Farran Smith Nehme, aka the Self-Styled Siren and one of the co-sponsors of the annual For the Love of Film film-preservation blogathon, in which this blog participates (most recently last May), announced today that we can now all enjoy the object of this year's fundraising effort. The surviving three reels of the six-reel silent The White Shadow (1924) will be streaming online for free for the next two months. The film, directed by Graham Cutts, is especially significant as it is the first surviving film on which Alfred Hitchcock is credited (he worked as assistant director, art director, editor, and writer on the movie).
Thanks to our readers who donated to this effort during this blog's participation in For the Love of Film III last May. And thanks, too, to those among my fellow bloggers who took part. It's a fun event and it's great to see such a concrete outcome!
Some more information on the film itself and the preservation project from the National Film Preservation Foundation's Annette Melville (via the Self-Styled Siren) can be found below the fold:
The opening three reels of the six-reel feature were uncovered in 2011 during research by the NFPF to identify American silent-era titles held by the New Zealand Film Archive...The film was preserved at Park Road Post Production in New Zealand under the supervision of the NZFA and the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The White Shadow will be presented for free streaming, with the following extras: · Program notes about the film by David Sterritt · Newly recorded musical score created by Michael M. Mortilla who, with Nicole Garcia, reprises the performance from the gala premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2011 · A short bio of the New Zealand projectionist, Jack Murtagh, who salvaged the film · Slide shows about the film’s discovery, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Academy Film Archive
The 43-minute presentation, which will run two months, is made possible by contributors from around the world. “Not everyone has the ability to attend the special screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington, or New York,” said Jonathan Marlow, co-founder of Fandor, the curated on-demand movie service that is donating webhosting for the event. “We’re thrilled to play our part in making this fascinating discovery available everywhere.” Fandor’s gift matches cash donations raised through the Internet fundraising drive organized by the 2012 “For the Love of Film” Blogathon, spearheaded by Marilyn Ferdinand, Roderick Heath, and Farran Smith Nehme. The campaign mobilized support from more than 100 film fans across five continent
Almost everybody loves Hitchcock movies. We went one better. We helped get one back in front of thousands of viewers for the first time in decades. No modesty here: This film is online because we worked our tails off to help get it there.
Once again, I'm so glad that the USIH Blog could play a small part in getting this to happen!
Guest blogger Andrew Seal follows up today on my post from last week on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Andrew is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale. His dissertation concerns politics and print culture in the twentieth century Midwest. His other research interests include Jewish studies, queer studies, and 20th/21st century US literature.
Thanks, first of all, to Ben Alpers for allowing me to respond at greater length than a comment might allow to his very sharp and insightful post about the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. He is very right to see the poll as a valuable resource in trying to get a handle on many of the kinds of questions which intellectual historians might ask about film criticism and (mostly elite) film consumption.
It is especially valuable, as he notes, as a snapshot of contemporary cultural politics surrounding canons, which has certainly changed in the past twenty or even ten years, although perhaps not quite, I think, the way that Ben argues it has. Ben makes the case that the positive responses to the Sight & Sound canon reflect an embrace of a sort of DIY approach to canon formation, where even the most authoritative canons are seen more as “conversation-starters,” and less as tools for indoctrination or discrimination. Furthermore, he very compellingly links this new attitude toward the massive increase in casual availability of all kinds of films—an increase which has made it possible for an avid cineaste to feel that she is, as Ben says, “no longer constrained by the programming choices of others.”
Yet I would argue that, far from reflecting a “mixtape” approach to canon formation, the 2012 Sight & Sound poll still shows all the fingerprints of a quite deliberately programmed approach to the cinema and to its history. Less important than the relatively anarchic, “make-your-own-queue” influences of YouTube and Netflix have been the still quite top-down institutions like the Criterion Collection of DVDs, the New York arts cinemas like Film Forum and the IFC Center, and prestigious film festivals like those at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice.
First let me say why I think it has been rather difficult to see this less anarchic spirit in the coverage of the release of the 2012 poll. First of all, a huge percentage of discussion of the poll has centered around what is, in my opinion, a non-issue: the toppling of Citizen Kane from the number one spot in the critics’ poll (by Vertigo) and in the directors’ poll (by Tokyo Story). As Ben noted in the comments to his post, “no film came close to appearing on a majority of ballots,” but not only that, the difference between Kane and the two films displacing it was, proportionately, pretty small: Kane appeared on only 4% fewer ballots than Vertigo in the critics’ poll, and less than 2% fewer than Tokyo Story in the directors’. Yet this switch has been granted enormous magnitude: in the words of the Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club, it’s “like having to orbit around a different sun.”
Secondly and somewhat contradictorily, as that Onion AV Club article also points out, the rest of the top of the list has remained remarkably steady (or stodgy) over the decades and resolutely resistant to more recent films: the “newest” film in the critics’ Top Ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out two years before Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood, was born. Together, these two factors—the Citizen Kane shake-up and the stodginess—make it seem as if the voters are collectively both a little capricious (why the ascendancy of Vertigo after all these years?) and also not paying close attention to the ongoing development of cinema (can it really be the case that nothing since 1968 deserves the hyper-immortalization of Top Ten status?). The picture one might be forgiven for forming is of a voter exploring the back catalogue of films somewhat idiosyncratically, championing a few favorites, but generally insulating herself from newer, fresher currents, or, more charitably, remaining aloof from trendy directors-of-the-moment and cause célèbres.
I think this picture is inaccurate, though, and a closer look at the whole 2012 list compared to the whole 2002 list shows why. First off, it’s important to note that Sight & Sound itself has made impressive efforts to adapt to a quite different landscape of film criticism and production; most significantly, it has massively expanded its voting pool: from 145 critics in 2002 to 846 in 2012 (a nearly six-fold increase!) and from 108 directors in 2002 to 359 in 2012 (about three-and-a-third times larger). This expansion has meant that the total number of films voted for has increased abundantly as well, but not quite in line with the ballooning of voters: from 884 films in 2002 to 2556 in 2012—an impressive enlargement, but less than three-fold.
Moreover, a detailed look at what the new films on the 2012 list are indicates that this healthy but not overwhelming expansion of the canon also seems to be along some definite, and relatively specific, lines. As Tobias notes in the Onion AV Club article cited above, the one big change in the Top Ten is the introduction of the Soviet documentarian Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and this greater enthusiasm for non-narrative film extends strongly to the broader field. While I can’t, unfortunately, be precise in quantifying how many documentaries, avant-garde shorts, and pieces of filmic installation art have been added (Sight & Sound doesn’t have a column for genre, and it would be rather laborious—and subjective—for me to supply it), I can approximate it by listing some of the non-narrative or experimental directors who gained the most from the poll’s expansion: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who had no films in 2002 and now have fifteen; Stan Brakhage, whose tally increased by nine; the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who went up from a single film to ten; and Robert Beavers, Jan Svankmajer, and Bruce Baillie, none of whom were represented in 2002, but who each have seven films listed in 2012. By contrast, Federico Fellini, whose films are artsy but not, I would argue, truly experimental, lost four films from 2002 to 2012. (For more, I have created a spreadsheet with all the data mentioned above and below in this post; it can be found here.)
Most of these non-narrative directors’ films are not available via Netflix, and one would have to look fairly hard to find many of them on YouTube or other free streaming sites (I’m speaking from experience here). And that’s also the point—if one is on one’s own, one has to look hard for them, and to know where to look and what to look for. The presence of so many non-narrative films on the 2012 list suggests to me that the changes between 2002 and 2012 are not due to casual exploration, but rather to focused and guided recuperation of certain films and certain kinds of films.
The Criterion Collection is probably the most famous and most admired effort along these lines and, while it doesn’t have a large number of experimental or documentary films in its inventory, its influence on the list is fairly evident. Alongside the more mainstream re-releases of fairly well-known classics, Criterion runs a series called Eclipse, which “is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.” Almost every Eclipse series contains a film that was new on the 2012 Sight & Sound list. A striking number of other new Criterion releases also joined the 2012 list.
The films selected for the Criterion Collection have often been recovered first at New York art cinemas like IFC or Film Forum: a sensible connection, after all, because the curatorial and technical restoration of a film is an expensive and labor-intensive process, and, while the Criterion Collection’s yearly output is impressive, the number of films that can be restored is quite limited, and it is wise to get both a theatrical re-release and a deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray out of each restored film print.
Finally, I think it’s worth putting some numbers out there to check whether the poll’s reputation for stodginess holds over the broader list. (Again, the data for this can be found in the spreadsheet linked above.) Over the full 2012 list (all critics and all directors), the median year of production is 1973, and the average year for the 2012 list is about 1972. So both the median and the mean for the list as a whole are four or five years later than the “newest” film in the Top Ten. Not only that, but both figures represent a full seven-year advance over the 2002 list (median: 1966; mean: 1965). Moving a list this size seven years in just a decade is fairly impressive, and suggests a much more than random movement in the voting pool.
Which leads me to my last, and most conjectural, point, which, like my sense that there are many more non-narrative films in this poll’s results, is more impressionistic than quantified. It seems to me that there are far more films in the 2012 list which are from the global south and from the old Soviet bloc than there were in 2002, and I think it is this, largely, that is pushing the median year forward in time, as more of these nation’s film industries only really took off in the last third of the 20th century, or at the very least only after World War II. This shift is paralleled by what I believe to be a (proportional) decline in the number of films in the 2012 list which could be considered products of Classical Hollywood Cinema, and I would point to this chart to back this claim up.
The decades of greatest change between 2002 and 2012—other than the 2000s, for obvious reasons—are the 1950s and the 1940s. The percentage of films from these two decades declined from 15.3% and 10.2% (respectively) in 2002 to 10.1% and 5.8% in 2012. Now, not all of these films are necessarily Hollywood products, but if we’re talking the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of them are. Furthermore, I did a little bit of checking, and only about three-fourths (663 of 884) of the films on the 2002 list repeated on the 2012 list (in the spreadsheet, I’ve marked the years of those films in italics), and it seems to me that Classical Hollywood Cinema is over-represented in those that didn’t return.
The availability of films from the global South and from ex-Soviet bloc countries on DVD or streaming has swelled since 2002, but it is still much more difficult to view even some of the most acclaimed products of these parts of the world than it is to see a product of Classical Hollywood Cinema. It’s a little easier if one has a multi-region DVD player (which I imagine many professional critics do), but I would offer that the best possibility for seeing these films is not home viewing and not even an arts cinema, but at one of the many international film festivals.
As much as I love Classical Hollywood Cinema, I personally find these shifts very healthy, and I hope they do presage greater availability of some of these (for now) obscure classics. But the shape of the 2012 Sight & Sound list is not really the product of critics and directors programming their own viewing. At festivals, through the Criterion Collection, at arts cinemas, the choices are very much decided, not deliberated. I think most cineastes are happy with that—Criterion and the others do an exceptional job of dusting off mouldering gems. But it is important not to confuse satisfaction with the current arrangement of taste-making and gate-keeping institutions with autonomy. If the Sight & Sound poll teaches us something about how canons work today, I’d say it tells us that the institutions which form canons have gotten better at selling them, not that they’ve ceded authority to make—or re-make—them.
As most readers of this blog are probably aware, Sight & Sound, the venerable monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute, announced the results of their once-a-decade poll of critics and directors earlier this month. Since 1952, the magazine has asked a select group of film critics to name the ten greatest films of all time. The lists are submitted unranked. The magazine then simply adds up the number of mentions of each film and produces a ranked list of the greatest films of all time. Since 1992, a parallel poll of critics has also taken place. The big news from this year's polls is that, for the first time since the inaugural poll of 1952, when De Sica's Bicycle Thieves grabbed the top slot, a film other than Citizen Kane finished in first place in the critics' poll: Vertigo, which appeared on 191 of the 846 top-ten lists, beat out Kane (which was on 157 lists). In the directors' poll, for the first time, Kane also lost the top slot, which went to Ozu's Tokyo Story (#3 on the critics' poll). The results of both the critics' and directors' poll can be found here.
