Difficult work in a popular medium: Godard on ‘Hitchcock's method’

Abstract

Difficult work in a popular medium:Godard on 'Hitchcock' s method'In the next-to-last episode of his video series Histoire(s) du cine ´ma (1988-98), Godard recombines familiar images from Hitchcock's films in a demonstration of what he calls 'Hitchcock's method', an all-powerful form of montage.In titles and voiceover, Godard makes several grand assertions: that Hitchcock is the 'greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century'; that he is the only director, apart from Dreyer, to 'film a miracle'; that he is the only 'poe `te maudit' to achieve major commercial success; and that during his Hollywood prime he 'took control of the universe' and 'succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon had all failed'.We hear and read these claims while Godard manoeuvres between Hitchcock's images, each clip separated from the next by a black screen.Speaking in a low, gruff voice, Godard contends that 'we' don't remember the plots of Hitchcock's films: why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of a cliff, why Joel McCrea goes to Holland, why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel.Instead, 'we' recall a handbag, a bus in the desert, a glass of milk, the sails of a windmill, a hairbrush, a row of bottles, a pair of spectacles, a sheet of music, a bunch of keys.Godard lists these things in a different order than he shows them, but his videographic montage works to suggest that the power of 'Hitchcock's method' lies in its intense orchestration of details.The basic thrust of the segment seems to be a salute to Hitchcock's fascinating command of objects through film form -simple, quotidian objects that float free from their narratives and linger in collective memory.Godard's itemising voiceover indicates as much, and so far this has indeed been a common reading of the segment by critics.Laura Mulvey, in her book Death 24x a Second, refers to Godard's 'fetishization of Hitchcock's things''' and points out that Dominique Paı ¨ni's 2001 museum exhibition Hitchcock et l'art, which displayed several of the same physical objects on red velvet pillows, carefully lit and encased in glass, took Godard's exercise in Histoire(s) 'to its logical conclusion'. 1 But this view, however encouraged by Godard's own statements, gives us a limited sense of what's going on in this complex sequence.It's important to observe that we are not dealing with a highlight reel of 'object images' that illustrate the voiceover.Take, for instance, the Pommard bottle in Notorious (1946): when it appears in Histoire(s), first it totters forward on the shelf at a gradual, uneven pace that suddenly accelerates; then it falls, according to Hitchcock's original speed, past Cary Grant shown in close-up as he inspects the other bottles; then, in slow motion again, the bottle shatters on the floor and its granular content spills out; then, with the speed still slowed, we see a low-angle shot of Ingrid Bergman responding.What we're given is an event in four parts.Hitchcock's original de ´coupage is left intact, but the rhythm is adjusted so as to stress not just the bottle but the ensemble of shot-units that renders it acutely memorable.If the black screens have the effect of isolating each fragment, they also open up new connective streams.To stay with the same example, the shots of the shattering wine bottle sustain a motif of objects dropping to the feet of a performer: the eyeglasses of the strangled wife in Strangers on a Train (1951), the key nudged into a floor vent with the toe of a high-heeled shoe in Marnie (1964), the key dropped and kicked under a table in Notorious after one hand transfers it to the other with the dexterity of a pickpocket.The bottle also initiates a textural association across three scattered fragments: the substance spreading at Devlin's feet finds an echo in the black dye rinsing from Marnie's hair in the sink, then another in the blood collecting at Marion Crane's feet in the shower, all three shots slowed and given a slight turbulence with video stop-starts.As the segment unfolds, we see that 'Hitchcock's method' has to do with the recombination of images according to formal resonances -repetitions, contrasts -across separate films.And we see that this method depends on performance gestures as much as it does objects.Godard makes this evident when, in three consecutive fragments, he links the slashing movements of Rose Balestrero from The Wrong Man (1956) frantically raising her hairbrush into the air, the wiper blades on Marion's windshield, and the downward stabs of 'Mrs Bates' through the shower mist.As Marion, defenceless, tries to avoid the attack, Godard repeats the title of the episode in voiceover, 'Control of the universe . ..'The more closely we examine this segment in Histoire(s), the more difficult it becomes to reconcile what Godard is doing with what he is saying.Questions stack up without easy resolutions.How did Hitchcock achieve this degree of control?What, for Godard, constitutes a miracle, and when did Hitchcock film one?Just who are the 'we' mentioned in Godard's voiceover?Is this 'method' even Hitchcock's in the first place?Godard, after all, seems to claim it as his own: rhythmically altering the speed of motion, tinkering with the colour 64

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.