Hitchcock and Contemporary Art

C. Sprengler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349351855, 9780230392151
• eBook ISBN: 9780230392168
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Hitchcock and Contemporary Art introduces readers to the fascinating and diverse range of artistic practices devoted to Alfred Hitchcock's films. His works have the capacity to activate sophisticated engagements with Hitchcock's films and cinema more generally, tackling issues of time and space, memory and history, and sound and image.

1

CINEPHILIC PILGRIMAGES AND THE REIFICATION OF PROFILMIC SPACE

Since 2009, Gail Albert Halaban has been seeking out and photographing houses painted by Edward Hopper in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s.¹ Titled Hopper Redux, this series of large-scale light box images replicates the frame and vantage point of the original paintings, but with certain modifications. Her motivation is twofold. On the one hand, she wanted to see how another artist captured in paint a region with which she herself was intimately familiar. On the other hand, she wanted to explore a comparison identified by critics between her earlier photographic series Out My Window (2007–) and Hopper’s paintings.² As she puts it, “People kept comparing me to Hopper and I wanted to know where that came from.”³ What this work accomplishes as a prefatory example in the context of this chapter is threefold. First, it exemplifies an art practice involving the act of pilgrimage, the physical journey to a special or sacred place. Second, it represents an artistic process that leads to discovery about its objects of scrutiny—Hopper’s house paintings, among other things. Third, and perhaps most appropriately, it stands as yet another example of a practice inflected by Hitchcock. For the modifications Albert Halaban introduces into Hopper Redux are ones inspired by Hitchcockian mise-en-scène, modifications that serve to “render these already familiar tableaux uncanny” and create a “heightened sense of artifice [to] underscore[s] the photographs’ status as re-presentations.”⁴

Pilgrimage has been an important facet of various art forms for many centuries. Medieval cathedrals were constructed to house relics for travelers keen to gain proximity to a choice piece of their favorite saint. Painters have embarked on taxing journeys to specific locations for their natural beauty, landmarks, and historical or political significance. But in Albert Halaban’s practice as well as other more recent examples of artistic pilgrimage, we are presented with documentation of a site rendered important or sacred by virtue of its previous representation. It is a site made famous for no other reason than being captured in paint or, as the focus shall soon be for the remainder of this chapter, on celluloid.

At first glance, investing in travel to photograph a site previously represented may seem a hollow act of appropriation. However, what Albert Halaban gained through this process was insight into Hopper’s work, specifically his earlier canvasses and their relation to his more iconic images. For instance, she discovered Hopper’s tendency to select the less flattering view of the structures he painted and to eliminate the picturesque elements of the surrounding environment, to capture instead “the more hard-edged, working-class end of [Gloucester, Massachusetts].”⁵ In other words, she became privy to how Hopper transformed a space to confront a history of it often ignored, in this case one supplanted by a touristic image. She also came to see how Hopper experimented with narrative by conflating various times of the day by blending different qualities and directions of light, thus turning on its head claims that the early Hopper was a realist. This strategy, one prevalent in some of his later, more famous paintings, directly contributed to their alienating effects. It also prompted Albert Halaban to deploy similar tactics in her own works as a means to inventing new narratives for these spaces.⁶

Albert Halaban’s practice of pilgrimage and representation unearthed important facets of Hopper’s work, shedding light on his approach to painting. Much the same can be said of artists who engage in (or with) the act of cinephilic pilgrimage and the type of insights gleaned about the films and filmmakers that motivated their ventures. To see what, in particular, we might learn about Hitchcock and the cinema more generally from this type of practice, I want to examine Cindy Bernard’s photographs Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 (1990) and Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990 (1990); David Reed’s installations/ensembles Judy’s Bedroom (1992) and Scottie’s Bedroom (1994); and Douglas Gordon’s public artwork, Empire (1998). I selected these examples for the ways in which they stand as the product of (or prompt for in the case of Gordon) cinephilic pilgrimage, the ways they bring the pleasures and limitations of cinephilia into stark relief, and for the probing questions they pose about the cinema in terms of its relationship to place, time, and history.⁷ From the photographic documentation of filmic sites in Bernard’s case, to the material reification of filmic sites in Reed’s, to the reconfiguration of urban sites for pilgrimage in Gordon’s, these three case studies represent three distinct approaches to the cinephilic pilgrimage, revealing each, in their own way, what cinephilia’s objects might accomplish.

Like Albert Halaban’s Hopper Redux, Cindy Bernard’s Ask the Dust begins with a physical journey to document sites rendered familiar through their previous representation. Completed between 1989 and 1992, Ask the Dust comprises 21 photographs of landscapes and locations from well-known Hollywood films released between 1954 and 1974, a time that roughly coincides with Bernard’s own childhood and youth. She chose her time frame based on significant historical events, namely, the desegregation of American schools and the resignation of Richard Nixon. These events bookend, for Bernard, a particular period of history defined by its significant social transformations and a growing cynicism in American life.⁸ It is also a period subject to intense national mythmaking, efforts that resulted in constructions like the “Fifties” and the “Sixties” and thus concepts that have become deeply entrenched—thanks in large part to Hollywood—in the American psych. Films like Them (1954), The Searchers (1956), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and The Godfather (1972) are represented in this project, one for which she spent countless hours at the Margaret Herrick Library and on the phone with location managers attempting to pinpoint the exact location of specific scenes. After discovering precisely where Roger Thornhill attempted to evade the crop duster in North by Northwest (1959), for instance, Bernard traveled to the site in order to photograph it. Like other works in this series, it is devoid of any human presence and framed to approximate the aspect ratio and shot distance of the original filmic image as closely as possible. And, like the rest, its title is that of the film followed by the year of its release and the year Bernard took her picture.

Like others in the series, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 and Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990 prompt us to confront a number of things (see figures. 1.1 and 1.2). They remind us of the constructed, mediated nature of landscape and the ways in which representational practices, and, in this instance Hitchcock’s cinematographic practices, necessarily inflect what and how we see, what and how we remember, and indeed how we experience the spaces we inhabit. Whether we are acutely or only vaguely familiar with the sites captured in Bernard’s photographs, we know, from their titles, that they refer to films.⁹ And yet, because landmarks and markers of the passage of time are present in most of the images from her series, we also know (or at least suspect) that we are looking at “real” places. Bernard appeals to the indexicality of the photograph in order to bring into collision fact and fiction, the real and the cinematic, past and present. These images, however much aligned with a particular film, now also belong to Bernard. Her authorship of photographs of locations otherwise already embedded in cultural memory through earlier filmic representations complicates the practice of appropriation pursued by many of her contemporaries. By eschewing the use of found footage or creation of visual pastiche, Bernard intervenes in the legacy of iconic cinematic places and asks, in this instance, what can actually be appropriated and what, in fact, is there to appropriate?

Figure 1.1 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990, 1990, photograph (courtesy of the artist).

Figure 1.2 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990, 1990, photograph (courtesy of the artist).

For Bernard, these questions are political. Her aim was to appropriate (and confront) a legacy of landscape representation shaped by male artists and thus a legacy steeped in patriarchy. Bernard explains that she “set out on a semi-feminist project—to recapture the idea of landscape from a long list of male photographers.” She continues, “I’m going to go into these spaces to make these photographs with my 4 × 5 camera all by myself, and there’s this act of recapturing a space away from this male-dominated perspective.”¹⁰ It is a perspective wrapped up in the history of Manifest Destiny, mythologies of the West and expansionism, and the tenets of Romanticism. As such, she appropriates landscapes defined by not only films, but also sites already inscribed by earlier, politically charged mythologies and image-making practices. Ultimately, she wanted to see how these spaces have been “coded by culture,” specifically from a male perspective.¹¹ And yet, as Martha Langford astutely points out in her deeply personal and sharply analytical essay, Romanticism informs Bernard’s approach as well through her appeals to “loss and yearning, passion, historicism and exoticism.”¹² For Langford, Bernard positions herself as Caspar David Friedrich’s Ruckenfigure, the “main protagonist of Romantic landscape painting . . . the figure who turns his back to the viewer, the possessor and director of the original gaze.” In Ask the Dust, it is Bernard who is this “surrogate and solitary traveler.”¹³

Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990 and Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990 exist as documents of mythic, coded, and mediated sites layered with history. They are also, quite crucially, documentation of Bernard’s cinephilic pilgrimages, records of her “solitary travels.” In his essay on the cinephilic pilgrimage, Douglas Cunningham explores this phenomenon, arguing that such journeys are the cinephile’s “attempt to reify (that is, ground within the real) an inherently ephemeral experience of the past, while simultaneously utilizing real spaces as portals through which to once again access, personally experience, and even occupy the past.”¹⁴ Cunningham’s acknowledgment that such visits tend to come up short for the cinephile and his identification of certain artistic practices (including those enacted by Chris Marker, Victor Burgin, and Cindy Bernard) as key to the process of rendering explicit these inadequacies is particularly compelling. While visiting a site allows for some physical, material connection to a film, it does not necessarily allow viewers to feel they are inhabiting the world of the film. Missing, among other things, is the cinematic frame that contains and thereby shapes this world. As Cunningham puts it, “the human eye . . . can only fail in its attempt to re-replicate the two-dimensional framed vistas and/or details the camera sought initially to replicate. Such a re-replication requires the intervention, once again, of an ‘optical crutch,’ as it were, a camera, a telescope, or some such.”¹⁵

By closely approximating the cinematic image, Bernard’s photographs both provide and draw attention to this “optical crutch.” As such, these images are as much the product of her own cinephilic desires as they are about cinephilia itself, the ways in which a deep love for the cinema is acted upon, and the inability of these acts to bring back these objects of desire. And yet, despite these shortcomings, there is pleasure in the process, in the research and the search, in the journey and discovery of filmic sites—both real and imagined. There are also pleasures to be had for the viewer, ones that stem from Bernard’s invocation of places that resonate with our own cinephilia as well as the potential for analytical pleasures from her invocation of the theoretical problematics of film and photography, indexicality and the real, and space and memory.

Whereas Bernard’s work is ostensibly about the cinephilic pilgrimage and the representational matters that its documentation brings to light, David Reed’s concern rests more with the reification of ephemeral cinematic and cinephilic moments. During an excursion to paint the landscapes of Monument Valley in the late 1960s, Reed experienced what he has since come to call his “media baptism.” Looking for reprieve from the hot desert sun, he discovered a cave with a small spring. Once inside, a sensation of overwhelming familiarity struck, compelling him to catch the flowing water with cupped hands and drink it. What seemed at the time like a primal bodily memory, a gesture reborn from a collective unconscious, resonated for years as a cherished spiritual experience. That is, until he rewatched John Ford’s The Searchers and witnessed Ethan (John Wayne) perform that very same gesture in precisely that location.¹⁶ This moment of recognition shattered an illusion of mystical significance and initiated Reed’s long-standing interest in how the cinema inflects our experiences and structures our memories in ways that are often embodied and deeply embedded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Alfred and the Art World
• 1   Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the Reification of Profilmic Space
• 2   Activating Memories and Museums through the Expanded Essay Film
• 3   Remediation and Intermediality: From Moving to (Film) Still
• 4   Spatial Montage, Temporal Collage, and the Art(ifice) of Rear Projection
• 5   The Acoustics of Vertigo: Soundtracks, Soundscapes, and Scores
• Conclusion   Repossessing Cinema
• Appendix: List of Hitchcock Artworks Cited
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index