dir. Alexandre O Philippe, USA, 2017
It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to declare that Alexandre O Philippe (please tell me the 'O' stands for nothing) has achieved the apparently quite tricky with 78/52, a doc that narrows its gaze right down to a single scene in Hitchcock's entire canon: the shower scene from Psycho. This isn't a film for Hitch virgins - if anything the frequent fawning of the contributors might put you off Hitchcock altogether - but it is for anyone familiar with Psycho, and it's especially for smartarses like me who thought they knew every piece of trivia about it.
For example, the "chocolate syrup" served up by the on-set caterers
was actually Janet Leigh's blood
In all honesty 78/52 begins terribly, with a bespoke recreation of scenes from Psycho so amateur-looking that you're waiting for a punchline that never comes. Once that's out of the way though, the path is clear for ninety minutes of (mostly) genuinely engrossing insight into the social and cultural context of both the film and the shower scene, followed by an exhaustive deconstruction of Marion Crane's final wash from a ragtag assortment of talking heads.
Among the yakkers are well-respected Hitch boffins like Stephen Rebello (whose book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho you'll need to read if we're ever going to be friends), Guillermo del Toro, and Peter Bogdanovich, who is contractually obliged to do his amusing Hitch impression in every interview. We could all have done without his utterly classless comment about feeling "raped" by Psycho though; why Philippe chose to keep that in is a mystery. Also judged to be experts are a handful of directors who've made shitty horror films without an ounce of Psycho's wit or technique (oh hello Eli Roth), although it turns out that Scott Spiegel (of DTV non-smash hit From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Blood Money "fame") is surprisingly erudite and insightful. And then there's Elijah Wood, who I can only assume is either a close friend of Philippe's or just happened to be passing.
The Man Who Spoke Too Much
Among the revelations (for me, anyway) are cheeky composition gags that I'd never noticed despite watching Psycho roughly eighteen thousand times; a quick but fascinating detour about the painting of Susanna And The Elders which Norman Bates uses to cover up his peephole-slash-movie-camera-metaphor; the exact type of melon stabbed to death by the foley team (Casaba, cucurbitaceae fans), and the deafeningly-obvious-once-you-hear-it point that Bernard Herrmann's score during the shower scene is effectively Marion's heartbeat.
It's the shot-by-shot analysis of that scene that truly satisfies though, with legends like Walter Murch and Gary Rydstrom exhaustively picking it to pieces until there's nothing left, and Janet Leigh's body double Marli Renfro offering a little-known viewpoint on those three minutes of era-defining, game-changing cinema. Imagine a film school class where the subject matter is genuinely fascinating and Elijah Wood keeps making unhelpful comments, and you're close to the experience of 78/52.
If the contributor sections are a tad bland-looking (they're all filmed in a recreation of a Bates Motel room, which doesn't help distinguish them from each other once the headcount hits double figures, and as usual almost everyone is white and male), then at least Philippe has assembled and nimbly edited a dazzling array of source footage. Like all the best film documentaries, it's this that makes you want to run home and watch the films it mentions immediately. And given Hitchcock's output, that's a lot of watching. But I did that already, did I mention that?
No comments :
Post a Comment