Some people don't like the film scholar, historian, and I guess, uh, aesthetical topologist (?) David Bordwell, but I do, and here's why: nobody wants to get elaborate about anything anymore because they are afraid they will look like they didn't study for the test. David Bordwell will show you thirty-six stills from two or three Yasujirō Ozu movies in a commendable effort to explain a certain kind of camera or cutting 'operation' Yasujirō Ozu can't seem to stop trying to perfect. I love David Bordwell, but so often in university I had to explain why I disagreed with him on one subject or another before I could proceed, which I found discouraging and stupid. In his essay "Art Cinema Narration," Davey Boy goes way fastidious with the subject. How do we do aesthetics and film form? Inventory, of course. One thing Bordwell believes is that "art is more complex than life can ever be," but then it becomes as though he forgets that movies are made in and about life. At this point somebody usually says I don't have a paying gig anymore. Heh heh. Academia didn't have a chance. I had completely forgotten where I had placed Academia.
How do we do structure and form in image + sound + floodlit time?
Jean-Luc Godard: "And something that is astonishing with Hitchcock is that you don't remember what the story of Notorious is, or why Janet Leigh is going to the Bates motel. You remember one pair of spectacles or a windmill..."
Jean-Luc is not addressing me, because if he was addressing me he'd be quite wrong—of this there can be absolutely no doubt; I know these films too well—though it does seem credible that he is speaking to somebody way in the future and that this person does respond in this way when these two movies are evoked. If that's not true, you can turn it into some kind of placeholder and put it somewhere else and run it better so that it is true or close to true. Whatever.
All that aside, the main thing about Hitch is he puts an invisible cursor down over the action and drags the audience along like a puppy.
Well, cinematic modernism has a lot in common with literary modernism, which I insist on insisting shouldn't be too surprising, and you obviously know this if you've seen Persona or Last Year At Marienbad, each of which start throwing "objective realist" conventions out the window immediately, like maybe you'd walked in late or started with the wrong reel. However, if we were to suggest that "classical fluidity" is missing we need to very clear by "classical" we mean something approximately like the first half of the 20th century. If you believe your great grandmother has an experience of movies comparable, really, in any way to your own, you are sorely mistaken. Disjointed, confused? Tell me about it. But, look, word on the street is that there is a whole lot of different disjointed and confuseds out there.
BUT I REALLY LOVE HITCH'S CURSOR!
David Bordwell gives a hint. Graphic counterpoint or temporally separated shots-reverse-shots between Marion/The-Cop-Who-Pulls-Her-Over & later ones with Norman/Arbogast help establish that, under heavy pressure & riddled with riddles, you can literally drag the audience's identification like a computer's mouse might, dropping (from) Marion, who has been murdered in the shower, and landing on Norman, who must VERY DESPERATELY burry the deed. Audience members who follow this pivot, bouncing off the shower more or less unscathed because "it's just a story"...have just been rooked...
]
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, DEATH IN HER HANDS
I threw the notebook in the trash, along with all his other papers, then wished,
when the trash got picked up, that I had burned it all instead, had the nerve to burn the
whole house down and scatter the chalky ashes in an open sewer grate somewhere,
let all of Walter's thoughts seep into the urine and feces that must still exist somewhere in
the bowels of this messy earth.
2.,
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