78/52 (15.)
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe.
Featuring Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Eli Roth, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Elijah Wood. Black and white. 92 mins.
The 3 minutes of the shower sequences in Psycho welcomed audiences to the 60s. Along with the 30 seconds of the Zapruder film, it ruthlessly stripped away any delusions that the Technicolor glow of the fifties might continue to light up the future. After them, you knew that things weren't going to turn out well. In this documentary (the title is the number of camera set up and cuts) a bunch of people – directors, actors, academics and Marli Renfro, the Playboy bunny who was Janet Leigh's body double for the seven days it took Hitchcock to film it – sit around in black and white discussing and dissecting its brilliance and its enduring influence.
78/52 is an example of that most despised of genres, the talking heads documentary. For once though the people contributing are worth listening to. It's full of observations that are both obvious and yet revelatory. When Anthony Perkins' son, Osgood, observes that the slashing of the windscreen wipers when Leigh's driving through the storm presages the slashing of the knife in the shower, you feel that deep down you already knew that, even though you may never have consciously made the connection.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the shower sequence is that 57 years on, it's still shocking. There have been far more graphic scenes since, but none that had the brutal sense of life being taken. It's almost unique among on-screen murders in making you feel the extent of the loss. Taking the shower scene in isolation is valid in as much as Hitchcock certainly did when he dedicated a whole week to filming it; but it is the rest of the film, particularly the forty minutes leading up to it, that really gives it its power.
And there is something equally unsettling about watching loads of (almost entirely) men gleefully and jokingly marvelling over the savage murder of a woman, the excellence of its execution, and doing it over and over again, in minute detail. The sequence about how the repeated slashing of a selection of watermelons with a butcher's knife was recorded to find which most closely replicated the sound of a knife penetrating human flesh, makes for genuinely unsettling viewing, especially when it is accompanied by the shot of a knife moving towards Leigh's midriff. That the knife doesn't come remotely close to piercing her flesh doesn't make it any less gruesome.
Psycho really is a masterpiece, though it may be one that we could've done without. Like all bold and breathtaking films that break new boundaries, the Clockwork Oranges or the Fight Clubs etc, they're thrilling while you're watching them, but the moment they are finished comes an impending sense of how you are going to pay for them. Like chocolate sauce swirling down a plughole, Psycho really dirtied our water, injected into the culture something so foul we will probably never wash away its effects. We'll never be clean again.
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe.
Featuring Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Eli Roth, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Elijah Wood. Black and white. 92 mins.
The 3 minutes of the shower sequences in Psycho welcomed audiences to the 60s. Along with the 30 seconds of the Zapruder film, it ruthlessly stripped away any delusions that the Technicolor glow of the fifties might continue to light up the future. After them, you knew that things weren't going to turn out well. In this documentary (the title is the number of camera set up and cuts) a bunch of people – directors, actors, academics and Marli Renfro, the Playboy bunny who was Janet Leigh's body double for the seven days it took Hitchcock to film it – sit around in black and white discussing and dissecting its brilliance and its enduring influence.
78/52 is an example of that most despised of genres, the talking heads documentary. For once though the people contributing are worth listening to. It's full of observations that are both obvious and yet revelatory. When Anthony Perkins' son, Osgood, observes that the slashing of the windscreen wipers when Leigh's driving through the storm presages the slashing of the knife in the shower, you feel that deep down you already knew that, even though you may never have consciously made the connection.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the shower sequence is that 57 years on, it's still shocking. There have been far more graphic scenes since, but none that had the brutal sense of life being taken. It's almost unique among on-screen murders in making you feel the extent of the loss. Taking the shower scene in isolation is valid in as much as Hitchcock certainly did when he dedicated a whole week to filming it; but it is the rest of the film, particularly the forty minutes leading up to it, that really gives it its power.
And there is something equally unsettling about watching loads of (almost entirely) men gleefully and jokingly marvelling over the savage murder of a woman, the excellence of its execution, and doing it over and over again, in minute detail. The sequence about how the repeated slashing of a selection of watermelons with a butcher's knife was recorded to find which most closely replicated the sound of a knife penetrating human flesh, makes for genuinely unsettling viewing, especially when it is accompanied by the shot of a knife moving towards Leigh's midriff. That the knife doesn't come remotely close to piercing her flesh doesn't make it any less gruesome.
Psycho really is a masterpiece, though it may be one that we could've done without. Like all bold and breathtaking films that break new boundaries, the Clockwork Oranges or the Fight Clubs etc, they're thrilling while you're watching them, but the moment they are finished comes an impending sense of how you are going to pay for them. Like chocolate sauce swirling down a plughole, Psycho really dirtied our water, injected into the culture something so foul we will probably never wash away its effects. We'll never be clean again.
