol can pay homage to Hitchcock, but the Anglo-American admirers of Resnais, Truffaut and Chabrol will continue to pass off Hitchcock as a Continental aberration. “The Master of Suspense” is thus virtually without honor in his own countries. Hitchcock’s art is full of paradoxes. The Birds, for example, reveals a rigorous morality coupled with a dark humor, but the theme of complacency which runs through all his work, is now so explicit that it is generally misunderstood. Hitchcock requires a situation of normality, however dull it may seem on the surface, to emphasize the evil abnormality which lurks beneath the surface. Hitchcock understands, as his detractors do not, the crucial function of counterpoint in the cinema. You cannot commit a murder in a haunted house or dark alley, and make a meaningful statement to the audience. The spectators simply withdraw from these bizarre settings, and let the décor dictate the action. It is not Us up there on the screen, but some play actors trying to be sinister. However, when murder is committed in a gleamingly Sanitary motel bathroom during a cleansing shower, the incursion of evil into our well-laundered existence becomes intolerable. We may laugh nervously or snort disgustedly, but we will never be quite as complacent again. Hitchcock’s repeated invasions of everyday life with the most outrageous melodramatic devices have shaken the foundations of that facile humanism which insists that people are good, and only systems evil, as if the systems themselves are not functions of human experience. Much of the sick, perverse, antihumanistic humor sweeping through America today is an inevitable reaction to the sickening sentimentality of totalitarianism masquerading as all-encompassing humanism. Hitchcock has never been accepted as part of this fashionable sickness, and that is all to his credit. He insists, almost intolerantly, upon a moral reckoning for his characters and for his audience. We can violate the Commandments at our own psychic peril, but we must pay the price in guilt at the end. Hitchcock can be devious, but he is never dishonest. F. W. MURNAU (1889-1931) FILMS: 1919—Der Knabe im Blau, Satanas, Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin. 1920—Der Januskopf. 1921—Der Gang in die Nacht, Schloss Vogeled, Sehnsucht. 1922—Marizza, Genannt die Schmuggler—Madonnna, Der Brennende Acker, Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, Phantom. 1923—Austriebung, Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs. 1924—Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh). 1925—Tartuffe. 1926—Faust. 1927 —Sunrise. 1928—Four Devils. 1930—City Girl (Our Daily Bread). 1931—Tabu (with Robert Flaherty). To put it as simply as possible, Murnau is mise-en-scene. The tradition he represents is that of the director who decides how much of the world will be revealed to the audience. The aesthetic of camera movement over montage implies the continuousness of a visual field outside the frame of a film. What we see on the screen is what the director has chosen to show us. He could have shown us more or less or something else, but he chose to show us what he has shown us for a specific purpose. In Faust, the screen is momentarily dark. Suddenly it is illuminated by a candle, and we see a man carrying the candle down some stairs. The man, the candle, the stairs have materialized out of the darkness. The world has been manifested by the director. Spottiswoode or Arnheim would demystify this luminous moment by FILM CULTURE 7