The Fragmented Frame 1

The aesthetic of the fragment is examined in detailed analyses of the Hitchcockian frame. The frame is both the formal composition underpinning mise en scène and the opening into the infinite play of fragmented images within visual, aural, and narrative form. The frame is a site of formal “expressivity,” “abstraction,” “topographic representation,” and “schematization.” The fragmented frame is revealed in the modernist experimentation of form through color, line, and shape in North by Northwest, the topographic frame in The Birds, and the canting of the visual frame in Shadow of a Doubt. The chapter concludes that the representational image forming the diegesis is overwhelmed in Hitchcock’s experimental works by the formal potential of abstract shape and pattern.

Pure Cinema in Context

Pure cinema is situated in terms of a larger aesthetic narrative that involves visual artists, theorists, intellectuals, and avant-garde filmmakers such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, and Sergei Eisenstein. Hitchcock appears in this milieu in his relation to a German experimental cinema tradition, and most obviously in his work with F. W. Murnau at UFA studios from 1924 to 1925. The chapter traces pure cinema as an evolution of a silent cinematic ethos that championed pure form: shape, pattern, line, symmetry, and the freedom of expression of movement and time within a moving image medium.

Introduction

Hitchcock’s clearest articulation of a pure cinema method appears in a lengthy discussion with François Truffaut in 1962. Discussing landmark works such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock frames pure cinema as a philosophical approach to film style. It is both medium-specific and part of a larger narrative describing the evolution of moving image art forms in the twentieth century. The introduction situates the relationship between Hitchcock and his “imitators,” filmmakers who reflexively evolved the pure cinema method. Brian De Palma emerges in the 1970s as the Hitchcockian imitator par excellence, the New Hollywood director who strove to take Hitchcock’s pure cinematic method further in terms of mise en scène, montage, and sound design.

Conclusion

The book concludes with a close examination of De Palma’s Femme Fatale as the exemplary experiment with a pure cinematic philosophy of the image and its praxis within visual, aural and narrative structures. The fragment is now intensified into a pure abstract geometric form in which the formal fragment takes on the qualities of a fractal organization in spatial and temporal relation. The fragment is analyzed in Femme Fatale in relation to shot scale (the close-up), the intensified split-screen sequence, the collage image (the concluding frame of the film), and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s reflexive imitation of Ravel’s Boléro theme. The book concludes with a hypothesis that the irreducible fragment of a pure cinematic form is suggestive of what Tarkovsky once called “the absolute image.”

The Part Is Greater Than the Whole

Pure cinema is defined in terms of the interrelationship of formal “fragments” that subtend an infinite array of formal systems within the work. In this model, the aesthetic philosophy of the fragment is developed through the seminal work of Raymond Bellour, one of the most astute of the classical Hitchcockian theorists. The fragment structures aesthetic form across mise en scène, montage, sound design, and narrative. The philosophy of the fragment is read in further detail and greater philosophical specificity through the historical tension between Eisenstein’s montage as whole and Deleuze’s attempts to read montage through the itinerary of the part. The resonance or vibration of the part is read as intensity, structuring the “excessive affect” that underpins the aesthetic of the fragment in film form. The aesthetic of the fragment is revealed in close formal analyses in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Argento’s Suspiria, and De Palma’s Union Station sequence in The Untouchables.

Hitchcock’s Interlocutors

Pure cinema is read as an aesthetic philosophy and stylistic practice that synthesizes an art cinema sensibility and a mainstream studio aesthetic design Hitchcock observed and further developed in his American films. Pure cinema thus incorporates both the radical self-awareness of the European auteur cinema and the generic narrative and image form of the American studio system. This synthetic style is then situated within a larger historical narrative that incorporates B-grade cinema traditions and styles (the Italian giallo cinema of Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and Brian De Palma’s self-conscious reconstruction of the B-grade thriller form. The chapter argues that the pure cinema ethos of these films and their filmmakers makes explicit a “visual vernacular” in mise en scène and montage construction that is then traced through Brian De Palma’s formal visual experimentation in Carlito’s Way.

Music You Can Hear

Pure cinema and the aesthetic of the fragment is applied to the evolution of sound design in the avant-garde experimental silent cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter argues that sound design and production were conceived as an integral part of pure cinema, tracing the emergence and development of this philosophy within the avant-garde experimentation with film form. Hitchcock articulates a philosophy of pure sound cinema in a number of critical pieces from the early 1930s and is clearly influenced by European philosophies of the early sound image. Sound is read as a discretized contrapuntal aesthetic form, achieving the abstraction of noise as patterned pitch (melodic), harmonic, and rhythmic form, in close analyses of Rear Window, The Birds, the imitation of Vertigo’s “Madeleine” theme in Pino Donaggio’s score for Dressed to Kill, and Argento’s cutting of a narrative segment of Deep Red to a standard blues I–IV–V harmonic progression. The chapter concludes with a study of Bernard Herrmann’s concluding sonic motif in Psycho as the purity of sound form in its atonal harmonic structure.

The Fragmented Frame 2

In this central chapter in Part II of the book, the aesthetic of the fragment is analyzed in its purest form: the split-screen image. The split-screen image crosses mise en scène, montage, and narrative relational systems. While Hitchcock did not use a split-screen effect in his work, the chapter analyzes several Hitchcockian sequences as split-screen compositions. The split-screen effect is intensified in the cinema of Argento, Lucio Fulci, and De Palma, materializing in these works as a literal rent within the frame. The chapter presents close formal analyses of Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie, Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, and De Palma’s Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out.The aesthetic of the fragment is further read through De Palma’s intensification of the split-screen effect, culminating in the abstraction of space and time in the split diopter lens composition.

Intensified Schematics

The affect of the fragmented frame is intensified within the visual and aural mechanics of the Italian giallo. Line, pattern, color, and movement are intensified within a regime of the fragmented image that builds within the complex of visual, aural, and narrative form. The frame is a discretized set of shapes overwhelming the representational image of the diegesis, and is revealed in a number of giallo films, including Bava’s A Bay of Blood, Blood and Black Lace, and Lisa and the Devil and Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The fragmented frame is interrogated as an interrelated configuration of form, pattern, and movement in De Palma’s Beverly Hills mall scene in Body Double.