First, my unreserved thanks to Adrian Martin for his recommendation of
my 'MacGuffin' website on Hitchcock.
Second, to Hunter Vaughan. Yes, the information is up there - sort of.
A line in the article "The fragments of the mirror: Vertigo and its
sources" says this: 'We know that Hitchcock in the 1940s studied Freud.'
A footnote number is given. Unfortunately, for reasons given on the
site - reasons of space at the time - the article is printed on the site
without its footnotes. (The original article was published in the
hardcopy 'MacGuffin'.)
That footnote reads as follows: 'See P[hilip] French, "Alfred Hitchcock:
The Film-maker as Englishman and exile", in Sight and Sound, Spring
1985, pp. 116-22.'
I don't have the article in front of me but when I read it I remember
being convinced that French wasn't referring just to whatever research
Hitchcock may have conducted at the time of SPELLBOUND (1945). By that
time he, Hitchcock, had already read some Freud for himself. (Surprise!)
Re SPELLBOUND, somewhere there's an anecdote about how the filmmakers
came up with the memorable shot of the opening doors. Hitchcock had
instructed Ben Hecht: 'Go away and find me the [a] Freudian symbol for
first love.' (Two decades later, in MARNIE, door-symbolism is constant.
But it's also a motif - not just one shot - in SPELLBOUND.)
In his previous film, LIFEBOAT (1944), he had already come up with a
similar symbol. I have seen a script of that film where, when
radio-operator Stanley Garrett undoes the ribbon in nurse Alice
MacKenzie's hair, a script-note observes that this is a Freudian symbol.
Of course, Hitchcock himself (unlike his producer of the time,
Selznick), never underwent psychoanalysis. When asked about this, he
replied with eminent justification (surely?!), 'Why should I?'
But I do take Hunter's point that Hitchcock's Catholic upbringing was an
important factor in his sensitivity to matters of guilt, human
fallibility, etc.
Third, on the matter of the jump-shots to the dead farmer's face in THE
BIRDS, I can agree that Hitchcock may have been influenced at some level
by the work of early Russian filmmakers, by James Whale, by Orson Welles
- any or all of those! He knew all of their work! But, pragmatically,
it was a case of a problem to be solved (not just a shock-point to be
made): how best to convey the effect of the moment on Lydia Brenner who
would have seen - half disbelieving, i.e., half denying - the terrible
sight of the farmer's bloodied eye-sockets? The ellipses in those cuts
= the element of disbelief, denial. (By contrast, the fast-zoom into
Gromek's motorbike in TORN CURTAIN, after his killing, registers the
sudden FULL realisation by Armstrong and the farmer's wife: 'Oops!
There's incriminating evidence against us! What shall we do?!') In
addition, of course, Hitchcock knew that he had to anticipate
censorship, and reasoned that the jump cuts might make it more difficult
for censors to think of simply snipping out the whole effect.
- Ken Mogg
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html
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