A belated thanks to Daniel Sayer for elaborating his position on
‘expressionism’ and
Hitchcock.  In particular, I’m grateful to Daniel for including the long
excerpt from
Ray Carney’s book on Cassavetes, opposing Hollywood’s ‘visionary/symbolic’
mode
to that of Cassavetes and others who prefer to focus ‘on the phenomenal
surfaces of
life almost to the point of sensory overload’.  ‘While the other kind of
film’, writes
Carney, ‘encourages us to tunnel under perceptual instabilities and
expressive vagaries
[to some sort of essential or metaphorical truth], Cassavetes [asks us to]
... surf on a
wave of shifting sensory experience: anxiously, uncertainly, carefully
reading
unanalyzed bodily movements, voice tones, gestures, and facial expressions.’

Daniel, I greatly enjoyed reading the Carney pages, which state a valid
preference, or
taste, for one kind of cinema over another.  I had guessed or assumed such a
position,
or stand, to represent the approximate direction from which you were coming!
 As I
say, it’s valid enough.  I was reminded of the ‘existential crisis’ (!) I
once went
through when I wavered between allegiance to Hitchcock, representing
‘closed’
cinema, and that of, say, Renoir or Rossellini or Satyajit Ray, representing
a more
‘open’ mode of filmmaking.  (I was then at the apogee of a long exposure to,
and
practice, of yoga, under the direction of a most remarkable man, Shri
Vijayadev
Yogendra.)  But I recalled the dictum of Heraclitus, about how ‘the way up
and the
way down are one and the same’, and I threw in a bit of Kierkegaard, to the
effect that
one must ‘go through’ subjectivity ‘to the other side’.  I ended up
retaining my
allegiance to Hitchcock, which isn’t of course to say that I ‘rejected’
Renoir, et al!

So nowadays I think I see how all good artists are on a common road, and
that
Hitchcock was ‘open’ in his own way, and that Renoir, et al., could be
‘expressive’ in
their way (indeed often resorting to different modes, ‘open’ or ‘closed’,
for different
films).  But, also, I think I see that, finally, it’s all One or, anyway,
relative.

Inevitably, for all the excellence of Carney’s writing about Cassavetes, and
his
impressive entering into Cassavetes’s world, his book is one of ‘special
pleading’.
For Cassavetes’s world is just that, *a* world, not *the* world - which is
ineffably
vaster.  But so is Hitchcock’s world just a world, no matter how it and
Hitchcock
strive to imply the totality beyond.  (‘Birds have been on this planet since
archeopteryx’, Mrs Bundy reminds us in THE BIRDS, which is all very
humbling, but
hardly definitive - of anything that isn’t necessarily elusive, I’d say.)

You end by quoting William James: ‘behind the bare, phenomenal facts ...
there is
nothing’.  And you comment, ‘there’s your “heart of darkness”.  Well, yes,
except that
the nothing is also a mystery.  Kant opposed the phenomenal to the noumenal,
and
said that the latter is unknowable.  I honestly don’t think that William
James - or
Stephen Hawking - have shown otherwise.

On a more pragmatic note, let me cite just a single instance of Carney’s
‘special
pleading’, which must stand for any number of such instances.  Quote: ‘When
Hitchcock backprojects waves crashing on the shore behind Scotty and
Madeline as
they kiss in VERTIGO, and edits the sound into the film, it’s obvious that
he is not
interested in the ocean but in a visual and acoustic representation of
Scotty’s surging
feelings.’  Is he, exactly?  First of all, the scene is the visual and
acoustic equivalent of
a moment in the Boileau & Narcejac novel in which the two characters emerge
from
the Louvre (instead of the sequoia forest) and sunlight catches a spray of
water,
creating a rainbow effect.  From the sublime to the kitschy!  From the
frozen or
deathly but implying the eternal (cf Scottie’s line about the sequoias being
‘always
green, ever-living’), to an illusion of ‘life’ or ‘purposefulness’ (the
rainbow is like
another kind of painting).  If you can quote William James, so, in effect,
can
Hitchcock!  Except that, where you see only ‘nothing’, Hitchcock (I think)
sees both
‘nothing’ (illusion of intent or immanent 'presence') *and* a mystery.  So?!
 Cassavetes dwells obsessively on ‘shifting
sensory experience’ without analysing it; Hitchcock dwells obsessively on
his
back-projections and his edits, without analysing them, just doing the best
he can.
Who is the more - or less - nihilistic?  Does it matter?  Both men, finally,
are just
creating art, albeit with different tonalities.  Neither more nor less.

- Ken Mogg (author of the uncut UK edition of ‘The Alfred Hitchcock Story’ -
I disown the cut and ‘simplified’ US version).
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin