I've just finished writing my first paper for my Hitchcock/Kubrick Film as Literature class. I'll be revising it throughout tomorrow and handing it in on Monday. I thought I'd troll for feedback here.

It's about Rope, Starring James Stewart, John Dall, and Farley Granger. It's one of my favorite movies by one of my favorite directors. The essay, as instructed by the Professor, is written with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the film. If you haven't seen this movie, I strongly recommend it!! If you have, then I welcome your feedback. What do you think of my thesis??

The Technical Eloquence of Hitchcock’s Rope

In the making of a film, Alfred Hitchcock took special pleasure in spearheading the use of new techniques. His interviews make it easy to see the pride with which he explains how he achieved some effect or other. No greater example exists than his film Rope (1948), which employed several technical innovations uncommon to filmmaking then and still today. This was not just Hitchcock’s way of playing with toys, however. Rope was made as it was to elicit specific emotional reactions from the viewer.

Rope, like many other films, was based on a stage play. In films, however, directors tend to expand the scenery of the play to more locations than is possible onstage. The dazzling Alpine scenes in The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965), for instance, were not possible on Broadway. Much of the first ten minutes of Harvey (Koster, 1950), where Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart) walks down the street to the pub, was not in the stage play at all, which opens in his private library. Hitchcock decries this approach in the book "Hitchcock" by Francois Truffaut, saying that “…. this is where the film makers often go wrong, and what they get is simply some dull footage that’s been added to the play artificially.” (212)

Hitchcock did the opposite with Rope. The credits play to a placid scene where people walk down a quiet city street (including Hitchcock himself). As soon as the credits have finished, we are pulled into an apartment, and there we stay. The apartment itself is arranged much like it would be onstage, with two rooms set next to each other. The viewer never sees the “wall” that is behind the camera in either room. The action is blocked much like a play would be, but the camera is “on stage” with the actors, drawing the audience into the room as well. As soon as we enter the apartment, we witness a murder, with the body then stashed in a trunk. The tension begins. The usual instinct is to run from a murder, especially if you have just committed it, but the guilty parties stay, and we, the witnesses, stay with them. The tension grows every time another person comes into the apartment and stays. No one leaves until near the end, and every new person in the room builds the pressure. Every time someone goes near the trunk or asks about the victim, it grows again. If Hitchcock had thrown in gratuitous scenes of the party guests arriving in their cabs and going up the stairs to the apartment, the pressure would have been vented when the action left the room. The audience would have a chance to relax, to “get away from it” for a bit. He keeps the feeling of unease constant and growing by keeping us in the small space that in real life, we would not hesitate to leave with great haste. He also keeps the pulse slightly elevated by repeatedly placing the camera, and thus the audience, next to the trunk.

A long window runs along the wall behind the action, offering a view of the New York skyline. This skyline also resembles what Broadway might offer. It is a diorama-like construct, with clouds that shift position at a regular rate throughout the film, and meticulous care was taken (to the point of reshooting several scenes) to display a colorful, but not too colorful, sunset fading into a dark night sky. The diorama’s appearance shows the attention to detail demanded by Hitchcock the artist. This progression of spun glass cloud and light gives the audience its’ only sense of time’s movement (and no doubt spares us a dozen or so shots of a clock). More importantly, however, the artificiality of the scenery serves to constantly remind us that everything truly important is in the apartment with us. That is the only place where we can see anything real, and in action. There are no birds, planes, or window washers to distract us from the tense situation, just this clockwork scenery. Hitchcock has managed to put a barrier around the scene, sheltering it from any outside reality until his purpose has been served.

Hitchcock also subtly manipulated the actors’ performances in order to draw the audience further into the drama. In most films, every scene will be composed of many cuts. During the process, actors will be doing the same short bits over and over, tweaking this or that, and correcting errors. They may go in and out of character during this process, and will be shooting the scenes in a different order than they appear in the finished work. The flow and timing are a result of the film’s editing. Plays are just the opposite. Actors, stagehands, orchestra, and audience are all “in the moment”. The performers must stay focused and in character. They are responsible for keeping the pace.

In filming Rope, Hitchcock eschewed editing as much as the physical medium itself allowed. Each cut was an entire reel of film, lasting about 10 minutes each. He avoided any obvious edits by having the camera zoom in on a dark field, like the back of a man’s jacket, at the end of a reel. The next reel would begin in the same spot, and move back. The pace of the “play” is never interrupted. The audience’s feeling of being in the room with the action is never challenged by a swift change of camera angle. By keeping the view to one camera, which of course can move about as a person would, the audience member never feels like a voyeur as much as like another person at the party – one who knows what’s up but cannot speak.
This tactic did more than merely allow a theatrical atmosphere, however. It forced the cast to perform in larger blocks. Instead of going in and out of character for 30-second cuts, they were forced to stay in character, and in the moment, for ten minutes at a time. This provided an emotional continuity that compliments the pacing continuity provided by the very same approach. Having the actors retain the emotions that their characters are feeling in this way helps draw the viewer into the emotional stew slowly boiling in that small space confining both cast and audience. By continuing to treat Rope as a play, Hitchcock loses none of the drama that made it work onstage in the first place.

While it is the norm today, color was fairly fresh technology in 1948. While it had been around for at least a decade, it was still usually reserved for special projects. Rope was, in fact, Hitchcock’s first color film. He didn’t merely allow the color to be its’ own reward, however. As he was already accustomed to using photographic style to make a cinematic point, color became another tool to him. For the most part, the color remained low-key, with soft, cool tones rather than bright, warm ones. Not only was Hitchcock taking caution with an unpredictable new (to him) medium, he was also taking care that the relative novelty of color would not distract the viewer from the story. In fact, part of the film was re-shot in order to tone down the sunset.

He used color pointedly in one instance, though.  When Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier) enters the party, she sees Kenneth (Douglas Dick) and mistakes him for the murder victim, David (Dick Hogan). She calls out the name “David”, startling Phillip (Farley Granger) and causing him to break his glass and cut himself. When the camera moves to Philip, the first thing the audience notices is the bright red blood on his hand. As it is normal to feel alarmed at the sight of someone bleeding, and since movie audiences had not yet in 1948 been inured to such sights, the audience is given a start. Had the film been black and white, the blood would not give the viewer a start at all. In fact, it is likely that the blood would go unnoticed for what it is until another character says “Philip, you’re bleeding”, which would be far less effective. This approach also allows Hitchcock to draw his metaphor subtly; Philip, indeed, has blood on his hands. Ironically, Hitchcock chose to make Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) in black and white so as to contain the emotional reaction to the blood in the shower scene.

At the climax of the film, Rupert (James Stewart) discovers what his hosts have done, and fires a gun out the window. This is the first time that the outside, or for that matter the windows themselves, have been acknowledged since the opening credits. In direct contrast to the carefully structured fantasy of the skyline, Hitchcock took great care in making the sounds at this point of the film realistic. To capture the sounds of people on the street reacting to the shots, he hung a microphone out of a window several stories up. He then had actors on the street reacting to the gunshots. This approach gave the voices distance; some words were clear, others not quite so. For the approaching police sirens, a microphone was set up outdoors and real car sirens were recorded, starting miles away and coming closer. The audience hears the sirens start far off into the dim distance, and slowly get louder as they grow closer. We hear the other street sounds, and the people now reacting to the approaching sirens.   Every sound from without is exactly like it would be to someone in a real apartment with a real window open in a real city. In this way Hitchcock uses meticulous reality to invite the outside world back into the picture. After being shunned for the length of the movie, reality can now enter the apartment again, just in time for Philip and Brandon (John Dall) to get a good taste of it. At this point, the tension is gone, the pressure vented out of the open window, and the “captive” audience is released to go where they will.

While Hitchcock’s entire career could be considered a love affair with cinema, Rope is a film for the theatregoer. While that makes it differ from much of his other works, it still has one thing in common with them all; Hitchcock’s contention that reality, plausibility, and character had less importance than the emotional involvement of the audience.  Creating that emotional involvement was the primary goal. From there came the joy taken in creating new ways of getting his desired image onscreen. The unique methods used in Rope would not be conducive to day-to-day filmmaking, and were not undertaken lightly. Everything Hitchcock did played a part in manipulating the audience’s emotions and creating a truly engaging experience.