Prelude to a
note on Alfred Hitchcock's film Suspicion (1941)
Mild
SPOILERS
With the relatively
recent releases of both The Girl (2012) and Hitchcock (2012) - two films that
deal with the more sensationalist aspects of the director's art - it seems
necessary to draw the emphasis back to Hitchcock's craft - his filmmaking - and
to ponder the questions: what makes Hitchcock so great, so essential to the
development of the motion picture as a legitimate art-form, and so enduring, as
a cultural concern? For many, it's his
obvious ability to tell a story; to involve an audience in the intrigues of a protagonist,
and in the emotional and psychological progression of his characters through
the course of a film. For others, it's
his talent for creating moments of pure action, drama, mystery and suspense;
the way the filmmaker so skilfully manufactures or engineers those iconic
moments that seem to capture so well the emotional perspectives of his central
characters (and even, in some cases, the antagonists) and to make them
relatable to the viewing audience, still passive before the screen.
All of these
factors are no less true, but the thing that makes Hitchcock's films stand out
against the work of those that have followed in his footsteps - at least, from
my own perspective - is the director's commitment to maintaining the sense of
artistry and poetic grandeur explicit in the cinema of the silent age. The stylisation of these films, where the
unreality of the work - the sense of the film being liberated from the more
cumbersome expectations of reality, or actuality, to instead soar with the
grace of a bird from the screen - stands in stark contrast to the heavier, noisier,
more overbearing bombast of contemporary directors like Michael Bay, Paul
Greengrass and Christopher Nolan, who assault the senses of the audience in an
effort to enforce a heightened air of overdramatic reality. Their work might focus on the implausibility
of fighting robots, super spies or men in rubber costumes, but the unimaginative,
often "televisual" approach to the staging and general design of
these films (handheld cameras, frequent close-ups, disorganised cutting, etc)
seems intent to remind the viewer that this is "real"; that the
action and adventure is genuinely taking
place.
For
Hitchcock, the ideology is reversed. His
stories could be real - they build on
the recognisable (small towns, city streets, apartment buildings, hotels, everyman
characterisations, etc) - but they're presented in a way that exaggerates the
theatricality; the "abstractness" of the situation. If modern filmmakers seek to show - to put into images a story that
can be followed and felt - then Hitchcock sought to adapt the psychology of his
characters; to put into images a particular mindset; a sensation of fear,
panic, hostility, danger and even death. Rather than attempting to place the audience
outside of the action, as objective observers, he invites us in; exploiting the
tools and techniques available to him as a filmmaker versed in the developments
of pioneers like F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Lev Kuleshov and Robert
Wiene, so that the audience is, in a way, more cognisant of what the characters
are thinking. We see what they see, feel
what they feel, and so on.
Hitchcock
manipulates the viewer, but does so with the intention of making the audience
identify with his protagonists. In Rear Window (1954) for instance, he traps
the viewer in a single midtown apartment, with only the 1.66:1-like
window-space to occupy our curiosity, as we're inevitably forced to accept our
own role as the submissive voyeur as surrogate for the character
on-screen. In Vertigo
(1958), he has the viewer dangling from the edge of a high-rise rooftop while
the trickery of the camera imposes a feeling of dizziness that will in turn
overwhelm both audience and protagonist alike...
Rear Window
[Alfred Hitchcock, 1954]:
Ways of
seeing: characters as viewers, the "viewer" as victim, etc.
Vertigo [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1958]:
Identification
marks: audience and character (on-screen) scarred by the same experiences.
With Suspicion,
every scene - every shot! - is designed to show us the "reality" as the
heroine sees it. If a character looks at
a note or letter, or sees something occur and registers it as either strange or
suspicious, then Hitchcock designs the scene so that the audience is naturally compelled
to think the same...
Suspicion [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1941]:
Hitchcock
uses an artificial highlight to draw the audience's attention to a particularly
chilling quotation as read by
the film's protagonist.
It's all foreplay, here. Hitchcock as seducer, misleading,
manipulating; using the film-making to skew our perception of the story, but
also to add clues and commentary to the sub-text of the narrative taking place
beneath the frame.
While Suspicion
isn't my favourite film by Hitchcock (for reasons that I'll return to soon) it is
one of the strongest examples of the director's aesthetic approach. This is a film like many by Hitchcock where
the subjectivity of his character's psyche - her way of perceiving events -
overwhelms the experience; creating the impression that all aspects of the film
(the music, cinematography, editing and design) are somehow interceding on
behalf of this character; expressing (visually) the fraught emotions that she
herself is unable to put into words.
Take this scene,
for instance. Here, the protagonist -
the vulnerable Lina (as accompanied by her husband, the rakish but somewhat still
threatening Johnnie Aysgarth) - is moving into an expensive and opulent new house
on the edge of the village. The
characters pause in the foyer while the anxious estate agent closes the deal. It's a perfunctory scene - intended to
establish the setting and a general feeling of happiness and excitement shared
by these characters before the story changes gear - but it's also a scene that
creates an added depth and texture by the general approach to composition (the
mise en scène) and the effect that Hitchcock and his cinematographer Harry
Stradling Sr. achieve with the clever lighting of the set....
Suspicion [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1941]:
The art-direction
by Van Nest Polglase incorporates a large skylight, which, when lit from a
certain angle, creates a magnificent silhouette. The design of the silhouette has the clear
appearance of a spider's web. As an
effect, it's ornate, eye-catching and highly decorative, but it also suggests
something more significant about the film's subtext. In relation to what we've seen and to what
Hitchcock wants us to think, the appearance of this web informs both the
relationship between these two characters and the situation, as it unfolds.
The initial courtship
between Lina and Johnnie is like a whirlwind.
We find out very little about these characters prior to their initial
meeting, and before we've even had sufficient time to suss out their
motivations, or the giddy feelings shared by these characters, or to see them
develop and progress, the couple are already married and settling down into a
life of polite domesticity. It is at this precise moment that Hitchcock (and
his writers) begin alluding to the true nature of Johnnie - his gambling
addiction, foul temper and general lack of funds - and how this seems related
to his relationship with Lina; this shy, largely naive young woman, with a
background of wealth and privilege.
As an
audience, we suspect what Hitchcock wants us to suspect; that Johnnie is using
Lina for her inheritance. Suddenly, the
subconscious idea expressed by the production design and cinematography becomes
clear. Lina is now trapped. Marriage has bound her to this potentially
dangerous character, while the house itself, as a materialist object, is the
thing that holds them together.
In using the
cinematography and production design to suggest this particular reading -
cluing the audience into the potential motivation of his character (as well as
the rules of the game) - Hitchcock is showing the influence of German
Expressionism; specifically a film like Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1920), where the stylisation of the frame frequently hints at the tortured
psyche of its central character.
Hitchcock's adaptation of Wiene's technique is more subtle but no less
artificial in the way that it draws our attention to the unreality of the
world; the perspective of a place as distorted by the fragility of human
emotions.
The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari [Robert Wiene, 1920]:
Caligari's
iconic production design is intended to express the world of the protagonist
as
a reflection of his own subconscious
mind.
Throughout
the film, Hitchcock will have his players return to the above-mentioned skylight/veranda setting
in an effort to emphasise the predicament of his central character and how the
behaviour of her husband has left no other alternative than to speculate on the
possibility of a dastardly deed. The
setting becomes an almost emotional leitmotif; one that again reinforces the
idea of Lina as both trapped by this relationship and by the circumstances
created by her less than honest husband, but also by the web of suspicion
itself, and how this deadly trapping lures these characters, unsuspectingly,
into a psychology quagmire of self-deception and acute/ironic misunderstanding.
This, as an
idea, is suggested in a later scene, in which Lina confronts the housekeeper Ethel,
and enquires about the location of her husband (already suspecting the
worst). As the two characters converse,
the shadow of the spider's web once again hangs heavily behind them, reminding both
the characters and the audience of Johnnie's presence (even when absent from
the frame) but also as an unspoken acknowledgement of the secret thoughts and
feelings (known but unstated) that seem to circulate around the house, or
around the position of these various characters too afraid to confront the
issue (the "real" issue)
head-on...
Suspicion [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1941]:
As the ensuing
dialogue is struck, the camera tracks in.
The movement of the apparatus is designed to bring the audience closer
to these two characters, as if we're drawn deeper into the intrigues of their
conversation as well as into the web of narrative conspiracies, both as mutual witness
and as a kind of co-conspirator.
However, the effect created by this dolly is also expressive of the
filmmaker's as yet unacknowledged psychological reading of his central
character; an understanding that only becomes blatant in the film's final scene. As the movement of the camera further
flattens the depth of field, it creates an even greater impression of the
character (or characters) as being
caught in this web of their conflicting suspicions, mistrust, passion and
peril...
Suspicion [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1941]:
This web,
which we assume relates to the presence of Johnnie as expressive of his control
and underhanded manipulation of events, is in fact conjured by our protagonist. It is the web of her own suspicion; her distrust
of others and her implicit snobbery that creates this feeling that changes the
perception of the world. Because we see
the entire second-act of the film subjectively, through Lina's eyes, her own
emotional or psychological perspective on events colours the way the audience itself
reads the film, or the intentions of its narrative. It forces us to see these scenes and interactions
as part of a larger conspiracy of events that can only lead towards a murderous
end, when the reality is something much more tangible, even benign.
This, as a misdirection
(which will only become explicit during a last minute twist), is best expressed
in that remarkable, almost dreamlike sequence, in which Lina envisions her
husband as a faceless figure. Shrouded
in the silhouetted cloak of a velvety blackness, he approaches with a sinister
looking glass of warm milk. The glass
itself becomes a signifier; the expressionist unreality of it (where the liquid
literally glows on-screen) is like an indicator that all is not as it should
be. In this scene, Hitchcock is once
again pushing the audience towards a certain realisation where Lina is
continually being reinforced as a potential victim - the helpless fly caught in
the sinister web of her husband's misdeeds - but also revealing something more
interesting about the psychology of the heroine...
Suspicion [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1941]:
Who's who? Is Lina trapped in a web of Johnnie's
malevolence
or of her own inability to observe the truth?
All of this
is part of the film's clever (but frustrating) game of misdirection, where the filmmakers
strive to establish the perspective of Lina as that of the obvious victim - the
frightened woman - even if the eventual outcome shows this to be a cheat. Conversely, Johnnie is presented as
mysterious, deceptive and often aggressive.
The audience, like Lina, is incapable of seeing him as anything less
than a threat. However, the stylisations
- which at first play into this deception, making the audience suspect Johnnie's
intentions (just as Lina does) - will in hindsight become expressive of Lina's
own perception of the word, which is fuelled throughout by the sheltered life that
she had led prior to her first encounter with Johnnie, to say nothing of the
death of her father, or the importance of social standing and reputation as something
threatened by her husband's more casual and potentially more illicit way of
life.
Nonetheless,
it is this approach to staging and stylisation that defines our experience of
the film (or mine at least) and what for me elevated a minor Hitchcock to a greater
level of technical sophistication and significance. If nothing else, the film remains an
outstanding example of the director's remarkable approach to craft.
Perhaps more
than anyone, Hitchcock recognised that the language of cinema is not "text"; it's
not written. It's imagery; shots and cuts, observations
and movement. We can take any frame of
this film and "read" the images.
We can perceive the fear, the concern of characters, the relationship
between people, the tone of a particular scene.
The body language, the composition of the shot, the use of light (and in
later films, the use of colour) are each significant; all suggestive of the
emotional and psychological subtext of the film, as well as existing as a more
conventional means of furthering narrative progression.
This, as a
mentality, is true for the majority of the other great Hollywood filmmakers -
Ford, Ray, Hawks, Tourneur - just as it's true of
the director's most indebted to Hitchcock's influence; Chabrol, Rivette, Spielberg,
Fincher; the more contentious but no less brilliant likes of De Palma,
Argento and Shyamalan. This sense of the
image - of the filmmaking apparatus - being used as a pen to tell a story; of "motion
pictures" being used to suggest or evoke specific thoughts, feelings and desires that enrich the story, or the way that we interact with the characters
on-screen. It's also the
self-reflexivity of this - the
"web" itself, as a recurrent visual motif - which ensnares the
doubtful Lina, and likewise ensnares the viewing audience, just as easily
misled by Hitchcock's clever manipulation of the form.
