STUDY TASK 5 - MODERNISM

The aim of this task is to find a minimum of 5 graphic designers for each lecture we have received on the program this year. The aim is to have a catalog of 45+ graphic designers, along with a rationale of why they fit into that lecture/movement/topic and relevant imagery and quotes to further reinforce the point.

I'm going to make a start on this and try and take my time with this, hopefully doing one lecture or two in each sitting so I can soak all the information in more. Hopefully I will take something away from it and produce a pretty useful catalog of designers for the future, instead of rushing through it.

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MODERNISM

Lecture notes(click)

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer was an influential Austrian American graphic designer. Heavily varied in his work, he also crossed over frequently and was a painter, sculptor and art director amongst other professions. Also a prominent member of the Bauhaus school of art and architecture up until the Nazis shut it in 1933. 

Bayer studied under Bauhaus artists such as Paul Klee, Moholy Nagy and Kandinsky. He developed his own visual style, based on minimalism, heavy use of grid, sans-serif typefaces and heavy use of lower case. He worked on a lot of Bauhaus publications.

Architype Bayer typeface by Bayer. Bayer reacted to the Germanic use of capitalisation for all nouns by abandoning uppercase.

 

 Poster by Bayer, 1926. Heavy use of grid, space and simplicity. Focus is on minimalism and legibility.

http://www.herbert-bayer.com/

"Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image" - Bayer, 1000 Photo Icons by Anthony Bannon

 

 

Muller Brockman

Muller Brockman was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. Studied in Zurich. Muller Brockmans is recognised for his simple, minimal designs with a strong focus on communication and legilbility. Also his close associate with Aksidenz Grotesk, a modernist, geometric typeface which is highly legible and flexible, allowing it to be applied to most design with it's lack of 'character'. It can mould to any context. Helvetica was heavily inspired and influenced by Grotesk. 

He was also a strong advocate on the grid system, publishing many books on the topic, such as 'Grid Systems in Graphic Design'

http://www.josef-muller-brockmann.net/

 

Really enjoy Muller's work, I like how he handles colour. Colour is something i've noticed drives a lot of my work and drives a lot of my reasoning for being a fan of something or for finding something aesthetically pleasing. He also handles imagery and balanced type and image very well too, as you can see here:

 

 "The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice." - Brockman.

 

Paul Renner

Paul Renner was a typographer and graphic designer. The reason why I've picked him as an example of a graphic designer associated with modernism is he designed the Futura typeface in 20's, a period which was at the height of modernism and modernity. It's also a typeface which is heavily geometric, with rigid widths and it's san-serif. It has appearance of efficiency and fowardness with the focus on function, before form. Renner tried to focus on the non-important decorative elements and focus on just what's needed and what is vital, another trait of modernism.

 

Futura, 1927. Paul Renner

An example of the diversity of the ways in which Futura can be used is the use of the typeface for movie posters, such as American Beauty

 

 

Gerd Arntz

http://www.gerdarntz.org/

Gerd Arntz was a prominent graphic designer who produce a lot of work in the visual communication realm with a wide variety of isotype and iconography. I feel his work is modernist as it's highly sophisticated and intelligent in the way it's designed to get the message across in a matter of seconds. Communication is key with modernist graphic design.

 

He's also probably more famous for his woodcuts which were very influential in the way they used the 'stick figure' and pretty ahead of theit time. They dealed with social issues such as worker strikes and Nazi and Weimar Germany.

 

 

So clever the way he used just black and white, to create pretty detailed yet highly simplified illustrations.

He also did many infographics, which we worked closely with Neurath with.

 

 

 Gerd Arntz "I was interested in depicting flesh and blood and sensuality. Unlike my previous prints, I did not fit the figures into an architectural construction anymore, but grouped them as one seamless composition." - Arntz

 

Otto Neurath

Otto Neurath was a philosopher  who worked closely with Arntz and created Isotype. Isotype and iconography can sometimes be overlooked in todays world as it serves its purpose so well when it comes to signage in things like airports and on road signs, but it's a testament to how efficient the design is that no one looks twice at them, as they communicate so efficiently in the first place. These ethos and themes ring true with modernism and with Neurath's work. Efficiency and intelligent use of framing and colour is key.

 

 

 

 

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POST-PRESENTATION FEEDBACK

Mixed response to the presentation and one that I kind of expected. My presentation was very broad over a wide variety of topics, like the idea of an auteur, hitchcock and feminism, hitchcock's recurring themes etc but I haven't thought about how it will relate to my concept. Which is an interactive (maybe) publication being image-led, and visualising famous Hitchcock techniques, scenes and opinions on Hitchcock, possibly his legacy etc. It all needs to be underpinned by a wealth of knowledge and theory though, but it all needs to be focused.

I think I'm finding it hard to balance the theory and visuals at the moment. It might be a good idea to think about the publication, a quick outline of it. It would allow me to consider what I actually want in the finished publication, without going to the design side of it as of yet, I'm confident and have some ideas for that.

So plan of action for now I think is to really knuckle down and think about what I want in this publication,

I've said before I want it to be a more wholesome image of Hitchcock with possible criticisms and quotes on him and his work. 

I want it to be image-led, with the opportunity for me to explore and communicate themes and techniques visually, so I guess I could also visually communicate criticisms etc too in a visual way?

So all the way through the book has the same theme and interest, hopefully.

Start researching more visuals and experimenting with ideas. Could be an informative guide on Hitchcock, quotes, scenes, techniques etc with some academic quotes etc to further enforce points I want to make.


Do I need to have an argument? What am I trying to achieve by making this publication?

Also taking note of the presentations, what worked well and didn't work so well:

• Have visuals, but the right amount. 
• Less mixtures of visuals and big chunks of text, the audience doesn't know where to look
• Less bullet points which you recite, it's better if you have the content in question and talk about it through clear articulate notes and points
• Not too short, not too long. Length of it is very important
• Clear order and progression of powerpoint
• Visuals are very important
• Talk loud and clearly, but still kind of conversationally while being articulate and professional too
• Less joking, take it seriously
• Organisation before the presentation and during it

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FAMOUS HITCHCOCK QUOTES

Source

NOTABLE QUOTES TO MENTION REGARDING RECURRING THEMES, STYLE OF FILMMAKING ETC:

•  There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. 
•   When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.' 
•   Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints. 
•  I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one. 
•  The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them. 
•  If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on. 
•  A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it. 
• Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.
  
  Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/alfred_hitchcock.html#ixzz1qWx8wacu
   

he following are a list of quotes either from Hitchcock, or ascribed to him...

• A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

• A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

• Actors are cattle.

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.

• Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

• Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up.

• Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

• For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.

• Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

• I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

• I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one.

• I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks.

• I have prepared one of my own timecapsules. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

• I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

• I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

• I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.

• I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.

• If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

• In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

• In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.

• In reference to the murder scene in 'Dial M for murder': As you have seen on the screen; the best way to do it is with a scissor.

• In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

• One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedlly, as in life.

• Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

• Self-plagiarism is style.

• Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.

• Someone once told me that every minute a murder occurs, so I don't want to waste your time, I know you want to go back to work.

• Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.

• Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

• Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime.

• Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.

• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

• The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.

• The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

• There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.

• There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.

• These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

• This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.

• This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

• We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

• When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.'

• You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

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PROMINENCE OF HITCHCOCK

With links to the idea of being an auteur and having a very personal relationship with the work, I've noticed the prominence of Hitchcock when it comes to promotion of the movies. Even by today's standards it's quite odd. Nowadays, obviously, a lot of movies selling point is the director, as a lot of directors are household names and have loyal fans who'll watch their movies, for example Tarantino, Michael Bay etc. The same case is here but I've never seen the director actually visually shown on promotional material such as posters with such prominence. Sometimes more than even the stars of the movie!

Examples:

 

 

 

 

 

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A short and articulate article on Hitchock recurring themes and plot devices on the dreaded Wikipedia
Source

Recurring themes and plot devices:

• Birds - Seen in The Birds, the plot revolves around Birds attacking Bodega bay
• Suspense - Hitchcock preferred suspense over surprise in his films. Hitchcock often described it as ""There's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't..."
• Audience as voyeur - In Psycho, along with Norman Bates, we, the audience watch Marion undress through a peephole
• Macguffin -
• The ordinary person - In The Man Who Knew Too Much - James Stewart plays an ordinary man from Indianapolis whose son gets kidnapped.
• The wrong man or wrong woman - North By Northwest - Cary Grant is mistaken for George Kaplan a non-existent CIA agent
• The double - Characters in same situation but with different personalities
• The likeable criminal, aka the charming sociopath - In Psycho, Marion steals money and runs away, only to feel sympathetic and return the money, only to be brutally murdered.
• Staircases - In The Birds - the camera follows Tippi Hedren up the stairs to the attic where suspensefully the birds will silently attack here.
• Trains - Trains are often used as sexual euphemisms, In the 39 steps and North by Northwest, the limitations exposed by the tight train environment further enhances the suspense.
• Transference of guilt - Often sets up a villain with a dark secret. In 'Suspicion', Lina suspects her husband is a murderer, and allows this suspicion to ruin their life, even when he is revealed to be innocent.
• Mothers - Frequently depicted as intrusive and domineering.
• Brandy- Consumption of brandy in many of his films
• Sexuality - Hitchcock films were seen as very sexualised for their time. Often dealing with perverse and taboo situations. Depicted sexuality, through metaphors without being graphic. In Psycho, Norman Bates carries a coversation on with Marion  while one of his hands strokes a dead animal and the other his crotch. Link between sexual feelings and violence?
• Blonde women - Hitchcock preferred blondes, saying audience would be more suspicious of a brunette. He also thought they photographed better in black and white, which was the main medium for a good portion of his career.
• Silent scenes - As a former silent movie director, Hitchcock often preferred to convey narrative through visuals rather than audio. An example of this is the lenghty sequence where Scottie follows Madeleine in Vertigo.
• Number 13 - Many scenes which exploit the superstitious response to the number 13. In Psycho, Marion's numberplate adds up to 13.
• Tennis - Films often mention tennis. For example in Strangers on  A Train, the main character is a tennis player.
• Falling from heights -
• The perfect murder
• Violence in a theatre

Further proof of idea of Hitchcock being an auteur, having signature traits and plot devices he almost signs his work with, along with cameo. Seems films are almost as much about Hitchcock as they are about the plot. Including film posters with prominence of Hitchcocks name and identity, something I'll delve into later with a specific post.






Here's the original more in-depth source:

Birds

There are countless images of birds in nearly all of Hitchcock's films. Some of the most prominent are listed below.
Psycho - The film begins in Phoenix, Arizona and a Phoenix is also a mythological bird. Marion's last name is "Crane." Norman practices taxidermy as a hobby and his favorites are birds. Norman describes Marion's eating behavior as "eats like a bird".
Vertigo - Gavin's last name is Elster, which is German for Magpie.
The Birds - The film's plot revolves around birds attacking Bodega Bay.

[edit] Suspense

Main article: Suspense

Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over the use of surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth. Hitchcock was fond of illustrating this point with a short aphorism – "There's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't..."

[edit] Audience as voyeur

Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment inescapably clear to viewers one and all, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In Rear Window (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying, "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time.
Similarly, Psycho begins with the camera moving toward a hotel-room window, through which the audience is introduced to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her divorced boyfriend Sam Loomis, played by John Gavin. They are partially undressed, having apparently had sex though they are not married and Marion is on her lunch "hour". Later, along with Norman Bates (portrayed by Anthony Perkins), the audience watches Marion undress through a peephole.

[edit] MacGuffin

Main article: MacGuffin

One of Hitchcock's favorite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "MacGuffin". The Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the Scottish screenwriter Angus MacPhail, as being the true inventor of the term. Hitchcock defined this term in a 1964 interview conducted by François Truffaut, published as Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967). Hitchcock would use this plot device extensively. Many of his suspense films revolve around this device: a detail which, by inciting curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of characters within the story, but whose specific identity and nature is unimportant to the spectator of the film. In Vertigo, for instance, "Carlotta Valdes" is a MacGuffin; she never appears and the details of her death are unimportant to the viewer, but the story about her ghost's haunting of Madeleine Elster is the spur for Scottie's investigation of her, and hence the film's entire plot. In Notorious, the uranium that the main characters must recover before it reaches Nazi hands serves as a similarly arbitrary motivation: any dangerous object would suffice. And state secrets of various kinds serve as MacGuffins in several of the spy films, especially his earlier British films The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock has stated that the best MacGuffin, or as he put it, "the emptiest," was the one used in North By Northwest, which was referred to as "Government secrets".^[1]

This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (March 2008)

[edit] The ordinary person

Placing an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances is a common element of Hitchcock's films. In The 39 Steps, the protagonist Richard Hannay is drawn into a web of espionage, after a female spy he meets in a theatre is killed in his apartment. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), James Stewart plays an ordinary man from Indianapolis vacationing in Morocco when his son is kidnapped. In The Wrong Man, Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is arrested for a crime he didn't commit. In Psycho, Janet Leigh plays an unremarkable secretary whose personal story is violently interrupted by a furious psychopath. Other clear examples are Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Vertigo, and North By Northwest. The focus on an ordinary character enables the audience to relate to the action in the movie.

[edit] The wrong man or wrong woman

Mistaken identity is a common plot device in his films.
North By Northwest - Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for George Kaplan, a non-existent CIA agent.
The Wrong Man - Henry Fonda is mistaken for a criminal.
Vertigo - The film revolves around Scottie Ferguson's investigation of the false Madeleine Elster's real identity.
The 39 Steps - Richard Hannay, the main character, is unjustly accused of murdering a woman, a spy by the name of Annabella, AKA Ms Smith.
Frenzy - The protagonist is thought to be the notorious Necktie Killer due the circumstances he finds himself in.
Saboteur - Barry Cane is framed by a saboteur named Frank Fry for an aircraft fire.
Shadow of a Doubt - Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is the real killer of the Merry Widow murders, but the police accuse a dead man from a different state. Only he and his niece (Teresa Wright) know the real murderer.

[edit] The double

Hitchcock often used "the double" in his films as a way to represent the relationship between characters. One representation of "the double" has both characters sharing the same desire however only one them takes action. In "Strangers On A Train", Bruno carries out the plot of murdering Guy's wife, just the way Guy would like to do it. Also in "Rope", Brandon Shaw and Philip Morgan kill an inferior human being just the way their teacher Rupert Cadell would like to do it. In "Psycho", Marion Crane steals $40,000 and plans on running away just the way Norman Bates would like to run away from his mother. These characters are in the same situation but are completely different personalities.

[edit] The likeable criminal, aka the charming sociopath

The villain in many of Hitchcock's films appears charming and refined rather than oafish and vulgar. Especially clear examples of this tendency are Godfrey Tearle in The 39 Steps, Paul Lukas in The Lady Vanishes, Claude Rains in Notorious, Barry Foster in Frenzy, Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, Ray Milland in Dial M For Murder, William Devane in Family Plot, and James Mason in North by Northwest. Villains such as Thorwald (Rear Window) and Norman Bates (Psycho) are portrayed as emotionally vulnerable and sympathetic characters.
In Psycho, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals from her employer and runs away to be with her boyfriend, thus making her a criminal for her theft, and immoral for having pre-marital sex. However, the filmgoers are sympathetic to her; she has just decided to return the money when she is then brutally murdered. In Marnie, the title character (Tippi Hedren) is a cunning serial thief.

[edit] Staircases

Images of staircases often play a central role in Hitchcock's films. The Lodger tracks a suspected serial killer's movement on a staircase. Years later, a similar shot appears in the final sequence of Notorious. In Vertigo, the staircase in the church bell tower plays a crucial role in the plot. In Psycho, several staircases are featured prominently: as part of the path up to the Bates mansion, as the entrance to the fruit cellar, and as the site of Detective Arbogast's murder. In Rear Window, an entirely nonfunctional staircase adorns James Stewart's apartment, in addition to the numerous fire escape staircases seen each time we follow Stewart's gaze out of his window. In Shadow of a Doubt, Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) attempts to murder his niece by rigging a staircase to collapse. In Dial M for Murder, a key kept under the stair carpet plays a pivotal role in booking the murderer. Frenzy features an unusual shot which tracks the killer and his victim first up the stairs, then retreats backwards down the stairs alone while the audience is left to imagine the killing which is taking place. One other iconic stairwell shot comes from the movie Suspicion as Cary Grant slowly walks up the stairs to deliver what would have been the poisonous warmed milk to his wife. Hitchcock, the studios and Cary Grant decided his character could not end up as a murderer and that scene becomes a red herring with a new ending added. In "The Birds", the camera follows Tippi Hedren up the stairs to the attic where (suspensefully) the birds wait silently to attack her.
This stylistic interest in staircases is attributed to the influence of German Expressionism, which often featured heavily stylized and menacing staircases, for example in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

[edit] Trains

In Hitchcock's films, trains are often used as a sexual euphemism. Extended sequences on trains feature in a number of Hitchcock films, including

• Number Seventeen
• Shadow of a Doubt
• The 39 Steps
• The Lady Vanishes
• Strangers on a Train
• North by Northwest

In The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, the limitations imposed by train travel on characters' movements enhances the suspense as the lead character is pursued for a crime he did not commit.
Hitchcock's most-extended train sequence is in The Lady Vanishes, where the inability to exit the train except at stations forces the two lead characters to accept that the lady for whom they are searching must still be aboard. The vertiginous excitement of moving around the outside of a moving train is exploited in Number Seventeen and The Lady Vanishes.

[edit] Transference of guilt

As related in articles by Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and others in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema -- and in Chabrol and Rohmer's book Hitchcock (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1957) -- Hitchcock often sets up a villain/antagonist who has a dark secret. In the course of the film, Hitchcock, through the screenplay and the filming, makes it clear that the hero/protagonist somehow shares in this secret or guilt. Examples include:

• Suspicion (1941): Lina (Joan Fontaine) suspects her husband (Cary Grant) as a murderer, and allows this suspicion to ruin their life, even when he is revealed to be innocent.
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943): after Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is revealed as a murderer, his niece, Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) says she will kill him if he doesn't leave the household.
• Lifeboat (1944): the Allied shipwreck victims attack the German captain (Walter Slezak) after several days, in what amounts to a lynching.
• Strangers on a Train (1951): Guy (Farley Granger) goes along with Bruno (Robert Walker) because Guy does want to kill his wife.
• Rear Window (1954): Jeffries (James Stewart) spies on his neighbors, hoping to catch a murderer (Raymond Burr), leading to dubious tactics to catch the criminal
• Vertigo (1958): Scottie (James Stewart) follows Madeleine (Kim Novak) and unwittingly accepts the story of Madeleine's life from her husband, indirectly causing her death.
• Psycho (1960): in a reversal of the usual pattern, a character who appears to be the heroine, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), commits a crime, is murdered, and the audience's sympathy is transferred to an ambiguous character Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).

[edit] Mothers

Mothers are frequently depicted as intrusive and domineering, or at the very least, batty, as seen in Rope, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Psycho, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Birds.

[edit] Brandy

Hitchcock includes the consumption of brandy in many of his films. "I'll get you some brandy. Drink this down. Just like medicine ..." says Scottie Ferguson to "Madeleine Elster" in Vertigo. In a real-life incident, Hitchcock dared Montgomery Clift at a dinner party around the filming of I Confess (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy, which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. In Torn Curtain and Topaz, brandy is defined more closely as cognac. This element is also present in Dial M for Murder where the main characters of the film consume brandy throughout the entire film. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is offered a brandy by Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), and after being attacked by the birds, drinks the brandy offered by Mitch (Rod Taylor). In Rear Window, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is "just warming some brandy". In Frenzy, Richard Blaney is sacked for supposedly stealing brandy, and can be seen in several sequences to be drinking brandy. In Saboteur, Harry Kane offers Mrs. Mason some brandy to calm her nerves. In Murder! the main evidence in the murder case is a bottle of brandy. The identity of the killer is later confirmed by a bottle of brandy seen in his dressing room.

[edit] Sexuality

For their time, Hitchcock's films were regarded as rather sexualized, often dealing with perverse and taboo behaviors. Sometimes, the prudish conventions of his era caused him to convey sexuality in an emblematic fashion, such as in North by Northwest, when the film cuts abruptly from two aroused but visually chaste lovers to a train entering a tunnel.
Hitchcock found a number of ways to convey sexuality without depicting graphic behaviors, such as the substitution of explicit sexual passion with the passionate consumption of food. In a particularly amusing scene in Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) carries on a conversation with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) while one of his hands strokes a dead animal and the other hand lingers on his crotch. Sexual feelings are often strongly associated with violent behavior. In The Lodger and Psycho, this association is the whole basis of the film. Biographers have noted how Hitchcock continued to challenge film censorship throughout his career, until he was allowed to show nudity in Frenzy.

[edit] Blonde women

Hitchcock had a dramatic preference for blonde women, stating that the audience would be more suspicious of a brunette. Many of these blondes were of the Grace Kelly variety: perfect, aloof ice goddesses, who also have a hidden red-hot inner fire.
In Vertigo James Stewart forces a woman to dye her hair blonde. One of Hitchcock's earliest films, The Lodger (1927), features a serial killer who stalks blonde women. Blonde actress Anny Ondra famously starred in Hitchcock's first sound film Blackmail (1929).
Hitchcock said he used blonde actresses in his films, not because of an attraction to them, but because of a tradition that began with silent star Mary Pickford. The director said that blondes were "a symbol of the heroine". He also thought they photographed better in black and white, which was the predominant film for most dramas for many years.^[2]
In Family Plot, Karen Black plays a kidnapper who wears a blonde wig and sunglasses as a disguise. Other notable blonde women include Tippi Hendren in The Birds, Dany Robin in Topaz, Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Grace Kelly in Rear Window, and Kim Novak in 'Vertigo.

[edit] Silent scenes

As a former silent film director, Hitchcock strongly preferred to convey narrative with images rather than dialogue. Hitchcock viewed film as a primarily visual medium in which the director's assemblage of images must convey the narrative. Examples of imagery over dialogue are in the lengthy sequence in Vertigo in which Scottie silently follows Madeleine, or the Albert Hall sequence in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

[edit] Number 13

Hitchcock has many scenes which exploit people's superstitious response to the number 13. The number shows up several times in his movies as an apartment number, room number or house number. For example, in Psycho, when Marion checks into the Bates Motel, Norman reaches first for room 3, then room 1. In addition, the number on the license plate that she drives adds up to 13. Another example is at the car dealership when Marion trades cars the number on the dealership adds up to 13. Each incidence of the number 13 provides an opportunity for her fate to change in this film.
Number 13 is also the title of an unfinished Hitchcock film early in his career.

[edit] Tennis

Tennis is often mentioned in Hitchcock films. In Strangers on a Train, the main character is a tennis player. In Dial M for Murder, Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is an ex-tennis player. In Rebecca, the second Mrs. DeWinter (Joan Fontaine) claims to be taking tennis lessons from Max DeWinter (Laurence Olivier). The sport is also briefly mentioned during passing conversation in Rope.

[edit] Falling from high places

In Vertigo, North by Northwest, Saboteur, The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions), To Catch a Thief and Rear Window, among others, the protagonist, villain, or even a supporting character falls from a height.

[edit] The Perfect Murder

Several of Alfred Hitchcock's movies feature characters who are deeply fascinated with the craft of murder. Murder is often treated as an intellectual puzzle, and several Hitchcock characters seek to establish a definitive "perfect" murder, that is, an undefeatable scientific method of murdering another person that would prevent the police from ever finding the culprit. This notion is a core concept in Rope, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and to a lesser extent, Shadow of a Doubt.

[edit] Violence in a Theatre

• The Man Who Knew Too Much (missed shot)
• The 39 Steps (climactic shootout)
• Stage Fright (climactic shootout)
• I Confess (climactic shootout)
• Torn Curtain (escape from theater)
• Saboteur (shootout in movie theater)

[edit] References

1. ^ Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60429-5., pg. 139
2. ^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 82

• Michael Walker, 2005, Hitchcock's Motifs, Amsterdam University Press"

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'HITCHCOCK BLONDE'

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NOTES

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"A 'Hitchcock Blonde' is an actress/character type that was frequently used by film director Alfred Hitchcock in his movies and for whom he appeared to have an obsessive fascination. They were beautiful, sexy, smart and sophisticated but also icy, strong and fearless; "a cool surface with an inner fire". Actresses that typified the 'Hitchcock Blonde' were Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint among others."






Jodi Ramer offers a careful close analysis of extended sequences from Alfred Hitchock’s marnie (1964) to frame her discussion of the formal construction of the Hitchcock Blonde. Ramer employs a measured “soft psychoanalysis” with consideration of film style and the place of the film within a range of broader contextual fields (e.g., Hitchcock’s oeuvre, the femme fatale, and issues of gender representation). The notion of style Ramer presents is informed by consideration of narrative and characterization as integral elements of a formal analysis of style.

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The image of the “Hitchcock Blonde” is a familiar one, more specific but perhaps almost as well known as that of the femme fatale. The Hitchcock heroine, in her purified state, has a crown of well-peroxided hair, elaborately upswept and emphasizing an unfussy vista of forehead; she is well-groomed, even severe in the cut of her modest but moneyed clothing; she is “cool,” a self-possessed WASP, the elegantly detached type. This type—seen through Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, et al—naturally has its variations, but does maintain, throughout several of Hitchcock’s films, enough recognizable traits to merit investigation. Such investigation usually follows in the form of soft psychoanalysis, citing Hitchcock’s impoverished self-esteem and his need to set up an unattainable glamour-girl as fodder for his propensity to lose himself in fantasy. But the ultimately elusive reason for Hitchcock’s use of the “cool blonde” is less interesting than the consideration of just how Hitchcock as filmmaker makes use of the cool blonde, how her image is created—from costume, make-up and hair, through camera placement and editing. Does this heroine occupy a special place in a given film; is her presence signalled stylistically, her body treated in a distinct or identifiable manner?

Marnie (1964), starring Tippi Hedren, stands out as a Hitchcock film in which the “cool” heroine breaks out of her supporting role as poised-and-pretty love-interest and enters the fray. Here she is not just a protagonist who must deal with an external blight, as was Hedren’s previous role of Melanie Daniels in The Birds, but as a character fraught with pathology, a pathology that in itself drives the narrative (Marnie thieves and cons, is blackmailed into marriage, is frigid and made suicidal and then finally is returned to a repressed memory, all because of her pathology—without it, there really is no narrative at all). As such, the film is really about the cool blonde rather than just featuring her, and for this reason I see Marnie as a good place to start in studying the employment of the “Hitchcock Blonde.” My space here is unfortunately too limited to address similar female figures in other Hitchcock films, nor is my aim to establish a comparative study of the figure; rather, I endeavour to provide a detailed account of the filmic construction of a particular character in a particular film, and insofar as the Marnie character may be identified in typage as a cool blonde Hitchcockian heroine, this instance may also be seen as representative of an aspect of the so-called Hitchcock style.
The formal construction of Marnie as heroine is complex, for narratively she functions both as subject (the protagonist) and as object (the legendary cool blonde). Furthermore, in either capacity she also alternates between femme fatale and particularly vulnerable ingénue. As the former, Marnie is a cunning thief, unencumbered by emotional involvements; as the latter, she is the inexplicably troubled young woman who cannot understand her own compulsions, nor trace her own past. Both types of gendered typage coexist in the female lead of Marnie, and yet, overall each mode is given differentiated treatment, such that Marnie as a character is at times formally coded as dangerous and mysterious in her attractiveness and at others as sympathetic and softly appealing.

