Philip French, The Observer, Sunday March 14, 2010
The shower scene from Psycho
Janet Leigh in Psycho.
Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho?
Half an hour into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor
Such indelibly iconic moments have been part of moviegoing since the Lumière brothers‘ first public screening of short scenes in December 1895. One of them had the audience recoiling from a train entering a station, another had them chuckling when a cheeky boy tricked a gardener into spraying himself with a hosepipe.
People judge a movie by the strength of its story and overall impact, but ultimately what they remember are individual moments and sequences.
This perhaps reflects the very nature of film, which is a rapid succession of still pictures that provide an illusion of motion.
Until the coming of cassettes and DVDs, few of us were able to see a picture over and over again or re-view a sequence. So we had to replay it in our minds, and naturally we’d often get it wrong.
Which is how “Play it again, Sam” entered the language instead of: “Play it, Sam, play ‘As Time Goes By.”
James Stewart seems to have been thinking of this approach to cinema when he talked to Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: “What you’re doing is… you’re giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget.”
This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, “treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise”, but “what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Canny filmmakers have cottoned on to the idea, like James Cameron, who says: “You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film.”
These moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, if they stick, become as real as any other memory. They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy’s missing half-finger in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel’s first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman’s mysterious box in the same director’s mainstream success Belle de Jour40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablancathat features that line.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venice hotel in Don’t Look Now.
The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: “If they move, kill ’em!”
Citizen Kane
A single favorite moment comes in Citizen Kane, where Kane’s now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphany memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
It’s a moment about remembering a moment, and the great character actor Everett Sloane makes it extremely vivid.
French Connection (1971)–Subway Chase
All About Eve (1950)–Bill’s Birthday
JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (1963) – THE SKELETONS SCENE
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) – THE FINAL SCENE
The Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photograph: Kobal
Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff. After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and the award-winning The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and most recently Glorious 39.
Decades later, people are arguing about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What the ending means to the film. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the fetus – it has passed into cinema folklore. Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick’s film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream “auteur cinema” than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.
I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick’s aspiration to be original. Now it’s been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.
TAXI DRIVER (1976)–MIRROR SCENE
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Photograph: British Film Institute
Chosen by Stephen Woolley, the award-winning producer best known for his collaborations with director Neil Jordan including Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game. Recent projects include How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham. In 2005 he made his directorial debut with Stoned.
I remember seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in Paris in the 70s. The taxi gliding across New York’s wet streets, smoke coming out of the subways, it was all incredibly delicious. It had this thundery Bernard Herrmann score, and when De Niro did his “are you talking to me?” sequence in front of the mirror you suddenly sensed the degree of anger there. It was all bottled up until he explodes with this bravura performance. It’s very clever, very economical, everything concentrated on his eyes.
Sequences like this are not only successful because they are so beautifully created but also because they often come at a point in a film where you begin to realize where it’s going, you think, “oh my god, I know what this is about”. Here you become aware that not only is Travis Bickle schizophrenic but he’s aware of his own schizophrenia. He’s like a genie in a bottle and you’re waiting for him to let the genie out – which he does brilliantly in that horrific sequence later on where he shoots Harvey Keitel’s character and saves Jodie Foster’s.
The scene was improvised but De Niro had tried out a version of it in an earlier film he made with Brian De Palma, I think it’s called Hi Mom! I didn’t see it until years after watching Taxi Driver and I remember thinking “I can’t believe it – the thing he does in Taxi Driver!”
Carrie
REAR WINDOW (1954)–OPENING SCENE
James Stewart in Rear Window. Photograph: Kobal
Chosen by Claire Denis, who made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat. Subsequent films include Good Work and 35 Shots of Rum. Her latest, White Material, is out in the summer.
We don’t have courtyards in France like they do in New York, where Hitchcock’s film is set, but we have street buildings that are set very close to each other. From where I stand in my kitchen or my bedroom I can watch neighbors’ windows very easily. I’m intrigued by voyeurism, about what is behind windows, and often in my films I stage a scene as if I was peeping in from outside.
The situation Hitchcock establishes in the opening scene of Rear Window is the ultimate voyeuristic situation. The character played by James Stewart has broken his leg, has nothing to do but linger behind his window and watch. He is passive but eager to find something – to be a witness of something, or to give his imagination something to chew on. As a spectator in a cinema theatre, you are a sort of prisoner in a chair, like he is.
1 Cinema 101: Scenes–Greatest–Psycho
Research in Progress (May 15, 2021)
Greatest film scenes ever shot
Philip French, The Observer, Sunday March 14, 2010
The shower scene from Psycho
Janet Leigh in Psycho.
Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock’s Psycho?
Half an hour into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor
Such indelibly iconic moments have been part of moviegoing since the Lumière brothers‘ first public screening of short scenes in December 1895. One of them had the audience recoiling from a train entering a station, another had them chuckling when a cheeky boy tricked a gardener into spraying himself with a hosepipe.
People judge a movie by the strength of its story and overall impact, but ultimately what they remember are individual moments and sequences.
This perhaps reflects the very nature of film, which is a rapid succession of still pictures that provide an illusion of motion.
Until the coming of cassettes and DVDs, few of us were able to see a picture over and over again or re-view a sequence. So we had to replay it in our minds, and naturally we’d often get it wrong.
Which is how “Play it again, Sam” entered the language instead of: “Play it, Sam, play ‘As Time Goes By.”
James Stewart seems to have been thinking of this approach to cinema when he talked to Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: “What you’re doing is… you’re giving people little… little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget.”
This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, “treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise”, but “what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he’d lie in the hospital recreating favourite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou.
Canny filmmakers have cottoned on to the idea, like James Cameron, who says: “You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film.”
These moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, if they stick, become as real as any other memory. They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy’s missing half-finger in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel’s first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman’s mysterious box in the same director’s mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.
The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin.
The love at first sight between John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man
The lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.
The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back.
The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach’s Kes.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venice hotel in Don’t Look Now.
The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: “If they move, kill ’em!”
Citizen Kane
A single favorite moment comes in Citizen Kane, where Kane’s now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphany memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
It’s a moment about remembering a moment, and the great character actor Everett Sloane makes it extremely vivid.
French Connection (1971)–Subway Chase
All About Eve (1950)–Bill’s Birthday
JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (1963) – THE SKELETONS SCENE
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) – THE FINAL SCENE
The Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photograph: Kobal
Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff. After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and the award-winning The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and most recently Glorious 39.
Decades later, people are arguing about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What the ending means to the film. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the fetus – it has passed into cinema folklore. Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick’s film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream “auteur cinema” than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.
I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick’s aspiration to be original. Now it’s been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.
TAXI DRIVER (1976)–MIRROR SCENE
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Photograph: British Film Institute
Chosen by Stephen Woolley, the award-winning producer best known for his collaborations with director Neil Jordan including Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game. Recent projects include How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham. In 2005 he made his directorial debut with Stoned.
I remember seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in Paris in the 70s. The taxi gliding across New York’s wet streets, smoke coming out of the subways, it was all incredibly delicious. It had this thundery Bernard Herrmann score, and when De Niro did his “are you talking to me?” sequence in front of the mirror you suddenly sensed the degree of anger there. It was all bottled up until he explodes with this bravura performance. It’s very clever, very economical, everything concentrated on his eyes.
Sequences like this are not only successful because they are so beautifully created but also because they often come at a point in a film where you begin to realize where it’s going, you think, “oh my god, I know what this is about”. Here you become aware that not only is Travis Bickle schizophrenic but he’s aware of his own schizophrenia. He’s like a genie in a bottle and you’re waiting for him to let the genie out – which he does brilliantly in that horrific sequence later on where he shoots Harvey Keitel’s character and saves Jodie Foster’s.
The scene was improvised but De Niro had tried out a version of it in an earlier film he made with Brian De Palma, I think it’s called Hi Mom! I didn’t see it until years after watching Taxi Driver and I remember thinking “I can’t believe it – the thing he does in Taxi Driver!”
Carrie
REAR WINDOW (1954)–OPENING SCENE
James Stewart in Rear Window. Photograph: Kobal
Chosen by Claire Denis, who made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat. Subsequent films include Good Work and 35 Shots of Rum. Her latest, White Material, is out in the summer.
We don’t have courtyards in France like they do in New York, where Hitchcock’s film is set, but we have street buildings that are set very close to each other. From where I stand in my kitchen or my bedroom I can watch neighbors’ windows very easily. I’m intrigued by voyeurism, about what is behind windows, and often in my films I stage a scene as if I was peeping in from outside.
The situation Hitchcock establishes in the opening scene of Rear Window is the ultimate voyeuristic situation. The character played by James Stewart has broken his leg, has nothing to do but linger behind his window and watch. He is passive but eager to find something – to be a witness of something, or to give his imagination something to chew on. As a spectator in a cinema theatre, you are a sort of prisoner in a chair, like he is.