1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:02,500 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,500 --> 00:00:04,030 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,030 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,730 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,730 --> 00:00:13,340 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,340 --> 00:00:17,217 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,217 --> 00:00:17,842 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:26,330 --> 00:00:32,210 DAVID THORBURN: We turn today to Alfred Hitchcock, 9 00:00:32,210 --> 00:00:33,810 one of the most remarkable, if not 10 00:00:33,810 --> 00:00:35,710 the most remarkable and significant, 11 00:00:35,710 --> 00:00:38,540 of what we might call the great studio directors, 12 00:00:38,540 --> 00:00:40,640 the people who worked with great ease 13 00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:43,750 and success inside the studio system 14 00:00:43,750 --> 00:00:46,160 that developed in the United States-- 15 00:00:46,160 --> 00:00:48,420 began to develop in the United States 16 00:00:48,420 --> 00:00:52,520 in more than embryonic form, in early systematic form 17 00:00:52,520 --> 00:00:55,900 in the silent era and then was fortified and extended 18 00:00:55,900 --> 00:00:58,780 into the great mass manufacturing 19 00:00:58,780 --> 00:01:03,000 center for dreams and movies, the Hollywood 20 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:05,570 system of the studio era. 21 00:01:05,570 --> 00:01:08,350 And I wanted to begin by saying a word about Hitchcock 22 00:01:08,350 --> 00:01:11,360 in relation to that great system. 23 00:01:11,360 --> 00:01:14,390 If we think about a famous quotation from the great film 24 00:01:14,390 --> 00:01:20,460 scholar, pioneering film critic Andre Bazin, 25 00:01:20,460 --> 00:01:23,770 to whom we will return later in the semester. 26 00:01:23,770 --> 00:01:28,330 Bazin, among his other an influential comments, 27 00:01:28,330 --> 00:01:32,440 this one is a particularly powerful and significant one. 28 00:01:32,440 --> 00:01:38,130 "The American cinema," he wrote in 1957, "is a classical art," 29 00:01:38,130 --> 00:01:40,655 and it's unclear exactly what he meant by that, 30 00:01:40,655 --> 00:01:42,930 but most critics assume that what he meant by 31 00:01:42,930 --> 00:01:46,520 that is that it's a system that works according to essentially 32 00:01:46,520 --> 00:01:52,030 classical genre forms, that these genre forms have origins 33 00:01:52,030 --> 00:01:54,910 behind the movies, and that the system works 34 00:01:54,910 --> 00:02:00,740 in a kind of a generic way, and that at least 35 00:02:00,740 --> 00:02:02,710 that's a part of what he meant when 36 00:02:02,710 --> 00:02:03,970 he called it a classical art. 37 00:02:03,970 --> 00:02:05,980 The American cinema is a classical art, 38 00:02:05,980 --> 00:02:11,140 but why not then admire it in what is most admirable, 39 00:02:11,140 --> 00:02:14,430 not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, 40 00:02:14,430 --> 00:02:16,970 but the genius of the system. 41 00:02:16,970 --> 00:02:18,470 And I think I alluded to this phrase 42 00:02:18,470 --> 00:02:20,160 or used this phrase earlier in the term, 43 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:22,230 and I want to do justice to it by acknowledging 44 00:02:22,230 --> 00:02:23,970 its origins in Andre Bazin. 45 00:02:23,970 --> 00:02:27,380 There's also a wonderful book by a film scholar from Texas named 46 00:02:27,380 --> 00:02:30,740 Tom Schatz called The Genius of the System, 47 00:02:30,740 --> 00:02:35,230 and it borrows, it uses this quotation as its inspiration, 48 00:02:35,230 --> 00:02:38,680 and it's a systematic analysis of the Hollywood studio 49 00:02:38,680 --> 00:02:41,300 system in which it talks about the interaction 50 00:02:41,300 --> 00:02:43,730 of individual agency-- the writers, 51 00:02:43,730 --> 00:02:46,270 the directors, the camera people, 52 00:02:46,270 --> 00:02:48,730 and so forth, the customers-- the interaction 53 00:02:48,730 --> 00:02:54,270 of those creative or semi-creative figures 54 00:02:54,270 --> 00:02:58,080 with the manufacturing and publicity practices 55 00:02:58,080 --> 00:03:00,980 and rituals that surrounded the production of movies 56 00:03:00,980 --> 00:03:04,330 in which he tries to provide a kind of integrated sense of how 57 00:03:04,330 --> 00:03:08,150 the system worked to explore what Bazin apparently 58 00:03:08,150 --> 00:03:11,140 meant when he talked about the genius of the system. 59 00:03:11,140 --> 00:03:13,890 Well, one way of understanding the genius of the system 60 00:03:13,890 --> 00:03:19,190 is to recognize that it creates an environment, first of all, 61 00:03:19,190 --> 00:03:23,510 of stability in which particular filmmakers 62 00:03:23,510 --> 00:03:25,220 or particular writers or directors 63 00:03:25,220 --> 00:03:28,640 can have confidence-- sometimes overwhelming confidence 64 00:03:28,640 --> 00:03:31,270 because they're ordered to do the job by the studio head-- 65 00:03:31,270 --> 00:03:35,760 can have confidence that the genre stories they're creating 66 00:03:35,760 --> 00:03:36,934 have an audience. 67 00:03:36,934 --> 00:03:38,850 And of course, that's been sort of established 68 00:03:38,850 --> 00:03:42,740 by the, essentially, assembly line system that develops, 69 00:03:42,740 --> 00:03:45,330 and the elaborate system of distribution and access 70 00:03:45,330 --> 00:03:46,940 that developed in the United States. 71 00:03:46,940 --> 00:03:48,940 The major studios actually, although they only 72 00:03:48,940 --> 00:03:54,579 controlled something like 16% of the resources they-- 73 00:03:54,579 --> 00:03:56,120 of movie-making-- actually controlled 74 00:03:56,120 --> 00:03:58,479 a much larger percentage of the theaters, 75 00:03:58,479 --> 00:04:00,770 because many of the theaters either were owned outright 76 00:04:00,770 --> 00:04:05,840 by studios or until a certain point when a Supreme Court 77 00:04:05,840 --> 00:04:09,170 decision divested the studios from-- 78 00:04:09,170 --> 00:04:11,470 forced the studios to divest themselves 79 00:04:11,470 --> 00:04:13,200 from their theatrical holdings. 80 00:04:13,200 --> 00:04:15,200 But when the system was in place, 81 00:04:15,200 --> 00:04:17,450 it was a monopoly system in which the rich got richer, 82 00:04:17,450 --> 00:04:21,640 in some sense, and the major studios controlled, 83 00:04:21,640 --> 00:04:24,140 owned many theaters themselves and by a system 84 00:04:24,140 --> 00:04:26,320 of what was called block booking, 85 00:04:26,320 --> 00:04:30,291 they forced theaters not just to book particular films 86 00:04:30,291 --> 00:04:32,040 and particular stars that they might like, 87 00:04:32,040 --> 00:04:35,330 but MGM would say to independent theater owners, 88 00:04:35,330 --> 00:04:38,160 if you want the MGM films, you have to take my whole card. 89 00:04:38,160 --> 00:04:40,242 You can't just choose the Clark Gable movies, 90 00:04:40,242 --> 00:04:41,700 you have to choose the whole thing. 91 00:04:41,700 --> 00:04:45,110 And this stability created an environment 92 00:04:45,110 --> 00:04:49,970 in which each major studio was confident that, in effect, 93 00:04:49,970 --> 00:04:52,450 it had a captive market for its product, 94 00:04:52,450 --> 00:04:55,880 and it created an immense sense of stability and confidence 95 00:04:55,880 --> 00:04:59,750 when the system was working at its best. 96 00:04:59,750 --> 00:05:01,510 And of course, again, because it was 97 00:05:01,510 --> 00:05:04,370 a system that was committed to entertaining the largest 98 00:05:04,370 --> 00:05:06,740 number of people it could reach as possible, 99 00:05:06,740 --> 00:05:09,210 it meant that there were certain parameters that 100 00:05:09,210 --> 00:05:12,540 were established within which the entire system was forced 101 00:05:12,540 --> 00:05:13,040 operate. 102 00:05:13,040 --> 00:05:15,242 Whatever genre was involved, there 103 00:05:15,242 --> 00:05:16,450 were certain kinds of limits. 104 00:05:16,450 --> 00:05:18,660 It's what I was talking about earlier, trying 105 00:05:18,660 --> 00:05:21,040 to get at this aspect of the system earlier, 106 00:05:21,040 --> 00:05:24,050 when I talked about the idea of consensus narrative. 107 00:05:24,050 --> 00:05:25,606 If the Hollywood film is reaching out 108 00:05:25,606 --> 00:05:27,480 to the whole of the society and it's telling, 109 00:05:27,480 --> 00:05:30,550 essentially, a story that appeals to or is supposed 110 00:05:30,550 --> 00:05:34,970 to embody the consensus view, the largest general view 111 00:05:34,970 --> 00:05:38,570 of what the belief system of the society is, what that means 112 00:05:38,570 --> 00:05:41,540 is that there are limits, very sharp constraints-- 113 00:05:41,540 --> 00:05:43,550 political and moral constraints-- within which 114 00:05:43,550 --> 00:05:44,400 the text operates. 115 00:05:44,400 --> 00:05:46,730 And as you know, especially if you've been reading your 116 00:05:46,730 --> 00:05:50,360 [? Cook, ?] the introduction of a particular sensory system 117 00:05:50,360 --> 00:05:52,380 introduced by Hollywood itself in order 118 00:05:52,380 --> 00:05:54,070 to avoid other kinds of censorship 119 00:05:54,070 --> 00:05:56,300 perhaps from the government, further 120 00:05:56,300 --> 00:06:00,050 constrained the kinds of stories that could be told. 121 00:06:00,050 --> 00:06:02,150 Well, within those constraints, of course, 122 00:06:02,150 --> 00:06:04,540 as I hope I've already begun to show you 123 00:06:04,540 --> 00:06:06,640 in our discussion of screwball comedy, 124 00:06:06,640 --> 00:06:11,920 there can be an immense range of difference, 125 00:06:11,920 --> 00:06:15,300 but it's still within certain controlled parameters. 126 00:06:15,300 --> 00:06:17,170 And one of the ways to understand 127 00:06:17,170 --> 00:06:19,720 Hitchcock's immense success is to recognize 128 00:06:19,720 --> 00:06:22,300 that he had the kind of sensibility, the kind 129 00:06:22,300 --> 00:06:24,610 of artistic impulses, and maybe even 130 00:06:24,610 --> 00:06:28,350 the kinds of limitations that made the studio system a kind 131 00:06:28,350 --> 00:06:30,400 of perfect environment for him. 132 00:06:30,400 --> 00:06:32,830 Anyone who's looked at a Hitchcock-- more than one 133 00:06:32,830 --> 00:06:35,260 or two Hitchcock films, is aware of the fact 134 00:06:35,260 --> 00:06:37,250 that there's something obsessional, 135 00:06:37,250 --> 00:06:40,950 something deeply disturbing about Hitchcock's imagination. 136 00:06:40,950 --> 00:06:42,960 He's drawn again, and again, and again 137 00:06:42,960 --> 00:06:46,080 to the same kinds of situations, to scenes of violence 138 00:06:46,080 --> 00:06:48,740 against women, to scenes of confinement, 139 00:06:48,740 --> 00:06:51,882 but the studio system was a kind of perfect environment 140 00:06:51,882 --> 00:06:54,520 for these kinds of preoccupations. 141 00:06:54,520 --> 00:06:57,320 On the one hand, the constraints of the system 142 00:06:57,320 --> 00:07:00,090 did not allow Hitchcock, even if he had the impulse 143 00:07:00,090 --> 00:07:03,230 to do so, to press so far into the perversity 144 00:07:03,230 --> 00:07:06,700 and disturbance that is the general subject matter he is 145 00:07:06,700 --> 00:07:10,520 looking at, as to actually fall into, say, pornography 146 00:07:10,520 --> 00:07:14,390 or to fall into something that will deeply offend 147 00:07:14,390 --> 00:07:16,170 some segment of the population. 148 00:07:16,170 --> 00:07:18,120 We can see that these were impulses 149 00:07:18,120 --> 00:07:20,430 in Hitchcock's imagination though, 150 00:07:20,430 --> 00:07:23,630 because after the-- Hitchcock lasted long enough, lived 151 00:07:23,630 --> 00:07:26,500 for such a long time-- he was a successful director 152 00:07:26,500 --> 00:07:27,680 in the silent era. 153 00:07:27,680 --> 00:07:29,740 Then he worked in Britain during the sound era 154 00:07:29,740 --> 00:07:32,740 and was the most well known and successful 155 00:07:32,740 --> 00:07:35,600 of all British directors in the early sound era. 156 00:07:35,600 --> 00:07:38,240 Then in 1940, he came to the United States for what 157 00:07:38,240 --> 00:07:40,940 as most people recognize as his American phase. 158 00:07:40,940 --> 00:07:43,160 He emigrated to the United States 159 00:07:43,160 --> 00:07:46,600 and that's a separate kind of distinct part of his career, 160 00:07:46,600 --> 00:07:50,330 as I'll describe in a little more detail in a moment. 161 00:07:50,330 --> 00:07:54,780 Well, by the end of his career, Hollywood 162 00:07:54,780 --> 00:07:57,480 itself was undergoing profound changes for reasons 163 00:07:57,480 --> 00:08:00,360 we've already begun to talk about in this course, the most 164 00:08:00,360 --> 00:08:03,390 important of them being the advent of television 165 00:08:03,390 --> 00:08:05,530 and the way in which, through the 1950s, 166 00:08:05,530 --> 00:08:08,580 television began to leech away the consensus 167 00:08:08,580 --> 00:08:11,730 audience and the consensus function that Hollywood 168 00:08:11,730 --> 00:08:13,220 had played in American life. 169 00:08:13,220 --> 00:08:16,220 And the effect this was to, in some sense, liberate Hollywood, 170 00:08:16,220 --> 00:08:19,484 and we'll be talking about what this ambiguous liberation later 171 00:08:19,484 --> 00:08:21,900 in the course when we look at some of the great films that 172 00:08:21,900 --> 00:08:25,400 emerge in the 1970s that are free of the constraints 173 00:08:25,400 --> 00:08:26,970 of a consensus system. 174 00:08:26,970 --> 00:08:30,815 Films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Cabaret, the two films 175 00:08:30,815 --> 00:08:32,440 that we're going to be looking at later 176 00:08:32,440 --> 00:08:36,250 that embody these sort of post studio era ideals 177 00:08:36,250 --> 00:08:37,179 and principles. 178 00:08:37,179 --> 00:08:39,850 Well, one of the ways in which you can see the damage that 179 00:08:39,850 --> 00:08:43,890 was-- the help that was given to Hitchcock's own imagination 180 00:08:43,890 --> 00:08:46,630 by what I'm calling the genius of the system, 181 00:08:46,630 --> 00:08:50,334 is that you can see that Hitchcock's-- that the latest 182 00:08:50,334 --> 00:08:52,750 films that Hitchcock makes, the films that Hitchcock makes 183 00:08:52,750 --> 00:08:57,520 at the very end of his career, and especially a film-- 184 00:08:57,520 --> 00:09:02,120 two films, a film called Frenzy starring Michael Caine in 1972, 185 00:09:02,120 --> 00:09:05,710 and the last film the Hitchcock made in 1976 called Family 186 00:09:05,710 --> 00:09:06,340 Plot. 187 00:09:06,340 --> 00:09:08,540 The same basic materials, but there's 188 00:09:08,540 --> 00:09:10,880 something gratuitous about the nudity in these films. 189 00:09:10,880 --> 00:09:13,970 He wasn't allowed to show nudity in the studio era, 190 00:09:13,970 --> 00:09:16,030 and it was good for his imagination. 191 00:09:16,030 --> 00:09:17,920 And when his imagination-- and any 192 00:09:17,920 --> 00:09:21,480 honorable-- any honest viewer of Hitchcock watching Frenzy, 193 00:09:21,480 --> 00:09:24,580 or especially Family Plot, and watch-- 194 00:09:24,580 --> 00:09:26,440 there's a scene in Frenzy in which 195 00:09:26,440 --> 00:09:28,310 a murderer strangles a woman. 196 00:09:28,310 --> 00:09:30,040 Now, there have been-- strangulation is 197 00:09:30,040 --> 00:09:32,200 one of Hitchcock's favorite forms of murder, 198 00:09:32,200 --> 00:09:34,070 and there've been many characters strangled 199 00:09:34,070 --> 00:09:36,240 in Hitchcock's movie, but this strangulation 200 00:09:36,240 --> 00:09:38,550 has a pornographic dimension to it 201 00:09:38,550 --> 00:09:40,862 that none of the early scenes like that did. 202 00:09:40,862 --> 00:09:42,820 And it has to do with the fact Hitchcock is now 203 00:09:42,820 --> 00:09:46,000 working in a film environment that is not telling him 204 00:09:46,000 --> 00:09:49,390 that he can't go too far, and he does go too far. 205 00:09:49,390 --> 00:09:52,270 And there's a terrible scene in which a murderer takes off 206 00:09:52,270 --> 00:09:55,390 his tie, and he strangles this woman with a tie. 207 00:09:55,390 --> 00:09:57,040 The woman is naked from the waist up, 208 00:09:57,040 --> 00:09:59,960 and you see her breasts bobbling around on the screen 209 00:09:59,960 --> 00:10:02,110 while she's being strangled, and you 210 00:10:02,110 --> 00:10:04,190 can see that the camera is enjoying 211 00:10:04,190 --> 00:10:08,280 looking at those breasts, even though it's a scene of murder. 212 00:10:08,280 --> 00:10:10,930 It's a very, very horrible scene, a very disturbing scene. 213 00:10:10,930 --> 00:10:13,236 It's a scene that-- it almost is a scene that 214 00:10:13,236 --> 00:10:15,860 makes you believe in censorship, to think that censorship ought 215 00:10:15,860 --> 00:10:17,860 to be-- certainly, you wouldn't want young people 216 00:10:17,860 --> 00:10:18,430 to see this scene. 217 00:10:18,430 --> 00:10:19,980 Now, the only reason that Hitchcock 218 00:10:19,980 --> 00:10:23,370 was free to create this scene is that there were no longer 219 00:10:23,370 --> 00:10:25,070 the same constraints being imposed 220 00:10:25,070 --> 00:10:28,060 upon him by what I want to call the constraining 221 00:10:28,060 --> 00:10:29,630 genius of the system. 222 00:10:29,630 --> 00:10:31,960 So my point is that Hitchcock was 223 00:10:31,960 --> 00:10:34,710 a man of obsessional genius of a certain sort, 224 00:10:34,710 --> 00:10:36,960 but he had the great good fortune 225 00:10:36,960 --> 00:10:40,010 to work within a system that also limited 226 00:10:40,010 --> 00:10:43,240 his liabilities, that didn't even 227 00:10:43,240 --> 00:10:46,530 allow the full expression of his obsessions 228 00:10:46,530 --> 00:10:51,921 in ways that might become deeply disturbing to audiences. 229 00:10:51,921 --> 00:10:54,170 The fact of the matter is, when you look at that scene 230 00:10:54,170 --> 00:10:57,260 and then you think back at many earlier Hitchcock movies, 231 00:10:57,260 --> 00:10:59,220 you can see many equivalents of it. 232 00:10:59,220 --> 00:11:02,469 Violence and damage to women is a recurring obsession 233 00:11:02,469 --> 00:11:03,010 in Hitchcock. 234 00:11:03,010 --> 00:11:05,260 Hitchcock is a sick man in many ways. 235 00:11:05,260 --> 00:11:07,770 But he's not a sick artist, he's a sick person. 236 00:11:07,770 --> 00:11:09,700 He turns his sickness into art. 237 00:11:09,700 --> 00:11:13,350 He turns his sickness into use by dramatizing it and reminding 238 00:11:13,350 --> 00:11:16,260 us of the-- so insofar as he's a good filmmaker, he's 239 00:11:16,260 --> 00:11:22,070 not a-- he's not a horrible perv, right? 240 00:11:22,070 --> 00:11:24,551 But there are perverted dimensions to Hitchcock. 241 00:11:24,551 --> 00:11:26,550 And in fact, part of why we find him interesting 242 00:11:26,550 --> 00:11:30,200 is his films are always hovering on the brink of awakening 243 00:11:30,200 --> 00:11:33,725 in us feelings that are disturbing and unsettling, 244 00:11:33,725 --> 00:11:37,710 and that touch on deep taboos in the ways 245 00:11:37,710 --> 00:11:40,180 in which our culture sort of understands how we should 246 00:11:40,180 --> 00:11:48,220 behave, and especially in our attitudes towards sexuality, 247 00:11:48,220 --> 00:11:50,470 and towards seeing, toward the act of seeing, 248 00:11:50,470 --> 00:11:52,690 which in Hitchcock becomes a kind of voyeurism. 249 00:11:52,690 --> 00:11:54,640 So one way to understand Hitchcock 250 00:11:54,640 --> 00:11:57,430 is to understand his genius, his greatness as a director 251 00:11:57,430 --> 00:11:59,310 as being directly connected to the fact 252 00:11:59,310 --> 00:12:01,730 that for the most part of his career, 253 00:12:01,730 --> 00:12:04,270 he worked in systems that constrained him. 254 00:12:04,270 --> 00:12:07,930 He worked in systems that had a very sharp boundaries, that 255 00:12:07,930 --> 00:12:10,920 didn't allow him to do certain kinds of things, 256 00:12:10,920 --> 00:12:13,130 and those limitations were turned 257 00:12:13,130 --> 00:12:16,570 into artful and valuable gestures. 258 00:12:16,570 --> 00:12:20,640 An anecdote that Hitchcock told about himself many times, 259 00:12:20,640 --> 00:12:22,960 this deeply revealing anecdote. 260 00:12:22,960 --> 00:12:24,380 It may not be true. 261 00:12:24,380 --> 00:12:26,580 We're not really sure, but he told it so many times 262 00:12:26,580 --> 00:12:30,330 that it's true even if it didn't happen. 263 00:12:30,330 --> 00:12:33,370 That's a line-- it's true even if it didn't happen-- 264 00:12:33,370 --> 00:12:35,510 it's a line from Ken Kesey's wonderful novel, 265 00:12:35,510 --> 00:12:38,130 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 266 00:12:38,130 --> 00:12:40,830 And the character, the narrator in the book, who 267 00:12:40,830 --> 00:12:43,010 was sort of a crazy man, or we think, 268 00:12:43,010 --> 00:12:45,260 he's in an insane asylum, he's in a loony bin 269 00:12:45,260 --> 00:12:47,440 when he starts narrating the story, 270 00:12:47,440 --> 00:12:49,350 tells us a story of his confinement 271 00:12:49,350 --> 00:12:51,774 in a lunatic asylum, and he says, 272 00:12:51,774 --> 00:12:54,190 you think the man who's saying this is raving and crazing? 273 00:12:54,190 --> 00:12:57,390 My god, this is true even if it didn't happen. 274 00:12:57,390 --> 00:13:00,120 And what he means is there's a kind of emotional truth, 275 00:13:00,120 --> 00:13:01,840 even if the actual facts aren't true. 276 00:13:01,840 --> 00:13:04,470 And I think that's true of the Hitchcock anecdote as well, 277 00:13:04,470 --> 00:13:08,170 and this is the anecdote he repeatedly told about himself. 278 00:13:08,170 --> 00:13:11,630 He said, when he was a young boy, five or six years-old, 279 00:13:11,630 --> 00:13:15,780 he committed some indiscretion that his father disapproved of, 280 00:13:15,780 --> 00:13:18,280 and his father, in response, without saying anything 281 00:13:18,280 --> 00:13:21,650 to the boy, wrote a note, sealed it in an envelope, 282 00:13:21,650 --> 00:13:23,650 gave it to the boy, and told him to take it down 283 00:13:23,650 --> 00:13:26,500 to the local constable-- the policeman 284 00:13:26,500 --> 00:13:28,190 in the police station around the corner 285 00:13:28,190 --> 00:13:29,710 from where they lived in London. 286 00:13:29,710 --> 00:13:32,040 So the young boy dutifully took the note to him, 287 00:13:32,040 --> 00:13:32,960 and then gave it to the constable, 288 00:13:32,960 --> 00:13:35,350 and the constable opened it, read it, and locked the boy 289 00:13:35,350 --> 00:13:38,480 in a prison cell, and kept him in there 290 00:13:38,480 --> 00:13:40,804 for a certain short amount of time, 291 00:13:40,804 --> 00:13:42,470 and then finally released him, and said, 292 00:13:42,470 --> 00:13:45,680 this is what happens to bad boys. 293 00:13:45,680 --> 00:13:48,420 And Hitchcock has said, ever since then, I 294 00:13:48,420 --> 00:13:50,780 have gone to any length to avoid arrest 295 00:13:50,780 --> 00:13:55,460 and to avoid confinement in confining spaces. 296 00:13:55,460 --> 00:13:57,660 And in fact, if you think about it for a second, 297 00:13:57,660 --> 00:14:01,610 over and over again in Hitchcock's films, 298 00:14:01,610 --> 00:14:03,650 a basic story, not the only story, 299 00:14:03,650 --> 00:14:06,220 but a basic story he tells is the story of someone 300 00:14:06,220 --> 00:14:07,490 who is wrongly accused. 301 00:14:07,490 --> 00:14:09,930 We might call it the wrong man theme, right? 302 00:14:09,930 --> 00:14:11,430 And someone who was on the run, who 303 00:14:11,430 --> 00:14:13,650 looked at the circumstantial evidence 304 00:14:13,650 --> 00:14:18,670 against him is-- or her, usually him-- is overwhelming, right? 305 00:14:18,670 --> 00:14:19,520 Absolutely looks it. 306 00:14:19,520 --> 00:14:22,160 And all the authorities, all the legitimate authorities 307 00:14:22,160 --> 00:14:26,270 of the culture, think the protagonist of the Hitchcock 308 00:14:26,270 --> 00:14:28,330 chase film is guilty, right? 309 00:14:28,330 --> 00:14:31,150 And his obligation is to somehow not only escape 310 00:14:31,150 --> 00:14:34,920 the authorities, who are much more powerful than he, 311 00:14:34,920 --> 00:14:39,590 of course, and have at their fingertips 312 00:14:39,590 --> 00:14:44,750 all kinds of modern systems for searching, and following, 313 00:14:44,750 --> 00:14:47,750 and capturing people, and the fugitive 314 00:14:47,750 --> 00:14:50,780 is a lone fugitive on his own without resources 315 00:14:50,780 --> 00:14:52,460 and without allies. 316 00:14:52,460 --> 00:14:55,724 So he's up against tremendously difficult forces 317 00:14:55,724 --> 00:14:57,765 and these are the forces of legitimate authority. 318 00:15:00,570 --> 00:15:03,010 So the theme of the wrong man, who's wrongly accused. 319 00:15:03,010 --> 00:15:05,130 The audience knows that he's wrongly accused. 320 00:15:05,130 --> 00:15:07,850 Often, Hitchcock will show the real murderer 321 00:15:07,850 --> 00:15:11,480 and will show us how circumstantially persuasive 322 00:15:11,480 --> 00:15:14,250 but also falsely evidence is, so through most of the movie, 323 00:15:14,250 --> 00:15:17,740 we identify with the fugitive, with the person who's running. 324 00:15:17,740 --> 00:15:19,830 We know he is innocent. 325 00:15:19,830 --> 00:15:22,200 So part of it is-- so many of his films 326 00:15:22,200 --> 00:15:25,360 then sort of dramatize a kind of massive principle of injustice 327 00:15:25,360 --> 00:15:28,160 that happens again and again in his movies. 328 00:15:28,160 --> 00:15:32,690 Authorities are almost always after the wrong man. 329 00:15:32,690 --> 00:15:37,140 And then many of his films, an overwhelmingly disturbing 330 00:15:37,140 --> 00:15:41,870 recurring element in his films, is confinement in tight spaces, 331 00:15:41,870 --> 00:15:43,200 is the sense of being caught. 332 00:15:43,200 --> 00:15:46,640 And you'll see one of the great, great instances of this, 333 00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:52,860 one of his most artistic accountings of this impulse, 334 00:15:52,860 --> 00:15:55,030 this fear of confinement, but this fascination 335 00:15:55,030 --> 00:15:56,570 with confinement, in the great film 336 00:15:56,570 --> 00:15:59,210 you're going to see tonight, Rear Window, which takes place 337 00:15:59,210 --> 00:16:02,170 entirely in a single confined space, in a room, 338 00:16:02,170 --> 00:16:04,220 because the man who-- the protagonist has 339 00:16:04,220 --> 00:16:06,300 a broken leg at the beginning of the film 340 00:16:06,300 --> 00:16:08,820 and he's literally unable to move out of his apartment. 341 00:16:08,820 --> 00:16:11,250 So the entire film is confined there, and, of course, 342 00:16:11,250 --> 00:16:13,200 many of Hitchcock's films love this. 343 00:16:13,200 --> 00:16:16,260 So what an interesting anecdote to be told. 344 00:16:16,260 --> 00:16:17,820 And think, by implication, what it 345 00:16:17,820 --> 00:16:20,760 says about his father, not to mention 346 00:16:20,760 --> 00:16:23,370 what it says about Hitchcock himself 347 00:16:23,370 --> 00:16:25,940 to tell a story like this so many times over the whole 348 00:16:25,940 --> 00:16:26,910 of his career. 349 00:16:26,910 --> 00:16:30,590 But the idea that a world that seems perfectly 350 00:16:30,590 --> 00:16:32,220 benign and protective could suddenly 351 00:16:32,220 --> 00:16:36,760 turn menacing and terrible, that behind any door or window lurks 352 00:16:36,760 --> 00:16:40,840 some monstrosity, that the ordinary world is just 353 00:16:40,840 --> 00:16:43,710 an illusion, that what you think of as ordinary, and plain, 354 00:16:43,710 --> 00:16:50,410 and prosaic can suddenly erupt in violence, or in terror, 355 00:16:50,410 --> 00:16:52,790 or in some form of unpredictable assault 356 00:16:52,790 --> 00:16:57,050 is a constant feeling you have in Hitchcock's films. 357 00:16:57,050 --> 00:17:00,890 His films dance along an edge in which the whole of the universe 358 00:17:00,890 --> 00:17:03,480 could be said to be, in some sense, endangered. 359 00:17:03,480 --> 00:17:07,371 The basic laws of our experience, of even sometimes 360 00:17:07,371 --> 00:17:08,829 the physical laws of our experience 361 00:17:08,829 --> 00:17:14,121 are upended, or denied, or suspended in Hitchcock's world. 362 00:17:14,121 --> 00:17:16,329 Can you think of one example where the laws of nature 363 00:17:16,329 --> 00:17:19,810 itself suddenly go cuckoo? 364 00:17:19,810 --> 00:17:21,256 One of his most famous films. 365 00:17:21,256 --> 00:17:22,089 AUDIENCE: The Birds. 366 00:17:22,089 --> 00:17:23,230 DAVID THORBURN: The Birds, of course, 367 00:17:23,230 --> 00:17:24,000 the late film The Birds. 368 00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:25,300 What happens in The Birds? 369 00:17:25,300 --> 00:17:27,650 AUDIENCE: All the birds start attacking [INAUDIBLE]. 370 00:17:27,650 --> 00:17:29,983 DAVID THORBURN: Yes, the most benign and beautiful parts 371 00:17:29,983 --> 00:17:33,554 of nature suddenly began to attack human beings. 