In keeping with this complexity, Marnie’s appearances on-screen—as well, tellingly, as the times she remains off-screen—are linked to the film’s stylistic presentation of narrative and “atmospheric” elements of suspense. Marnie as a whole is nicely illustrative of a stylistic motif found throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre: the use of montage to pointedly—almost over-deliberately—convey information, chiefly through use of a point-of-view insert shots of a given object (or specific space/place). Often this object is connected to a character’s train of thought by the inclusion of such an insert preceded by a shot indicating an actor’s eye-line: the montage creates the illusion of the character gazing at a given object, thus drawing the viewer’s attention to this detail. Marnie is often caught up in this montage network of gazes, objects, and focused attention, and I would argue that the variations of this filmic relay occur around and in regards to Marnie preponderantly, and in correspondence—though not always clearly definable—with the fluctuating positions she occupies within the narrative. Ultimately, though the playing out (through compulsion: thefts, assumed identities, avoidance of men) and uncovering of Marnie’s pathology drives the story and defines the eponymous character, Marnie herself is placed within the film moreso as object than subject. This is to say, Marnie, as character and as a body on film, is generally acted upon, commented on, and positioned, within mise-en-scene and patterns of editing, as a passive rather than active party: as an object.

Discussing the female body on film as an object is, of course, entering into fraught territory. Laura Mulvey’s enormously influential article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) adopts a psychoanalytical model to account for dominant filmic codes in which the male character—and by extension the male viewer—is entitled to gaze at the female character with mastery, a privilege not granted to the objectified female and her spectatorial counterpart, who is excluded from anything but a masochist relationship to cinematic pleasures. Mulvey’s polemic established a persuasive account of patriarchal norms in representation, but fails to acknowledge that, quite simply, women can and do experience pleasure at the movies, and that even when formally objectified, female characters may contain an affective potency that cannot be underestimated.

It must be noted that such qualifications of—and outright disagreement with—Mulvey’s article have been well-voiced by feminist critics and even Mulvey herself: current feminist discourse is not much interested in insular, hothouse psychoanalytical critique, and has eschewed the tendency of judging the merits of a given representation in binary terms (i.e. “good” or “bad” portrayals of women). [1] Such a departure from earlier models of feminist evaluation (important in their time) makes for a freer—and more sensible—approach to the study of filmic form and style, which otherwise is irrationally hindered by an imposed negative or positive value which would suggest that certain formal and stylistic choices are inherently reactionary or progressive (and, by extension, reactionary or progressive by specific, time-and-context-bound criteria). My investigation here of how the female lead in Marnie functions as an object, therefore, is not bound up in the negative valence that might be attributed to such observations; rather, I am interested in how Marnie is constructed on film and through filmic techniques, and how such construction adds to a complex characterization.

This complexity I do not take up in terms of psychological “depth” (a matter which is arguable, and has been debated, in relation to the overt and some say naïve treatment of psychoanalysis the narrative employs) [2], but as a suggestive and varied approach to characterization through film style. Marnie underwent critical complaint at its release (from Andrew Sarris, for one, and especially from many reviewers in England, nostalgic for Hitchcock’s British period) for being, among other things, not enough of a thriller and too much of a psychodrama. [3] But Marnie certainly finds its place within Hitchcock’s oeuvre in the film’s use of a mystery or crime ultimately revealed as a MacGuffin: conventional tantalizing devices quite beside the point except in the crucial establishing of suspense and an atmosphere sinister or unsettling. The thefts committed by Marnie, her changes of identity, the threat of being exposed by Mr. Strutt and other ex-employers—even the details and convincingness (or lack thereof) of her psyche, its pathology, and her “treatment” under husband/amateur therapist Mark (Sean Connery)—all ultimately fall under the aegis of MacGuffin. These details are not crucial in themselves, but are the kind of detail that contribute to the driving force of the film (like “realism” or continuity, issues that Hitchcock himself often insisted were not important if the movie is succeeding in drawing the viewer in).

In the case of Marnie, the female lead is constructed as the embodiment of an enigma, an enigma that constantly piques the interest of the characters who revolve around her. As such, the film’s workings focus on Marnie’s primary relationships (with Mark, and with her mother—which includes the traces of Marnie’s mysterious past) and the secondary relationships that unfurl from these focal points (including Strutt, Lil Mainwaring, the man who recognizes her at the racetrack, the little girl Jessie). The suspense of the film certainly is in uncovering the mystery of Marnie, but moreso in watching the unfolding dynamics around Marnie as the fascinating centre, as the object around which curiosity and suspense revolve. Marnie participates as protagonist in this drama, and yet, as the centre, she is rather passive, really quite helpless and less involved, less interested in her cause than those around her. Thus, the character is treated throughout the film primarily as an object of intrigue.

My discussion of Marnie, then, is one that considers narrative and characterization as being integral to a formal analysis of style. If I see the film as being principally “about” the engagement and intrigue produced over Marnie’s character, rather than, say, a serious treatment of a psychoanalytical case-study, or a crime thriller, this is not because the story or narrative alone produces this effect. To state the obvious: the script, taken in itself, could have privileged very different elements, altering the mood, altering what gets emphasized; likewise for the same script treated differently in production and post-production. As much as this point seems evident, it is worth making in order to demonstrate how it also works the other way, serving to reveal the holistic nature of film style: though formal elements may be separated from content and studied as such, style must be more of a merging of the two. Particularly in the case of Hitchcock, a director so motivated in telling a story with the most effective means possible, elements of the overall story become heightened and downplayed by his stylistic interventions in various ways that the screenplay alone would not reveal. [4]
 
Certainly Hitchcock, insistent on the nature of film as a visual medium, occupied himself with the craft of developing such elements through showing rather than telling. All of this is to establish my interest in the film’s treatment of Marnie and the amount of showing that goes on around the development of her character and its function as intriguing object. The telling has a part to play in this—I will detail the opening sequences of Marnie, in which discussions around this mysterious female figure are key to her introduction—but Hitchcock would seem to be less invested in the affect produced by this aspect of the story. Thus, the repressed trauma Marnie had suffered as a child may not seem commensurate with her symptoms, or, to take it further, the entire psychoanalytical framework attached to Marnie’s character, as some have scoffed, may seem just plain silly—and yet, the film’s focus on showing us a stylized approximation of trauma and the return of the repressed would seem to be the affective core of the piece, with the details of Marnie’s past and psychic journey just a way of getting us there for the show, as it were. Defenders and detractors of the film have both applied themselves to explaining the meaning of Marnie’s episodes—either to justify or bemoan devices such as the red suffusion flashes or the patently artificial backdrops and rear projection. While the interpretation of these devices (as Expressionist, as an artful deployment of artifice, as distanciation, as encouraging subjective identification, or what have you) often blooms into the kind of purple over-reading that Hitchcock’s apparent fascination with unattainable women receives, this tendency does point up the manner in which interpretation is inextricable from discussions of style.
This point warrants a somewhat lengthy detour: I have stated that I do not want to engage in the kind of interpretative overreaching that often characterises examinations of Hitchcock films, and any auteurist study, the kind that contorts itself to find (hopefully compelling and convincing) reasons for any given stylistic motif, a framework of justification for whatever the film, or the oeuvre, in question might contain. But I do not attempt to eschew interpretation altogether. To comment on the use of, say, red flashes in the film these flashes must be taken as something, must be given some kind of interpretive assessment. The use of rear projection is a formal device and recognizable as such, but pointing out its use falls short of providing a meaningful discussion of style. It means more if one is informed as to how common or rare the practise was at the time of the film’s production—and in the case of Marnie, rear projection was beginning to look dated, at least according to reviewers’ complaints on the issue. But to take up these complaints and defend rear projection and fake-looking backdrops as part of Hitchcock’s evolving style is to engage in interpretation. Either one judges these devices as looking realistically convincing enough to be in line with the tradition of Hollywood moviemaking of which Hitchcock was a part or one interprets them as looking sufficiently fake to be surely intentionally artful. One might argue that Hitchcock was simply using production methods with which he was most comfortable, not liking to shoot on location, and yet surely this claim, true as it may be, misses something in the overall effect of Marnie, with its undeniably strange blend of Hollywood realism, acidic-hued brittleness, and dream-quality hysteria. One cannot really do justice to the Hitchcock style without acknowledging the affect formal devices—in specific, notable instances and in overall, cumulative power—have on the viewer, as subjective as these affects necessarily are. The critic is not immune to such impressions, and it would not serve him or her to be immune: the critic’s job is to refine such impressions and examine them with refined rigor. [5]
Ultimately, to me, the formal treatment of the titular character in Marnie makes for compelling study because the stylistic management of this on-screen body corresponds in a satisfying manner with a more impressionistic, interpretative reading of the film. For one, the overall construction of Marnie as a curiously contained, unreachable, elusive character—intriguing but somehow something short of compelling, too brittle, too unfathomable, yet also too commonplace to excite more than an intellectual curiosity—is a construction that nicely, microcosmically, mirrors my impression of the film as a whole. That is, I would describe Marnie, the film, just as I described Marnie, the character, above. And in having a mitigated response to the film, in finding it really very interesting but less than wholly successful, I am reluctant to apply a totalising interpretative vision to the film, and both suspicious of and dissatisfied with others’ efforts to do so. Alongside other objections, I think that this approach diminishes what is so very interesting about Marnie, which is that one can hardly account for the strangeness of it: its combination of stylistic excellence and contextual naïveté, the artifice that is obviously intentional and yet which does not go far enough, the hysteria that references the best of classic “women’s film” melodrama while foreshadowing the cheesy, overwrought sensibility of the TV-movie-of-the-week. Quite possibly Marnie—like the unenthusiastically received films that followed, Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Family Plot (1978)—is indicative of Hitchcock operating within changing cinematic conventions and styles and being simply, stubbornly or cluelessly, old-fashioned (whereas Frenzy (1972) makes use of a gritty naturalism in vogue at the time). Such a possibility need not be fatal, but can be acknowledged without either dismissing the film as hopelessly dated or recouping it by claiming it as an artefact of genius—in which everything is intentional, brilliant, and never bound by history or context.

Finally, I am intrigued with how the formal patterns around Marnie’s construction as female character invoke certain broader thematic experiences of gender difference and its representation. I do not need the film to be coherent or unified around such themes (and it is not), nor do I ascribe feminist—or misogynistic—intention to the filmmakers, nor rely upon encoded psychoanalytical/ideological “truths” to be channelled through the text. [6] Rather, I find enticing correspondences between what is concretely present on a formal level and what these devices suggest when expanding outward from straight formal analysis into the realm of interpretation.
***

The character of Marnie is introduced in a manner befitting a femme fatale, with a sense of mystery and vaguely menacing purpose. The film begins with a tight shot of a (perhaps seductively) plump and dimpled yellow handbag tucked under the arm of a well-suited-in-tweeds lady. The shot expands as the woman, whom we see from the back carrying, with her other arm, a suitcase, walks steadily, in high-heeled pumps, down a train platform. She then stops and, with a graceful little twist of the ankle, sets down her suitcase and gazes down the empty tracks. The viewer is given opportunity to contemplate this fetching figure with the flatteringly cut dress suit, as the camera follows the receding woman at an ever-slower tracking pace, adjusting to allow the figure to get ahead, until the camera becomes static, allowing her to ultimately walk into long shot during a long take of thirty seconds (not long for a long take, but it feels like one, letting this single action unfold in real time). We are soon to find that our attention has been directed at the handbag for reasons of narrative foreshadowing: a few sequences later the woman—still only viewed from the back and as body parts, particularly as agile hands—will dump from the handbag and into a suitcase large bundles of cash. The woman is to remain faceless for the first six and a half minutes of the film (following the credit sequence).

The interest in Marnie as a character—and additionally as a compelling femme fatale figure—is further created around the idea of her in absence. After her halt on the train platform, a rather jarring straight cut takes us to a strikingly direct medium close-up of a put out-looking middle-aged man with glasses declaring, “Robbed!” He is almost looking into the camera, and seems to be addressing us. He then changes his eye-line, looking and gesturing left, adding “Cleaned out!” Cut and an insert of a safe—open, with the top shelf clearly emptied—appears, as if to indicate just-so-there-can-be-no-mistake. Cut back to Strutt, the strenuously complaining man, who goes on to say that $9,967 is missing, “And that girl did it. Marion Holland.” We do not know who this Marion is, but Strutt goes on to describe her (in such detail—and as if he is describing a show horse, “good teeth”—that the policemen interviewing him and his dubious-looking secretary share a smirk at his expense). She sounds potentially like the mystery lady with the handbag. Strutt is then joined by Sean Connery’s character Mark Rutland in confirming the comeliness of this “Marion,” and while Strutt huffs about her having seemed so “nice, so efficient, so…” Mark offers wryly, “resourceful?” while the camera moves to hold him in a medium one-shot that lingers on his ironic, amused expression. He seems to be gazing off at something in the distance, at which point a straight cut takes us back to the tight shot of the handbag under the arm, though this time the setting is different. In the abstracted space created by cinema, Mark’s gaze seems to be literally traveling toward this mystery lady and the proof of her crime, as a sort of literalization of the movement of his mental attention. As viewers, our attention had been drawn to the woman and her bag once before, and now again—with the addition of new information and the shared interest of other characters in this spectacle of lady and handbag—to heighten our suspense.

