Names:
Raymond Chandler
Francois Truffaut
Alma Reville Hitchcock
Patricia Hitchcock
Ed Gein
Robert Bloch
Joseph Stefano
Bernard Herrmann
Saul Bass
Anthony Perkins
Janet Leigh
Sergei Eisenstein
Battleship Potemkin
Gus Van Sant
Brian De Palma
Dressed to Kill
"Lamb to the Slaughter"

Terms:
auteur
director
preproduction, production, postproduction
storyboard
Freudianism
suspense (vs. surprise)
McGuffin
subjective camera (point of view shooting)
"absolute" camera
"cutting in the camera"
frame
mise-en-scene
montage (cutting)
match cut
motif
over-shoulder shooting / cross-shooting


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, displacement, doppelgangers and exchange of guilt)
Doppelgangers & doubles
Scopophilia, voyeurism, the gaze
Serial killers: Jack the Ripper/The Lodger (basic information in relation to Hitchcock) and Ed Gein (general information & the first webpage on Gein)


Critical essays in Psycho casebook, ed Kolker
You are responsible for the essays by the critics listed below. The notes that follow are to aid you in reviewing the most important ideas and discussions in the essays listed.

- Hitchcock interview with Truffaut: you should have read it carefully
- Wood
- Durgnat
- Douchet
- Toles
- Williams
- Kolker


Robin Wood, “Psycho”
Audience identification and complicity: "our moral resistance is skillfully undermined"
- Audience participation and identification
- Spectator as protagonist

Motifs-techniques:
Dominance of past over present
Parent-child relationships
Pairings: Marion & Norman, Marion & Lila, Sam & Norman



Raymond Durgnat, “Psycho”
Psycho as a "fun picture"
Old dark house film genre and horror cliches
Two false endings

Elements of "a very sad joke":
- byplay between sex and money
- Momism
- characters alone on screen

Notion of "double predestination"
Film convicts spectators of Original Sin



Jean Douchet, “Hitch and his Audience”
"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

Psycho: "We have become accomplices. . . . Hitch uses the spectator for the internal progression of his film."



George Toles, "'If Thine Eye Offend Thee . . .': Psycho and the Art of Infection"
Discomfort with the work … an endlessly renewable response”

Eye as metaphor: discussion of Poe and Bataille [not on exam]
“The eye … is the ultimate goal for any act of violation.”

Hitchcock’s “indifference, his refusal to be engaged or soiled by his transactions with suffering”
- Hitchcock's wit as evasion: “allows one to punish to one’s heart’s content … and yet remain blameless”

Shower scene:
pp. 126-30: analysis of the shower murder in Psycho as example of the "aestheticizing of cruelty".

"The eye and “visual analogues” for the eye in the scene and elsewhere in Psycho.

“Why does the match cut between the drain and the corpse’s eye seem so conclusively to define the imaginative center of the film?”
- Bloch’s novel handles the shower murder in one sentence
- Why did Hitchcock make so much of it? Why is Marion disposed of “in so extravagant, prolonged, and visually intoxicating a fashion?”

Visual treatment provokes an aesthetic response that tranquilizes the scene.
- “Determination to extract a kind of classical shapeliness and beauty from this broad, unbeautiful pour of chaos.”
- Does aestheticizing neutralize the cruelty?
- “Marion’s murder refuses to accommodate any of the humanized or aesthetically dignified meanings one would be inclined to project onto it. . . . He placed it in that strangely aseptic realm of ‘pure cinema’. . . . something with no depth. … Hitchcock’s style is predicated on the belief that the surface of a screened image is absolute. It never yields anything ‘within’. The only interior it has is supplied by the mind of the spectator.”

"For Hitchcock . . . the cinema involves an immediate (and total) subtraction of unmanageable elements. Film is not a medium for introspection."

"Building a patterned sequence of images": "Arranging a composition for the camera is the way to demonstrate that its content is manageable … Control, as always for Hitchcock, is to be understood here as ability not to internalize.”

