Tag: hitchcock

Notorious

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The extraordinary power of Notorious does not come through its plot (although the story concerning Nazis hiding in Brazil was renowned for its topicality and thematic resonance) or Ben Hecht’s Academy-Award nominated dialogue (although every line either reveals something about the plot or character) but rather its two central performances from Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman; two lovers bound together by a mutual self-loathing.

The concept is simple. Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a disgraced Nazi traitor to the US government. To mask the pain of her father’s betrayal she drinks copiously, hosting parties where she fails to pretend that nothing is the matter. Government agent Devlin (Cary Grant) meets her at one of her parties, and recruits her to travel to Brazil, where she will use her father’s name to infiltrate a group of Nazi spies plotting a deadly uranium attack.

Released in 1946, the central concept was highly timely. WW2 had only just ended, people were afraid of Nazis on the loose in South America, and concerns about atomic warfare had been heightened after the deadly bombs America detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By roping Cary Grant and Ingmar Bergman in on the tale, Hitchcock scored a true box office hit and created one of his most gloriously romantic films, perhaps only bettered by the James Stewart-starring Vertigo (1958).

In true Hitchcock fashion, the film is a classic not because of its story but how it goes about telling it. With Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, Hitchcock found the perfect correlatives for his twin themes of love and fear, and how often they can be two sides of the same coin. Her Alicia Huberman is a totally broken woman, a compulsive alcoholic, drawn into the arms of Cary Grant’s infinite cool, while Grant’s Devlin is a failed attempt at a posturing blank slate; his eyes fearful of ever conveying anything other than pure detachment. Nonetheless, as part of his plan, she must be driven into the arms of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), sending Devlin into a spiral of jealousy. Suddenly the previously composed government agent has to face up to his true feelings, lest he loses the first person he’s ever really cared for.

Hitchcock has always been known for the way he co-mingles sex, lust and love with the creeping fear of the unknown, yet Notorious is so seeped in its glorious, doomed romanticism that its images of love transcend the bounds of the conventional thriller into something incredibly gripping, vital and actually rather unconventional.

It’s best known for its Hay Code-skirting kiss scene, in which Grant and Bergman trade endless three second smooches for the better part of three minutes (a duration completely novel at the time), yet these moments keep on recurring, making it a true film of smushed-together faces, filmed in glorious close-up. Here Hitchcock innovates the use of the zoom. While the best example is the long pan from the stop of the stairs down to Alicia in the ballroom holding the key for the basement, Hitchcock also uses fast zooms during romantic sequences as well, suddenly getting us up close and personal with our subjects in the midst of passion. Every close-up becomes a tightening of the vice, another way of rushing to the heart of the matter, carrying us, the viewer, along with him.

While these love scenes — filmed in cars, hotel balconies and gorgeous ballrooms — are part of the plot per se, Hitchcock, with help from cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff, frames them in such a tender way that all “thriller” elements seem completely subsumed by nakedly erotic passion. It is this very woozy passion that is the heart of Notorious —a film obsessed with trust, brokenness, addiction and poison — and what makes it a particularly adult and unconventional thriller, even now.

It’s success rests upon Ingrid Bergman’s beautiful face, playing a woman endlessly oscillating between self-hatred, doubt and fear; both of the enemy and the far more terrifying prospect of opening her heart to another man like she did to her traitorous father. Is there any actress in history of cinema that could pierce quite so fiercely into the heart as her? Whether its as Rick Blaine’s ex-lover in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), the wife in a failed marriage in Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) or the terrifying matriarch in Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978), no actress before or since has ever been so effective at conveying vast emotions through the power of close-ups alone. Watching her act I find my critical faculties melting away in favour of pure adoration of such an evocative range of facial expressions. It’s hard to imagine any other actress playing that same role.

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The plot of Notorious might be concerned with violence and death, yet these moments almost entirely take place off-screen. Whether it’s the agitated guest who is euphemistically “driven home” or the iconic final scene where Sebastian walks back to the mansion and an almost certain death, everything is suggested rather than depicted. The MacGuffin may concern hidden uranium, yet no bombs go off, voices are rarely raised, and there are no wild chase scenes. Rather the most violent scenes are the love sequences, both players losing themselves in the midst of incredibly raw and evocative passion.

Hitchcock understands better than any other mainstream director that love and sex can be far more terrifying than gunshots and creatures in the dark. It is rare to see a romantic thriller where both characters are ostensibly so weak-willed, yet one where their love for each other eventually sees them through to a happy ending (eighties and nineties noir updates almost always end up with betrayal or death). Instead Notorious stands out for its belief that love can just about keep persisting, even when you hate yourself, drink obsessively, and are surrounded by Nazis. While Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963) are often considered to be bigger reinventions and artistic leaps in terms of Hitchcock’s technique, Notorious deserves credit for its uncommonly powerful, optimistic yet mature romantic vision; completely undimmed by the passage of time.

Notorious is back in cinemas across the UK more than 70 years after its original release on Friday, August 9th.

Daguerrotype (Le Secret de la Chambre Noire)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In a large house in a rural French town, contemporary photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet) employs 19th century daguerreotype photographic plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. (The “chambre noire” of the title is the French term for both “darkroom” and “camera obscura”.) Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. Stéphane attaches his models to metal rigs designed to hold them in place for the duration, an experience both uncomfortable and sometimes painful for them. He makes a living from fashion shoots set up by his colleague Vincent (Mathieu Amalric).

In between paid gigs, Stéphane obsessively photographs on a larger plate camera life-sized images of his 22-year-old daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau) just as while she was still alive he previously lensed his late wife Denise (Valérie Sibilia). Exposing his daughter for longer and longer periods of time of around 60 minutes, he sometimes has her drink liquid compounds to help her keep still.

Marie is concerned that the mercury-laden chemicals required for her father’s work, spillages and seepages of which can kill vegetation, are stored near the greenhouse in which she’s grown rare plants since she was a child. She wants to study botany and gets accepted on a course in Toulouse. This would mean moving away from home. She’s deeply unhappy about the father-daughter relationship and her father’s new assistant Jean (Tahar Rahim), talking to estate agent Thomas (Malik Zidi), hatches a plan to convince Stéphane of Marie’s death so that he will sell the house at a low price enabling Jean and Marie to make a fast buck by reselling at market value. It’s the sort of plot from which Hitchcock or Chabrol might have made a terrific suspense thriller.

“He’s confused photography and reality for so long he can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead”, Marie confides to Jean. A few minutes in, when neither Jean nor the audience have been introduced to Marie, he spots her as a silent apparition in a blue, nineteenth century dress moving slowly up a staircase to be briefly framed like a pictorial subject in the circular landing above. Have we just seen a ghost?

Occasional creaks, blackouts and apparitions recall classic ghost stories like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963). There’s a scene when Marie emerges from a bedroom that recalls the a similar scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and there are echoes in the father’s moulding his daughter into her departed mother which recall Obsession (Brian DePalma. 1976), itself a reworking of Vertigo. The heavily melancholic/ romantic score by Grégoire Hetzel, while light years away from Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo and Obsession, has a similar effect.

However, those expecting a shocker like Kurosawa’s own Pulse/Kairo (2001) or Creepy (2016) are likely to be disappointed. Admittedly, an unexpected fall down some stairs proves as unnerving as anything in Pulse/Kairo and unsettling corridor lighting cues recall rival J-horror ghost outing Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002). Yet the film largely eschews J-horror shock tactics to deliver a far more meditative, languorous and fluid experience to dreamlike, ethereal effect – as you might expect from a film based around the slow processes of nineteenth century photography.

Despite the French cast, crew, locations and architecture, this feels every inch a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film with numerous echoes of his other, Japanese-shot work. Opening exteriors recall the house that opens Before We Vanish (2017) and in almost every scene, there’s a clean feel to the composition familiar from those other films. Away from his native Japan, Kurosawa has imposed his own unique visual sensibilities on French culture and come up with something at once recognisably French and at the same time strangely alien to that culture.

(A note on spelling: the photographic plate is referred to as a ‘Daguerreotype’ after its inventor Louis Daguerre, while the film’s title drops the second ‘e’, presumably to make the English title’s pronunciation easier for a popular audience.)

Daguerrotype is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection. And don’t forget to check our interview with Kurosawa!

Perfect Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A performer. A career that demands everything of her. A double. An identity crisis. A falling apart. You might immediately think of that Hollywood thriller with ballerinas Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) but it had already been done over a decade earlier in Japan not with a ballerina but an idol singer – and not in live action but in animation. Perhaps surprisingly, Satoshi Kon’s animated precedent Perfect Blue is far more complex than the Hollywood effort widely considered to have been inspired by it.

In Japan, an idol singer is a squeaky clean, teen-targeted, music industry-manufactured pop star, often in a band that sings and dances. The nearest UK equivalent would be the boy band phenomenon. Perfect Blue’s idol singer Mima quits popular girl trio CHAM! to pursue a solo career as an actress, landing a role in the TV crime thriller series Double Bind. In order to get a bigger part and greater exposure, she agrees to play an explicit rape scene. Meanwhile, the internet fan site Mima’s Room is posting intimate details of her life, an unknown assailant is violently murdering some of her close colleagues while Mima herself is being stalked by a happy-go-lucky doppelgänger.

From the start, the film throws you for a loop when it begins with what appears to be an open air, sci-fi stage show. It will unsettle you, even if you’re watching it for the umpteenth time. This segues into a CHAM! gig, but it’s already cutting back and forth between the public performance and elements of Mima’s more mundane private life. Such as her looking at her reflection while travelling on the train with the impersonal city on view beyond the glass, or her buying dairy goods in the supermarket aisle.

Perfect Blue keeps these shifts up for most of its 80-odd minutes running length. There are times when it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching something taking place in the real world or inside Mima’s head, although the closing shot lets you know exactly where you are. Because it’s executed in drawn animation, there really are no limits to what it can show and where it can go. You want to show a doppelgänger in a ballet-type short skirt leaping from atop one lamp post to another? No problem at all.

After multiple viewings over the years, the film remains as powerful as the best of Hitchcock or Argento. The new trailer with its pounding prog score wisely or unwisely opts to play up the latter’s influence although it still conveys something of Perfect Blue’s constantly shifting perspective. It’s a real treat to see it back on the big screen this Halloween, whether you’ve seen it once or many times before or you’re just jumping into its flow for the first time.

Perfect Blue is back out in the UK on 31st October 2017 with previews on the 27th. Watch the film trailer below:

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.

This is NOT just a film!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

Phew, it’s finally the end credits, this is such a relief, this is just a film after all! Or not? Some movies are so disturbing that you are glad that they have finally come to an end. But what if some of them do NOT find closure after the lights go on? Some characters in such films are so strong that they refuse to cease to exist. Instead they acquire a life of their own, either through the soul of the poor actor who impersonated them in the movie, or through a gullible and easily impressionable fan.

From Hithcock to Fassbinder, from the United States to Brazil, from horror to sexual liberation, sometimes fiction just wants to become reality. These characters are shining examples of anti-mimesis, a philosophical stance in the direct opposition to Aristotelian mimesis (the representation of the self through art). Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”.

So next time you watch a jarring film and encounter a mighty or threatening character, don’t simply dismiss them as fictional. In fact, they might be waiting for you just around the corner. Or worse still, they might be living inside of you, dorment, just waiting for the right moment to bust out of your chest, kill you and take over your reality. Ouch, cinema can hurt!!!

…

1. Norman Bates in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

The crossdressing and incentuous mommy’s boy Norman Bates was played by Anthony Perkins, who also had serious mental health issues and a split personality – as he attempted to fight his homosexuality. Perkins was deeply closeted, self-hating and subjected himself to a series of psychiatric attempts in order to “cure” his same-sex attraction. He even used electroshock aversion therapy, precisely at the moment the gay liberation movement was smashing LGBT taboos. The knife in the famous shower sequence was replaced by an electroconvulsive therapy machine in real life, and both the victim and the perpetrator were Perkins himself. He died of Aids-related pneumonia in 1992, after living a life as lonely and dysfunctional as Norman Bates.

DMovies does not perceive homosexuality as a disease, and instead we celebrate sexual diversity. Perkins’s egodystonic attitude towards his sexuality represents the dysfunctional element here.

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2. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

Ted Levine should have received a Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, the twisted serial killer who skins females and dances in front of the mirror with his penis stuck between his legs, concocting a mock-vagina. His character was so controversial that, besides copious amounts of hate mail from across the world, the movie role offers largely became scarce. Most significantly, the habit of watching copious amounts of hardcore pornography for the role took a psychological toll on the man whose friends and co-workers describe as “the nicest guy you will ever meet”. Could the perverted crossdresser eventually take over Levine’s life?

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3. Armin Meier in Germany in Autumn (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

The West German omnibus film about the 1970s terrorist incidents known as German Autumn is composed of contributions from different filmmakers, including the enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The controversial director opted to show terrorism within a domestic environment: his very own house. He documents his stormy and abusive relationship with his mother Lilo Pompeit and his partner Armin Meier. The latter killed himself after not being invited to Fassbinder’s 33rd birthday party, shortly after the film was completed. Meier’s body was later found in Fassbinder’s apartment, the same one as in the movie.

Most of Fassbinder’s films did not have credits in the end, suggesting that the director did not want to separate fiction from reality. Such a harsh world mandates harsh cinema. Or is it the other way around?

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4. Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

The Italian director confessed that the rape sequence in this famous sexual liberation movie was non-consensual in an interview three years ago. He then tried to play it down by arguing that only the butter element wasn’t disclosed in the film script, but that Schneider was aware of the violence all along. One way or another, there was at least one non-consensual element in the sequence. The impact on Schneider’s life was tremendous. The French artist never again filmed another sex scene and she suffered from depression until her untimely death to cancer in 2011, suggesting that the butter rape indeed afflicted the woman for the rest of her life – click here for more about the infamous event.

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5. Fernando Ramos Da Silva in Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980)

Possibly the most subversive Brazilian film ever made, Pixote is a riveting documentary-like account of Brazil’s delinquent youth and how they are used by corrupt police and other crime organizations to commit crimes. The film featured Fernando Ramos da Silva as Pixote at the age of just 12 and the veteran Brazilian actress Marília Pêra as the prostitute Sueli (both pictured below). Despite the director’s financial support, Ramos da Silva went back to a life of crime and poverty a few years after the film was completed. He was killed at the age of 19 by the same police which he tried to evade in the movie.

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6. Chucky in Child’s Play (Jack Bender, 1991)

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were 10 years old when they kidnapped, tortured brutally murdered two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool, in 1993, Thompson and Venables snatched the toddler from a shopping mall and took him to a railway line where they beat and sexually assaulted the young boy. They left Bulger’s mutilated body on the railway tracks to die. The case shocked Britain due to the level of sadism and young age of the murderers. Thompson and Venables were supposedly inspired by the evil toy Chucky in the horror film Child’s Play 3, which they watched shortly before the murder.

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7. Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

Stone’s controversial satirical crim film has been associated with several serial killers, including the homicidal couple Sarah Edmonson and Benjamin Darras. In 1995, the murderous duo dropped LSD and watched Natural Born Killers repeatedly before going on a drug-fueled crime spree of robbing and shooting a convenience store clerk that left her a quadriplegic. During the crime spree, Darras shot and killed a Mississippi businessman. Edmonson was sentenced to 35 years in prison, while Darras is doing a life sentence. They were attempting the emulate the murderous couple in the ultra-violent flick.

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Such dangerous fiction can have loud reverberations into reality. Sometimes it’s be best to build a very tall and robust fourth wall keeping fiction where it belongs. But just how do we stop a character from jumping it?