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Oct, 2019

The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators

by Bruce Isaacs (Author)

In a now-famous interview with François Truffaut in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock described his masterpiece Rear Window (1954) as "the purest expression of a cinematic idea." But what, precisely, did Hitchcock mean by pure cinema? Was pure cinema a function of mise en scène, or composition within the frame? Was it a function of montage, "of pieces of film assembled"? This notion of pure cinema has intrigued and perplexed critics, theorists, and filmmakers alike in the decades following this discussion. And even across his 40-year career, Hitchcock's own ideas about pure cinema remained mired in a lack of detail, clarity, and analytical precision.

The Art of Pure Cinema is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avant-garde film movement in the mid-1920s. Tracing the evolution of a philosophy of pure cinema across Hitchcock's most experimental works - Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy - Isaacs rereads these works in a new and vital context. In addition to this historical account, the book presents the first examination of pure cinema as an integrated stylistics of mise en scène, montage, and sound design. The films of so-called Hitchcockian imitators like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma are also examined in light of a provocative claim: that the art of pure cinema is only fully realized after Hitchcock.
Bruce Isaacs

Bruce Isaacs is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published work on film history and theory, with a particular interest in the deployment of aesthetic systems in classical and post-classical American cinema. He is the author of the monographs Toward a New Film Aesthetic (Continuum, 2008) and The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Endnotes

1.Peter Travers, “Transformers: Age of Extinction [Review],” Rolling Stone (2014). http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/transformers-age-of-extinction-20140626.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. For a useful overview of continuity aesthetics, see Tim J. Smith, “The Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6:1 (2012): 1-27.

5. Lisa Purse, Contemporary Action Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011: 170.

6. Ibid., 33.

7. Leon Gurevitch, “The Cinemas of Transactions: The Exchangeable Currency of the Digital Attraction,” Television & New Media 11:5 (2010): 367-85.

8. D. Harlan Wilson, “Technomasculine Bodies and Vehicles of Desire: The Erotic Delirium of Michael Bay’s Transformers,” Extrapolation 53:3 (2012): 350.

9. Matthias Stork, “Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking,” Press Play (2011). http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video_essay_matthias_stork_calls_out_the_chaos_cinema.

10. Todd Berliner and Dale J. Cohen, “The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System,” Journal of Film and Video 63:1 (2011): 44-63. See also Greg M. Smith, “Continuity Is Not Continuous,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6:1 (2012): 56-61. Smith’s inquiry is specifically into “how actual audiences assemble a succession of onscreen images into a coherent narrative occurring in diegetic time and space” (56).

11. For this orthodox approach to cinematic continuity, see Gustavo Mercado, The Filmmaker’s Eye: Learning (and Breaking) the Rules of Cinematic Composition. Boston: Focal Press/Elsevier, 2011: 6-16. Mercado’s method addresses filmic composition in stylistic terms, reflecting on film as a formal compositional field. Perhaps the seminal formulation of an aesthetic of continuity underpinning Hollywood’s image and narrative style remains David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

12. For a useful coverage of the continuity system, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013: 232-255.

13. Berliner and Cohen, op. cit., 44.

14. For a discussion of the continuity aesthetic in the early work of D. W. Griffith, see Jacques Aumont, “Griffith – the Frame, the Figure,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI, 1990: 348-49.

15. Stork, op. cit.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. For a very useful discussion of art classicism and the emergence of various post-classical art styles, see Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1992: 17-22.

21. David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55:3 (2002): 16-28.

22. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006: 127.

23. Bruce Isaacs, The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013: 73-78.

24. Harlan Wilson reads Transformers (2007) as an “extrapolation of the Hasbro toy line and subsequent cartoon series.” See Harlan Wilson, 348. In addition to Bay’s franchise, the Transformers entertainment brand has materialized also as an animated feature film – Transformers: The Movie (1986) – a long running set of TV Series from the mid-1980s to the present, tie-in novellas and comics, and the toy line from which it all began. Bay’s franchise therefore represents both a continuation, and to some extent, a strategic re-articulation of a discursive textual lineage.

25. Berliner and Cohen, opt. cit., 46-47.

26. Ibid., 52.

27. Ibid., 59.

28. Tanner Mirrlees, “How to Read Iron Man: The Economics, Geopolitics and Ideology of an Imperial Film Commodity,” Cineaction 92 (2014): 4-11.

29. Transformers [DVD], Two-Disc Special Edition. Paramount, 2009.

30. Berliner and Cohen, op. cit.,52.

31. Ibid., 53.

32. See David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Describing one increasingly pervasive framework for the classical narrative arc, Bordwell suggests that, “the hero enters a ‘special world’ of trials, allies, and enemies. Eventually the hero approaches the ‘innermost cave’, the arena of a supreme ordeal. After winning, the hero returns to everyday life transformed” (33). Similarly, Robin Wood reads mainstream fantasy, adventure and action genres as expressions of “the capitalist myths of freedom of choice and equality of opportunity, [of] the individual hero whose achievements somehow ‘make everything all right’…” See Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986: 147. Elsaesser reads such narrative and ideological systems as fundamental to the existential bond between spectator and screen within the majority of Hollywood films of the classical period; following Bordwell and Thompson, I would extend this field to include the contemporary Hollywood era. For Elsaesser, the classical Hollywood ethos is in significant part defined as “the living out of an emotional impulse or psychic drive accompanied and paralleled by a deepening of moral awareness, a growth and progress in the hero’s consciousness, such as the audience can infer it across action, setting, symbolic objects and iconography.” See Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2012: 93.

33. Berliner and Cohen, op. cit., 58.

34. Bob Rehak, “The Migration of Forms: Bullet time as Microgenre,” Film Criticism 32:1 (2007): 27.

35. Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect. Washington: Zero Books, 2010: 67.

36. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001: 322-26.

37. Shaviro, op. cit., 73.

38. Stephen Prince, Digital visual effects in cinema: the seduction of reality. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012: 31-37.

39. Shaviro, op. cit., 74.

40. William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. New York: Berghan Books, 2013: 2.

41. Bruce Isaacs, op. cit., 258-262.

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