372 00:17:33,554 --> 00:17:35,470 He gives some partial explanation in the film, 373 00:17:35,470 --> 00:17:37,928 where you see there's a scene in a restaurant where you see 374 00:17:37,928 --> 00:17:39,540 pictures of fried chicken, and people 375 00:17:39,540 --> 00:17:44,470 talking about how they love roast pheasant, and so forth. 376 00:17:44,470 --> 00:17:46,420 But in all of Hitchcock's films, there 377 00:17:46,420 --> 00:17:49,500 is never an adequate, a truly adequate motive 378 00:17:49,500 --> 00:17:52,250 for the madness, terror, disorder 379 00:17:52,250 --> 00:17:54,350 that is released in the movies. 380 00:17:54,350 --> 00:17:56,330 There's often an attempt to explain them, 381 00:17:56,330 --> 00:17:58,850 but nobody takes the explanations very seriously, 382 00:17:58,850 --> 00:18:00,880 because the point is, his vision of life 383 00:18:00,880 --> 00:18:03,560 is a vision in which the world is an incredibly 384 00:18:03,560 --> 00:18:08,610 dangerous, wholly unpredictable, monstrously fearsome place. 385 00:18:08,610 --> 00:18:11,530 Maybe his dominant emotion is the emotion of fear. 386 00:18:11,530 --> 00:18:15,550 He dramatizes fear over and over and over again in his movies. 387 00:18:15,550 --> 00:18:17,200 Here is a brief selection. 388 00:18:17,200 --> 00:18:18,890 He made over 50 films, and I think 389 00:18:18,890 --> 00:18:23,480 53 total films, silent and sound films in his career. 390 00:18:23,480 --> 00:18:26,800 The list I put up there is just a very brief selection, 391 00:18:26,800 --> 00:18:31,270 but let me say a few things about the trajectory 392 00:18:31,270 --> 00:18:36,610 of that career and then I'll turn to a bit more 393 00:18:36,610 --> 00:18:40,720 about his technical genius and about the central themes 394 00:18:40,720 --> 00:18:42,880 of his work, which I've already begun to elaborate 395 00:18:42,880 --> 00:18:46,430 and won't repeat myself too much, I hope. 396 00:18:46,430 --> 00:18:48,980 But let's talk a bit about his career, 397 00:18:48,980 --> 00:18:55,570 because like Howard Hawks and Frank Capra, 398 00:18:55,570 --> 00:19:01,010 Hitchcock is, even more than those two, 399 00:19:01,010 --> 00:19:04,820 a dominant figure of the studio era, maybe the dominant figure. 400 00:19:04,820 --> 00:19:08,560 Certainly, the director whose work has been most influential, 401 00:19:08,560 --> 00:19:09,930 has lasted the longest. 402 00:19:09,930 --> 00:19:11,370 One of the most interesting things 403 00:19:11,370 --> 00:19:13,760 about Hitchcock's career, as a whole, 404 00:19:13,760 --> 00:19:17,340 is that even after film came to be recognized 405 00:19:17,340 --> 00:19:19,450 as something more than mere entertainment, 406 00:19:19,450 --> 00:19:22,530 Hitchcock was always admired as a great entertainer 407 00:19:22,530 --> 00:19:27,181 and was a successful director from the silent era 408 00:19:27,181 --> 00:19:29,180 from the time he began to work in Great Britain. 409 00:19:29,180 --> 00:19:37,430 When he made his move to the United States in 1939, 410 00:19:37,430 --> 00:19:40,320 he was Britain's most famous and most admired director. 411 00:19:40,320 --> 00:19:42,159 In fact, when he came to the United States, 412 00:19:42,159 --> 00:19:43,700 there was a kind of negative reaction 413 00:19:43,700 --> 00:19:46,850 in Britain, because they felt it was unpatriotic 414 00:19:46,850 --> 00:19:49,330 of this great director to desert his native homeland 415 00:19:49,330 --> 00:19:52,030 in the middle of the war, among other things. 416 00:19:52,030 --> 00:19:56,330 And he did feel guilt over this, in many ways, 417 00:19:56,330 --> 00:19:59,010 and some of that guilt is said, by some scholars, 418 00:19:59,010 --> 00:20:02,100 to express itself in some aspects of the other film 419 00:20:02,100 --> 00:20:04,490 you're going to see this evening, an earlier film, 420 00:20:04,490 --> 00:20:08,620 made in 1943 shortly after Hitchcock 421 00:20:08,620 --> 00:20:09,870 had come to the United States. 422 00:20:09,870 --> 00:20:11,750 It wasn't his first American film. 423 00:20:11,750 --> 00:20:13,782 While he was making that film, he 424 00:20:13,782 --> 00:20:15,990 was receiving news from England about his mother, who 425 00:20:15,990 --> 00:20:18,690 was very ill, and she actually died 426 00:20:18,690 --> 00:20:22,960 while he was in the United States filming 427 00:20:22,960 --> 00:20:24,430 Shadow of a Doubt. 428 00:20:24,430 --> 00:20:27,590 And there are some scholars who say 429 00:20:27,590 --> 00:20:30,890 that his familial feelings, his guilt over leaving England, 430 00:20:30,890 --> 00:20:33,130 his guilt about deserting his mother 431 00:20:33,130 --> 00:20:36,050 come out in various ways in Shadow of a Doubt. 432 00:20:36,050 --> 00:20:38,180 I'm not so sure about that, because it's 433 00:20:38,180 --> 00:20:40,170 a pretty cynical, and tough-minded, 434 00:20:40,170 --> 00:20:42,200 and anti-sentimental film in its own way, 435 00:20:42,200 --> 00:20:44,610 but there are some elements of family life in it 436 00:20:44,610 --> 00:20:51,050 that perhaps recover or allude to aspects 437 00:20:51,050 --> 00:20:53,750 of Hitchcock's own career. 438 00:20:53,750 --> 00:20:56,200 One significant thing, as I've already suggested, 439 00:20:56,200 --> 00:20:59,710 is that he was successful at every phase in the history 440 00:20:59,710 --> 00:21:02,610 of movies that, like Hawks and Capra, 441 00:21:02,610 --> 00:21:05,910 he began in the silent era, did distinguished work there, moved 442 00:21:05,910 --> 00:21:08,170 into the sound era and did distinguished work 443 00:21:08,170 --> 00:21:08,940 in the sound era. 444 00:21:08,940 --> 00:21:12,780 He has something else in common with Hawks and Capra, 445 00:21:12,780 --> 00:21:14,480 and I only recently discovered this. 446 00:21:14,480 --> 00:21:16,970 It's not as systematic as in the case of Hawks and Capra, 447 00:21:16,970 --> 00:21:19,550 but he, too, studied engineering. 448 00:21:19,550 --> 00:21:21,810 So there must be something in this. 449 00:21:21,810 --> 00:21:24,080 You guys should maybe reconsider what 450 00:21:24,080 --> 00:21:27,040 you're up to here, because three of the most 451 00:21:27,040 --> 00:21:29,120 remarkable and technically adept directors 452 00:21:29,120 --> 00:21:34,670 in the history of the studio era all had 453 00:21:34,670 --> 00:21:36,680 partial training as engineers. 454 00:21:36,680 --> 00:21:42,270 So he begins in the silent era, and in fact, let's 455 00:21:42,270 --> 00:21:44,050 go behind-- let me say just a little bit 456 00:21:44,050 --> 00:21:45,590 about his background. 457 00:21:45,590 --> 00:21:47,260 He was an outsider, in a certain way, 458 00:21:47,260 --> 00:21:48,634 even though he was an Englishman, 459 00:21:48,634 --> 00:21:50,030 because he was a Jesuit. 460 00:21:50,030 --> 00:21:52,680 His parents were Catholic in Protestant England. 461 00:21:52,680 --> 00:21:55,320 And he felt himself, all his life, I think in some ways, 462 00:21:55,320 --> 00:22:01,650 to be a kind of outsider, someone who didn't exactly 463 00:22:01,650 --> 00:22:05,760 fit in traditional society. 464 00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:09,460 He went to work after his schooling in the advertising 465 00:22:09,460 --> 00:22:11,360 department of a telegraph company, 466 00:22:11,360 --> 00:22:14,370 began to write the title cards for silent films 467 00:22:14,370 --> 00:22:20,510 as early as 1921, and then began for this telegraph company, 468 00:22:20,510 --> 00:22:24,460 began to work on certain feature films that 469 00:22:24,460 --> 00:22:26,574 were co-produced in Germany. 470 00:22:26,574 --> 00:22:28,240 And this is, of course, the great period 471 00:22:28,240 --> 00:22:31,990 of German Expressionism, when the great German silent 472 00:22:31,990 --> 00:22:35,360 directors are creating their science fiction 473 00:22:35,360 --> 00:22:37,540 and Expressionist works. 474 00:22:37,540 --> 00:22:39,410 And Hitchcock, in his early life, 475 00:22:39,410 --> 00:22:41,650 is immersed in that stuff, learns that stuff, 476 00:22:41,650 --> 00:22:44,830 goes to school in that, and you can feel the Expressionist 477 00:22:44,830 --> 00:22:48,300 impulse in the darkness and the disturbance that's 478 00:22:48,300 --> 00:22:53,570 a central part of almost every Hitchcock film. 479 00:22:53,570 --> 00:22:58,660 He makes something like, I think, a total of six 480 00:22:58,660 --> 00:23:02,430 or seven silent films of which the-- 481 00:23:02,430 --> 00:23:06,020 do we have the list up there, yes-- of which the most 482 00:23:06,020 --> 00:23:08,310 important is-- The Pleasure Gardens 483 00:23:08,310 --> 00:23:10,430 was a co-production, the first film 484 00:23:10,430 --> 00:23:11,870 that he worked on systematically, 485 00:23:11,870 --> 00:23:13,570 and it was a German co-production. 486 00:23:13,570 --> 00:23:15,500 He wasn't the prime director in it. 487 00:23:15,500 --> 00:23:16,970 The Lodger is probably his most-- 488 00:23:16,970 --> 00:23:20,610 almost surely his most important and most Hitchcockian 489 00:23:20,610 --> 00:23:21,450 silent film. 490 00:23:21,450 --> 00:23:22,870 Can you guess the topic? 491 00:23:22,870 --> 00:23:24,750 It's Jack the Ripper. 492 00:23:24,750 --> 00:23:26,360 It's a silent film. 493 00:23:26,360 --> 00:23:29,120 It's a story about a landlady who thinks fearfully, 494 00:23:29,120 --> 00:23:31,370 nervously that she may have rented a room to Jack 495 00:23:31,370 --> 00:23:32,650 the Ripper, the famous killer. 496 00:23:32,650 --> 00:23:35,140 So he's a successful silent director already, 497 00:23:35,140 --> 00:23:37,730 an admired director, makes the transition to sound, 498 00:23:37,730 --> 00:23:40,040 and in fact-- historically he'd be famous 499 00:23:40,040 --> 00:23:43,030 just for this one fact-- Blackmail, a British film he 500 00:23:43,030 --> 00:23:46,820 made in 1929, is the first British talkie. 501 00:23:46,820 --> 00:23:51,680 And he almost immediately began to figure out 502 00:23:51,680 --> 00:23:55,240 how to integrate-- was very interested in all 503 00:23:55,240 --> 00:23:57,260 the technical aspects of movie-making, 504 00:23:57,260 --> 00:24:00,530 especially interested in the way you integrate sound with image. 505 00:24:00,530 --> 00:24:05,670 And as anyone who's watched the shower scene in Psycho, 506 00:24:05,670 --> 00:24:09,000 for example, would be a famous example, 507 00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:11,760 anyone who's watch these scenes like that in Hitchcock 508 00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:14,750 will recognize the tremendous importance of music 509 00:24:14,750 --> 00:24:15,730 in his films. 510 00:24:15,730 --> 00:24:21,420 The way he uses music to deepen and complicate the moods 511 00:24:21,420 --> 00:24:24,470 he's creating, and especially how he can use music 512 00:24:24,470 --> 00:24:27,460 to enhance your sense of terror and fear 513 00:24:27,460 --> 00:24:31,780 as he does in certain frenzied, powerful scenes in his most 514 00:24:31,780 --> 00:24:33,420 remarkable films. 515 00:24:33,420 --> 00:24:37,350 And then he goes on to really an immensely successful career 516 00:24:37,350 --> 00:24:40,310 as the director of action adventure mystery films 517 00:24:40,310 --> 00:24:43,594 of which I've listed the most famous and significant ones, 518 00:24:43,594 --> 00:24:46,010 films that are still interesting to people, that are still 519 00:24:46,010 --> 00:24:49,110 watched today for their own intrinsic excitement, 520 00:24:49,110 --> 00:24:52,080 even though many of them also feel a bit old-fashioned 521 00:24:52,080 --> 00:24:53,700 in their behavior. 522 00:24:53,700 --> 00:24:56,830 The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady 523 00:24:56,830 --> 00:25:00,490 Vanishes, and there are other films he made in this era, 524 00:25:00,490 --> 00:25:02,670 I'm only listing a selection, as I've said. 525 00:25:02,670 --> 00:25:05,510 Then he makes the transition to the United States. 526 00:25:05,510 --> 00:25:08,740 He's lured here by David Selznick, 527 00:25:08,740 --> 00:25:11,130 the head of a great studio. 528 00:25:11,130 --> 00:25:13,810 Hitchcock is especially drawn to coming to the United States 529 00:25:13,810 --> 00:25:17,000 because he envies the technical resources that 530 00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:19,490 are available to American directors, who, because they 531 00:25:19,490 --> 00:25:23,630 have much more budget, they can do much more when they have 532 00:25:23,630 --> 00:25:26,780 enough money to add cameras, and to have adequate crews, and so 533 00:25:26,780 --> 00:25:27,400 forth. 534 00:25:27,400 --> 00:25:30,540 And the first film he makes in the United States, 535 00:25:30,540 --> 00:25:33,650 Rebecca, a remake of a famous novel, 536 00:25:33,650 --> 00:25:36,020 won an Academy Award as best film of the year, 537 00:25:36,020 --> 00:25:41,240 although Hitchcock did not win a director's award. 538 00:25:41,240 --> 00:25:43,470 But it's the least Hitchcockian of all of his films, 539 00:25:43,470 --> 00:25:45,290 and perhaps he was restraining himself 540 00:25:45,290 --> 00:25:49,009 a little bit in an attempt to establish himself 541 00:25:49,009 --> 00:25:50,050 in the American audience. 542 00:25:50,050 --> 00:25:52,280 It's a very interesting film, and you can still 543 00:25:52,280 --> 00:25:54,820 see that it, in some broad way, fits Hitchcock. 544 00:25:54,820 --> 00:25:57,630 It's a Gothic story, the classic English novels 545 00:25:57,630 --> 00:26:00,700 about governesses who go off in the country 546 00:26:00,700 --> 00:26:04,910 to strange mansions, and they are both attracted to 547 00:26:04,910 --> 00:26:08,720 and repelled by the handsome, sometimes scarred stranger 548 00:26:08,720 --> 00:26:09,930 who runs the place, right? 549 00:26:09,930 --> 00:26:12,280 I'm talking especially about what novel? 550 00:26:12,280 --> 00:26:15,410 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's great novel. 551 00:26:15,410 --> 00:26:18,440 And of course, that pattern-- that [INAUDIBLE] that pattern 552 00:26:18,440 --> 00:26:20,330 repeats itself again and again in the movies, 553 00:26:20,330 --> 00:26:24,040 and Rebecca is a version of that kind of story. 554 00:26:24,040 --> 00:26:26,230 And then Hitchcock goes on in the '40s 555 00:26:26,230 --> 00:26:29,380 to make a series of films in which his own interest 556 00:26:29,380 --> 00:26:31,630 in the technology of motion pictures 557 00:26:31,630 --> 00:26:34,190 and his own obsession with setting problems 558 00:26:34,190 --> 00:26:36,560 for himself that are difficult to solve, 559 00:26:36,560 --> 00:26:39,680 his own sort of engineer's obsession with the technology 560 00:26:39,680 --> 00:26:43,050 of motion picture begins to become clearer and clearer. 561 00:26:43,050 --> 00:26:46,290 Another reason that The Lodger is an important Hitchcock film 562 00:26:46,290 --> 00:26:48,790 is that it's the first film in which Hitchcock himself makes 563 00:26:48,790 --> 00:26:51,130 a brief cameo appearance, and after 564 00:26:51,130 --> 00:26:53,800 that it becomes a kind of signature feature of his movies 565 00:26:53,800 --> 00:26:56,150 that at some point in the film, a character-- 566 00:26:56,150 --> 00:26:58,840 Alfred Hitchcock will appear briefly. 567 00:26:58,840 --> 00:27:01,390 He won't be identified, he won't be noticed in the credits, 568 00:27:01,390 --> 00:27:03,790 but as he became more and more well known, 569 00:27:03,790 --> 00:27:06,032 audiences began to watch for this. 570 00:27:06,032 --> 00:27:07,740 This bothered him in some way, because it 571 00:27:07,740 --> 00:27:11,680 meant that it distracted people from the movies themselves, 572 00:27:11,680 --> 00:27:14,490 because they were waiting to see when Hitch would emerge, 573 00:27:14,490 --> 00:27:17,240 so he began to do it earlier and earlier in the films 574 00:27:17,240 --> 00:27:20,100 in order to avoid distracting audiences. 575 00:27:20,100 --> 00:27:23,070 But think what it means, having to devise a way for him 576 00:27:23,070 --> 00:27:24,180 to be in the movie. 577 00:27:24,180 --> 00:27:25,720 In many cases, it's easy. 578 00:27:25,720 --> 00:27:28,660 OK, a man's getting on a bus, so he can be in the crowd of the-- 579 00:27:28,660 --> 00:27:31,720 but what happens when he makes films that are arbitrarily 580 00:27:31,720 --> 00:27:33,630 restricted, as he does in some cases? 581 00:27:33,630 --> 00:27:37,790 For example, the film Lifeboat, in 1944, some of you 582 00:27:37,790 --> 00:27:38,550 know about it. 583 00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:40,470 It takes place entirely on a lifeboat. 584 00:27:40,470 --> 00:27:42,675 There are eight or nine characters. 585 00:27:42,675 --> 00:27:44,570 They've escaped a shipwreck. 586 00:27:44,570 --> 00:27:47,447 It's a World War II parable about Nazism, 587 00:27:47,447 --> 00:27:49,030 and they're all stuck in the lifeboat. 588 00:27:49,030 --> 00:27:51,670 And for the entire film, the film 589 00:27:51,670 --> 00:27:53,850 is confined to that lifeboat. 590 00:27:53,850 --> 00:27:56,450 It presents all kind-- it's not one of his best films, 591 00:27:56,450 --> 00:27:58,120 but the technical challenge presented 592 00:27:58,120 --> 00:27:59,550 is really interesting, isn't it? 593 00:27:59,550 --> 00:28:02,142 Vertigo was an even more interesting instance, 594 00:28:02,142 --> 00:28:03,600 and a much more successful instance 595 00:28:03,600 --> 00:28:06,700 of the same desire or the same weird impulse 596 00:28:06,700 --> 00:28:10,070 in Hitchcock himself to create confining situations 597 00:28:10,070 --> 00:28:13,905 and then see what that confinement allows him to do, 598 00:28:13,905 --> 00:28:17,720 what grows out of these arbitrary limitation. 599 00:28:17,720 --> 00:28:23,290 But just as a kind of minor instance of this kind of thing, 600 00:28:23,290 --> 00:28:28,040 if all the characters in Lifeboat 601 00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:30,200 are on a boat in the middle of the ocean, 602 00:28:30,200 --> 00:28:31,820 how can Hitchcock appear? 603 00:28:31,820 --> 00:28:34,540 Because he's not one of the main characters. 604 00:28:34,540 --> 00:28:37,036 Does anyone know how he did it? 605 00:28:37,036 --> 00:28:39,160 There's a newspaper lying on the floor of the boat, 606 00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:41,326 and you pick up the newspaper, and there's a picture 607 00:28:41,326 --> 00:28:44,310 of Hitchcock in the newspaper. 608 00:28:44,310 --> 00:28:46,300 It's a trivial thing, but it [INAUDIBLE], 609 00:28:46,300 --> 00:28:49,130 but its triviality is exactly what makes it so interesting. 610 00:28:49,130 --> 00:28:53,500 In other words, what Hitchcock loved, this kind of problem. 611 00:28:53,500 --> 00:28:55,350 When he took these problems in a serious way 612 00:28:55,350 --> 00:28:57,770 and when these problems sort of led him 613 00:28:57,770 --> 00:29:01,120 into a kind of exploration of our darker, and more disturbed, 614 00:29:01,120 --> 00:29:07,360 and more uncivilized sides, he made remarkable films that 615 00:29:07,360 --> 00:29:10,270 are memorable and haunting. 616 00:29:10,270 --> 00:29:14,750 And one more example of Hitchcock 617 00:29:14,750 --> 00:29:18,140 setting himself these difficult technical feats. 618 00:29:18,140 --> 00:29:21,740 The film Rope, well titled in a way. 619 00:29:21,740 --> 00:29:24,440 It's a murder mystery, but Hitchcock set it up in a way, 620 00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:28,649 it's actually, such that, it creates the illusion 621 00:29:28,649 --> 00:29:30,940 that the entire film-- I don't remember how long it is. 622 00:29:30,940 --> 00:29:32,910 Let's say it's a standard feature length film. 623 00:29:32,910 --> 00:29:34,910 Let's say it's 89 minutes long. 624 00:29:34,910 --> 00:29:36,640 It's a standard feature length film. 625 00:29:36,640 --> 00:29:40,800 It feels as if it's all unraveled in a single take, 626 00:29:40,800 --> 00:29:43,540 as if there are no cuts, no edits in the movie. 627 00:29:43,540 --> 00:29:46,910 Now, it's not exactly true, because the film was not 628 00:29:46,910 --> 00:29:48,600 capable, technically, of doing that. 629 00:29:48,600 --> 00:29:53,200 What Hitchcock did was, he had cassettes of film that 630 00:29:53,200 --> 00:29:54,600 would last, say, 10 minutes. 631 00:29:54,600 --> 00:29:57,080 So he would make 10-minute long takes, but then he'd 632 00:29:57,080 --> 00:29:59,230 have to change the cassette, put in a new one, 633 00:29:59,230 --> 00:30:01,090 but he disguised the takes. 634 00:30:01,090 --> 00:30:02,360 He disguised the cuts. 635 00:30:02,360 --> 00:30:05,890 And in fact, it's an unbelievably tedious film, 636 00:30:05,890 --> 00:30:09,140 because when you're watching it, you feel you can't look away. 637 00:30:09,140 --> 00:30:11,122 One of the things that you discover 638 00:30:11,122 --> 00:30:13,455 when you're watching this film is that cuts are actually 639 00:30:13,455 --> 00:30:14,860 a relaxation. 640 00:30:14,860 --> 00:30:16,970 They let you relax. 641 00:30:16,970 --> 00:30:18,640 They break the rhythm in some way. 642 00:30:18,640 --> 00:30:22,080 And if you sit there for 89 minutes watching something that 643 00:30:22,080 --> 00:30:24,040 seems to be unfolding-- and film, of course, 644 00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:27,330 unfolds in real time, also, therefore, right? 645 00:30:27,330 --> 00:30:29,200 So he's playing both with another kind 646 00:30:29,200 --> 00:30:31,480 of confinement, which is the duration of the movie. 647 00:30:31,480 --> 00:30:34,200 He's saying, I'm going to make the duration of the viewing 648 00:30:34,200 --> 00:30:36,500 the same duration as the action of the movie, 649 00:30:36,500 --> 00:30:38,095 and I'm never going to cut, or I'm 650 00:30:38,095 --> 00:30:40,220 going to create the illusion that there's not going 651 00:30:40,220 --> 00:30:41,797 to be a single edit in my film. 652 00:30:41,797 --> 00:30:43,380 When you're watching it, you actually, 653 00:30:43,380 --> 00:30:45,862 yourself, feel trapped. 654 00:30:45,862 --> 00:30:47,570 You feel guilty if you look away, or you, 655 00:30:47,570 --> 00:30:49,710 but you constantly want to blink or look down, 656 00:30:49,710 --> 00:30:52,900 because it's almost as if the absence of edits 657 00:30:52,900 --> 00:30:56,490 creates a kind of continuous stream of imagery, 658 00:30:56,490 --> 00:30:58,810 and you feel you're trapped within it, like a wall that 659 00:30:58,810 --> 00:31:00,790 doesn't let you escape from it. 660 00:31:00,790 --> 00:31:02,510 Well, that kind of-- I don't know 661 00:31:02,510 --> 00:31:04,930 that Hitchcock actually intended such a reaction, 662 00:31:04,930 --> 00:31:09,000 but is not inconsistent with Hitchcock's desire 663 00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:11,890 to manipulate your feelings as you're watching a film. 664 00:31:11,890 --> 00:31:16,315 And he became a master at manipulating your reactions 665 00:31:16,315 --> 00:31:18,520 as you watch the film. 666 00:31:18,520 --> 00:31:21,800 So there are many-- and I could cite many other examples 667 00:31:21,800 --> 00:31:23,690 of this sort of technical obsession, 668 00:31:23,690 --> 00:31:27,280 but let me just say a couple of things about the major films. 669 00:31:27,280 --> 00:31:29,230 And he successfully, in every phase, 670 00:31:29,230 --> 00:31:30,790 but he really comes into his own, 671 00:31:30,790 --> 00:31:34,180 most folks critics would say, at the end of the 1940s 672 00:31:34,180 --> 00:31:36,850 with a series of-- maybe the early '50s-- with a series 673 00:31:36,850 --> 00:31:40,390 of films that run from '51 through, maybe, 674 00:31:40,390 --> 00:31:42,859 most people would say through The Birds in 1963. 675 00:31:42,859 --> 00:31:45,150 And I haven't listed all the films he made in that era, 676 00:31:45,150 --> 00:31:47,310 but I've listed the most important ones, 677 00:31:47,310 --> 00:31:51,510 and you can judge for yourself how significant this is, why? 678 00:31:51,510 --> 00:31:54,550 Because look at how many titles you recognize. 679 00:31:54,550 --> 00:31:57,680 How many titles by directors so many years ago 680 00:31:57,680 --> 00:31:59,187 would you actually have seen? 681 00:31:59,187 --> 00:32:01,270 It's one measure of what an important figure, what 682 00:32:01,270 --> 00:32:05,290 a successful figure Hitchcock is that he's still so widely 683 00:32:05,290 --> 00:32:07,480 known, that he's more famous today than he was 684 00:32:07,480 --> 00:32:08,985 when he was making his movies. 685 00:32:11,560 --> 00:32:14,510 As I started to say earlier, one of the most distinctive things 686 00:32:14,510 --> 00:32:17,370 or interesting and revealing things about Hitchcock's career 687 00:32:17,370 --> 00:32:19,890 is that through the mass of his career, 688 00:32:19,890 --> 00:32:24,930 even though he was one of the most popular directors, 689 00:32:24,930 --> 00:32:30,080 and his films made money, and he was 690 00:32:30,080 --> 00:32:32,730 a totally bankable director, no, maybe 691 00:32:32,730 --> 00:32:34,660 the most bankable director in Hollywood 692 00:32:34,660 --> 00:32:38,600 during the studio era, he didn't get much respect. 693 00:32:38,600 --> 00:32:41,410 Some people have suggested that one of the reasons for it 694 00:32:41,410 --> 00:32:43,440 is that he gave so much pleasure that there 695 00:32:43,440 --> 00:32:45,648 was a feeling that anyone who gave this much pleasure 696 00:32:45,648 --> 00:32:50,460 couldn't be an artist, that it worked against him that he 697 00:32:50,460 --> 00:32:52,100 was such a great entertainer. 698 00:32:52,100 --> 00:32:53,610 And there may be something to that. 699 00:32:53,610 --> 00:32:57,030 But steadily over time, and especially since his death, 700 00:32:57,030 --> 00:33:00,080 his reputation has increased, and increased, and increased. 701 00:33:00,080 --> 00:33:03,330 And in fact, recently, his film Vertigo 702 00:33:03,330 --> 00:33:07,450 was voted the best film of all time, the best film 703 00:33:07,450 --> 00:33:10,620 ever made, displacing Orson Welles' Citizen 704 00:33:10,620 --> 00:33:13,190 Kane, which had been at the top of this list for something 705 00:33:13,190 --> 00:33:15,100 like 20 years. 706 00:33:15,100 --> 00:33:18,800 And this ascension in which Hitchcock was sort of 707 00:33:18,800 --> 00:33:22,040 denigrated as a mere entertainer to now being recognized 708 00:33:22,040 --> 00:33:25,360 as one of the greatest artists in the movies 709 00:33:25,360 --> 00:33:28,382 of the 20th century is a very interesting development, 710 00:33:28,382 --> 00:33:30,840 and it's a development that's partly a function of the fact 711 00:33:30,840 --> 00:33:33,890 that all of that happened after the movies were 712 00:33:33,890 --> 00:33:41,260 no longer the central narrative experience in the modern world 713 00:33:41,260 --> 00:33:48,390 in which they had already been displaced as a system. 714 00:33:48,390 --> 00:33:50,860 So in this period between Strangers 715 00:33:50,860 --> 00:33:54,130 on a Train through The Birds in 1963-- 716 00:33:54,130 --> 00:33:56,590 some people might include Marnie in '64-- 717 00:33:56,590 --> 00:33:58,370 he made a series of masterpieces that 718 00:33:58,370 --> 00:34:00,880 are among the most significant and most powerful 719 00:34:00,880 --> 00:34:06,460 films ever made, two of which we're talking about tonight. 720 00:34:06,460 --> 00:34:07,930 Hitchcock the technician. 721 00:34:07,930 --> 00:34:09,870 I've already implied something about this, 722 00:34:09,870 --> 00:34:12,780 but it's worth emphasizing this. 723 00:34:12,780 --> 00:34:19,250 Hitchcock became famous, especially in the industry, 724 00:34:19,250 --> 00:34:22,730 for the unbelievably fastidious, almost bored way 725 00:34:22,730 --> 00:34:25,940 in which he carried out his direction of a movie. 726 00:34:25,940 --> 00:34:28,739 By the time Hitchcock got to the set of the film, 727 00:34:28,739 --> 00:34:33,449 he had so obsessively planned out every aspect of the movie 728 00:34:33,449 --> 00:34:36,840 that he acted as if everything was all finished. 729 00:34:36,840 --> 00:34:38,921 He often annoyed his actors. 730 00:34:38,921 --> 00:34:40,670 Some actors disliked him a lot, because he 731 00:34:40,670 --> 00:34:44,600 gave very little instruction to his actors, 732 00:34:44,600 --> 00:34:49,600 and some actors like this, but many resented it a great deal. 733 00:34:49,600 --> 00:34:53,400 See, he's been quoted a number of times 734 00:34:53,400 --> 00:34:57,629 as showing a kind of disregard for actors. 735 00:34:57,629 --> 00:34:59,170 At one point, he said actors are just 736 00:34:59,170 --> 00:35:04,110 cattle to be moved around on the set like animals. 737 00:35:04,110 --> 00:35:07,832 But it was more of the fact that the actors had trouble with him 738 00:35:07,832 --> 00:35:09,790 because he seemed to have worked everything out 739 00:35:09,790 --> 00:35:10,850 before he got to the set. 740 00:35:10,850 --> 00:35:14,640 He was always tremendously calm, he sat in his director's chair, 741 00:35:14,640 --> 00:35:17,880 would give directions, and he had storyboarded-- 742 00:35:17,880 --> 00:35:22,180 he had drawn out every single scene and every single camera 743 00:35:22,180 --> 00:35:25,080 angle before he even came to the set, 744 00:35:25,080 --> 00:35:27,167 so that it was as if he had worked everything out 745 00:35:27,167 --> 00:35:28,250 before he reached the set. 746 00:35:28,250 --> 00:35:30,480 And what that meant, of course, is that 747 00:35:30,480 --> 00:35:31,900 no improvisation on the set. 748 00:35:31,900 --> 00:35:34,640 He would be very unhappy if people tried to deviate, 749 00:35:34,640 --> 00:35:37,240 never allowed people to deviate from the plans that 750 00:35:37,240 --> 00:35:38,310 had been set before. 751 00:35:38,310 --> 00:35:42,560 This is in shocking contrast to the way in which, let's say, 752 00:35:42,560 --> 00:35:46,011 a director like Jean Renoir or sometimes Orson Welles 753 00:35:46,011 --> 00:35:47,510 might operate in making their films. 754 00:35:47,510 --> 00:35:49,830 Quite the-- looking for the contingent 755 00:35:49,830 --> 00:35:52,070 and the accidental that happens while you're 756 00:35:52,070 --> 00:35:53,430 at work creatively. 757 00:35:53,430 --> 00:35:54,850 Hitchcock would have none of that. 758 00:35:54,850 --> 00:35:58,180 Hitchcock came into the process of directing 759 00:35:58,180 --> 00:36:00,590 with the film finished, completed in his head, 760 00:36:00,590 --> 00:36:03,750 completely, fastidiously blocked, 761 00:36:03,750 --> 00:36:07,560 angled, and so forth, and there was no deviation from it. 762 00:36:07,560 --> 00:36:10,020 And he actually did often act bored when he did it. 763 00:36:10,020 --> 00:36:11,680 How interesting that is. 764 00:36:11,680 --> 00:36:14,180 But he's also, of course, a supreme technician 765 00:36:14,180 --> 00:36:16,640 of the movies, a master of camera angle, 766 00:36:16,640 --> 00:36:20,870 a master of montage, a master of the mingling of music 767 00:36:20,870 --> 00:36:22,930 and image, right? 768 00:36:22,930 --> 00:36:24,910 And you'll see many, many examples 769 00:36:24,910 --> 00:36:27,730 of this in the two films we are going to see this evening. 770 00:36:27,730 --> 00:36:31,280 How interesting, then, that he is this incredibly fastidious, 771 00:36:31,280 --> 00:36:35,600 granular technician who plans out every single camera angle 772 00:36:35,600 --> 00:36:37,100 before he comes on the set. 773 00:36:37,100 --> 00:36:38,130 What does this tell us? 774 00:36:38,130 --> 00:36:39,140 Why would he do that? 775 00:36:39,140 --> 00:36:40,620 What's interesting about it? 776 00:36:40,620 --> 00:36:43,090 What's most revealing about it? 777 00:36:43,090 --> 00:36:44,761 Why would someone do this? 778 00:36:44,761 --> 00:36:47,010 Maybe if the subject matter you're trying to deal with 779 00:36:47,010 --> 00:36:49,820 is so unruly and so frightening that the only way 780 00:36:49,820 --> 00:36:51,970 you could handle it is by surrounding it 781 00:36:51,970 --> 00:36:55,510 with this pretense of fastidious coherence and control. 782 00:36:55,510 --> 00:36:57,790 And I think that there's no question at all 783 00:36:57,790 --> 00:37:00,900 that his cool demeanor, his mocking demeanor, 784 00:37:00,900 --> 00:37:05,219 and especially his sense when he comes to actually make 785 00:37:05,219 --> 00:37:07,260 the film, that all the problems have been solved, 786 00:37:07,260 --> 00:37:08,843 that everything has already been done, 787 00:37:08,843 --> 00:37:11,830 is an attempt to compensate for or defend himself 788 00:37:11,830 --> 00:37:17,410 against the roiling irrational power of the subject matter 789 00:37:17,410 --> 00:37:19,500 that his films mobilize. 790 00:37:19,500 --> 00:37:22,220 What a wonderful revealing paradox, right? 791 00:37:22,220 --> 00:37:26,840 He's this fastidious technician, but his themes 792 00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:29,290 are the themes of craziness, of madness, 793 00:37:29,290 --> 00:37:33,290 of murder, of voyeurism, of violence, of rape, 794 00:37:33,290 --> 00:37:38,930 of strangulation, of fear, of pursuit, imprisonment, 795 00:37:38,930 --> 00:37:41,170 confinement, injustice. 796 00:37:41,170 --> 00:37:43,472 One the most interesting things about Hitchcock, 797 00:37:43,472 --> 00:37:44,930 and those of you who have seen more 798 00:37:44,930 --> 00:37:47,755 than two or three of his films will feel this much 799 00:37:47,755 --> 00:37:50,380 more strongly than those of you who've only seen a few of them, 800 00:37:50,380 --> 00:37:54,940 is how essentially passive, deeply unaggressive, 801 00:37:54,940 --> 00:37:58,830 and acted upon most of his protagonists are. 802 00:37:58,830 --> 00:37:59,900 They're being pursued. 803 00:37:59,900 --> 00:38:00,920 They're on the run. 804 00:38:00,920 --> 00:38:02,700 They're confined in small places. 805 00:38:02,700 --> 00:38:03,940 They're full of fear. 806 00:38:03,940 --> 00:38:08,000 One of Hitchcock's recurring moments, a recurring scene, 807 00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:11,160 is the protagonist dangling from a height. 808 00:38:11,160 --> 00:38:13,160 And you'll see one magnificent instance of this 809 00:38:13,160 --> 00:38:15,750 at the end of Rear Window, where Jimmy Stewart is hanging 810 00:38:15,750 --> 00:38:18,110 like this above a void, and you see his face, 811 00:38:18,110 --> 00:38:21,450 and you can see his face register abject fear, right? 812 00:38:21,450 --> 00:38:24,310 We could call that one of Hitchcock's iconic moments. 813 00:38:24,310 --> 00:38:27,620 It occurs again and again in his movies, of characters hanging 814 00:38:27,620 --> 00:38:31,860 over a void, terrified, terrified of what 815 00:38:31,860 --> 00:38:36,100 is about to happen, and often they fall into the void, 816 00:38:36,100 --> 00:38:38,690 and some of the dream sequences in Hitchcock 817 00:38:38,690 --> 00:38:42,230 show us characters falling through voids into nothingness. 818 00:38:42,230 --> 00:38:46,110 So the subject matter of Hitchcock's films 819 00:38:46,110 --> 00:38:49,630 couldn't be more shocking and disturbing in some sense. 820 00:38:49,630 --> 00:38:55,840 They mobilize problematic subjects that are terrifying, 821 00:38:55,840 --> 00:38:58,697 and they obviously were so terrifying to Hitchcock 822 00:38:58,697 --> 00:39:00,280 that his only way of dealing with them 823 00:39:00,280 --> 00:39:05,554 was to surround them with all this appearance of control. 824 00:39:05,554 --> 00:39:07,095 Another thing that follows from this, 825 00:39:07,095 --> 00:39:10,040 and it's a very-- on a final point 826 00:39:10,040 --> 00:39:12,360 to make about Hitchcock's films, is how often 827 00:39:12,360 --> 00:39:15,170 his reassuring or happy endings don't 828 00:39:15,170 --> 00:39:17,499 reassure or make us happy. 829 00:39:17,499 --> 00:39:19,040 And the reason, of course, is that he 830 00:39:19,040 --> 00:39:20,620 doesn't mean the happy endings. 831 00:39:20,620 --> 00:39:21,890 I'll come back to this again. 832 00:39:21,890 --> 00:39:26,830 But very often, even though his films fit perfectly within-- 833 00:39:26,830 --> 00:39:30,780 or imperfectly, but well enough-- into the convention 834 00:39:30,780 --> 00:39:33,830 that the endings in a consensus system, 835 00:39:33,830 --> 00:39:36,220 and the endings of these stories have to, in some sense, 836 00:39:36,220 --> 00:39:39,370 restore normality and reassure us, 837 00:39:39,370 --> 00:39:41,560 Hitchcock goes through the motions of doing that, 838 00:39:41,560 --> 00:39:43,660 but again and again, the endings of his films 839 00:39:43,660 --> 00:39:46,650 are morally ambiguous, and provide us 840 00:39:46,650 --> 00:39:50,440 with kind of subtext which put in question the reassurance 841 00:39:50,440 --> 00:39:55,250 that we have superficially been offered, as if there's 842 00:39:55,250 --> 00:40:01,320 a level of irony, and cynicism, and deconstructive contempt 843 00:40:01,320 --> 00:40:05,470 beneath, undermining the reassurance 844 00:40:05,470 --> 00:40:07,460 that the endings offer us. 845 00:40:07,460 --> 00:40:11,210 And that's also a part of this idea 846 00:40:11,210 --> 00:40:16,340 that the themes that Hitchcock mobilizes are 847 00:40:16,340 --> 00:40:18,420 the dark elements of our subconscious 848 00:40:18,420 --> 00:40:22,550 and of our unconscious, and the fear that people have, fear 849 00:40:22,550 --> 00:40:26,520 of authority, fear of disorder, fear of disturbance, 850 00:40:26,520 --> 00:40:31,950 a sense that the ordinary world is full of menace and terror. 851 00:40:31,950 --> 00:40:34,010 But again and again in Hitchcock's films, 852 00:40:34,010 --> 00:40:35,570 he doubles his characters, and you'll 853 00:40:35,570 --> 00:40:37,460 have a good character and an evil character, 854 00:40:37,460 --> 00:40:41,730 and the idea-- he grew up in the late Victorian era of Robert 855 00:40:41,730 --> 00:40:44,450 Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 856 00:40:44,450 --> 00:40:47,110 and he actually thought that was a version of human psychology, 857 00:40:47,110 --> 00:40:51,270 that there's a kind of dark or savage aspect in ourselves 858 00:40:51,270 --> 00:40:53,840 that's hidden or damped down by civilization, 859 00:40:53,840 --> 00:40:56,320 and if we let it come out, we could turn monstrous, 860 00:40:56,320 --> 00:40:58,460 we could turn horrible, right? 861 00:40:58,460 --> 00:41:00,660 And again and again in Hitchcock's films, 862 00:41:00,660 --> 00:41:06,220 we have a kind of doubling in which one character interacts 863 00:41:06,220 --> 00:41:09,580 with a more villainous or murderous character, 864 00:41:09,580 --> 00:41:12,020 who we come to recognize as a kind of double 865 00:41:12,020 --> 00:41:14,590 of the protagonist, or represents 866 00:41:14,590 --> 00:41:17,000 the darker, more disturbing energies 867 00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:19,690 within the protagonist's nature, right? 