Research in progress, March 3, 2024
Experiencing Hitchcock: Ways of Seeing, Looking, Gazing at Hollywood’s Greatest Director
Film Theory and Hitchcock
What could be said about Alfred Hitchcock that has not been already said in the 200 books and thousands of articles about him (my rough estimate).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of influential theories of spectatorship and representation have led to a reevaluation of Hitchcock’s work.
Metz on the film experience: Cinema retains something of “the sight of the primal scene.”
Steven Heath: on Narrativity
L. Mulvey: masculinization of spectatorship.
De Lauretis: What constitutes being socialized as woman in our culture has impact on the experiences of the female spectator.
Spectatorship: Description of spectators in terms of unconscious desires and basic structures of language.
De Lauretis (Alice, p. 145): confusion about identify–as if synonym for understanding, as if it denotes a specific process by which comprehension occurs.
The 24 chapters in this book are arranged in a manner that reflects the evolutions of film studies over the past half a century.
Each chapter provides an extended look at one or more particular film(s) made by Hitchcock.
All the chapters include info about the filmmaker’s other works, especially about films that help to clarify the film discussed in detail (and about related work by others).
Each discussion explores the potential of the particular film for critiquing the dimensions of commercial cinema.
Obviously, films can be approached from different theoretical directions, and used in a variety of contexts;
My goal is to provide a diversity of ways–theoretical and pragmatical–of seeing that will makes energizes viewers’ experience with Hitchcock’s half a century cinema, 53 films made between 1927-1976
While each chapter provides in-depth discussion of a particular theory or perspective, the overall organization of chapters facilitates comparisons of Hitchcock’s great variety of films.
Each person goes to the movies…a series of previous identifications by which she or he has somehow been engendered.”
Kaplan: Forms of Phallic Domination (1984)
Two main cycles of films have dominated commercial cinema from the mid 1960s, in the wake of the women’s movement.
The first excluded women (the buddy-buddy film), avoiding the problem of sexual difference altogether.
The second, emerging when the problem of sexual difference could no longer be avoided, showed women being raped and subjected to violence.
The first deals with problems of production, exhibition. and distribution of independent women’s films. I focus here particularly on the contradiction inherent in the very notion of an “alternate” cinematic practice and raise questions that must be answered if we are to move out of the impasse that both feminist filmmakers and feminist critics have now reached.
We need to combine debate about the most “correct” cinematic strategy (theoretically) with consideration of the practical problems of how individual films are received (read) and of the contexts of production and reception as these affect what films can be made and how films are read.
The conclusion looks at future directions in relation to
The possibilities inherent in Hitchcock’s films for challenging dominant patriarchal discourses.
Fr instance, the figure of the Mother offers a possible way to break through patriarchal discourses since, as critics have noted, she has not been totally appropriated by dominant culture. But this is clearly a problematic area in which much work remains to be done.
For the benefit of readers new to the richness of film theories, I have listed below definitions of terms, concepts, and theoretical models that are used frequently throughout this book and are central to the theoretical arguments being developed.
1.CLASSICAL (DOMINANT, HOLLYWOOD) CINEMA
A feature length narrative sound film made and distributed by the Hollywood studio system, roughly from 1927 to 1960.
The classical model has its fixed conventions of practice that are repeated from product to product and that the audience comes to rely on and to expect.
Central to this classical cinema are:
(a) genres (e.g. the gangster genre, the western genre, the adventure film, the woman’s film). (b) stars.
(c) producers, and (d) directors.
At different times, the public has shown interest for the presence of certain stars and certain genres.
The demand for different genres varies in different phases of Hitchcock’a career.
Producer David O. Selznick had imported Hitchcock from England, in 1939, and put him under contract. During that decade, the direct0r made some of his best (Rebecca, which won the 1941 Best Picture Oscar) and some of his worst (“Under Capricorn”) films.
THE CINEMATIC APPARATUS
This concept refers to the cinema in its many dimensions economic, technical, psychological. and ideological.
Embedded in a particular social and institutional context, the cinema works to permit only certain “speakers,” only a certain “speech.”
What critics call the enounciation of the cinema (its processes of saying) cannot be distinguished from the enunce (what is said).
Jean Louis Baudry has argued that the meaning (ideology) that is produced by the cinematic mechanism depends not only on the content of the images but also on the “material procedures by which an image of continuity, dependent on the persistence of vision, is restored from discontinuous elements”
Jean Louis Baudry (1974 5) “Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 42).
Other critics have focused on the position of the spectators as the creators of the films as as they are watching it.
The meaning established in the interaction between viewer and screen image involves a particular type of pleasure that arises from the cinema’s dependence on the psychoanalytic mechanisms of fetishism and voyeurism.
REPRESENTATION
The “constructed” nature of the image, which Hollywood mechanisms strive to conceal.
The dominant Hollywood style. realism (an apparent imitation of the social world we live in), hides the fact that a film is always constructed, and perpetuates the illusion that spectators are being shown what is “just natural.”
The spectators are often encouraged to engage in the pleasurable mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism.
FREUD AND THE OEDIPAL CRISIS (Psychology, Psychanalysis)
The mechanisms underlying pleasure in the cinema.
Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex provided the cornerstone for his revolutionary psychoanalytic theory.
Freud took the name Oedipus from classical mythology, as dramatized by Sophocles, of how Oedipus unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, a deed for which he was punished.
The myth represents the inevitable fantasy of the growing child. First bound in illusory unity with his mother, whom he does not recognize as Other, separate, or different, the child exists in a pre-Oedipal phase; as he moves into the phallic phase, the child becomes aware of his father. At the height of his Oedipal phase, he loves his mother and hates his father who takes mother for himself.
Successful resolution of this Oedipal phase takes place on the boy’s discovery that his mother lacks the penis. i.e. is castrated (he imagined that all people must originally have had penises). This bitter discovery propels him away from his mother, since he fears that by identifying with the one lacking penis, he will endanger his own organ. He now identifies with his father, whom he longs to be like, and he looks forward to “finding someone like his mother” to marry.
Freud did not pay much attention to the girl’s Oedipal crisis, but post Freudians agree that it is much more complex. The girl turns away from her mother through penis envy and the belief that her mother is responsible for her lack of penis. The girl tries to get from the father what the mother could not provide, now equating “child” with “penis,” and looking to bear the child with a man like her father.
FETISHISM
Fetishism refers to the perversion whereby men strive to discover the penis in the woman in order to grant themselves erotic satisfaction (e.g. long hair, high-heel shoes, and earrings might stand in for the penis).
Fear of castration underlies fetishism in that sexual excitement is impossible with a creature who lacks the penis, or something that represents it.
In cinema, the female body may be “fetishized” in order to counteract the fear of sexual difference, i.e. of castration.
VOYEURISM AND EXHIBITIONISM
Pleasure in the cinema is created through inherently voyeuristic mechanism. Voyeurism refers to the erotic gratification of watching someone without being seen oneself, the activity of the Peeping Tom.
Exhibitionism refers in psychoanalysis to the erotic gratification derived from showing one’s body to another person, as in the pleasure of being seen, or seeing oneself on the screen.
Voyeurism is an active perversion, practiced primarily by men with the female body as the object of the gaze, while exhibitionism is its passive counterpart:
THE GAZE: THE THREE “LOOKS” IN THE CINEMA
(a) Scopophilia
Sexual pleasure in looking is activated by the darkened room, the way the gaze of the spectator is controlled by the aperture of the camera and the projector.
The fact that the spectator is watching moving images rather than static ones (painting) or live actors (theatre), help to make the cinematic experience closer to the dream state than is possible in other arts. Psychoanalytic critics argue that regression to the state of early childhood happens in the cinema.
(b) The act of gazing is played upon in dominant cinema, creating the pleasure that has ultimately erotic origins. The gaze is built upon culturally defined notions of sexual difference.
There are three looks:
The basic level for Saussure is that of sounds made by the human voice (the phonetic level). Items gain their significance from their relationship to other items in the system, which are signaled by difference. The level of recognized difference is the phonemic level. As Terence Hawkes puts it: “This is to say that the meaning of each word resides in a structural sense in the difference between its own sounds and those of other words.
The contrast or sense of ‘opposition’ between the sound of /t/ in tin and the sound of /k/ in kin as significant, as capable of generating meaning”
(Structuralism and Semiotics (1977) London, Methuen, pp. 22 3).
Saussure called the two aspects of the linguistic sign concept and sound image, the signified and the signifier.
The signifiers in the language system are phonemes which can be made up into words to represent certain objects in the world, i.e. the signified on the level of denotation. The sounds r o s e make up the word rose, which is the sign for a flower that looks a certain way. But there is no inherent relationship between this sign and the flower. It is only an arbitrary connection and thus can never be questioned in terms of its fitness or suitability to anything in the sensual world. Furthermore, all that we can think and know is conditioned by the language system we must use; ideas and concepts do not exist outside of the system, but are bounded by it, shaped by what the sign system permits.
Viewers thus do not simply use language (discourse) but are positioned in discourse.
The decentering of a hitherto unquestioned, autonomous and individualistic Cartesian “I.” “I” is now simply the subject in a subject predicate linguistic system. Far from being the central actor, man is controlled by the laws that govern the language system in which he lives.
The earlier thinkers did not question their own ability (methodologically) to analyze their subject matter “objectively,” and it is this examination of the very tools of analysis (signification) that characterizes semiology and puts the nail in the coffin of the unified self.
Essentially, within the film text, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze;
The spectators are made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen.
The camera’s original “gaze” is manifest in the very act of filming.
THE IMAGE
Sociological critics discuss the image in terms of the types of role characters play (e.g. the image of the housewife, the macho male (hero), the homosexual, the villain (anti hero), the prostitute, etc.). They compare the representation of these roles in film to people in these roles in society. The problem here is that such analysis ignores the mediation of film as an art form (i.e. that these images are constructed).
But cinematic analysis keeps in mind the construction and talks about distance of subject from camera, point of view, editing, place. function of a character in a narrative, etc.
SOCIOLOGY AND SEMIOLOGY
The sociological method refers to a study of people in society; theorists use the terminology of sex roles, e.g. Virgin, Vamp.
The semiological method refers to a science of signs; theorists use terminology from linguistics, discussing film as a signifying system, in which, for example, woman functions as “sign.”
The sociological approach was the one the early feminist film critics used, and it continues to be an important method. Concepts such as the distinction made between the domestic (private) sphere of the home, where the wife or mother is positioned, and the work (public) sphere, where the husband belongs, are useful but limited.
But they do not explain how meaning is produced in film, and they tend to blur distinctions between the realm of lived experience (the social formation) and that of representation (images on film).
Semiology attempts to explain how film communicates, how its meaning is produced in a manner analogous to the way a sentence in written language communicates meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure is credited with introducing semiology or the science of signs. The meaning of language, he said, is found not in the words or thoughts of an individual speaker, but in the relation of elements within the sign system itself. He used the word langue to refer to the whole complex language system with its structure of relationships and parole to refer to the level of speech, where the abstract rules of the larger system are put into operation.
Relevance of semiology to the analysis of women in film
Christian Metz extended Saussure’s theories about language to film and wrote a semiotics of the cinema (Metz (1974) Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor (New York, Oxford University Press).
The rules and conventions that structure the discourse are codes; Roland Barthes established a series of codes which literature uses (Barthes (1975) S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, London, Cape), and critics began to apply them to film.
The concept of “code” analyzes how a film works . Barthes has suggested that we live in a world comprised of series of signifying systems of which language, while dominant, is only one.
Sign systems range from clothing, eating habits, sexual habits, to the construction of photographs, advertisements, film images.
For Barthes, film is a sign system that functions largely on the level of myth it has lost its connection to any tangible reference, any object in the real world. (Barthes (1975) Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill & Wang).
A sign (the sign “rose”) can be emptied of its denotative meaning and a new connotative meaning piled onto it. Thus rose becomes signifier for “passion” (a signified), making a totally new sign
It is culture that provides the new meanings, that drains original signs of their denotation and lifts them into a connotation that is culture specific, fitting a certain ideology, a certain set of values, beliefs, ways of seeing.
Barthes (in Mythologies, p. 116) gives the example of a photo in Paris Match of a black soldier saluting the French flag. On the denotative level, that is the meaning of the photo: the soldier is saluting the flag; but on the secondary level of signification, that of culture, ideology, connotation, the meaning is about celebrating French colonialism. As if the colonized people love their governors-oppressors and willingly fight for their cause.
Godard uses in the film Letter to Jane of the Life front page photograph of Jane Fonda with the Vietnamese.
This photograph too has connotation (i.e. ideology); it is emptied of its denotative sign, a white woman with some Asian soldiers in a j jungle setting, and built up into the second level that Barthes calls “myth”. Fonda, with connotations of both film star and radical activist, is in the front of the photograph large, important, given status while in the rear are the anonymous Vietnamese small, bunched together, with connotations of inscrutability, foreignness. the Other. The photograph thus praises the liberality of Jane Fonda. with her position in American culture as sex object and star, in going to visit the “enemy,” who is racially stereotyped.
In cinema woman is a real woman, lifted onto the second level of connotation, myth; she is presented as what she represents for man, not in terms of what she actually signifies. Her discourse (her meanings) is suppressed in favor of discourse structured by patriarchy in which her real signification has been replaced by connotations that serve patriarchy’s needs.
The sentence “A woman is undressing,” or the image of a woman undressing, cannot remain at the denotative level of factual information, but is raised to the level of connotations–her sexuality, her desirability, her nakedness; she is objectified in such a discourse, placed in terms of how she can be used for male gratification. That is how our culture reads such sentences and images, although these meanings are presented as natural, as denotative, because the layering of cultural connotation is masked, hidden.
Our task in looking at Hitchcock films is to unmask (decode) the images, the sign of woman, to see how the meanings that underlie those codes really function.
DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION
On the level of the sign (image, word), ideology works by sliding between connotative and denotative usages of words or images. The Strict, literal definition of an expression (word, image, sign) is not easy to distinguish from its connotative uses (i.e. the suggestive and associative levels). What passes itself off as denotative “natural” meanings may already carry a number of implicit connotations (See the discussion of semiology in definition 11 above.)
ICONOGRAPHY
Ideology is communicated in film is through the specific properties of the shot, i.e. its iconography, mise en scene, composition, dress, gesture, facial expression, focus, lighting.
NARRATIVE: DIEGESIS, AND DISCOURSE
The film narrative combines diegesis and discourse and represents a chain of events occurring in time, in a cause effect relationship. The diegesis is the denotative material of narrative (the Story, i.e. actions, happenings, characters, items of Setting), while the discourse refers to the means of expression (i.e. the use of language and other Sign Systems in a spatio temporal order) rather than to content.
Discourse also contains the conditions of expression, a source of articulation (“I”) and an addressee (“You”).
Codes
The discourse is structured through rules or conventions that semioticians call the code. Cinema employs a complex system of codes pertaining to its heterogeneous levels of expression: codes of representation and editing, acting and narrative, sound, music. and speech. Some of these codes are specific to the cinema (e.g. editing), while some are shared with other forms of art and communication.
17. CINEMATIC VERSUS THE EXTRA CINEMATIC
Levy: Cultural Codes, Artistic Codes, Uniquely Filmic (Cinematic Codes).
Example: The murder of Marion while she takes a bath in Pyscho.
The cinematic refers to what goes is on the screen and to what happens between screen image and spectators.
The extra cinematic refers to discussion about the lives of the director, stars, producers, etc., the production of film in Hollywood, as an institution, the politics of the period when a film was made, the cultural assumptions at the time a film was made.
Theories (A to Z)
Anxiety of Influence (Bloom)
Auteurism
Feminism
Intertextuality
Modernism/Postmodernism
Psychology/Psychoanalysis
Queer Theory
Semiotics
Sociology
Ambiguity
Walter Benjamin:
“Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill.”
Wide openness is not common in mainstream American films. But open-endedness and ambiguity are not the same. Ambiguity implies uncertainty, instead of one reading or plurality of meanings.
Ambiguity may or may not present/encourage demands on the viewers. Ambiguity can mean freedom from concern about what was seen as indefinite, unrealizable, unknowable.
