Four movies that are Hitchcock recorded afterwards Marnie - Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy i Family Plot - each in their own way, either in the formal organization, or in the selection of visual priorities, therefore, in the mode of how the Name-Author works, they showed that there was a blockage, that the previously active synthesis remained beyond the reach of the new aesthetic vectors of integration, that privileged Hitchcockian moments were still present, but also that they remained in 'isolation', which is why they symptomatically began to 'stick out' in the text, as the ultimate indicator that Hitchcock as an author still functioned only in those fragments, brilliant details, in precious embodiments exceeding pleasure.
After Marnie, in short, Hitchcock's film as it was recognized by critics and audiences, above all Hitchcock himself as author, has become impossible, even outside the classicism-modernism dialectic. Impossible, because - which was visible both on the surface and in the depth of those films, and in the selection of stories, and in the underlining of semantic points - from the director's point of view, from the enunciator's stronghold, the segment of Eros that no longer mobilized in any way was completely banished or suppressed. Hitchcock's cinematic apparatus, most obviously in the fact that the director's final films do not even try to imagine the figure of the Hitchcockian blonde. The author's view was still only focused on the field dominated by the Thanatos-signifier.
History might have been different if Hitchcock had managed to realize the fifty-year-old idea of a screen adaptation Mary Rose, but he was forced, under pressure from his studies, to accept Torn Curtain. The planned plan was too predictable, confident in marking the ground previously ruled by the Master of Suspense: all the familiar ingredients were there, a spy story which is, in fact, a pretext for the (re)formation of the couple, but already from the opening scene it seems to it became clear to the director himself that nothing is the same and cannot be the same. The way the author frames the extended kiss of Armstrong (Paul Newman) and Sarah (Julie Andrews) at the very beginning of the film is stylistically recognizable, somewhat quotable, but the overall effect is (un)expectedly empty, just as empty is the love story itself, which has already lost any ability to organically or extremely artificially develop from anyway of a provisional narrative: familiar signs and gestures are deprived of adequate semantic and visual effect.
By the end of the film, however, Hitchcock will fully accept and make a metapoetic point with a specific reversion and dramaturgical lowering of tone and expectations: in the final scene, regardless of the interpellation of the photographer (who Hitchcock himself once 'played' in Young and Innocent), in a move that combines the director's distaste for both the actual actors and the resulting text, an impenetrable blanket, or curtain, is raised over the couple - never has the 'climax' looked so disappointing - and the camera in the last act focuses on this, unbearably gray void this story, this movie. Hitchcock, the ultimate voyeurist author, blocks his own field of vision, so that the last scene in Torn Curtain becomes the most resigned shot of the author's acceptance of symbolic castration in his entire oeuvre.
With the withdrawal of Eros from the text, the phallic signifier - as the Name-Author - is left bare in its destructive dimension: what we remember u the director's last films, or what we remember od of the director's last films, are the murder scenes as 'post-lapsarian' traces of authentic mastery in mise-en-scène. U Torn Curtain the scene of Gromek's murder (wolfgang kieling) is a long, completely deglamorized explanation of how much 'torment and effort' is needed to tire the human body: the spectacle is turned into a dreary existentialist study, which cannot be justified even if it is read in a retouching ideological key. U Topaz, on the other hand, there is a scene that is so striking that it is able, by itself, or for itself, to 'redeem' the entire film, which is otherwise unusually chaotic in the 'modernist' layering of stories. Namely, the upper perspective - the special topos auteurske controls - allows the death of Juanita (Karin Dor) sees as a lyrical composition worthy of the best symbolist painters: while the heroine's face is motionless in a deadly fall after being 'mercifully' shot by a deceived lover, her purple dress 'blooms', like purple blood 'spills' on the farmer's floor.
But the next movie will Frenzy, which is taken as the director's 'return to the roots' and 'return to form', completely reject that late version of violent beauty: in it, the murder scenes will not be filmed, as the famous and precise Truffaut wording, 'like love scenes', as well as the created 'allergy' to the 'boy meets girl' plot will be sealed through the narrative 'logic' according to which the violence is essentially directed at two female characters who, in the past and present, were a couple with the protagonist, Blaney (Jon Finch).
In this regard, both key murders in Frenzy represent two modes of how, in the poetics of excess, Thanatos can be written into the text(ur): the rape of Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is excessive in its material presence, in its length of duration, in its sadistic brutality, in its hideous perversion by which the impossibility of sexual satisfaction is "solved" in unrestrained violence, while the murder of Babs (Anna Massey) excessively in imaginary absence, in Hitchcock's strategic removal of the camera - which, in doing so, makes another virtuosic spiral - from the scene of the crime, in the alleged censorship, pre-modern tactic by which the viewer is left to imagine the horror that is even greater, only that, in the continuation of the film which brings no spare, on the contrary, the corpse of a woman would become the object of ironic treatment in a truck full of potatoes, and her distorted face in rigor mortis would be revealed in the end.
U Family Plot, on the other hand, the most famous sequence - the last incarnation of the famous Hitchcockian moment - is that of the attempted murder, when the car of the heroes, Blanche and Georg (Bruce dern), they race downhill without brakes. But this is not a sequence of tension, excitement, realistic threat in which death is a real danger: in a crucial rhetorical change, for Hitchcock this is actually a comic, even comic set piece with an absurdist intonation, where the Master primarily appreciates the effects of self-irony. Which is another reminder: u Family Plot the director literally appears in a cameo - only as a silhouette, that is, as his own shadow, as the shadow of the director he once was.
Numerous segments auteurske poetics are present, but their realization is without additional stylistic engagement and investment. But precisely as an unpretentious achievement - which, however, as we have seen, produces enough poetic consciousness to symmetrically bring an opus to an end - Family Plot and is a charming director's testament that will not succumb to the inertia of melancholy and resignation. Even though it no longer had the range and resonance that was last recorded in the Marnie, even though a certain shadow(s) fell on it, the Name-Author remained functional and accurate to the end.
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