London Screenings

London must be a paradise for cinemaniacs. There are so many great films playing (in cinemas and on rooftops) every day that one gets easily overwhelmed. Being in England for only a few days, I nevertheless grabbed the opportunity to see two very different films that I highly recommend to anyone near the city for different reasons:

Every patron matters

Practically by chance and out of curiosity, I went to a very small, very independently produced first time feature called CHICKEN, simply because there was a Q&A by its London based director Joe Stephenson.

The film has already finished its festival circuit, where it drew the attention of audiences and people like Sir Ian McKellen, and is now practically self-distributed because its opening weekend got eclipsed by the latest X-MEN movie. So like in the good old days of independent movies, Stephenson books the film on a screening per screening basis around town and country, often with a Q&A, because he is a strong believer in the cinema experience as opposed to DVD/VOD.

Yasmin Paige

Scott Chambers and Joe Stephenson

CHICKEN is an adaptation of a play that feels so natural that you would not even think of its theater origins if you were not told. It might not have a high concept or even a star (well, Yasmin Paige should be well-known for her part in SUBMARINE, but that has not happened so far), but for a first time effort it is extremely focused and consistently gaining momentum. In fact, the film is completely built around Scott Chambers tour de force performance that really carries the small scale coming-of-age drama.

Besides, Joe Stephenson is a great interviewee. In the screening at the Prince Charles Cinema last Wednesday, he even managed to win the audience over without a proper interviewer. But what's more, try to catch a cinema screening because every single patron really matters to these filmmakers!

Next screening: Thursday, June 9, 9:00 pm, Genesis Cinema Whitechappel
Further screenings here.

Like most of us have never seen it before

And then there was VERTIGO. A film that anyone with an interest in cinematography, editing patterns, and especially color and music has to see at least once in a theater, and one of my all-time favorites. So why see it again in a place that offers culture and entertainment in abundance? Because the Prince Charles Cinema at Leicester Square is currently showing it in 70mm! Except for a few scratches and such (that were adverted up front) the print itself as well as the projection were perfect.

And it is true, you absolutely positively have to see it in 70mm, accept no substitutes! The characteristic Technicolor reds, greens, skin tones and deep blacks were there, and most of all: the rear-projections and special process shots looked awesome, i.e. much more invisible than on digital or 35mm versions. Besides, the PCC members are a great audience which adds a lot to the movie-going experience.

And if you are near London, make sure to check out their schedule. Who would want to miss out on a special screening of THE IRON GIANT - SIGNATURE EDITION followed by Hitchcock's THE BIRDS?

Psycho Excess Leftovers [Updated]

Tonight I'll be giving my lecture on audience involvement and suspense technique in Psycho (1960). However, as usual I have aggregated far more information than I could possibly fit into half an hour. And since my lecture serves as an introduction to the screening of the full-length film, I'm careful not to reveal any twists and surprises.
So some of my excess research is turning up in this "compilation" post which also serves as a companion piece to my lecture and should not be read before seeing Psycho for the first time since it contains SPOILERS.

The Madhouse Motif
Personally I was most interested in Bernard Herrmann's experimental score, a piece of music I have known and liked for at least 16 years. It probably helped making me aware of modernist composing techniques in the same way as Stravinsky's "Rite of the Spring" to which I was introduced through Fantasia (1940).

So while I almost know the cues by heart by now, and I was delighted to discover the so called "madhouse" motif in Herrmann's Taxi Driver score last year. This connection has now spawned a whole branch of clips that even involve Star Wars and revolve around Benny Herrmann's Hitchcock scores.

Psycho's madhouse motif consists of two "unhummable" interval leaps - a seventh up followed by a ninth down. According to his biographer Steven C. Smith "it was one of the composer's favorite signatures for madness and desolation", two themes that were frequently on Herrmann's mind. It first surfaced in 1935, then in his "Moby Dick Cantata" and after that in the above mentioned films.

In Psycho's most memorable dialogue scene, Herrmann introduces the madhouse motif exactly when Anthony Perkins says "madhouse". From then on, Herrmann develops into an unsettling fugue that "echoes the third movement of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, a piece alluded to in Bloch's novel" (Smith).

Even in classically invisible dialogue scoring Herrmann does not revert to simple musical expressions like "happy" or "sad" which would keep the audiences grounded.

And here are the two madhouse-moments in Taxi Driver (1976) which deliberately ends on the motif since Benny Herrmann and Scorsese wanted to tell the audience that Travis Bickle will be doing it again. In the first clip the motif is used only seconds before Bickle is committing his first murder.

And then a year later, practically out of the blue, the madhouse-motif turns up in John Williams late-romantic Star Wars (1977)! Since it absolutely makes no sense thematically where did this "homage" come from?

Well, Paul Hirsch was the editor on Brian DePalma's two Hitchcock themed films that Herrmann scored and thus personally got to know Benny. When they were putting together the temp track for Star Wars originally consisting of late-romantic classical music, there was a scene that seemed not to work with any of the Holst or Dvorak pieces. So Hirsch suggested using Herrmann's madhouse motif instead.

John Williams reportedly liked the idea and incorporated it into his score as you can hear here:

I've taken this scene from the Special Edition DVD and accidentally stumbled over one of George Lucas' improvements of the original trilogy. Isn't it convenient that we now don't have to trust the images since he has added dialogue to the mute stormtroopers searching the Millenium Falcon? Have we really become so stupid since 1977 that we now need to have voice-over telling us what we see?

Anyway, back to Star Wars: Originally John Williams was hired to re-arrange Holst's "The Planets" to match Lucas' space saga. While Spielberg and Williams convinced Lucas to use original music instead, Williams incorporated certain characteristics of Holst's Suite into his orchestration. This is most obvious right at the beginning in the cue called "rebel blockade runner" (essentially the introduction of the "Rebel Fanfare") on the 1997 soundtrack re-issue:

Since Benny Herrmann was also heavily into turn of the century English composers, his interest in Holst is not surprising. In the words of Steven C. Smith: "That Herrmann wished to record Gustav Holst's The Planets is not surprising; it was perhaps the single work to which Herrmann was most indebted as a composer."

To finally come full circle to Hitchcock, here is a comparison of the opening bars of "The Planets'" sixth movement "Uranus" followed by the opening bars of Herrmann's The Trouble with Harry (later retitled "A Portrait of Hitch"): 

Geometric Production Design
Another observation that didn't make it into my lecture simply because it had nothing to do with suspense technique or music was the visual theme of horizontal and vertical lines throughout the film.

Many critics have pointed out the contrast between the horizontal motel and the vertical house which seems to be adopted in Saul Bass' title sequence. In my opinion however, these contrasts structure the film right from the beginning in Phoenix and especially in the hotel room scene with Marion and Sam.

Saul Bass' geometrical metal bar animation...

...dissolving into the city of Phoenix itself full of horizontal and vertical lines.

The initial love scene in the first hotel room: all vertical.

Arbogast finally enters the Bates manor: all horizontal.

Norman looks at the mess mother has created in the place where horizontal and vertical lines finally met.

Further Viewing
Finally a list of films to see after Psycho:

• obviously Vertigo (1958) because there are so many thematic and musical elements that point towards and paved the way for Psycho, certainly the most symbiotic collaboration between Hitchcock and Herrmann.
• The Birds (1963) because it takes the "dominant mother / bird" theme into a totally different direction. Whereas Psycho only had extradiegetic music, The Birds features only diegetic music with Herrmann coordinating the electronic bird noises.
• Spellbound (1945) because more than Vertigo this is the mother of all movies about transfer of guilt.
• The Wrong Man (1957) because this was Hitchcock's first attempt at telling a true story.
• Les Diaboliques (1955) because Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller with a famous surprise ending was one of the films Hitchcock regretted not having made himself.
• Touch of Evil (1958) because this was the first time Janet Leigh had to stay in an off-highway motel.
• Taxi Driver (1976) because Herrmann's approach of scoring another story about a lonesome psychopath is quite different yet familiar.
• The Tingler (1959) because it may be William Castle's most entertaining rip-off shocker and Vincent Price's most restrained mad scientist performance. The music is hilarious Herrmann-imitation.
• Sisters (1973) because Brian DePalma has been obsessed with Vertigo and Psycho so much that he re-imagined them throughout the Seventies (see also Dressed to Kill (1980)), here with the help of Benny Herrmann himself, later with Pino Donaggio filling in for him. Split screen meets split personality.

This may well be the first but certainly not the last post of its kind since I've always been looking for a container to "store" the excess analyses that didn't make it into straight essays and lectures.

Scorsese vs. Hitchcock: Camera as Character

Travis is introduced through his eyes and his reflection in rear-view-mirrors.

One of my favorite fields of interest in films of any kind is narrative point-of-view. This post may be about live-action films exclusively, but since animation artists are essentially film makers we can learn a great deal from analyzing the thinking behind two very controlled directors’ decisions. There are mild spoilers ahead, as always when classics are debated, so if you haven’t seen Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Scrosese’s Taxi Driver (1975) yet, go see them, they are great examples of what night-time cab-driver Travis calls “morbid self-attention”. And hey, they both are masterfully scored by Bernard Herrmann and are available in stellar image quality on Bluray!

Film history provides us with a wide range of psychological studies that are essentially told from a character’s subjective perspective. With the exception of Robert Montgomery’s Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake (1947) the camera doesn’t usually limit itself to the literal point-of-view of the first person narrator.

Lady in the Lake: a whole movie composed of point-of-view shots.

In fact, we are accustomed to the convention of seeing a character within the image and still accept it as his personal vision of reality. Yet in many subjective movies – particularly the ones dealing with voyeurism – there are moments when the director intentionally breaks the concept and either shifts the narrative’s point of view to another character (Brian de Palma’s Sisters, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) or – more interesting – has the camera see things that no character inside the movie could see. 

Voyeurism and self-reflection
The principal visual leitmotif of Taxi Driver is the mirror. We are introduced to protagonist Travis Bickle by seeing his eyes and their reflections in the rear-view-mirrors of his taxi before we see anything else of him. There’s no doubt that self-reflection is the central theme that is perhaps most obviously illustrated in the famous mirror-scene (“you talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here.”).

But Travis is also a voyeuristic substitute of ourselves as movie spectators – observing what goes on around him rather than being part of it – and he more disturbing, this leads him to become a murderer. Even without being aware that composer Herrmann cites his own Psycho motif just before Travis kills for the first time, the connection to Hitchcock’s “peeping tom” Norman Bates can be easily seen.

While Scorsese – with the exception of one and a half scenes – confines the narrative to Travis’ point of view, Hitchcock radically changes our perspective from a thief (Janet Leigh) to an obsessive murderer (Anthony Perkins). From that point on we also share the knowledge of his pursuers which is the basis of Hitchcock’s suspense technique. 

Manipulation vs. distancing effect 
Taxi Driver however is not a crime thriller since no one is really paying enough attention to Travis to pursue him – or at least we don’t see them. Furthermore, the two directors have fundamentally different agendas. Hitchcock uses subjective narration to manipulate our emotions so that we are as thrilled that we don’t question the logic as long as we are watching his films.

Scorsese on the other hand is constantly trying to disorient us with subtle jumpcuts and other Nouvelle Vague techniques to slightly distance us from morally ambivalent Travis. Even though he gets us interested in Travis’ life (the sentiments might be fascination as well as pity), he encourages us to reflect on what we see. He does so most obviously in some shots that are held longer than the information they give us needs to sink in, so that we become aware that we are watching a movie which would clearly break the suspense of a Hitchcock movie.

He also gives us moments of rest after something emotionally excruciating happened. In Taxi Driver the longest “pause scene” is the song that plays after Travis’ first murder. There is also a brief scene after he tried to kill the senator and Travis sits even down in the middle of his “roaring rampage” right after he killed Sport. Of course, in a Scorsese picture the distancing effect is never as dominant as in a Brecht play or a Godard film. 

Borrowing from horror movies
In the Criterion director’s commentary, Scorsese reveals that he applied techniques of classical Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur horror movies to suggest Travis’ paranoia. One of the examples I found is when Travis first enters the brothel with Iris.

In the following video we first see a classic suspense situation from Psycho and then the analogous scene from Taxi Driver. It’s interesting to see how much of Psycho is composed of simple shot-reverse shot scenes (the basic cinematic difference to theater) with extreme control over what is revealed at what time.

The Taxi Driver ends on a jump cut to De Niro in the room, which might not be noticed consciously but adds to the sense of uneasiness. More interesting, at the beginning of the excerpt, we believe that the camera shows us Travis’ point of view while the reverse-shot shows us that he hasn’t yet entered the room. 

Camera as additional character
We don’t normally perceive camera moves as long as they are reframings in order not to lose the actors from sight. We also accept camera moves along a character’s personal stuff inside his apartment, especially if the move ends on the person who lives there.

Hitchcock however likes to use his camera as an additional character who moves independently from the actors and points towards what he wants the audience to see. He always uses this device to give us additional information and heighten the suspense (while emphasizing a red herring once in a while, too).

In his British comeback film Frenzy (1972) we already know that a red-haired neck-tie murderer strangles women after telling them “you’re my type of woman”. Like in many scenes of Psycho and Taxi Driver the camera is positioned in a staircase while we see the murderer and his victim ascend the stairs. Once we heard the crucial sentence, we don’t have to see the murder to know what’s going on. Instead, the camera character tracks down the stairs and out of the house where we learn that no one will notice the murder because of the noise outside.

Both of Hitchcock’s observing cameras are clearly intended to transport information to the audience.

In Taxi Driver, however, there’s a scene where Travis is talking to Betsy on the phone one last time. According to Scorsese this is the key shot of the film and first that came fully formed to his mind when starting work on the film.

Here the camera, like in an Antonioni or Huillet/Straub film, moves independently away from Travis, but we only see a corridor. Scorsese repeatedly said that this conversation was too painful to watch, so he wanted to pan away from it. At the same time, this gives us one of those shots that outlast our expectations. From our subconscious movie knowledge we either expect someone coming through the corridor or out of one of the doors. The non-existing moment of suspense fizzling out, though, once we see Travis enter the frame from the left. 

Camera as transcendent observer
The last video starts with a scene from Psycho that pretends to reveal the long-awaited visual information about Norman’s mother. Ultimately, Hitchcock manages to deceive us once again, though, by having the camera perform a move that suggests a free floating agent who can assume any perspective, even one that is usually attributed to god alone.

typical Scorsese rostrum shot for rituals.

Scorsese (like his apt pupil Wes Anderson) likes these top shots a lot. Especially his 1990s films like Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) are rife with god’s-eye-views that have been said to represent not only the point-of-view of a not-so-goodnatured divine being but also the point-of-view of a priest during consecration (looking down on the communion table). Therefore he often uses such rostrum type shots for ritualistic moments. In Taxi Driver we see it when Travis applies for the job, when he asks Betsy out on a date and when he purchases and handles the guns for his ritualistic killing.

He comes back to that perspective in the end, when the camera slowly observes Travis’ trail of blood and finally leads into a homage to the Frenzy scene described above.

There are also some more explicit intertextual references as in all of Martin Scorsese's works. A good account of many of those not documented on the imdb can be found in this essay by John Thurman.


Recommendation: Sony’s new Taxi Driver BD is among the best restorations of a 1970s film so far. Contrary to current practice the picture is not enhanced or “fixed” but just restored to what it looked (and sounded) like in 1976. The heavy involvement of Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman made sure that even the overly grainy Columbia logo used during the 1970s was kept intact.

The main difference to most of the earlier DVDs is that they were “color corrected” towards a colder white/blue whereas the film was always intentionally more yellow/dingy. Even the altered colors of Travis’ bloodbath are still in the grainy sepia look that made the artificial blood look much better than in other violent movies of the time. In short, it looks rather like film than like a super-enhanced DVD.

all comparison images lifted from DVDbeaver.com

For DVD comparison see DVD Beaver's review. Don't be fooled by the relatively small difference in sharpness of the stills. Seen in motion this Bluray really looks like film rather than video and vastly superior to all previous editions. 

For more information about the restoration process: Digital Bits interview with Sony's Grover Crisp.

The dark side of theaters

No, I haven’t forgotten about the 3rd Indy post, nor have I forgotten about and Walt Peregoy101 Dalmatians, or the countless other subjects I wanted to blog about. But…
…ever since the Filmpodium, my favourite repertory programming movie house, started its great Hitchcock retrospective, I have found myself racing there whenever time permits, so in a way, this guy Hitchcock is largely responsible for the latest decrease in blogging here. Fortunately, work does not allow me to become a true cinemaniac (although sometimes, I find myself secretly wishing to be able to organize my life around movie theater showtimes).

Well, anyway. I wanted this to be a column about all the unknown people who sit around me in the dark during many a screening, in short: my fellow audience members. Well, not all of them, just some of them actually… those who kindly prevent me from immersing myself too much in a movie.

I adhere to the notion that the best way to see a movie is by light projected through celluloid onto a large screen in front of a sizable audience that gives it their full attention.

Roger Ebert

It is one thing to point out Hitchcock’s cameo appearances. And by pointing out I mean – apart from uttering things like: “There he is! Everybody, I have seen Hitchcock!” – literally pointing a finger at the screen. Thankfully these cameo appearances are usually during the first act and they channel all the people with an urge to speak up to one specific scene. Besides, this is not wholly unintended.

Identifying actors can even become a tricky game, intended or not by the director, as I have recently learnt during a perfectly matched double feature. It started with Robert Altman’s The Player (about a sleazy movie exec getting away with murder), one of these Altman movies with overlapping dialogue and long tracking shots, where you meet half the personnel of 1992’s Hollywood. I had the joy of having a young couple behind me with the guy whispering most of the big shots’ names to his audibly impressed girl friend. He did a great job, got it right all the time, so I really can’t complain, can I? Near the end, when Susan Sarandon appeared briefly but prominently, the now familiar female voice behind me proudly cried out: “I know her, there’s Meryl Streep!” Well, needless to say, the screening was part of a series devoted to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon…

I know, I know, Sarandon’s face is probably not that well known and after all, the poor girl meant no harm and I better stop being such a smart aleck… At least these people were paying attention to what happenend on the screen. So I didn’t think there would be any guessing games necessary during the second film that night, the Coens’ Hudsucker Proxy. Until shortly before the film ended, I witnessed women (and this was no multiplex-teen-crowd) asking each other if the old villain (one of the main characters) could possibly be Paul Newman. Was I accidentally attending a screening for people with agnosia? Hadn’t Newman been all over the papers lately, I guess even the prominent screen credit in the beginning would have escaped the attention of these audience members.

But I’m digressing… all of the above was simply comedy continuing beyond the boarders of the screen. This here is about people talking when they really shouldn’t. During a movie, for example.

"Attention" means silence, however, when the film deserves and earns it.

Roger Ebert

I may be a little old fashioned but I like visual storytelling and that’s why I go to the movies a lot.
Sometimes I believe there is a strong minority of people living among us who honestly believe that all that constitutes a movie is dialogue and only dialogue. So when they spot moments without dialogue they step into the breach and provide their own chatter. Now, as you know, there are long stretches without dialogue in almost any Hitchcock film. The rest is silence... or rather the lack thereof...

Sometimes I ask myself: “Do people actually think that movies will become interactive by talking to them?”

A subcategory of "attention" may apply to the modern annoyance caused by moronic narcissists who use cell phones or do text messaging during a film. This is growing more common, and recently the Answer Man reprinted an eyewitness movieweb.com account by a writer who sat next to a newly famous film critic who used his cell and processed text messages during virtually an entire movie.

Roger Ebert

Receptive observers will have noticed that, very sporadically, there are people who don’t believe in the concept of paying attention at all. To them a darkened auditorium seems to be nothing more than an airport waiting hall. In fact, they have found it to be an ideal place to attract attention more than anything else.

Usually I feel like Bob Clampett’s suicidal cat (“now I’ve seen everything!”) having witnessed people picking up their cel phones during The Trial, 80 year olds beating each other with sticks and handbags over a favourite seat (Monty Python meets Cinemania), not to forget the rather clumsy man who was looking for his wife (asking around in a very polite, hushed way “have you seen my wife?”) and then for his coat, the whole procedure twice during Notorious. The Cave of the Yellow Dog in my memory will always remain connected to the marriage problems of two 40-somethings even if I don’t remember what the movie itself was about. By the way, have you ever seen a bald headed man hitting himself over the head with his flat hand every time he accidentally snorted? To me it is Suspicion. You can see, the beautiful thing about paying full attention is that one is very receptive to whatever goes on around him. Moreover, only one single occurrence might trigger an acquired reflex. A learning success only dreamed of in most other situations.

A few weeks ago I had a glimpse of what Tex Avery’s Cat Who Hated People must have been going through: It wasn’t until a recent screening of Fritz Lang’s Fury – yes the one about vigilante justice – that I discovered a secret impulse to take the law into my own hands and strangle a senior citizen who had already made such a racket that a woman had left the auditorium in protest. He not only broke out in laughter every two minutes, he “unconsciously” fumbled with some plastic bag for almost a whole hour until he had to go to the bathroom and never returned. It was the first time I actually screamed at a complete stranger and my pulse was so fast I almost fainted. Needless to say, it took me some time to calm down and concentrate on the movie again. After all, this is about emotions. I'm sure the next time I see Spencer Tracy my pulse will be accelerating.

Don’t get me wrong, I love going to the movies for many reasons, a receptive audience is certainly one of them. There’s nothing like 400 people laughing at Little Miss Sunshine’s final reel or children screaming “NO!” when Snow White is about to eat the poisoned apple. It’s part of the experience and – like the “I have seen Hitchcock” whisper – it is an intended reaction.

And I don’t intend to let a few chatterboxes ruin that for me or anybody else. Come to think of it, it might actually be interesting to make a documentary about what goes on in the mind of someone who is talking during a movie. Or at least such a person would make a believable villain.