Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

Past a certain point, when they started location shooting (late '40s?), I don't think everyone continued to use them. I'm glad there aren't any in, say, On the Waterfront. I just think they look bad, regardless of the director. I don't think they look less bad because it's Hitchcock, and I don't think they look less bad because it's Joyce Carol Oates doing the complaining.

Next thing please let her tell us how much she hates the glass shots in Black Narcissus.

Hadn't seen the previous post when I mentioned On the Waterfront...I don't remember any, maybe there is one or two. Substitute Sweet Smell of Success if you want.

Her Twitter account is a pretty amazing feat of anti-marketing; I know she's written like 400 books, but I don't know anybody who's read any of them, and nothing she says makes me want to crack one myself.

the answer to the thread is obviously dud along with kubrick and all the other great men of cinema whose abuse of women is glorified by film nerds. i'm sure the films are great in some sense, i'm also told birth of a nation and triumph of the will are great films

That's an excellent comparison--fantastic.

xxxpost I don't think matte shots look bad enough to give a shit about, no matter who used 'em when. Who cares about policing the background, esp. when you got Kelly & Grant up front?

Martin Skidmore was a huge fan of hers and the few things I read were good but yeah, she is what the Germans call a "Vielschreiber," in her case "Vielschreiberin."
(xp to up)

If only Euler were still around to duke it out with left.

I'm really caught in the middle here. I'm supposed to love the matte shots in Hitchcock because anything Joyce Carol Oates tweets should be discounted, but at the same time I'm supposed to consider Hitchcock worthless because he abused (literally or symbolically, I'm not sure) women. Very, very confusing.

xxxxp Moot, because Kubrick and Hitchcock films are good in ways the tours de force/tech coups Birth and Triumph aren't. Kazan films also in the former group.

Ignore all that if you can, just like Hitch himself ignored the factcheckers, the bean counters, the trainspotting continuity crew or whatever he called them, can't recall.
(xp)

Just kidding, not confused at all: love Rear Window, hate those matte shots.

No doubt JCO has a particular bone to pick with Hitchcock since she is an aficionado as well as a writer of crime fiction and knows How It Should Be Done, preferring local color and gritty detail to stars dangling in front of monuments in rear projection shots.

you've all already piled on so i'll just sit and wait for eyeballs to unroll

Hitchcock's process shots are exemplary and deliberate ffs

the factcheckers, the bean counters, the trainspotting continuity crew or whatever he called them, can't recall.

xp yeah no prob, overall results usually good at v. least.

looking forward to Joyce noticing all those Italian movies were dubbed next

I don't doubt that they're deliberate--things that make me wince in some of Tarantino's later films were deliberate too--but you'll have to explain to me what's exemplary about them. They make me notice the artificiality of something he's trying to draw me into (and usually succeeding in doing so).

i dislike JCO and love hitchcock but will admit that i have always enjoyed clowning on the terrible process shots in his films, both of which he lazily relied on for years after they were no longer standard or necessary and which often looked conspicuously bad even by the standards of the time imho. i have never been swayed by arguments that he did it on purpose as some brechtian distancing technique or comment on the artificiality of cinema or w/e. i believe that he didnt waste a lot of effort on it because it looked "good enough" and, as others have said, who gives a fuck? which is correct, you shouldnt give a fuck. but thats not to say that, especially by the time you get to shit like topaz, family plot, torn curtain et al, there are not some true howlers on display

"both of which"

NV otm obv

Two of us have made an effort to explain why we don't like them; maybe somebody who thinks their exemplariness is obvious could explain why that's so.

Who cares about policing the background, esp. when you got Kelly & Grant up front?

I don't agree with that, but it's at least an explanation that makes sense to me.

The artifice of old movies is really fun for me, anything from those types of backgrounds to beautiful matte landscapes and clearly what are indoor sets of outdoor scenes (such as the late-film forest meeting between Cary grant and Eva Marie Saint in NBNW or a couple scenes from The Searchers which stand out to me.)

Hitchcock being so excellent w/plot and thriller psychology and casting would I think make a lot of that irrelevant even if I was skeptical of their charms.

