Vertigo

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

André Crous

Sadly, another case where it is (far) better to read the book than watch the movie.

hitchcock-truffautUSA/France
2*

Director:
Kent Jones
Screenwriters:
Kent Jones
Serge Toubiana
Directors of Photography:
Nick Bentgen, Daniel Cowen, Eric Gautier, Mihai Malaimare Jr., Lisa Rinzler and Genta Tamaki

Running time: 80 minutes

It may share a title with one of the most accessible studies of a filmmaker ever published, but in his documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, director Kent Jones (assisted here on the screenplay by Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana) forgot to take a page from the very book with which it shares a title. As a result, it fails to present its facts, few and far between though they may be, in a compelling way.

What we end up with here is a messy assortment of thoughts and reflections on the Master of Suspense, countless extracts from his films (none of which is indicated to the uninitiated) and a mish-mash of audio excerpts taken from the legendary eight-day interview back in 1962 between the young but ultimately immensely influential French film critic/director François Truffaut and the ageing sage who had been thrilling the masses for many decades with his tales of murder but whose status as one of the cinema’s great auteurs was still underappreciated, Alfred Hitchcock.

In the film, we meet 10 directors, among whom only David Fincher proclaims a personal connection with the book, first published in 1966, which contains a wide-ranging discussion between the two cinephiles of all of Hitchcock’s films up to that point, just four short of the ultimate tally by the time he passed away in 1980. The conversation, which sadly was not filmed but only recorded, was facilitated by the bilingual Helen Scott, who gets only one shout-out here without any further information about her. Truffaut spoke no English, and Hitchcock spoke no French, so Scott interpreted back and forth between them from morning till late afternoon every day for more than a week.

Besides Fincher, some of the most loquacious speakers here are French directors Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, with speed talker Martin Scorsese also called upon to share his views of Hitchcock’s most famous works. However, it is wholly unclear why these particular filmmakers and their ilk, including Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the little-known James Grey, are recounting their impressions. Had we listened to someone like Brian de Palma, or Steven Spielberg, perhaps we could have learned something about tension, art and entertainment, but while these particular filmmakers are amiable enough, it remains a mystery why they were chosen to share their opinions of Hitchcock. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, they’re no François Truffaut.

Time and again, we return to the question of whether Hitchcock was an entertainer or an artist, a doubt he even expressed to Truffaut. Predictably, the film leans very heavily towards the latter, as was the intention of Truffaut at the time: Along with his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma film monthly, he praised the Hollywood-based British director for being the force that drives every one of his films, in other words, for being an “auteur”.

According to Truffaut, the work of an auteur might not always be good, but it is always better than the work of a non-auteur (he used the examples of French filmmakers Jean Renoir and Jean Delannoy as representatives of these two respective kinds of directors).

Hitchcock/Truffaut, unsure of its own raison d’être, turns towards armchair psychoanalysis in its second half, as the directors, most of whom are too young to have met Hitchcock, speculate about the fetish objects in Hitch’s films. Fortunately, we are spared any significant amount of discussion about the blonde actresses he employed, but the topic of dreams does come up, and it is truly puzzling that there is no mention of Spellbound, which was Hitchcock’s big “dream” film and also dealt very cynically with psychoanalysis.

Most frustrating is an extended sequence that encompasses an analysis of Vertigo, during which we learn precious little, except that the film works not because of its narrative, which is deeply flawed and more than a little silly, but because it is, in the words of Scorsese, “poetry”. Such bland statements about Hitchcock the artist, as opposed to Hitchcock the mass entertainer, bring absolutely nothing to our understanding of the director’s undeniable appeal.

What would seem to be the most important point of discussion is one that is mentioned all too briefly: Hitchcock’s problem with realism, especially following the brutal reality of World War II.

Scorsese admits that Vertigo has a “spirit of realism”, but that the film cannot possibly be described as realistic. This is in fact a larger issue in the director’s works and ultimately led to his ex-communication from the world of entertainment because of his stubborn refusal to renounce outdated techniques such as rear projection. This gimmick, often utilised in studio pictures during the age of black-and-white cinema, made Marnie — released in 1964 in between the French New Wave and in the middle of the British New Wave, both of which focused on the lives of people in the middle or the bottom half of society and whose films were shot on location — look downright laughable.

Truffaut, who was just 30 years of age at the time he conducted the interview in 1962, is always a magnetic speaker, his enthusiasm for Hitchcock palpable, and it is a shame Jones only very superficially compares an incident in the Frenchman’s début feature, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) with a famous story Hitchcock often told. But he fails to share with the audience, for example, that Truffaut asked himself “What would Hitch do?” when he shot the suspenseful scene in which the rebellious Antoine Doinel’s mother shows up at school to confront him about his lies.

It is all well and good to assemble a few friends to talk about a man who was a giant in the industry before they came along, but this film does not contribute to a deeper understanding of the man, his life or his films. At best, it may serve as a starting point for students who need to write a film review for their high-school English class. Those who did not know anything about Hitchcock or Truffaut before watching the film might very well learn the basics, but for everyone else, this film offers less than the bare minimum. Go out and buy the book instead.

Viewed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2015

Vertigo (1958)

André Crous

VertigoUSA
3.5*

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters: 
Alec Coppel
Samuel A. Taylor
Director of Photography: 
Robert Burks

Running time: 128 minutes

I’ve always considered Vertigo to be one of those acclaimed works of art that are accessible and even enjoyable from a distance, like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but if you try to approach them from the beginning and have an immersive experience, the effect is often frustration.

I understand the film. It is about obsession. But Hitchcock doesn’t approach his material with the intention of having us share the experience of the main character, Scottie, and obsessing with him; rather, he chooses to subtly warn us of the dangers that lie ahead if Scottie stubbornly proceeds along this path. We know that things won’t end well, because the whole atmosphere of the film is indicative of this inevitability.

Now, I realise that many viewers would disapprove of my slight dissing of one of Hitchcock’s best-known films, a film that even managed to reach the No. 2 spot on the coveted Critics’ Top 10 Poll of the British film magazine, Sight and Sound, in 2002, but let me tell you why the film doesn’t work for me.

In this film about obsession and illusion, Hitchcock’s primary concern should have been the viewer’s identification with Scottie, played by Jimmy Stewart, including his point of view. Unfortunately, the issue of point of view is the film’s big flaw.

Consider the following scenes and the shots out of which they consist:

1) The famous restaurant scene, where Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time. He is seated at the bar and looks to his far right, where Madeleine is seated at a table, her back turned towards him. Hitchcock introduces Madeleine by first focusing on Scottie, then panning to her and physically tracking in onto her. This shot is intercut with a shot of Scottie at the bar, followed by his point of view – a shot that contains Madeleine, filmed from his position. Later in the scene, when Madeleine leaves the restaurant, she pauses behind Scottie, whose face is turned away from her. Her face is framed from the side, we only see the right side of her face against the red backdrop of the wall behind her, but Scottie doesn’t see anything.

2) In the moments before Madeleine’s apparent suicide, Scottie runs after her. At first, he looks up at the Mission’s bell tower and we get a shot that we perceive to be his point of view. Madeleine runs into the church, followed by Scottie. There is a chase up the staircase, but Scottie looks down and is struck by his acrophobia (vertigo). Madeleine leaves through a trapdoor at the top and we see her, through an opening in the wall, falling back down to earth, having supposedly jumped to her death.

The first scene, as I described it, is mostly from an external perspective, except for the one or two brief shots taken from Scottie’s position at the bar, which may be labelled his point-of-view shots. But in a later scene in Scottie’s car, he flips through the museum catalogue and while looking at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, there is a flash, very clearly meant to be subjective, of Madeleine’s face as she stood behind him. This shot is impossible since he could not witness this particular image, having had his face turned away when it happened.

After Scottie’s first visit to Judy, the actress who played Madeleine, Judy, has a flashback to the events at the Mission. She “sees” the same shot that we had attributed to Scottie, namely the bell tower, and there are other external shots that seem altogether inappropriate in a flashback scene that ultimately ought to be very subjective.

Hitchcock’s failure to orientate his film successfully with regard to its presentation of perspective creates fluidity that does not allow the viewer to align himself/herself with the character of Scottie. However, one scene that is successful in this respect is the scene at the cemetery, in which Hitchcock often intercuts a lateral tracking shot, meant to indicate Scottie’s trajectory, with a reverse tracking shot that frames Scottie himself moving forward, towards us.

The film’s obsession with power and death, especially towards the end of the story, becomes a bit tedious, and while Scottie’s intentions are quite clear (he wants to get the woman back whom he loved and for whose death he feels responsible – even though he’s not responsible and calling their relationship “love” is a bit grand), Judy seems masochistically determined to endure Scottie’s near-abusive behaviour when he restricts her choices in clothes, hairstyles, and so on. This aspect of the film alienates the viewer from both characters because the idea of “conditional love” is very unappealing.

I found one particular scene’s editing frustratingly bad, namely the scene in which Scottie, in his car, pursues Madeleine’s car through San Francisco. There is a very clear lack of continuity from one shot to the next and generally feels like a choppy editing job, with the car turning in one direction while the driver is clearly turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction. Jimmy Stewart has a less pathetic character than in many of his other films, but he still seems to be one step behind the viewer. Also, being a former policeman, Scottie should be able to follow someone (in the cemetery, in an art museum) without being spotted. But the only reason he didn’t seem to be spotted is that Madeleine/Judy knew he was there and pretended not to notice. Such bad tailing diminished his value as a character in my eyes.

But the film will be praised for its meticulous attention to detail, and the choice of colour (in particular, the various traces of green) the film is beyond reproach. My favourite scene, in terms of the character’s interaction with the soundtrack, is the scene with the sequoias: Bernard Herrman’s music is almost distressingly calm and quiet, even though Scottie is aggressively interrogating Madeleine. But in a film of this kind, dealing with real and illusory psychological problems, his music is at times unnecessarily loud and screeching – just consider the moment when Madeleine leaps into San Francisco Bay.

Vertigo is cold and analytical; a more immersive approach would have suited the material better, especially as a film. Kim Novak is wonderful, and the design of the film is well-chosen (the many instances of rear projection may be read as another hint at the real/illusory dichotomy of Madeleine’s character). But it is far less enjoyable than Hitchcock’s other great films, and for me, Vertigo will always be more of a cerebral joy than an engaging work of fiction.