Word: hitchcock
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Meyer has not been treated as extensively by critics as say, Godard or Hitchcock have, but recently Vincent Canby decided to spend a few inches on him. Now I'm still so dumb about the cinema that I don't know whether I should say "movie" or "film" or "picture." but I know when I've caught Canby with his foot in his mouth. Meyer would be all right, Canby said, if only he could get his mind off sex. Hah. What makes Meyer so great is that he can think of nothing else...
Characteristically for Hitchcock, this masterpiece of sympathetic shooting is followed by barren exercises. The Birds, Marnie, and Torn Curtain are as abstract as their heroes are cold and two-dimensional. Hitchcock transcended his fascination with formal schemes only rarely...
...Hitchcock's character delincations had always been sick, so for him Freudian notions were no great breakthrough. He merely began to construct his films like popularized case histories. His characters became illustrations of abstract psychological types: his plots became schemes of sexual interrelations. Observation of characters became an unimportant meanse of description; chance mannerisms and incidents disappeared. His formal control increased, but his tendency to neat plotting gave this advance the feeling of excessive design...
...Psycho may be the ultimate in Hitchcock's fewcharacter dramas: it starts with one character, leses her in finding another, and follows him to the picture's end. But this character is observed, not determined. Perkin's magnificent performance, not Hitchcock's camera motions and edtting, shapes our feeling about him. An extraordinary mobile camera follows the characters isto their natural settings, their homes, instead of isolating them in unfamiliar places...
...Hitchcock's usual superiority to his characters gives way to a character study. Despite Perkins's supposed psychological complexity, we know him through his charming mannerisms, his strong moral opinions, his reactions to other people. Hitchcock abandons a manipulative shooting style for one that is simply assured. From the opening sequence, a series of pans over Phoenix succeeded by a track into a dark hotel window, one feels a solid engagement with the character's personal situations. The people of the film exist in the world, not in relation to some abstract scheme intended for moral edification...