Hardly a day goes by that I don't think about Alfred Hitchcock. I dream of meeting him, but I fear that if that were to happen in an alternate universe (or heaven, I suppose), it might be a rather awkward encounter. I might even feel a bit intimidated. And so, in my dream, I meet someone else first: Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. If she liked you, Alma could be relied upon to grease the wheels of friendship between her guest and the great director. Plus, I hear that she made a mean Beef Beaujolais, so if the meeting was a flop I imagine I'd still have had a wonderful dinner.
Alma's profound, yet generally unsung, contribution to Hitch's films has only recently begun to be acknowledged. As film historian Charles Champlin once wrote, “The Hitchcock touch had four hands and two of them were Alma's.”
According to IMDb.com, she is credited with writing contributions to 29 films for Hitch and other directors. She also served in a variety of other capacities, including editor and assistant director. Like her husband, she understood filmmaking from the ground up. Thanks to her first-rate intellect, coupled with fierce determination, she was a film pioneer in an era when film—not to mention women in the workplace in general—was yet silent. As screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train) says, “Alma was truly a filmmaker. I can sincerely say from personal experience that I don't think Hitch's films would have been as good without Alma.”
Handling continuity for The Mountain Eagle (1927), 5' 0" Alma ascends a stepladder to adjust Bernard Goetzke's hair.
To those who knew her, however, she was content to be Alma, a gracious host and a thoughtful friend. She was a superb cook whose souffles were like her friendship itself: they never failed and always rose to the occasion. If her hand in the Hitchcock touch has been overlooked, it's mainly due to her modesty, which seems to have sprung from deep place of ego-security. She simply had no need for that kind of attention.
By contrast, Hitch seems to have harbored a great deal of insecurity and fear. Yet, his public never really knew about that. For that we can also thank Alma, who was his staunchest defender and supporter and the only person to whom he revealed his vulnerable side. Because his films deal with the dark matter that resides in human nature, critics and fans alike have long assumed that Hitch himself was a bit “mogo on the gogo”—an armchair diagnosis that shows up Spellbound (1945). If you want an idea of what Alma's view of him might have been like, pop in a DVD of that movie. Gregory Peck plays “J.B.,” a man stripped of his identity and accused of being a homicidal maniac. As her name aptly implies, Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) refuses to succumb to such thinking, even when the learned Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekov) pooh-poohs her defense of him, saying, “We are speaking of a schizophrenic, not a valentine.” She replies, “We are speaking of a man.” With those six words, she gathers up her interlocutor's collection of Freud's writing and hurls it back at him. I see that as Alma's rejoinder to hamfisted biographers who would conjure up demons in Hitch's psyche where there are none.
Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, wrote a memoir about her mother, called Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. When you finish this post, do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy. It remains as good a view of this extraordinary woman we will likely ever get. Here are a few excerpts:
Whitfield Cook:
“I remember meeting Pat, Hitch and Alma for the first time at the exact same time. I went to [their] house and the first thing I realized was that they were all real people—no Hollywood stuff, very real and very, very nice.... I was quite crazy about Alma because she was so gentle and yet so strong. I don't think she cared that people thought she was working in the shadow of Hitch. She adored Hitch and she loved working with him.... Alma was very short but extremely attractive, and part of that attraction came through her intelligence and warmth.... One thing I did notice about her was that she never talked about herself and she never talked about the past. She had been a pioneer in the silent era, but she never made a point of mentioning it.”
Connie Erickson (wife of favored Hitchcock Production Designer) on meeting the Hitchcocks for the first time, at what the Hitchcocks referred to as “The Ranch” in Santa Cruz:
“[There were] colorful hanging baskets of begonias everywhere. Only the English can do so well with their gardens and flowers—a built-in talent. Being so young at the time, I was a bit nervous, but once we got to the Hitchcock home, I felt at ease and we spent a couple of delightful days, eating (Alma cooked the meals and Hitch chose the appropriate wine) and relaxing. Alma was the perfect hostess because she was so simple and understated.
“Years later, I flew to London with Pat for the Hitchcock hundredth birthday celebration. We took the train to Nottingham where Alma was born.... For some strange reason, Nottingham seemed familiar to me. It was then that I realized that Alma had recreated the beautiful feeling of the city where she grew up in the house in Santa Cruz. Nottingham, I found out, is known as the flower city of England. Like in the Santa Cruz home, there were flowers everywhere. And no doubt, Alma was one of them.”
Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (Marnie):
Although she was opinionated and contributed a great deal to any conversation, Alma never talked about the past. And she never pushed herself forward. The only ego she displayed was in her presence—she was really there, she did not disappear.
Nurse Betty Losher, who cared for Hitch in his final days:
“The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. H was a respectful, collaborative, loving and protective one. For instance, after one of the drafts of The Short Night [(Hitch's final screenplay, never filmed)] was completed, Mr. H brought a bound copy to his wife. He asked if she would read it the next day and she said she would. I remember the next morning, while Mr. H was at the 'stuuuudio,' she read the entire script, stopping only for lunch. She finished it after tea and waited for him. I was with her in the main room when he came home. He walked straight through the foyer to see his wife. 'Well, what do you think?' In her soft voice but loud enough for him to hear her, she replied, 'Quite good. Quite good.' To my surprise, he completely fell apart and wept.... The next morning, I overheard Mrs. H ask, 'Whom do you see as the detective?' He immediately replied: 'Peter Lorre,' followed by, 'But we don't have him anymore.'”
Alfred Hitchcock cut a large figure in more ways than one. Yet, Alma lived in no one's shadow. She was and always will be Alma Reville. With begonias and Champagne, Happy Birthday, Alma.
“During its 400-year history, the novel has missed many of its possibilities; it has left many great opportunities unexplored, many paths forgotten, calls unheard.”—Milan Kundera, “An Introduction to a Variation”
Hitch slips on a pair of headphones to direct Anny Ondra on the set of his first sound film, Blackmail (1929). From the beginning, he exploited the audio track's Expressionistic potential.
The war hero crushes the leading lady against his chest as rain gently falls on her creamy, blemish-free cheeks. They kiss. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a 100-piece orchestra swoops in to deliver an orgasmic crescendo. That's non-diegetic music for you. Always wandering in, squelching the realism of a movie scene. You can see, though, why film makers love it. Such music helps cue the audience how to feel about or react to a scene. It's an easy way to manipulate an audience's emotions—if that's all you want it to do. But what if you want a deeper level of engagement that moves your audience to participate in the movie more actively? In that case, non-diegetic musical underscoring could be a barrier to such intimacy. Alfred Hitchcock understood that naturally occurring sounds are more suited to putting an audience inside the film—that is, to putting them through a “pure film” experience.
Interestingly, three of Hitchcock's films whose settings were restricted to a single location—Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954)—restrict the use of non-diegetic music to the opening and closing credits. The rest of the time, the only music you hear comes from within the movie.
In the 1944 movie, Joe Spencer's (Canada Lee's) penny whistle helps relieve the tedium of being lost at sea. Other characters take turns singing as well. Hitch also takes godlike control over the weather to provide a naturalistic soundtrack. These organic sounds make it easy to forget that they do double duty on behalf of both the setting and the the story. Thus, while the seeming intent of that solo music is to boost the spirits of the castaways (as well as the audience), it ironically draw attention to just how isolated the tiny crew is on that vast ocean. Likewise, the sea and wind sounds provide a textured, nuanced point and counterpoint to the travails of the castaways. For instance, the sea waves are temporarily hushed as the castaways pause in mournful silence to honor the watery burial of Mrs. Higgins' (Heather Angel's) baby. Later, though, as capitalist shipping tycoon Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) prepares to beat socialist John Kovac (John Hodiak) at a round of poker, the Atlantic wind heads off this unfair monetary trickle-up with a gust that blows their makeshift cards away. The irony is so strong that “Ritt” blames Kovac for what you can really call an act of God. I take this scene to mean that, though the strong may prevail over the weak in this life, there is a greater justice at work that levels all humans. (Of course, that is the implicit theme of the entire movie: the group of characters in the lifeboat are a microcosm of society.) But it all happens so naturally that you can simultaneously laugh at the irony, wince at Ritt's loss (which he can well afford), and rejoice at Kovac's escape from financial ruin without feeling artificially forced to perceive a “moral” to the incident. Or you can just watch the movie and let the weather effects pull you deeper into the setting.
Anticipating the musicless killing of Gromek in Torn Curtain, the beating to death of Willy in Lifeboat is rendered more realistic by the absence of music. The brutality of the characters who set upon the German like a "pack of dogs," as Hitch described them, is brought into relief by the absence of music. The sea and wind are as passive as the camera itself, which stands at a discreet distance from the violence.
