Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance.

Pomerance, Murray, 1946- . Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance. 0813533945 series New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1998.3.H58 P66 2004

Film scholar Murray Pomerance ivestigates six films directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, a master of the cinema. One of the films is Spellbound. Murray Pomerance takes us deep into the structure of Hitchcock's vision and his screen architecture, revealing key elements that have never been written about before. Pomerance shows how Hitchcock was profoundly interested not only in social class, but also in humanity's philosophical predicament, as we travel a world full of shifting appearances, multiple deceptions, vulnerability, and destruction. Pomerance also clearly reveals the link between Hitchcock's work and a wide range of thinkers and artists in other fields.
One such artist was Savador Dali. Also, Pomerance points out that Hitchcock drew attention to the fact that certain aspects of his film such as the heterosexual romance or the neat, tidy ending, were concessions to a repressive studio system and perhaps, by extension, a repressive society by having that romance seem forced or by suddenly shifting the tone of the film.

Contention was caused by the hiring of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to conceive certain scenes of mental delusion of Ballentine in Spellbound. Selznick hated Dalí's ideas, and although much of his work was used, one dream sequence depicting Bergman turning into a statue of the Roman goddess Diana was cut. Dali's work is clearly seen in the depiction of the dream of the amnesiac. The dream consisted of a gambling house with no walls, instead had curtains with eyes painted all over them, there was a man with a pair of scissors cutting all the drapes in half, a girl who hardly had anything on who went around kissing everyone, Ballentine dealt a seven of clubs to a man with a mask, proprietor accuses the man with mask cheating, then the dream is sifted to a sloping roof of a high building, the man with a mask is hiding behind the chimney with a wheel, he drops the wheel on the roof, suddenly Ballentine is running and he sees shadows chasing him and a winged figure following him. Each and everyone one of the elements of this dream symbolizes how the murder of Edwardes took place through random association in Ballentine's subconscious, which came out in the dream. Dali did this beautifully. For example, Ballentine said the kissing girl reminded him of Constance- what Freudian would call wishful thinking. The man with the mask is the murderer, Dr. Muchinson ,the old head of the asylum, and the wheel he was holding symbolizes a revolver, and thus he drops the gun on the cliff after shooting Edwardes.

Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance.

Pomerance, Murray, 1946- . Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance. 0813533945 series New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1998.3.H58 P66 2004

According to Pomerance, popular film plots in the 1960s were obsessed with rationalizing idealized heterosexual unions. But Hitchcock turned the romance genre on its head. As Mark and Marnie walk away from Mrs. Edgar’s home at the film’s end, we understand that this is not an ending where the couple lives “happily ever after.” Instead it seems that Marnie is the girl for Mark because he will never quite succeed in taming her. The war he will have to fight against this rebellious woman, in the bathroom, the boardroom, and the boudoir, will never altogether be won. Marnie says, “I don’t want to go to jail. I’d rather stay with you.” And now, Mark replies, “Had you, love?” making any attentive member of Hitchcock’s audience sit up; “For the romantic viewer convinced her marriage will now bring an eternity of daylight, Marnie’s “I’d rather” is a clear contraction of “I would rather.” But Mark has a grammatical fluency that stumps the viewer. His response is a clue that she meant—or that he interpreted her to mean “I’d” that is past tense. Not “I would rather tomorrow and eternally; but “I had rather,” meaning in the past. He says, “Had you, love?” She is saying bluntly that previously it had been her desire to remain with him but now desire is not her primary motivation. The pure romance of that earlier attraction, Mark knows, has been diminished by the fact, now very evident, that he is the one who will keep her out of jail—that for Marnie he represents only the better of two alternatives, the other being an unthinkable option. Mark, and the viewer, must wonder, does she truly desire to go anywhere with him?”

The ambiguous ending of Hitchcock’s Marnie raises the ultimate question: if jail were not one of the looming possibilities, would Marnie be wanting to stay at Mark’s side? Is a life with Mark simply the lesser of two evils or is her desire to “stay” with him something of genuine love. The marriage between Mark and Marnie is anything but romantic, with a relationship that can be seen as that of doctor and patient rather than husband and wife and a relationship between two people that do not necessarily trust one another. Hitchcock makes it unclear whether Mark has actually cured Marnie—is he the only male with whom she can feel comfortable, or has he simply been deceived by Marnie in falling for her disguised “need” as love?

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Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance.

Eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance.