Camille Paglia on Women and Magic in Hitchcock

so let me um for those of you who don't know as much about Hitchcock as others let me just give a little background which is that his um his reputation uh paradoxically was relatively low he was for a very long time he was thought as merely a kind of purveyor of um murder mysteries pot boilers uh it was a secondary rank during the I can still remember being in college in the 1960s and there was absolutely no doubt that the major European art film directors were ranked higher than than Hitchcock they were thought to have great philosophical profundity um to speak to existential issues you know that like that of French uh you know thought following um World War II Etc it was the young French critics of Cayu Cinema later on directors truo godar chabrol who um who fastened on Hitchcock who discovered him before the anglo-american critics really did for them he was the model of the theory of allurism which is still controversial the idea that a the theory that a director has the same relationship to a film as a as a novelist has to a novel or a PO you know a poet to to a poem because it's pretty clear that film is a collaborative activity it owes a great deal to all kinds of often invisible staff members be you know behind the scenes Etc nevertheless they said um that Hitchcock's imprint his sensibility his imagination was very clear um in his in in in his in the body of his work um so now another thing that's helped the rise in Hitchcock's reputation is um with the you know arrival of videotapes home videotapes then DVDs then cable television in the United States Turner Classic Movies is runs Hitchcock films regularly after Ted Turner bought you enormous archives of the studio um Studio system period And I thought people I've been seeing Hitchcock's films exposed to them repeatedly and then so his reputation has built and built and built the Sight and Sound poll which made international news news around the world recently that for the first 50 years the of the the film Citizen Kane ranked as the greatest film of all time has been displaced by Hitchcock's vertigo I I was part of that poll put vertigo also at the top it's even risen up rank you know for me North by Northwest used to be my favorite Hitchcock film still it's very dear to me but vertigo it's be you it becomes it's like a a life experience it's it's like it's like the theme is Obsession and and the relationship of the fans to that film is Obsession okay um I I'm one of many who've made pilgrimages okay to the to the very spots in San Francisco where where the film took place I my first visit in the 1980s whenever I'm in San Francisco if I can go to nowhere else I may I walk up up Knob Hill to see that magnificent apartment building with the stone Courtyard where where Kim Novak emerges to get into her green Jaguar okay I stand there and Pine and looking of course you know the stone is starting to wear off after so many decades etc etc but that to me is like a it's magical the way Hitchcock this is a good uh kind of segue into this theme which I I esteem in Hitchcock which is his feeling for architecture okay he right from the start right from the the period when he was still uh working in England he had a great feeling for streets and public plazas squares uh for monuments on a colossal scale whether it's the you know the Dome over at the British Museum and later on the Statue of Liberty Mount Rushmore the United Nations building and so on or the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house at the end of North by North by Northwest quite unlikely in the middle of seems to be a desert land and so on um and and yet he's also someone who is such a genius about psychology but the the the in Eternal world I think it's almost unique I I can't imagine anyone any other director who has had such a such a range of achievement okay from from showing almost like Edgar aleno the internal you turmoil the powers of the irrational Terror and Dread and anxiety and all that and yet this external frame how how how beautifully he captures space so many of his he he could have been an artist in my opinion I mean he he might well have 100 years earlier when film was not a medium been a painter instead of a you know instead of a film director that that was his great pleasure he he um the actual filming process bored him he had already made all the decisions ahead of time about script and also everything was storyboarded so his favorite part part of film making was sitting at home with a with a a male colleague drinking wine smoking cigars from for months at a time working out the plot working out the storyboarding and so on and then when he got on the set he had to deal with these actors who were were these frail embodiments okay of his of his Creative Vision and that's why he's so famous for his a serbic you know sardonic comments about about actors um you he denied he had said that actors are cattle what what he said was actors should be treated like cattle is what he said right another time ingred Bergman was going through all kind wondering about her role and her motivation all kinds of things and he said ingred it's only a movie and sometimes people spotted him dozing like dozing in his director's chair as the acting was going on because he had you know like a bottle of wine at lunch and things like that he was quite quite a Gand oddly enough although a Gand in his um in his films even when a very tempting meal is served people can't finish it I mean there some there's something with which interferes with the with the eating of food okay it's either people having trouble cutting it or or it's it's a crustacean okay that you can't kind of cut through so you watch for that Motif which is which is odd he's very food conscious and yet he denies his characters or the um the pleasures of eating I mean even You To Catch a Thief where uh a chicken is is brought out of a picnic basket there's like these little tiny bites that's all that car Grant is allowed to take just little nips you know out of the side all right um now what else in terms of background before we move on um oh now because hitchc began in silent film I feel very strongly that um his silent film Roots can be detected in the way he treats scripts later on he he he is brilliant at the minimization of dialogue okay he what he would do in the process of a screenplay is to cut out dialogue and to let his camera okay uh show the the psychological and emotional realities as registered in the faces of of the actors so I think that that that aspect of nonverbal communication in Hitchcock is one of his great points of Genius he shows that most of human life is actually nonverbal and and and and and people read each other through you know little things of the eyes and little little body language and so on this this shows why poststructuralism is such I hope there are not people here who are still pursuing that that dead end okay post structuralism which said that all of reality is mediated through language well you then they have never seen Hitchcock films okay because everything about Hitchcock shows that nonsense okay I was show you some some examples here but I want you to perhaps be aware how much of the how many of the Great scenes in Hitchcock are in really silent they're silent you'll hear um background sounds you'll hear you know ambient sounds you'll hear the music particularly Bernard Herman's great music but a lot you can go out for 10 minutes with no dialogue right and you feel totally in the current of the film all right and that and that that is his that that is the Poetry of Hitchcock to be able to be able to communicate through mood and atmosphere to enter the world and and language is really regarded as as quite you know quite frail it's substantial okay now what else um well this issue about you know now with with um films coming out about Hitchcock um fictional films and um uh a film focusing on Tippy hedin's terrible you know experiences of of sexual harassment from from Hitchcock and so on I'm I'm concerned about the return of this feminist idea of Hitchcock as a misogynist and I've tried to talk about that in the essay that's in the 39 steps volume I think that um Hitchcock like many great uh artists of the past male artists okay has had a has a had a conflicted relationship to women he both he was in love with women and yet he feared and resented women okay it's it's a very complicated relationship that um speaks to the condition the sort of subordinate condition that men have from from the moment they're formed within a female body which is their which is their haunted house for N9 months and so on you know Becket claimed Samuel Becka claimed that he remembered life in the womb he remember being stifled and suffocated by life in the womb do you notice how few women there are in Becket okay no one seemed to notice okay they're waiting for gdau hailed as the greatest play of the 20th century has no women all right that wasn't why wasn't that commenting on okay uh you see so it's that that that is a huge Vision you know of the world where where men have been reduced to hobos and the world of desolate landscape with one one dead tree which then Sprouts a leaf at the end which is a symbol of Hope but major major artists um have this you you could even not Picaso Michelangelo um this like flight from the power of of women we know that um Hitchcock had a very domineering mother that he was very attached to symbiotically and yet he feared dreaded and resented and that's that definitely erupts into the Nightmare Mother the mummified mother of psycho you know for sure but let me just read look this La just last week I stumbled on this I found a 1998 special issue of People magazine commemorative about the death of Frank Sinatra okay and and they quoted this from Frank Sinatra he said and this is the older Frank Sinatra he said women I don't know what the hell to make of them do you every day I know less maybe that's what it's all about maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less okay you see there it is okay now now feminism would like to just sweep this away and say misogyny this that and the other no no no this is the universal Paradigm okay of men's relation to wom when Freud asked what do women want okay feminism laughed who cares okay about that well you know there's no question what do men want well women are Mysteries women are enigmas even to themselves Oscar wild even has has a maximum about that okay feminism has to start listening to Frank Sinatra okay and stop listening to laon Da D and fuk all right now all right um all right I'm dying to get to the clips but what else do I want to say in his background um oh yes Hitchcock was a familiar in personal uh presence to us in in the United States because of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents program uh my my my parents were very dismissive of most popular culture but they adored Hitchcock who had come out as this kind of lugubrious host address the audience with his world weariness and and then suddenly appear at breaks in the his story line okay to like to introduced now for the commercial sponsor and so right and I you know we would adore or he would show himself standing in a wheelbarrow or up to his neck in you know in in a in a swimming pool or what he was very prankish he had he was both dignified and yet constantly subverting his own dignity that's why he has so many cameos of himself you doing absurd things not quite making a boss you know in in in in his movies you always spot him there's always one moment when will spot him um and I think he performed a great service for my generation which would end up in college in the 1960s he really was the first okay in our home environment to point out to bring attention to okay the commercial framework of mass media all right he was constantly talking about the my here I'm this artist who has to deal with the people the moneymen ETC okay mean there were work there were works at the time like Vance Packard the hidden persuaders being read by adults but uh we young people essentially thought media you know were reality and then Hitchcock gave us a kind of oblique um angle okay on that uh you know commercial framework

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Keywords: BFI, Hitchcock, Camille Paglia, women, magic, Alfred Hitchcock (Film Director), Women and Magic in Hitchcock, Camille, Paglia, truffaut films, godard films, french movie, hitchcock films, English film director, british, institute, British Film Institute (Publisher), British films, The Master of Suspense, Psycho, Writer Camille Paglia, hitchcock silent film, Hitchcock (Film), hitchcock psycho, hitchcock full movie, United Kingdom (Country), Film (Film)

Id: 1Q6Lahhi7rU

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 28 2012