In this regard, part of the beauty of Hitch's films is that they let viewers choose between finding a deeper meaning or simply enjoying them for entertainment. To Hitch (and for me, as a Hitchcock Geek), both ways of looking at his movies are acceptable. Though some critics, notably Andre Bazin, call Hitch to task for the tyranny of his camera that only allows for one set of perceptions, his themes allow for a variety of conflicting interpretations. That multiplicity was misunderstood in 1944 when the supposed propaganda film Lifeboat was scorned for sympathizing with the Axis powers. Such is the two-edged nature of Hitchcockian “pure film,” which brings life in all of its rich contradiction to the screen.
Brandon and Phillip's isolation from society in Rope is accented by their swank apartment with its lofty Manhattan view displayed through a large window that resembles the framework of a gilded birdcage or hothouse.
Rope takes place inside the apartment of a gay couple who push their rarefied Ivy League intellectualism too far, committing murder as a Nietzschean experiment and following the act up with a macabre celebratory dinner served from the wooden chest that conceals their victim. Logically enough, each of the dinner guests arrive with the sound of a doorbell. Its shrill ping punctuates the scene, in effect replacing the visual stimulation of a cut. An exception is made, however, for James Stewart, who quietly lets himself in. In one of my favorite star entrances, he simply appears, like an inspecting angel, when the camera dollies out to a wide shot, as unannounced as one of Hitch's own cameos. The audience feels surprised, caught as unaware as Brandon, who scrambles, stuttering, to regain his composure. By setting up a rhythm of doorbells and then flipping it with Rupert's silent entrance, the audience feels the movie right alongside the characters. This, too, is “pure film.”
Brandon and Phillip are far above “the madding crowd” and when their apartment windows are shut, the silence emphasizes their social disconnection. Helen Cox and David Neumeyer note in their essay “The Musical Function of Sound in Three Films by Alfred Hitchcock” that noises from the street below are heard three times: following David's murder; after Brandon's obnoxious defense of murder as an art for the privileged few; and at the end of the film. Like air hissing out of an escape valve, street noise is used to release tension from these scenes. In the final case, Rupert opens the window, fires the gun into the air and for about two minutes we sit with him, Brandon and Phillip in a wordless funk as the latter plinks his final notes at the piano over the distant hum of traffic and voices and approaching sirens, which drift upward and curl about the room. For Brandon and Phillip, that cathartic burst of fresh air also carries the scent of their own impending death as murderers.
Rear Window is one of the greatest masterpieces of audio design in all film. Not only is all the sound diegetic (except for a musical overture that bookends the movie), but it all seems to waft in through L. B. Jefferies' (James Stewart's) apartment apartment window, keeping audiences rooted in his point of view. With most of Hitch's films you can turn off the sound and follow only the imagery. With Rear Window, however, you can turn off the picture and the main dialogue and still get a strong sense of mood. Yet, like the weather in Lifeboat, that ambient noise serves a further purpose.
Hitchcock wasn't just a realist. His background in German cinema made him a lifelong Expressionist. Those commonplace neighborhood sounds—distant conversations, the tinkling laughter of a house party, Greenwich Village traffic, a yapping dog—reflect off the walls of L. B. Jefferies' courtyard community, echoing his own state of mind. If the scenes he witnesses in his window are a projection of his own inner state, these noises are its soundtrack. When Jeff overhears the bitter sniping that takes place between Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald, or the wife's nagging “Ha-a-a-a-rry” from the newlyweds' apartment, it echoes his own fears about commitment and marriage.
Early in the film, the afternoon's drowsy white noise of neighborhood life aurally approximates Jeff's own slumber as he takes a break from peeping on his neighbors. Though he may feel omnipotent, with a front-row view into his neighbors' apartments, he isn't God. And so later, while sleeping, he misses seeing a crucial detail: Mr. Thorwald leaving his apartment with a mysterious woman who is not his wife. This beautiful panning shot is scored to the anodyne sound of steady rain and the ghostly call of a distant foghorn. It is as though Jeff, whose suspicions have been aroused by Thorwald's late night trips, has subconsciously willed his neighbor into the role of murderer.
