Michel Chion
Eyes Wide Shut (Amazon US | Amazon UK)
London: BFI 2003

Tony Lee Moral
Hitchcock and the Making of “Marnie” (Amazon UK | Amazon US)
Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002

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How much should we allow the production history of a film to affect our interpretation of the film? Or, to turn it around, how can an interpreter of a film afford to leave its production history out of account? These are questions that haunt all writing on film. Theoretically, we can reduce these questions to two alternatives: read the film as a text standing apart from any of the circumstances that may have formed it; or read the film as the product of its circumstances.

In film criticism, the question of the role of production history in interpretation has become bound up with the controversy surrounding auteurism. Auteurist criticism in its classical phase, during the 1950s and 1960s, ignored all factors involved in the production of films other than the creative personality of the director. Anti-auteurist historians have often had recourse to details of a film’s production in order to denounce the overestimation of the director’s role.

But production history, auteurism, and textual criticism have no necessary correlation. Although production histories, especially of Hollywood films from the “classical” or “studio-system” era, have been used to demolish the myth of the director as demiurge, they can just as well be used to add to our knowledge of how directors (or any other category of film artists) actually functioned within the studio system and thus clarify and deepen our picture of the actual practices of film authorship. (An excellent example of such a use of production history is Lutz Bacher’s Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios.) On the other hand, a “textual” approach that excludes consideration of how the object under study came to be made can dispense just as well with an author as with any other agency, as the different traditions of formalism, New Criticism, and structuralism amply demonstrate.

In his rich, perceptive, and enjoyable book on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Michel Chion makes use of production history when it pleases him, but his primary interest is in experiencing the film as a field of signifiers without signifieds. To cite production history as an explanatory authority would be to assign a signified, to put a stop to the play of the signifier. Instead, Chion adopts as his rule “never allowing anecdotes about the making of a film to influence the analysis of that film.” (Chion, page 66) In contrast, Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of “Marnie” mobilizes production history in the analysis of a film on which the critical and popular discourse has already been influenced to an unusual degree by accounts of production circumstances.

It’s fitting that the first book-length studies of Marnie and Eyes Wide Shut should appear in print at about the same time, for these two films have much in common and, I would contend, can illuminate each other. I had barely started to formulate this comparison when I found it anticipated toward the end of Moral’s book on Marnie, in a section on the legacy of the Hitchcock film. As Moral points out, both films deal with the themes of “the sexual problems of a married couple and the terrors of intimacy,” both are mature works by directors known for exercising an extraordinary degree of control over their films, and both films were widely criticized on their initial release for lacking verisimilitude (notably in their creation of exterior locations on soundstages). (Moral, pages 188-189)

I’d add that both films are deeply connected with psychoanalysis. In a famous scene in Marnie, a film that recounts a fictional psychoanalytic case history, the neurotic heroine (Tippi Hedren) mentions Freud by name and plays a free-association game, ostensibly to satisfy the desire of her husband, Mark (Sean Connery), to play at lay analysis. Eyes Wide Shut is based on a novella, Dream Story (Traumnovelle), by Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese contemporary of Freud, who considered the writer his “double.” In a letter to Schnitzler on his 60^th birthday in 1922, Freud (who had till that time deliberately avoided meeting him) wrote: “I have formed the impression that you know through intuition—or rather through detailed self-observation—everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people.” (A personal note: Eyes Wide Shut is by far my favorite Kubrick film, and Marnie is, depending on such factors as the weather, either my favorite or, after The Birds, my second favorite Hitchcock.)

Chion recounts some of the main stages in the preproduction, production, and postproduction of Eyes Wide Shut, but only in order to establish a minimalist context for his discussion of the film’s screenplay, camera placement, editing, and scoring. Chion’s principal aim, as he says near the outset of this short book, “is to try to see what should be seen and to hear what should be heard.” (Chion, 9) This is more ambitious than it may sound. In discussing the much-criticized “banality” of the dialogue in the film, Chion notes that Kubrick films with the same care, and has his actors speak with the same precision, apparently banal lines and obviously important ones. Chion continues:

He brings the same meticulousness to bear on filming the act of opening a door and, a few seconds later, of passing a hand across a dead man’s face. By always paying the same degree of attention to the act of listening and looking, no matter what it is that we see or hear, Kubrick gives us a different perspective on existence. The film does not impose on us a hierarchy of what is important and what is not. (25)

The whole of Chion’s book is informed by a love of Kubrick’s film; it is an effort to prolong the film’s effects through writing about them, to let the film continue to work its magic, not to kill the magic through analysis of how it was done or what it means. “A film is a system, not of meanings, but of signifiers,” Chion writes. (38) To find these signifiers, Chion advises a “non-intentional method.” His few sentences on this subject are among the most valuable in the book. “The right way to work on a film—to avoid too closed an interpretation—seems to me to watch it several times with no precise intentions.... At the same time we must watch the film as though continually rediscovering it; we must retain the traces of our very first impressions, of all that was charming, intriguing or boring at first sight, while also never censoring what we have understood or not understood first time around.” (37-38)

Chion’s sensitivity to the cinematic signifier, in its displacements, allows him to pay attention to an aspect of film experience that might be called undertheorized, if it could be said that it has ever been noticed at all: the fact that “every film, any film, is a series of first times: the first time characters are called by name; the first time their professional and family identity is given; the first time they meet another character, that they sleep, and so on.” (49-50) It’s this singularity of the cinematic signifier that accounts for the difference between the film and life.

This difference may seem to require no comment, but one of the notable aspects of Chion’s reading of Eyes Wide Shut is that he finds it to be about everything:

“Eyes Wide Shut is a film that talks about life; a film that describes everyday life through a couple who have procreated and perpetuated life, and as such it has no precise meaning.... The subject of Eyes Wide Shut is the everyday life of a couple of mortal human beings, from the point of view of the vastness of history and the infinity of the world.” (41)

The terminology here (“a film that talks about life,” “no precise meaning,” “vastness,” “infinity”) indicates that Chion’s project is different from that of most film critics: he seeks not to pin the film down, not to limit the range in which it functions and can be read, but to expand this range (to “infinity” if necessary). Chion sees Eyes Wide Shut as a “universal” film, in which “everything is done to ensure that a western audience will recognize elements of their own daily lives in what happens on screen” (43).

Chion’s universalizing impulse leads him to deny that Eyes Wide Shut, in which Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play a rich married couple, is a portrait of a particular class. “There is surely something of every woman in Alice, of every man in Bill, while their marriage has something of every marriage.” (39) Later, Chion writes that since the Harfords’ wealth enables Kubrick to remove from the story all material concerns, “All that remains is naked human nature.” (45) Many readers will doubtless be uncomfortable with Chion’s refusal to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the story of Eyes Wide Shut, a disavowal that suggests the existence of a blind spot in Chion’s criticism. On the other hand, this refusal is strikingly appropriate for a film that sets out to deny the differences between the bourgeoisie of Schnitzler’s Vienna and that of contemporary Manhattan—to the point of deliberately turning its back on the look and feel of Manhattan.

The best fruits of Chion’s method can be found in his analysis of what he calls “parroting” (psittacisme in the original French text): “the mechanical repetition of sentences and phrases by someone who does not understand them.” (71) Chion finds 46 cases of parroting in Eyes Wide Shut, most of them spoken by Bill. These examples are typical:

DOMINO: Come inside with me?

BILL: Come inside with you?

 

RED CLOAK: The password for the house.

BILL: The password for the house?

 

Chion finds in such repetitions (which, of course, many of those disposed against the film have dismissed as examples of the film’s frustrating vacuity) a kind of negative counterpart to Joycean wit: “the shimmering of the signifier in itself, without recourse to any kind of wordplay.” (76) This emphasis on “the literality of speech” produces effects of appropriation, expectation, delay, feedback, paranoia. Elsewhere in the book, Chion contemplates the unique speech rhythms of Eyes Wide Shut and is led to consider that “behind the words that are spoken we imagine all those that could have been said in their place” (69) and that “Eyes Wide Shut consists of people confronted with speech,” while “the images become what does not reveal.” (70)

Chion places great weight on a shot in Eyes Wide Shut showing the arrival of Carl, the fiancé of Bill’s bereaved patient, Marion. Not only is this, as Chion points out, “the first [shot] in the film to show the complete action of a character who is alone and is neither Bill nor Alice.” (65) For Chion, this shot is the moment when “a meaning for the entire film [is] decided.” (62) Chion’s interpretation of the shot (“it is Bill’s own future son, in a future where Bill can never meet him, that Bill has just seen in Carl” [67]) strikes me as more suggestive than persuasive, like his perception that the entire film is narrated from the point of view of a child who is conceived during the sexual act promised in the film’s very last line of dialogue. But Chion merely proposes these interpretations; he doesn’t insist on them, and he doesn’t attempt to use them as starting points for a deconstruction.

The shot of Carl’s arrival evokes for Chion the memory of shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. In practice, then, Chion isn’t above invoking Kubrick’s other films in discussing Eyes Wide Shut: he sees the film as belonging to a Kubrickian thematic of things going wrong when everything should be going fine (45), and compares Alice’s last line with the closing statements in several other Kubrick films (81-82). Yet Chion’s method seems to reject auteurism, for he writes that his “approach also involves abandoning any simplified overall judgment, along with everything we already know about the director through his previous films and media presence.” (37)

It’s easier to bracket assumptions related to the personality of the director (or the coherence of the director’s work) in the case of the reclusive Kubrick than in that of Alfred Hitchcock, the most self-promotional of directors. The interpretation of Hitchcock’s films, and Marnie foremost among them, has been substantially affected by such assumptions. It’s safe to say that the revelations about Hitchcock’s obsession with Tippi Hedren in Donald Spoto’s 1983 The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred HitchcockMarnie than any other piece of writing on the film. As Moral puts it in Hitchcock and the Making of “Marnie,” “Spoto’s account of Marnie’s production can be defined as the single most influential text, which has affected subsequent analysis of the film by journalistic media in the last twenty years.” (Moral, p. 178) During the preparation and shooting of Marnie, Spoto disclosed, Hitchcock’s attentiveness to Hedren (whom he had discovered in a TV commercial, put under personal contract, and directed in her film debut, The Birds) culminated in late February 1964 in “an overt sexual proposition that she could neither ignore nor answer casually, as she could his previous gestures.” Hedren refused him, despite his threats to destroy her career. For the rest of shooting and “forever after,” Hitchcock refused to speak to Hedren, directing her and replying to her questions through assistants. (Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock [New York: Ballantine Books, 1984], page 504) have had a greater influence on interpretation of

The incident enabled Spoto to find a simple explanation for what he, following many other critics, saw as the film’s “glaring technical blunders”—its use of obvious back projection (in a racetrack scene, several driving scenes, and the scene of a fox hunt) and painted backdrops (representing a large ship docked at the end of the street where Marnie’s mother lives). Despite the efforts of “a cadre of Hitchcock’s admirers” to come up with “tortuous arguments” defending these devices as “a conscious reversion to an expressionistic style,” the plain truth, according to Spoto, is that Hedren’s rebuff caused Hitchcock to lose interest in Marnie.

Hitchcock seemed to want Marnie to fail, in fact, and he no longer took any concern even for the technical details, the special effects, or the careful use of rear projection and artificial sets that, with much hesitation, had been planned for major scenes. He refused the advice of designers and assistants to use alternatives to these inferior, almost makeshift movie means. (Spoto, pages 504-505)

I’ve set out Spoto’s revelations and his conclusions in this much detail in order to fill in the background against which Moral’s book takes on its importance. If Marnie is a great film, as has been claimed with increasing frequency, the back projection and the backdrops must be defended. This defense can only, it seems to me, take one of these forms:

1. The artificiality pulls the audience out of the illusion of diegetic reality in the interests of either (a) expressionism, (b) surrealism or oneirism, (c) Brechtian distanciation and anti-illusionism, or (d) visual beauty.

2. The back projection and the backdrops are merely conventional signs designating the locations where scenes take place. Their lack of verisimilitude is irrelevant, since their role is merely to signify these locations, not to represent them with photographic realism.

3. The back projection and the backdrops are indeed flaws, but only minor ones that don’t prevent the film from being great anyway.

 

None of these defenses requires any information or suppositions about the conscious intentions of the filmmakers. Nevertheless, for readings of type 1, evidence of the filmmakers’ intentions would be useful (though not decisive), especially in view of the tendentious interpretation by Spoto.

A critical study and chronicle of the origins, preparation, production, and reception of Marnie, Moral’s book has as one of its main tasks the refutation of Spoto’s attack on Marnie through the use of production history to buttress a type-1 reading. Moral writes in his introduction:

Hitchcock has been charged with neglect during the postproduction of Marnie. I will refute these allegations by detailing his active involvement throughout the production process.... I will unequivocally argue that the techniques employed were intentional and that Marnie is the culmination of Hitchcock’s concept of “pure cinema.” Furthermore, the utilization of such expressionistic devices was part of a larger campaign by Hitchcock to be taken seriously as an artist. (xiii)

Moral’s research was exhaustive. He had access to archival material from Hitchcock’s files, now maintained at the AMPAS Library, which was denied Spoto. Moral interviewed many members of the film’s production team, including all three screenwriters who worked successively on the project (Joseph Stefano, Evan Hunter, and Jay Presson Allen—the last of whom received sole screenplay credit), cast members (notably Tippi Hedren, Diane Baker, Louise Latham, and Mariette Hartley), and others (including production designer Robert Boyle, unit manager Hilton Green, and assistant director James Hubert Brown). Moral’s book also makes use of interviews, seminar transcripts, and other sources of statements from Hitchcock and other key personnel.

Despite Moral’s claims, the evidence regarding Hitchcock’s conscious intentions for Marnie’s back projection and backdrops must be regarded as inconclusive. Neither the transcripts of Hitchcock’s preproduction conferences on the film nor later accounts by Hitchcock and his co-workers show that Hitchcock wanted to use these devices expressionistically. James Hubert Brown, who also worked on The Birds, which involved location shooting in the cold and wind, recalled that Hitchcock simply “didn’t like being out in the elements, and Marnie was designed in such a way, except for the foxhunt and the racetrack sequence, there wasn’t much he had to leave the studio for.” (57) Robert Boyle said:

Back projection was a system used in many of Hitch’s films, mainly because he thought he was in control. In Marnie we were dependent on back projection in relation to the movement. For the horse riding scenes we used backgrounds shot from a helicopter, but the results were not too satisfactory. But for Hitch it didn’t matter. His main concern was the visceral sensation—the feeling aroused was more important to him than the technological perfection. (116-17)

Seemingly unaware that he is contradicting his own claim for the intentional nonrealism of the backgrounds, Moral writes at one point that “In both the riding and racetrack sequences, Hitchcock and his collaborators strived for realism but were undermined by the technology available.” (118) Later, Moral writes:

For Hitchcock, the perfectionist who valued order above all else, the production of Marnie was bound up with loss—loss of the female star, loss of public acceptance, and, most detrimental to Hitchcock, a loss of control over the final result. (201-202)

The statements by Robert Boyle and James Brown about the ship backdrop are confusing and contradictory, and Moral gives no help in resolving this confusion. Boyle cites three different causes for the deficiencies of the backdrop. First, “we should have done it in real materials, but we did it with flat cut-out board.” (At least in the sources cited by Moral, there is no explanation of why inferior materials were used on a film that was, one gathers, comfortably budgeted.) Second, “the rain got on it and made it all slick so that nothing looked right.” Finally, after the background was photographed, and Boyle and director of photography Robert Burks watched the dailies, Burks “admitted that he had lit the sides of the street too much.” (119)