Ambiguity does not necessarily upset assumptions or endanger tranquility.
Usually there’s narrative closure, completeness.
Allegory:
A symbolic method in which stylized characters and situations represent ideas such as justice, death, society.
It was a popular genre in German cinema.
The Birds: Allegory about sexual repression; the first attack prevents the couple from getting together.
The ability to confine viewers in the filmmaker’s vision
Anxiety of Influence
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new “revisionary” or antithetical approach to literary criticism.
Bloom’s thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets.
While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that “the poet in a poet” is inspired to write by reading another poet’s poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak.
Because poets emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets.
Bloom attempts to work out the process by which a small minority of ‘strong’ poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Such an agon, Bloom argues, depends on six revisionary ratios, which reflect Freudian and quasi-Freudian defense mechanisms, as well as tropes of classical rhetoric.
Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.
Emphasis was given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton, Robert Burns, and Edmund Spenser.
Other poets analyzed range from Lucretius and Dante to Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. In The Anxiety of Influence and other early books, Bloom claimed that influence was particularly important for post-enlightenment poets. Conversely, he suggested that influence might have been less of a problem for such poets as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Bloom since has changed his mind, and the most recent editions of The Anxiety of Influence include a preface claiming that Shakespeare was troubled early in his career by the influence of Christopher Marlowe. The book itself is divided into six major categories, called “six revisionary ratios” by Bloom.
They are clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.
Six revisionary ratios
Bloom introduces 6 revisionary ratios, which he consistently applies in this book and another volume, A Map of Misreading.
Clinamen – Bloom defines as “poetic misreading or misprision proper”. The poet makes a swerve away from the precursor in the form of a “corrective movement.” This swerve suggests that the precursor “went accurately up to a certain point”, but should have swerved in the direction that the new poem moves. Bloom took the word clinamen from Lucretius, who refers to swerves of atoms that make change possible.
Tessera – “completion and antithesis.”
The author “completes” his precursor’s work, retaining its terms but meaning them in a new sense, “as though the precursor had failed to go far enough”. The word tessera refers to a fragment that, together with other fragments, reconstitutes the whole; Bloom is referring to ancient mystery cults, who would use tessera as tokens of recognition
Kenosis –Bloom defines this as a “breaking device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions”, in other words “a movement toward discontinuity with the precursor”.
The poet humbles himself, “as though he were ceasing to be a poet”, but does so in such a way as to empty out the precursor poem too, so that the later poet is not deflated as much as may seem. Bloom took the word kenosis from St. Paul, who uses it to refer to Jesus accepting his own reduction from divine to human status.
Daemonization – Bloom defines this as a “movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime”. The author suggests that the powers in the precursor poem actually derive from something beyond it; the poet does so “to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work”. Bloom took the term daemonization from Neoplatonism, where it refers to an adept being aided by an intermediary, who is neither divine nor human.
Askesis – Bloom defines this as a “movement of self-purgation which intends the attainment of a state of solitude”. The author curtails the impression of his-her own “human and imaginative endowment” in order to separate themselves from others and stress his/her own individuality. The poet does this in such a way as to do the same to the precursor, whose limitations and individuality are also emphasized, separating him/her from the later poet. Bloom took the word askesis (asceticism) from the pre-Socratic philosophers
Apophrades – Bloom defines this as the “return of the dead”. The poet, toward the end of his/her life, opens up his poem – this time deliberately rather than naturally – to the precursor’s influence. But this deliberateness creates the uncanny effect that the precursor’s work seems to be derivative of the later poet. Bloom took the word apophrades from the Athenian concept of the days on which the dead return to reinhabit the houses in which they once lived.
John Badham, Saturday Night Fever (Source: Peacock, p. 231)
“Anyone who tells you they’re not influenced by the past or current directors is probably fibbing. It’s almost impossible not to be influenced. Me, I take the attitude that if it’s a good shot and I can use it, I’ll steal it. I have no shame. My goal is to make the best film possible.”
For older Hollywood directors, their artistic reference points included lived experiences as well as those of other movies. For most of today’s directors, the only reference points are other movies and TV shows.
