Provide critical analysis of a film, specifically in relation to elements of the film’s style and other topics you consider relevant.
Psycho (1960)
The film Psycho, by the stalwart director, Alfred Hitchcock, is one of the most iconic films in the history of cinema. The film bears the testimony to the aesthetic excellence and usage of quintessential film techniques by the director. The film has left an everlasting mark on the minds of the audience across the globe, and enjoys immense popularity even on the present day.
The director places the audience away from the movie’s real dramatic centre. The opening moments of the film are utilized by Hitchcock to set up the ‘red herring’ storyline. Here, Marion stealing the money is shown as the localized storyline to set up a false main suspense storyline in the film. Even the title sequence at the opening and the very first moments of Psycho add to the ‘false’ feeling of fearfulness. Thus, various stages of suspense are portrayed in the film, making the entire experience much more unsettling and disruptive.
The story is linearly structured by the filmmaker, and it grips the audience right from the inception. The occurrences unfold in front of the audience in chronological order. The movie starts with Marion travelling and reaching this hotel. She stays there, and gets murdered. The search of missing Marion is on, and the murderer is finally caught by the police. The story is said from the perspective of a narrator, a person alien to the events that are occurring. The camera views the actions of the characters in the film. The voyeuristic nature of the camera is evident in many scenes in the film.
The film evokes the fearfulness of the audience, and makes them cringe at the horrific murder and suspenseful scenes. The theme of the film is based on horror and suspense. The filmmaker leaves no stone unturned to intrigue the audience with the scenes and occurrences of the film. Hitchcock grips the attention of the audience, and baffles them with his cinematic genius.
Hitchcock involves the audience as subjective characters in his film. This goes on to increase the psychological effects of the film for the audience. The audience can, thus, recognize the neurosis. They even identify with the various contrasting characters that are portrayed in the seminal cinematic work.
In the beginning of the film, the camera randomly opts one building, and then moves to one of the windows to explore the lives inside. The way the filmmaker uses the camera work to bring in a sense of random selection gives an idea to the audience that the characters are arbitrarily chosen. Thus, the audience is made to identify with the characters that are shown on the screen.
The major effect of starting the film with the hysterical tone makes the audience unable to return to a normal tone as the true storyline starts to get revealed in the due course of the narrative of the film. The director ensures that the narrative portrays the moments of horror as quick and intrusive ones, so that the audience is never able to come to terms with the shock. Thus, he uses the narrative structure to bring more tension in the cinematic work, so that the cinematic work has an accentuated effect on the minds of the people who are watching the film.
Hitchcock goes on to bring out the machinery of misogyny in this film through the Male Gaze. Marion Crane is shown many times in the film being partially-clothed. Even before she even reaches the Bates Hotel, the audience watches her. She gets questioned and the gaze follows her to Los Angeles. While the cop follows her, the scenes are obviously voyeuristic in nature as the cop sees Marion from the other side of the street as she goes on to buy a used car from a place.
It can be argued that the shower scene is portraiture of the sadistic desires of the male audience that gets played on the screen. The feminist film critic, Laura Mulvey, also argues about the male gaze in her seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). The scene in the film depicts the viewpoint from the voyeur’s perspective, and not the one of Marion. The director uses allusions to the voyeuristic gaze in the scene by showing the drain, the shower-head and Marion’s eye when she is dead.
This particular film by Alfred Hitchcock has revolutionized cinema in many ways. The technical excellence and quintessential content of the cinematic work has impressed one and all. Hitchcock handles the passage of time in the film with sheer perfection and panache. In the beginning of the movie, when Marion leaves the room, the audience understands that it is the same day. The character visits her workplace, gets some money that she is supposed to deposit in the bank and returns home. All these actions take place in the span of an afternoon, and thus the time frame does not face a change.
The shower scene is arguably the most eminent and best edited scene in the history of world cinema. The director uses the editing technique and sound to portray the horrendous murder scene to the audience. The audience witnesses the portraiture of as many as 78n shots on the screen in less than a minute. There is the sound of the knife slashing against the skin of the female character. Although the knife is never shown to enter the flesh, the audience is yet convinced owing to the motion of the hands, sounds and background score.
While the first part of the film shows that the events take place within the span of just two days, the next part has a different time frame. Arbogast starts the process of searching various hotels to get information about Marion who is missing. The filmmaker uses montage of a sequence to show him searching in different hotels—something that reflects the passage of time.
The director uses the powerful tool of dramatic irony to accentuate the effect on the minds of the audience. Dramatic irony is employed in a work of art when the audience comes to know more about an event than the film’s characters. As the detective climbs the stairs, the audience knows he would face something horrific, although he himself is unaware of the situation. Thus, the audience is gripped to the scene even more, and it accentuates the emotional reaction in them.
Psycho, as a film brings horror in the minds of the audience. However, this fear is not instilled due to the cruelty of the murders. The fear has its roots in the subconscious identification with the various characters of the movie. All the characters that are portrayed in the film reflect a facet of a collective character.
The director successfully enforces the idea in the minds of the audience that the sentiments and emotions that the film evoke in the mind can reach out to anyone for the very fact that the continuous struggle between the good and the evil is prevalent in all the aspects of human life. Since the audience gets involved in the film subjectively, this subjectivity of perspective enables Hitchcock in unleashing the effect of horror on the minds. He terrorizes the audience with the lingering anxious sequences as the film progresses with its theme.
The unparalleled capability of the director in the portrayal of all the occurrences using the various cinematic techniques and devices makes this film attain immortality in the history of cinema. The film is surely one of most famous works of audio-visual art. The work is immortalized in the minds of the gazillion people who are still in awe of the quintessence of the filmmaker and the cinematic work.
Works Cited
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Janet Leigh.
Paramount Pictures, 1960. Film.
