Tag: Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock gets a dirty film guide!

Posted on by victorfraga

In terms of longevity and influence, Alfred Hitchcock proved to be one of the most enduring directors of his generation, spearheading a narrative style that was homaged by James Bond directors John Glen and Peter Hunt in later years. His status was assured to the point where his name stood comfortably beside Hollywood luminaries Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and James Cagney, becoming a director ubiquitous within the realm of celebrity culture. In his book HITCHOLOGY, film writer Neil Alcock peers at the English director’s body of work, contextualising his artistry both in the era when it was created, and how it speaks to younger generations.

The admiration for the director is evident, although HITCHOLOGY never shies away from the criticisms that are levelled at him. In his closing pages, Alcock outlines a series of lessons that filmmakers can learn from his example, citing an absence of minority cast members and a questionable depiction of women as two factors that should not be homaged. Interestingly, Hitchcock leaned on the guidance of one woman in particular: his wife Alma. A noted film editor, Alma understood the medium of cinema, providing guidance and criticism that helped her husband complete his work. “Her notes were invaluable to him,” Alcock writes; “her approval essential.”

Anxious to become a name, a face and an authority, Hitchcock made the creative decision to put his name before the film title in 1948. (The opening credit for Rope reads ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope’). By the time he completed Psycho (1960), Hitchcock was popular enough to appear in the promotional materials by himself. His face became a recognisable fixture, no doubt helped by his decision to make a cameo appearance in his work. But behind the veneer stood a man who needed to support his family: In an effort to accommodate his wife and children, Hitchcock agreed to direct a musical biography on Johann Strauss II. While some of the observations are spurious (it’s highly unlikely that Hitchcock saw himself in Strauss), Alcock peers behind the public facade – or mask, if you will – to show a worker driven by his desire to complete decent work in a form of entertainment that was still in its relative infancy.

Wittily written – Alcock drily writes that Juno and The Paycock (1930) is as miserable to watch as it was for Hitchcock to complete – the book punches along with impressive economy, and Alcock packs the director’s catalogue into a tidy work that isn’t even 400 pages long. What is apparent is that Hitchcock was a commercial artist at heart, and was happy to accede to trends if it meant getting his work on the big screen. Hitchcock applied 3D to Dial M for Murder (1954), a film that utilises a variety of colourful techniques.”It’s also impossible to ignore the wildly expressionistic scene,” Alcock says, “in which Hitchcock elides an entire court case by using a head- on shot of Margot, as slivers of dialogue, coloured lights and shadows swirl menacingly around her”.

By the time he directed 1954’s Rear Window, Hitchcock was keen to build on character development over narration, culminating in a film that features one of James Stewart’s more refined performances. Rear Window became a favourite of Martin Scorsese’s, another man invested in character building a la Taxi Driver (1976). Rear Window, notably, was filmed entirely at Paramount Studios, which had become something of a habit for Hitchcock after enduring ignominy during the making of The Pleasure Garden (1925). Not only was 10,000 feet of film confiscated by Italian authorities, but Hitchcock’s room was also broken into and burgled. From that point on, he kept his narratives inside a studio, containing his madcap ideas in safe space.

Hitchcock got involved in the scripts, shaping them to fit his vision. Naturally, Alma Hitchcock got involved. “Husband and wife rarely gave themselves screen credit for their writing, but they were both knee-deep in the process,” Alcock notes, although she later demurred from his projects in an effort to focus on her role as a grandparent. Cannily, Alcock hints that had an effect on her husband’s work: “the further towards the end of Hitchcock’s filmography you get, the less believable and sympathetic the female characters become.”

Considering Hitchcock’s penchant for comedy. The fairground scene in Strangers On A Train (1951) ripples with a sexual energy that anticipates the bawdiness of James Bond’s frolics in Octopussy (John Glen, 1983). Alcock wisely litters the book with witty one-liners and frolicsome insights into the Hitchcock universe. He lets his inner critic out at various points – anyone who favours the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is “mad” in his eyes – but the research leads the book, exploring the director’s creative rationale. In an effort to capture the French scenery in To Catch a Thief (1955), Hitchcock opted to film aerial shots from a helicopter; a rarity in the 1950s. In an effort to satiate audience’s expectations of violence and horror in the early 1960s, Hitchcock devised a feature (The Birds, 1963) where animals terrorise humans out in the open air. And when he couldn’t produce a film that interested him on an intellectual level, Hitchcock acquiesced to Universal’s demands to adapt a Cold War Thriller for the big screen: Topaz (1969).

Endlessly inventive, ill health and old age forced Hitchcock to slow down productivity, leading to a four-year-gap between Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976).The latter wound up being his last film, an oddity that has some esoteric charm, particularly in the second half. “On its own terms, Hitchcock’s swan song is a perfectly adequate comic thriller,” Alcock says,”but as far as its legacy is concerned, it’s less ‘crowning finale to an unparalleled career’ than it is ‘tricky pub quiz answer’.” Hitchcock died four years later, at the age of 80.

He left behind a body of work that spanned decades, from the early days of silent cinema, to the kaleidoscopic majesty of his 1950s’ work (to my mind, his most fertile era.) Hitchcock experimented with form, colour and scope, which gives Alcock ample room to ruminate on the director’s canon. That Alcock does it with zest, fervent research and dry wit only furthers his credit.

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Click here in order to find out more about and also to purchase your copy of HITCHOLOGY:a film-by-film guide to the style and themes.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) first came out, no one knew about its most notorious scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually Alien, treat yourself to watching it before seeing Memory: The Origins Of Alien. Or, indeed, before reading this review.

You’d be forgiven, as this new documentary starts, for thinking you’d wandered into a different film. Spiders on sun-drenched stone surfaces. Footage of Greek temples. But then, visuals clearly inspired by Alien show three Furies waking up on the floor of a spaceship interior and advancing towards camera. The voice-over invokes the myth of Clytemnestra and the Furies, although they are referenced rather than well explained so you’d be advised to click through the above links or google and look up references to them before seeing the film.

Greek temple/Furies bookend notwithstanding, this generally excellent documentary about Alien isn’t quite as integrated a whole as 78/52, director Philippe’s prior, terrific documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, the making of Psycho (1960) and the shooting of the infamous shower scene. However at a pitch level Memory: The Origins Of Alien at least follows a similar model: an examination of a film with a key shocking scene which resonated heavily through popular culture both at the time of its initial release and ever since. In the case of Alien, that would be the so-called chest-burster scene in which John Hurt, seemingly recovering from having an alien entity known after the film came out as a face-hugger clamped to his face with a tube inserted into his mouth, which creature has disappeared, being interrupted when eating a meal with crew mates by his suddenly becoming very ill before an alien entity fatally bursts out of his chest.

Alien differs from Psycho in that while Hitchcock’s film very much conforms to the idea of film director as auteur – there are other collaboators however (despite a specious argument that surfaces from time to time that Saul Bass not Hitch shot the shower scene) the whole thing was Hitch’s vision – Alien is somewhat problematic in that regard, being the product of at least three separate minds: US writer Dan O’Bannon, Swiss artist H.R.Giger and British director Ridley Scott. One can certainly play auteurist games with Alien and talk about it in terms of Scott’s wider body of directorial work, but no serious attempt at understanding the film can fail to examine the contributions of the other two contributors.

Indeed, watching this documentary, if anyone can lay claim to being auteur of Alien, it would be O’Bannon who wrote it and spent $1 000 of his own rather than the production’s money to hire Giger to make sketches and designs on paper before Scott became anywhere near involved. For a while, it was set to be directed by Walter Hill, a director who writes most of his films, but he wasn’t especially enamoured of the project and eventually left to make Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981). Hill’s name remains on all the Alien films as producer. A good half of the current documentary is devoted to O’Bannon, with a little interview material augmented by considerably more interview footage of his knowledgeable wife Diane. There’s a short if informative section on Giger and then, finally, the last half hour or so covers Scott’s involvement and the actual shooting, including the chest-burster sequence.

That makes the whole very much a film of two halves – the O’Bannon half and the Scott half. The O’Bannon half is the better one, packed with fascinating insights which make you want to go back and watch the original film all over again. The brief Giger section is just as good, although there’s not all that much of it. In the Scott section, Scott comes over as the right person to direct the film, in tune with O’Bannon and Giger, but there’s a sense in which Alien is more O’Bannon’s baby than Scott’s. Scott brought Giger back onto the project after Giger had been dropped against O’Bannon’s wishes during the period when Walter Hill was the director.

A number of pundits wax rather too lyrical about Alien and there’s no mention of the embarrassing moment after the chest-bursting in which the little post chest-burst critter hilariously dashes off screen like the Road Runner from Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons. The interviews in 78/52 threw all manner of light on various aspects of Psycho; those in Memory: The Origins Of Alien are a little less critical and a little more adulatory, which doesn’t do the piece any favours.

Yet, flawed as both Alien and this documentary may be, the former remains one of the great filmic SF texts while the latter proves a mostly worthwhile and compelling companion piece. If it doesn’t attempt to cover the series of films that followed – a little more on Scott and Prometheus, in particular, would have been good – it nevertheless throws considerable light onto how Alien got made (and how it very nearly didn’t) and most definitely merits just over an hour an a half of your time.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd.. Watch the film trailer below:

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

Orphée

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.

Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.

So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him. When Eurydice dies following her too being hit by the motorcyclists, Orphée must venture through the mirror and across the Zone to get her back from the underworld. But once there, he’s confronted by a panel of men judging the Princess for trying to seduce him into going there…

It’s a fairly basic production by today’s standards. The director’s understanding of the mythology is profoundly inventive. Cocteau’s ideas easily transcend not only its budgetary limitations, but also the contemporary 1950 French café society setting in which it was made. As well as the motorcycling Angels of Death, some of the amazing visuals include running the camera backwards so that, for example, dead people are resurrected for their journey into the underworld by reverse falling from horizontal on a bed to an upright standing position. People travel through the surface of mirrors, with one extraordinary close up image created by rubber-gloved hands being plunged into a vat of mercury, a special effect that would probably not be allowed today for health and safety reasons. And in the Zone, Orphée and the Princess’ chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) pull themselves along walls as if climbing or are sucked past them as if towards a vacuum.

Orphée is an extraordinary special effects fest, underpinned by Cocteau’s poetic sensibility, storytelling ability and visual flair. There’s no obvious reason why such seemingly extraneous material of radio messages such as “a glass of water illuminates the world” should make such an impression on both Orphée and us, but they do. Once we realise that not only is the Princess in love with Orphée but Heurtebise has fallen for Eurydice, we sympathise with each of them in their various plights as well. Plus, the film is packed with incredible images that, once seen, aren’t easily expunged from your head.

It doesn’t hurt that Cocteau knows how to cast actors who are visually striking in addition to giving compelling performances. Leading man Jean Marais is just as memorable in Orphée as he is in full beast make-up in the director’s earlier Beauty and the Beast (1946) while Maria Casarès is both elegant and enigmatic as Death.

You could beef up the effects by spending more money – but Cocteau’s inventiveness with the minimal resources available to him remains more impressive than most if not all contemporary megabudget movies. In the cinema of magic, mythmaking and enchantment, Cocteau has no equal and has left a lasting imprint on film cuture. You can see Orphée‘s influence in works as diverse as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977). Orphée’s pursuit of the Princess who vanishes into thin air in a colonnade anticipates the sequence in Vertigo where the pursued woman vanishes into thin air in the McKittrick Hotel, not to mention the setting of a colonnade at the Spanish Mission later on. And the dogtooth pattern on Orphée’s bedroom floor prefigures the one in the protagonist’s dream in Eraserhead, not to mention the room where the dwarf appears in Lynch’s subsequent TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91).

Society has changed a lot since the 1950s. You might think the relationships in the film would benefit from being more explicit, but somehow the lack of bodily flesh on display here adds to the film’s charm: why be explicit when you can do it all with subtle hints and suggestion? The one area where the film might be made differently today is in its portrayal of women. If the strong willed Princess is impressive enough, Eurydice does little beyond pine for her husband and desire to make him happy. Also, the committee that sits in judgement on the Princess consists entirely of men, whereas today one would include both sexes. And although Cocteau himself was openly homosexual (no-one used the word ‘gay’ in his lifetime), there are no LGBT characters as such here. Perhaps in today’s more open society he’d have realised his characters slightly differently.

Nevertheless, there’s really nothing else in cinema quite like Orphée just as there’s really no-one else in the wider world of the arts quite like Jean Cocteau. Orphée is just as dazzling today as it was when first released two thirds of a century ago. The BFI’s new 2K restoration of this classic in cinemas provides the perfect opportunity either to revisit it for the umpteenth time or to view it for the very first.

Orphée is out in the UK on Friday, October 19th. Watch the BFI’s brand new film trailer below:

It’s also showing as part of Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema

at BFI Southbank from Tuesday, October 23rd to the end of November

and a Jean Cocteau retrospective at the Institut français

from Tuesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 18th.

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

78/52

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) first came out in 1960, no one knew about the shower scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually seen Psycho, treat yourself to watching it before seeing 78/52.

This documentary is called 78/52 after the shower scene’s number of set-ups (78) and cuts (52). Psycho was shot in four weeks; one of the four was dedicated to shooting that one scene.

In some ways, 78/52 doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It talks a little about the context of the film in Hitch’s career, a lot about Psycho the film and the cultural phenomenon – much more than this writer expected, actually, given that it purports to be a film about the shower scene – and then, quite some way in, gets round to talking in great depth about the shower scene. Which, for the Hitchcock nerd like myself or the Psycho admirer is fine.

Hitch himself and numerous key cast and crew members have long since passed away, among them leading lady Janet Leigh, leading man Anthony Perkins, designer Saul Bass and composer Bernard Herrmann. Despite these obstacles, Philippe has assembled an extraordinary cast of interviewees including numerous directors, editors, technicians, writers and actors as well as descendants of Hitch (granddaughter Tere Carrubba), Leigh (actor-daughter Jamie Lee Curtis) and Perkins (director-son Oz Perkins II).

In something of a coup, he also has Janet Leigh’s body double from Psycho Marli Renfro and there are alumni of the 1998 shot for shot Psycho remake too, not to mention Stephen Rebello whose excellent book Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho sits on my shelf. As if that wasn’t enough, their number also includes both Guillermo del Toro and the directing duo Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson whose respective latest films The Shape Of Water and The Endless are to be found elsewhere in this year’s LFF.

The interview material is wide-ranging and often revelatory. I consider myself a Hitchcock buff and heard or saw things here I’ve never heard or seen before. The only real problem is that in editing the documentary down to a taut 91 minutes, there must inevitably be a lot of material that had to be either left out or taken out. This results in the occasional anomaly, such as for example the implication that all Hitch’s films in the fifties were colour while Psycho was in black and white when the geek will know that Stage Fright (1950), Strangers On A Train (1951), I Confess (1952) and – most importantly because it breaks Hitch’s run of colour films from Dial M For Murder (1953) to North By NorthWest (1959) – The Wrong Man (1956) were also black and white. But such minor blips scarcely detract from 78/52’s monumental achievement of presenting afresh a film that many of us thought we already knew intimately, inside and out.

Speaking of minor elements in the film, for those audience members who can bear not to get up out of their seat the moment the credits roll, there’s a nice little something at the very end of the credits. Hitch, who on Psycho’s first run insisted no-one would be admitted after the film had started, would I think have heartily approved. Although he had such a strong understanding of audiences that he would also know that most punters wouldn’t possess the necessary patience.

78/52 is playing at BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 15th October, and a week later in the Cambridge Film Festival. The movie is out in cinemas on Friday, November 3rd, and then on DVD on December 11th, and BFI Player in the new year.