There’s No “I” in Auteur Theory
Notes on the metaphysics of an evolving cinema.
Alfred Hitchcock in 1939 with some of his chief collaborators: (left) Joan Harrison, (right) young Patricia Hitchcock, Alma Hitchcock and their terriers. (Bettmann Archive.)
“[Hitchcock] is, perhaps, at the juncture of the two cinemas, the classical that he perfects and the modern that he prepares.”
—Gilles Deleuze [1]
“I will not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it; God and humanity made it; and it made me.”
—G. K. Chesterton [2]
“Storytelling is an emergency. Changing the narrative is an emergency.”
—Sophie Strand [3]
Part 1: Poe’s pendulum, meet Occam’s razor.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK DIDN'T EXACTLY GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT. Fizzing with ideas to the end, he battled his body, his habits and his demons to bring one more vision to the screen. Pursuing Pure Cinema as a Platonic ideal—as a Holy Grail—he demanded ever-potent and varied expressions from the moving image. Generously, in interview after interview, he showed us how he did it. At other times, he pointed the way to possibilities that he never realized in his own work. Consequently, Hitchcock’s stature as the Master of Cinema increases with each passing year.
It’s a complicated relationship. For some, he’s the chief exemplar of French critics’ auteur theory, which proposes that the director is the sole author of a film. For others, he’s a cautionary tale—yet another brilliant-yet-powerful white male who took undue credit for other people’s work. Eventually, even the auteurist François Truffaut acknowledged that the Hitchcock Touch had two pairs of hands: those of the director and those of his wife and chief collaborator Alma Reville. Recently, biographer Christina Lane added a third pair to that séance: writer-producer-intimate Joan Harrison. In the 1940s, producer David O. Selznick pressed his own heavy hands on the director, instigating a Clash of the Auteurs. Scholars such as Steven DeRosa and the two Walters—Raubicheck and Srebnick—have examined the role screenwriters played in the creation of Hitchcock’s films. [4] Noting the wide latitude they often had in the scripting process, they argue convincingly that these, too, deserve a measure of authorial credit.
Among art forms, filmmaking looks less like the work of a lone genius and more like the operation of a restaurateur—a crowded kitchen overrun by producers, cinematographers, production designers, casting directors, herds of actors and more. And why stop there? In the 1950s, Shamley Productions was formed to produce Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Psycho and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A reference to their former country home in Shamley Green, England, the name suggests that the Hitchcockian enterprise was, in principle anyway, a family affair that could include their daughter, Pat, and, whimsically perhaps, even their pets: it’s reported that the firm was named after their favorite furry family members, with the director pointing out that “Shamley” is a near-anagram for his beloved “Sealyham” Terriers.
Widening that authorial circle further, movies have always riffed among themselves, borrowing from or outright plundering each other for ideas. Discovering these connections has become such a popular pastime among film scholars that many have replaced the simple word “allude” with the fancier-sounding term “intertext” so as to avoid being caught having fun. Ferreting out the myriad layers of literary and filmic influences on Vertigo (1958) alone can trigger its own form of dizziness. As Sidney Gottlieb has observed, “It takes a community to raise a masterpiece.” [5]
With Hitchcock, hamhocks and hand grenades melted interpenetrably into one cosmic enchilada, what does authorship even mean?
Expanding our circle outward, historical forces also deserve special credit for bringing Hitchcock and his films into being. Had there been no World War II, there would have been no Lifeboat (1944)—at least not in the form we have. Who pitched in on the creation of Willi, their German Nazi castaway? Hitler? Nietzsche? Schopenhauer? Ultimately, we can widen the circle of authorship to embrace grand forces of cosmic consciousness reaching back to the Big Bang. Latent in the eons-old singularity lay the potential for one mentally-ill serial killer to arise in rural Wisconsin USA, who would inspire a pulp novel, which would catch the attention of one British-American director whose film would change cinema forever. [6] If there were no Hitchcock it would have been necessary to invent him. As much as we want to elevate our heroes, the universe did not arrive at the party with a plus one. With Hitchcock, hamhocks and hand grenades melted interpenetrably into one cosmic enchilada, what does authorship even mean?
In The Wrong Man, Manny Balestraro (Henry Fonda) can only ask, impotently: “You realize what you've done to my wife?”
Hitch himself seems to have been haunted by this web’s infinite regress of causality. In The Wrong Man (1956), Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) gets caught up in a horrific concatenation of events that culminates in a case of mistaken identity and an existential crisis—for him and, especially, for his collaterally injured wife. In his very next film, Vertigo, Scottie (James Stewart)—Hitchcock’s biggest patsy—howls, as if on behalf of Manny—and maybe all humanity—“Why did you pick on me? Why me?!”
The question must go unanswered. Otherwise, we’d have to sit through a lecture from Psycho’s Dr. Fred Richman (Simon Oakland) on New World colonialism. Phony though they may have been, Madeleine’s trances were inspired by a portrait of a historical figure (within the film) of Carlotta Valdez, whose harrowing backstory was intertwined with the history (in real life) of Spanish colonialism and its subsequent capitulation to the American empire. Scottie’s takeover of Judy’s identity places him in the same causal continuum as Hernando De Soto—the namesake of the automobile he uses to prowl San Francisco’s historical haunts. This centuries-long arc of new-world violence is the de-equilibrating psychosis at the heart of Vertigo. Had none of that happened, it would be a very different film. Who really authored Manny’s or Scottie’s suffering? Tough to say.
This isn’t to diminish Hitchcock’s brilliance. Actors and writers may come and go, but there is a unique Hitchcockian voice—a singular essence, irreducible as a single grain of sand that happened to float along this patch of ocean floor, into this particular oyster, at this particular time to produce this particular pearl. Sorry PoMo critics, we can’t junk auteur theory altogether. The question is, what is the nature of that singular essence? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe what we call an “Alfred Hitchcock movie” as at least the work of both Hitch and Alma? I think so. This entity was like a lens, bringing all of the foregoing elements into focus—transparency being the key word—to deliver complex and contradictory universal concerns with utmost clarity. Maybe we can envision a virtual figure that acts as a container for all these voices. Let’s call this imaginary entity “Hitchalma.” Such a proposition has interesting—and practical—implications, particularly at this juncture in history, when it may be time to find new ways of telling stories.
Part 2: Whose story is it, anyway?
In modern life, ideas are property. Fortunes have traded hands just to settle issues of authorship over even a snippet of music. This development—which has peaked in the last few years, and which shows healthful signs of abating somewhat—is only a couple of centuries old. The ancients would look at our preoccupation with authorship and shake their damn heads. Theologian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) would have been scandalized. As philosophy professor Brandon Watson notes, for Malebranche, “Ideas are the province of the [Logos, or] second Person of the Trinity; to attribute ideas to ourselves is to commit the serious mistake of attributing to ourselves what only belongs to God.” [7]
The ancient Greeks gave credit for their ideas to the Muses. Meanwhile, the Hebrew prophets, like the ancient Norse, claimed to receive inspiration from God or the Gods. For the early Christians, it was a gift from the Holy Spirit. 19th century Romantics believed that inspiration arrived when the poet tuned into "divine winds." For Federico Garcia Lorca, it was the terrible duende. Regarding the latter, author Sophie Strand calls up images of the so-called “zombie fungus” that colonizes certain carpenter ants. Once infected, “the ant’s nervous system and body becomes an extension of the fungal need to reproduce.” They’re then compelled to perform a “death bite” on the central vein of certain leaves—as they have for at least 48 million years. “Once latched onto the plant, the fungus erupts from the body of the plant, producing a fruiting body from the head of the ant that releases spores.” The brain, however, is left intact. Strand continues:
“Try to imagine the experience of a hijacked consciousness. What does it feel like, to still have your mind, but to feel it being compelled, chemically, and bodily, toward a purpose not specifically tailored to your own life and needs?... What does it mean to become a channel for another species? Another strange type of reproduction? What does it feel like?… I think it might feel like duende…. Only when we surrender to ‘struggle’ and dance with something that wants to create ‘through’ us and not ‘for us,’ can we open up to what Garcia Lorca calls ‘the endless baptism of freshly created things.’” [9]
I believe that Hitchcock—perhaps like all artists—responded to this same radically integrating call. Or, maybe even more accurately, that forces beyond his control carried him to Gainsborough Pictures and on to Hollywood in exactly the same way that a drunk gets carried to Skid Row and into Alcoholics Anonymous. Once they’ve arrived, they might each explain their journey the same way: “It was destiny.” That aspect of being tugged along shows up in his insatiable and omnivorous appetites for literature and art—not to mention food and wine. It manifested in a cinema that provoked much of the world to treat him as a monster, a misogynist or worse. Nevertheless, he pressed ahead, driven onward by forces against which "no amount of moral consideration could have prevented him from making” Rear Window or any of his films. If you’re an artist or an engineer or a historian and you’ve worked until you’re surprised to see the morning sun, you know what I’m talking about.
Part 3: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”—Matthew 18:20
Once, when preparing for her close-up, Greta Garbo asked director Rouben Mamoulian what expression she should convey. He replied: “Nothing, absolutely nothing. You must make your mind and heart a complete blank. Make your face into a mask; do not even blink your eyes while the camera is on you…. This is one of those marvelous spots where a film can turn every spectator into a creator.” (Italics mine.) [8]
Russian director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein would concur. According to his editing theory, when two or more images are spliced together, they generate a tertium quid (third thing) in our mind. Marshall McLuhan took that idea in another direction, suggesting that the intense concentration demanded by the low-definition images of mid-century television screens—a condition that he defined as a “cool” experience—forced viewers to fill in the missing information in our heads. [10]
The Artist (Cyril Richard) guides Alice’s hand (Anny Ondra) to produce a work that expresses his overt and, arguably, her covert sexuality in Blackmail (1929). Credit: KL Studio Classics.
Since spectators are a film’s co-creators, we can easily open up questions of “Hitchalman” authorship to write you and me into the credit roll. [11] These films do everything but grab us by the hand, provoking us to add our own flourishes to the story. For example, Hitchcockian gaming strategies recruit viewers to actively engage with them as the director takes “them into his confidence” as author Thomas Leitch has expressed it when describing such games as “Find the Director”—a twist on “Hide-and-Seek” in which crowd members are challenged to spot his customary walk-on appearance. Of these, Leitch adds, “Both director and audience are called on to exercise considerable ingenuity in devising and recognizing these cameos.” [12] When Hitchcock walks onscreen, a crowded theater might ripple with titters of recognition and applause, as if sharp-eyed patrons are signaling to others that they’ve won the game by spotting him. [13]
Audience authorship could even be extended to the hundreds of books and thousands of articles, essays, social media posts, fan art pieces and endless polarized debates about his films. Think about it: the first time you saw Marnie, you might not have given some of its rather obvious rear-projection effects much thought. But then you picked up on the debate over whether their conspicuity was intentional or not. Maybe you picked a side. From then on you might have found it hard to “unsee” the scenes that way. In that way, the raw material of a Hitchalman film, annotated by other viewers and added to your own perceptual/memory apparatus, becomes your total experience of it. This is the greatest—and most baroque—game at the Hitchcockian funfair: Exquisite Corpse.
Film philosophers from Rene Clair to Gilles Deleuze would also agree. Recognizing their ideas embedded in this thought experiment, they might even titter and clap. Cinema, they argue, doesn't really take place on screen—that’s just where the photons bounce around. Clair maintained that “pure cinema” occurs “as soon as a sensation is aroused in the viewer by purely visual means.” [14] The real action is in our heads, and once a filmmaker enters into that privileged space, he or she submits the film to our co-creation. This fact terrifies the people who finance movies, and they palliate their anxieties by insisting that filmmakers create characters and situations that can only be interpreted one way—and then, for good measure, by assaulting our senses at such speed that we don’t have time to respond critically. Richard Maibaum, screenwriter for most of the James Bond films from Doctor No through Licensed to Kill, explained how Hitchcock influenced his writing, while also identifying what, specifically, makes a Bond film artistically less-satisfying than a Hitchcock film:
“Hitchcock once said to me, ‘if I have 13 “bumps” I know I have a picture.’ By “bumps”, he meant, of course shocks, high points [or] thrills…. [With the Bond films, we] have not been content with 13 “bumps.” We aim for 39. Our objective has been to make every foot of film pay off in terms of exciting entertainment.” [15]
Part 4: Spiritually speaking, film is a medium.
Buying into the idea that we are “Hitchalman” collaborators lets loose a metaphysical hornet’s nest, doesn’t it? I’m hardly alone in sensing that the film experience can be a magical working; a conjuring. As Hitchcock scholar Murray Pomerance has written, “Many cinema scholars have found it compelling, have at least wished to believe in representational power both situating itself in that ethereal zone outside practical concerns, bordering on the metaphysical, and also traveling back to a distant time.” [16] Let’s pop the lid on this hive and try to lasso a few bees. Returning to our introduction, Hitchcock’s prime concern—his idée fixe—was the relentless pursuit of Pure Cinema. As with Rene Clair, for him, Pure Cinema took place in the mind of the audience and operated in two ways, with “the pieces of film that are put together to create an idea, or the pieces of film that are put together to create an emotion.” [17]
Early Soviet, avant garde and surrealist films—frequently the three categories are the same—tended to implant ideas and emotions via objective means. (For Eisenstein, montage techniques were an intellectual process.) Think of the battle scene in Eisenstein’s Strike: images of Bolshevik rebels being massacred by the czarist army were intercut with grisly images of beef cattle getting their throats slit. The tertium quid was that the soldiers were heartless, treating the revolutionaries’ lives as cheap as cattle—a political statement formulated in the mind of the filmmaker and implanted in the mind of the audience. One wonders if this is where Hitch got the idea to compare actors to cattle.
As is well-known, Hitchcock’s Pure Cinema often operates from a subjective perspective, taking the audience along to a private, sacred place—the mind of a single character—to work his magic. For example, when L. B. Jefferies espies Miss Torso in his binoculars, we’re made to join in his erotic fantasies. In this demonstration of the famed Kuleshov effect, the inserted shot of the dancer stretching and wriggling in her pink undies does more than implant an idea—it arouses our sexual desire. Hitchcock was scrupulous about giving his Russian forebears credit for such techniques. By favoring emotion over intellect, I think he also did them one better.
With Kuleshov, clues to the viewing character’s reaction are written into the inserted shot. Hitchcock’s inserts, on the other hand, can lack such overt content, requiring the viewer to use their powers of deduction to interpret their meaning. For example, in Spellbound, Constance ascends a darkened staircase hoping to engineer a chance encounter with her amour. She looks off and we cut to a P.O.V. shot. We see nothing more than a blade-shaped shock of white light beneath a closed door. Nevertheless, the implanted idea is clear: her lover is awake at this late hour! The feeling is unmistakable: heart-piercing desire! She’s being drawn like a moth to a flame. By abstracting erotic desire to its graphic essence—a blazing phallus of light—this scene takes a page right out of the Surrealist playbook. [18] In keeping with one of Spellbound’s themes that we “know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart”—a pronouncement that applies equally across Hitchcock’s films—this sequence can only be fully interpreted by the heart. [19]
In Vertigo, after fishing Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay, Scottie takes her back to his place and settles her down comfortably by the fireplace to warm up. The cozy mood is interrupted when the phone rings, and we follow him into his bedroom to answer it. After the call, he hangs up. He looks into his living room. We cut to a P.O.V. shot and see only an empty space where the young woman once was. From the variety of conclusions we could draw from this Kuleshovian montage—she’s hiding behind the door; she got up to pee—we pick only one: She’s gone! There’s nothing in the frame that would explicitly lead the viewer to that conclusion. In fact, the charge of this sequence derives from its lack of content. It’s a picture of absence. Again, the Surrealists come to mind, this time René Magritte, who was concerned with painting pictures of the invisible. [20] We feel a shock, followed by disappointment, for we, too, would like to spend a moment longer by the fire with Madeleine. (I’ve been feeling this way since 1983 when I first saw the movie.)
In short, whereas the Kuleshov technique originally depended on its explicitness, Hitchcock’s contribution was to make the meaning implicit. He elevated the technique, making the Russian models seem crude, even hammy. His demonstration of the technique on Fletcher Markle’s Telescope comes off as parody.
Hitchcock laid the groundwork for his audience to make these mental connections. Were they unable to make the cognitive leap, they could lose the thread of the story. Yet, Hitchcock respected his audience and trusted their intelligence—and it unfailingly works. I think that’s a powerful lesson that filmmakers can learn from today. The payoff for audience members is that their deductive reasoning is validated, giving them confidence that they can follow the story and know where it’s headed. Of course, that puts them right where Hitch usually wants them—on the primrose path to a twist ending. This is yet another of Hitchcock’s games: “Cat and Mouse.” [21]
Though it might seem counterintuitive, Pure Cinema is a psycho-emotional practice, not a filmic one. You start with the idea or the feeling and then work back to find the best cinematic technique to create it. This might be one reason why Hitchcock boasted that he was concerned primarily with the form of the medium and not its content. The practice took him down rabbit-holes that were much less fun for him to describe than they were to demonstrate. In fact, he rarely discussed film in metaphysical terms. He was generally loath to talk of spiritual matters in any depth—at least, not in public. Maybe we can chalk that up to a British reticence. Yet, we see glimpses of his sense of what Pure Cinema could entail with what Jean Domarchi and Jean Douchet dubbed his Moving-Around Principle. As Hitchcock revealed in an interview with the two Cahiers du Cinéma critics, he understood early on that:
“The chase film was ideal from a cinematic point of view, not only because it allowed a lot of action, but mostly because the idea of a chase makes possible lots of changes in background scenery. I don’t know why. That’s the way it is. But just as the film—be it in preparation, in the camera, or in the projection booth—has to move around, so in the same way I think the story has to move around also. This may well be a foolish association of ideas.” [22]
Foolish—or maybe too woo-woo for public consumption—though it might have seemed to him, this is how Hitchcock understood cinema to work. At the very least, the analogy holds up. Like the drummer Guy’s spasmodic eye in Young and Innocent, this was Hitchcock’s tell—an offhand remark suggesting that he perceived a metaphysical dimension in cinema. The notion echoes surrealist filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein’s remarks from 1926:
“A moment ago I described as photogenic any aspect whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. I now specify: only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls, may see their moral value increased by film filmic reproduction…. The photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time.” [Italics mine.] [23]
Twenty years later, he again argued that movement was the primary concern:
“There never did and never will exist any but one problem… in cinema: the expression of any thing, from the outer world as well as from the inner world, in cinematographic terms, that is, in terms of movement. Which is exactly the object of pure cinema.” [Italics mine.] [24]
Though there’s no proof of this, there’s little doubt in my mind that Hitch read Epstein, who often spoke of Pure Cinema in mystical terms. Instead, he cut to the chase and demonstrated it. Germaine to this idea of movement, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, philosopher Henri Bergson noted that our subjective experience of time—durée, or duration—is like a pair of spools, one releasing its thread and the other taking it up:
“This inner life may be compared to the unrolling of a coil, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming gradually to the end of his rôle; and to live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory.” [25]
Hitchcock’s ideas jibe so neatly with Bergson that I’m tempted to believe that he appropriated the philosopher’s metaphor and applied it to cinema, replacing those rolling coils with a film projector or camera, whose feed spool depletes its load while the take-up reel grows heavy with those celluloid images. Such movement is suggested by Epstein’s principles of movement—as well as in Hitchcock’s Moving-Around Principle. As has often been said, film is indeed a metaphor for life, and as our time on earth plays out, we bend more and more under the weight of our memories.
Part 4: Hitchcock’s multijective camera.
Flitting from one point of habitation to the next, Hitchcock’s camera is promiscuously subjective. Every single shot is, from the camera's persepctive, at least, a P.O.V. shot. [26] There are few, if any, “objective” framings. Now we’re in the hero’s head! Now we’re in the villain’s! Now we’re running with the hounds! Now we’re a hare! This ghostly, free-floating quality isn’t limited to flesh-and-blood actors. His is an animistic universe, where so much depends upon a cigarette lighter, a length of rope or a flammable film canister. It’s a private zone where Sealyham Terriers can claim collaborative credit. His devouring lens can also have its own editorial point of view, identified, reflexively, with itself, or with that of the director, the audience or a sewer drain. Oh, the places his camera can go! Perhaps Hitch took his cue from Epstein, who wrote in 1926:
“One of the cinema’s greatest powers is animism. On screen, nature is never inanimate. Objects take on airs. Trees gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna, convey meanings. Every prop becomes a character. The sets are cut into pieces and each fragment assumes a distinctive expression. An astonishing pantheism is reborn in the world and fills it until it bursts…. A hand is separated from a man, lives on its own, suffers and rejoices alone…. Is such freedom, such a soul, more epiphenomenal than the one we claim to be our own?” [27]
In Strangers on a Train (1951), Bruno reaches into a storm drain to retrieve a cigarette lighter. Whose point of view is this? I like to imagine it’s that of a little sewer rat, munching on a kernel of popcorn, taking in this unexpected bit of theater on his front porch—on which we, the audience, have been invited to briefly sit. (Warner Home Video.)
Hitchcock’s camera is like a bumblebee in a flower patch, floating along to sip from one viewpoint and then from the next. That mobility—and the unfettered freedom it entails—reaches a logical conclusion in The Birds when the camera, adopting a very high bird’s-eye view, approaches God-like omniscience. “Subjective” is too limited a word. I prefer to call this a “multijective” approach. Bergson again comes to mind. His 1907 masterpiece Creative Evolution tore through the European and American creative world, igniting the imagination of writers like James Joyce and William Faulkner, artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and, yes, film theorists like Jean Epstein. His theories about memory and the subjective construction of reality encouraged artists to “look on all matter as if it were carvable at will” and to “regard matter as indifferent to form.” To see “even the form of natural things as artificial and provisional,” and to recognize that the human “intellect is characterized by the unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and of recomposing into any system.” [28] Inotherwords, only a human can look at a tree and see a wooden boat, or look at a doorjamb and behold the spellbinding flame of Eros.
Deployed in combination with montage editing and the close-up, Hitchcock’s multijective camera conducted a fifty-plus year survey of Bergson’s “carvable” reality. Like Cubist art, his camera explodes perspective to examine figures from multiple points in space and time. For mid-century philosopher Jean Gebser, this twentieth century development represents an evolution in human consciousness. He envisaged three human epochs, one of which has mainly passed, one that we currently inhabit and one into which we’re evolving:
The unperspectival, which we occupied for thousands of years;
The perspectival, which dawned around the time of the invention of the telescope, and in which we live today;
The aperspectival, an integration these two epochs and the era into which we’re now entering, of which he saw Cubism as a vanguard. [29]
Describing the first epoch, he wrote that “the unperspectival world is related to the anonymous ‘one’ or the ancient, tribal ‘we,” … a “one world” that is “grounded in Being.” In this ancient world, there is little individuation between the self, the community and the cosmos. Example: Homer’s epic heroes, which were conceived as a dance between Odysseus, for example, and nature and the gods. The second epoch he related to the perspectival, “to the ‘I’ or ego,” occupied with “the other” and “beginning with the renaissance, in Having.” While “the former is predominantly irrational,” the later epoch is rational. With the advent of such optical technologies as the telescope, the microscope, perspective drawing and the printing press—which eventually brought literacy, a visual skill, to populations that formerly relied on oral traditions with aural skills—perspectivity arose, promoting a new sense of self and of the individual. Example: the lone Arthurian hero who goes off to slay the dragon and save his lady fair. To demonstrate how fundamentally different these two worlds are, Gebser cites Cortez’ conquest of Mexico. The Mexican king Montezuma sent his best sorcerers, soothsayers and magicians to cast a spell on the invading Spaniards, but “the magic-mythical world of the Mexicans could not prevail against the Spaniards; it collapsed the moment it encountered the rational-technological mentality.” Their spells could only work on those attuned to them, on those who shared in the magical consensus reality. For these newcomers, the wizardry simply passed them by. [30]
Nude Woman, Standing, Pablo Picasso, 1912. (Moma.org)
Just as the unperspectival epoch has its merits—indeed, it has essential insights for us and, in fact, has never really gone away—it’s also true, in Gebser’s visioning of it, that the epoch of aperspectivality doesn’t oppose the perspectival. Aperspectivality doesn’t negate the self, rather, it’s liberated from it. This emergent epoch embraces a holistic and infinite conceptualizing of space and reaches further to include a radical inclusion of time—past, present and future. Gebser draws on a variety of examples from throughout art history to illustrate this third epoch into which civilization has been transitioning since the early twentieth century. Using a Picasso nude, he begins with a connection that ties Cubism in with his Bergsonist influences:
“It is precisely integrality or wholeness which are expressed in Picasso’s drawing, because for the first time, time itself has been incorporated into the representation. When we look at this drawing, we take in at one glance the whole man perceiving not just one possible aspect, but simultaneously the front, the side, and the back.” [31]
From there, he bridges these observations to his own philosophy:
“Space and body have become transparent. In this sense the drawing is neither unperspectival, i.e., a two-dimensional rendering of a surface in which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional visual sector cut out of reality that surrounds the figure with breathing space. The drawing is "aperspectival" in our sense of the term; time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension. By this means it renders the whole visible to insight, a whole which becomes visible only because the previously missing component, time, is expressed in an intensified and valid form as the present. It is no longer the moment, or the "twinkling of the eye "—time viewed through the organ of sight as spatialized time—but the pure present, the quintessence of time that radiates from this drawing.” [32]
Gebser could just as well have used cinema— Hitchcock’s in particular—to exemplify aperspectivality. The director’s multijective camera, highly attuned to points of view, points to Gebser’s third epoch, integrating all points of view in space-time.
Among many contemporary philosophers, perspectival consciousness is at the heart of the crises we face today as a civilization. It exacerbates what Robert Anton Wilson calls our “reality tunnels,” [33] showing up in the categorical thinking that separates one species, or political party from, another. Its universities breed scientific specialists, where few have their eyes on the big picture and those who do are viewed with suspicion or dismissed as generalists. The solipsistic thinking that it promotes sees anyone with a divergent viewpoint as a threat. Its subject-object orientation has led entire industries to see the world’s forests and minerals as mere resources—“standing reserve” in the words of Martin Heidegger [34]—and they are being harvested to death. Disastrously, the ancient wizardry has passed modernity by. It was into this perspectival world that the voyeuristic “portable keyhole” of cinema was born. Maybe it can help us move forward.
Part 6: Toward a new cinema
What we’re talking about is moving from subject/object egoism and instead engaging with the world in an I/thou relationship. Hello, glass of milk. Hello, latchkey. Hello, Sequoia sempervirens. Regarding the latter, this scene from Vertigo, set among California’s ancient redwoods, beautifully illustrates the aperspectival orientation. Lost in the dwarfing presence of the “oldest living things,” Madeleine’s soul stretches across the centuries.
True, her words may be part of a “fake, phony” performance—or, Judy-as-Madeleine may indeed have gone so deep into her role as to actually touch the supernal. [35] Regardless, as she presents it, her consciousness, expanded to embrace “all the people who’ve been born and have died,” wanders both among the massive “always green, ever living,” redwoods and in the here-and-now with Scottie, modeling an aperspectival space-time condition. Her real battle, which she’s forbidden from revealing to Scottie, is for control of her “I”-ness. In this neo-animistic framing, all is connected as if in a mycelial network, an internet of consciousnesses, a neural system in which we see ourselves as one unique cell. Madeleine models aperspectivality. Sophie Strand surmises that “the Amazon forest that is your gut biome reaches out through the delta of your body to join the universal ocean of consciousness.” Stories that take this into account can perhaps be liberated from or move beyond the hero’s journey, past the neverending and—boring to me—battle between the good guys and the bad guys.
Part 7: Man vs. Yeast
In the beginning, film recording and projection technology was ingeniously simple—an easy-to-understand system of lenses, pulleys, levers and a lightbulb. In a pinch, you could get by with an editing suite of scissors and glue. Equipment repairs could be knocked out with tools from the kitchen junk drawer. If you wanted to nerd out on the chemical and mechanical processes involved, a book or two could tell you all you would want to know. Gaining a thoroughgoing, end-to-end knowledge of the filmmaking process was relatively simple and straightforward. That’s what Hitchcock did. As a kid in the nineteen-teens, he loitered at his local newsstand, collecting film industry trade magazines—not fan literature—and studying how the movies got made. Later, when black-and-white silent films transitioned to sound and then to color, he was able to build on that original foundation to keep up with the times—and point out ways forward. Grokking film in that way, he was able to develop fresh, uniquely cinematic ways of telling age-old stories. Indeed, the mechanics of cinema show up in his films a rich meta-language unto themselves.
Smash cut to today's digital era. Digital filmmaking technology is infinitely more complex and reliant on the cooperation of entire industries (note the plural) that are staffed by armies of specialized engineers, all working in concert to manufacture equipment, develop software, store the finished product in an Internet-reliant “cloud” and present the film on a complex digital display. Do you even understand how the monitor you’re looking at right now works? Few do. And even fewer possess the kind of end-to-end knowledge that was once table stakes for getting into the movie business. Maybe no one really does. Filmmakers today can't follow Hitchcock's completist path to come up with new ways of telling stories, not to mention inventing new stories altogether. Concepts that made sense in a mechanical world, like his Moving-Around Principle, struggle to remain relevant in a digital environment whose tools don’t spin, whir, click or clack. How can an artist break fresh ground, developing new grammars and new stories that are more organically suited to digital technology?
Maybe an answer lies in digital filmmaking’s near incomprehensibility itself. For example—and hopefully you’ll come up with more elegant approaches than this—the binary code that makes up a digital film has been compared to DNA. The digital software/hardware ecosystem can be viewed rather usefully as a reflection of earth’s environment, complete with its attendant mysteries. Both systems are fragile and highly contingent. By comparison, in the Middle Ages, a cathedral—itself a miniature replica of heaven—contrasted sharply with its parishioners’ daily lives. How can digital filmmakers create similar sacred spaces? It’s a challenging task: cathedral-like movie palaces have yielded to the humdrum cineplex and, anyway, most people watch their movies on a variety of screen sizes in a variety of formats. How can you create a sacred space for an audience that’s watching from a coffeehouse, subway or sofa? One approach could be to acknowledge that the sacred is, or can be, wherever you want it to be. In an animistic world, there isn’t necessarily a hard difference between sacred and profane locations; it’s all sacred. Likewise, the modern distinction between “civilization” and nature is an illusion; it’s all nature. What is a straphanger in a jam-packed Japanese bullet train doing when she slips on her earbuds and transports herself to another dimension via a movie on her iPhone? How can modern storytelling meet commuters, metaphysically, on their own terms? (No, I don’t think mindfulness apps are the answer.)
This decentralized, digital ecosystem also prompts a refined understanding of authorship. Maybe we can apply a new understanding of auteur theory to our stories that incorporates the subjective “I” of the nominal author into a far more inclusive, multitudinous authorial “I.” This doesn’t necessarily mean crowdsourcing our ideas or forming a collective. (Though it could. Isn’t that what a writers’ room is for?) Rather, I’m suggesting a shift in the paradigm itself. In a recent panel discussion, Strand questioned the idea that history itself is authored by humankind:
“We look at the rise of monocultural civilizations as a human story. But, given that [cell for cell] we have more bacterial cells in our body than human cells, is it in fact a human story? The rise of civilization can be mapped to the proliferation of fermentation. Maybe yeasts are really authoring the story. [Consequently,] we need new stories, new ways of telling that complicate and trouble our anthropocentric ways of saying we’re at a distance. Or that we’re the only ones telling the story. Yeah, civilization is killing everything, but I don’t know that it’s our civilization.” [36]
Maybe the next Hero is neither suffering the gods nor wielding his sword as a solo champion. Maybe he/she/they act in concert or conflict with all the above, and also with the bacteria, viruses and yeasts—and solar winds and photons and Higgs bosons—not to mention inherited narratives, consciousnesses (collective and non-) and epigenetics—that influence our every enterprise. That’s a kung fu movie I’d pay money to see.
Part 8: Spitballs
Alma once described Hitch as “the most objective of men.” I believe he arrived there by cinematic means. As his camera gained access to multiple of points of view, it may also have had a reflexive effect on the director, opening him up to empathy for his characters and, perhaps, for humanity in general. In any case, that was the effect his multijective cinema had on me. Raised in a strict fundamentalist religion, I was taught to have a black and white view of humanity, made up of the good guys (church members) and the bad guys (everyone else). A person was either destined for either eternal paradise or immolation at Armageddon. Hitchcock’s films inoculated me against that dualistic thinking and from my early teen years on I couldn’t buy into it. It took a few years, but that tiny opening eventually widened to allow my escape from a destructive cult. That’s the power of Hitchcock’s cinema. Clearly, there are opportunities right now to pursue an aperspectival cinema. In fact, it’s already being done. Here are a few approaches that show promise.
The Netflix series Sense8 (2015-2018), created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski, is conspicuously aperspectival. The story concerns eight persons, each in a different country, who form a cluster of psychically-connected "sensates." Though separated by thousands of miles, they can detect each other’s mental and emotional states, perceiving things through each other’s senses. In terms of point of view, politics, sexuality and temperament, they couldn’t be more different. Subjectively, we’re right there with them. As the camera flies around the world, slipping out of one point of view and into another (the producers’ travel budget was apparently a stack of blank checks), the effect is at first dizzying and then liberating. Say what you will about the show’s heavy-handed didacticism, the Wachowskis know their Bergson from their Gebser.
Reality television is usually given a bad rap. But when it works best, these unscripted shows can stimulate viewers to greater empathy to, as it were, exercise our aperspectival muscles. The History Channel’s Alone drops ten contestants into a wilderness area without any food or water, with a minimum of supplies (but with a small arsenal of cameras) to fend for their survival. The one who lasts the longest before “tapping out” wins a hefty $500,000. As the episodes advance—especially in the first three seasons—an interesting change often occurs. Leaving civilization behind, participants soon become attuned to the rhythm and flow of their natural environment. As if on a vision quest, they learn new things about themselves. Their values often change. Some tap out early, not because they gave up or became despondent, but because the prize money itself lost value in their eyes: being with loved ones becomes more important than winning the game. Because these videos are self-produced, the audience is treated to an intimate and vulnerable view of the participants. This can bring the audience along on a journey toward greater empathy—a move toward aperspectivality. Talk about a real Reality show.
With typical Silicon Valley bluster, virtual reality technology has been called an empathy machine. However, the description is not without merit. For several years now, VR apps have been used to inspire domestic abusers start making non-violent choices. help those with relative privilege feel how hurtful race-based micro-aggressions and help caregivers learn greater compassion. By putting users in other people’s shoes, VR may be the most direct cinematic line yet devised to helping persons gain an aperspectival awareness.
Such paradigm-shifting seems to be the creative obligation of the moment. We’re in an era of crisis—and in response, civilization is more fractious than at any time in history. Old institutions and worn-out stories may not be much help. New stories that embrace an aperspectival consciousness collapsing the false divide between self and other, humanity and nature, can help the courageous to find a better way forward. That was the project of cinema as outlined by Jean Epstein a century ago. It was the mission that Hitchcock took up. This is the moment to try something new. What will you say?
Notes
[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. P. x.
[2] Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton Spiritual Classics Collection: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man. P. 117. Las Vegas: Public Domain.
[3] Podcast, Garfield, Michael, Future Fossils, October 28, 2021. “Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit.” Listen.
[4] DeRosa, Steven. Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. New York: Cinescribe Media. Raubicheck, Walter and Srebnick, Walter. Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
[5] Gottlieb, Sidney and Martin, Donal, editors. Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now. United Kingdom: John Libbey Publishing, Ltd.
[6] I’m referring, of course, to human butcher Ed Gein, of Plainfield, Wisconsin, USA, who inspired Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, which Hitchcock adapted for the screen, which formed the template for countless “slasher” movies to come.
[7] Watson, Brandon. “Nicolas Malebranche: Religion.” iep.utm.edu. https://iep.utm.edu/malebr-r/ (accessed March 5, 2022).
[8] Gottlieb, Robert. Garbo. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Perhaps it was from Mamoulian that Hitchcock discovered the value of actors “who can do nothing extremely well,” or vice versa.
[9] Strand, Sophie. “The Endless Baptism of Freshly Created Things.” @Cosmogyny, November 8, 2021. instagram.com/p/CWBAty7lXkZ/ (accessed March 5, 2022).
[10] The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine, March, 1969. For this reason, counterintuitively, McLuhan described television as a tactile medium, as opposed to a visual one—an observation that bears comparison with philosopher Jean Gebser’s ideas, as briefly outlined below. While today’s mobile devices boast life-like image fidelity, their miniaturized image and the facts that they’re handheld and come with various interactive controls suggests to me that modern videos are more “tactile” than ever.
[11] Would that make this a “Hitchallmen” move?
[12] Leitch, Thomas. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. P. 2
[13] Although younger audiences seem to be no longer in on this game, I still clap during his cameos whenever I’m in theater—a tradition that embarrasses my friends and confuses everyone else in the room.
[14] Clair, René, Cinema Yesterday and Today. Trans. Stanley Applebaum. Dover Publications.
[15] Chapman, James. Hitchcock and the Spy Film. London, New York: I.B. Taurus. P. 243. Citing: James Bond’s 39 ‘Bumps,’ New York Times, December 13, 1964, p. 22.
[16] Pomerance, Murray. A Dream of Hitchcock. Albany: State University of New York Press. P. 195
[17] Gottlieb, Sidney, Editor. Hitchcock on Hitchcock. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. P. 288
[18] The abstracted streaks and negative “rayographs” of Man Ray’s Le Retour à la Raison (The Return to Reason, 1923) come to mind. In my film Spellbound by L’Amour (2021), I demonstrated that the most surreal aspects of Hitchcock’s film are found outside of its Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequences.”
[19] While this famous pronouncement isn’t directly quoted in the movie, I’d say that Blaise Pascal could be credited as one of the film’s cosmic co-authors.
[20] This P.O.V. shot’s uncanny frisson can be seen as analogous to the experience of Spellbound’s amnesiac John Ballantyne, who compared losing his identity to “looking into a mirror, but there’s no one there.”
[21] Compare Leitch, p. 136.
[22] Naremore, James, editor. North by Northwest. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. P. 179.)
[23] Keller, Sarah and Paul, Jason N. Jean Epstein: Critical essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. P. 294. Evidently, Epstein was the first to expand the meaning of “photogenic” to mean “photographs well.” By “moral character,” Epstein apparently meant an object’s inner nature. For example, a close-up of an eye reveals its character as an organ that gazes. A close-up of a gun reveals its deadly intent.
[24] Ibid. P. 356.
[25] Bergson, Henri, Translated by T.E. Hulme. An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. P. 11
[26] Arguably, every shot in every movie or TV show is a POV shot. However, Hitchcock was especially attuned to this insight, as William Rothman has so poetically indicated in the titles of his two landmark books The Murderous Gaze (a gaze that he proposes is that of the camera) and The “I” of the Camera, the latter of which inspires the title of this essay.
[27] Keller, p. 289
[28] Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Kakapo Books. P. 156
[29] Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Translated by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. Athens: Ohio University Press. P. 9-29.
[30] Ibid. P. 3.
[31] Ibid. P. 24.
[32] Ibid. P. 24.
[33] Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. Grand Junction: Hilaritas Press.
[34] Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper. P. 20.
[35] As Scottie calls them at the climax of the film.
[36] Future Fossils.