From the moment of its release, the poll has been the talk of both film blogs and film podcasts (e.g. this and this...but the volume of commentary on it has been truly extraordinary). The conversation has also spilled into more general-interestblogs. I find the Sight and Sound polls oddly fascinating and wanted to do a post taking an intellectual-history angle on them.* My first thought was to do a fairly comprehensive review what people were saying about the polls, but I quickly got lost in the endless commentary on them. However, two aspects of the polls--and the discussion of them--that I found interesting seem to be getting little mention. So they are the subject of this post. The Sight & Sound poll emerged in 1952, toward the end of a long period in film criticism in which establishing that cinema was a serious art was one of the perennial tasks of those who wrote on film. Canon construction was an important part of this task. And it's hard to imagine a purer example of canon construction than the Sight & Sound poll, with its technique of simply counting the mentions that each film receives from those polled. While this year's poll has been praised by some and criticized by others, I've been struck both by how few people have questioned the entire enterprise and by how mild such criticism has been when it has come.
Not so long ago, canons were an important front in our ongoing culture wars. Now, however, they seem to have lost their status as a cultural flashpoint. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the epicenter of the canon wars was, of course, college campuses. But these days, as far as I can tell, the struggles over great books courses and reading lists in general have eased, even as the underlying issues of those struggles very much remain.**
If once canons seemed to some like an invidious attempt to draw a sharp line between a handful of great works (almost inevitably authored by Dead White European Males) and the rest of human culture, today they are more often treated as one might treat a mixtape: a suggestion of what one might profitably consume that represents a personal opinion on the matter more than an authoritative statement from on high. The status of those taking part in Sight & Sound poll--as professional critics or directors--makes the poll potentially worth listening to. But in no sense does it forestall the possibility of the rest of us coming up with our own mixtape-like Top Ten lists, which we might then blog, e-mail, tweet, or torrent to our friends and beyond. Rather than shutting down conversations, as some once felt literary canons did, this year's Sight & Sound poll has been almost universally seen as a conversation starter.
Part of what's changed, I think, is the way we consume movies these days. I come from the last generation whose cinematic education began before the home video revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s. When I first began to watch movies seriously, my knowledge of film was still at the mercy of (pre-cable) television and theaters. Especially in a town like Berkeley, these could provide an excellent introduction to world cinema. Repertory theaters like the UC and the Rialto 4, and arthouses like the Northside, provided me with a terrific cinematic education, supplemented by local television's tendency to fill time with old movies. My strongest t.v. movie memories revolve around Creature Features, the late-night Saturday horror / monster movie show on Oakland's KTVU (Channel 2), hosted by the inimitable Bob Wilkins. Wilkins aired an incredibly eclectic mix of films. His show introduced me to everything from Ray Harryhausen's work to the Toho studio Japanese monster movies, from the classic Hammer films of the 1950s and 1960s to Night of the Living Dead (which scared the pants off of me). Here's Wilkins introducing a particularly obscure horror flick...though I think you'll get a sense of both his nerdish enthusiasm and the care with which he tried to pass his cinephilia on to his audience:
One could certainly get an excellent introduction to film from these sources. Indeed, the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, became steeped in the history of cinema largely via watching old films on t.v. But starting when I was in high school, home video became an ever more important method of cinematic consumption. Over the course of the '80s, repertory film theaters remained vibrant (though they often became part of chains), but by the end of the decade they had entered into steep decline. Of the repertory theaters of my college years in Cambridge, one--the Brattle--is still hanging on, but the Orson Welles is long gone (a fire led to its closure while I was still in college).
VHS, and later Laserdiscs and DVD, meant that one was no longer constrained by the programming choices of others. Though which films were available in these formats was--and remains--a source of some frustration. Nevertheless, the world of cinema opened up in a way that it never had before. Even when a film was unavailable on VHS, one could often obtain bootleg copies, often recorded off the air. Indeed, there was an outfit in L.A. that used to rent such films by mail. Yes, the quality was often low. But certainly no lower than that of the films that the young Martin Scorsese watched on his family's small black-and-white television in the 1950s.
We're now in the midst of the latest phase of the ongoing home video revolution. For those with an internet connection, streaming video makes an enormous quantity of film instantly available through services like Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and Amazon streaming video. The Internet Archive has made a large number of films that have fallen into the public domain available via torrent. And, if one is willing to break the law, virtually any film imaginable can be found online for free.
At the time I began high school in the late 1970s, it would have been practically impossible to see Vertigo. The #1 film on this year's Sight & Sound critics poll had been withdrawn from circulation by Hitchcock's estate in the early 1970s; it would return to movie screens with much fanfare in the 1980s. Today, I could begin viewing it on my computer screen in a matter of minutes without leaving my desk.
We can now, I think, go beyond talking of a home-video revolution and instead consider what one might call the informationalization of motion pictures. This is, to be sure, a mixed blessing. Seeing Vertigo on my computer screen is not remotely the same thing as seeing it projected in 70mm. Indeed, even in theaters, digital formats are threatening to kill off celluloid. But the informationalization of motion pictures fundamental alters the way we consume movies...and the way we think about our consumption of them. And it contributes powerfully to our experience of the Sight & Sound poll as a kind of mixtape--a cultural production we can both experience and re-mix ourselves--rather than as the hermetic declaration of a cultural authority.
_______________________________________ * "In the old joke about The Daily Worker, an editor hands a rewrite person a wire service item about a motorcyclist knocked over by a car, and says, 'Class angle this one, comrade.'"-- Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, October 16, 1989.
** Once again I've strayed onto ground that is the professional province of two of my fellow bloggers, so I hope Andrew and L.D. will add to these thoughts about canons and canon wars.
[This is the second post in the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. See Ben's fantastic first contribution here. This year's blogathon, which runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin. For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]
What do horror films do? What makes them persistently popular? I came of age in the 80s with Freddy Krueger, the undead, knives-as-finger-nails antagonist in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. These films pivoted from the tried-and-true horror flick formula. Teenagers who behaved badly, those who imbibed in drugs and sex, died the first horrific deaths at the "hands" of Freddy, who worked as a sort of demonic guarantor of a traditional symbolic order--an order that was dying an equally horrific death. But even more, Freddy was the return of the repressed for the parents, who had long ago violated Biblical commandments in their futile efforts to protect the old order. So Freddy is a ghoulish representation of the corruption of both old and new orders. There's no going back to the old, which was sustained by an undercurrent of repression. But the new, the libertine, the transgressive, the antinomian, is nothing to celebrate. Freddy as such is the quintessential postmodern specter.
But even if A Nightmare on Elm Street and other horror films of the 80s nicely illustrate the conundrum of post-sixties culture, they cannot compare to the understated brilliance of the Hitchcock horror film. I also, in a way, came of age with Hitchcock. My father loved Hitchcock and introduced me to all of his films on VHS in the 80s. I was so taken with these movies, for reasons I only faintly grasped at the time. Hitchcock uses horror as a backdrop for the human struggle to come to terms with the symbolic order. Horror goes where we consciously cannot go. At least, this is Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds--elaborated in Zizek's lovely little film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Here's a clip where Zizek explains his interpretation of Hitchcock:
In deconstructing the famous blue pill/red pill scene from The Matrix, a take, of course, on Plato's Cave, Zizek argues that the choice offered Neo between fiction and reality is a false one. The two are mutually reinforcing."Fictions structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself." Zizek wants a "third pill," one that allows us to see the reality in fiction, or to see how fiction makes reality more real. This is how he wants us to interpret Hitchcock. Zizek claims that the key to understanding horror films is to imagine the same story without the elements of horror.
There are non-horror elements that disturb reality in The Birds, such as the intrusion of a strange, seductive woman into the Oedipal relationship between Mitch and the mother he lives with. But these intrusions can be digested or incorporated into the symbolic order. The birds, then, represent an intrusion into the reality that disintegrates it, that upends the symbolic order, that lays bare a more primal human condition. The Birds do what Mitch's mother wishes she could but cannot due to the symbolic order that structures her reality. Horror does what our unconscious wishes we could do but cannot.
Given that I'm more an expert on Zizek and contemporary critical theory than I am on Hitchcock and film history, I will conclude with a question for our readers, many of whom might be cinephiles, newly drawn to the USIH blog this week thanks to the For the Love of Film blogathon. Is Zizek's a standard interpretation of Hitchcock? Or is it new to you?
Alfred Hitchcock's Self-Portrait (from the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents)
[This post kicks off the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. This year's blogathon, which began yesterday, May 13, and runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin. For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]
I
In his two-volume autobiography, the magnificent A Life in Movies(1986) and the messier but still fascinating Million-Dollar Movie (1992), Michael Powell writes extensively about his fellow English-born director, Alfred Hitchcock. Seven years his junior, Powell evinces great admiration for Hitchcock, calling him, along with Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, one of "three great artists [who] have saved the film business from going completely off the rails in my time" (ALIM, 183). But despite his repeated praise for Hitchcock, Powell's feelings about him appear to be more complicated than he is willing to explicitly admit.
In ALIM, Powell reports a story from the time in the late 1920s when he was working as the head of the stills department of British International Pictures, where Hitchcock had established himself as a director. Hitchcock took a shine to Powell and insisted that he personally take stills for his movies. According to Powell, while completing The Manxman (1929), Hitchcock asked him to help improve the final act of the screenplay for Blackmail (1929), which would become Hitchcock's first sound movie:
When we came to the chase through the streets, I broached an idea that I had been maturing for a while.
"Hitch! Don't let's do an ordinary chase through the streets like you did in The Lodger. Let's take it into some bizarre location that is entertaining in itself."
"What do you mean? What do you think Michael means, Alma?" Alma [Hitchcock's wife and screenwriting collaborator] looked encouragingly at me.
I had been thinking of my visits to the British Museum Reading Room to see my grandfather, and the impression that had been made upon me by his bent figure, at his desk, dwarfed by the height of the shelves and topped by the glass dome over the whole vast room, and I went on: "Let's have him slip into the British Museum at night and get chased through rooms full of Egyptian mummies and Elgin Marbles, and climb higher to escape, and be cornered and then fall through the glass dome of the Reading Room and break his neck."
Hitch, being a Londoner, had never been near the British Museum Reading Room, but he saw the possibilities of the idea, and so I think I can make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in Blackmail, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it. (ALIM, 193)
Powell says no more about this and immediately moves on to other matters (he would, in a sense, try his own hand at a Hitchcock Climax in his second collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, Contraband(1940)). But this little anecdote is, I think, very telling.
Not only does Powell claim to have invented the Hitchcock Climax (apparently after much careful thought), but, at least initially, Hitchcock doesn't even understand the idea before Powell spells it out to him in great detail. And Powell at least implicitly relates Hitchcock's lack of understanding to the defective nature of the latter's Englishness. Powell writes, just before relating the above anecdote about Blackmail, that Hitchcock, as a Cockney from the East End, had a great way with lower-middle class characters and actors, and possessed a "knowledge of London [that] was peculiar and delightful, east of Temple Bar." But his knowledge of the West End, according to Powell, was limited and entirely conventional. And "beyond city streets," "Hitch was not enthralled by local colour" (ALIM 193, 191).
Contrast this with Powell, the self-described "Man of Kent," who opens A Life in Movies with a long and poetic invocation of the Kentish countryside in which he grew up, and whose films, more often than not, are positively obsessed with local color, from Canada to Uruguay, Monte Carlo to London, Scotland to Shropshire, the Himalayas to the Netherlands, Heaven itself to Kent. Powell, it should be added, never draws this contrast with Hitchcock explicitly. But it is as clear as day to any reader of his autobiography.
Instead, Powell largely discusses Hitchcock as a parallel figure to himself. And the most significant parallel he draws, by the time we get to volume two of the autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie, involves one of the great themes of Powell's books: the quest for artistic independence within a motion-picture industry that seems structurally designed to destroy it. Powell correctly sees Hitchcock, like himself, as a seeker of such independence. The one great difference between the two directors' quests--and here Powell is explicit in drawing the contrast--is that Powell and his partner in movie-making Emeric Pressburger sought their independence by keeping their distance from Hollywood while, fairly early in his career, Hitchcock moved to California and tried to find independence in the belly of the beast.
This, in turn, becomes the theme of another Powell anecdote about Hitchcock, this one appearing in Million-Dollar Movie. In March, 1952, Powell travelled to the U.S. in a small plane largely, he reports, for the experience of flying over the Greenland icecap. But once in the U.S., Powell meets in New York with a wide array of past and potential artistic collaborators and financiers, including his old friend Raymond Massey, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Arthur Loew, and David O. Selznick. All want to work with Powell and are willing to shower him with money. But Powell, untempted, dislikes and rejects the proposals and repeatedly insists on his artistic independence. (MDM, 182-194)
Flying on to Hollywood, Powell arranges meetings with a number of figures who have maintained their artistic integrity: tea with Igor Stravinsky and dinner with Alma and Alfred Hitchcock. Hollywood, Powell judges, had been very hard on Hitchcock, precisely because he had successfully asserted his artistic independence:
Hitch was off-balance--neuritis. He'd had it for nearly half a year, and it was souring his life. He had won too much independence for himself, too much responsibility for his choice of paths through the Hollywood jungle. They were narrow and dangerous trails, and one never knew where they led; sometimes nowhere, sometimes to the open country, where he was a master among masters, and all the time invisible. But near, he could hear the crashing of great beasts, their sudden roar as they charged, and their snarls as they fought and tore over the quivering flesh of their victim.
For make no mistake, these Hollywood monsters didn't want Hitch to succeed. They don't want any artist to succeed on his own. They fear the creative talent. Possessing none, they claim the power of money. Possessing the money, they claim the credit, too. It was in this twilight world that Hitch was preparing and making his films. He had thought he could play the Hollywood game as well as these beasts. Later he would put stars like Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren under contract to him personally, and this would make his enemies fear him, and envy him, even more. Mostly they tried to seduce him and buy him back by offering enormous sums of money at a time when he was struggling to finance his own productions and knew only too well how underfinanced he was. It was a heroic struggle, conducted mostly in secrecy except to his agent, and it went on for years.
The strain on Hitch was enormous. Only Alma, and a few devoted friends, knew how great it was. I think that I love Hitchcock more than all his films, for the struggle that he put up to keep the independence of the filmmaker in Hollywood. And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall . . . (MDM, 198)
With the major difference of Hitchcock's decision to pursue his career in Hollywood, Powell emphasizes the similarities between his career aspirations and Hitchcock's and his great admiration for his fellow director. And he returns to these similarities--and their mutual admiration--as he summarizes his long relationship with Hitchcock and concludes his discussion of his 1952 dinner with Alma and Alfred...though he concludes with an ambiguous contrast:
I had known and loved Hitch, as a friend and fellow craftsman, for forty years. At first glance, each recognized in the other the same confidence, the same mastery of the medium. For a year or more Hitch held out his hand to me in what had become for me a strange land, England. Abroad, in Europe [at the beginning of their careers], Hitch with UFA and I with MGM and Rex Ingram in France had once and for all caught a glimpse of the grail. That glimpse was enough for us for the rest of our lives and careers. Hitch's way was to impose himself upon the world, to exploit that marvelous personality and quick wit; mine--well, we shall see what mine was, when we come to the end of this very long book. (MDM, 199-200)
But Powell fails to mention another significant similarity between himself and Hitchcock. And he declines to discuss, at least directly, what appears to me (and I suspect to Powell as well) to be the most significant difference between their careers.
II
Both Powell and Hitchcock were unusual not only in their quests for artistic independence but in their desire to create a kind of cinematic brand identity for themselves. And both, for a time, succeeded magnificently.
Like few other directors of his generation, Hitchcock put his mark on his films. Hitchcock movies practically became a genre unto themselves. His famous cameos ensured that the public recognized not only Hitchcock movies, but Hitchcock himself...indeed part of the fun of going to a Hitchcock film was finding how the director would manage to get himself on screen. By the early 1940s, Hitchcock's name was appearing prominently above the title on publicity materials for his films (see this site for a great survey of Hitchcock posters from around the world).
The great success of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, which began in 1955, expanded to become the Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and finally went off the air in 1965, helped cement Hitchcock's brand identity. To this day, what's best remembered about the long-running series is its iconic opening, which featured a nine-line self-portrait, the director himself in silhouette, and a mordantly witty introduction by Hitchcock:
By the time Psycho came out in 1960, Hitchcock was front-and-center in much of the publicity around his film:
Powell's branding of his films was more collaborative, but just as distinct. Starting with One of our Aircraft if Missing (1942), their fourth film together, Powell shared with his screenwriter and producing partner Emeric Pressburger the unusual title card: "Written, Produced, and Directed by..."And the two became collectively "The Archers," a name that was soon accompanied by a distinctive image at the start of their films:
During the time of their greatest fame--and among cinephiles to this day--that arrow hitting the bullseye held as much promise as Hitchcock's name above the title. Martin Scorsese, who fell in love with Powell's films as a child and became very close to Powell late in his life, has said that "every time I saw The Archers logo, I knew I was in for something special."
But even as both Powell and Hitchcock began to reach the greatest heights of their fame, and had carved out a good measure of artistic independence for themselves, in the late 1940s, when Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and Hitchcock was in the midst of a long series of cinematic masterpieces including Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Notorious! (1946), and Rope (1948), their careers were in certain ways beginning to diverge.
Hitchcock's great popular success and critical reputation would only grow through the '50s and into the '60s.
In contrast, in the 1950s, Powells career stumbled and his collaboration with Pressburger came to an end. Their final three movies together--Oh....Rosalinda! (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), and Ill Met By Moonlight (1957)--were not up to the standard of most of their earlier work (though The Battle of the River Plate was a big box-office hit, at least in the UK). And while Hitchcock's critical reputation continued to soar, the Archers' reputation, always mixed, fell, as even their greatest films often came to be regarded as over-the-top fantasies, especially as British filmmakers began to produce the grittier, kitchen sink movies of the late 1950s and 1960s.
But the body-blow to Powell's career came with the release of his second film after the break-up of his collaboration with Pressburger, Peeping Tom (1960). Extravagantly denounced by British film critics ("it's a long time since a film disgusted me as much"--Caroline Lejeune, The Observer; "the sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing"-- Isobel Quigley, The Spectator; "alternately dull and repellent"--Derek Hill, Tribune; "I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standing befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense"--Nina Hibbin, The Daily Worker; an "exercise in the lower reaches of the psychopathic"--Dilys Powell, Sunday Times), the film effectively ended Powell's career as a director in his home country; during the final three decades of his life, he would direct a few films in Australia as well as a British television production. His independence and his brand were in tatters.
In Million-Dollar Movie, Powell describes Peeping Tom's reception in some detail (those quoted reviews are taken form pp. 293-295). But in his discussion of what was in many ways the greatest disaster of his career, Powell doesn't draw attention to an oft-noted contrast: the very different reception that Hitchcock's similarly boundary-crossing Psycho received that very same year. This is the unstated poignancy of Powell's comment, nearly a hundred pages earlier in his autobiography, about the positive role that Psycho played in Hitchcock's career: "And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall." Psycho saved Hitchcock; Peeping Tom doomed Powell.
III
We are now in the fourth decade of an ongoing Michael Powell revival. Long esteemed by the generation of American filmmakers who created the "New Hollywood" of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Powell spent much of the final decade of his life hanging out with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. In the early 1980s, he was Senior Director in Residence at Coppola's short-lived Zoetrope Studios. In 1984, he married Scorsese's long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. By the late 1970s, critics and cinephiles on both sides of the Atlantic began to return to the great films of the Archers...and to Powell's once despised Peeping Tom. Powell, who passed away in 1990, lived to see the full recovery of his critical reputation; Million Dollar Movie's discussion of Peeping Tom is framed by the fact that Powell's movie had already been vindicated in the eyes of critics. The critical reverence for Powell has only grown since his death. Most of the Archers' films, as well as The Edge of the World (1937), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Peeping Tom, are widely available on DVD and BluRay. Many of these films have been lavishly restored.
But the great acclaim that Powell has received since the late 1970s does not hold a candle to Hitchcock's reputation among the general public. Perhaps it never can. Hitchcock is today one of the few filmmakers of his generation who remains a household name. Even those who've never seen any of his films associate him with suspense and have some sense of the basis of his fame. The opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents remains one of the most parodied thirty-seconds of television.
In comparison, Michael Powell, at least in this country, is a relatively obscure figure. Cinephiles know him well; everyone else draws a blank when you mention his name.
All of which brings us back to Powell's "modest claim" that he invented the Hitchcock Climax. Though the story is told almost as a throw-away in the midst of one of Powell's many discussions of Hitchcock as a fellow craftsman with whom he shared deep mutual respect, I can't help but think that there's a significant amount of pain lurking in the background of this tale. I have no reason to doubt that, as Powell reports, he and Hitchcock saw each other as fellow artistic geniuses. But among all but the most cinematically knowledgable, Hitchcock's fame is far, far greater. And Powell knew this well.