Hitchcock wasn't a realist film-maker.

if you don't buy the argument that Hitchcock constantly foregrounds the cinematicness (artificiality? well yes sure but that's a whole chain of arguments in itself) then that's fair enough, you don't find it appealing. but since almost every film he made is centred upon cinematic effect - the 10 minute takes, the disorienting camera angles, the different uses of montage and editing - i don't think there's much of a case to say that the process shots aren't intentionally visible or that he didn't care about how they looked. i think there's numerous examples of him saying precisely that he wanted to draw an audience in or emotionally manipulate them through the use of movie grammar. it's the opposite of suspension of disbelief

As one tweet response put it, Hitchcock thought of his movies as cake. Artificiality is part of that recipe

One Taschen-style book I actually would pay big bucks for would be a coffeetable art book of golden age Hollywood matte paintings

xp and to follow the cake metaphor thru when people are impressed by those crazy cake sculptures that are meant to look like not cake they're not going to complain about the ways in which a cake doesn't exactly duplicate whatever it is it's representing

Something like this?

https://a.co/d/0KA46LA

C'est ne pas un gâteau

Fair enough. I find those shots distancing in a way that can undermine the carefully calibrated engine of the story, but--depending upon which film it is--there's usually enough (and sometimes more than enough) to compensate.

I like the forest in NbN too because of it's dreamlike quality. I don't get the same feeling from two people in a car.

it's the opposite of suspension of disbelief

100% this ... it's the "seduction of disbelief"

Evidently it doesn't work on all of us.

Sure, I wouldn't argue with questions of personal taste

Ok lol I would but that isn't my point

You could make an argument that in NxNW for example, in the scene with drunkened Cary Grant careening downhill in the car, the bathetic effect of the process shot is tied in to Thornhill's status as a comedy playboy at that point - when he tells the story back to the police it sounds like a drunk fantasy and we've just watched it play out in much that way. But then I'd be trying to make a case for a kind of metarealism that I'm not interested in making, really

whoa thanks omar, that looks great!

the process shots work against the seduction of disbelief - in all those examples of foregrounded technique, the point was that the manipulation worked and was motivated by its effectiveness on the audience. he wasnt saying "make this angle real disorienting to kick the audience out of the movie and remind them this is all fake," quite the opposite. the weak process shots are the opposite of that kind of seduction, they actively work to undermine it in a way that i cant accept Hitchcock would have deliberately sought. i just refuse to believe that he ever looked at a completed process shot and said "take another run that and make it look worse and more wobbly, because i hate reality and love the artificiality of cinema." he obv just didnt like to waste a lot of time building sets and wrangling extras, its not rocket science.

He was using them in films where he had budget and time to do what he liked. Cropduster scene for example

well exactly - he had the luxury to avoid dealing with directorial chores he dgaf about. him having the time & money to do them and wanting to do them are two different things.

like you said no accounting for taste, but idk its just never been hard for me to believe that he treated them like an afterthought because he didnt think they mattered much. because they dont, the movies are great!

I'd extend his who-gives-a-fuck attitude (to things he didn't consider important; obviously he was meticulous to the nth degree about things he did) to some of the minor parts in his movies, but I should have some specific examples on hand, and I don't.

I'm a fan too. I don't think you have to like every last thing about a filmmaker to like lots of other things.

Yes, some of the supporting performances in his films distract with what is obviously a lack of direction.

Hitchcock being so excellent w/plot and thriller psychology and casting would I think make a lot of that irrelevant even if I was skeptical of their charms.

― omar little, Thursday, January 5, 2023 5:26 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hitchcock wasn't a realist film-maker.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Thursday, January 5, 2023 5:27 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Drinks for both of you.

Does anyone defending these shots give younger viewers a pass for finding them hard to accept (as I imagine they might)?

Hitchcock wasn't a realist film-maker.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length

That's fine, but as Cary Grant runs from the plane in NbN, are we supposed to think "Ah, it's just a movie--he'll be fine." I'm pretty sure Hitchcock wants us to feel like he's in mortal danger, to be 100% caught up in the moment. And he didn't use any fake-looking shots there, if I'm remembering correctly.

This is a fun little essay

https://reverseshot.org/features/640/north-by-northwest

Think we should now discount all of Hitchcock's earlier black and white films - so unrealistic as we don't see things in black and white, we see in colour FFS

fwiw when she was younger my older daughter really enjoyed the Hitchcock movies we watched. and that's not true for most movies starring, in her words, "old white men who all look alike." she still speaks fondly of her favorites.