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Hitchcock Follows Function into Modernism by Doniphan Blair with Davell Swan
A 26-year-old Alfred Hitchcock shooting 'The Lodger' with assistant director Alma Reville, soon to be his wife. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
Born in the last year of the 19th century, raised Catholic in a London East End teaming with Jews and cockneys, an overweight momma's boy and loner, Alfred Hitchcock came of age with modernism and tuned into its very essence through his own anxiety.
"I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear," he once remarked. "Because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film." Fortunately for us, "The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them." In addition to murder and moral turpitude, he must have feared women and sex considering his oeuvre's focus on empowered women and sexual issues.
And this is content only. Formally, Hitchcock was so forward-leaning he has to be considered Bauhausian. Virtually each one of his shots, lines of dialogue and other cinema elements seem to relentlessly drive his film's essence, although he would have to plow through Expressionism and Surrealism to get there.
The new era suffused Hitchcock. First working in advertising, he switched to graphics in the booming new film business and may have read Joyce's groundbreaking "Ulysses" the year it came out (1919), which was when he started publishing his own edge- as well as throat- cutting stories.
His first, "Gas", features not only a rape but his trademark twist ending, in this case the fact that the woman is actually at the dentist, receiving laughing gas and fantasizing about an assault. Making his way in the small Gainsborough Studios, he co-wrote "The Blackguard" (1924), about a violinist who saves a princess during the Russian Revolution, and was sent to work on its set in Germany.
Driven by the absence of movies during the war and the magic of marketplace research, Germany was in a cinema frenzy. Studio execs had figured out how to provision their audiences with precisely what they wanted—romance, death and mysticism—already leading to one of the greatest films of all time, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920), the story of which, about a madman heading the asylum, essentially predicts Hitler.
Hitchcock directing 'The 39 Steps' (1935) with Madeleine Carroll as an independent woman who rebuffs the hero until she cracks the conspiracy against him on her own. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
Hitchcock was overjoyed to be in Germany, where he watched the great F.W. Murnau direct "The Last Laugh" (1924) but it was "Caligari" which paralleled his sensibilities most precisely. Indeed,he spent his career exploring its tropes: horror, sea-sawing storylines, severe psychologies, sexual perversion, faulty narrators and Expressionist sets—wilder than anything the '60s produced. His 1950 film "Stage Fright" features a narrator so faulty he provides a false flashback.
Certainly his first film, "The Lodger" (1926) adopted many "Caligari" conceits. Strikingly Expressionist, it concerns a serial killer of women and opens on the face of a woman screaming, a full frontal attack he used again in "The Young and the Innocent" (1938) and elsewhere. Instead of "Caligari"'s condemnation of society, however, "The Lodger"'s bait-and-switch ending exonerates the suspect, whom the female lead has a crush on—to the chagrin of her policeman boyfriend, revealing Hitchcock's romanticism about underdogs as well as the complexity of attraction, which he used repeatedly.
Beneath his terror, suspense and brutality, as well as brutal directing style, Hitchcock maintained modernist ethics, showing women, minorities, as well as truth, justice, and love, in a good light. Some see him as misogynist but they seem to be confusing his story's surfaces with their underlying morality not to mention ignoring the parade of powerful women, in front or behind the camera. Alma Reville, his assistant director on "The Lodger", became his wife, shortly after shooting wrapped, and eventually his lifelong collaborator.
"Black people appear as stereotyped one-dimensional characters in Hitchcock's films, except in Topaz," according to Alfred-Hitchcock-films.net, pointing to, as a prime suspect, the "Young and Innocent", where the murderer is a white jazz drummer who performs in blackface.
'The Life Boat' (1942) iconized our interdependence including with a black man who as just another shipwreck victim until he proved a bit more moral. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
But, as with serial murderers and rapists, Hitchcock was not making news, only reporting it: In fact, English musicians appeared in blackface until the early 1960s. The blackface element interested Hitchcock not as a racist reference but for its disguise quality. Only when the killer's face is wiped off and he is returned to whiteness is the witness able to identify him.
A black man is featured in "Lifeboat" (1942), shot entirely onboard one and a masterpiece of confined space (one of Hitchcock's specialties, according to film scholar David Carren, see "Big Ideas in a Small World: Trapped by Alfred Hitchcock", 2011). The man is just another marooned passenger until he is distinguished by not beating the German sailor they save and by being the first to spot the rescue ship—symbolizing something significant, as does virtually everything in a Hitchcock film.
The impression of Hitchcock as a crazed Expressionist only out to shock with over-the-top emotions obscures his exacting and technical left brain, the combination of which made him one of the greatest directors of all time—despite the fact he never won a best director Oscar. French director François Truffaut was amazed to find, when he came to the United States, that the Hitchcock that he and his other New Wavers revered as the first of the auteurs was considered a B-film thriller maker.
In fact, Truffaut put his filmmaking career on hold to interview him at length for a coffee table book "Hitchcock by Truffaut: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock" (1967). According to his daughter, Laura Truffaut, he would watch Hitchcock films over and over, especially when he needed to solve a cinema problem.
"My father always thought he would see something he hadn't seen before," Laura told me recently (see interview). "Hitchcock was always on his mind." Hitchcock was also recognized around then by the Canadian critic Robin Wood and by 2007 the critic's poll in Britain's Daily Telegraph, rated him as "the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands."
How did Hitchcock achieve this: by being a perverted, one-trick horror exploiter? Or by making taut, film-language articulate and modernist masterpieces?
Hitchcock's greatest influences, it turns out, were not the moody Expressionists of Potsdam, Germany's Hollywood, nor the crazy Surrealists of Paris, with whom he is also associated, but the ultra modern artists hard at work 150 miles away. While there's no evidence he travelled to Weimar, where Walter Gropius and buddies had started the Bauhaus School in 1919, including art, architecture, graphic design, industrial design, weaving and typography—albeit no film—he adopted their principles.
This opening shot from 'The Lodger' and the first scene of frantic blonds donning brunette wigs to avoid a serial killer, gets the film racing from the get-go . photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
Indeed, Gropius' "Gesamtkunstwerk", or total work of art, was realized better by Hitchcock than Gropius himself, who ignored the theatrical arts and called them "women's work." Hitchcock, however, adored women, starting with his overbearing mother and including all his female leads—often to obsessive excess—as well as the wives of his writers, whose husbands he seemed to select based on their beauty. He certainly featured female beauty, innocence and morality as well as surprising strength in almost all his dramas.
As an advanced devotee of Gesamtkunstwerk, he also used eloquent camera work, snappy dialogue, complex sets, interesting fine art, aggressive music and—in a tip of the hat to Gropius— architecture, like the British Museum or the Statue of Liberty, to convey concepts from his febrile imagination directly to the mind of the viewer, although it was in his female leads like Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly, and Kim Novak where forms embodied ideas most succinctly.
“You might say I was playing [the audience] like an organ,” he told Truffaut in one interview. Indeed, he would use any trick in the book—extreme close-up, focus pulls, long track-ins, trick photography and sound—to achieve his ends because he also adhered to Bauhaus's most central postulate: form follows function.
It could be said that Hitchcock was the first filmmaker to look at the film, the form of the art product or media itself, as a pure expression of his vision, and to regard any artifice available as fair game for manipulating the audience. He even included a winking acknowledgement of the process, a certain post-modernism, which was personified by his presence as an extra in every film "Rebecca" (1940) on.
He would have the camera announce not only its existence but its power to select what to view, according to William Rothman in "Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze" (1984). Realizing this, the viewer could stand back from the brute force of his technical onslaught to observe the aesthetic effect, if for only for a moment, before being sucked by his expertise back from the surface and down into the frothing content.
Hitchcock directing 'Vertigo' in San Francisco in 1958. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
This is similarly set out in his use of dialogue, which "should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms." "If it's a good movie," he added on another occasion, "The sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on." While he was criticized for insufficient character development as well as for saying "actors should be treated like cattle," this is because actors, like their dialogue, like all the other elements in the picture were subordinated to the Gesamtkunstwerk.
In terms of form-follows-function (FFF), Hitchcock would be loath to lard in a black person just for color, as is common today, but was overjoyed to do so if the narrative merited it, as in "Lifeboat" or "Topaz" (1969). In the latter, the African-American actor Roscoe Lee Browne stars because the story involves the CIA infiltrating the Cuban UN delegation's building in Harlem.
Hitchcock also worked on the massive end-of-World War II newsreel, his only documentary. It detailed the horrors of the Holocaust but was shelved when the world-wide party started in May 1945. "In feature films, the director is God," he said, "In documentary films, God is the director."
When "The Lodger" became a critical and box office success, Hitchcock was off to the races, downloading his dreams directly into the audience's mind via any innovation the new art of cinema would allow. In the silent "The Lodger", when confronted with how to portray the suspect pacing violently in his newly rented room, he constructed a transparent floor, although he recalled to Truffaut that the solution was a bit odd.
Hitchcock's "Bauhaus Cinema Principles" can be phrased as follows: the plot is held up by the characters who in turn are driven by their psychology and ultimately the deep feelings the filmmaker wishes to conjure. The audience's final impression, with which they exit the theater, is the end result of that alchemy, a massive delivery system of dialogue, scenes, stars and technical tricks which work only as long as its entire artifice in direct alignment with the filmmaker's psyche.
Hitchcock pioneered the science of terror: "There is no terror in the bang," he said, "Only in the anticipation of it." Or "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible [by drawing the terror out]," although he also notes, "Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
Hitchcock famously appeared as an extra in all his films but was it to save money—he was famously cheap—or to be post-modern and self-referential. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
Serial killings were nothing new in 1926, as we can see from "The Lodger", but Hitchcock was hardly a traditionalist; indeed he was always looking for the new technology, new trick, new idea.
"In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog (but) audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings." Also, "One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life." And "The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture," a point Truffaut regarded as gospel.
Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Andre' Bazin along with critic Charles Barr all believed that the history of film aesthetics was relative to the achievement of ever-greater realism. The advent of sound, longer shot length, depth-of-field photography, and the wide-screen all contributed to the progression that allowed the viewer to create their own version of the screened events, as if in real life. Similarly, Hitch realized that by utilizing charming, not purely 100% evil villains, each viewer would relate to this character in personal, varying degrees, as if they're creating their own personal movie.
After mucking about with a few pictures, Hitchcock was back on the thriller track with "Blackmail" (1929). In his endless quest for cutting edge, he converted it to a talkie mid-production, making it Britain's first sound film. Introducing the iconic monumentalism he would use throughout his career, "Blackmail" climaxes in, and then on top of, the British Museum.
Despite being an early sound film, he experiments wildly with sound. After the heroine stabs a man in self-defense, she hears a the next morning breakfast talk of the killing with the word "Knife, knife, knife..." repeating until it is almost screamed. She jumps, and her bread knife scutters across the table.
As in many Hitchcock films, the characters in "Blackmail" are closely related. So much so, her boyfriend is the Scotland Yard detective assigned the case in which she is the primary suspect—the blackmail of the title comes from petty criminal who saw her committing the murder. In lesser hands, this might appear forced or too tidy but in Hitchcock's well-plotted setup he makes these relationships inevitable, almost necessary even. At the end, in his standard bait-and-switch, the blackmailer is exposed and the woman exonerated.
In "Dail M for Murder" (1954) the characters are so intertwined as to be internecine. A man is trying to murder his wife because she had an affair with his best friend who happens to be a murder mystery writer. Indeed, he concocts what turns out to be the actual plot of the film, as a story to tell the police, in an innocent attempt to help his friend exonerate the very wife he's trying to set up for murder. While seemingly absurd on paper, in Hitchcock's world, it is the reductio ad absurdum of the troubled human family.
'Psycho''s notorious shower scene with Janet Leigh featured 50 edits and 77 camera angles, many extreme closeups. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
Hitchcock's universe was a tidy one, because he believed both consciously and subconsciously, both in the technical production and in the film's story, in organization and efficiency. While that may be how he kept the dreaded crazies at bay, it is also very Bauhausian.
A component of his efficiency is his combination of surrealistic effects and cheap short cuts. "Family Plot" (1976) features plenty of in-car rear-screen projection, despite the cinema-verité style of the day: it saved time but it also added an unreal effect. "Foreign Correspondent" (1940) contains a surreal of an airplane, animated and probably cost-saving. Similarly, some say he should've sprung for a more realistic backdrop in "Marnie" (1964).
Another obvious FFF, in lining up profession to character and psychology, is how his characters use the tools of their trade for other purposes. In "Rear Window" (1954), the photographer played by Stewart employs his camera first to spy on his neighbors and then to blind his attacker with flashbulbs. Doris Day's character in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956) gives up a singing career to please her husband only to perform a song to alert her kidnapped son of her presence.
In "I Confess" (1953), one of the French New Wavers' faves, the priest's occupation almost hangs him. A moral man, he cannot finger the killer, played by Montgomery Clift, because the latter admitted the crime in confession, even though he was dressed as a priest when he committed them murder—which is why the priest is in the dock! Similarly, a psychoanalyst uses her skills to heal her lover in "Spellbound" (1945),. Conversely, some professionals' abilities fail them; in "Vertigo"'s (1958) Scottie, Stewart again, is duped and nearly destroyed as a police detective.
One of the most amazing examples of Hitchcockian FFF can be found in "To Catch A Thief" (1955). The camera veers from flying behind a police car to finding the thief in a nearby home. Although one doesn't expect the camera to take off on its own like that, we are pleasantly surprised by its reassignment. Toward the end of the film, Hitchcock utilizes a contraption beneath the heroine's gown to have her glide rather than walk across a room. While "expressionist", it conveyed a higher level of truth, hence served that function. He uses the same trick with Kim Novak in "Vertigo" entering Ernie's Restaurant.
The optical trick from the tower in 'Psycho', although simply zooming in while dollying out, is both effective and vertigo-like. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock
"Psycho" (1960), considered Hitchcock's greatest film by most, was shot in black and white, considered low of budget in those days, and by a television crew, even though Hitchcock was at the top of his talents and budgets. He went that route specifically to add grittiness, to the film's eternal benefit.
The killer in "Rope" (1947), gets a kick out of tying the books he's loaning to the father of his victim with the rope he used to strangle the son. Unfortunately, this joke upsets his partner in crime, who raises suspicions with negative results for the murderers, essentially a Form Follows Function/ Form Versus Function tie.
"Frenzy" (1966) features a killer who makes efficiency a high art by using whatever tie he happens to be wearing to strangle women. The denouement, however, finds the fiend tieless near a corpus delicti: another FFF tie-in, as it were.
The murder of the tennis star's wife, during "Strangers On A Train" (1951), is seen reflected in her eyeglasses that are dropped onto the ground as Bruno Anthony performs his strangulation. An exquisite example of FFF regarding a camera's perspective, symbol of spectacles, etc.
Perhaps there's an element of Form Following Dysfunction, in which a character will misuse a public area for a rest or an escape. Roger Thornhill, the besieged madman of "North By Northwest", eludes the killers by disrupting an art auction they're taking part in, resulting in his safe removal by police officers. Richard Hannay, a character on the run throughout much of "The 39 Steps", attempts to use a political rally to avoid the police.
For Hitchcock's many duplicitous characters, the false form they present is most functional for fooling their intended victim. Throughout the Hitchcock canon, there are innumerable examples of repeated markers. The ways in which a kiss is conducted, a stairway is ascended or descended, the manner in which jewelry is displayed and used, all little FFF tidbits which tie into a unified Gesamtkunstwerk.
Ultimately, Hitchcock was a one-man cinema Bauhaus, a polyfaceted genius, who grew up with film and helped invent many of its tropes and genres, and throughout the horror and complexity, maintained a goal that was exceedingly simple. He wanted to create a world exploding with suspense and humor within the mind of the filmgoer, while living a safe and seemingly unostentatious life, but still enjoying of the finest company, liquor and foods. The making of his films made all of this possible: the ultimate living Form Follows Function.