868 00:41:19,690 --> 00:41:22,160 And in Strangers on a Train, what happens, 869 00:41:22,160 --> 00:41:24,860 a tennis star, who's having trouble with his wife, 870 00:41:24,860 --> 00:41:27,290 is on a train, and a guy pops up next to him and says, 871 00:41:27,290 --> 00:41:28,600 I know you're having trouble with your wife. 872 00:41:28,600 --> 00:41:29,975 I read about it in the newspaper. 873 00:41:29,975 --> 00:41:31,134 Let's make a deal. 874 00:41:31,134 --> 00:41:32,050 Nobody could track us. 875 00:41:32,050 --> 00:41:32,970 It'll be the perfect murder. 876 00:41:32,970 --> 00:41:34,303 I'm having trouble with my wife. 877 00:41:34,303 --> 00:41:36,340 You murder my wife and I'll murder yours. 878 00:41:36,340 --> 00:41:40,194 Then the guy said, get thee behind me, Satan, right? 879 00:41:40,194 --> 00:41:41,360 Don't ever talk to me again. 880 00:41:41,360 --> 00:41:42,540 I'm very nervous about it. 881 00:41:42,540 --> 00:41:45,497 A few weeks later, his wife is murdered, right? 882 00:41:45,497 --> 00:41:47,580 And then he starts getting messages from this guy, 883 00:41:47,580 --> 00:41:49,871 when are you going to fulfill your part of the bargain? 884 00:41:49,871 --> 00:41:52,340 That's what the film is about. 885 00:41:52,340 --> 00:41:54,690 And it's a wonderful, interesting movie. 886 00:41:54,690 --> 00:41:58,240 The scene I want you to see now dramatizes some of this. 887 00:42:01,070 --> 00:42:04,060 It comes at end of the film, at the great climax of the film, 888 00:42:04,060 --> 00:42:05,830 and one reason I want you to see it 889 00:42:05,830 --> 00:42:09,270 is that it also shows another aspect of his what 890 00:42:09,270 --> 00:42:13,930 we might call the thematic world of Hitchcock's films, 891 00:42:13,930 --> 00:42:18,540 and it's his recurring interest in the subject of entertainment 892 00:42:18,540 --> 00:42:19,680 itself. 893 00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:23,251 What he became aware of and what his films often dramatize 894 00:42:23,251 --> 00:42:26,550 is the illicit and disturbing dimension of our desire 895 00:42:26,550 --> 00:42:29,020 to go to the movies, or of our desire 896 00:42:29,020 --> 00:42:31,170 to have the kinds of excitements we 897 00:42:31,170 --> 00:42:33,000 get when we go to amusement parks. 898 00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:35,730 What Hitchcock understood was that these experiences 899 00:42:35,730 --> 00:42:37,427 have an illicit dimension. 900 00:42:37,427 --> 00:42:40,010 We sit in the dark, and what do we do when we sit in the dark? 901 00:42:40,010 --> 00:42:41,900 We watch people take their clothes off. 902 00:42:41,900 --> 00:42:44,370 We watch them murder each other. 903 00:42:44,370 --> 00:42:45,120 We're in the dark. 904 00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:45,640 We're safe. 905 00:42:45,640 --> 00:42:46,181 Nobody knows. 906 00:42:46,181 --> 00:42:47,080 We're solitary. 907 00:42:47,080 --> 00:42:48,492 We're anonymous. 908 00:42:48,492 --> 00:42:49,450 But we're, what are we? 909 00:42:49,450 --> 00:42:50,710 We're voyeurs. 910 00:42:50,710 --> 00:42:52,750 And what he understood was that voyeurism 911 00:42:52,750 --> 00:42:54,782 was at the heart of going to the movies, 912 00:42:54,782 --> 00:42:56,490 was at the heart of the movie experience, 913 00:42:56,490 --> 00:42:58,640 and that there-- we'll come back to this. 914 00:42:58,640 --> 00:43:00,470 We'll come back to this scene. 915 00:43:00,470 --> 00:43:03,380 So at the end of Strangers on a Train, 916 00:43:03,380 --> 00:43:06,090 there's a particularly wonderful and dramatic example 917 00:43:06,090 --> 00:43:09,930 of Hitchcock looking at the space of entertainment 918 00:43:09,930 --> 00:43:12,335 as a space that can turn into an environment of menace 919 00:43:12,335 --> 00:43:13,750 and disturbance. 920 00:43:13,750 --> 00:43:16,070 And this is character-- and again, 921 00:43:16,070 --> 00:43:18,532 exactly because-- remember, I said one of his deep themes 922 00:43:18,532 --> 00:43:21,096 is what we might call the menace of the ordinary. 923 00:43:21,096 --> 00:43:23,095 Well, what could be more ordinary and reassuring 924 00:43:23,095 --> 00:43:25,510 than a child's merry-go-round? 925 00:43:25,510 --> 00:43:27,810 Well, here's the great climax of Strangers 926 00:43:27,810 --> 00:43:31,310 on a Train in which the good and the bad, the good and evil 927 00:43:31,310 --> 00:43:35,170 sides have to engage in a kind of contest or wrestling match. 928 00:43:35,170 --> 00:43:36,870 And as you're watching, note the way 929 00:43:36,870 --> 00:43:39,930 in which, characteristic of Hitchcock, characteristic 930 00:43:39,930 --> 00:43:43,560 of him, there's a combination of terror and comedy. 931 00:43:43,560 --> 00:43:46,260 He unsettles us, also, because often the most 932 00:43:46,260 --> 00:43:50,820 terrifying scenes are leavened with a kind of macabre comedy 933 00:43:50,820 --> 00:43:53,000 that unsettles us even more. 934 00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:54,412 Here's the scene. 935 00:43:54,412 --> 00:44:02,188 [VIDEO PLAYBACK] 936 00:44:02,188 --> 00:44:07,060 [MERRY-GO-ROUND MUSIC] 937 00:44:07,060 --> 00:44:08,320 Good guy, bad guy. 938 00:44:08,320 --> 00:44:09,598 He finally sees his double. 939 00:44:14,180 --> 00:44:16,022 These are very helpful FBI people 940 00:44:16,022 --> 00:44:19,485 who do more harm than good. 941 00:44:19,485 --> 00:44:21,590 They shoot at the wrong person to begin with, 942 00:44:21,590 --> 00:44:24,409 and they accidentally shoot the person 943 00:44:24,409 --> 00:44:25,950 who's controlling the merry-go-round, 944 00:44:25,950 --> 00:44:27,033 so it goes out of control. 945 00:44:36,155 --> 00:44:37,030 -Everyone stand back. 946 00:44:37,030 --> 00:44:38,512 Stand back, please. 947 00:44:41,970 --> 00:44:42,958 -[INAUDIBLE], sir. 948 00:44:42,958 --> 00:44:43,857 That's him. 949 00:44:43,857 --> 00:44:44,440 -He's the one. 950 00:44:44,440 --> 00:44:45,428 He's the one who killed him. 951 00:44:45,428 --> 00:44:45,922 -[INAUDIBLE]. 952 00:44:45,922 --> 00:44:46,463 We know that. 953 00:44:50,455 --> 00:44:52,830 DAVID THORBURN: Part of the comedy here is they're wrong. 954 00:44:52,830 --> 00:44:54,579 They don't know who they're talking about. 955 00:44:54,579 --> 00:44:57,665 They have the wrong man, but we in the audience know it. 956 00:45:02,504 --> 00:45:03,992 -Hey, [INAUDIBLE], stop. 957 00:45:03,992 --> 00:45:05,476 -Or do you want to do it yourself? 958 00:45:05,476 --> 00:45:05,976 -No. 959 00:45:05,976 --> 00:45:07,464 I guess you could make [INAUDIBLE]. 960 00:45:29,784 --> 00:45:33,752 -My little boy [INAUDIBLE]. 961 00:45:33,752 --> 00:45:36,724 My little boy. 962 00:45:36,724 --> 00:45:37,224 Please. 963 00:45:42,809 --> 00:45:44,600 DAVID THORBURN: See, only Hitch-- Hitchcock 964 00:45:44,600 --> 00:45:47,870 had such confidence that he could introduce a comic moment 965 00:45:47,870 --> 00:45:50,600 like that in the middle of what is a terrifying climax. 966 00:45:50,600 --> 00:45:52,650 The only director who would do that regularly. 967 00:45:58,530 --> 00:46:00,490 [LAUGHTER] 968 00:46:00,490 --> 00:46:02,450 Now you know who the bad guy is, right? 969 00:46:05,410 --> 00:46:07,029 So the hero rescues the kid. 970 00:46:28,486 --> 00:46:29,983 [SCREAMING] 971 00:46:46,949 --> 00:46:49,940 Is this a montage or a mise en scene effect? 972 00:46:49,940 --> 00:46:51,530 A montage effect, right? 973 00:46:51,530 --> 00:46:54,540 See the close up on the animal, the way 974 00:46:54,540 --> 00:46:56,910 you get very-- the camera itself doesn't 975 00:46:56,910 --> 00:46:59,500 allow you to sort of look back and get 976 00:46:59,500 --> 00:47:01,150 a sense of the environment? 977 00:47:01,150 --> 00:47:04,087 Your emotions are controlled by the tightness of the shot, 978 00:47:04,087 --> 00:47:05,420 by the quickness of the editing. 979 00:47:15,980 --> 00:47:17,640 Comic version of a hero, right? 980 00:47:25,660 --> 00:47:29,380 And this is quintessential Hitchcock. 981 00:47:29,380 --> 00:47:29,970 Are we saved? 982 00:47:39,340 --> 00:47:40,080 Very helpful. 983 00:47:45,990 --> 00:47:47,180 All right, that's enough. 984 00:47:47,180 --> 00:47:48,140 You get the idea. 985 00:47:48,140 --> 00:47:49,290 [END PLAYBACK] 986 00:47:49,290 --> 00:47:52,180 And so the fact that this space of entertainment-- 987 00:47:52,180 --> 00:47:53,200 can you get lights up? 988 00:47:53,200 --> 00:47:55,390 The fact that this space of entertainment 989 00:47:55,390 --> 00:47:57,960 could become a-- one more minute, people-- could become 990 00:47:57,960 --> 00:48:00,330 a space of terror is the point. 991 00:48:00,330 --> 00:48:03,460 So finally, what would we say about Hitchcock? 992 00:48:03,460 --> 00:48:05,270 He's a double man. 993 00:48:05,270 --> 00:48:10,820 To borrow from the great essayist Montaigne, who said, 994 00:48:10,820 --> 00:48:15,480 we human beings are, I know not how, doubling ourselves, 995 00:48:15,480 --> 00:48:18,910 so that what we believe, we disbelieve, 996 00:48:18,910 --> 00:48:22,620 and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn. 997 00:48:22,620 --> 00:48:24,810 What Hitchcock tries or condemn or what 998 00:48:24,810 --> 00:48:28,630 Hitchcock thinks he hates keeps coming back in his films. 999 00:48:28,630 --> 00:48:35,060 Images of strangulation, of damage to women, images of fear 1000 00:48:35,060 --> 00:48:41,070 and terror in the face of irrational authority. 1001 00:48:41,070 --> 00:48:43,550 These themes keep returning again and again 1002 00:48:43,550 --> 00:48:46,270 in his film with the power of obsession, 1003 00:48:46,270 --> 00:48:51,700 but he controls the obsession with that fastidious technical 1004 00:48:51,700 --> 00:48:55,670 distance that allows these obsessions to reach us 1005 00:48:55,670 --> 00:48:58,920 in a way that disturbs and enlightens.