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Exam 1 review
These notes are intended to aid your review of course materials; they are not a substitute for class discussions or having done the critical readings.
The exam covers primarily Psycho. However, there will be some questions relating to Strangers on a Train (primarily as it deals with themes or motifs important to Hitchcock or Psycho).
Below are review notes and links for:
Psycho & Strangers on a Train visuals: scenes, motifs, images, etc
Psycho influences, sequels, remake, homages
Terms and names
General topics
Criticism
- Wood, "Retrospective"
- Doucet, "Hitch and his Audience" (excerpt)
- Wood, "Strangers on a Train"
- Skerry, Psycho in the Shower
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Psycho and Strangers on a Train visuals:
Psycho scenes: These are the most important to recall; you should have some knowledge of what happens and how the scene is treated visually.
- opening sequence: Phoenix skyline, hotel window
- parlor scene
- shower sequence and the following tracking shot
- Norman's clean-up
- Arbogast murder
- Lila's discovery of mother
- final shots
See Gallery for stills from the films, arranged by scenes and topics
These are to help you remember specifics of the movies, especially elements of visual presentation, as well as to review the most important scenes and topical areas.
Psycho motifs, key images, and related items:
Some of these also appear in Strangers on a Train
- Hitchcock's cameo appearance
- birds
- fly, "fly on the wall"
- bathroom
- eyes
- food / eating
- mirrors
- mothers
- police
- psychiatrist
Psycho influences, sequels, remake, homages:
See webpage
[You are responsible only for what has been covered in class and screenings]
Terms and names:
This list does not include all relevant names and terms: see the critical articles references above, as well as website pages for particular topics
Names:
[This list does not include names of characters]
Saul Bass
Battleship Potemkin
Robert Bloch
Raymond Chandler
Brian De Palma
Sergei Eisenstein
Dressed to Kill
Ed Gein
Hilton Green
Bernard Herrmann
Patricia Highsmith
Alma Reville Hitchcock
Patricia Hitchcock
"Lamb to the Slaughter"
Janet Leigh
Anthony Perkins
Brian De Palma
Joseph Stefano
Gus Van Sant
Terms
[see also terms on the websites linked below]:
absolute camera
auteur
director
dissolve
enunciator
establishing shot
Freudianism (see webpages)
McGuffin
"flash cutting"
frame
match cut
mise-en-scene
montage (cutting)
motif
over-shoulder shooting / cross-shooting
pan (camera movement)
parallel editing
POV shot
"spectator trap"
storyboard
subjective camera (point of view shooting)
suspense (vs. surprise/terror)
General topics relating to Hitchcock:
Webpages on these topics, as they relate to Psycho and Strangers on a Train and were covered in class:
Montage theory (not including the page on Vertov)
Psychoanalysis (Oedipal complex/Momism, stages of psychsexual development, Ego, Superego, and Id; displacement)
Doppelgangers & doubles
Voyeurism
Serial killers: Ed Gein (general information & the first webpage on Gein)
Criticism
(The essay by Maurice Yacowar is not included on the exam)
Robin Wood, "Retrospective" (in Hitchcock Reader)
Two major aesthetic influences:
- Expressionism: (p. 35)
- montage (Soviet)
Both contrast to the idea of film as inherently realistic
Blackmail: knife sequence uses both
Kuleshov experiment (37)
- principle of audience identification is already implicit
- identification is what carries the audience over the artificiality
Hitchcock an image-centered rather than actor-centered cinema (40)
- This is consistent with the fact that H's characters typically are isolated &
impotent
Auteur theory (42)
- Hitchcock as auteur relates to his drive to control his films' expression
"The look" & its relation to power-impotence obsession
Wood: most admirable H films are centered on movement toward health via therapy & catharsis
Weaknesses of H's approach, in Wood's opinion:
- Hitchcock the entertainer makes compromises
Best ex: Strangers on a Train where it diverges from Highsmith on
Guy's killing Bruno's father
- Weakness in H of “normative impulse”
H associates bourgeois normality as empty, treats it satirically
Damned characters are the most interesting
Jean Douchet, “Hitch and his Audience” (in Hitchcock Reader)
"In a Hitchcock film it is the spectator who creates the suspense."
"Triple form" of Hichcock's presentation:
1. The everyday world.
2. The world of desire, "the fundamental component of every Hitchcock film."
3. The intellectual world
Robin Wood, "Strangers on a Train" (in Hitchcock Reader)
Opening sequence: parallel editing, contrast
establishes link between the two men
On the train: Guy's response to Bruno
what Bruno represents: overthrow of responsibility
significance of Guy's leaving the lighter behind
Guy's responsibility in Miriam's murder
Bruno's associations: shadows, darkness
Miriam
what she represents: the world Guy wants to escape
association with revolving objects
amusement park as “symbolic projection” of her world
how Hitchcock shot the murder
Bruno & the blind man: eyes motif
Bruno & Guy outside Guy's apartment in Washington
“beautifully exact symbolic expression of Guy's relationship to Bruno and what he stands for.”
Ann
Her relationship with Guy, what she represents
Barbara
Her function “to express . . . what everybody - including the spectator - is slightly ashamed to find themselves thinking”
Implication of the spectator
Mrs. Cunningham
party scene (“centerpiece . . . in some respects of the whole film”)
“spectator trap”
Guy's visit to Bruno's house and Hitchcock's “cheating”
“major lapse in artistic integrity” (?)
The tennis match and Bruno's journey
Cross-cutting [parallel editing]
Light & darkness - superego & id
Fairground climax
Denial of release to the audience
Last scene
Guy's personality remains unintegrated
Summary: Important Hitchcock themes in Strangers on a Train:
- assumption of common guilt
- struggle of personality between order and chaos
- “experience therapy”
- characteristic Hitchcock moral tone:
(a) condemnation of forces causing disorder
(b) awareness of the fascination of disorder and the impurity of motives
- good and evil inextricably mixed
- Hitchockian humor
Philip J. Skerry, Psycho in the Shower: click for review notes
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