Manna for film nerds. Not the usual talking-heads career encomium, but a well considered discussion/ deconstruction of the shower scene from PSYCHO/’60. A dissection of a dissection; four minutes that changed Hollywood trajectory & Hollywood technique. (The title refers to the 78 camera set ups and 52 cuts in the scene.) And while a few celebrity ringers are in the mix, no one bloviates. (Well, no one but Peter Bogdanovich who has to pull out his tired Hitchcock impersonation. But then, he’d long earned the right.) Yet what’s truly unique about the shower sequence, and something that gets short shrift amid the hows & whys of this or that detail, is how the horror in it remains shocking to this day. After sixty years of escalating graphic gore & sadistic sensationalism, the abstract precision of light, sound, music & movement still the stuff of nightmares & artistic inspiration. Nicely abetted here by contrasting John L. Russell’s crisp, Murnau-influenced b&w cinematography against the richly saturated TechniColor Robert Burks was shooting for Hitchcock before & after. (Plus snippets showing how disastrously Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake combined the two looks.) And if Hitch himself always stuck to his view of PSYCHO as a ‘fun’ film (or did so in public), fellow director George Cukor, an exact contemporary, both born in 1899, and great admirer, put it better than anyone does here when he said: ‘Oh, he’s so perverse! He’d never tell you what he really thinks. Never, never! I have the greatest respect and admiration for him, but he will never tell you! He’s absolutely impassive and says ridiculous things in this solemn way.’ That last idea largely avoided in this little thesis film.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: PSYCHO the obvious choice. Along with Hitchcock’s underrated return to form in FRENZY. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/frenzy-1972.html
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