Hitchcock, the split screen and the immanent beyond.

Still from Psycho (1960) featuring Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates.

Lets consider the famous quote from Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in the film Psycho (1960) ‘we’re all in our private traps clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out, we scratch and claw but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it we can never budge an inch’. What this statement communicates is a feeling of being immobile, passive, suspended, possibly at the mercy of some unknowable higher being. Like insects within a jam jar belonging to a child with a macabre interest in our fate.

Through his disruption of the continuity that regulates narrative cinema, and through his innovations within the techniques of filmmaking; Hitchcock reminds us that he is in control of this world we have entered and that the only rules and laws are his rules and laws, we are reminded that he is the Master, and we the suspended slaves, caught within his intricately crafted bonds, passive to the mercy of his arbitrary desires.

He represents then a force beyond the knowable world. A menace, a disturbance.      

 It is Hitchcock’s intention to unsettle and captivate both his audience and character’s through a suggestion of some disturbance from the beyond, this beyond is realized as the unconscious in the film Psycho, Nature in the film the Birds, and perhaps death in the film Vertigo. Yet it is also Hitchcock himself  who represents this beyond to film goers, since he represents himself as some Macabre Master and creator, pulling the strings behind the scenes.    

The beyond, in Hitchcock’s universe could perhaps be compared to a Platonist view of the beyond, whereby the beyond is something finite, beyond or above our means of perception, yet it is that which governs and locates our means of understanding and perception.

Continuing to loosely follow the narrative of Psycho then lets come to one of the most famous of all scenes in Hitchcock and in Cinema.

The shower scene in Psycho is so well known that it hardly seems worth going into a great discussion of it, to briefly summarize it’s significance as part of my research; I will say that it explores the body, the body as a concept or maybe even a hypothesis, perhaps drawing a parallel between the Filmic construct as a body, a body of segments that are both connected and yet dissected and disjointed by the overall perceptive experience, highlighted in this case through the cut. In the shower scene the body and the machine of cinema become entangled, and become restricted and malfunction as they get caught up in each other.     

Lets consider this shower montage in relation to the preceding montage that we examined earlier ( the driving sequence which brought Marion to the Bates Motel), we can in these terms draw a parallel between these two montages, both representing a drive of sorts if we identify Norman’s or perhaps our own sex drive as fueling the shower scene, Lets then summarize these two montage sequences collectively as being a deregulation or deconstruction of order, just as the driving montage serves to establish a mechanical progression, a vehicle through time/space and the subsequent collapse or malfunction of that vehicle as it is overpowered by the totality of nature, so too does the shower montage establish a body of segments that attempt to resist a unified location, a body of segments that become disrupted, misplaced through the mechanized cutting, a body suspended, dismembered and no where. A body fueled by desire and engaged in a futile struggle against nature, against totality, against suspension and against death.

Just as nature and the weather succeed in deregulating the driving montage and overpowering our assertion over reality by forcing us into an impotent suspended state, it is Marion’s death that interrupts the stabbing montage, and again forces us into an impotent suspended state.  There is one shot which is born from this montage about stabbing, cutting and splicing the body that explicitly illustrates this position.

 

The montage concludes with this final shot of Marion as she is dying of the stab wounds inflicted on her body, I see this shot as an address to the viewer, an effort to challenge the frame, and the restricted, limited, empirical order that is supposed and as I will later explain denied through the process of framing, this reaching into the beyond is then a means of addressing that beyond, beyond the body, beyond the immediate, beyond the frame. Is Marion trying to pull us into the nightmare world that she occupies or is she trying to pull herself out of it? Again I will refer to Norman’s famous quote since it is as if Marion is trying to pull herself out of her own private trap, which after the stabbing montage has been indentified as the frame. Perhaps our position as suspended, disengaged, impotent, witnesses, is our own trap from which Marion is trying to pull us. 

In any case the result is an exposition of a third place that I have already discussed in my study of the driving montage, a third place that exists somewhere between us as viewers and the frame it’s self.

Lets then use a seemingly paradoxical expression to define this third place, that being the immanent beyond, I see it as being a desire to explore this sense of an immanent beyond that motivates many contemporary directors to appropriate a ‘split screen’ device within their films, what emerges when; two screens are situated parallel to each other within a larger screen, is that a void appears in the gap between the two screens, a non-place is created, a place that is real yet is no-where, a place that both belongs to the screen itself and yet is beyond it also.

This split in the screen represents a world of unknowable detail beyond our spectrum of understanding.     

A point I will return to later.

Psycho Driving Montage

This is one of my favourite scenes amoung Hitchcock’s films and a big influence on my own work (see ‘Waterloo Sunset’ project). So have written a short study of the scene. This study might be extended to form part of my essay about Split Screen Cinema and screens within screens, in which case I will start to consider the relationship between the windscreen of Marion’s car and the Cinema screen.

The Scene which leads Marion into the Bates motel, uses montage to represent Marion’s passage through time and space, while as viewers we simultaneously travel through Marion’s metal state.  Point of view shots depicting Marion driving  motorways are intercut with close ups of Marion’s face, while through the sound track we hear an imaginary testimony from several male authority figures, starting with a traffic cop and a used car sales man that Marion has encountered on her travels and finally Marion’s employer and his business associate from which Marion has stolen 40,000 dollars. These voices in Marion’s head expose both Marion’s paranoid mental state and also give us some background information on her position. The sound montage and Marion’s journey concludes with a darker more violent remark from Mr Cassady( the sleazy businessman who’s deposit Marion has stolen) ‘Well I ain’t about to kiss of 40,000 dollars I’ll get it back and if any of it’s missing I’ll replace it with her fine, soft flesh’.

It has turned from day to night, it is pouring with rain and there is little visibility through the windscreen, we just see the lights of oncoming traffic and the poor driving conditions force Marion of the main road, she pulls into the Bates Motel. Thus Marion stops driving and becomes passive and submissive to her environment.

It is important to remember that these voices are presented as Marion’s imagining of the kind of thing these people might be saying about her, rather than as being words actually spoken; the sound montage exists inside Marion’s head, and we as audience are then provided information about a dimension both belonging to and removed and isolated from the overall reality presented by the films narrative.

A kind of alternative reality thus emerges that occupies a privileged space between the occurrences of the film, our engagement with the character of Marion and our unique position as passive spectators. 

This last remark differs from the rest of the voices we have heard which were incidental and matter of fact in their tone, the fierce weather and the aggressive rush of oncoming traffic function as a kind of impressionistic landscape communicating Marion’s psychological disquiet while the functional screen of the Cinema and Marion’s car, begin to lose their illustrative qualities and start to take on a more expressionist charechter.  

What is interesting about the remark from Mr Cassady is that it makes most explicit the connection between Money, Power, Violence, and Sex, and how these are the real factors which constitute the motivational, ‘driving’ complexes of our Character and are simultaneously the themes which keep us engaged as viewers and are thus fueling the journey upon which we are collectively embarked.

Thus during this scene the being of Marion dissolves into the greater cosmos of our viewing experience, as the entity of Marion becomes forced of the road by the weather, she in turn becomes over- powered by her unconscious; both Marion’s journey and our journey through this narrative suddenly become overpowered; overpowered by elements beyond our control, the forces of the world become explicit and Nature, Money, Sex, Gender all emerge from this scene and force us of the road of civilization into a scary, irrational, nightmare, primordial world, The Bates Motel. The montage illustrating a mechanized, passage of time and movement thus malfunctions, we are then suspended, though time has not stopped, it has in fact caught up with us, we are no longer in transit through time, we are firmly attached to it, ruled or governed by it once again, and so as the forces of nature overpower our mechanical, empirical assertion over it we become suspended, impotent and passive.

Essay Plan: Screens within Screens

Introduction

My essay ‘Screens within Screens’ fundamentally considerers the usage of split screen and embedded screens as a formal device within narrative cinema. My initial study of the split screen device within narrative cinema has led me to conclude; There are three distinct effects that the usage of split screen in contemporary cinema is employed to create.

1) is associated with surveillance and the assumption that technology gives us a privileged power to be everywhere at once and to record the objective unfolding of events in multiple situations simultaneously, the privileged view of the control room.

2) The other is more expressionistic, the multi image composition can be used to convey a fractured personal reality whereby the subjective viewpoint provides the only form of government. Often psychological and emotional conflict are characterized through this more expressionistic usage of the split screen format, or sometimes the split screen can be used to represent a sense of authorship whereby the cinematic vision of the director is called into focus by drawing attention to the construct of the film in question. This expressionistic use of split screen then is to encourage an emphatic engagement with the film’s author and/or central character(s). It is ultimately subjective and/or immersive.

3) The third is harder to define, often it will sit comfortably within either of the above categories however the key principle that defines this third category is interactivity, the deductive powers of the viewer(s) are called into question, the viewer(s) is challenged to put together the little pieces and make the big picture. There is then a game like engagement that is instigated through the use of the split screen to encourage comparative and deductive analyses. While there is of course a dialogue between contemporary cinema and computer games, and many contemporary films could be seen as heavily derivative from gaming interfaces, it is cinema ultimately that introduced the use of split screen in this context notably through the Murder Mystery genre and titles from the 70s such as The Boston Strangler.

The first chapter of this essay will be split into three sections and will attempt to chronicle three independent history’s of the Split Screen within mainstream cinema or at least site some of the key moments in those history’s. I have deliberately chosen to keep these three histories isolated from each other. They will at times correspond and at times contradict with each other, but ultimately I want each of these histories to be self contained and independently resolved, while ignorant of each other (isolated histories). What I am trying to achieve by doing this is a structural introduction to my second chapter which is about ‘meta narrative’ my aim is to introduce the subject of meta narrative by creating an essay where the subject of meta narrative is introduced as a meta narrative in itself, I will return to this point later, first I will describe each of the independent sections within chapter one.

Chapter one three histories

of the Split screen within

Narrative Cinema.

This history of split screen cinema is relative to the introduction of psychology into mainstream culutre and how structure and architecture have been used to both communicate and to some extent instigate psychological conflict. The bulk of this section will be a study of the film Psycho which represents a good place to mediate between German Expressionist Cinema (Hitchcock having learnt his craft in Germany during the era of Expressionistic Cinema) and the split screen films of Brian De Palma (De Palma’s cinema being explicitly influenced and in continuous dialogue with Hitchcock). It has been observed how the architecture of Norman’s house in the film Psycho corresponds in some interesting ways with Freud’s model of the psyche  as divided by Ego, Id and Super Ego. The significance of this for me is as an introduction to a filmmaker using the technical structure of space within his film to assert a theme beyond the dramatic occurrences of narrative. I see Psycho as being a good introduction to expressionistic uses of split screen because of this empathies on structural space as a reference to psychological phenomena, thus it anticipates film makers such as De Palma who uses multiple screens and screens within screens as an expressionistic device to convey a fractured sense of self.

This next history of split screen cinema looks firstly at telecommunications, the split screen format was introduced into narrative cinema as a means of representing a phone conversation without cross cutting. The engagement with split screen in this history is in relation to technocratic power structures and an appeal to technology to provide government. Space and time become de-regulated and then re-regulated through technological innovation in this history and the medium becomes the message, while technology in it’s self becomes a symbol of governing power. Here the embedded screen represents location within a power structure, and through technology we are offered a privileged view, all seeing and god like, the man in the control room. I will look at the history of split screen cinema in relation to the history of telecommunications and compare Hollywood thrillers (many of which star Harrison Ford) in relation to news room reportage of the first gulf war. To consider how Technology and Authority have become synonymous in meaning, and how this presupposed authority has been created and then exploited for propaganda purposes. I will reference Foucault’s discourses about power structures and also theorists such as Theodore Roszak and Arthur Kroker who explore the notion of technocracy.

This third History of Split Screen Cinema is concerned with interactivity, and the split screen format that invites the viewer to make a choice between competing options, and by doing so to play an active part in resolving the narrative conflicts. I will follow the evolution of this mode of Split Screen cinema through the Murder Mystery genre and look at films such as the Boston Strangler where simultaneous abstract information is presented to the viewer, often in close up ‘clues’, I will follow the evolution of this interactivity within cinema through to contemporary cinema that has entered into a dialogue with computer gaming and the language/interfaces of Games. While also considering advertising and the appropriation of screens within screens in advertising contexts i.e ‘ugly woman before, beautiful woman afterwards’. I will thus identify the history of these interactive modes of split screen media, as being motivated by consumerist culture, the increasing demands of the consumer to be provided with an engaging experience rather than a simple product per-se. The main factors that communicate this engaging experience to the consumer are suggestions of choice, of their being options. I will thus follow this discussion of the evolution of interactive engagement within the split screen format from; the Murder Mystery genre through computer games and advertising and maybe conclude with a study of a contemporary product such as the series 24. What I want to define in this history is a relationship between interactivity and consumerist culture. I will conclude with some evaluation of contemporary politics, there is a conclusion I want to make, it starts with the murder mystery genre whereby though our choices we are able to identify and distinguish the villain, the murderer, by having options and being able to evaluate we are able to make the right decisions ultimately and the result of those decisions is justice’ thus there is a connection between democracy and justice and so a kind of association exists here between interactive engagement and democratic freedom, and I will identify this misconception as consumerist culture, and so this history of split screen cinema is relative to the history of consumerism.

Chapter two

Meta narrative.

The study of Meta Narrative is in many ways my real interest and by looking at screens within screens and presenting three isolated histories simultaneously I hope to be able to approach this subject.

What is a meta narrative? Simply put it’s kind of the bigger picture around the little picture, perhaps first introduced by Plato in his theory of ideal forms, an ideal form being an absolute value that is beyond the world of reason and logic, according to him there must be an ultimate beauty an ultimate truth etc against which all lesser examples of beauty and truth are quantified. In this context Meta Narrative is also transcendental and metaphysical, often spiritual or religious narratives appeal to the greater truth beyond the story.

Postmodernism uses split screen to both introduce and deny the idea of a meta-narrative one of the most resonant ideas among post modern thought is that culture is incapable of referencing beyond it’s self and thus the search for meaning just equates to containers within containers so to speak with in a fractured perception of reality. Postmodernism often acknowledges the fact that if there were an ultimate total narrative, a meta narrative, it would not be approachable through language and rational discourse, since by definition it would have to allude these containers, since the big picture can never fit within the little picture. Thus culture and philosophy in their search for enlightenment have inevitably become self obsessed and narcissistic and abandoned the exploration of metaphysics which once gave them meaning.

This section will then explore these discussions while referencing contemporary cinema and ways which it uses split screen in a paradoxical way to both suggest and deny potentialities of a meta narrative, the paradoxical logic of which can be compared to the famous liars paradox ‘this statement is false’. I will also reference relevant theories of post structuralism and post modernism from Lyotard and Baudrillard, through out this section.

Chapter 3

Soft Cinema

May not be necessary, though I would at some stage like to introduce a consideration of Soft Cinema (Manovitch) or software cinema, cinema which uses a program to randomly present different material from an archive or database, not sure how this relates to my overall subject other than through the split screen, but I have a feeling that there is something interesting about this which might be a means of concluding my essay.