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.

Inbetween XIII

Thanks for the comments on my last post. I'm glad no one seems to be disappointed with it. I'm currently working on a few posts about Clint Eastwood's directing style. In the mean time, let's have a look at Wes Anderson's love for animation, Michael Powell's love for colorful art direction and my first attempts with digital clean-up.

Imaginary Children's Books

As an addendum to my comments on Moonrise Kingdom I'd like to direct your attention to the animated imaginary children's books short that was created as a sort of tie-in for the wider release of Moonrise Kingdom (thus, it contains no spoilers).

Anderson commissioned six artists to create the books’ evocative jacket covers, but initially the director wanted to take the artistry even further. “At one point in the process, when she’s reading these passages from these books, I’d thought about going into animation,” he says.

Anyone who’s seen the film knows Anderson ultimately chose to simply hold on the faces of his cast as they listen to Suzy read, but with his experience making the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox still fresh in his mind, Anderson never quite let go of the idea.

So in April, the idiosyncratic filmmaker decided to animate all six books anyway, as a supplementary treat to the film itself. “I wrote passages for the other books that didn’t have any text [read aloud in the film], and we animated that too,” he says. “So we now have this piece where our narrator, Bob Balaban’s character, takes us through these little sections of each of these books.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Maybe this has gone below the radar or the animation community is already tired of this kind of movie byproduct, but since I haven't read about it on either Cartoon Brew, Drawn, On Animation or Michael Sporn's Splog, here is the Link to the exclusive Entertainment Weekly article with the embedded video.

Horror in Eastmancolor

And now for something that couldn't be more different in content but is the work of a director equally interested in color and camera angles.

While researching horror films made around 1960 for a lecture on Psycho I revisited Michael Powell's brilliant but ultimately career destroying Peeping Tom. The use of colored light (especially red) in this film would certainly make for an interesting subject.

What caught my eye, however, was a painting that mirrored the set design of the room it was hanging in. It is visible in at least three shots and stays in the frame even during camera moves.

(it's all a little dark and murky... click on it to see larger)

On an abstract level the red bars on the painting frame the white space similarly to the red curtains around the windows. All the colors are meticulously matched (just look at the orange cushion underneath the painting).

Whenever the female protagonist Helen is seen in front of the window, even the composition (blue object in the middle) is mirrored. Helen's red hair, by the way, is another leitmotif in this horror film that can't deny its director's heritage (just think "The Red Shoes").

Digital Clean-Up Test
Preferring to work on paper whenever possible I have finally given in to the temptations of a Wacom Cintiq. My first successful clean-up test in Photoshop shows a rather silly troll I did for a friend's summer camp media team.

Colorful Live-Action Expressions?

Thanks to Cartoon Brew’s recent plug there is still some traffic on my blog, even though I haven’t even been able to keep up posting once a month recently. I’m not running out of topics, however.
While this will always be first and foremost an animation blog, I might post more analyses of live-action films in the future, simply because I find more substantial inspiration in live-action films these days and because analyzing live-action films happens to be part of my current work.

This, of course, by no means implies that I have lost interest in animation. In fact, I’m still looking forward to having the time to analyze the color work in one of the Mary Blair features (Cinderella, Alice or Peter Pan) or write about current animated films I’ve been enjoying.

But as an animator and film scholar, I learn many a thing by digging deeper into storytelling decisions and devices by live-action directors with unique stylistic visions*. And I truly believe that our animation should be inspired by what we find in other media or art forms, be it live-action or painting or most of all our personal lives.

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a companion blog primarily on live-action films – but obviously this would mean that I’d have to divide my time between two blogs which doesn’t seem to be very reasonable.

To cut a long story short: I hope you keep reading my posts even though articles exclusively concerned with animation may be interspersed more sparsely. As always, I'm interested in your thoughts about this decision. So if you feel like leaving a comment, I'll be happy to read it!

*After seeing Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom a few days ago, I’ve been struck by how the director even seemed to be able to translate the perfected mechanics of the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox into a live-action film. Whatever I have written on the style of Mr. Fox is still valid for Moonrise Kingdom. 

Upon first viewing, Moonrise Kingdom might be the quintessential Anderson movie - as self-contained and auto-referential as can be. Whoever succeeds in mixing Hank Williams and Benjamin Britten must be a genius (Randall Poster and Alexandre Desplat have outdone themselves once again). And yes, Tilda Swinton would make a wonderful live-action Maleficent.

Jan Vermeer and the Deep Blue Sea

If you have the opportunity to see Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea on a big screen, go for it! It might not be around too long, even though it only opened in the US about two weeks ago. This 2011 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play is clearly among my favorite films of the last few months and one of the most beautiful love letters to the power of cinematic storytelling. Cutting almost half of Rattigan’s dialogue and replacing it by musically structured flashbacks, Davies took me on an emotional ride through postwar London that couldn’t be more different from standard British period pictures.

I could go on and on about this film and Terence Davies’ highly personal style. But since I have very little time to blog these days let me just throw a glance at a visual detail.

In an elaborate Notebook interview by Michael Guillen Davies talks extensively about the way he re-created the drab but warm England of his childhood and specifically mentions the lighting:

We talked about the textures. I told them, "I want lots of pools of light and relative darkness."  Because that's what it was like. If you were lucky, you had electricity downstairs.  Upstairs there was no electricity at all. You took up candles or just moved in the dark; but, there were pools of light.  Sometimes just light from a fire, which I've always loved

At least since The House of Mirth (2000) Davies has been obsessed with Dutch painter Jan Vermeer who also reportedly worked very slowly and only produced a relatively small amount of works almost all of which depicted interior scenes of middle class women. Davies’ love for Vermeer even shows in his autobiographical working class features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), mainly in their use of chiaroscuro indoor cinematography.

Simon Russell Beale in chiaroscuro lighting (production still from The Deep Blue Sea)

The press release for The Deep Blue Sea contains the following paragraphs:

But despite the drab surroundings of much of the story, Davies was keen to infuse the film with a rich visual texture. Cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister created a look of which brought pools of light and textured shadow into the film.
“I’m obsessed with Vermeer,” says Davies. “I love the glow you achieve when you switch on a red light in a drab room - you get a wonderful glow.”

Since I’m not able to take any screenshots yet, one of the production stills (not completely replicating the film’s particular style but coming fairly close) will have to do for the comparison.

I didn’t have to look very far to find Vermeer paintings that reflected Davies’ use of light and color in this film.

Woman holding a balance (1664, Jan Vermeer) - Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) in The Deep Blue Sea

Windows have always been important in his films and The Deep Blue Sea is no exception. In both pictures the main source of light on the woman is daylight coming through a window. Warm artificial light is relatively low in comparison and closer to candle light than to modern lightbulbs.

Hester in the dreamy haze of memories (in what seems to be an actual frame enlargement).

Soft focus, grainy film stock and a veil of cigarette smoke create a look that comes even closer to 17th century painting techniques than the production stills can recreate.

In the original play, Hester tries to make a living by selling self-made paintings (to her ex-husband of all people). Terence Davies completely omits this aspect in favour of a new scene that takes place in an art museum where the differences in taste and worldviews of Hester and her young lover Freddie come to light. It's no coincidence that Davies also leaves the pictures they are looking at to our imagination.

Swiss Animation Revisited

There aren’t too many books about Swiss animation. So whenever someone takes on the task of writing and publishing one, it is worth a look simply for being a rarity. Christian Gasser’s new book “animation.ch” (in German and English side by side) however goes far beyond that. Gasser attempts nothing less than an appraisal of Swiss animation of the last 20 years, a period that hasn’t been covered in any book so far. His account is not without drawbacks, but overall it’s worth reading and offers a lot of color stills.

Although most mainstream audiences still don’t really notice Swiss animated films, Christian Gasser is rightly pointing out that Swiss animation “is currently in one of its most productive, ambitious and successful historical periods. Never before have so many films been made and never before have these films enjoyed such international success.” 

The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has been one of the key factors in this development and the initiator of Gassers extensive baseline study. Since the Lucerne University decidedly educates authors and directors “who are able to develop and design their own characters” and not classically trained animators, the book focuses mainly on three active generations of film makers. Some of the interviews are compressed into short portraits, some are printed in full length and framed by three insightful essays.

Among the usual suspects such as Georges Schwizgebel and Ted Sieger a maverick like Yves Netzhammer pops up. His reflections about subjective perception and political art turn out to be the most interesting pages. Netzhammer examines his own work (which mostly consists of art installations) in a broader context than most other interviewees.

Circuit Marine (2003) by Isabelle Favez

“animation.ch” doubtlessly portrays a many-voiced and vital Swiss animation scene, mentions diverging production models and current debates. However, its concept does not seem to include any critical classification and emphasis (apart from selecting 20 film makers as representatives of the scene). Occasionally one gets the impression that creator driven short films are automatically of high quality and that festival prizes are the benchmark.

Since the reader is required to relate the interviews to one another all by himself, deeper insight is only accessible to those who read the whole book. When Ted Sieger – one of the Lucerne school’s self-taught professors – wonders whether his potential would be detected within the current animation schooling, an indirect answer is found in an essay by the director of studies: he mentions a student who didn’t turn in any drawings when applying but was accepted on the basis of his abilities to entertain and his convincingly demonstrated passion for all things animation. He has turned out to be one of the more successful short film makers.

Laterarius (2010) by Marina Rosset

It would have been interesting to have an external view on what formal and narrative characteristics were developed by the Lucerne University and how the bulk of student films among the total Swiss output affects the choice and depth of subjects.

Although short film making is still an unprofitable business around here, some at-a-glance portraits of graduates and autodidacts who cut their own path off the beaten track of doing their own short films raise hopes of being able to make a living in the animation field. Christian Gasser’s final essay on applied animation also fathoms where these paths could lead to eventually.

Even if “animation.ch” tends to bow to the portrayed film makers a little too low, this fluidly written tome is an important addition to the slim Swiss film history output and can be ordered here or here on Amazon.

ASIFA Switzerland can be found here.