On the origins of a Hitchcockian dictum

In my last entry I discussed Xavier Dolan's 2013 thriller Tom at the Farm. I tried to show how, in my opinion, the director's failed attempts at building suspense largely depended on bad staging and ineffective camera placement. In fact, despite many reviews having described Dolan's work as "Hitchcockian", the term seemed to me totally out of place in that case.

Killing the suspense: Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm (2013)

Recovering from what for me was easily the worst cinematic experience of the year and in the impossibility of rewinding the whole thing in my head, I decided that I had to make something good out of it by at least trying to understand why it had been so frustrating. Was it Xavier Dolan's omnipresent, falsely angelic face? Or maybe the exploitation of the theme of homosexuality to seek the viewer's complicity? No. Apparently, it had something to do with camera placement.

The missing picture

Film theorist David Bordwell yesterday posted an article on his blog about movies referencing other movies, and how allusionism is not a prerogative of contemporary cinema. He discusses the allusions present in a scene of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, where many movie posters dating to 1912 can be seen in the background of a lengthy tracking shot. He concludes the article with some guesses about a poster he wasn't able to identify (the photo below is taken from his website). I confess that I haven't been able to think about anything else for a few hours.

Let's try to give a small contribution to the investigation. As Bordwell observes, the first letters of the title seem to form the word "Car", while the spot on the left could likely be a determinate article. However, there seems to exist no movie of the epoch titled "The Car...". The first option occurring to me is "The Conductor", which seems confirmed by the fact that the man in the foreground apparently wears the uniform of a train conductor. Does he expect the native guy below to pay the fine? However, the only movie title I found which seems consistent with this hypothesis is Conductor 786 (1912), but the plot apparently doesn't fit with the poster. Another possibility, but maybe it's my Italian background speaking, is "The Carabiniere" or "The Carbineer", which again would explain the uniform. There does exist a 1913 Italian film titled Il Carabiniere, but it doesn't feature American Indians, as one would expect.

And what if the first letter was a capital "H" instead? The search goes on...

Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier, 2013)

In a recent article film critic Matt Zoller Seitz advises wannabe film critics, among other things, to study history and psychology. I was reminded of his advice while watching Nymphomaniac, and especially I was wondering in which way psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, has influenced filmmaking and film criticism. Indeed, a lot of movies these days seem to have been bathed in psychoanalysis − Spider, The Machinist and Black Swan are just the first examples coming to my mind. That's something even a layman on the subject like me can easily recognize, since, as anthropologist Henrietta L. Moore points out in her book A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender,

"Psychoanalysis has entered popular culture [...]. Not very much may be known about psychoanalytic theory, but a whole series of popular experiences − like motivation in crime novels and television dramas − has been profoundly influenced by theories of causation and personality development based on a version of psychoanalytic thought."

The topic deserves greater attention than my limited knowledge allows. Indeed, the book Psychoanalysis and Cinema by film theorist Christian Metz seems to be an essential reference point. I will concentrate just on these two aspects: How much the common practice among certain filmmakers of venturing into Freudian territory has contributed to flatten out film characters and plots, and to what extent Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac can be considered a critical response to this approach?

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Spike Jonze's Her will be probably be remembered as the most old-fashioned futuristic movie ever made. Set in in an unspecified future where checkered shirts and high-waisted pants seem to be the latest fad, it follows a lonely ghostwriter as he embarks on a love affair with the female-voiced, ever-evolving operating system of his personal computer.

35 Shots Of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

A strange thing happened to me after watching Claire Denis' 35 Shots Of Rum. Once the film was over, I thought I would forget both the story and its characters very quickly, because it seemed to me that nothing remarkable had happened during its 100 minutes running time. Only after a few days I realized how much the film had settled in my mind, despite (or maybe I should say precisely because of) its unremarkability. 

The Minister (Pierre Schoeller, 2011)

In the same way that Krzysztof Zanussi's 2005 Persona Non Grata offered us a cross section of the intrigues taking place in a Polish Embassy, Pierre Schoeller's The Minister has undoubtedly the merit of introducing us into a world we know only superficially, and generally never get in contact with. Most of its appeal indeed comes from the great care it devotes to illustrate the mechanisms of power unraveling inside the departments of a French Ministry.

Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

"The heavens are what split first", wrote Christa Wolf in her 1963 novel Divided Heaven in the aftermath of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Even if a quarter of a century has passed since the heavens reconciled (the Wall fell in 1989) apparently that chapter in German history still proves an inexhaustible source of inspiration for contemporary German cinema, see for example Sonnenallee (1999), Goodbye Lenin (2003) and the Academy Award winner The Lives Of The Others (2006). But when is the former East Germany backdrop motivated by the urgence of filmmakers to grapple with a recent past that still hurts, and when is it more an exploitative choice, of the sort made by Liliana Cavani with The Night Porter?

La Moustache (Emmanuel Carrère, 2005)

Don't be fooled by the apparently innocuous title. Written and directed by first and foremost writer Emmanuel Carrère and based on his own novel, La Moustache is a powerful, unsettling film that will make you feel uneasy long after the end credits have rolled.

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

Continuing on a path begun with 1998's The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt tells the story of a man falsely accused of child sexual abuse who is ostracized by the small Danish town he lives in. If that previous feature centered on a harsh truth that everyone seemed unwilling to accept, here the situation is reversed, the plot revolving around a blatant falsehood that everyone for some reason is willing to swallow.