Chapter 5, Constructing Suspense: Mise-en-Scene

Mise-en-scene (73)
German Expressionism (74)
prominence of the director (74)
“auteur” (75)
Hollywood, or classical, filmmaking (75)
suspense (75-76)
ambiguities of appearance and reality (77)
doppelganger (77)
dangers of voyeurism and spectatorship (79)

Psycho opening (79- )

Opening credits (79)
music: Bernard Herrmann
design: Saul Bass

Establishing shots (79-80)
reinforce motifs of doubling, splitting, and reformulating
light vs. darkness
public vs. private spaces
voyeurism

Hotel room scene (81-88 )
themes and motifs:
hidden and guilty sex
psychical, emotional, and monetary debts to dead parents
sins of parents visited on children
unsatisfying and failed marriages
naked and exposed flesh
gloom and foreboding
darkness and shabby environment
foreshadowings in dialogue
low angles, truncated perspective
claustrophobia
distortion of the female body
characters at edges of frame

Four narratives: Marion's, Sam's, Norman's Norma's (84-85)

“Cataphors” (86-88)
window
horizontal and vertical
mirrors

Real-estate office (88-93)
Hitchcock's cameo (88)
cataphors: two paintings (88-89)

Psycho as antipastoral (89-93)
classical cinema: marriage & family (90)
“Lamb to the Slaughter”: Mary Maloney prefigures Marion & Norma (90-91)
the oilman and the gift of the house (92-93)

Marion's apartment (93-97)
role of the camera
black bra & slip
the money
the showerhead
pictures in Marion's room
mirror
purse

Marion in her car (97-104)
scene construction: “two descents into darkness sandwiched among three discrete mini-scenes” (98)
viewed by the enunciator
imagined voices - psychological space

Policeman interlude (99)
the car window
the policeman
car as cataphor (99)
use of camera to encourage identification (99)

Used car lot interlude (101-2)
the salesman
the ladies'-room scene
Marion as victim of male gaze (102)

Bates Motel scene (104-21)
confined space-claustrophobia: debt to Poe
link of eating with violence and death (105)
trapped in one's own body
taboo space: the figure in the window

First motel subscene (107-15): the motel office & cabin 1
mirror
Signing in as Marie Samuels
Norman's left-handedness
Norman's inability to say taboo words
the bathroom door, bright lighting
the two bird pictures
the window
framing: right and left of frame (110-11)
the house: Gothic secrets (113)
on the pathway: “seems like a romantic moment” (114)
reflection of Norman in window
connection between food and sex

The parlor subscene (115-17)
parlor as cataphor for Norman's mind
stuffed birds
“private traps”
sons, mothers, and lovers
separate framing, isolation within the frame (116)

Norman after the parlor scene (117-20)
getting the audience to care about Norman
glowing eyes as cataphor (118)
voyeurism
Norman sees Marion naked, the audience doesn't
Norman's eye and the audience's eye symbolized by the hole in the wall (120)

Chapter 6: Interview with Hilton Green
[not on exam]

Chapter 7: Montage: Creating Terror

Montage in Hitchcock's pure cinema
Narrative montage (138): moves along the action
Expressive montage (138): expresses a feeling or idea
Eisenstein-style montage (138-39): creates purely cinematic space & time

In Hitchcock, suspense constructed through mise-en-scene, terror constructed through montage. (139)

Edgar Allan Poe (140)

Classic continuity editing (140)
Hitchcock's "American training"
- editing largely subordinated to narrative
- editing invisible and not disruptive,
- creates space-time continuum

Basic techniques of continuity editing (141)
- Parallel editing
- Spatial fragments
- Shot-reverse shot
- POV and eye-line match
- Fourth wall
-180-degree rule (150)

Influence of Soviet filmmakers on Hitchcock (141)
Eisenstein categories of montage (153)
- Metric (shot length)
- Rhythmic (pattern of movement within & between shots)
- Tonal (patterns of light and dark)
- Intellectual (juxtaposition of disparate visual metaphors)


Examples of montage in earlier Hitchcock films: Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Saboteur (142-62)

Point of view (POV) shooting (143)
Shot A: enunciator's shot
Shot B: the object of the character's look
What motivates the look is usually something in the mise-en-scene
Shot C: character's reaction

Terror is induced by surprise, suspense by forewarning (148)
Hitchcock: “suspense and terror cannot coexist” (149)

“vortex of violence” (157) usually climaxing in a fall or descent
Psycho's echo of Milton (161): suggestion of “fortunate fall”?
Psycho and Vertigo deny the fortunate fall (161)

In Psycho, Hitchcock's strategy foregrounds mise-en-scene in the first half of the film, to shape “narrative thrust.” (162)

Real-estate office scene: violates 180-degree rule (165)

First significant POV shot in Psycho is in Marion's apartment:
- the money as MacGuffin (165)

Relationship between enunciator's shot and POV shot (167)

Importance of POV shots in the car scenes (170).
Most are associated with enclosed space: metaphor for Marion's mind (172)
Policeman scene foreshadows shower scene (171)

Bates Motel scenes (prior to shower scene) designed to shift POV focus from Marion to Norman.
Three Norman pov shots “co-opt” Marion's story (174-175)
- Norman's voyeurism of Marion (175)
- one pov shot missing
- Norman as director surrogate

Shower murder creates “existential shipwreck” and forces the viewer to look for something to cling to (176)
This will be Norman, who “has the film to himself” (177)

Chapter 9: Evolution of the Shower Scene

Psycho as "boundary between two different worlds of cinema:
- before:
- Hollywood studio system
- classical style
- star system
- Production Code
- after:
- cinema of sensation
- independent productions
- experimentations in style and narration

Five Hitchcock films that foreshadow Psycho [not on exam]
each narrative centers on male and female in violent situation
- Blackmail (1929)
- Sabotage (1936)
- Spellbound (1945)
- Dial M for Murder (1953)
- The Wrong Man (1956)

Chapter 10: Interview with Terry Williams
[not on exam]

Chapter 11: The Culmination of Suspense and Terror: The Shower Scene

Influence of the shower scene (pp. 220-221):
1. weakened power of the Production Code
2. more frank presentation of former taboos (nudity, bathrooms, incest)
3. new era of violence, leading to slasher films
4. new practice of requiring audiences to see films from the beginning
5. identified the director as dominant figure in film

Myths, distortions, fabrications (221-26):
knife touching flesh?
number of shots & length of scene
use of nude model?
Saul Bass's involvement
use of cold water?
visible nipples?
one-third of way into the film?

Five books that analyze the shower scene (226)

Connection between Psycho and Les Diaboliques (227-29)
eroticism, suspense, violence
Legacy of German Expressionism

Robert Bloch's novel and its appeal to Hitchcock (229-32)
Joseph Stefano's first draft of the shower scene

Skerry's analysis of the shower scene (233-60):

Act I: Marion's Mea Culpa (233-42)
[see the discussion for comments on particular shots and motifs]
“geography of the screen” (238)
camera placement (140-41)

Act II: The Revenge of Mother (242-52)
[see the discussion for comments on particular shots and motifs]
“flash-cutting”
identification of audience with victim (246)
“metric montage” (regularity of beat) (247)
similarity to Eisenstein (249)
three points of view (250)

Act III: The Descent of Marion, the Ascent of Norman/Norma
[see the discussion for comments on particular shots and motifs]
“aroused by pure film” (253)
space, height, dangling anxieties (255)
the deleted shot (256-57)
dissolve [match-cut]: “Hitchcock's most contextually open shot” (258-59)
camera moves away from Marion (259-60)