Research Diary/Sketchbook for Objective 1.0

This is the research diary that covers the analysis of visual metaphor and perception and the critical analysis of film studies into Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Derek Jarman.





Visual Metaphor and Perception:

(notes taken from Metaphor and Film by Trevor Whittock)



Is the[ir] use of what is normally regarded as a literary term appropriate, or is it, when carried over to the cinematic context, mere license?  Is "cinematic metaphor" itself a metaphor only, or do metaphors reallt exist in films? (p1)


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W.B. Stanford - The frequent misuse of the term metaphor for symbolism demands a distinction.  As S. J. Brown puts it, symbolism belongs to the sphere of things while metaphor beings to the sphere of words.  This does not mean that words cannot be things but that metaphor must not be used as a term for nonverbal transferences if it is to retain its meaning at all.  What is one to make of this use in a cinema critique from The Spectator of October 4, 1935? - 'Here as a priest strikes a bell Mr. W______ uses one of the loveliest visual metaphors I have ever seen on any screen.  The sound of the bell startles a small bird from it's branch and the camera follows the bird's flight and the notes of the bell across the island down from the mountain side, over forest and plain and sea, the vibration of the tiny wings, the fading sound' - this is symbolism, parallelism, analogy, anything but metaphor. (p2)


Calvin Pryluck - A number of writers have criticized the whole idea of "film metaphor" on the partially valid basis that the photographic image in film is a literal representation of objects and events.  These objects and events, the argument goes, have intrinsic meanings which militate against the images being interpreted figuratively.  On these grounds, Kracauer, for instance, suggested the the gods sequence in October would be seen as "an aimless assemblage of religious images rather than as an attack on religion. (p2)


Such views are not to be dismissed lightly.  They stress the two fold drawbacks to any endeavor to apply traditional notions to new areas of experience:  The traditional terms may become overextended and useless; and their employment may lead to preconceptions that hinder the recognition of the new for what it is.  Bt what other recourse have we but to explore the unknown with the aid of the known, in the process modifying what we thought we knew and discovering what we did not expect to find? (Indeed, some regard this as the fundamental process of metaphor itself.)  The history of film, as much as the history of film theory, exemplifies this procedure.  D. W. Griffith brought the conventions of melodrama to establish the narrative resources of the new medium, just as Eisenstein adapted the methods of Meyerhold and Kabuki theater to formulate image and montage. (p2)


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[Yet,] the question might still be asked, why metaphor?  Reasons have already been hinted at.  As the opening quotations illustrate, people do frequently rely upon the term when discussing films.  Often their usage is loose, and the approach has been challenged.  Clarification is needed, and implications should be set out before the debate continues.  Then, theories of metaphor are closely related to theories of imagination and to the processes and structures imagination employs.  The study of metaphor leads off in one direction toward cognitive psychology with its interest in the mental processes underlying perception and mental categorization; in another direction toward rhetoric and strategies of communication. (p3)


Although it would not be true to say that structural linguists have not propounded ideas that cast a new light on metaphor, in general their treatment of the subject has been disappointing.  Particularly notable has been the failure to deal with the specificity of metaphors – their uniqueness of content – and with the way metaphors, as it were, step outside accepted codes to express meanings for which the codes themselves do not allow.  Film semiology has been, if anything, even less fitted to tackling these issues.  Cinematic metaphor still remains largely unexplored and unexplained. (p3)


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Metaphor is usually defined as the presentation of one idea in terms of another, belonging to a different category, so that either our understanding of the first idea is transformed, or so that from the fusion of the two ideas a new one is created.  This can be represented symbolically as

A + B = A(B)    or    A + B = Z

It has become customary to refer to the original idea as the tenor, and the second idea imported to modify or transform it as the vehicle.

original idea = tenor = A
modification = vehicle = B
transformation = Z or A(B)

(p5)


Analogy is a process of reasoning from parallel cases, but with the two cases remaining separate and unchanged.  Analogy is the basis of many metaphors – “similitude in dissimilitude.”  In particular it is the basis of that form of metaphor called simile that explicitly calls attention to an analogy.  “My love is like a red, red rose.”  This is as that.  In a common type of metaphor the words spelling out the comparison are simply omitted, and the analogy is implied only. (p5)


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In analogy the connections between the subject and its parallel case are accepted literally; in metaphor the connections between tenor and vehicle are understood figuratively.
The distinction between literal and figurative is inextricably bound up with thinking about metaphor.  Literal derives from being true to the letter.  A literal transcript is one that accurately reproduces the words originally used.  In time this fidelity of rendition was extended to two different sets of circumstances, an extension that, ironically, is itself metaphorical.  “Literal” came to be applied to the recounting of events.  A literal account of what happened is one that is faithful to the facts, not coloring or distorting them in any way.  Second, it came to be applied to the use of language.  Words used literally are words employed in accordance with the rules of grammar and to be understood in their usual or primary sense. (p6)


To identify a visual phenomenon as a red rose the beholder must be acquainted with the categories of redness and rose.  Language gives names to most of the categories we possess.  When children learn to speak, they are acquiring not only phonemes, syntax, and vocabulary but also the categories society has adopted to organize and classify and interconnect its experiences.  Words in their ordinary or primary usage refer to these categories.  When words are used literally the language seems most neutral, reliable, and transparent because the words accord to categories that are accepted and acceptable – ones that are handed on socially, binding the society together and making communication possible.
Not all our actual experiences, however, are covered by the conceptual categories we thus acquire nor can they be represented through the literal usage of language.
Perhaps this can best be illustrated through the verbal behaviour of children when they have as yet a restricted vocabulary and, consequently, a limited possession of conceptual categories.  Daily they are confronted with experiences new to them for which they possess no names.  What do they do when they wish to speak of these experiences?  They coin metaphors.  They carry over (meta-phora) a word they know, connected to a category they possess, to describe something for which they do not have the word or the category.  Sometimes they even surprise us by coming up with a metaphor to say something which no category has been established. (p6-7)


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As societies change and people encounter new experiences, so we may expect to find them having recourse to language that is at first figurative but which, as the category is acknowledged and accepted, becomes literal.  This, indeed, is what we find does happen.  Much of the vocabulary of our language consists of words and phrases that are now dead metaphors, but which once were new mintings or wrenchings of preceding usage to describe the strange, the innovative, or the unnamed.  Skyscraper must have once been a description expressing awe:  Now it is just another noun.  The perception has become categorized, the novelty has gone, and the thrill has faded.
We can now redefine the distinction between analogy and metaphor.  Analogy entails literal comparison only:  The categories remain undisturbed.  Metaphor is figurative:  Categories are compacted and broken down so that fresh meaning can be expressed.  The effect of vehicle on tenor will either be to reconstruct the category of the tenor, or from the fusion of vehicle and tenor to create something for which no category yet exists.
This account leads to the suggestion that metaphors are born at a frontier of human consciousness – at a place where language with its inadequacies and our mental framework of classifications with its restrictions encounter unassimilated experiences.  The difficulty of discussing what takes place on this frontier is compounded by the inescapable recognition that we cannot even discuss the nature and process of metaphor without recourse ourselves to overtly metaphorical language. (p7)


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“It is proper,” wrote Aristotle, “to derive metaphors… from objects which are closely related to the thing itself but which are not immediately obvious.”  That is, the tenor and the vehicle must belong to categories that are neither too close to one another nor too remote.  The effort demanded to span the gap between tenor and vehicle has come to be called the tension of a metaphor.  A dead metaphor, because it has become an accepted category in its own right, is one where the tension has been lost or is residual only.  Sometimes that latent tension can be revivified, as in the case of such unfortunate mixed metaphors as “No stone was left unturned in plumbing the bottleneck to the depths.”  Dr Johnson’s well-known objection to some of the conceits of the metaphysical poets – that they “yoked heterogeneous objects together with too much tension.

Discussions of the tension or incongruity in metaphors call attention to an aspect of metaphor that has often been vehemently distrusted.  May not the connections linking tenor and vehicle be arbitrary?  Or even worse, may not the figurative meanings generated by metaphor be illusory? Precisely because, the argument runs, metaphor challenges the received categories by means of which we realize our experience, may metaphor not be setting up false connections and weakening our grasp on the real world?  Perhaps some such fear lurked behind Samuel Parker’s action in 1670 when he advocated an act of Parliament forbidding the use of “fulsome and luscious” metaphors.  (The obverse side of the argument is put by Wallace Stevens when he says, “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”)  That metaphors may be deceitful is a perfectly rational apprehension, for even staid metaphors can have the air of playing a game of “as if” with us.  It is through, however, their fanciful play of analogies that we are freed from our set habits of thought.  The mind can reconceive the subject, and contemplate fresh aspects of it.  This is why writers on metaphor refer to the stereoscope of metaphor, or to its multidimensional depiction of a subject.  Metaphor dissolves our fixed notions in order to produce fresh insights.

Metaphor’s wrenching of language and assault on categories means it can never be employed without an accompanying emotional charge.  This probably explains why metaphor is so often considered to be an emotionally expressive trope. (p8)


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Breakdown of  Wordsworth’s The Daffodils

Without an understanding of the meaning of phrases, and how the meanings interconnect, many metaphors cannot even be identified at all, and the richness of the poetry may be underestimated.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

According to the schoolbook accounts of figures of speech, this stanza contains few metaphors.  True, there is a simile at the beginning (though there are still rhetoricians and others who do not consider a simile to be a metaphor) and “host” would be accepted as figurative, and “dancing” as well.  But from this schoolbook point of view “floats” is not a metaphor because clouds literally float; “crowd” is not because the word may be used of any large number of objects; “golden” simply describes the color of the flowers; flowers do “flutter” in a breeze;  “Beside the lake, beneath the trees” is clearly a literal depiction of place.
Close attention to movement and meaning in the poem, however, changes this picture.  The simile seems simple enough, until we ask what is being compare with what?  Is the first line to be read:  “I, (feeling) lonely as a cloud that… wandered”?  Or:  “I, (feeling) lonely, wandered as a cloud that…”?  The speaker’s aimless drifting across the landscape is certainly suggested.  But so is a link between his sense of loneliness and that of the cloud:  The position of “lonely” in the line enforces it.  Why should a cloud, though, be thought of as lonely?  Because if is the only one in the sky? Possibly, but that is not what the second line emphasizes:  “That floats on high o’er vales and hills.”  It is the remoteness, the detachment, from the world of things that is stressed.  This separateness is contrasted with the thronged involvement.  The third line culminates in “a crowd,” and the explanation is held over, delayed further by the intensifying exclamation of “A host,” before the golden daffodils are discovered.  The effect is to animate connectedness, and to evoke a bond between natural objects that later lines in the poem will make more explicit:

The waves beside them danced: but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company.

Once the main purport of the poem is recognized – that a sense of belonging to the life of the world releases energy and joy, and saves us from the pleasant but apathetic aimlessness of detachment – it becomes clear that all the relationships detailed in the poem are to be understood figuratively as well as literally.  “That floats on high o’er vales and hills” describes a mental abstractedness as much as a physical phenomenon, and prepares for the isolating moods depicted later in the poem in the phrase “In vacant or in pensive mood.”  Even “Beside the lake, beneath the trees,” which at first seemed only literal, can now be seen as a metaphor working almost subliminally. (p11-12)


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The reader must start from the verbal text in order to explore the tissues of meaning inherent there.  The only time it is appropriate to think of metaphor as a device merely is when attention is being drawn to a particular linguistic arrangement initiating a poetic amalgamation of meanings.  Provided this is borne in mind, and the all important significance of semantic context is never forgotten, it is possible to proceed usefully to discuss metaphor in relation to other figurative “devices.”  Three such devices warrant special mention if only because of the degree of overlap between them and metaphor.  They are image, symbol, and objective correlative. (p12)

Image

Erza Pound defined image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  Several critics have noted that this is, in effect, a description of metaphor, particularly diaphoric metaphor.  Normally, however, image is conceived more vaguely and widely that this, as any phrase containing marked sensuous particularity.  As the name suggest, it must have been visual pictures that were first thought of, but by now image has come to mean in the writings of literary critics verbal “pictures” derived from any of the senses.  The classification in literary criticism is broader than that of metaphor, and it incorporates most metaphors because of their sensory appeal.  Image overlaps with metaphor in another way:  Both entail attitudes toward and comment on the material assimilated to them.  C. Day Lewis puts it this way:

In its simplest term, [the poetic image] is a picture made out of words.  An epithet, a metaphor, a simile may create an image; or an image may be presented to us in a phrase or passage on the face of it purely descriptive, but conveying to out imagination something more than the accurate reflection of an external reality.  Every poetic image, therefore, is to some degree metaphorical.  It looks out from the mirror in which life perceives not so much its face as some truth about its face.

The aim of art, after all, is never to reproduce reality but to understand it:  Image and metaphor are related ways of embodying significance. (p12-13)

Symbol

Symbol may be conceived as an offshoot of metaphor that has developed characteristics peculiarly its own.  Like metaphor it normally possesses a tenor and a vehicle, but its treatment of them is different.  In symbol the vehicle acquires greater stress, whereas the tenor is always concealed and usually is elusive.  The increased status of the vehicle is achieved partly by giving it concreteness, and partly by retaining its literal reference along with its figurative suggestiveness.  In this way the vehicle is made to seem a literal example, one possibility among many, of some wider principle – as with Blake’s Tyger where the beast in the jungle seems one case of some greater destructive energy.  The wider principle is normally not specified, but the figurative senses of the vehicle adumbrate what it might be.  For the symbol to be successful the vehicle must be rich in figurative connotations.  These may be accumulated in two ways:  first, by cultural accretion, as when an object is deeply embedded in a society’s myths or has a long history of artistic usage; and second, by deliberate policy of the poet who makes the context in which the vehicle is placed foster it with figurative associations. (p13)

Objective Correlative

The phrase, objective correlative, was originally coined by T. S. Eliot, but the definition he attached to it has never proved very satisfactory.  He wrote:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

This is too wide and too unspecific.  Almost anything in a work of art could be an “objective correlative” by this account, the only test of recognition being the evocation of a particular emotion.  It is also to be doubted whether art ever evokes emotion so pure and isolated a way as this, untouched by thoughts, judgements, and values.  Eliot’s definition suffers from the defects of the affective theory of art underlying it.  Although it is reasonable to reject the definition, to discard a phrase so memorable and suggestive seems a pity.  But perhaps there is some more appropriate use for it.  Frequently, in drama, fiction, and films, a specific object is imbued with special significance, so that every time the object reappears the meaning associated with it (including the affective meaning) is called to mind.  The handkerchief in Othello is a case in point.  This device has no name, though sometimes, and not always accurately or without confusion, it is referred to as a symbol.  Objective correlative, I submit, is an apt title for such an object. (p14)


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There are no limits to the ingenuity of artists when it comes to constructing metaphors.  To try and define all the conceivable ways would be pointless.  (p15)


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In art, figurative meanings coalesce to form new constellations; patterns amalgamate to create larger structures; constituent parts are ever-combing into significant wholes.  Metaphor is not only an element in this process: The process itself is one of metaphorical transformations.  Art by its very nature is, as Coleridge called it, esemplastic - that is, metaphorical. (p15)



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When Hermione’s statue comes to life in The Winter’s Tale, has not dramatic plausibility given place to a metaphorical enactment of the power of grace?  What of the issue of blindness, physical and moral, that links subplot and plot in King Lear?  Twentieth century critics, explicating the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays, have come to speak of them as “expanded metaphors.”  Implicit in this is the recognition that complex works of art possess layers of meaning, and that a crucial way of bringing one layer to bear on another entails metaphorical conjoinings.  Writers quite regularly structure their works by means of metaphor at every level.

Reading a poem, a play, or a novel, then, is a process of continuing discovery, as meanings breed new meanings, and as figurative structures are observed to erect further figurative structures.  At every stage, metaphorical transfigurations lead to new amalgamations and extensions.  Thus, there are inherent hierarchies of metaphorical connections within the wrought fabric of artistic works.

By the very elaborateness of its form, and by the nature of the material shaped – whether it be language or something else – the work of art calls attention to its disparity from the world outside it.  Yet by the very fact that a work of art often “imitates” some aspect of the world, it also calls attention to a similarity between them.  Likeness and difference.  So once again when we consider the relationship of art to the reality it deals with, we are back to a metaphorical relationship.  The ultimate metaphor the reader must complete for himself or herself is to comprehend how the artistic vehicle modifies and transforms the tenor that is that reader’s experience of the living world. (p16)







Different periods, with their diverse ambitions and interests, have stressed different attributes of metaphor.  The principal uses ascribed to metaphor include the following:



(1) Decoration:  This approach conceives metaphor to be an embellishment, a mere stylistic flourish laid upon plain sense.  It assumes that literal meaning is more important than figurative.  At best, metaphor so conceived is thought to play a trivial role only.  At worst, metaphor is regarded as deceitful:  It distracts people’s attentions away from clear and rational thought by its arbitrary associations and confusion of categories.  This attitude to metaphor derives from a rhetoric that would prescribe rules for public speaking and clear discourse, and not from a rhetoric developed as a basis for poetic expression.  The philosophical theory underpinning it is positivist.  In poetry that gives its central attention to literal meaning, decorative metaphors are often obliquely presented examples or illustrations of generalizing assertions.

(2) Emotional Effect:  The minimum claim that is sometimes made here is that metaphors contribute vividness and memorability to rational discourse.  This is, at least, an acknowledgement that metaphor provides pictorial or sensory concreteness.  But most writers on metaphor, including some who distrust its irrationality, stress the emotional power of metaphor.  If this aspect has been, and on the whole will be, underplayed or sketchily dealt with in the present study it is because the emotional potency of metaphor is virtually unanimously recognized.

(3) Concision: This approach still places emphasis on rational and literal meaning but regards metaphor as contracting a series of complex statements into one brief figure.  Critics adopting this view of metaphor do not stress the new meaning that may coalesce in a metaphor but rather attend to the components that have gone into the metaphor.  William Empson’s discussion of metaphor in The Structure of Complex Words and many of his accompanying analyses tend this way.  Structural linguists have given a new slant  to this approach by regarding metaphor as a manipulation in the surface structure that gives rise to a series of propositional sentences in the deep structure.  The point that is often disputed, however, is whether all metaphors can be unravelled this way and their meaning translated back into the sum of their component parts.

(4) Naming the unnamed:  This approach envisages metaphor as creatively compensating for deficiencies in the language.  Metaphor, by presenting one object in terms of another, is able to identify certain characteristics of the first for which no terminology has been coined.  Sometimes it can do this because the concept providing the vehicle encompasses distinctions that, when applied to the tenor, define new facets of it.  In general, this approach goes with a view of language that stresses how dependent on metaphor it is for its development and for its acquisition of new words (e.g., skyscraper).

A variation of this use is the employment of metaphor in lieu of a word that cannot be used for reasons of obscenity, blasphemy, or political ban.  By obliquity or ellipsis the responsibility for identifying thetaboo topic is placed upon the reader.  (In the days of the Hays Office Code, film directors were to become adept at finding metaphorical euphemisms for the sexual act.)

(5) Naming the unnameable:  The preceding approach presupposes that certain categories do not have names, and metaphor helps to name them.  This approach assumes that some experiences always will fall between or beyond categories and can only be expressed by means or metaphor.  Any experiences entailing synesthesia would be relevant here.  When this approach emphasizes metaphor’s potency for capturing private and idiosyncratic experience, it tends toward subjectivism.  More often, however, the approach typifies idealism – the belief that there are realms of reality outside ordinary perception discoverable only by insights and revelations.  The major proponent of this view in English criticism is Coleridge, and his account of the secondary imagination is virtually a theory of metaphor.  Significantly, in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry there is a tendency for metaphor to merge with symbolism.
Inevitably this approach stresses the uniqueness of metaphors:  What they express is untranslatable into other words.
(6)  Eliciting the readers’ own creativity:  This approach stresses the effort required to find the figurative relationship that will justify the yoking together of the disparate elements.  The poet has a gift for making connections and for choosing the metaphors that elicit those connections.  Readers, faced with these metaphors, must discover for themselves the connections linking tenor and vehicle.  In doing so they become, as it were, poets by proxy.  Because potentially more than one relationship may bind tenor and vehicle, and because readers must supply the connections out of their own experience, there is a degree of freedom and fresh creation in what they do, posited by this account.  This theory of how metaphor functions involves a paradox.  The poet manipulates the readers by setting up the metaphor – that is, supplying the meanings that are needed according to the linguistic specifications of the metaphor – bring contributions from their own experience that are actually outside the poet’s control.  Interpreting a metaphor then entails that the readers, without falsifying the linguistic text given them, make the metaphor their own.
One extreme account of this approach denies the importance of the poet’s contribution at all, and runs the risk of making metaphors meaningless by overstressing the readers’ freedom to the extent of making it uncheckable license.  A more logical and restrained version of this account would simply stress that reading is always a process of experiential insights, and that a great writer is one who creates a text that seems inexhaustible:  Its meaning changes and grows as the experience a reader brings to bear upon it becomes more the product of a mature, informed, and wise sensibility.  Indeed, that is why we attend to good critics at all – by the example and aptness of their criticism they help us cultivate such a sensibility. (P16-18)



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Suggestion of the principal forms by which metaphors are generated:

Explicit comparison (epiphor)
Identity asserted
Identity implied by substitution
Juxtaposition (diaphor)
Metonymy (associated idea substituted)
Synecdoche (part replaces whole)
Objective correlative
Distortion (hyperbole, caricature)
Rule disruption
Chiming (parallelism)

(p18-19)



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Metaphor leaps over the restricted categories of our experience, any attempt to classify metaphor itself must be regarded as misconceived.  As well attempt to net Proteus. (p19)



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Many classificatory schemes have been proposed over the centuries.  Aristotle initiated the endeavor with a species-genus analysis, and also gave hints of an animate-inanimate classification, which some of his successors developed further.  Domains of thought and dominant traits common to both tenor and vehicle are other bases that have been selected for the construction of topologies.  Christine Brooke-Rose, in Grammar of Metaphor, summarizes these approaches and briefly criticizes them before offering her own classification of metaphors in terms of syntactic forms.  Although her definition of metaphor is broad (“any replacement of one word by another, or any identification of one thing, concept or person with any other”), her grammatical categories still limit the number of metaphors she can acknowledge and do not enable her to explore adequately how metaphor can breed metaphor in poetry.  A liberal treatment of metaphor carries less dangers then than a restrictively oversystematic one.  It is not claimed that the formulas I have offered are complete, merely that  - sketchy as they are – they will serve to open out one way of discussing metaphors and of drawing attention to them in films as well as in poetry. (p19)




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In a book we are aware that we can only be presented with an illusion to a dog barking; in the cinema we seem to see the actual dog and hear its actual bark.  In its apparent duplication of reality, film can seem transparent, like a window on to life.  It has an immediacy we normally, though often mistakenly, credit.
Christian Metz remarks:

Because still photography is in a way the trace of a past spectacle – as Andre Bazin has said – one would expect animated photography (that is to say, the cinema) to be experienced similarly as the trace of a past motion.  This, in fact, is not so; the spectator always sees movement as being present (even if it duplicates a past movement).

So it happens that “the movie spectator is absorbed, not by a ‘has been there,’ but by a sense of ‘There it is.’”  There is some truth in this, but it does need qualifying.  Metz is clearly thinking of visual rather than aural reproduction.  If we are unaware of the mechanical source of reproduced conversation and sounds, we are likely to take them for something actually occurring just then.  When we are conscious the sounds emanate from a tape recorder, do we still think of them belonging to the present and not the past?  When was this recorded, we ask, making clear our sense of the pastness of the recorded events.  In my experience the same holds true for video playback or home recordings.  Only if we become engrossed in the content of what has been recorded do we begin to have the illusion of nowness.  It is the function of art to obtain that engrossment, and in doing so to make the presence of what is being played back more important to us than the link the material has with past circumstances and their capture on audio- or videotape.
So it is with films.  We got to view them prepared to give them the credence that fiction demands, the willing suspension of disbelief that entry into that autonomous world requires.  The darkened auditorium and the hypnotically bright screen help achieve this, as do credits, titles, and other conventions of cinematic narration.  But our apprehension of fiction is tinged still with a sense of the authenticity of film images, of their bespeaking the existence of objects with a directness that verbal narration does not quite possess.  In discussing the phenomenology of film images, we must consequently take into account not only the circumstances in which they are displayed but also the mental sets audiences bring, which condition how they receive what they witness.
The transparency and the immediacy experienced in the film image are related in other important ways to the psychology of perception.  That sense that the visual and aural configurations of the film image are imprints of aspects of real objects affects how we take them and encourages us to identify them in much the same way within the mind.  Sensations, whether from an object or its “trace,” are grouped and sorted into appropriate categories.  Indeed, we are not even aware we are doing it.  On the screen we see a twenty-foot close-up, and immediately identify it as something we are accustomed to seeing, an ordinary telephone.  We integrate the cinematic conventions of changes of angle and proportion with the schemata we possess for recognizing objects in the real world as we identify what we are viewing.  Thus, though cuts from one shot to another may bring abrupt changes of angle and size, as observers we scan each image according to perspectival assumptions, and adjust our interpretations accordingly.  Our minds discover solidity, proportion, and spatial dimensions in images projected on one plane.  Indeed, the technology of cinema developed film toward this end, and still endeavors more and more to find ways of matching the film image with what it is an image of:  Color becomes more accurate, monophonic sound gives way to stereophonic and quadraphonic, and experiments with 3-D continue.  So doing, technology serves the primary imagination rather than the secondary.  The results are transparency and immediacy in the film image itself. (p22-23)



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In modern physics the principle of complementarity has been established, whereby two different models may be applied to the study of the same phenomenon in order to achieve completeness of description.  Light, for instance, is thought to consist of particles to account for some aspects of its behaviour, and of waves to account for other aspects.  A similar approach might be useful in discussions of metaphor.  On the one hand we have a mental process that creates a synthesis of disparate ideas; on the other hand we have manipulations of signifiers in a medium that it would seem both records and passes on that synthesis.  When I. A. Richards, for example, discusses metaphor, he draws explicit attention to this feature:

The traditional theory noticed only a few of the modes of metaphor; and limited its application of the term metaphor to a few of them only.  And thereby it made metaphor seem to be a verbal matter, a shifting and displacement of words, whereas fundamentally it is a borrowing between the intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts.  Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.

Each account complements the other, and relies upon it in order to be complete.  The artist cannot communicate his vision, indeed most commonly could not even arrive at it, without a medium – whether it be words, paints, or the audiovisual images of film – and devices the medium makes possible.  The artistic fabrication utilizing that medium would be uninterpretable, however, unless the spectator’s own mind were capable of mental processes analogous to those of the artist.  One account emphasizes psychology, perception, and experience; the other the medium, techniques, and figurative devices.  But we are not discussing two different things; rather we need two accounts to explain the one thing.  The first account we may term an imaginative theory of metaphor, to draw attention to its links with Coleridge’s explanation of the esemplastic powers of the mind.  The second may be called a rhetorical theory of metaphor, to stress its connections with classical descriptions of linguistic tropes.  (p25-26)





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(p78)




(p79)




(p79)



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(p81)



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(p84-85)



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(p88)



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(p91)




(p92)



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(p98-99)



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(p102)



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(p110)



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(p113)




(p113)



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(p117)




(p118)



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(p121-122)




(p122)




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(p124-125)




(p126)




(p126)



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(p129)




(p130)








My Own Thoughts:

Metaphor in literature is used to conjure up images, spark the imagination like waking dreams, or hallucinations of the mind.  In film the director has already created these images, almost as if we are seeing into his/her imagination.  For film the visual metaphor is like a secret the director wants to communicate, willing the viewer to read their mind and thoughts.  The only problem is once a secret has been told it no longer remains a secret, it becomes fact, a reference and told often enough a symbol, therefore once a metaphor has been deciphered the term only remains as a ghost.  Once the transition from subconscious to conscious has passed so has the visual metaphor.

Another point of the metaphor is that the viewer can also perceive their own personal visual metaphors or secrets from a piece, whether intended or not by the director/artist.  As everyone has different experiences and knowledge ultimately a variety of metaphors can be achieved, but again, once told/explained to someone else the metaphor passes and becomes symbolic.

It is my belief that visual metaphor is part of the creative talent of an artist that tries to communicate through their art, but also being brand new, never been done before.  It lives within the subliminal levels only and only partially sees light at those split seconds when realised and enters the conscious levels.  The moribund state between life and death.

Also thinking on, even if a viewer wasn't to pass on the "secret" the viewer being conscious of it can begin to see the said metaphor in other things, therefore becoming symbolic to them.  So the secret may not have to be passed on, but just becoming in the conscious state it disappears from existence.  The original intention of the metaphor or conjuring of the accidental, still happened, but now in the past and lingers as a faint ghost.








Alfred Hitchcock:












The Lodger (A Story of the London Fog) (1926)

- "The Lodger is the first picture possibly influenced by my period in Germany.  The whole approach to this film was instinctive with me.  It was the first time I exercised my style.  In truth, you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture." (A. Hitchcock - p44)


A landlady takes on a lodger that she comes to suspect as Jack the Ripper
- "I treated it very simply, purely from her point of view.  Since then there have been two or three remakes, but they are too elaborate." (A. Hitchcock - p43)


"I want to show you a shot, though we were never able to get it right.  



I showed the back of a small London news van.  The back windows are oval.  There were two men sitting in the front, the driver and his mate.  You see them through the windows - just the tops of their heads.  And as the van sways from side to side, you have the impression of a face with two eyes and the eyeballs moving.  Unfortunately, it didn't work out." (A. Hitchcock - p45)


The Glass Ceiling

- "In his room the man paces up and down.  You must remember that we had no sound in those days, so I had a plate glass floor made through which you could see the lodger moving back and forth, causing the chandelier in the room below to move with him." (A. Hitchcock - p46)

Seeing through the ceiling could suggest the visual imaginations of the occupants below, as we are already seeing the story through the landlady's point of view, instead of the actual movements of the man.




Handcuffs




F. Truffaut - "Yes, a man and woman linked to each other.  Handcuffs are certainly the most concrete - most immediate - symbol of the loss of freedom." 

A. Hitchcock - "There's also a sexual connotation, I think.  When I visited the Vice Museum in Paris, I noticed there was considerable evidence of sexual aberrations through restraint.  You should try to go there sometime.  Of course they also have knives, the guillotine, and all sorts of information.  Anyway, getting back to the handcuffs in The Lodger, I think the idea was inspired, to a certain extent, by a German book about a man who spends a whole day in handcuffs and tells about all the problems he runs into during that day."

F. Truffaut - "Is it farfetched to suggest that in the scene where the man in handcuffs is backed up agaist the railing, you were trying to evoke the figure of christ?"

A. Hitchcock - "When the people try to lift him and his arms are tied together?  Naturally, that thought did occur to me."

(p47)



This shot to me could mean a couple of things.  The shadow of the cross on the suspects face showing his innocence under the gaze of God or it could suggest the masking of the key identifications of the face.



___





Downhill (U.S.A.: When Boys Leave Home) (1927)

A boy is accused of a theft in his school, he is expelled and his father wants nothing more to do with him.  His life continues to take a downhill journey.


- "...when the boy is thrown out of the house by his father.  To show the beginning of his downhill journey, I put him on an escalator going down." (A. Hitchcock)


F. Truffaut - "There was a very good scene in a Paris cabaret."

A. Hitchcock - "Yes, there I experimented a bit.  I showed a woman seducing a younger man.  She is a lady of a certain age, but quite elegant, and he finds her very attractive until daybreak.  Then he opens the window and the sun comes in, lighting up the woman's face.  In that moment she looks dreadful.  And through the open window we show people passing by carrying a coffin."

F. Truffaut - "There were also some dream sequences."

A. Hitchcock - "I had a chance to experiment in those scenes.  At one point I wanted to show that the young man was having hallucinations.  He boarded a tiny schooner, and there I had him go down to the fo'c'sle, where the crew slept.  At the beginning of his nightmare he was in a dance hall.  No dissolve, just straight cutting.  He walked over to the side wall and climbed into a bunk.  In those days dreams were always dissolves and they were always blurred.  Though it was difficult, I tried to embody the dream in the reality, in solid, unblurred images."

(p51)



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The Ring (1927)

A story about two prize fighters who are in love with the same woman.



- "You might say that after The Lodger, The Ring was the next Hitchcock picture.  There were all kinds of innovations in it, and I remember that at the premiere an elaborate montage got a round of applause.  It was the first time that ever happened to me." (A. Hitchcock - p52)


- "There were many things in that picture we wouldn't do today.  For instance, there was a little party one evening after a boxing match.  The champagne is poured out and it is all bubbly.  They drink a toast to the heroine and then discover she isn't there; she's out with another man.  And so the champagne goes flat.  In those days we were keen on the little visual touches, sometimes so subtle that they weren't even noticed by the public." (A. Hitchcock - p52

- "And at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two.  It was brand-new!  One-Round Jack was so good that they'd never got around to using it before!  I think the touch was lost on the audience. (A. Hitchcock - p54)


F.  Truffaut - "There were many other visual innovations in the picture.  The story was about a triangle, with frequent references to original sin, and I still remember that you used a snakelike bracelet as a symbol in several different ways."*

A. Hitchcock - "These things were noticed by the reviewers and the picture had a succès d' estime, but it was not a commercial hit.  This is also the film in which I introduced a few notions that were widely adopted later on.  For instance, to show the progress of a prize fighter's career, we showed large posters on the street, with his name on the bottom.  We show different seasons - summer, autumn, winter - and the name is printed in bigger and bigger letters on each of the posters.  I took great care to illustrate the changing seasons: blossoming trees for the spring, snow for the winter, and so on."

* "In this, and several other ways, the sinuous bracelet weaves it's way through the theme and winds up being twisted around itself, like a snake.  The film's title, The Ring, may be taken in it's dual sense, referring both to a boxing arena and a wedding band." (p54)



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Talkies

- "When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise" (A. Hitchcock - p61) 



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Blackmail (1929)

"[A young] detective's girl is waiting for him; they go to a restaurant, have a row and go their separate  ways.  She's picked up by an artist who takes her to his place and tries to rape her.  She kills him.  As it happens, her young man is assigned to the case.  He finds a clue, and when he realises that his girl is involved, he conceals it from his superiors.  Then the blackmailer comes into the scene and there's a conflict between him and the girl, with the young detective between the two." (A. Hitchcock - p63)


F. Truffaut - In that picture there's one scene that was subsequently used by several other directors of American films.  That's the scene in which the painter lures the girl to his apartment with the intention of seducing her and which winds up with his being killed."

A. Hitchcock - Of course.  I did a funny thing in that scene, a sort of farewell to silent pictures.  On the silent screen the villain was generally a man with a moustache.  Well, my villain was clean-shaven, but an ironwork chandelier in his studio cast a shadow on his upper lip that suggested an absolutely fierce-looking moustache!"




___



The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

A British couple traveling in Switzerland with their daughter witness the assassination of a Frenchman who tells them of a plot to murder a foreign diplomat in London.  The spy ring abducts the daughter to ensure the couple's silence.  They return to London and track down the kidnappers where the mother manages to save the ambassador's life.



A. Hitchcock - "The picture opens with a scene at St. Moritz, in Switzerland, because that's where I spent my honeymoon with my wife.  From our window I could see the skating rink.  And it occurred to me that we might start the picture by showing an ice skater tracing numbers - eight - six - zero - two - on the rink.  An espionage code, of course.  But I dropped the idea."

F. Truffaut - "Because you couldn't get the shot?"

A. Hitchcock - "No.  It simply had no place in the story.  But the point I was trying to make is that from the very outset the contrast between the snowy Alps and the congested streets of London was a decisive factor.  That visual concept had to be embodied in the film."



- "Do you remember, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, there's a scene in the dentist's office?  At first I had intended to do it in a barbershop, with the hot towels masking the men's faces.  But just before shooting I saw Mervyn LeRoy's I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, with Paul Muni, which had a scene just like it.  So I transposed it to a dentist's office." (A. Hitchcock - p91)



F. Truffaut - "...the villains listen to the record of the cantata before going to the concert hall.  You have them play the key passage twice over.  It's quite precise and very emphatic."

A. Hitchcock - We had to do that so that the audience would participate completely.  In the audience there are probably many people who don't even know what cymbals are, and so it was necessary not only to show them but even to spell out the word."

(p92)



F. Truffaut - "It seems to me there are two kinds of creative artists:  those who simplify, and the others, who might be described as complicators. Many fine painters and excellent writers belong to the latter category, but to be successful in the medium of the spectacle, one has to be a simplifier.  Do you agree with that?"

A. Hitchcock - "Oh, absolutely.  That's essential, if only because you can't convey an emotion to the public unless you feel it yourself.  For instance, you must be able to simplify if only to control the time element.  Directors who lose control are concerned with the abstract, and these vague preoccupations prevent them from concentrating on specific problems.  They're like a poor speaker who loses his head because he's overly self-conscious and is unable to make a point, or to get to the point."

(p93)




___




Plausibility

- "I'm not concerned with plausibility; that's the easiest part of it, so why bother? Do you remember that lengthy scene in The Birds in which the people are talking about the birds?  In that group there is a woman who is precisely a specialist on the subject of birds, an ornithologist.  She happens to be there by pure chance!  Naturally, I could have made up three scenes just to give that woman a logical reason for being there, but they would have been completely uninteresting." (A. Hitchcock - p99-102)

- "Let's be logical if you're going to analyze everything in terms of plausibility or credibility, then no fiction script can stand up to that approach, and you wind up doing a documentary." (A. Hitchcock - p102)

- "To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately.
There's quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary.  In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life.  And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed.  We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it's not dull.  A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow." (A. Hitchcock - p102)



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Sabotage (1936)


- "... I'm quite satisfied to let the pieces of film create the motion.  For instance, in Sabotage, when the little boy is in the bus and he's got the bomb at his side, I cut to that bomb from a different angle every time I showed it.  I did that to give the bomb a vitality of it's own, to animate it.  If I'd shown it constantly from the same angle, the public would have become used to the package:  "Oh well, it's only a package, after all".  But what I was saying was:  "Be careful! Watch out!" - (A. Hitchcock, p265)



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Rebecca (1940)


- "You may remember that the location of the house is never specified in a geographical sense; it's completely isolated.  That's also true of the house in The Birds.  I felt instinctively that the fear would be greater if the house was so isolated that the people in it would have no one to turn to." (A. Hitchcock - p131)

The location is isolated and so is the 2nd Mrs. de Winter, she has no friends, no family and psychologically alone in the house



___




Foreign Correspondent (1940)

A. Hitchcock - "There were lots of ideas in that picture"

F. Truffaut - "There certainly were.  One of them is the windmill scene, which, I understand, was your point of departure for the whole film.  Your idea was to show that wings spinning against the direction of the wind might be used to convey a secret message to the planes above"

A. Hitchcock - "Yes, we started out with the idea of the windmill sequence and also the scene of the murderer escaping through the bobbing umbrellas.  We were in Holland and so we used windmills and rain.
Had the picture been done in color, I would have worked in a shot I've always dreamed of:  a murder in a tulip field.  Two characters: the killer, a Jack-the-Ripper type, behind the girl, his victim.  As his shadow creeps up on her, she turns and screams.  Immediately, we pan down to the struggling feet in the tulip field.  We would dolly the camera up to and right into one of the tulips, with the sounds of the struggle in the background.  One petal fills the screen, and suddenly a drop of blood splashes all over it.  And that would be the end of the killing."

(p135)

The viewer is limited to what they see, thus leaving it to their own individual imagination.



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Suspicion (1941)

 


- "Well, I'm not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends.  I had something else in mind.  The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Carry Grant to bring her a glass of milk that's been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: "Dear Mother, I'm desperately in love with him, but I don't want to live because he's a killer.  Though I'd rather die, I think society should be protected from him"  Then Carry Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, "Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?"  She drinks the milk and dies.  Fade out and fade in on one short shot:  Carry Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in." (A. Hitchcock, p142)

This was dropped by the producers because they believed no one could or would accept Carry Grant to play a killer.

A. Hitchcock - "By the way, did you like the scene with the glass of milk?"



F. Truffaut - "When Carry Grant takes it upstairs?  Yes, it was very good."

A. Hitchcock - "I put a light in the milk."

F. Truffaut - "You mean a spotlight on it?"

A. Hitchcock - "No, I put a light right inside the glass because I wanted it to be luminous.  Carry Grant's walking up the stairs and everyone's attention had to be focused on that glass."

(p143)

No direct indication of Carry Grant playing a murderer, Hitchcock uses subliminal implication leaving it up to the audience to make up their own mind.






___




Shadow of a Doubt (1943)





F. Truffaut - "I was wondering where you got the idea of illustrating the tune of "The Merry Widow" with dancing couples.  It's an image that reappears several times."

A. Hitchcock - "I even used it as a background for the credits"

F. Truffaut - "Was it a stock shot?"

A. Hitchock - "No, I made it up especially for the picture.  I can't remember now whether Uncle Charlie is the one who first had the idea of whistling a few bars of "The Merry Widow" or whether it was the girl.

F. Truffaut - "At first you showed the dancing couples and the air is played by an orchestra.  Then the mother hums the opening bars and everyone at the table is trying to remember the title of the song.  Joseph Cotten, who's a little disturbed, says that it's the "Blue Danube," and his niece then says, "That's right... Oh no, it's The Merry..."  Whereupon Cotten spills his glass to create a diversion."

A. Hitchcock - "Yes, because it's too close to the truth.  It's also another indication of the telepathy between Uncle Charlie and his niece."

(p153)


 - "...he's a killer with an ideal;  he's one of those murderers who feel that they have a mission to destroy.  It's quite possible that those widows deserved what they got, but it certainly wasn't his job to do it.  There is a moral judgement in the film.  He's destroyed at the end, isn't he?  The niece accidentally kills her uncle.  What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white;  there are grays everywhere.  Uncle Charlie loved his niece, but not as much as she loved him.  And yet she has to destroy him.  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde:  "You destroy the thing you love"." - (A. Hitchcock, p153)





F. Truffaut - "I'm puzzled by one detail of the picture.  In the first scene at the station, when the train carrying Uncle Charlie is coming in, there's a heavy cloud of black smoke coming out of the engine's smokestack, and as the train comes close, it darkens the whole station.  I have the feeling that this was done deliberately because when the train is leaving the station, at the end of the picture, there's simply a small puff of light smoke."

A. Hitchcock - "That's right;  I asked for lots of black smoke for the first scene.  It's one of those ideas for which you go to a lot of trouble, although it's seldom noticed.  But here, we were lucky.  The position of the sun created a beautiful shadow over the whole station."

F. Truffaut - "The smoke implies that the devil was coming to town."

A Hitchcock - "Exactly.  There's a similar detail in The Birds*..." 

(p153-154)

*see The Birds below



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Lifeboat (1943)



F. Truffaut - "With Lifeboat we come to the type of picture that represents a challenge.  Wasn't it pretty daring to undertake to shoot a whole film in a lifeboat?"

A. Hitchcock - "That's right, it was a challenge, but it was also because I wanted to prove a theory I had then.  Analyzing the psychological pictures that were being turned out, it seemed to me that, visually, eighty per cent of the footage was shot in close-ups or semiclose shots.  Most likely it wasn't a conscious thing with most of the directors, but rather an instinctive need to come closer to the action.  In a sense this treatment was an anticipation of what was to become the television technique."

(p155)



A. Hitchcock - "...Shadow of a Doubt had no bearing on Lifeboat, which was solely concerned with the war.  It was a microcosm of the war."

F. Truffaut - "At one time I was under the impressions that Lifeboat intended to show that everyone is guilty, that each of us has something to be ashamed of, and that your conclusion meant that no one man is qualified to pass judgment on others.  But now I believe that I was mistaken in that interpretation."

A. Hitchcock - "You were indeed; the concept of the film is quite different.  We wanted to show that at that moment there were two world forces confronting each other, the democracies and the the Nazis, and while the democracies were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction.  So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination."

(p155)



- "One of the things that drew the fire of the American critics is that I had shown a German as being superior to the other characters.  But at that time, 1940-41, the French had been defeated, and the Allies were not doing too well.  Moreover, the German, who at first claimed to be a simple sailor, was actually a submarine commander;  therefore there was every reason for his being better qualified than the others to take over the command of the lifeboat.  But the critics apparently felt that a nasty Nazi couldn't be a good sailor. - (A. Hitchcock, p156)



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Spellbound (1945)



F. Truffaut - "In the book they've written about you, Eric Rhomer and Claude Chabrol claim you intended Spellbound to be wilder, more extravagant picture.  The clinic director, for instance, was to have the Cross of Christ tattoed on his soles so that he trampled it with each step.  he also engaged in various forms of black magic."

A. Hitchcock - "Well, the original novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes, was about a madman taking over an insane asylum.  It was melodramatic and quite weird.  In the book even the orderlies were lunatics and they did some very queer things.  But I wanted to do something more sensible, to turn out the first picture on psychoanalysis.  So I worked with Ben Hecht, who was in constant touch with prominent psychoanalysis.
I was determined to break with the traditional way of handling dream sequences through a blurred and hazy screen.  I asked Selznick if he could get Dali to work with us and he agreed, though I think he didn't really understand my reasons for wanting Dali.  He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes.  The real reason was that I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself.  I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work.  Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective.
But Dali had some strange ideas;  he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by the ants!  It just wasn't possible.
My idea was to shoot the Dali dream scenes n the open air so that the whole thing, photographed in real sunshine, would be terribly sharp.  I was very keen on that idea, but the producers were concerned about the expense.  So we shot the dream in the studio."

(p163-165)




F. Truffaut - "The peculiar thing is that several of your pictures-among them Notorious and Vertigo-really look like filmed dreams, and that's why one expects a Hitchcock film on psychoanalysis to be wildly imaginative-way out!  Instead, this turns out to be one of your most sensible pictures, with lots of dialogue.  My criticism is that Spellbound is rather weak on fantasy, especially in the light of some of your other works."

A. Hitchcock - "since psychoanalysis was involved, there was a reluctance to fantasize;  we tried to use a logical approach to the man's adventure."

F. Truffaut - "I see.  Well anyway, there are some very beautiful scenes in the picture.  For instance, the one showing the seven doors opening after the kiss, and even the first meeting between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman;  that was so clearly love at first sight."

A. Hitchcock - "Unfortunately, the violins begin to play just then.  That was terrible!"

(p165)



___





Notorious (1946)


A. Hitchock - "Do you remember the scene in which Ingrid Bergman, after having carried out her instructions to become friendly with Claude Rains, meets Carry Grant to report to him?  In speaking of Claude Rains, she says, "He wants to marry me."  Now that's a simple statement and the dialogue is quite ordinary, but that scene is photographed in a way that belies that simplicity.  There are only two people in the frame, Carry Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and the whole scene hinges on that sentence: "He wants to marry me."  The impression is that it calls for some sort of sentimental suspense around whether she's going to allow Claude Rains to marry her or not.  But we didn't do that because the answer to that question is beside the point.  It has nothing to do with the scene; the public can simply assume that the marriage will take place.  I deliberately left what appears to be the important emotional factor aside.  You see, the question isn't whether Ingrid will or will not marry Claude Rains.  the thing that really matters is that, against all expectations, the man she's spying on has just asked her to marry him."

F. Truffaut - "If I understand you correctly, the important thing in this scene isn't Ingrid Bergman's reply to the proposal, but the fact that such a proposal has been made."

A. Hitchcock - "That's it."

F. Truffaut - "It's also interesting in that the proposal comes as a sort of bombshell.  Somehow, one doesn't expect the subject of marriage to crop up in a story about spies."

(p171)



F. Truffaut - "Something else that impressed me-and you deal with it again in Under Capricorn-is the imperceptible transition from one form of intoxication to another, going from liquor to poison.  In the scene where Carry Grant and Ingrid Bergman are seated together on a bench, she's beginning to feel the effects of the arsenic, but he assumes she's gone back to her drinking and he's rather contemptuous.  There's real dramatic impact in this misunderstanding."

A. Hitchcock - "I felt it important to graduate this poisoning in the most normal manner possible;  I didn't want it to look wild or melodramatic.  In a sense, it's almost a transference of emotion.
The story of Notorious is the old conflict between love and duty.  Carry Grant's job-and it's a rather ironic situation-is to push Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains's bed.  One can hardly blame him for seeming bitter throughout the story, whereas Claude Rains is a rather appealing figure, both because his confidence is being betrayed and because his love for Ingrid Bergman is probably deeper than Carry Grant's.  All of these elements of psychological drama have been woven into the spy story."

(p171)




F. Truffaut - "...there was a closeup on their two faces together as they moved across the whole set.  The problem for them was how to walk across, glued to each other in that way, while the only thing that concerned you was to show their two faces together on the screen."

A. Hitchcock - "Exactly.  I conceived that scene in terms of the participants' desire not to interrupt the romantic moment.  it was essential not to break up the mood, the dramatic atmosphere.  Had they broken apart, all of the emotion would have been dissipated.  And, of course, they had to be in action; they had to go over to the phone that was ringing and keep on embracing throughout the whole call and then they had to get over to the door.  I felt it was indispensable that they should not separate, and I also felt that the public, represented by the camera, was the third party to this embrace.  The public was being given the great privilege of embracing Carry Grant and Ingrid Bergman together.  It was a kind of temporary menage a trois.
The idea not to break up that romantic moment was inspired by the memory of something I witnessed in France several years earlier.
I was on the train going from Boulogne to Paris and we were moving slowly through the small town of Etaples.  It was on a Sunday afternoon.  As we were passing a large, red brick factory, I saw a young couple against the wall.  The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm.  She'd look down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, the back again at the boy.  I felt this was true love at work."

F. Truffaut - "Ideally, two lovers should never separate."

A. Hitchcock - "Quite.  It was the memory of that incident that gave me an exact idea of the effect I was after with the kissing scene in Notorious."

(p261-262)



___




The Paradine Case (1947)




- "There is an interesting shot in the courtroom when Louis Jourdan is called in to give evidence; he comes into the courtroom and must pass behind Alida Valli.  She's turning her back to him, but we wanted to give the impression that she senses his presence-not that she guesses he's there-that she actually can feel him behind her, as if she could smell him.  We had to do that in two takes.  The camera is on Alida Valli's face, and in the background you see Louis Jourdan coming down to the witness box.  First, I photographed the scene without her; the camera panned him all around, at a two-hundred-degree turn, from the door to the witness box.  Then, I photographed her in the foreground; we sat her in front of the screen, on a twisting stool, so that we might have the revolving effect, and when the camera went off her to go back to Louis Jourdan, she was pulled off the screen.  It was quite complicated, but it was very interesting to work that out." - (A. Hitchcock, p175-176)







F. Truffaut - "Of course the highlight of the trial is that very shot showing Gregory Peck as he's leaving the courtroom when he gives up his client's defense.  I agree with you that Laurence Olivier would have been far better suited for that part.  Whom did you have in mind for the character played by Louis Jourdan?"

A. Hitchcock - "Robert Newton."

F. Truffaut - "I see what you mean.  He would have been perfect as a rough character."

A. Hitchcock - "With horny hands, like the devil!"

(p177)



___




Rope (1948)



- "I undertook Rope as a stunt*; that's the only way I can describe it.  I really don't know how I came to indulge in it.
The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curtain goes up until it comes down again.  I asked myself whether it was technically possible to film it in the same way.  The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action, with no break in the telling of a story that begins at seven-thirty and ends at nine-fifteen.  And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single.  When I look back, I realize that it was quite nonsensical because I was breaking with my own theories on the importance of cutting and montage for the visual narration of a story.  On the other hand, this film was, in a sense, precut.  The mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice.  In other words, I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to it's emotional importance within a given episode." (A. Hitchcock, p179-180)

*"As a rule, a film sequence is divided into shots that last between five to fifteen seconds.  A film that runs an hour and a half will average six hundred shots.  Occasionally-and this is particularly true of the highly precut Hitchcock pictures-there may be as many as a thousand shots; there were thirteen hundred and sixty shots in The Birds.
In Rope each shot runs to ten minutes, that is, the entire film roll in the camera magazine, and is referred to as a ten-minute take.  In the history of cinema this is the only instance in which an entire film has been shot with no interruption for the different camera setups." (as of when Truffaut's book went to print)



___




Colour/Light

- "We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as color; in fact, there's no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent.  After all, one of the first things I learned in the School of Art was that there is no such thing as a line; there's only the light and the shade." - (A. Hitchcock, p183)



___




Stage Fright (1950)



A. Hitchcock - "I did one thing in that picture that I never should have done;  I put in a flashback that was a lie."

F. Truffaut - "Yes, and the French critics were particularly critical of that."

A. Hitchcock - "Strangely enough, in movies, people never object if a man is shown telling a lie.  And it's also acceptable, when a character tells a story about the past, for the flashback to show it as if it were taking place in the present.  So why is it that we can't tel a lie through a flashback?"

(p189)



___




Strangers on a Train (1951)



F. Truffaut - "One of the best things in Strangers on a Train is the exposition, with the follow shots on feet going one way and then the other.  There are also the crisscrossing rails.  There's a sort of symbolic effect in the way they meet and separate, and that's also true of the direction arrows in I Confess.  You often open your pictures on a symbolic note."

A. Hitchcock - "The direction arrows exist in Quebec; they use them to indicate one-way streets.  The shots of the rails in Strangers on a Train were the logical extension of the motif with the feet.  Practically, I couldn't have done anything else."

F. Truffaut - "Why not?"

A. Hitchcock - "The camera practically grazed the rails because it couldn't be raised; you see, I didn't want to go higher until the feet of Farley Granger and Robert Walker bump together in the railroad car."

F. Truffaut - "That's what I mean.  That accidental collision of the two men's feet is the point of departure for their whole relationship, and the concept s sustained by deliberately refraining from showing their faces up to that point.  In the same light the separating rails suggest the idea of divergent courses-two different ways of life."

A. Hitchcock - "Naturally, there is that as well.  Isn't it a fascinating design?  One could study it forever."

(p195)




F. Truffaut - "This picture, just like Shadow of a Doubt, is systematically built around the figure "two."  Here again, both characters might very well have had the same name.  Whether it's Guy or Bruno, it's obviously a single personality split in two."

A. Hitchcock - "That's right.  Though Bruno has killed Guy's wife, for Guy, it's just as if he had committed the murder himself.  As for Bruno, he's clearly a psychopath."

(p199)

Fight Club?




___




I Confess (1952)


F. Truffaut - "...there are some very good things in it.  One of them is the way Montgomery Clift is always seen walking;  it's a forward motion that shapes the whole film.  It also concretizes the concept of his integrity.  The scene at the breakfast table is especially Hitchcockian.  Otto Keller's wife, serving coffee to all the priests, keeps on passing back and forth behind Montgomery Clift, while she's trying to figure out what he plans to do.  The dialogue between the priests is completely innocuous.  It's only through the image that one understands that the essential of the scene is happening between the woman and Montgomery Clift.  I don't know of any other director who can successfully convey that, or who even tries to."

A. Hitchcock - "You mean the sound track says one thing while the image says something else?  That's a fundamental of film direction.  Isn't it exactly the way it is in real life?  People don't always express their inner thoughts to one another;  a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person really thinks or feels."

(p204)




F. Truffaut - "...the turning point in Otto Keller's attitude is when he instructs his wife not to clean up the bloodstained cassock.  At that moment he relinquishes any claim to being naive and deeply religious man:  he is deliberately trying to destroy his confessor and benefactor; he's become diabolic and evil."

A. Hitchcock - "That's the idea.  Up to that point he had behaved in good faith."

(p204-205)

Otto filmed from above as someone look down on a child, then becomes the devil in your ear, over your shoulder




F. Truffaut - "Brian Aherne's characterization as the prosecutor was quite interesting.  The first time we see him, he's playfully balancing a knife and fork on a glass; the next time he's lying on the floor, balancing a glass of water on his forehead.  I had a feeling that both incidents were related to the idea of equilibrium, that they were put there to suggest that in his scale of values, justice was merely a parlor game."

A. Hitchcock - "Yes, that's the general idea.  You may recall that in Murder I showed the defense attorney an the district attorney having lunch together during the trial recess.  In The Paradine Case the judge, who has just sentenced Alida Valli to death by hanging, is having a quiet meal at home with his wife.  You feel like saying to him, "Tell me, your Honor, what do you think about when you go home after having sentenced a woman to death?"  And Charles Laughton's cold, unruffled manner suggests that his answer to such a question would be: "I simply don't think about it!"  Another illustration of the same idea is the way the two inspectors in Blackmail, after locking the prisoner in his cell, go to the men's room to wash their hands, just like any two office workers.  As a matter of fact, I do the same thing.  When I shoot a terrifying scene of Psycho or The Birds, I don't go home to have nightmares al night long.  It's simply another day's work;  I've done my best and that's all there is to it.  In fact, although I'm very serious during the shooting, I might even feel like laughing about those things afterward.  And that's something that bothers me because, at the same time, I can't hep imagining how it would feel to be in the victim's place.  We come back again to my eternal fear of the police.  I've always felt a complete identification with the feelings of a person who's arrested, taken to the police station in a police van and who, through the bars of the moving vehicle, can see people going to the theater, coming out of a bar, and enjoying the comforts of everyday living;  I can even picture the driver joking with his police partner, and I feel terrible about it."



F. Truffaut - "...what appealed to me in those two instances of equilibrium I mentioned is that they're related to the concept of the scale of justice.  And since your pictures are very elaborate throughout..."

A. Hitchcock - "They're elaborate in an oblique way;  yes, they are."

F. Truffaut - "They're so elaborate that it's difficult to believe that these things just happen to be in your films.  If so, they must be credited to a powerful cinematic instinct.  Here's another instance of what I mean:  When Montgomery Clift leaves the courtroom, he is surrounded by a hostile crowd of people in a lynching mood.  And just behind Clift, next to Otto Keller's lovely wife, who is obviously upset, we see a fat and repulsive woman eating an apple and looking on with an expression of malevolent curiosity."

A. Hitchcock - "That's absolutely right;  I especially worked that woman in there; I even showed showed her how to eat that apple."

F. Truffaut - "Well, what I'm trying to bring out is that these elaborate details are generally over-looked by the public because all the attention is focused on the major characters in the scene.  Therefore, you put them in for your own satisfaction and, of course, for the sake of enriching the film."

A. Hitchcock - "Well, we have to do those things; we fill the whole tapestry, and that's why people often feel they have to see the picture several times to take in all of these details.  Even if some of them appear to be a waste of effort, they strengthen the picture.  That's why, when these films are reissued several years later, they stand up so well; they're never out of date."

(p205-206)



___




Dial M for Murder (1954)


- "We did an interesting color experiment with Grace Kelly's clothing.  I dressed her in very gay and bright colors at the beginning of the picture, and as the plot thickened, her clothes became gradually more somber." - (A. Hitchcock, p212)




- "I just did my job, using cinematic means to narrate a story taken from a stage play.  All of the action in Dial M for Murder takes place in a living room, but that doesn't matter.  I could just as well have shot the whole film in a telephone booth.  Let's imagine there's a couple in that booth.  Their hands are touching, their lips meet, and accidentally one of them leans against the receiver, knocking it off the hook.  Now, while they're unaware of it, the phone operator can listen in on their intimate conversation. The drama has taken a step forward.  For the audience, looking at the images, it should be the same as reading the opening paragraphs of a novel or hearing the expositional dialogue of the stage play.  You might say that a filmmaker can use a telephone booth pretty much in the same way a novelist uses a blank piece of paper." - (A. Hitchcock, p213)



___




Rear Window (1954)

F. Truffaut - "...in Rear Window the first time you show the whole courtyard is when the woman begins to scream over the death of her dog and the neighbours all rush to their windows to see what's happening."

A. Hitchcock - "Absolutely.  The size of the image is used for dramatic purposes, and not merely to establish the background.
Just the other day I was doing a television show and there was a scene in which a man came into a police station to give himself up.  I had a close shot of the man coming in, the door closing behind him, and the man walking up to the desk;  I didn't show the whole set.  They asked me, "Aren't you going to show the whole thing so that people know we're in a police station?"  I said, "Why bother?  The sergeant has three stripes on his arm right next to the camera, and that's enough to get the idea across.  Why should we waste a long shot that may be useful at a dramatic moment?""

(p218)



___




The Wrong Man (1957)




- "...my picture is made from the viewpoint of the prisoner himself.  From the outset, when he's arrested, he's seated in the car between the two detectives.  There's a close-up of his face, and as he looks to the left, we see the solid profile of his guard from his viewpoint.  Then he turns to the right, and we see his other guard lighting a cigar; he looks straight ahead, and in the mirror he sees the driver of the car observing him.  The car starts off and he looks back at his house.  At the corner of the block is the bar he usually goes to, with some little girls playing in front of it.  As they pass a parked car, he sees that the young woman inside is turning on the radio.  Everything in the outside world is taking place normally, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and yet he himself is a prisoner inside the car.
The whole approach is subjective.  For instance, they've slipped on a pair of handcuffs to link him to  another prisoner.  During the journey between the station house and the prison, there are different men guarding him, but since he's ashamed, he keeps his head down, staring at his shoes, so we never show the guards.  From time to time one of the handcuffs is opened, and we see a different wrist.  In the same way, during the whole trip, we only show the guards' feet, their lower legs, the floor, and the bottom parts of the doors." - (A. Hitchcock, p239)




F. Truffaut - "The real problem is with the direction.  You're trying to make the public identify with Fonda, but when he goes into his cell, for instance, you show the walls spinning in front of the camera. That's an antirealistic effect.  I feel it would have been a good deal more convincing if you had simply shown Henry Fonda sitting on a stool in the cell."

A. Hitchcock - "Maybe so, but wouldn't that be rather dull?"

F. Truffaut - "Frankly, I don't think so, because this case history has a dramatic strength of its own.  It should have been done in a very objective way, with the camera always at normal level, like a documentary; it should have been handled like a newsreel reportage."

A. Hitchcock - "It seems to me that you want me to work for the art houses."

(p240-242)



___




Vertigo (1958)


- "At the beginning of the picture, when James Stewart follows Madeleine to the cemetery, we gave her a dreamlike, mysterious quality by shooting through a fog filter.  That gave us a green effect, like fog over the bright sunshine.  Then, later on, when Stewart first meets Judy, I decided to make her live at the Empire Hotel in Post Street because it has a green neon sign flashing continually outside the window.  So when the girl emerges from the bathroom, that green light gives her the same subtle, ghostlike quality.  After focusing on Stewart, who's staring at her, we go back to the girl, but now we slip that soft effect away to indicate that Stewart's come back to reality." - (A. Hitchcock, p244-245)




- "When Joan Fontaine fainted at the inquest in Rebecca, I wanted to show how she felt that everything was moving far away from her before she toppled over.  I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me.  I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn't do it.  The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise.  I thought about the problem for fifteen years.  By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and zoom simultaneously.  I asked how much it would cost, and they told me it would cost fifty thousand dollars.  When I asked why, they said, "Because to put the camera at the top of the stairs we have to have a big apparatus to lift it, counterweight it, and hold it up in space."
I said, "There are no characters in this scene; it's simply a viewpoint.  Why can't we make a miniature of the stairway and lay it on it's side, then take our shot by pulling away from it?  We can use a tracking shot and a zoom flat on the ground."  So that's the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars." - (A. Hitchcock, p146)



___




Dreams/Subconscious

F. Truffaut - "...would you say that dreams have a bearing on your work?"

A. Hitchcock - "Daydreams, Probably."

F. Truffaut - "It may be an expression of the unconscious, and that takes us back once more to fairy tales.  By depicting the isolated man who's surrounded by all sorts of hostile elements, and perhaps without even meaning to, you enter the realm of the dream world, which is also a world of solitude and of danger."

A. Hitchcock - "That's probably me, within myself."

F. Truffaut - "It must be, because the logic of your pictures, which is sometimes decried by the critics, is rather like the logic of dreams.  Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest, for instance, are made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare."

A. Hitchcock - "This may be due to the fact that I'm never satisfied with the ordinary.  I'm ill at ease with it."

F. Truffaut - "That's very evident.  A Hitchcock picture that didn't involve death or the abnormal is practically inconceivable.  I believe you film emotions you feel very deeply-fear, for instance."

A. Hitchcock - "Absolutely, I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications.  I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.  I don't want clouds overhead.  I get a feeling of inner peace from a well-organized desk.  When I take a bath, I put everything neatly back in place.  You wouldn't even know I'd been in the bathroom.  My passion for orderliness goes hand in hand with a strong revulsion towards complications."

(p259-260)



___




Imagery

A. Hitchcock - "One of the reasons most films aren't sufficiently rigorous is that so few people in the industry know anything about imagery."

F. Truffaut - "The term "imagery" is particularly appropriate, because what we're saying is that it isn't necessary to photograph something violent in order to convey the feeling of violence, but rather to film that which gives the impression of violence.
This is demonstrated in one of the opening scenes of North by Northwest, in which the villains in a drawing room begin to manhandle Cary Grant.  If you examine that scene in slow motion, on the small screen of the cutting room, you will see that the villains aren't doing anything at all to Cary Grant.  But when projected on theater screens, that succession of quick frames and the little bobbing movements of the camera create an impression of brutality and violence."

A. Hitchcock - "There's a much better illustration in Rear Window when the man comes into the room to throw James Stewart out of the window.  At first I had filmed the whole thing completely realistically.  It was a weak scene;  it wasn't impressive.  So I did a close-up of a waving hand, a close-up of Stewart's face and another one of his legs;  then I intercut all of this in proper rhythm and the final effect was just right.
Now let's take a real-life analogy.  If you stand close to a train as it's speeding through a station, you feel it;  it almost knocks you down.  But if you look at the same train from a distance of some two miles, you don't feel anything at all.  In the same way, if you're going to show two men fighting with each other, you're not going to get very much by simply photographing that fight."

(p265)



___




Camera Rule

A. Hitchcock - "I'd like to mention what I regard as a fundamental rule:  When a character who has been seated stands up to walk around a room, I will never change the angle or move the camera back.  I will always start the movement on the close-up, the same size close-up I used while he was seated.
In most pictures, when two people are seen talking together, you have a close-up on one of them, then a close-up on the other, then you move back and forth again, and suddenly the camera jumps back for a long shot, to show one of the characters rising to walk around.  It's wrong to handle it that way."

F. Truffaut - "Yes, because that technique precedes the action instead of accompanying it.  It allows the public to guess that one of the characters is about to stand up, or whatever.  In other words, the camera should never anticipate what's about to follow."

A. Hitchcock - "Exactly, because that dissipates the emotion and I'm convinced that's wrong.  If a character moves around and you want to retain the emotion on his face, the only way to do that is to travel the close-up."

(p266)



___




North by Northwest (1959)


F. Turffaut - "...in North by Northwest, there's a scene in which the action takes place inside the train, but you show the whole of the train from outside.  To do that you didn't set your camera on the outside, in the fields, but you attached t to the train so that it was entirely dependent on it."

A. Hitchcock - "Planting the camera in the countryside to shoot a passing train would merely give us the viewpoint of a cow watching a train go by.  I tried to keep the public inside the train, with the train.  Whenever it went into a curve, we took a longshot from one of the train windows.  The way we did that was to put three cameras on the rear platform of the Twentieth Century Limited, and we went over the exact journey of the film at the same time of the day.  One of our cameras was used for the long shots of the train in the curves, while the two others were used for background footage."

F. Truffaut - "In your technique everything is subordinated to the dramatic impact;  the camera, in fact, accompanies the characters almost like an escort."

(p265)



___




Psycho (1960)


- "...audiences are changing.  It seems to me that the straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at by the younger viewers;  they'd feel it was silly.  I know they themselves behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did.  I think that nowadays you have to show them the way they themselves behave most of the time.  Besides, I also wanted to give the visual impression of despair and solitude in that scene." - (A. Hitchcock, p268)




A. Hitchcock - "I think the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddeness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue."

F. Truffaut - "The killing is pretty much like a rape."

(p268-269)




F. Truffaut - "In Psycho there's a whole arsenal of terror, which you generally avoid:  the ghostly house..."

A. Hitchcock - "The mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental.  For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very common.  They're either called "California Gothic," or, when they're particularly awful, they're called "California gingerbread."  I did not set out to reconstruct an old-fashioned Universal horror-picture atmosphere.  I simply wanted to be accurate, and there's no question but that both the house and the motel are authentic reproductions of the real thing.  I chose that house and motel because I realized that if I had taken an ordinary low bungalow the effect wouldn't have been the same.  I felt that type of architecture would help the atmosphere of the yarn."

F. Truffaut - "I must say that the architectural contrast between the vertical house and the horizontal motel is quite pleasing to the eye."

A. Hitchcock - "Definitely, that's our composition: a vertical block and a horizontal block."

(p269)



- "You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story;  they like to feel they know what's coming next.  So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.  The more we go into the details of the girl's journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed in her flight.

Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating.  I was directing the viewers.  You might say I was playing them, like an organ." - (A. Hitchcock, p269)




F. Truffaut - "I understand that in addition to the main titles, Saul Bass also did some sketches for the picture."

A. Hitchcock - "He did only one scene, but I didn't use his montage.  He was supposed to do the titles, but since he was interested in the picture, I let him lay out the sequence of the detective going up the stairs, just before he is stabbed.  One day during the shooting I came down with a temperature, and since I couldn't come to the studio, I told the cameraman and my assistant that they could use Saul Bass's drawings.  Only the part showing him going up the stairs, before the killing.  There was a shot of his hand on the rail, and of feet seen in profile, going up through the bars of the balustrade.  When I looked at the rushes of the scene, I found it was no good, and that was an interesting revelation for me,  because as that sequence was cut, it wasn't an innocent person but a sinister man who was going up those stairs.  Those cuts would have been perfectly all right if they were showing a killer, but they were in conflict with the whole spirit of the scene.
Bear in mind that we had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare the audience for this scene:  we had established a mystery woman in the house; we had established the fact that this mystery woman had come down and slashed a woman to pieces under her shower.  All the elements that would convey suspense to the detective's journey upstairs had gone before and we therefore needed a simple statement.  We needed to show a staircase and a man going up that staircase in a very simple way."

(p273)




- "I used a single shot of Arbogast coming up the stairs, and when he got to the top step, I deliberately placed the camera very high for two reasons.  The first was so that I could shoot down on top of the mother, because ifI'd shown her back, it might have looked as if I was deliberately concealing her face and the audience would have been leery.  I used that high angle in order not to give the impression that I was trying to avoid showing her.
But the main reason for raising the camera so high was to get the contrast between the long shot and the close-up of the big head as the knife came down at him.  It was like music, you see, the high shot with the violins, and suddenly the big head with the brass instruments clashing.  In the high shot the mother dashes out and I cut into the movement of the knife sweeping down.  Then I went over to the close-up on Arbogast.  We put a plastic tube on his face with hemoglobin, and as the knife came up to it, we pulled a string releasing the blood on his face down the line we had traced in advance.  Then he fell back on the stairway." - (A. Hitchcock, p273-276)




F. Truffaut - "Later on in the picture you use another very high shot to show Perkins taking his mother to the cellar."

A. Hitchcock - "I raised the camera when Perkins was going upstairs.  He goes into the room and we don't see him, but we hear him say, "Mother, I've got to take you down to the cellar.  They're snooping around."  And then you see him take her down to the cellar.  I didn't want to cut, when he carries her down, to a high shot because the audience would have been suspicious as to why the camera has suddenly jumped away.  So I had a hanging camera follow Perkins up the stairs, and when he went into the room I continued going up without a cut.  As the camera got up on top of the door, the camera turned and looked back down the stairs again.  Meanwhile, I had an argument take place between the son and his mother to distract the audience and take their minds off what the camera was doing.  In this way the camera was above Perkins again as he carried his mother down and the public hadn't noticed a thing.  It was rather exciting to use the camera to deceive the audience."

(p276)




A. Hitchcock - "...you know that to me Janet Leigh is playing the role of a perfectly ordinary bourgeoise."

F. Truffaut - "But she does lead us in the direction of the abnormal, toward Perkins and his stuffed birds."

A. Hitchcock - "I was quite intrigued with them:  they were like symbols.  Obviously Perkins is interested in taxidermy since he'd filled his own mother with sawdust.  But the owl, for instance, has another connotation.  Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins' masochism.  he knows the birds and he knows that they're watching him all the time.  He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes."

(p282)



F. Truffaut - "Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?"

A. Hitchcock - "Possibly.  My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important.  I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream.  I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion.  And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this."

(p282)



___




The Birds (1963)


- "...space should not be wasted, because it can be used for dramatic effect.  For instance, in The Birds, when the birds attack the barricaded house and Melanie is cringing back on the sofa, I kept the camera back and used the space to show the nothingness from which she's shrinking.  When I went back to her, I varied that by placing the camera high to convey the impression of the fear that's rising in her.  After that, there was another movement, high up and around her.  But the space at the beginning was of key importance to the scene.  If I'd started, at the outset, right next to the girl, we'd have the feeling that she was recoiling in front of some danger that she could see but the public could not.  And I wanted to establish just the contrary, to show that there was nothing off screen.  Therefore, all of that space had a specific meaning.
Some directors will place their actors in the decor and then they'll set the camera at a distance, which depends simply on whether the actor happens to be seated, standing, or lying down.  That, to me, seems to be pretty woolly thinking.  It's never precise and it certainly doesn't express anything." - (A. Hitchcock, p263)




A. Hitchcock - "At the beginning of the film we show Rod Taylor in the bird shop.  He catches the canary that has escaped from it's cage, and after putting it back, he says to Tippi Hedren, "I'm putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels."  I added that sentence during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterization as a wealthy, shallow playgirl.  And later on, when the gulls attack the village, Melanie Daniels takes refuge in a glass telephone booth and I show her as a bird in a cage.  This time it isn't a gilded cage, but a cage of misery, and it's also the beginning of her ordeal by fire, so to speak.  It's a reversal of the age-old conflict between men and birds.  Here the human beings are in cages and the birds are on the outside.  When I shoot something like that, I hardly think the public is likely to notice it."

F. Truffaut - "Even though that metaphor wasn't obvious-to me, at any rate-this is truly a remarkably powerful scene."

(p288)



A. Hitchcock - "At the end of the picture the little girl asks, "Can I take my lovebirds along?"  That little couple of lovebirds lends an optimistic note to the theme."

F. Truffaut - "They convey a double meaning to several scenes, including one with the mother and another with the schoolteacher."

A. Hitchcock - "It all goes to show that with a little effort even the word "love" can be made to sound ominous."

(p288)




- "I decided to show the mother through Melanie's eyes.  The scene begins with the whole group of characters, the sheriff, Mitch, the mother, and Melanie, in the background, and the whole scene that follows is a transfer from the objective viewpoint to a subjective viewpoint.  The sheriff says, "It's a sparrow all right!"  And from the group of static figures the mother's figure detaches itself and her moving figure bends down.  That downward movement now generates interest in the girl and the scene is now going to become her point of view.  Melanie looks at the mother and the camera now photographs Jessica Tandy going around the room, in different positions, to pick up the broken teacups, to straighten the picture and to jump back when the bird falls out of it's frame.  The reverse cuts of Melanie, as she looks at the mother going back and forth, subtly indicate what she's thinking.  Her eyes and gestures indicate an increasing concern over the mother's strange behaviour and for the mother herself.  The vision of the reality belongs to the girl, even when she crosses then room to say to Mitch, "I think I'd better stay the night."  To go up to Mitch she has to walk across the room, but even as she's walking, I keep a big close-up on her because of her concern and her interest demand that we retain the same size of image on the screen.  if I were to cut and drop back to a looser figure, her concern would be diminished as well.
The size of the image is very important to the emotion, particularly when you're using that image to have the audience identify with it.  In this scene, which is intended to suggest that Mitch's mother is cracking up, Melanie represents the public." - (A. Hitchcock, p290)





- "Right along I was concerned about the fact that the word-of-mouth rumors would make the public impatient.  I was worried about the audience sitting through this part of the picture and thinking to itself, "Come on.  Where are the birds?  Let's get on with it."  This is why we have an isolated attack on Melanie by a sea gull, why I was careful to put a dead bird outside the schoolteacher's house at night, and also why we put the birds on the wires when the girl drives away from the house in the evening.  All of this was my way of saying to the audience, "Don't worry, they're coming.  The birds are on their way!" - (A. Hitchcock, p292) 





A. Hitchcock - "For the arrival of the truck, I had the road watered down so that no dust would rise because I wanted that dust to have a dramatic function when she drives away."

F. Truffaut - "I remember that very clearly.  In addition to the dust you even had the smoke from the exhaust pipe."

A. Hitchcock - "The reason we went to all that trouble is that the truck, seen from a distance like that, moving at a tremendous speed, expresses the frantic nature of the mother's moves.  In the previous scene we had shown that the woman was going through a violent emotion, and when she gets into the truck, we showed that this was an emotional truck.  Not only by the image, but also through the sound that sustains the emotion.  It's not only the sound of the engine you hear, but something that's like a cry.  It's as though the truck were shrieking."

(p296-297)

- "...in The Birds when Jessica Tandy, in a state of shock after having discovered the farmer's body, takes off in her car.  To sustain that emotion, I had them put smoke in the truck's exhaust and we also made the road dusty.  It also served to establish a contrast with the peaceful mood of her arrival at the farm.  For that scene we had the road slightly dampened and there was no smoke coming out of the truck." - (A. Hitchcock, p154)



___




Hypnotism/Illusion

- "I feel you cannot put hypnotism on the screen and expect it to hold water.  It is a condition too remote from the audience's own experiences.  In the same way, it's impossible to put an illusionist on the screen, because the public knows instinctively, through the tricks they have seen in films, how he director went about it.  They will say, "Oh well, he stopped the reel and then took her out of the box!"  It's the same thing for hypnotism.  And visually speaking, there would be no difference between someone who is really hypnotized and someone who's pretending." - (A. Hitchcock, p307)



___




Mary Rose (never made)

- "It's not really Hitchcock material.  What bothers me is the ghost.  If I were to make the film, I would put the girl in a dark gray dress and I would put a neon tube of light inside, around the bottom of the dress, so that the light would only hit the heroine.  Whenever she moved, there would be no shadow on the wall, only a blue light.  You'd have to create the impression of photographing a presence rather than a body.  At times she would appear very small in the image, at times very big.  She wouldn't be a solid lump, you see, but rather like a sensation.  In this way you lose the feeling of real space and time. You should be feeling that you are in the presence of an ephemeral thing, you see." - (A. Hitchcock, p308-309)



___




General

A. Hitchcock - "I'm aware that you and many other critics feel that all of my films resemble one another.  But to me, strangely enough, every film is a brand-new thing."

F. Truffaut - "In your work there's a consistent effort to tackle new experiences.  It seems to me that once you get a cinematic idea, you never let go of it until you're entirely satisfied-even if it takes several pictures to work it out successfully."

A. Hitchcock - "I see what you mean.  It's possible that I sometimes go back subconsciously, if only to run for cover.  But I've never sunk low enough to say to myself, "I think I'll copy what I did in such and such a film."

(p314)



- "My mind is strictly visual, and when I read an elaborate description of a city street or of the countryside, I'm impatient with it.  I'd rather show it myself with a camera." - (A. Hitchcock, p316)



F. Truffaut - "I wonder whether you know Night of the Hunter, the only picture Charles Laughton ever directed?"

A. Hitchcock - "No, I never saw it."

F. Truffaut - "Well, in that picture there was a very good idea that reminded me of your films.  Robert Mitchum plays the preacher of one of those secret, strange religious sects.  The word "love" was tattooed on one of his hands and the word "hate" on the other.  His sermon consisted in a sort of pathetic struggle between the two hands.  It was quite effective.  When I saw that, it occurred to me that your pictures also describe the conflict between good and evil.  It's shown in a great variety of ways-some of them quite powerful-and yet it's always simplified, just like that fight between the two hands.  Do you agree?"

A. Hitchcock - "I would say so.  The other day we mentioned a slogan:  The better the villain, the better the picture.  We might turn that around and say "The stronger the evil, the stronger the film."

(p316)



F. Truffaut - "How do you feel about being labeled a Catholic artist?"

A. Hitchcock - "That's a rather difficult question, and I'm not sure I can give you a precise answer.  I come from a Catholic family and I had a strict, religious upbringing.  My wife converted to Catholicism before our marriage.  I don't think I can be labeled a Catholic artist, but it may be that one's early upbringing influences a man's life and guides his instinct.
For instance, in several films-and though this seemed, at the time, to be accidental-there were Catholic churches and not Baptist or Lutheran churches.  For Vertigo I needed a church with a tower, so naturally I looked around for an old church.  The only churches of that kind in California are the Catholic missions.  On the face of it, it might seem that I deliberately chose to show a Catholic church, but, in reality, the idea originated with the Boileau-Narcejac novel.  I simply couldn't see anyone jumping from the tower of a modern Protestant church.  I am definitely no anti-religious; perhaps I'm sometimes neglectful."

(p316-317)



A. Hitchcock - "...I've often wondered why I've never been interested in pure stories of everyday conflict.  I think it may be because, pictorially speaking, they're dull."

F. Truffaut - "Exactly.  It might be said that the texture of your films is made up of three elements:  fear, sex, and death.  These are not daytime preoccupations, like in films that deal with unemployment, racism, poverty, or in many pictures on everyday love conflicts between men and women.  They are nighttime anxieties, therefore, metaphysical anxieties."

(p319)



- "For me to take someone else's script and merely photograph it in my own way simply isn't enough.  For better or for worse, I must do the whole thing myself.  And yet, in a way, one has to be terribly careful that one doesn't run out of story ideas.  Like any artist who paints or writes, I suppose I'm limited to a certain field.  Not that I'm comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the Cross.  That constituted his life's work.  Cezanne was content with a few still lifes and a few scenes in the forest.  But how long can a film-maker go on painting the same picture?" - (A. Hitchcock, p319)



- "At times, I have the feeling I'm an orchestra conductor, a trumpet sound corresponding to a close shot and a distant shot suggesting an entire orchestra performing a muted accompaniment.  At other times, by using colors and lights in front of beautiful landscapes, I feel I am a painter.  On the other hand, I'm wary of literature:  A good book does not necessarily make a good film." - (A. Hitchcock, p335)












Stanley Kubrick:


Dr. Strangelove

The table was specifically made with green felt to represent a poker table, as if they were gambling the fate of the world.




2001: A Space Odyssey

The throwing of the bone into the sky signifies man's early triumph but also the technological triumph.  It also is reference to weapons




They think Hal cannot hear their discussion about it, but Hal lip reads their intention - this shot is as if Hal is looking into their minds, it sees through the window in


 Throughout the film there is a sense of serenity even when Hal is murdering each crew member, the viewer feels like being tranquillised or in a trance even when the sense of fear is heightened within.  The travelling at speed to a place unknown should give a sense of trepidation but the visuals give off a beautiful light show to numb the panic.  A balance of fear and calmness


The camera shots and sets show a great sense of technicality, but also give an immense illusion as they look like one complete shot was taken.







A Clockwork Orange

This film is about the continuous repetition of violence and the quick editing seems to reflect this idea, quick sharp cuts give the viewer harsh images








Amongst the violence there are sets that seem to give off a 'Fun House' effect, Alex's costume almost like a dapper Willy Wonka enticing his prey.  Alex is getting his kicks from within all the violence that he causes.  The sets in this scene give off a 'house of mirrors' look, giving the idea that it may look fun from one angle but from another is chaos.





The Shining

As the film is about Jack Nicholson's character slowly losing his mind, the camera follows the child around the maze of the building, this also reflects the garden maze and in turn the maze of confusion in the lead character




the setting being in the middle of nowhere also reflects the isolation, cold and darkness of the characters.



following the child at his level feels like you're riding with him, and also the walls seem to close in making everything look bigger.  when the child cycles to the certain room in the hotel the feeling of apprehension rises and you just want him to get back on and cycle both of you away


the maze seems to be a recurring image as it seems to be in the patterns of the decor, for example the rugs.




Derek Jarman:

Edward II & The Tempest

Derek Jarman has a beautiful way of interacting with the audience, like he's asking them to help colour the scenes with him.

Framing

shafts of light in this scene from Edward II ask your imagination to fill in the surrounding areas. broadening your mind to what you actually see



Lighting

creating optical illusions 


Impressions of the scene - Derek Jarman didn't have the budgets to create elaborate sets - there is no budget in the mind, might have to dig deep though 


Costume can speak louder than words


Props

It's like when you were a child and you picked up a stick and believed it to be a sword - it's like Jarman is asking to play again.  He hands out the props, now lets imagine.



Jarman makes strong use of shadows - what lurks in them? half an image can be made more powerful than a fully lit scene