Nothing could have been more natural in Greenwich Village in the 1950s than to overhear a composer laboring over a new tune. So it makes perfect sense that Jeff would overhear that. Yet, murder mystery aside, the real story of Rear Window is about Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who adores Jeff, who, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with marriage. That incomplete tune (and its writer's struggle to make something worthwhile out of it) stands in for their relationship—particularly Lisa's side of the story. Every time the tune drifts in through the window, Lisa's ears perk up. Jeff, however, is constantly annoyed by it. Enchanted by its romantic melody, Lisa remarks that it's “almost as if it were being written especially for us,” while, Jeff quips: “No wonder he's having so much trouble with it.” By the end of the movie, when the composer has finished it (and Jeff and Lisa seem to have found a way to unite in something that looks like love), it's a forgone conclusion that that song should be titled “Lisa.”
The point is, in a Hitchcock film, incidental sounds aren't just part of the fabric of realism. They aren't just part of the story, they are the story, another implement in Hitch's “pure film” toolkit.
In 1888, art critic Walter Pater wrote that "all art aspires towards the condition of music" in that music unifies subject matter and form. By means of editing, camera movement, long and short takes, visual design, sound design all the rest of “the technical ingredients,” Hitch's works achieve that musical quality. In a tribute to the maestro, written in 1963, Truffaut remarked that Hitch understood cinema to be “an art of sustained impression, like music. And, like music, it is subject to laws of progression and rhythm, which, for example, have nothing to do with the laws of writing a novel. Many films resemble novels. Those of Alfred Hitchcock resemble a symphonic concert.” That is as good a definition of “pure cinema” as you will find anywhere. Hitch's films don't merely aspire, they attain the “condition of music.”
Hitch achieved that mastery by the most honorable means possible: he paid his dues. In the 1920s, he cut his directorial teeth using mostly stationary cameras to create soundless films shot in grainy, low-resolution black and white. With those basic materials, he was able to move audiences like few directors then or since.
As time went on, he accepted each technological advancement—sound, improved film stock, color, 3-D, Vistavision—with skeptical aloofness. Understanding the value of such “enhancements,” he also comprehended their limitations and often longed for those innocent days of the silent era, when you had to no choice but to work in “pure film.” Embedded in his tissues was the knowledge that the essential capability of film, its magic, lies, not in this or that technological capability, but in its very nature: that it can flow through a projector and create a sense of reality on an otherwise blank screen. As the world's foremost practitioner of pure cinema, he knew when to cut away and when to leave his audience alone in the dark. He knew there was a time to speak and time to keep quiet, passive as a camera, taking it all in.
Practically every film Alfred Hitchcock made was in the service of “pure cinema.” Why, then, did he occasionally eschew the established cinematic grammar of editing and montage in favor of long takes? Were these “experiments” deviations from his mission to create “pure cinema,” or were they artistic decisions made in its service? I believe the latter is the case. Here's why.
Hitchcock caught the film bug at around the same age I was when I caught the Hitchcock bug—he was just a teenager. It was 1913 and he, like everyone else of that time, had never seen anything like it. To that generation, it wasn't “only a movie.” It was a motion picture, the result of a series of scientific advancements that projected an uncannily convincing illusion of movement on a bare white wall. In those days, there was no such science as film editing, which meant there was no montage and no close up. In fact, the camera rarely moved at all. It just sat there, unblinking, devouring the action that took place before its lens. Those early cameras were as passive as the audiences they served.
You could say that it was an age of innocence for the camera, the era before that machine became aware of its power and freedom; that it could turn its attention elsewhere via editing; that it could select its viewpoint by moving in for a close-up. Eventually the camera realized that with montage it could treat actors like cattle, knocking veteran stage performers down a rung or two, even making them seem to portray emotions they never intended, turning the meekest of them into coldblooded killers. Perhaps even more miraculously, the camera could make an audience think just about anything its handlers chose.
Still, before all those techniques were discovered, the essential magic of the movies was born fully formed when Georges Méliès (1861 - 1938) first began amazing audiences with magic shows whose tricks were impossible in real life but which were all in the day's work of an inventive film maker.
Before Pee Wee's playhouse and The Wizard of Oz, there was Méliès' The Man with the Rubber Head (1902).
The reason I bring this history up is that this is the world of movies to which Hitch was introduced during the formative years of his youth. I believe he tried to create that sense of wonder, using, among other things, surreal imagery, a sense of the uncanny and, as I hope to demonstrate here, "pure film."
Hitch was once asked how he felt about the new film schools that started to pop up in the late 1960s. His answer offers up a clue as to what “pure film” meant for him. He said that it was fine—“only on condition that they teach cinema since the era of Méliès and that the students learn how to make silent films.” The era of silent film history to which Hitchcock pegged his proposed curriculum is telling. You might think he would have those undergrads start with the predecessor he most admired, D. W. Griffiths, but he went further back in time, though not to the absolute beginning. Méliès didn't invent the motion picture, but he was the first to come along and discover its magical properties. He pioneered the use of special effects to take his audiences to wonderlands of his own making, where flowers bloomed before your eyes and you could even fly to the moon and back without leaving your theater seat. For Hitchcock, that was the origin of the art of filmmaking—that age of innocence before the advent of sound and montage. That was the birth of “pure film.”
Viewed in retrospect, Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon is really nothing more than actors clowning in front of a camera, with some ingenious special effects thrown in. But that's the point. The joie de vivre of pre-montage silent cinema is as frothy and simple as whipped cream.
Soon enough, along came the 1920s and the theories of montage developed by Russian film directors, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and his fellow countryman Lev Kuleshov, whose famous experiments pretty much formed the basis for his editing scheme for Rear Window.
Hitchcock schools Fletcher Markle on the Kuleshov effect.
But Hitch was nothing, if not an innovator. He knew that the Russian cookbook was only one of any number of ways to shoot a movie. With its series of long takes spliced together to appear to be essentially one long take, Rope was his greatest effort to create “pure film” using other means. I believe his approach was also an attempt to return to the wonder years of early silent cinema when all movies were shot in a single take. In 1934, Hitch said in an interview, "I think cutting has definite limitations. Its best use is in violent subjects. That is why the Russians made such effective use of it, because they were dealing with violence, and they could pile shock on shock by means of editing."
The long takes of Rope (1948)and Under Capricorn (1949), as well as his other films to a lesser extent, comprise a qualitatively different and new way of 'writing with the camera.' They are a breed apart from the long takes of other directors, such as those of Orson Welles, who employed the technique for theatrical, not purely cinematic purposes.
Those two movies are remarkable artistic and technical achievements, but thanks to their critical and financial failure, they resulted in the dissolution of Hitchcock's production company, Transatlantic Pictures. After an up-and-down stretch (critically and financially, but not creatively) in the early fifties, in 1954 Hitch ran for cover to direct Dial M for Murder -- a surefire hit in 3-D. That bumpy ride proved to be prelude to an extraordinary string of a triumphs never matched by another director, beginning with Rear Window (1954) and ending with Psycho (1960).
And then came the early 1960s: The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) were as self-consciously "arty" as Rope and Under Capricorn, and they also flopped -- though, not as spectacularly. Much has been written about Hitch's supposed directorial hubris on these films and that the failure of Marnie, in particular, was a Waterloo-like defeat for him. The current thinking is that high praise from the critics at Cahiers du Cinema, along with François Truffaut's almost sycophantic bond to Hitchcock, went to the director's head. (This, despite having endured decades of cycles of praise and dismissal.) He has been criticized for losing his perspective, believing the he didn't need stars in his films, because the Hitchcock name alone was enough to draw audiences into the theater. Let's address that.
While he obviously relished the attention from the French critics, I doubt that he allowed it to inflate his already secure ego to the degree that it greatly affected his artistic choices: there's no doubt that he was always humble before his muse. Further, after decades of unrelenting self-publicity, along with the success of recent films and his TV show, he had, indeed, become a star in his own right. He had worked for years to get to a point where he no longer needed expensive, spotlight-grabbing A-list stars in his films. With Psycho, he proved that he didn't need his legendary team of brilliant technicians and that a TV production crew could do just fine. That's not an ego trip: it's what he had been working toward for decades.
Putting the full weight of his creative energy into those movies, he'd hoped that they would be regarded as his greatest achievements. So you can imagine how crushing it was for him to see them fail. It was Transatlantic Pictures all over again. Still Hitchcock was a survivor.
The more "conventional" films of his that followed -- Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) -- have been devalued, alternatively as the work of a chastened creative genius; a lion in winter shackled by his fiscal obligations to Universal Studios, in which he held a substantial equity position. Most damningly, biographer Donald Spoto wrote that they were the work of a man who had “lost all interest in his women, his actors, his stories – indeed, in movies.” Um, yeah.... With all due respect to these astute writers, I have to politely disagree. True, Hitch's age and the loss of some of his longtime collaborators in the mid-sixties were real setbacks. Studio bosses cramped his style and killed a pet project or two, but none of that was new to him. That's Hollywood. With Torn Curtain and Topaz he was simply repeating the pattern of the fifties (and, early, the thirties, which I haven't yet mentioned): after a pair of failures, he returned to a tried-and-true formula, the spy thriller. Those two movies have so much to offer that I fear they are unfairly overlooked -- particularly as gems of "pure film."
To be honest, Torn Curtain suffers from wooden performances by Julie Andrews and Paul Newman -- she looks like she'd rather be dodging Nazis with the Von Trapps and he looks like he forgot to bring a roll of Tums antacid to the set. Some of the expository dialogue makes me wonder if Hitch even showed up to work on those days. The music is awful and Bernard Herrmann's unused score could well have saved the film. But, even for those flaws, the film still carries more heft than most anything else you might find coming out of Hollywood. For starters, fellow Hitchcock geek Ken Mogg interprets the "fire and ice" imagery of the opening credits, in which a red flame is set against apparition-like images of some of the characters to represent, respectively, Schopenhauerian Will and Representation. Who knows whether or not Hitch was literally thinking of the German philosopher (though the film's title could refer to the veil that separates Will from Representation), Ken's observation is spot on!
Torn Curtain still offers up profound moments of "pure film." The famed murder of Gromek is Hitch's most harrowing death scene up until that time, and I never tire of watching it. But check out the perversely beautiful chase scene below. It might be the oddest chase you'll ever see on film. It's also one of the most compelling. Set in the exquisite Greco-Roman beauty of the East Berlin Museum, the scene reprises Scottie's visits to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Vertigo -- but this time on a hit of crack. The narrative is underscored, not by lush orchestration, but by the minimalist tap-tapping of two pairs of shoes. You wish Paul Newman could stop and enjoy those masterpieces on its walls, but he is as unstoppable as the movie itself. Boom. "Pure film."
But getting back to the long take. Midcentury audiences weren't as gullible as those in Méliès' day. They knew that editing can conceal as well as reveal. Montage can deceive. Thus, although Hitch found (the hard way?) that long takes can't be employed exclusively, he recognized that they served his quest for “pure film” very well and he never fully abandoned the practice. The uninterrupted gaze of the long take confers a sense of unfiddled-with truth. That's why Hitch encouraged its use in the production of documentaries that depicted the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, knowing that audiences might not otherwise believe their very eyes.
That's also why he employed a long take in this murder scene from Frenzy in which we, alongside the camera, balefully excuse ourselves from the scene of the crime:
Skipping Topaz for now (with regrets -- it's one of my favorite Hitchcock movies), Frenzy (1972) was a return to form for Hitch -- his last masterpiece. But time was running out for the old man. Following Family Plot (1976), he died with his boots on, devising new situations and plot twists to the last. I believe that if he'd lived another 10 years, he would have recovered from the missteps of the 1960s. That was his creative cycle.
Long takes have a conviction, a presence, a specific gravity that a heavily edited sequence might lack. They keep the audience rooted in the story, not just as an observer, but as a participant in the drama, inexorably drawn along with the unfolding story, with the film itself. For instance, in Lady Henrietta Flusky's (Ingrid Bergman's) nine-minute confession in Under Capricorn, the audience hears the truth about her past at the same time as her confessor and friend, Charles Adair (Michael Wilding). This intimate scene is a direct counterpoint to their first meeting, in which the long take makes us feel the gulf between the drug-addled, hallucination-prone Hattie and the rest of the world. (When you see the scene for the first time, her alienation seems to stem from her weakness; when you see it the second time, her isolation is made more poignant because we are aware of the her essential nobility and of the shameful secret she carries.) The long take in the confession scene allows us to feel Charles' feelings as he felt them—shock and, ultimately, compassion as her story comes out.i That effect—making the audience experience its feelings in tandem with the rest of the characters, a trait Hitchcock called "putting the audience through it"—is a hallmark of Hitchcockian “pure film.”
Okay, so much for editing and montage as “indispensable” aspects of pure film. (As if you haven't yet had enough, for more of my thoughts on the long take, read my post about Hitch as the compleat film maker.) How did Hitch use sound to pull his audience into the pure film experience? Come on back and read the exciting conclusion to my thoughts on Hitchcock and “pure film.”
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i When Bergman, who disliked performing long takes, saw the finished product she recognized that it added power to her show-stopping performance.
ii Hitch later admitted that it was a mistake to reject montage editing, though he also defended himself, explaining to Truffaut that “the mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice. In other words, I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importance within a given episode.”
Hitch and Alma's wedding day, December 2, 1926
