week 11 lecture: reading hitchcock’s north by north west and the birds
TRANSCRIPT
Week 11
Lecture: Reading Hitchcock’s North by North West and the Birds
Screening/Readings
Screening: North by Northwest (1959); and clips The Birds (1963)
Reading: Cohen; Volume 2 Part IV. The Black Sun 9. Upping the Ante: A Deauratic Cinema (pp 191- 196)
Recommended Readings
Recommended Readings: Sloan, J., Hitchcock: The Definitive Bibliography (pp. 295-300) and (pp 305- 311)Raymond Bellour "Symbolic Blockage" (on North by Northwest) (reader)Jameson, F "Spatial Systems in North by Northwest" (Reader)Assignment #3 Library research essay (due 30%) Take Home examination handout
1950’s
Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief , The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest.
Origins: Ernest Lehman
The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who purportedly wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock, Hitch (1978), suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer's block during the scripting of another movie project.
The title
The title, North by Northwest, is taken from a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Hitchcock interview with Peter Bogdanovich 1963). The play is also concerned with the difference between reality and appearance-- an old Platonic problem. “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly / I know a hawk from a handsaw.” (Hamlet Act II, Scene ii). Hamlet thus hints to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his friends, that his madness is only an act to protect himself while he gathers information on his father's murder.
N by NW ?
North by Northwest is a non-existent coordinate that “refers in part to the directionless, surrealistic search of the befuddled hero/common man around the country for a fictional character.”
Cast
Cary Grant... Roger O. Thornhill Eva Marie Saint... Eve Kendall James Mason... Phillip Vandamm Jessie Royce Landis .Clara Thornhill Leo G. Carroll..The Professor Josephine Hutchinson...Mrs. Townsend Philip Ober...Lester TownsendMartin Landau...Leonard Adam Williams
Cary Grant
Archibald Alec LeachBorn: January 18 1904 Bristol, England, UKDied: November 29, 1986 (aged 82), Davenport, Iowa United States. Years active:1932–1966Spouse(s):Virginia Cherrill (1934-1935);Barbara Hutton (1942-1945);Betsy Drake (1949-1962)Dyan Cannon (1965-1968); Barbara Harris (1981-1986)Partner(s)Maureen Donaldson (1973-1977. Children:Jennifer Grant (b. 1966)
Grant and Hitch
Cary Grant was a favorite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, notorious for disliking actors, who said that Grant was “the only actor I ever loved in my whole life” Nelson, Nancy, and Cary Grant. Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections In His Own Words and By Those Who Loved Him Best. Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike Press. 1992. p.325.
Eva Marie Saint
American. Born: Newark, New Jersey, 4 July 1924. Education: Attended Delmar High School, New Jersey; Bowling Green State University, Ohio, B.A. 1946; Actors Studio, New York. Family: Married the director Jeffrey Hayden, 1951, son: Darrell, daughter: Laurette.
Career:
Acted on radio in New York, including the serial One Man's Family, and later in TV version, 1950–52; 1953—role in the Broadway play The Trip to Bountiful; 1954—film debut in On the Waterfront; later worked on stage and television, sometimes directed by Hayden; 1986—in TV mini-series A Year in the Life; 1987–88—appeared in TV series Moonlighting; 1990—in TV mini-series Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair and People Like Us. Awards: Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, for On the Waterfront, 1954; Emmy Award, for People Like Us, 1990.
Cary Grant Films (Selected 1940-)
His Girl Friday (1940)
My Favorite Wife (1940)
The Howards of Virginia (1940)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Penny Serenade (1941)
Suspicion (1941)
The Talk of the Town (1942)
Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)
Cary Grant films cont.
Mr. Lucky (1943) Destination Tokyo (1943) Once Upon a Time (1944) Road to Victory (1944) (short subject) None But the Lonely Heart(1944) Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)Notorious (1946)North by Northwest (1959)
Eva Marie Saint Films
1954 On the Waterfront (Kazan) (as Edie Doyle)
1956 That Certain Feeling (Panama and Frank) (as Dunreath Henry)
1957 A Hatful of Rain (Zinnemann) (as Celia Pope);
Raintree Country (Dmytryk) (as Nell Gaither)
1959 North by Northwest (Hitchcock) (as Eve Kendall)
1960 Exodus (Preminger) (as Kitty Fremont)
1962 All Fall Down (Frankenheimer) (as Echo O'Brien1964
36 Hours (Seaton) (as Anna Hedler); A Carol for Another Christmas (Mankiewicz—for TV) (as Wave)
The Vandamm house
The set designers on North by Northwest were Robert Boyle, William A. Horning, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace, and Frank McKelvey. It has not been possible to sort out exactly which of these men was responsible for the house design, but whoever did it did his homework. The final design was of a hilltop house of limestone dressed and laid in the manner made famous by Wright, along with a concrete cantilever under the living room area.
Key Locations
1. The United Nations Building (New York City) (a hidden camera filmed the hero's entrance up the steps into the building, but the UN lobby was a recreation)
2. Grand Central Station (New York City)
3. Mount Rushmore (in South Dakota) (there are shots of the exterior of the park's monument, but the actors crawled next to a reproduction of the Presidential faces)
Set Pieces
Exciting set-pieces include Thornhill’s thrilling drunk driving scene, travelling seduction scenes with steamy double entendres during a cross-country train ride, the seven-minute bi-plane crop-duster attack scene near a Midwest cornfield, the art auction scene, and the dangling (hanging) finale at Mount Rushmore.
MacGuffin
The MacGuffin in this film (the device or plot element that catches the viewer's attention or drives the logic of the plot) is the secret information sought by the spies (contained in a figurine), and secondarily, the mistaken identity at the beginning of the film.
Themes
North by Northwest ,is considered to be a masterpiece for its themes of deception, mistaken identity, and moral relativism in the Cold War era.
The central theme is that of theater and play-acting, wherein everyone is playing a part, no one is who they seem, and identity is in flux. This is reflected by Thornhill's line: “The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead.”
Award Nominations
Academy Award nominations, but no Oscars. This film was nominated for three awards: Best Story and Screenplay (Ernest Lehman), Best Color Art Direction/Set Decoration, and Best Film Editing (George Tomasini). [Some believe that the film's premise was based on the famous 1956 international espionage case titled: "The Galindez Affair."] The film also included a superb score by Bernard Herrmann. However, there were no nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, or Best Score, to name only a few.
The Birds (1963)
The short story The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. The film's innovative special effects, soundtrack, and apocalyptic theme influenced later “revenge of nature” disaster and ecology films. Screenplay: Evan Hunter
Cast
Tippi Hedren… Melanie Daniels
Rod Taylor… Mitch Brenner
Jessica Tandy.. Lydia Mitch’s mother
Suzanne Pleshette…Annie Hayworth
Veronica CartwrightCharles McGrawEthel Griffies
Audio track
Instead of a typical film soundtrack, Hitchcock had Oskar Sala painstakingly create bird sounds on his trautonium, which were then scored to the movie by Bernard Herrmann. No natural bird sounds were used. There is a very high-pitched soundtrack of electronic noise through the film which subconsciously adds to the tension experienced by the viewer. Just prior to the attack on the school children, as they run from the historic school, they sing an unaccompanied song.
Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren
Bodega Bay
Origins
The Du Maurier story suggested a myriad of cinematic possibilities that stirred Hitchcock’s creative instincts. Financed by the success of his television show, and filmed with equipment borrowed from the Revue Studio, “The Birds” became Hitchcock’s first horror/fantasy film.
Locations
All of the inside scenes were recreated very specifically from the original buildings and shot within the studios. Only outside shots were filmed on location. Many of the aerial and far away shots were painted mattes amplifying the size of the town.
Week 11
Lecture: Phantasmatic themes in Hitchcock; the ‘undead.’Screening: The Trouble with Harry (1954)Reading Cohen, T. Volume 2 Part IV Hitchcock’s Light touch (pp 197-256)Recommended readings Sloan, J., Hitchcock: The Definitive Bibliography (pp 271-278)
Origins
Hitchcock paid $11,000 to acquire the rights to British author John Trevor Story’s novel The Trouble with Harry (1950), and in 1954 asked John Michael Hayes to produce the screenplay for this dark comedy that was released in 1955.
Parable
Hitchcock wanted to do this film“just for fun and relief from what he was doing regularly” Spoto called it “a filmed parable on the death and resurrection of Christ, presented ironically.” Hitchcock himself - always ironic - called it a “nice little pastorale.”
Harry Worp
The Captain thinks he has inadvertently shot Harry Worp; “Harmless potshot at a rabbit and I’m a murderer.”
ars longa, vita brevis.
Over the course of several hours from early morning to late evening the four characters bury Harry and then disinter him four times. On one level this film is about the abstractions we live in daily life, time and space, the question of being, and an example literally for Harry, of a Heideggerian ‘being for death.’ A core theme for Hitchcock in this film, as for Thomas de Quincey and Oscar Wilde, is the mutability of life and immutability of art - ars longa, vita brevis.
Phantasmatic/Thanatophilia
Sigmund Freud; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Death Drive / Thanatos versus Eros.
Giorgio Agamben Phantasm phantasmatic
Derrida: Spectres/ Ghosting.
Allegory
The film narrative is an allegory about the value of art, life and death, or more specifically a dialogue between the art in death and the death in art (the images of Harry are foreshortened like Andrea Mantegna’s painting Dead Christ (c. 1480), and in one scene we view his feet sticking out of the bath, a Hitchcock detail joke which is a reference to Death of Marat (1793) another famous painting from the historical canon, by the French painter J-L David.
Two Deaths
Slavoj iek’s Lacanian inspired analysis of this film argues that there are two deaths, the real and the symbolic: Harry’s death - the death of the father - is “a blot” isolated as an understatement but also a settling of accounts.
Amenable object
Ken Mogg suggested that the bodyof Harry functions as a type ofWinnicottian ‘amenable object’which has no intrinsic value otherthan providing an opportunity toexperience and learn from one’sexperiences, somewhat akin to theMacGuffin itself which function inHitchcock films as symbolicdrivers of narrative
Oscar Wilde again
Oscar Wilde. “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless”