Hitchcock/Truffaut

Kent Jones' Hitchcock/Truffaut, currently playing at Film Forum, is a rare bird, a film based upon an iconic book which memorialized the extensive conversation between two great filmmakers. Truffaut had only made three films when he sought out Hitchcock in l962. Visiting Hitchcock for the young filmmaker championing the Nouvelle Vague and the auteur theory of cinema was like a pilgrim traveling to mecca. As such the film has a degree of separation from the films since it relates to them by way of the written word. Along the way David Fincher, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson make cameo appearances to discuss both book and film. But the real star of the show is Martin Scorsese and the subject that takes up most of the celluloid are arguably Hitchcock’s two greatest masterpieces Psycho (1960) and Vertigo (1958). Scorsese is particularly brilliant describing Psycho and the placement of the steering wheel within the frame of the shot in which Janet Leigh is driving to her doom. Interestingly Truffaut and Hitchcock had one childhood trauma in commo; they were both imprisoned as children by their fathers. In Truffaut’s case the incarceration would become part of the plot of his autobiographical first film, The 400 Blows (1959). But what the two more profoundly shared was a love of cinematic form that was comparable to how the abstract expressionists felt about paint. They were formalists in this sense. Talking about Psycho, Hitchcock says at one point “There wasn’t a message…it was pure film” and he talked proudly about the idea of producing “mass emotion,” through the use of famous techniques like the montage between the shower head. Janet Leigh’s naked body and the bathtub drain in the film’s famous bathroom scene. What is astonishing is that even when you know what happens in both Psycho and Vertigo, the revisiting of the great moments of these two movies still manages to send chills down the spine. The feeling is somewhat similar to the hearing the canons going off in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. They never cease to surprise, regardless of the fact that you know what's coming. Psycho, Vertigo, Spellbound (1945)--don't the titles sound like they could be drawn from the pages of the DSM-5?

Tiinnitus and Tintinnabulation

Acquired by Henry Walters, 1922

Tinnitus is a ringing in the ear and when it’s chronic, it can be quite annoying, particularly when it seems like it’s never going to stop. Tintinnabulation also refers to a sound but in this case it’s the ringing of bells. Both words derive from the Latin tinnire, to ring. The ringing of bells is a little like perpetual motion. Though it comes and it goes, usually ending with a Doppler like effect as the last swinging barely strikes a chord, it conveys a wave like feeling, that church goers associate with the sound of eternity. Ringing in the ears or tinnitus, on the other hand, when it’s not a source of torment, is a little like the sound of the sea that you hear when you put a shell to your ears. The sound is not that of waves crashing, but simply of the general subterranean firmament that's a counterpart to the vastness and power exerted by celestial bodies. You've heard of solar flares and sun storms. In the movie The Conversation the saxophonist and private eye Gene Hackman turns up the volume to overhear criminals converse. Imagine turning down the volume on this enormous and ongoing roar of power to the point where it was digestible to the human ear and you’d probably get something that sounds a little bit like the inside of a shell. "Ring My Bell" was a disco era song sung by Anita Ward and the bell rings when a round of boxing is to begin. But while the subject is love or fisticuffs, it doesn’t convey the majesty of either the world in a shell or of the ringing of church bells that you hear on a Sunday morning on the Janiculum, one of the hills overlooking Rome. Here is a line from Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, “The bells of hell go ting-a-ling for you but not for me... Oh! death where is they sting-a-ling. Oh! grave thy victory.”And then there’s of course “Ding dong the witch is dead" from The Wizard of Oz. And don’t forget that bell tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The Attack

One of the most interesting things about Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack is the retrospection. The film is based on a novel by Yasmina Khadra and the many of the flashbacks are more novelistic than cinematic. They're not merely visuals amplifying a story, but independent vignettes, part and parcel of the back and forth between appearance and reality that constitutes the theme. Nothing is what it appears to be in the film which deals with a Palestinian born Israeli doctor (Ali Suliman) who discovers that his wife is a terrorist. Throughout the first part of the movie Amin, the doctor, is slowly and painfully disabused of his preconceptions about Siham (Reymond Amsalem), his beautiful wife. These early scenes, which are suspenseful could be compared to Vertigo in which Scottie (James Stewart) seeks to find an apparition, a woman who it turns out never existed. Then just as the protagonist and by proxy the viewer are ready to accept one truth, another asserts itself. Siham is, despite everything she has done to herself and others, what she always was, a devoted and loving wife. Does the film owe its provenance to Hitchcock or to filmmakers like Pontecorvo who used a cinema verite style to convey a political message? In the case of The Attack, the esthetic and the political aren’t mutually exclusive. The Attack uses the unraveling of the suspense genre in the service of its message—which is one of moral ambiguity. There's no right or wrong. Both Amin and Siham are deluded into thinking that political reality does or does not define them. Their tragedy—and it’s something they both learn too late to do anything about—is that the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined.

The Skin I Live In

The notion of the mad doctor or scientist, who kidnaps and imprisons subjects for his experiments, is a staple of horror films. It is a also unfortunately a recurrent staple of reality, where newspaper headlines routinely report cases of imprisonment. In one an Austrian psychopath, Josef Fritzl, actually fathered children with the imprisoned daughter he’d incested. If nothing else Pedro Almodovar ‘s The Skin I Live In exemplifies the director’s obsession with plot. Horror film plots, romantic plots crimes of passion are all gris for this plotmeister.  He is the most plotty of modernists. No Bergman or especially Antonioni film was ever so heavy on plots as Almodovar's are and The Skin I live In takes the cake. The enormous reticulations of the plot in question lead to the simple conclusion that however much we change the surface, the inside of the human being is stubbornly unmalleable . The skin we live in is still an intransigent ego, no matter how much it’s tattooed or it the case of  the term the film coins, transgenesized. It’s an anti-Pygmalion if you like or another version of Vertigo in which the protagonist falls in love with someone who doesn’t exist. What’s really interesting is the brute grief that lies at the heart of all the desire to remake and reshape reality--another curiously simple, but essential element that is like the sun around which the other planets of the complex story turn. Louise Bourgeois makes a cameo appearance in the form of a book of her work. Bourgeois’ sculptures are psychohistories and testaments to trauma. The appearance of the Bourgeois book also makes a cool art critical point in comparing plastic surgery with her preoccupations. Robert Ledgard (Antonion Banderas) the villainous plastic surgeon who drives the action has lost his wife (a burn victim who jumped out of the window on seeing her reflection) and a daughter (who has never recovered from the trauma of seeing her human cinder of a mother fall to the ground). There is yet another level of the movie having to do with other mothers, the mother of the plastic surgeon  and the mother of the kidnapped victim, a young man who undergoes a vaginoplasty. To return back to Vertigo, the movie is vertiginous, highly flawed and much more powerful than some critics are crediting.