Alfred Hitchcock: On Creating Suspense

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Vertigo follows John "Scottie" Ferguson, a police officer who realises he has a fear of heights that presents as vertigo and is forced to resign after an unpleasant occurrence occurs as a result of his condition. He spends his time with his friend and ex-fiancée Marjorie "Midge" Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a brilliant and self-sufficient woman who clearly has affection for him. However, Scottie's daily routine becomes more interesting when an old college acquaintance Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) visits him and requests an unusual favour. Elster wishes to have his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) watched, but not out of suspicion of infidelity, but out of concern for her mental health. Madeleine is apparently reenacting the latter days of her late great-grandmother's existence, and Scottie is interested by the strange blond young woman who appears to have no idea where she is or what she is doing. Our protagonist quickly becomes enamoured and unable to leave, urgently attempting to unravel the mystery around Madeleine while revelling in it, for it is precisely the unknown about this woman that fuels his infatuation turned obsession. 

Scottie's downward spiral begins with a plot twist that concludes with his obsession taking control of both his acts and his life. For it is here that we see the heartbreaking reality of a man in love with an impenetrable vision, a phantasm in his imagination that no woman—not even the one he claims to love—could ever live up to. For Madeleine is the epitome of the mysterious woman, so mysterious, evasive, and alluring that a person can project all of their deepest desires onto her, worshipping and feeling a miraculous pull towards the constructed image in their mind's eye, as long as real facts about her remain obscured and she herself remains just slightly out of reach. Scottie's inability to comprehend Madeleine drives him literally insane with desire and fuels a fruitless urge within him, since each attempt offers him only another difficult puzzle to solve. The more the truth eludes him, the more obsessed he becomes with unravelling Madeleine's mystery; however, this is a puzzle he subconsciously desires to remain unsolved, as it would imply the end of his attraction and, with it, his vertigo, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of control and sense of disorientation experienced when hopelessly in love.

Vertigo is a deft story about the factuality of the persistent male gaze that dominates and determines both our shared collective reality and the bulk of the narratives we as a species make and willingly consume, but it is also a deft deconstruction of it. By portraying a man who, at one point in the film, exerts control over what a woman should look like, how she should speak, walk, and behave in order to conform to his fantasy and satisfy his gaze, Hitchcock subtly reveals his own obsession with controlling his actresses and his attempt to transform them into the perfect "Hitchcock blond." As Kim Novak noted in a 1996 interview with Roger Ebert, "I could completely relate to (...) being pushed and pulled in many directions, being instructed what clothing to wear, how to walk, and how to behave. I believe there was a slight edge to my performance, as if I were implying that I would not allow myself to be pushed past a certain point—that I was present, that I was myself, and that I insisted on myself.” In other words, possessing a woman becomes an obsession unto itself—and when a man obsesses, he acts as if possessed. However, on another level, Vertigo's male voyeur is the one who finds himself on the receiving end of this patriarchal powerplay—for he does not control the narrative, she does. Scottie is made impotent by the idealised and romanticised fantasy in his head, unconscious of the true identity of the unknown woman and unaware of what is truly occurring. On the other side, she is perpetually one step ahead of him, relying on his attention, attraction, and impulses to bring both of them where they need to be in order for the plan they are a part of to play out as planned. Ultimately, the decision to stay or leave was hers alone—she willed it that way, intentionally and willfully, whatever the consequences. 

In 1963 Peter Bogdanovich prepared the first complete Alfred Hitchcock retrospective in America, ‘The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock’ at The Museum of Modern Art. As part of the exhibition Bogdanovich conducted an extensive interview with Hitchcock about his career. In the following excerpt Hitchcock discusses the role of suspense in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Psycho’:

Isn’t ‘Vertigo’ about the conflict between illusion and reality?

Oh, yes. I was interested by the basic situation, because it contained so much analogy to sex. Stewart’s efforts to recreate the woman were, cinematically, exactly the same as though he were trying to undress the woman, instead of dressing her. He couldn’t get the other woman out of his mind. Now, in the book, they didn’t reveal that she was one and the same woman until the end of the story. I shocked Sam Taylor, who worked on it, when I said, ‘When Stewart comes upon this brunette girl, Sam, this is the time for us to blow the whole truth.’ He said, ‘Good God, why?’ I told him, if we don’t what is the rest of our story until we do reveal the truth. A man has picked up a brunette and sees in her the possibilities of resemblance to the other woman. Let’s put ourselves in the minds of our audience here: “So you’ve got a brunette and you’re going to change her.” What story are we telling now? A man wants to make a girl over and then, at the very end, finds out it is the same woman. Maybe he kills her, or whatever. Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense.

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! The bomb goes off and they’re shocked – for fifteen seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock – it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one – show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. ‘Look under the table! You fool!’ Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds. Now let’s go back to Vertigo. If we don’t let them know, they will speculate. They will get a very blurred impression as to what is going on. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘one of the fatal things, Sam, in all suspense is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won’t emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don’t let them say, “I don’t know which woman that is, who’s that?” ‘So,’ I said, ‘we are going to take the bull by the horns and put it all in a flashback, bang! Right then and there – show it’s one and the same woman.’ Then, when Stewart comes to the hotel for her, the audience says, “Little does he know.”

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Second, the girl’s resistance in the earlier part of the film had no reason. Now you have the reason – she doesn’t want to be uncovered. That’s why she doesn’t want the grey suit, doesn’t want to go blond – because the moment she does, she’s in for it. So now you’ve got extra values working for you. We play on his fetish in creating this dead woman, and he is so obsessed with the pride he has in making her over. Even when she comes back from the hairdresser, the blond hair is still down. And he says, ‘Put your hair up.’ She says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Please.’ Now what is he saying to her? ‘You’ve taken everything off except your bra and your panties, please take those off.’ She says, ‘All right.’ She goes into the bathroom. He’s only waiting to see a nude woman come out, ready to get in bed with. That’s what the scene is. Now, as soon as she comes out, he sees a ghost – he sees the other woman. That’s why I played her in a green light.

You see, in the earlier part – which is purely in the mind of Stewart – when he is watching this girl go from place to place, when she is really faking, behaving like a woman of the past – in order to get this slightly subtle quality of a dreamlike nature although it was bright sunshine, I shot the film through a fog filter and I got a green effect – fog over bright sunshine. That’s why, when she comes out of the bathroom, I played her in the green light. That’s why I chose the Empire Hotel in Post Street – because it had a green neon sign outside the window. I wanted to establish that green light flashing all the time. So that when we need it, we’ve got it. I slid the soft, fog lens over, and as she came forward, for a moment he got the image of the past. Then as her face came up to him, I slipped the soft effect away, and he came back to reality. She had come back from the dead, and he felt it, and knew it, and probably was even bewildered – until he saw the locket – and then he knew he had been tricked.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Do you really consider ‘Psycho’ an essentially humorous film?

Well, when I say humorous, I mean it’s my humor that enabled me to tackle the outrageousness of it. If I were telling the same story seriously, I’d tell a case history and never treat it in terms of mystery or suspense. It would simply be what the psychiatrist relates at the end.

In ‘Psycho’, aren’t you really directing the audience more than the actors?

Yes. It’s using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote. It was done by visual means designed in every possible way for an audience. That’s why the murder in the bathroom is so violent, because as the film proceeds, there is less violence. But that scene was in the minds of the audience so strongly that one didn’t have to do much more. I think that in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn’t time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They’re just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture. I wasn’t interested in them. And you know, nobody ever mentions that they were ever in the film. It’s rather sad for them.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Can you imagine how the people in the front office would have cast the picture? They’d say, ‘Well, she gets killed off in the first reel, let’s put anybody in there, and give Janet Leigh the second part with the love interest.’ Of course, this is idiot thinking. The whole point is to kill off the star, that is what makes it so unexpected. This was the basic reason for making the audience see it from the beginning. If they came in half-way through the picture, they would say, ‘When’s Janet Leigh coming on?’ You can’t have blurred thinking in suspense.

Didn’t you experiment with TV techniques in ‘Psycho’?

It was made by a TV unit, but that was only a matter of economics really, speed and economy of shooting, achieved by minimizing the number of set-ups. We slowed up whenever it became really cinematic. The bathroom scene took seven days, whereas the psychiatrist’s scene at the end was all done in one day.

How much did Saul Bass contribute to the picture?

Only the main title, the credits. He asked me if he could do one sequence in Psycho and I said yes. So he did a sequence on paper, little drawings of the detective going up the stairs before he is killed. One day on the picture, I was sick, and I called up and told the assistant to make those shots as Bass had planned them. There were about twenty of them and when I saw them, I said, ‘You can’t use any of them.’ The sequence told his way would indicate that the detective is a menace. He’s not. He is an innocent man, therefore the shot should be innocent. We don’t have to work the audience up. We’ve done that. The mere fact that he’s going up the stairs is enough. Keep it simple. No complications. One shot.

Did you intend any moral implications in the picture?

I don’t think you can take any moral stand because you’re dealing with distorted people. You can’t apply morality to insane persons.

– Alfred Hitchcock: 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich at MoMA.org

Imamura: Vengeance is Mine

Vengeance is Mine (Directed by Imamura)

Vengeance Is Mine is an intricately woven depiction of a sociopath's 78-day killing spree, but it is also a strange and profoundly empathetic depiction of individualism and the infinitude of a species terrified of not being able to diagnose itself. Vengeance Is Mine is a sprawling 140-minute work that traverses Japan from top to bottom, moving between time and perspective.

Iwao Enokizu is a vague fictionalisation of real-life serial killer Akira Nishiguchi, played by the great Ken Ogata. When the film opens, Enokizu has been apprehended by authorities and has become a media star following months as Japan's most wanted man. While the film is purportedly narrated through flashbacks as Enokizu is probed by police, Imamura quickly disassociates his narrative from the framing tale, opting for a more freewheeling approach. The film follows Enokizu as he kills, relocates, and takes on new identities. Peripheral characters capture an unusual amount of Imamura's attention, as they are all bound together by the monotony of their lives. 

Ogata's charisma conceals Enokizu's sociopathy, his countenance revealing none of the thoughts that drive his character to murder. Enokizu performs his killings in the manner of a man running errands, hurried but uninvolved in the moment. As the film progresses Enokizu recalls his killings casually. The film explores every conventional explanation for Enokizu's violence, only to end up refusing to endorse any of them. Is he this way as a result of his aversion to conformity? Is he a victim of childhood trauma? A vaguely Freudian collateral damage of the fight between Christianity and Japanese culture. Perhaps, but Imsmura offers no single solution to this mystery.

Imamura Sho ̄hei once said to the poet Sugiyama Heiichi that he wanted to ‘make messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films’. His obsessive and visually intricate explorations of what he has termed ‘the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life supports itself’ (17) certainly propose a provocative association between the unreliable nature of ordinary cinematic representation and the insecurities behind conventional Japanese social organisation. This chapter will argue that the distinctively interwoven relationship between the visual and the social in Imamura’s cinema is especially evident in the case of one of his greatest commercial successes, Vengeance is Mine (Fukush ̄u suru wa ware ni ari, 1979 – hereafter Vengeance).

Vengeance, which came at an important turning point in the director’s career, may at first glance seem simply to be a retrospective investigative drama about a notorious Japanese serial killer during the 1960s, but the fluctuating geography of the film’s narration, as well as its unsettling non-chronological structure, point to a particular concern with temporal and spatial fluidity. This interest in the instability of visual and social surfaces, characterised also by the constantly shifting identity of the murderous protagonist, may be seen as a central component of the wider disturbing claims about Japanese national history and culture that Imamura engages with so compellingly in this key film of the 1970s.

Imamura himself has played a leading role in the shifting fortunes of the Japanese film industry from the beginning of his career as an assistant director to Ozu Yasujiro ̄ on such films as Tokyo Story (T ̄oky ̄o monogatari, 1953) up to, most recently, his work on the Japanese related segment of the international compilation film, 11’09’01 – September 11. After writing and directing several plays while at Waseda University in Tokyo, Imamura passed an examination to join Sho ̄chiku studios as an assistant in 1951. There, along with Ozu, he also collaborated with the likes of Kobayashi Masaki and Nomura Yoshitaro ̄. Imamura soon distanced himself from Ozu’s rigid screen direction and precise framing of actors preferring to work with the satirical comic director Kawashima Yu ̄zo ̄ with whom he moved to Nikkatsu in 1955. He later published a critical biography of his mentor, Sayonara dake ga jinsei-da [Life is But Farewell] (1969) – a title which resonates strikingly with the concerns of Vengeance.

What Imamura saw as Kawashima’s deep aversion to authority and hypocrisy is certainly visible in his early work such as Stolen Desire (Nusumareta yokujo ̄, 1958) – his debut film – and Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan, 1961). With The Insect Woman (Nippon konchu ̄ ki, 1963) the director also began to elaborate on his favoured depiction of the vital and tenacious ‘Imamura woman’ embodied in Vengeance by Kiyokawa Nijiko who plays the mother of the innkeeper, Asano Haru (Ogawa Mayumi). Imamura’s interest in unearthing the more irrational elements repressed in conventional modern-day Japan has been a dominant theme in his subsequent filmography. It has also led to an ongoing investigation of the relationship between documentary and fictional film practice that is strongly visible in Vengeance along with a keen interest in the observational ethics underlying the ethnographic impulse. His radical investigative film, A Man Vanishes (Ningen jo ̄hatsu, 1967), for example, explicitly drew attention to the artifice behind the conventions of Japanese social representation, and the revealing literal translation of his 1966 film, Jinruigaku nyu ̄mon, known in English as The Pornographers, is ‘An Introduction to Anthropology’. As Imamura himself says, ‘In my work people take centre stage . . . There are no shots which do not contain human action . . . I want to capture the smallest action, the finest nuance, the most intimate psychological expression because filmmakers must concern themselves with more than facades’.

Vengeance represented Imamura’s return to the dramatic form at a time when his own career was in flux. During much of the 1970s, Imamura had renounced fiction altogether, partly as a result of the financial losses suffered by Nikkatsu after The Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no fukai yokubo ̄, 1968) and partly from his professed frustration with working with actors, a turn towards television documentary production and his involvement in the foundation of the Yokohama Academy of Broadcasting and Film in 1975. (Now called the Japan Academy of Visual Arts and based in Kawasaki, the school’s graduates include Miike Takashi.) Although other directors such as Fukasaku Kinji had originally wanted to tackle the property, Vengeance eventually led to the reunion between Imamura and Sho ̄chiku. The studio was by now, of course, much changed in comparison to the more structured production regime of the 1950s.

The film was based on the best-selling prize-winning novel by Saki Ryu ̄zo ̄ that fictionalised the real-life story of the serial killer Nishiguchi Akira which had gripped Japan during the latter part of 1963. Born, unusually, into a Catholic family in the hot spring resort of Beppu in Northern Kyu ̄shu ̄, Nishiguchi had killed an employee of Japan’s nationalised tobacco company and his driver in October that year, then stolen money and travelled as far north as Hokkaido ̄ in disguise while often swindling further funds. He subsequently killed a mother and daughter in an inn in Hamamatsu before murdering an elderly lawyer in Tokyo. The killer was finally apprehended, but only after his face had featured on more than half a million ‘wanted posters’ around the nation. He was hanged in 1970.