Brown cites a fourth reason for the problem with the backdrop. He recalls that Boyle’s backdrop was designed “for a high camera shot, about twenty to thirty feet above street level,” and that on a particular morning when the backdrop was to be used, Burks had set up his camera

about thirty feet in the air on a platform.... When Hitch came on the set that day, he decided to have the camera at street level and that put things on a different perspective. It distorted the entire backdrop and the forced perspective that Boyle had built into the set. Why Hitch did that, I don’t know. (119)

Brown’s statement is especially puzzling in light of Boyle’s confirmation that the background “was designed for two heights, one at street level and one higher. And the higher one you had to naturally raise the backing. Which we did. We did all those things.” The several shots in which the backdrop appears are taken from varying heights: both high (for example, in the first shot of Marnie arriving in a taxi early in the film and in the last shot of the film as Mark and Marnie drive away) and slightly above street level (in the second shot of Marnie arriving in the taxi). One is tempted to discount Brown’s story of a last-minute decision by Hitchcock as based on misunderstanding or inaccurate recollection. In any case, one looks in vain to Moral for guidance in resolving the contradictions or even for an acknowledgement that they exist.

During the preproduction conferences, Hitchcock said, “By the time you go into that trauma in Baltimore, I don’t want any normality to intrude anywhere.” Moral quotes this sentence (within a longer passage) without comment, but this is the single closest thing Moral has found to direct evidence that Hitchcock wanted Marnie to look unrealistic.

The absence of stronger evidence does not, of course, prove that non-realism wasn’t a conscious goal (or at least something Hitchcock was willing to tolerate). As a commercial director in 1964 Hollywood, Hitchcock worked within a cinematic ideology that tolerated violation of the codes of realism only in scenes clearly marked as fantasy. (Yet Hitchcock’s films before Marnie had often blurred the line between fantasy and reality: most relevant to Marnie is the scene in Vertigo in which, as Scottie embraces Judy/Madeleine, the background changes from the hotel room where the scene “really” takes place to the livery stable at San Juan Baptista.) Any overt expression by Hitchcock of an intention to defy this ideology would probably have caused his production team to question his judgment and would certainly have put him in conflict with his employers, MCA/Universal.

Moral’s book addresses the controversy surrounding Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren in a gingerly manner. He has gathered further testimony that Hitchcock’s attitude toward Hedren affected the mood of the set, but little to either rebut or affirm Spoto’s claim that Hedren’s rejection of Hitchcock caused the director to lose interest in the film. Moral’s assertion that “What is evident from the production history is that whatever transpired between Hitchcock and Hedren did not adversely affect the completion of the film or its intrinsic design,” however reassuring to admirers of Hitchcock and Marnie, must be taken as unproved. (129)

Some of the most interesting testimony in the book suggests that Hitchcock’s relationships with Diane Baker and Mariette Hartley repeated, in miniature, the pattern of his relationship with Hedren. Hartley recalls that Hitchcock was agreeable and pleasant with her until, suddenly, he became cold to her: “I was made to feel that I had overstepped my mark.... I went up to Hitchcock and asked if I had offended him. His reply was, ‘Miss Hartley, I think you have problems with men.” (110) Baker says:

Most of the time he treated me with genuine warmth and sensitivity, but during the filming of one particular scene, he turned his back on me and was very abrupt.... I thought that he was upset with me personally, that I had done something wrong, but he gave me no direction, and later I realized he wanted Lil to be strong-willed and have an element of hurt. (111)

These statements remind us that the pattern of Hitchcock’s treating an actor or actress first with warmth, then with coldness, was repeated throughout his career. (Moral cites Doris Day; Vera Miles also comes to mind.) They also suggest that Hitchcock may have used such tactics in order to elicit the performances he wanted. (Baker recalls that Hitchcock deliberately angered Hedren just before the shooting of the scene in which Marnie and Mark pack, after he has tracked her to Virginia.) The statements of Hartley and Baker are important for indicating a wider context in which Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren can be seen.

The book adds new information to our picture of Hitchcock’s relationship with Hedren. Baker remembers that before the end of production, Hedren told Hitchcock of her decision to get out of her contract with him. (121) Baker also recalls that Hitchcock made it his practice to slight Hedren in favor of Baker, and that “the tension did get so great, one day just before Christmas I was sick”—a comment that indicates that Hitchcock had already turned against Hedren long before his failed pass at her in late February. (121) Moral also says that Hitchcock and Hedren had a private row in late January over his refusal to allow her to fly to New York during filming in order to accept an award. “Hedren believed [this incident] was the culmination of Hitchcock’s excessive control over her personal life.” (123) (Unfortunately, Moral provides no direct quote from Hedren on the subject.)

Both Baker’s recollections and the late-January incident could be used to refute Spoto’s claim that Hedren’s rejection of Hitchcock’s sexual overture in late February marked a turning point in Hitchcock’s involvement with Marnie. One wishes that Moral, who had access to the Marnie production records, had used them in a more explicit way to address Spoto’s argument. Some indication of when the backdrop scenes were shot would be especially valuable. Moral does indicate that the back-projection scenes “had been scheduled toward the end of filming,” a point that might be adduced in favor of Spoto. On the other hand, Moral informs us that several scenes between Marnie and her mother were filmed in March, after Sean Connery’s February 28 departure; the viewer of the film may judge whether any aspect of any of the scenes featuring Louise Latham’s magnificent performance as Mrs Edgar suggests a director who has lost interest. Furthermore, Moral documents Hitchcock’s considerable involvement with the postproduction and marketing of the film.

Moral’s book is stronger in the compiling than in the interpretation of data. Throughout the book, Moral shows that although he has been influenced by feminist and poststructuralist readings of Marnie, he is uncomfortable in making the concepts behind these readings his own. To put it bluntly, he is sometimes adequate with historical narrative, but he is awkward with interpretation. In the middle of an account of the film’s costume work, for example, Moral throws in this undigested tidbit: “In the early scenes at her mother’s and at Rutland’s, Marnie dresses respectably, acknowledging her potential as a spectacle for the male gaze.” (68) About Mark, Moral writes:

The massive male presumption in the character easily lends itself to the sadomasochism and fetishistic aspects, which were Hitchcock’s reasoning for making the film. They are initially deemed acceptable by Connery’s charisma, but these qualities make Mark Rutland’s actions reprehensible and formed the source of an uneasiness and reluctance to accept the film when it was released. (78)

One can vaguely sense what Moral probably had in mind when he wrote these sentences, while regretting that he gave up so early the struggle to formulate his thoughts in English.

The book was badly in need of an editor, who could have fixed, for example, a serious mistake in block quotation on page 111, or who could have queried the author on the text’s numerous minor errors, contradictions, and obscure references to names and facts not previously introduced. In general, and in ways that it would be painful and unproductive to enumerate, the book is not well written. At times, Moral’s habit of stringing together paragraphs out of disconnected points resembles stream-of-consciousness, as on page 142, when a paragraph on Bernard Herrmann’s relationship with Hitchcock winds up mysteriously with: “Poet Philip Larkin made the famous remark that the sixties only really began in 1963 with The Beatles’ first album.”

Moral’s book remains, nevertheless, a valuable addition to the literature on Marnie, not least because in its failure to settle the controversies over the film, it reminds us of the impossibility that a film’s production history should ever settle questions of aesthetic evaluation. If a memo from Hitchcock to Robert Burks could be found, instructing him to shoot the fox hunt and the Baltimore street so as to emphasize the artificiality of the backgrounds, would that make Marnie greater? Or if someone could be found to testify that Hitchcock’s anguish over Tippi Hedren was so intense that he became blind drunk on the days when those scenes were shot, would that make Marnie less great?

 

Chris Fujiwara, film critic and author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall