I would like to thank Melissa Zinkin who recently referred
'Film-Philosophy' readers to her chapter called "FILM AND THE
TRANSCENDENTAL IMAGINATION: Kant and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes"
(printed in Kieran & Lopes [eds], 'Imagination, Philosophy and the
Arts', Routledge, London, 2003).

I read the chapter with interest, and may 'review' it soon on the New
Publications page of the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website.

Meanwhile, I would like to ask Melissa whether she has read
Schopenhauer's hundred-page essay on Kant's transcendental philosophy
and 'The Critique of Pure Reason', which forms the Appendix to Vol. 1 of
'The World As Will and Representation'?  (Schopenhauer prefaces his
essay by quoting Voltaire: 'It is the privilege of true genius, and
especially of the genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes
with impunity.')  I have read that the essay is still one of the best
critiques of Kant's work.

Next, and here we get closer to the matter of trains and Hitchcock's THE
LADY VANISHES, I would like to ask Melissa what she thinks of my own use
of Schopenhauer to explicate Hitchcock's constant references, implicit
or otherwise, to a life-force that is also a death-force?  (Schopenhauer
virtually equated his notion of a cosmic Will with both such an entity
and with Kant's unknowable Thing-in-itself.)  I'm thinking of such
Hitchcock films as LIFEBOAT, THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, and THE BIRDS (but
there are really about 50 other examples from the Hitchcock canon that
would do almost as well).  I'll (here) let the title of LIFEBOAT speak
for itself.  A well-known essay on HARRY by Ed Sikov speaks of its
depicting 'the ongoing life-force'.  Of THE BIRDS, I would take a line
from an early scene (and a passage from Schopenhauer) and suggest that
the film is effectively about the Will turned back on itself.  (All of
these things are expanded on in my book 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' -
the unexpurgated UK edition, Titan Books, London, 1999.)

Also, I was struck by the last paragraph of Melissa's chapter.  Too long
to quote here in full, it basically refers to how, in the 1930s (when
THE LADY VANISHES was made), academic philosophy was just undergoing a
split 'between analytic, or Anglo-Amerucan, and continental traditions
..., the division between the logical-scientific view of philosophy
represented by Carnap and the existential-historical view represented by
Heidegger'.  Not to put too fine a point on it, I wonder whether Melissa
can share some of the excitement I always feel when I read a passage by
Oliver Sacks (in 'Awakenings, 1973) referring to Schopenhauer:
'Schopenhauer's thesis is that the world presents itself to us under two
aspects - as Will and [Representation] - and that these two aspects are
always distinct and always conjoined; that they totally embrace, or
INFORM, one another.  To speak in terms of either alone is to lay
oneself open to a destructive duality, to the impossibility of
constructing a meaningful world ...' (This passage is in the section
PERSPECTIVES, sub-section "Awakenings".)  I often feel that Hitchcock
traded, in some of his screen effects, on just such an appeal to more
than 'single-vision' ...

Finally, speaking of the 1930s, and Hitchcock, I often point out - from
my own researches - that in England at that time, the influence of
Nietzsche, Bergson, and, yes, Schopenhauer (via such writers as Shaw and
Conrad) was very much in the air.  (I give a Bergsonian reading of the
climax of Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS [1935] in my review of Mark Glancy's
monograph on that film: see the current issue of the online journal
'Screening the Past', published at La Trobe University, Melbourne.)

Of course, behind all of those fine thinkers stood Kant himself - but
none who more revered Kant than Schopenhauer.

- Ken Mogg (Ed., 'The MacGuffin').
Website: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin

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