Saki had converted Nishiguchi’s name to Enokizu Iwao. Although his book had been written after careful research using classified police files, Imamura went further and uncovered new documentary elements worthy of dramatic development. In a manner typical of much of his practice, he also worked in an intensive collaborative fashion during the gestation of the final shooting script. Ikehata Shunsaku was employed as an assistant to the main scriptwriter, Baba Masaru, and all three worked on an initial temporal structure before Baba and Ikehata wrote the first draft, followed by a second written only by Imamura, a third set of further revisions between Baba and Imamura and then a definitive fourth version devised solely by the director.

This high degree of preparation relates to the fact that Imamura rarely changes his scripts during rehearsals and shooting. By this stage, he prefers to concentrate instead on the visuals, especially in relation to the direction of actors and the construction of spatial relations within the screen frame. Individual scenes are therefore first closely plotted with his cast. This is usually an arduous process. Ken Ogata, who plays Enokizu in Vengeance, recalls, for instance, that ‘in the course of producing a scene [in the film], and to further pursue the latent power required to make the scene all the more strongly appealing, every actor and staff [member was] required to be physically and mentally tough, stubborn and [perseverant]’. According to Imamura’s long-standing colleague Kitamura Kazuo, who plays the former husband of Asano Haru (Ogawa Mayumi) in the film, the director also spends a lot of time getting the measure of the specific district in which he shoots. The acute sense of place in Vengeance is certainly vital to the film’s distinctive emotional timbre as well as its obvious concern with the representation of regional and national identity. In another example of his collaborative method, Imamura then works closely on image construction with his Director of Photography – on Vengeance he devised the framings with his long-standing cinematographer Himeda Shinsaku – before filming using a high shooting ratio. This relates to the extended period usually required by Imamura for editing, something especially important in this film in particular given its intricate mosaic of different, but also inter-related, temporalities and locations.

Vengeance can thus, in fact, be seen as a carefully designed production despite Imamura’s professed predilection for ‘messy’ cinema. It begins with a forlorn high-angle long shot of a police cavalcade driving through the mountains in the sleet. A sequence of yellow lights indicates the progression of the cars across the empty wintry terrain and the camera pans slowly to the right to keep them in view. This isolation of a single colour element – it is frequently yellow – is a recurring aspect of the overall design of the film’s mise-en-scène. We cut dramatically to a low-angle close-up at a bend in the road which takes in just the headlights and radiator grilles of the passing vehicles before cutting again to a full-frame windscreen shot taken from outside the car which, we soon learn, contains Enokizu and the police officers who have arrested him. This is not yet obvious, however, and the fact that the camera gazes through the glass for some time heightens a sense of the scrutiny of a secondary visual surface within the texture of the film that is demonstrably resistant to clear explanation.

In just three stages, therefore, Imamura and his collaborators have established a particular regime of looking which will be emblematic of the film as a whole. Yann Lardeau has argued that the blurring of documentary and fictional film practice in Imamura’s work can best be characterised ‘not by the cinematographic material that is utilized, but by the quality of the look’. What does this look consist of here? First, there is a sense of detachment which is evoked by the issue of reduced vision. Second, there is a play between distance and proximity and then, finally, especially when we actually move inside the car, there is an inter-relationship of internal and external fields of observation. It is this shift between either hikisoto (from the outside) or hikiuchi (from the inside) that Imamura has suggested to Donald Richie is a key characteristic of his general cinematic principles. ‘A lot of the decision depends upon the way the set is made, but a lot of it is psychological as well’, he says. ‘I always have to think of who is seeing this, who is doing the viewing. And putting the camera outside and letting it peer in gives a kind of intimacy that no other shot can’.

– Excerpt from Unsettled Visions Imamura Sho ̄hei’s Vengeance is Mine (1979) Alastair Phillips Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts.