Fragments and Fury

Abstract

Fragments and Fury David Greven (bio) Bruce Isaacs. The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $39.95 paperback. I have often considered my critical stance on Brian De Palma an anomalous one. While I consider Alfred Hitchcock the greatest of classical Hollywood directors (a placeholder description given his transatlantic career), I consider De Palma the greatest postclassical Hollywood director. Important critics of De Palma, such as Adrian Martin, Terrence Rafferty, Thomas Leitch, Pauline Kael, and especially Robin Wood, have defended his aesthetics, and specifically defended his work against the dread charge of “ripping-off Hitchcock,” but not very many critics have written from a position of partisanship for both directors. (Kael famously angered Andrew Sarris and others by perversely proclaiming De Palma the infinitely greater director, but Eyal Peretz essentially follows suit in his book on De Palma, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses [Stanford University Press, 2008].) In The Art of Pure Cinema, Bruce Isaacs has, more than any other critic I have read, shed light on the peculiar and heady relationship between Hitchcock and De Palma, and in so doing has produced a thrilling account of De Palma’s aesthetics that illustrates its singular force and overlaps with Hitchcock’s. Isaacs also sheds revelatory light on Hitchcock, who, while not the sole focus of this book, is treated with ample rigor. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, Isaacs stages— and ably inspires—a bracing conversation among Hitchcock and several of his “imitators”: De Palma and the giallo [End Page 146] directors Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. This is a book I have long waited for, and it exceeds my expectations in its finesse, rigor, insightfulness, and—most notable of all—committed demonstration of the art of close reading and textual analysis in this era of detachment and distance in Film Studies, characterized by what we can call archival hegemony. Isaacs brilliantly breaks new ground by covering the seemingly well-covered terrain of Hitchcock’s theory of “pure cinema.” Excavating the meanings of this term, how Hitchcock got to it, and what it means for his cinema and its disciples is Isaacs’s foundation. He points out that a desire to create “a cinema unaffiliated with earlier artistic forms” was not unique to Hitchcock but a goal shared by many early twentieth-century aesthetic modernists (15). “Pure cinema . . . was a European avant-garde movement that emerged during the mid-1920s in Paris,” incorporating elements of German expressionism and Soviet montage and exemplified by the work of filmmakers Henri Chomette and Germaine Dulac (16). The latter was particularly relevant to Hitchcock’s early development as a film theorist, as was, of course, F.W. Murnau, the great German expressionist director whose filmmaking Hitchcock observed first-hand (The Last Laugh, 1924). Isaacs discusses connections between Murnau’s and Dulac’s views on pure cinema, which coalesced in Hitchcock’s thought. Isaacs makes sure to clarify that Hitchcock did not take an active interest in Dulac’s writings and films; instead, “his aesthetic development occurred in relative proximity to the emergence” of the pure cinema movement that Dulac led (18). Isaacs contends that Hitchcock’s cinema is one in which “narrative and representational form is increasingly distilled into the abstraction of cinema’s pure formal and phenomenological elements: relations within space, movement, time (and thus duration), perception, affect, and intensity” (23). No wonder the giallo artists found his work so resonant! An early section of Isaacs’s book includes a remarkably fresh and detailed look at the scene in Frenzy [End Page 147] (1972) when the murderer Rusk takes the deeply likable Babs, his unfortunate next victim, up the stairs to his flat, saying she is really “my type of woman,” before Hitchcock’s camera ominously backtracks into the street, where the ambient street noises slowly engulf the soundtrack. Isaacs painstakingly analyzes this sequence in order to demonstrate Hitchcock’s negotiation, tethered to the impact of the tracking shot, of realist and anti-realist techniques, and he emphasizes a new excessiveness in the director’s style, excess being a key linkage among Hitchcock and his adrenalized...