Hitchcock’s „Psycho”, which is now available on Netflix US and on SkyShowtime in Romania, is fully deserving of its legend: rarely has a film proven such a mindboggling precision of the act of mise-en-scene.

In 1960, when he was preparing himself for the release of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock was coming off the trail of a series of successive masterpieces – from Rear Window (1954) to Vertigo (1959) –, like very few others had achieved in the entire history of cinema (Renoir in the thirties, Rossellini in the forties…). In his sustained rhythm – one film per year –, Hitchcock managed to work with the absolute on a roll, turning his obsessions inside out, in a sublime agreement with the requirements of popular taste. Order, quantity, the pressure to sell: only this type of adversity – the horror! – is the condition that he needed to show the measure of his talents.

However, Psycho is something a bit different: it’s not another spin around the wheel of fantasy, but rather, it’s the radical film that lands straight on the open faultline between a game with clear rules, but that has grown old (classical Hollywood) and a new, still-hesitating version, still struggling to be born (New Hollywood). Two years later, his studio neighbor, John Ford – another mise-en-scene maniac that survived the silent age, triumphed during the Golden Age and left behind an unfillable gap – executes another ravishing reverence with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: another eloquent return to black and white, only apparently reconciled with the rigors of a classical cinema. After all, both Psycho and Liberty Valance are swan songs, mournful – yet proud – gazes of art that knows itself to be unparalleled, the final lap of undisputable champions. From the late films of Nicholas Ray – the Hollywood romantic that grew prematurely old – to The Manchurian Candidate (1964), Hollywood, as we knew it, was dying a convulsive death. And this final spasm births maddeningly beautiful films. 

Still, Psycho has a sort of inner turmoil that goes beyond the simple fact of being a final gift made by artists that invented the system to the same degree that they also perfected it. In other words, Psycho is not a classical film. The way Norman Bates is framed – crooked low-angle-shots, zooms on his disturbed visage, bathed in a didactic chiaroscuro – are anything but indicators of a tame, formally stable art. Bates himself, in the performance of Anthony Perkins, marks a date in the calendar of art history: he is quicksilver, the problematic spinner that throws a bomb into the film’s beautifully organized structure. Hitchock seeks this clash out on purpose, he desires it, he provokes it: the supreme generosity of a maestro that is haunted by the need for control, but who is aware that control is not everything. Here, the director anticipates modern cinema, turning Perkins – with his erratic movements and his restless searching/gaze – into the necessary imperfection, the free electron that opens the world of cinema towards a greater grip on reality.

Here lies the paradox: by allowing himself to sway to the rhythm of an actor who came from an altogether different paradigm – nothing more contrary to Hitchcock’s method than the Stanislavskian hodge-podge that was predicated at the Actors’ Studio –, the filmmaker did not diminish his control, but rather, he tightened it, because, with this, he proved that he could also account for alterity. As Godard remarkably put it: “We forgot why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel […], but we recall a bag […], a piece of music, a keychain, because thank to them, and through them, Alfred Hitchcock triumphs where Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon had failed: in gaining control over the universe.”

It is indeed hard to believe that, at the time, Hitchcock was simply regarded as nothing more than an adept craftsman – and that he was satisfied with this position. From this point of view, the first positive reappraisals of his work (the hand of Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, and company), as just as they were, come off as barbaric. In the end, they inevitably cut off the mystery of a filmography that is so maniacally technical and masterful, which could coexist in an uninterrupted flow together with the spectators’ most mundane expectation: that universe of unpretentiousness, of the desire for basic stories (think “a girl and a gun”), is the one that built Hitchcock. Obviously, however, the times have changed, and together with them, the demise of the porosity between high-brow and low-brow, of art and entertainment, of so many mental borders and boundaries that Hollywood cinema knew how to shatter.

Nowadays, Psycho is everywhere: Norman Bates’ atrocious smile is a meme, the terrible idea of a motel lost “far beyond the highway” must have caught the minds of many of us, and has seemingly been inscribed into the very gene of humanity. I’d, however, say that what is forgotten is not the reason why Janet Leigh decides to spend the night there: what is forgotten is the discreet superimposition between Perkins’ dissolved face and the teeth of the cadaver in the basement; it’s the gothic house in which he is living, already so in your face that it makes the postmodern Tim Burton look like a harmless pasticheur; it’s the story’s remarkable grip, that still avoids transforming into an art of happy coincidences (all the difference between Lang and modernist Hitchcock lies here); it’s the recurrent innovative storm of Hitchcock, camouflage as a craft of variation and repetition.

The tense attention towards small details in the mise-en-scene, the pure pleasure that they may provoke, like the disruption of the puritanical slogans that have become standard in the exercise of the critical act – here are some ideas that no longer have much currency, nowadays. Fortunately, the filmmaker read his copy of Oedipus from head to tail, so he also has something to say about the contents. Whichever way you look at it, Hitchcock is one of the heavyweights that is always a step ahead of us. It’s enough to take a look through the boring selections of today’s legitimate art festivals to see what I mean by this.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.