Film Studies- An Introduction
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12 the second motorcyclist heading towards him.
13 Shot of Michel reaching into the car.
14 Close-up of Michel’s head in profile, facing screen right. He says, ‘Stop, or I’ll kill you.’
15 Close-up of Michel’s hand holding a gun.
16 Close-up of the gun as Michel gets ready to fire.
17 The cut to shot 17 occurs as the sound of the gun going off is heard. Shot 17 consists of the policeman falling down.
18 In this shot, Michel is shown running across open fields.
This description cannot capture the frenetic nature of this series of shots. The first 17 shots last just 44 seconds, which makes on average a change of shot every 2.6 seconds. (The final shot lasts 14 seconds.) All the innovative production techniques mentioned above are apparent in this series of shots. The scene is shot on location, on the highway. The rest of the film is also shot on location, particularly on the streets of Paris.
The camera is very mobile and shaky. The pans in shots 3
and 4 are very quick, creating blurred images. The lighting is 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 89
natural. In shot 7, the sun shines directly into the lens, creating a bloomer. Belmondo is renowned (and often imitated) for his casual acting style in this film. He seems to improvise most of the time. Finally, this series of shots subverts the rules of continuity editing. The cut from shot 3 to shot 4 is less than 30
degrees and, therefore, creates a jump cut. In shot 5, Michel’s car is travelling from screen left to screen right. But in shot 6, the police are shown travelling in the opposite direction, from screen right to screen left. The cameraman has crossed the road after filming the car to film the motorcycles. Such a change of direction creates a confusion of screen space. Similarly, when Michel stops the car, he looks screen left at the police passing by. But after he has picked up the gun, he looks screen right at the policeman, rather than screen left, as we would expect.
Finally, the cut from 15 to 16, the shot of Michel’s hand to the shot of the gun, creates another jump, because there is very little difference between the two shots.
The use of a shaky, hand-held camera, together with the use of location shooting and natural lighting, jump cuts and discontinuous editing, do not aim to show the action clearly; instead, it offers a fragmentary and partial vision of the scene.
These ‘imperfect’ techniques represent the auteur’s presence and serve as clear marks of the way he or she writes his or her individual vision into the film.
The effect these production techniques create is one of
spontaneity and improvisation. However, what interests
me in the use of these techniques is that they give the film a documentary feel. The blurred pans, the shaky camera
movements and abrupt editing testify to the difficulty the cameraman has filming in the conditions he found himself in, and to his physical interaction with the event.
It is important to point out that the stylistic choices made by the French New Wave directors were not simply determined by aesthetic considerations, but also by economics. The French New Wave is a low-budget film-making practice. Filming on location with natural lighting decreases production costs, just as the emphasis on spontaneity reduces pre-production costs such as scriptwriting. Nevertheless, far from being despondent 90
by the lack of money, the French New Wave directors identified low production costs with artistic freedom. They saw an
inverse relationship between the size of the budget and artistic freedom: the higher the budget, the lower the artistic freedom.
They even saw economic failure at the box office as a sign of artistic independence.
These economic considerations also fed into the judgements the New Wave directors made when they were auteur critics. When assessing the films of American directors, auteur critics defined an auteur as a director who transcended the high production values of the Hollywood studios. In other words, an auteur managed to stamp his or her personality on a high-budget film, whereas a metteur-en-scène was swamped by high production values and became an anonymous technician.
Consequently, a Hollywood auteur film is one that contains a tension between the demands of the studio system and the director’s self-expressiveness. As John Caughie explains:
… the struggle between the desire for self-expression and the constraints of the industry could produce a tension in the films of the commercial cinema…, encouraging the auteurist
critics to valorize Hollywood cinema above all else, finding there a treasure-trove of buried personalities, and, in the process, scandalizing established criticism. Uniqueness of personality, brash individuality, persistence of obsession and originality were given an evaluative power above that of stylistic smoothness or social seriousness.
The business of the critic was to discover the director within the given framework, to find the traces of the submerged personality, to find the ways in which the auteur had transformed the material so that the explicit subject matter was no longer what the film was really about…
Theories of Authorship, pp. 11–12
As a final point, we need to consider the implicit criticism of the auteur policy that Caughie refers to in the first quotation above, when he writes that ‘Uniqueness of personality, brash 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 91
individuality, persistence of obsession and originality were given an evaluative power above that of stylistic smoothness or social seriousness’ (emphasis added). Both the auteur critics and the New Wave directors have been criticized for their lack of social commitment. However, the auteur policy offers a defence against standardized film-making practices in favour of an alternative – a more expressive and personalized – cinema. The New Wave, while concerned primarily with the personal lives of the young French middle class, put into practice this alternative style of film-making.
From the mid-1960s onwards, Godard’s film-making became
politicized, both in terms of his innovative and disturbing style, and in terms of theme and content. His style became political by jolting spectators out of their comfortable and leisurely consumption of film, by continually distracting them, making them notice the style, thereby distancing them from the film’s content. In other words, the disturbing style makes spectators aware of the film-making process, rather than trying to conceal it. He also changed the content of his films by including political subject matter (the activities of a Marxist group of students in La Chinoise, a strike in Tout Va Bien). In other words, Godard made films about politics and also made films politically. These films include La Chinoise, Le Weekend, Le Gai Savoir, made between 1967 and 1968, and films made under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group (basically Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin) between 1969 and 1972, including Pravda, Vent d’Est and Tout Va Bien.
In 1973, the Dziga Vertov Group was dissolved and Godard teamed up with Anne-Marie Miéville and made a series of video projects for television. Godard rethought his political position and this led him to pursue new themes in his work, including family and personal relationships, reflecting the emergence of the women’s movement in France.
In the early 1980s Godard returned to making less marginal films, including Passion in 1982. However, this commercial period came to an abrupt end in 1987 when he made a film version of King Lear, with Norman Mailer and his daughter.
Both walked off the set before the film was completed, so Godard started again.
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A number of film critics (David Bordwell among them) point out that the spectator cannot read character relations or thematic significance from Godard’s political films, and the films do not seem to have any overall coherence. Each scene seems to go off on a tangent. Part of Godard’s move towards becoming a political film-maker was to downplay the Romantic idea of the film director as an auteur, making films with stylistic and thematic unity. This is why he made his most radical political films under the impersonal banner of the Dziga Vertov Gro
up, rather than his own name.
Style and themes in Alfred
Hitchcock’s films
Alfred Hitchcock is an undisputed auteur for all the auteur critics mentioned above – Cahiers du Cinéma, the Movie critics and Andrew Sarris. I shall briefly review the ways in which these three schools of auteur criticism discussed Hitchcock before listing the stylistic and thematic elements that unify his films. Cahiers published a special issue on Hitchcock in 1954
(no. 39), which comprises two interviews with Hitchcock, one by André Bazin, the other by Chabrol. In 1957, the Cahiers critics Rohmer and Chabrol published the first book-length study of Hitchcock, simply entitled Hitchcock and translated into English as Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. Rohmer and Chabrol developed a thematic and stylistic analysis of Hitchcock’s films. They identified the following themes: 3
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the influence of Catholicism
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the theme of shared guilt
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homophobia and misogyny.
In terms of form and style, they noted at the end of the book that: Hitchcock is one of the greatest inventors of form in the entire history of cinema. Perhaps only Murnau and Eisenstein can sustain comparison with him when it comes to form. Our effort will not have been in vain if we have been able to demonstrate 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 93
how an entire moral universe has been elaborated on the basis of this form and by its very rigor. In Hitchcock’s work, form does not embellish content, it creates it.
Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, p. 152
Rohmer’s and Chabrol’s book was followed by a book by
another Cahiers critic, Jean Douchet, whose Alfred Hitchcock was published in 1967. Douchet identifies three worlds
operating in Hitchcock’s films:
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the world of the mundane (of everyday events)
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the world of subjective desire
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the intellectual world.
For example, Psycho (1960) begins with the mundane. The camera pans across the skyline of Phoenix, Arizona, and we are supplied with mundane information: the name of the city, the date and the time. We see and hear about the mundane lives of Sam and Marion and see the mundane office job that Marion has. The film then moves on to the world of subjective desire, in this instance, Marion’s, as she steals the $40,000 to fulfil her love with Sam. But after Marion is murdered, the film moves into the intellectual world as several characters try to work out what happened to her.
Douchet was one of the first critics to draw the (by now familiar) analogy between Jeff (James Stewart) in Rear Window (1954) and the film spectator. Jeff is a photographer who is confined to a wheelchair after breaking a leg. He spends his days spying on his neighbours across the courtyard. For Douchet, Jeff replicates the film spectator – the spectator confined to a chair observing a spectacle at a distance. In Rear Window, the windows of the apartments across the courtyard replicate the cinema screen.
The most famous book on Hitchcock was published in 1967 –
François Truffaut’s Hitchcock, which was based on more than 50 hours of interviews in which Truffaut and Hitchcock talk about Hitchcock’s films in chronological order, covering such issues as the inception of each film, the preparation of 94
screenplays, directorial problems and Hitchcock’s evaluation of each film.
The Movie critics also interviewed Hitchcock and wrote several essays on mechanisms of suspense in his films. Robin Wood, who wrote regularly for Movie, published a book on Hitchcock, simply called Hitchcock’s Films (1965) (which has been revised and updated several times), which is almost as famous as Truffaut’s book. Wood argues that we should take Hitchcock seriously because of his thematic and formal unity, and because his films have a thematic depth similar to Shakespeare’s plays.
Finally, in The American Cinema, Sarris defined Hitchcock as a pantheon director, the highest and most prestigious category in his evaluative history. Pantheon directors, according to Sarris: are the directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world. To speak any of their names is to evoke a self-contained world with its own laws and landscapes.
The American Cinema, p. 39
StylIStIcunItyInhItchcock’SfIlmS
33 1 Emphasis on editing and montage
Early in his career, Hitchcock was influenced by German
Expressionism and Soviet theories of montage. The first two films he completed as director, The Pleasure Garden (1925) and The Mountain Eagle (1926), were made in German studios.
Examples of Hitchcock’s reliance upon editing are numerous, but one can do no better than look closely at the end of Notorious, already analysed at the end of Chapter 1. Hitchcock’s reliance on editing is also illustrated in the famous shower scene murder in Psycho, in which 34 shots appear on screen in a matter of 25 seconds. The style and themes of this scene were analysed in detail by the Movie critic Perkins in Film as Film.
33 2 High number of point-of-view shots
Hitchcock had a tendency to use shots that represent a
character’s look. It is common to find that about 25 per cent 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 95
of all shots in Hitchcock’s films are point-of-view shots, which critics interpret as Hitchcock’s fascination with voyeurism. The clearest examples are Rear Window (the shots of Jeff looking out of his window at his neighbours) and Vertigo (1956), in which the private detective, Scottie (James Stewart), is hired to follow Madeleine (Kim Novak).
Spotlight
Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) can be seen as a metaphor for the cinema itself. Chair-bound Jeffries (James Stewart) represents the cinema audience, while the apartments opposite his window represent the cinema screen.
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3 3 Shooting in a confined space
In the 1940s and early 1950s, Hitchcock imposed upon himself a technical constraint: he made a number of films in confined spaces. In films such as Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder (1954) and Rear Window (1954), most of the action takes place in the same space (a lifeboat in the film of the same name, the Manhattan penthouse of Brandon Shaw in Rope, Tony Wendice’s apartment in Dial M for Murder, and Jeff’s apartment in Rear Window). This self-imposed constraint limited the stylistic choices that Hitchcock could make and offered him a challenge on how to construct the film.
Considering Rope would be useful, because it marks a deviation in Hitchcock’s film-making. In the late 1940s, Hitchcock temporarily abandoned his emphasis on editing
and experimented with the long take (plus camera movement).
Rope takes the long take to its logical conclusion, because the film consists of only 11 takes, two of which last 10 minutes, which is the maximum length of the reel of film that fits into the camera. Yet, despite the limitations Hitchcock imposed on himself – limitations of space and a severe limitation on cutting from one shot to another – the camera moves almost continuously around the apartment, in the hallway and in the kitchen, demonstrating Hitchcock’s skill in translating mise-en-scène into mise-en-shot.
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Moreover, the effect of these long takes, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, is to emphasize the actor’s performance, which is not cut up into many shots. This is because the long take maintains the dramatic unities of space and time. In Rope, the events in Brandon’s penthouse take place in one evening; in fact, the skyline outside Brandon’s penthouse slowly changes from daylight to twilight as the film progresses. Hitchcock combined editing and long takes in his film Under Capricorn (1949) and returned to editing from Stage Fright (1950) onwards.
themeSInhItchcock’SfIlmS
33 Narrative techniques
We can identify two basic narrative techniques in Hitchcock’s films. These two narrative techniques are related in that both in
volve investigations, usually the investigation of a murder. These narratives are distinguishable by whether the main protagonist is the one who carries out the investigation, or whether the main protagonist is the one who is under investigation.
In the first narrative technique, the film focuses on the protagonist as he carries out an investigation. Furthermore, he is usually set up with a mistaken identity. The solving of the crime occurs simultaneously with the unmasking of the mistaken identity (I shall discuss this point below).
In the second narrative technique, the protagonist comes under investigation – that is, the film focuses on the protagonist who is being investigated. For example, Marnie in the film of the same name, Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder, Manny Balestrero in The Wrong Man (1956), Marion and Norman in Psycho.
Psycho, for instance, begins with a crime (Marion stealing $40,000), which is then investigated by Arbogast, Lila and Sam.
But as the investigation continues, it soon becomes evident that it is not only Marion’s theft that is being investigated, but also the murders committed by Norman.
This discussion of murder and its investigation leads to the other themes in Hitchcock’s films, which are:
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Confession and guilt, as Rohmer and Chabrol point out in their book. Marion in Psycho realizes her guilt in stealing the 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 97
$40,000; Marnie is plagued by guilt concerning a childhood experience – she murders a man who attacked her mother; in I Confess (1953), Otto Keller confesses a murder to Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), who is then bound to
silence.
33 Suspense (Hitchcock as the ‘master of suspense’). This applies to most of Hitchcock’s films, but is epitomized in North by Northwest (1959), analysed in Chapter 2.
33 The perfect murder. A single character or group of characters devise complex and unusual methods of committing the
perfect murder; however, the investigator always finds a clue overlooked by the murderers. In Rope, there is no motive for Brandon and Phillip to kill David Kentley; they are simply acting out the existential theory of their former teacher Rupert Cadell. After killing Kentley and hiding his body in the apartment, Brandon and Phillip hold a party at the scene of the crime and invite Rupert as one of the guests. However, upon leaving the party, Rupert is mistakenly given Kentley’s hat; this is the clue that leads to his solving of the crime. In Rear Window, Thorwald cuts up his wife’s body, but Jeff and Lisa find her wedding ring, disconfirming the claim that she has simply left town. One more example: in Strangers on a Train (1951) Bruno Antony meets by chance Guy Haines, a famous tennis player, on a train. Bruno knows that Guy wants to divorce his wife Miriam and marry his girlfriend Anne Morton. As the two of them get talking, Bruno