"I want to put my The film is organized on the screen, rather than simply shooting a scene that has been organized like a theater performance. This is the effect of giving a movie life-this is a feeling, it makes you feel When you see this movie on the screen, it is produced directly through visual means. The screen must speak its own language, a unique language. If it does not regard a scene as a raw material, it does not use this Separate the raw materials and weave it into an expressive visual image, then it cannot achieve this."
Montage VS long shot. The great Hitchcock seemed to be on the side of the montage. But this does not mean that Hitchcock does not like long shots. In fact, many famous scenes in his film career used long shots. If this is not enough, then the node of time has brought us into the most famous long-shot film in the Hitchcock movie sequence "Rope, 1948" (Rope, 1948). This is another turning point in Hitchcock's artistic career. Prior to this, Hitchcock finally ended his troubled contract relationship with David Selznick through the filming of "The Paradine Case", and became a close friend of Sydney Bernstein. Transatlantic Pictures, their own independent production company. "Imperial Soul" is Hitchcock's first independently produced and directed film, and also his first color film. If it is said that in previous movies such as "Destroying Flowers", Hitchcock has been unable to restrain his own impulse to shoot murders, and even let the characters in the film tell the art of perfect murder, then, in "Desperate Soul", he Let all these desires be expressed in the most perfect and realistic way. If it is said that Hitchcock after the passage of time has complained in an interview with Truffau and others that "Imperial Soul" is a failed work due to his personal "fascination" that is too paranoid, then, Isn't Hitchcock just a paranoid artist?
"It's better to set up a stage for the audience to come to see it!"
The story of "Irpato" is adapted from a play by the playwright Patrick Hamilton. Hitchcock's works include movies based on the drama, but "Irrath of the Soul" "What distinguishes it from others is that it is almost a movie that uses a moving long lens to present the real space and time of the drama. "Imperial Soul" and "Rear Window" are listed as one of Hitchcock's most experimental films, and this kind of experimentation stems from Hitchcock's "everything to do realism" (Truffaut on The evaluation of this film) is a kind of paranoia. This 80-minute-long film only cut 10 dollars, and this is only because the technical conditions at the time only allowed each film to be shot for about 10 minutes. What's more, almost half of the editing was done by Hitchcock. It is carefully hidden, and a black field is naturally formed through close-ups of clothing or furniture. When the camera is pulled out again, Hitchcock has actually completed a cut.
This paranoid long-shot shooting posed a huge challenge to the actors and staff at the time. Since the Technicolor camera in the late 1940s was extremely large, and all the personnel were shooting in a space that was imitated from a real apartment, I wanted to make the camera move and adjust the lighting and other equipment during the on-site shooting according to the movement of the camera. It is something that can only be done without fail. A small mistake in one department will cause the entire scene to be re-shot. Since Hitchcock once again demonstrated his fascination with enclosed scenes and claustrophobia in this film, all the staff have to cooperate with him in this small space. When shooting a panoramic view, the furniture in the entire room is vividly visible, and once the camera advances to shoot middle shots or close-ups, these furniture are often moved, and their positions have to be occupied by equipment such as light cameras. However, moving furniture and equipment also cause unavoidable noise. Therefore, what we are seeing now is actually the result of at least two shots. The radio equipment was abandoned for the first shot and only the picture was taken. In the second shooting, the camera is abandoned, only the sound is taken, and the sound and the picture are combined in the later stage.
Hitchcock's extreme realism approach also challenges the actors. If in the early Hitchcock movies, the actors with rich experience in theater performance could not adapt to the fragmentary performance method of the film, then, in "Imperial Soul", screen-born actors such as James Stewart and John Dall In turn, they must draw inspiration from theatrical performances, so that their performances appear to be complete and uningenious. This film is also the first collaboration between James Stewart and a master. Hitchcock once invited Cary Grant, whom he has always loved, to play this role, but choosing Stewart is obviously the right choice. "Cary Grant is sexy, and James Stewart lacks this sexy." But Pat Hitchcock said that his father thought that "American audiences will recognize James more because he is a symbol of everyman for Hitchcock. "However, James Stewart himself doesn't like the work he first collaborated with Hitchcock. He even complained on the set that if Hitchcock is so obsessed with presenting movies in this way, then he" It’s better to set up a stage for the audience to see it!"
From black and white to color
Nowadays, another reason why "Imperial Soul" is often discussed is because he is Hitchcock's first color film. According to the Warner Bros. brochure and "The New York Daily News" (The New York Daily News), this is the first "surprise film about murder and detectives" in film history that uses color film. Hitchcock is the purest aesthetician in film history (almost as Wilde-like temperament as the two killers in this film). His requirements for light and color are so demanding that he eventually fought Lost the film’s photographer Joseph Valentine (Joseph Valentine), who had collaborated with him on "Mystery" (1943). As he explained in François Truffaut’s interview with him, he believes that Valentino lacks an “artistic taste” in color photography:
"I decided to make colors extremely simplified. We have already I built an apartment with a living room, corridor and kitchen. The (windows) face the New York skyline, and the background is processed into a semicircle... When I took the last four to five rolls of tape, I found that at sunset, the sun The orange in the middle is too strong, so we remade the last five volumes...Valentino said to himself: "Well, this is just another sunset. "Obviously, either he hasn't seen the sunset or watched it with enough time, so his shooting results are totally unacceptable. The things he took are like postcards with gaudy colors."
In Hitchcock's eyes, the color of the film should be suppressed, only in this way can it be consistent with the world of upper-class artistic intellectuals in which the story takes place. We also noticed that the mural on the wall of the well-decorated Manhattan apartment in the story is either a pencil drawing or a black and white monochrome painting. The opening shot of the film—two well-dressed young men strangling another man with a rope—has already hinted at the absence of bright colors in the film: the scene takes place in a dark room, with curtains obscuring the light outside the window. All three men are wearing black suits and ties, so all we can see are their faces, hands, the corners of white shirts and beige curtains that block the sun. After stuffing the body into the suitcase, one of the killers, Brandon, turned on a lamp, which cast a golden light on the room. "No!" his partner Phillip said. Brandon turned off the light and lit a cigarette. "It was the darkness that defeated you." He said gleefully. "No one would feel safe in the dark." He turned around, walked to the curtains, and rolled them up. Outside was the cold steel Manhattan skyline above. It is a few pinkish clouds at dusk. Now, the room was surveyed by a cool and comfortable light. Brandon said, "It's a pity that we can't open the windows and do this in broad daylight!"
The two killers discussed the murder and began to prepare dinner. They walked through the hall, dining room, and kitchen, and then returned to the living room again, where the decoration colors were relatively low-key and dark. A long shot followed by a long shot, Hitchcock technicians subtly adjusted the tone of the entire set until the skyline outside the window turned into a dark silhouette. In the fifth shot, the sky is dim, the top of the building has almost disappeared into the darkness, and the room is full of shadows. Rupert turned on the lamp on the piano, and this caused Phillip to furiously: "Do you mind turning it off?" He turned off the light, and Rupert obeyed and said nothing. In the sixth shot, the room has become so dark that when the servant starts blowing out the candles and cleaning the remnants of the party, she has to turn on most of the electric lights; at this moment, a rose-colored strip of light shines from the sky. The skyline, and in the glowing skyscraper, a tiny neon light is shining red. Finally, when the final night fell, the light from the electric lights outlined the entire skyline, and we also saw the most colorful picture in this film. Rupert took a rope out of his pocket and claimed that Brandon and Phillip were murderers; when the camera turned to capture their reaction, the huge S on the neon sign on the right outside the window happened to start to flash. When Rupert opened the suitcase in the middle of the room, the neon lights illuminate his face as pale green as a patient, and then apply a layer of blood red.
The last shot is an excellent example of how a subject that is accustomed to black and white thrillers can be reborn through the power of color. In order to allow the audience to receive the effect of this lens at the end, Hitchcock used only a fairly limited color design for most of the film, and avoided high contrast and dramatic shadows. He told Truffaut: "When I saw the first film development, my first feeling was that color can show more things than black and white." He immediately realized that he no longer needed "outline lines." Or the back light, because the color can already distinguish the foreground and the background clearly. Although he was strongly opposed by the studio technicians, he still insisted not to allow exaggerated shadows to appear on the walls and the faces of the characters. And the result of this is a fairly restrained film, which effectively controls the use of colors, and these colors burst out dazzlingly until the last moment of the film.
Multiple insinuations
Although "Imperial Soul" is not a film with a clear religious color, we can still see the intricate relationship between Hitchcock's Catholic plot and the film. To kill, invite related characters to the killing scene to eat, and set the dinner on a box containing the dead. What's more, this is a sufficiently luxurious feast, the box is covered with lace tablecloths, stilettos, and delicate basins. , This is almost a religious dinner celebrated for this murder, a last supper. The staple food of this dinner is the chicken placed on the dead man's box, and "strangling the chicken" has become a metaphorical joke in the film. On the one hand, the chicken symbolizes the dead under it. On the other hand, "strangled chicken" also means male masturbation in Western colloquialism. As a result, the narrative clues of the story are connected by this multi-referential term. Brandon and Phillip strangle their classmate David to death, and this is precisely because of the homosexual relationship between the three of them. Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter of the film said: "When I adapted "Imperial Soul" into a movie, homosexuality was still a forbidden word in Hollywood. People can only use'it' to refer to homosexuality. However, this is about three In a gay drama,'it' must be very obvious, so that everyone can feel... Without'it', the story will not make sense. Between the two killers, Phillip and Brandon, there is no scene that is not a hint 'its."
However, the most symbolic thing is the title of the film, which is the "rope", the murder tool in the film. The two killers strangled their classmates with a rope, then tied the books with the rope and gave them to the father of the deceased. Through this rope, the deceased who appeared only once in the movie are replaced with some words. As some commentators have pointed out, this is a kind of replacement from "real" to "symbol". From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the killer in this film, Brandon, is a person who cannot get out of the "real world." The person who connects between the word" and the "action". Because of this, when his former teacher, Rupert, who appeared as a father figure, taught Nietzsche’s superman theory to him, he could not understand it as a literal metaphor, but had to put it into action. As a result, the assertion that “good races can kill inferior races without any moral and legal condemnation” was realized as a well-planned and perfect murder, and presented as a work of art through complicated details. Before the other characters in the film and the audience.
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