“Hitchcock’s decision to link the ‘eye’ throughout the shower sequence with as many other ovals as possible derives from his conviction that any painful subject can be stabilized if one locates a point of concentration apart from the ‘thing itself.’”

Review of eyes & eye imagery in Psycho (pp. 130-32)

The clean-up, etc. “Norman’s extreme but eminently logical solution to his impossible filial bind is to learn how to see and do the things that he is forbidden to do without actually seeing anything. . . . Norman’s perception is restricted to the order he manages to maintain within his frame.”

Mirrors, mirror images, doubles (pp. 134-38):



Linda Williams, "Discipline and Fun: Psycho and Postmodern Cinema"
Psycho as postmodern
". . . to locate within the history of cinematic reception a moment in which the audience response to postmodern gender and sexual fluidity, schizophrenia, and irony began to become not only central attractions of 'going to the movies' but the very basis of new spectatorial disciplines capable of enhancing these attractions."

The place of Psycho in film studies
Psycho was legitimized in film studies by psychoanalytic concepts
what’s missing from these interpretations: “a fun” picture"
- sensory pleasures of popular cinema
- "deviant" pleasures of Psycho itself: a "intensification of certain forms of visuality" already in cinema

Psycho’s story of an eye
Voyeurism and "the gaze"
- not a male gaze but "schizo-psychotic Norman-Mother"
- Disorientation of spectatorship, disorientation of gender identification

The new “cinema of attractions”
- movies' return to sensation, violence, and sexual display
Early movies: a cinema of attractions (concept by Tom Gunning)
- narrative less important than “a succession of visual and auditory attractions”
- montage theory in relation to theory of attractions
Roller-coaster ride as metaphor for modern movie-going

Recent cinema: a return to sensations as primary
- similar to early cinema of attractions, though recent cinema retains narrative structure
- cinema as theme park ride, and vice-versa
- cinema as simulacrum (Baudrillard)
Psycho’s significance to these developments: "new twist on some very 'basic instincts'"

Psycho & genre study
Horror films and the gaze (feminine abjection and masculine mastery)
- movement of fear from something 'out there' to sexuality and psychosis
Psycho sexualized the motive and action of violence
Psycho destabilized gender – anticipated slasher movies
- "vicarious 'abject terror, gendered feminine'"
- not the monstrous feminine but destabilization of masculine and feminine
Psycho is “the moment when the experience of going to the movies began to be constituted as providing a certain generally transgressive sexualized thrill of promiscuous abandonment to indeterminate, ‘other’ identities.” (p. 181)

Disciplining fear
Hitchcock's special policy of admissions for Psycho
Foucault’s idea of cultural discipline: Psycho as "discipline for fun"
Psycho’s “new scopic regime”

Gendered responses to Psycho:
male viewers: traditional notions
women viewers: “a source of highly ritualized feminine pleasure”
Summary. Psycho introduced a new form of performativity in watching movies.



Robert Kolker, “Form, Structure, and Influence of Psycho”
“Form is everything”
Hitchcock controlled form “by setting boundaries, even obstacles”

The Pattern

"deliberately setting boundaries": production restrictions on Psycho
"tight, abstract visual design":
- horizontal/vertical design: strong grid from the beginning
- diagonals, arc-like, & circular elements

- final two shots of Psycho: visual elements & effect

Anxiety of the Frame
- shots moving off center and/or upward, askew, straining the grid
- 90-degree position looking straight down
- - two 90-degree shots in Psycho

The Parlor
"a perfect example of mise-en-scene"
- two McGuffins
- doublings
- - visual doublings of the final scene
- mirrors
- ironic foreshadowings
- compositions involving Norman
- characters shown alone in 'one-shots'
- change of composition halfway through the scene
- - Norman as a threat
"All of Norman's secrets that can be known are revealed here without our knowing it."

The Shower
example of montage
evokes deep fears
composed as series of slashes

Hitchcock's uses of moving camera
- 'cross-tracking'
'visual rhymes': circular forms break horizontal-vertical
the murder: "using form to imitate the act"

Under the Influence [not included on exam]
Other directors inspired by Psycho