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78/52
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The numbers have it: in a rather alarming fashion, 78/52 and Room 237 (2012, on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining [1980]) define the main tendencies of a new kind of
essay-documentary devoted to examining cinema classics: part “behind the
scenes” supplement, part YouTube fan tribute, part glorified DVD audio
commentary – with a parade of expert talking heads optional, depending on the
occasion (and the budget).
78/52, devoted to the shower scene of Psycho (1960) and the build-up given to
it by Alfred Hitchcock (both inside and outside the film) is a slick,
occasionally intriguing, proudly nerdy affair. Film clips, staged re-enactments
and archival documents are mixed with interviewees filmed on a set that
recreates Norman Bates’ home.
Where the numbers obsession of Room 237 triggered a delirium of fan interpretations of hidden
themes, allusions and symbols (a similar work on Twin Peaks: The Return [2017] surely cannot be far away), 78/52 – referring (hazily) to 78 camera
set-ups and 52 cuts – is fixed on the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking craft.
Useful insight into production and post-production mechanics is provided by
Marli Renfro (Janet Leigh’s body double) and by Stephen Rebello (author of the
excellent Alfred Hitchcock and the Making
of Psycho). A string of editors (Walter Murch, Amy E. Duddleston, Bob
Murawski, John Venzon, Chris Innis) annotate the scene’s cuts, rhythms and
perspective-shifts. Hitchcock’s granddaughter Tere Carrubba, Janet Leigh’s
daughter Jamie Lee Curtis and Anthony Perkins’ son Osgood add personal
testimonies. More than a few talking heads – such as actor Ileana Douglas and
composer Kreng (credited as composer on Cooties [2014] and Camino [2015])– will make
you wonder why they are there at all.
All these participants are posed and shot in the same
way: in black and white, sitting in the mocked-up Psycho set, backed by sub-Bernard Herrmann pastiche music for
strings. This mimicry-effect, so beloved of the films-on-film genre, quickly
becomes tiresome and cheesy.
Meanwhile, the meaning quotient of Hitchcock’s film is
briskly boiled down to, on the one hand, some very old-fashioned nuggets about
“the randomness of life” and what Guillermo del Toro calls a “Biblical sense of
doom and punishment”; and, on the other hand, a barrage of socio-historical
contexts somehow simply reflected on screen – everything from America’s
unpreparedness for World War II and nuclear-age anxieties to the changing roles
of women and a shift in the depiction of suburban domesticity. This is the type
of airy generality that does not get us terribly far inside Psycho.
Film history students are advised to avoid proclaiming firsts: first close-up, first screen
kiss, first Western, etc. 78/52 throws all such caution to the wind. I can accept, at a pinch, Rebello’s
declaration that Psycho marks “the
moment that signalled New American Cinema” at the dawn of the 1960s. But I was
quickly annoyed by the protracted litany that it is also “the first modern
expression of the female body under assault” (Karyn Kusama), “the first time in
movies it wasn’t safe to be in the movie theatre” (Peter Bogdanovich), a film
that “changed the way films are exhibited” (Murch), that “elevated filmmaking”
(Josh Waller), and even “the first A-movie to deal with this kind of
horror/trashy/tabloid stuff” (Bret Easton Ellis, insufferable in his latest
role as pop culture commentator).
Such claims are easier to make if the scope of world
cinema history is reduced to commercial American filmmaking. A telling moment
arrives when writer-director Daniel Noah mocks “an obscure Czechoslovakian
film” of his imagining that probably had a shower scene before Hitchcock – but,
he strongly implies, who could care less about that? Although passing reference
is made to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les
Diaboliques (1955), Michael Powell’s Peeping
Tom (1960) and German expressionist films of the 1920s, Psycho is served up to us as essentially
a game-changing tabula rasa. Even
something so evidently influential on Hitchcock as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil from 1958 (the two films
share a leading lady!) is ignored.
Although no one could doubt that Hitchcock is the
artist most responsible for Psycho, 78/52 reveals how blinkered a
standard-operating auteurist premise can become. Psycho’s editor George Tomasini receives praise, as does Herrmann, but
the decisive labour of screenwriter Joseph Stefano and shower-scene storyboardist
Saul Bass is underplayed, while the cinematographer (John L. Russell),
production designers (Robert Clatworthy and Joseph Hurley) and costume designer
(Rita Riggs) are scarcely mentioned, if at all. Overloading this simplistic
auteur bias still further, Philippe encourages from his guests the typical speculations
on Hitchcock’s neuroses and obsessions (mother fixation, sexual repression, anti-US
and anti-Hollywood sentiments) and how they received virtually unmediated
expression on screen – a dubious assumption, at best.
Philippe’s rather cautious inclusion use of critics
and academics is revealing. Bill Krohn and David Thomson appear, but hardly get
to utter more than two sentences apiece. Alas, Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat
are no longer around to contribute; but what about Laura Mulvey, Raymond
Bellour, Tania Modleski or many other candidates of a similar calibre? Instead,
we get rather too much from an irritatingly gregarious scholar, Marco Calavita of
Sonoma State University (“somewhat loud and very repetitive”, reads the first, very perceptive verdict on the “Rate My Professors” site),
as well as generally unilluminating snippets from Howie Movshovitz, Norman
Hollyn and Jim Hosney.
Like Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), 78/52 places its greatest
faith in the insights and responses of filmmakers – which is not always a wise
move, Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey Through French Cinema notwithstanding. Philippe seems inordinately fond of a particular breed of
contemporary horror-thriller practitioners: Leigh Whannell, Justin Benson, Eli
Roth, Mick Garris, various collaborators of Sam Raimi, and especially a chummy
trio comprising the production company SpectreVision (Mandy, 2018): Elijah Wood and the aforementioned Daniel Noah and
Josh Waller.
The less than profound exclamations of Psycho-love (like “this is crazy good!”)
from most of these guys – men outnumber women almost 4 to 1 in the
expert-witness list – are usually prompted by having them comment live as they
gawk at the film unspooling on a nearby monitor. It’s an awkward and largely unproductive
technique.
© Adrian Martin September 2017 |