Again we are given the spectacle of the handbag/woman sashaying away from us, this time down a hotel hallway, tracked by a slowly moving camera that allows the receding figure to gain on it into several seconds of a full body shot in depth, before she turns the corner (just as Hitchcock emerges from a door into the hallway to put in his cameo). She is followed by a bellboy carrying large wrapped packages. The straight cut that immediately follows her turning the corner finds us in a generic-looking hotel room set in neutral colours, and we see the packages, evidently women’s apparel wrapped in tissue and department store boxes, strewn about. Unpacking these boxes is the dark-haired figure, still with her back towards us but now in a bronze-patterned silk robe to the knees, much more opulent and exotic than the prim, practical robes we will later see Marnie wearing: here, with her raven tresses, as the attractive thief “Marion Holland,” she functions in definitive femme fatale mode. [7]
 
The woman is transferring new clothing and accessories into a shell-pink suitcase, pearly and fresh beside the dark suitcase (the one she was carrying on the train platform) that receives cast-away, crumpled attire: the woman throws a lacy bra and slip (de rigueur vamp apparel) into the old suitcase, a gesture pointedly recorded by a crane shot which has come in over her back and moved in to a closer shot of the suitcases, giving us a good view of the cast-off items, as well as the careful way the new, pristine and lady-like articles (satin boudoir slippers and white gloves) are being arranged. All of this information signalling the process of changing personas (which is considerable—the boxes, the suitcases, the separated piles of personal effects) is handled with great economy. It is easy to miss the specific clues and simply notice that a woman is packing, but the camera and editing make sure that this impression of the scene is there to be had. At this point, not-yet-Marnie’s body has functioned as yet another object, another clue within these introductory sequences, signifying in the details. The dark hair is now out of frame, and the delicate hands and refined coral-hued manicure now become the representative image of this woman, just as the thrown-aside brighter, flashier clothes are replaced by the subdued greys and creams of the new items.

The next cut follows along the same plane of action, a rapid readjustment from the close medium shot of the suitcases to the yellow handbag, also on the bed in front of the suitcases. The woman’s hands smoothly open the purse, remove some essentials (comb, wallet, makeup compact) and then swiftly dump the remaining contents of the purse into the new suitcase, these contents being piles and piles of cash. The camera stays quite tight on these actions, following the flow of her arm movements. There is a fluidity and intimacy to all of this, in the closeness of the camera to the action, and its ease of movement, and also in the woman’s smooth gestures: she obviously knows what she is doing, and has done it before, probably several times. This impression continues with the next shot, which is a close-up of the wallet, from which she removes a Social Security card, then picks up the golden face-powder compact, opens it and unhinges the mirror with a nail file to reveal a secret compartment, and sorts through a number of such cards, all with different names. She then replaces the old Marion Holland alias with a new one, Margaret Edgar, and slips it into the plastic folder in the wallet, in front of an “In event of an accident card” (a bit of sly Hitchcock humour). The camera’s holding on these methodical actions (this last sequence being all one shot of 26 seconds) is a very Hitchcockian device, taking us visually through the details rather than offering verbal exposition, and allowing for a focus on the intimate materiality of the diegetic world as experienced by the characters and thus by the viewer, rather than relying on the abstracted actions we only hear about, or infer.
From the minutiae of this task of identity-changing, the film moves into a dramatic revelation.

As Bernard Herrmann’s score suddenly soars with harps and violins, a dissolve (a dreamy contrast to the clean straight cuts we’ve had so far, and which are the norm of the film) transports us to a close up of a white ceramic sink in which the black hair is being washed. Artistic licence has black hair dye come off like spilled ink into the water (as it never would: only several rounds of bleaching would strip the hair of that dark stain) and voila!—cut to a slight low angle view (with the camera where the mirror should be) of a soggy mane poised above the sink and, with a toss of the head, the lovely face of our (now blonde) mystery lady is finally revealed!

The face we see is recognizably the shining face of an ingénue, not femme fatale. She looks like the Marnie we will come to know, but a glorified version, with sparkling eyes (Tippi Hedren’s eyelashes, both real and fake, are very intricately mascara-ed, giving her particularly bright doll-like eyes), clean smooth peachy-white skin, and a refined smile of tasteful abandon: this is the carefree face of Marnie that we will only see in the forthcoming Forio-riding scenes, the ones with much maligned back-projection. Otherwise, Marnie looks composed, reserved, and often tense. She seldom actually looks distraught; even during her panic attacks she is presented as tight with shock. She only really comes undone in the final scenes, from the killing of her beloved horse Forio through to the confrontation of her mother and her past—at which time her hair is partially down rather than pulled into a complicated up-do, and through her distress she becomes bedraggled and dewy, like a child woken from a nightmare. Marnie is constructed as an elegantly withholding woman of refinement (seemingly classless, or classy—rather than actually high-class, as is the patrician Lil Mainwaring, or Grace Kelly’s Hitchcock characters). In her pathologies, she becomes vulnerable and pitiable in a childlike manner; she never, except possibly when riding Forio, confronts her demons as a woman, nor expresses herself as a womanly sexual being. She is, then, quite convincingly “frigid.” Much of this has to do with her smart sleek coifs and clean, business-like makeup, and especially her prim costuming: unflashy, practical suits and blouses; the robe she wears on the honeymoon cruise, which certainly sends a message of untouchableness to her unwanted new husband, as the neckline nearly comes up to her chin; the ice-white party gown, covering everything but her neck. But the sense of containment within Marnie is also a result of the containment around Marnie, and this is due to the placement of Marnie through montage as an object of contemplation.

After revealing her face, the film still employs the scheming, active femme fatale Marnie: the next scene returns to the previous stylistic motif of following her from behind; we are taken through her process of stashing the old suitcase in a locker, and then led, through Marnie’s gaze off-screen, matched with an insert of a floor grill, to take careful notice of her covert toss down the grate of the yellow (like the money-filled handbag she has disposed of) locker key. But following this we get a glimpse of the leading lady Marnie in what is perhaps her “real” life, as she confidently checks into a cozy country bed-and-breakfast and, with relaxed hair and sporty outfit, takes her dearly loved horse for a ride. Here, Marnie’s movements are monitored by the male stable hands—before cutting to a shot of Marnie and Forio galloping off in the distance, a shot of the unnamed (and unimportant as a character) stable hand watching Marnie intently as she rides off is held just long enough to strike one as uncomfortably or surprisingly over-long. This shot is easily forgotten when a cut later we are privileged to his view, and another quick cut finds Marnie in medium shot, astride a mechanical horse (that is out of the shot) and glowing with the pleasure of the ride. This shot not only contains the rather obvious (but not as strikingly fake as many of the film’s supporters and detractors will declare) back projection, but also curiously has Marnie wearing an altogether different sweater than the one she had on previously. Whether due to continuity error or an almost avant-garde way of suggesting different days spent by Marnie at this activity, this scene does create a subtly jarring sense of dislocation or dream—an attempt by Marnie to escape reality? Or at least a sign that the film, stylistically, is not beholden to verisimilitude (especially as it is directly followed by the taxi’s approach to Marnie’s mothers house, with the dramatic painted backdrop of an imposing ship). And, retrospectively, the stable hand’s gaze signals the kind of world that Marnie finds herself trapped in, a world of probing gazes in which, as criminal and psychically-scarred woman, she must navigate a safe, self-sufficient path.


Space does not permit me, here, to analyse the film as a whole with such detail. But I choose the opening sequences because they nicely set up the manner in which Marnie tends to function throughout the film. She is introduced as a captivating, attractive specimen, the object around which much intrigue revolves. She is at this time given the status of protagonist, a status that takes over as the blonde leading lady takes over from the dark-lady femme fatale. The narration remains almost exclusively (but not strictly so) with Marnie throughout the film, following her through her travels to her mother’s, to Forio’s stable, to her interview and working days at Rutland’s, and in her encounters with Mark and his family. Likewise, after the opening sequence with Strutt, the narrative unfolding is fairly restricted to Marnie’s experience and knowledge of events, though within this her own past, her thoughts and her secrets are not disclosed to the viewer until they are made known to another character, and even close-up and lingering shots of her face do not reveal much before it is explicitly stated—Marnie’s facial expressions are not readily readable, and evidence points to Hitchcock’s direction as largely responsible for Tippi Hedren’s composed, inscrutable bearing here. Certainly Marnie’s triggered phobias and panic attacks are treated with a stylized, expressive subjectivity. Considering the foregrounding of Marnie as protagonist, she is given few point-of-view shots, or at least her POV shots are diminished in emphasis among the other characters’ POV shots (even incidental, non-recurring characters such as the stable hand and, pronouncedly, the shady, pestering man at the racetrack)—POV shots that take Marnie as their object.


Marnie’s optical POV is utilised pointedly for the montage gaze-floor-grate-and-dropped-key referred to above. It is also in play in the early scene at her mother’s house, an instance wherein Marnie’s emotions—her discomfort with her mother and attempts to please her, her rather absurd jealousy of the little neighbour girl—register as repressed but acute. And the lurid close-ups of Mark’s eyes as he forces himself upon her are expressively sinister Marnie points-of-view. But generally, POV shots are given to the characters that surround Marnie, and are directed at her. A number of scenes are organized around a given character or characters taking note of Marnie, their curiosity specifically piqued by her. Thus, a character newly introduced or coming into a scene midway are often granted POV shots of Marnie, such that Marnie’s movements are tracked by others even when the scene “should” be Marnie’s, that is, scenes that exist to further the information on or characterization of her, or the plot in which she is the protagonist. The racetrack scene, for example, actually begins, after a few establishing shots, with a medium close-up of a stranger, then cuts to a shot of Marnie and Mark in the distance, framed from the perspective of the stranger’s spy-hole (a rolled up newspaper). When Marnie interviews at Rutland & Co. she is first spied on by an intrusive-feeling crane shot (in the famous Hitchcockian “voyeuristic” camera style) which backs up only to have Mark, upon his entrance, insistently follow Marnie with his gaze, with an intimidating high-angle among others, and then Lil, upon her entrance, to also monitor Marnie’s presence with interest. Marnie POV shots are related to her criminal scheming: though watched by others on this, her first day in the office, her attention is captured by Mr. Ward’s checking, in a locked drawer, on the combination of the safe. This is shown through an exaggerated POV shot, in that the action with the key and the drawer are presented in a close-up, as though Marnie’s attention could allow her gaze to zoom in on the details. And in the subsequent scene, on another day at the office, the camera circles Marnie in a dramatic, bird-of-prey crane shot until it arrives at her face and her own gaze, which a straight cut reveals as a POV shot of the receptionist at the open safe, cut back to Marnie at which point the camera careens back, behind her, to reveal Mark watching her watching the safe. Marnie’s every move, it would seem, is monitored, and even her own perspective, her own POV shots, are controlled, as it were, by a relay of gazes that fix her as the object. Caught in this containing relay of gazes, Marnie is cast as the intriguing but inscrutable object—the fascinating, unattainable, unforgettable Hitchcock blonde.

Jodi Ramer wrote on Post-Feminism and Boredom in Synoptique 4.> > >

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¹ Feminist critics such as Miriam Hansen, Patrice Petro, Anne Friedberg and Giuliana Bruno are interested in the advent and development of cinema and cinema-going as commensurate with the experience of urban modernity. In both, women are and have been active participants in inevitably gendered, but not necessarily limiting, ways. The experience of popular culture—its pleasures as well as its disorientating and alienating effects—is central to this revisioning of the last century, which sees the so-called postmodern as just a continuation, and in many ways a replaying, of early twentieth century modernity

² Robin Wood takes on such critiques in order to defend Marnie as an accomplished and deliberately artful/artificial film; they can also be found in both of Spoto’s studies on Hitchcock, though he aligns himself with Robin Wood’s take in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, and then sides with the film’s detractors when he writes his Hitchcock biography. A recent study of Marnie’s production history by Tony Lee Moral also addresses these criticisms.

³ See endnote above.

⁴ Hitchcock’s intentions, while usefully telling as a source through which to study the film, are not ultimately at issue, but the signs of storyboarding, direction, mise-en-scene, art direction, set and costume design, and editing that are traceable in a given film and more widely across an oeuvre, add up to that thing called style. In all of these elements Hitchcock, with his attention to detail and concern with artistic control, was instrumental. His involvement extended to the development of a script in pre-production, often an adaptation from a novel, as in the case of Marnie, or from another source. Much has been made of the reoccurring thematic and narrative motifs in Hitchcock’s movies; whatever the causality or degree of intent that may be attributed to these patterns, their presence indicates that the Hitchcock style is undeniably imbricated with aspects of story, narrative and characterization.

⁵ Spoto falls into a critical sandtrap when, after learning through research for his biography on Hitchcock that the director gave up on Marnie after suffering romantic rejection from Tippi Hedren, he denounces his former position as defender of the film’s unnaturalness as expressive of the title character’s subjectivity and writes, “But the real reason was simpler and sadder, and those reviewers who were critical, it should be admitted, were right: these moments in Marnie are not emotionally disturbing, they are simply visually jarring; they mark not a deliberate use of unconventional means, but are simply unpleasant examples of the director’s cavalier disinterest in the final product” (476). This despite a production history and interviews by the director and his crew that express Hitchcock’s desire to make a stylised, perverse and unconventional film from a novel which is more a standard psychological thriller; this despite a pronounced deliberateness accorded by Spoto—and everyone else—to Hitchcock’s other films, which share with Marnie common stylistic motifs. But most problematic is Spoto’s naïve assumption that “facts” turned up in research delimit the “right” approach to a film text. Again, the film itself cannot be ignored, and a text’s impressions on the viewer must be reckoned with.

⁶ In his book on the making and reception of Marnie, Tony Lee Moral insists upon all of this, without examination, and it is annoying, to say the least.

⁷ But still within the modest reserve typical of the Hitchcock blonde: unlike another Marion, Marion Crane of Psycho (1960), who though blonde, is not really a Hitchcock blonde, not with her extreme bras and open sexuality. The formal use of Janet Leigh, including her style of dress, is pointedly different, with much more focus on the body than the rather spiritualised, clean-face-and-superb-clothing treatment the cool blondes receive. This dichotomy is somewhat merged but tellingly maintained in Vertigo (1958), wherein Kim Novak plays both Madeline, the sublime “face” type, and Judy, the lower-class “body” type.

Bibliography:

Alfred Hitchcock Interviews. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2003.
Bellour, Raymond. “To Enunciate (on MARNIE).” The Analysis of Film. Ed. Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. p. 217-237.
Durgnat, Raymond. The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Plain Man’s Hitchcock. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.
Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Moral, Tony Lee. Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie. Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Smith, Susan. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: BFI, 2000.
Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976.
___________. The Dark Side of Genius. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

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