Word: hitchcocks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BRIDE WORE BLACK. Juggling erotica and neurotica, Jeanne Moreau plays a wronged bride out to revenge her murdered husband. Director Francois Truffaut's homage to Hitchcock has all the ingredients for a tense film in the genre of suspense...
...Much of Hitchcock's art relies on point-of-view, the director showing action as seen by the protagonist. When the audience and the characters share a single eye, audiences naturally begin to identify with the person through whose eyes they see; Hitchcock often undermines our complacency by forcing us to identify with a peeping tom (Rear Window) or murderer (Psycho). Halfway into The Bride Wore Black, the camera begins to follow a young mother and her son walking home from school; although we do not see Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) following them, the boy's glances directly into...
...Hitchcock's films often concern individual therapy and emotional redemption through bizarre and indirect encounters with melodrama. In North by Northwest, Thornhill's adventure with the spies almost kills him, finally leaves him a more complete man than in the beginning of the film; Jeffries in Rear Window is more mature for his journey into depravity, as is Marnie after experiencing for a second time the trauma of her youth. Truffaut is too intelligent to afford dramatic consummation only to Julie's desire for revenge, and some indirect therapy does take place in The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut suggesting that...
...regardless of point-of-view and our knowledge of the intensity of her purpose, Julie's killings if understandable, are nonetheless private acts in which we cannot share. Flashback sequences, so purgative and cathartic in Hitchcock, are coldly detached in The Bride Wore Black, existing in a no-man's-land between Julie and the audience; the slow motion sequence is stylistically justifiable only if we interpret Coutard's contemplative panning as emerging from a half-memory of Julie's too personal for us to experience. The last shot of the film also deprives us of the vision...
...Bride Wore Black is perhaps less an homage to Hitchcock than Truffaut's own attempts at working Hitchcock-style, planning every shot and cut in advance of the shooting. Coutard's claustrophobic framing suggests "plan-sequence," sketches of shots realized by the camera, and there are no traces of the nouvelle vague hand-held technique of Truffaut's films through Soft Skin. A shot will follow a telephone wire in close-up through two rooms, stopping briefly at a closeup of the phone, then dollying into a medium close shot of the victim, unaware his phone wire has been severed...