I have a strong admiration for Alfred Hitchcock. Though he
may not be my favorite filmmaker of all time, I can totally appreciate his
genius and the influence he has contributed to modern cinema. I have decided to
talk about 2 Hitchcock films I really like for this week and next week. This
time, I will talk about the James Stewart classic – ‘Rope’ (1948)!
‘Rope’ has always been seen as a very special Hitchcock
film, because it was one of the Master of Suspense’s most daring and
experimental films. This Hitchcock classic has generated more attention
recently due to the emergence of ‘Birdman’ (2014), because both films have a
common technical style – both films ‘appear’ to be shot in one continuous take,
meaning that there are no obvious edits at all in the films (though, the
situation in ‘Rope’ was not as simple as that). ‘Rope’ came as a time when
Hitchcock was actively exploring the potential of the long take, and the film
and his subsequent film, ‘Under Capricorn’, are both celebrated of having very
precise and expressive long takes. This feat provided great challenges for the
Master of Suspense, because fewer edits meant that the whole shot has to be
designed in a very precise manner – the composition, the movement, the
performance and staging – everything has to be made as the Master wanted. I
will point out that the ‘long take’ style was not merely a technical gimmick –
the technique gave meaning to the story as a whole. And, ‘Rope’ is also worth
pursuing because it demonstrates how Hitchcock generated suspense through what
the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called a relation-image / mental-image,
and another strategy which I would call ‘Knowing more than James Stewart’.
Indeed, ‘Rope’ is a beautiful Technicolor film – though it was made in 1948, the
quality is still high for today’s standard.
2 college kids, through a mis-interpretation of Nietzsche’s
idea of ‘Over-man’, decided that they were superior to another of their
classmate, and so they strangled him with a rope. Believing that their
intelligence has led him to commit a ‘perfect crime’, they invited a bunch of
guests (including the victim’s father) to a dinner party, when the dead body
was hidden. They wanted to see if anyone could discover this crime. They have
also invited a special guest – the housemaster-turned-publisher Rupert (James
Stewart), and their intention was even more perverse – they wanted to offer
this crime as a gift to Rupert because it was him who taught them the idea of
‘over-man’ and the perfect crime. When the party went on, guests started to get
suspicious of the victim who never turned up. Rupert, with a logical detective
mind, decided to take the situation to his own hands. Time was running out –
would Rupert discover the truth?
When we talk about Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’, it is all about the
impressive ‘one continuous shot’ approach. Technically, it was not possible for
a feature film, because it was limited by the length of the film (about 10
minutes), and more realistically, when the projectionist in a cinema had to
change a reel (about 20 minutes). Therefore, in Hitchcock’s case, we can assert
that for a movie of about 80 minutes, it is technically impossible to shoot a
single continuous shot with film. But, Hitchcock could make the movie appear as
if it was shot in one continuous shot, as he could use some clever, unobvious
obstructions or a very sharp cut (which was at the time the projectionist had
to change the film reel) to transit into another sequence. It worked very well
because movie audience were often very aware of cuts in a film. Indeed, editing
often helps the audience to understand, for example, the spatial relationships
between two characters, and how a few series of actions are happening or
influencing each other through time. To be honest, for audience who are not
film buffs, they will not be aware of the fact that films like ‘Rope’ and
‘Birdman’ appear to be shot in a continuous take, and even if one looks very
carefully to see where the cuts in ‘Rope’ are, I doubt whether they can easily
find out except someone has told him before – because our attention spans are
not able to do that, and also we are so conditioned to cinematic editing that
we will let these ingenious cuts to escape our senses.
Why did Hitchcock make ‘Rope’ as if it was a single,
continuous shot? Well, the first thing was that Hitchcock loved to use
symbolism in many of his films. The rope, not only as the two college boys’
weapon of choice, also uncannily resembled the structure of the story. We can
analogize a short piece of string as the content on one roll of film (i.e. one
sequence), and these 8 or 9 pieces of strings are then tied up by knots – which
are the sharp cuts or obstructions that serve to cover up technical limitations
and link up the whole film.
What this continuous take approach has achieved was that the
story was understood to take place in a real-time manner, which was rather rare
for most films (once again, I have to point out that the film did not totally
happen in real time, for example, the dinner party took place in about 20
minutes, which is quite impossible for the real world). When ‘Rope’ was
unfolded in real-time, it made the audience far more conscious of the passing
of time, and it reflected the desperation of James Stewart’s character to solve
the puzzle, because, the two bad guys might end up walking away free. The
real-time format and the claustrophobic apartment setting made the atmosphere
very tense and suspenseful, as all scores have to be settled in here, within a
short time. I can also think of another relation between the rope and
Nietzsche’s ideas. Man on the tight-rope, and James Stewart’s character was
walking on a pretty tight one!
This then brings us to Hitchcock’s mechanics of suspense. ‘Rope’
is a film that illustrates how Hitchcock has designed the story and generated a
suspenseful atmosphere for the audience. His style has been studied by many
subsequent film theories, and Deleuze has provided some original and insightful
views regarding Hitchcock’s approach. Classifying Hitchcock’s style as a ‘relation-image’
or ‘mental-image’, Deleuze believed that Hitchcock’s style worked because he
always introduced a thirdness element in his many films. While Deleuze’s views
were very elaborate, an important thesis was that Hitchcock’s films always
invited the participation of a third party – the audience – as part of the
plot. Not only the audience members were seen as observers or voyeurs, they
were often active because they could see the relations behind the different
elements in the film more than the characters did. I believe it was an
important point because it very much illustrated how Hitchcock could
successfully generate suspense in his various films. For this I would elaborate
under the heading ‘Knowing more than James Stewart’.
Hitchcock’s audience often knows more than the protagonists
of his films. In a number of iconic cases, it has something to do with James
Stewart, who has appeared in a number of Hitchcock’s most famous films. This is
interesting because, rather coincidentally, there were similar situations for
his anti-heroic characters in a number of Anthony Mann’s Western films, which
were mostly made in the 1950s. While Anthony Mann used his Cinemascope
compositions to allow the audience to see and know much more than Stewart’s
characters, Hitchcock allowed his audience to map out the relations and notice
the important clues way before James Stewart’s characters could have, or never
would have. This approach was deliberate, because such a dissonance between the
audience and the character’s viewpoints not only made the protagonist far more
tragic due to his failures of noticing the clues, it also generated suspense as
a result. Hitchcock let the audience know the important details. In the first
shot of ‘Rope’, we already know who were responsible for the murder. In the
most famous case, ‘Vertigo’, we know long before Stewart’s character the
ultimate truth; yet it still did not prevent a dark ending. Too often, it was
these extra insights that would have saved the protagonist from these
misfortunes and sad fate. Thus, the audience was more active than some passive
observers. While Hitchcock encouraged us to identify with the moral protagonist
of the story, we had an additional connection to the plot, by understanding
more about the cause-and-effect than the protagonist. Through this, the
audience will develop sympathy towards these characters’ absurd fate.
Through this approach, Hitchcock shifted the focus of the
audience’s attention regarding the plot. In many films, the directors intend to
synchronize the perceptions of the audience and the character, meaning that the
audience will experience the same situation as the same time as the character,
leading to a surprising sensation from the audience. There is nothing wrong
with this approach, yet Hitchcock’s approach was more innovative because it
could serve further purposes. If the story is a murder mystery, than the
audience’s focus will be on the ‘Who did it?’ and they will concentrate on the
clues – like the protagonist – to find out who was responsible for the murder.
In Hitchcock’s case, because he has allowed the audience to notice the extra
information, the audience would divert the focus to why the character committed
the crime, and hopefully shed lights on the psychological motivations behind
it. In some cases, Hitchcock could also allow explorations on other themes such
as obsession, guilt or psychoanalytical concepts. True, the ‘whodunit’ format
can provide thrill for the audience, yet by adopting his approach, Hitchcock
could engage his audience to think intensely about his films, and to acquire
insights from these brilliant works.
One last comment regarding the theme of ‘Rope’. This film
came out in 1948, for which the world has just be woken up from the nightmare
known as ‘World War II’. The film captured a relevant point because the two
murderers distorted the teachings of Nietzsche, which was what Hitler and
Nazism were driving at what they attempted to rationalize their racist beliefs.
It is really sad to see that some immoral persons will often resort to
mis-interpretation or distortion of the meanings of good-natured teachings
throughout history, in order to justify their ends. One can easily see how
disappointed was Rupert when he found that his efforts to educate young
students would lead to such a horrific crime. And, full of hubris and over
self-confidence, the two young boys thought they were above the law and could
get away due to their intelligence. Yet, it was these very qualifies that would
lead to their destructions. ‘Rope’, a movie from almost 70 years ago, can just
be as much a cautionary tale for today’s audience.
by Ed Law
16/4/2017
Film Analysis
