Book Chapter Two
Chapter Three:
Projecting the Post-War:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), and Reading the Surface of the Archive
“Discursive manipulations are incisions.”
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800 / 1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990), 344.
No theory of reading can avoid being a theory of tropes. . .
Paul De Man, Hypogram and Inscription, 45
[I am like] a castaway who drifts on a wreck by climbing to the top of an already crumbling mast. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.
Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Gerschom Scholem,” April 17, 1931, in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 233.[i]
Begin with question of the archive and Hitchcock with Tom Cohen. Then go to surfaces with Jameson.
From there paralinear reading and the archive in the wake of the disaster.
Reading becomes a question of the surfacing of ht archive, its collection and recording, and paralinear narrative that poses a problem of taking sides —who is who?
From the point of view of reading, citational nodes network technemes, rhizomatic algorithms, postal nodes, “times,” phonemes that sound like others, angles. . . . there can be no glossary here, no symbol [to understand Hitchcock’s films]. . . One is, as it were, always in the debris floating at the opening of Lifeboat, in the afterlife of a semioclasm. Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies: Secret Agents, 49
Here, far more abstractly, we confront the same grid of parallel lines, systemically carved into the rock surface like a strange Mayan pattern. Again what is confirmed by this pattern, and scored in the space of the scene, is the primacy of surface itself: the earth as surface upon which the anti-like characters move and agitate, the sky as a surface from which intermittently a model and deadly technological mechanism dips; and here finally the upending of the surface into the vertical monument, prodigious bas-relief which has no inside and cannot be penetrated; upon which, as in some ultimate lunar landscape—neither country nor city—the human body, in its most vulnerable manifestations, must crawl, itself taking on something of there merely implicit or potential volume of the bas-relief.
Frederic Jameson, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” 64-65[ii]
Question of what is hitcockian about Hitcock, his signature, becomes aquestion of the cut and reading, of open reading or reading as a scene of violence, interrption. Bankhead’s thrust and tear through the newspaper is a less explicit version of the violent ruins left in he wake of the ship’s destruction in the opening title sequence
We could posesse this as a problem of philology and reading comaprateively, De Manon Heidegger—violence of interpretation (which is internal) versus non-violent, open and edited text (prior to reading; like Riffaeterre elimination of reading, of what comes preares forreading s that reading doesn’t have to happen.
Lifeboat does violence to the Nazi for what he and other would have done (put them in a concentration camp), not for what e did (murder , or euthanasia?)
So we have violence, gang violence, then a violent interpretation of that gang violence. The film leaves us in de Man’s indeterminate exegetical method—his essay ends in a violent critical gesture of criticism—the critical of the critical closes to avoid violence or danger of poetry—being poetic by aiming friendly fire at another philologist Struck—discourse of madness—poetry is madness, mental torture (Holderlin).
SaBOATage: 12/11 Changed Everything
Released just a year before World War II ended, Lifeboat stages a scene of reading an editorial page of a crumpled, old newspaper that projects a post-war future as a “problem.” Shot over the shoulder of the reader, John Kovac (John Hodiak, Figure one, upper right), the editorial title is set in large type (Figure one, lower left).
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Figure 1
“What Shall We Do with Germany--After the War?” In smaller type, “Our Post War Problem” appears just below it.[iii] Lifeboat projects beyond the immediate question of whether the survivors will be found before they die of thirst and starvation to a larger question of the future as itself a problem: Victory will not mark the end, even it presumably will arrive soon, but the beginning of a problem for the U.S. (“us”) even more than it will be for Germany. The newspaper’s editorial complicates the determination of what “post” means for “us” both by its relatively obsolescence as “old news” and by the large type for the word “Mailbox” for letters to the opposite and placed opposite the words “Post War.” A declaration of the end of the war will arrive through a postal relay and delay network. News may arrive eventually, but is delayed, late, boxed in (like the survivors in the lifeboat).[iv]
We take this scene of reading, which we will discuss shortly in more detail, to be exceptional in Hitchcock’s many scenes of newspaper in his other films, making Lifeboat a singular film.[v] Contemporary critical debates over Hitchcock turn largely on how to make sense of his many repetitions and citations various motifs: images (blonde and brunette women; birds; books), cameo appearances, sound effects (conversations being drowned out by louder sounds), and themes (the wrong man; murder) across his fifty-two films. The difficulty of systematically itemizing Hitchcock’s film into repeatable units of signification has become explicit, the common question asked by critics including Peter Conrad, Slavoj Zizek, Frederic Jameson, Michael Walker, and Tom Cohen, how to account for the polysemous and sometimes senseless relays and channels of symbolic meaning (agency, auteurism, meaning) in non-auteurist terms (subjectless History, for Jameson), non-symbolic terms (the Lacanian Real, in Zizek’s case; a deconstructive “anarchivist anterior marks that precedes “occularcentrism,” in Cohen’s).[vi] As Tom Cohen writes, “there has always been a problem with characterizing Hitchcock’s signifying strategies, into which trap the most sophisticated theorists have stumbled. Objects are hosted, seem marked, yet refuse assigned contents and dissolve into citational networks; after their passage through a sort of ‘spies’ post office,’ they reemerge elsewhere, become host” (45).[vii]
We characterize the problem of reading repetition somewhat differently. The problem with reading Hitchcock in terms of what Jameson calls “form-intrinsic” meaning (reading repetitions as symptoms in a text) and “form-extrinsic” meaning (reading repetitions as symptoms across works in an auteur’s oeuvre) is less whether one reads the films in terms of an auteurist subject than it does with identifying what counts as the “motifs” as Michael Walker calls them, of Hitchcock’s films, and, more crucially, what counts as Hitchcock’s signature, first identified by William Rothman in Hitchock’s Murderous Gaze as a bar series of metaphorical marks and gestures. Lifeboat’s practice of repeating as what we call “sui-citation” puts into question what constitutes a recognizable repetition. To be sure, some repetitions are obvious in Lifeboat, as when characters turn their back toward the camera when amputating one of Gus’s legs and when they murder the U-boat captain, Willy (Figure 2, upper left and upper right); when Willy first appears grasping the boat-rail, shot from the left side, one hand at a time and the young German sailor survivor at the end of film grasps the boat-rail one hand at a time, this time of the right side of the boat (Figure 2, middle left and right). Similarly, Gus’s shoe drops and then is picked up to kill Willy (Figure 2, lower left and right), Connie is knocked down twice on falls to the right and also lies down once to the right; she comments explicitly on the dispossession of her camera and film of the shipwreck, worth millions of dollars, her torn stocking, and finally her bracelet used as fishbait. Commenting on these kinds of repetitions constitutes, as Jameson observes, that are the stock in trade of “intrinsic-form” criticism. The shots of the hands of the German sailors from left side to right side and of the shoe upside down and right side up help to make our case about Lifeboat’s allegory of reading as a side to side movement.
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Our concern at the moment is not to comment on these particular repetitions but to point out that certain repetitions in Lifeboat, as we shall see, are difficult to recognize, and others that may be recognized do not solicit an obviously symbolic reading but are instead engimas. [viii]
Conceding in advance that Hitchcock’s repetitions, if read closely, will inevitably mean that the critic’s text will move between symbolic and psychotic registers, we maintain that Lifeboat, lies in the consequences of its merges repetition and rupture for reading and for politics, not that it departs from Hitchcock’s “normal” repetitions and allegorical structure, as The Wrong Man and his last four films have often been said to do.[ix] Lifeboat allegorizes reading as repetition and rupture within a diegetic, “prefabricated” allegory of the film as a response to what political theorist Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin writing with deep sense of urgency in the 1930s identified (from opposite sides of the political spectrum) as an irresolvable crisis of liberal democracy: liberal democratic states unavoidably preserve themselves by secretly circumventing the law or openly suspending in order to commit acts of violence, supposedly to protect its citizens, that it disavows.[x] Under pressure after Lifeboat sank quickly after its theatrical release, Hitchcock affirmed that his film was a propaganda film about the need for the U.S. to unite internally (characters allegorically personify and embody labor and management; whites and blacks; men and women; rich and poor) and externally with its allies (in this case, Canada) against their common threat, namely, Nazi Germany, embodied in Lifeboat by the duplicitous and bi-lingual U-Boat captain, Willy (Walter Sleazak).
This pre-fabricated allegory reads like a cover story or alibi to anyone who has watched the film with any attention, however, because Lifeboat refuses to resolve the crisis of liberal democracy it stages: in terms of sovereignty, sovereign takes power not only in terms of age, physical strength, and ruthlessness but also through his reading and linguistic capacities, his detection of foreign accents and translation of foreign languages. As in Walter Benjamin’s account of sovereignty the German Mourning Play, in Lifeboat, sovereignty is always weak or tyrannical; the lifeboat itself contain a variety of survivors with a potentially combustible mix of domestic and foreign threats, and the sovereign has to decide who is friends and foe apart from who is native and who is foreign, a decision made all the more difficult for much of the film when it turns out that the villain, a German (played by a then well-known American character actor) and heroine, an American both speak German and English fluently. The circumstances in which the characters of Lifeboat find themselves, stranded, cut off from all outside communication, uncertain how to find safety or avoid danger, constitute a permanent state of emergency: accordingly, the state of exception (the suspension or limitation of legal norms) becomes the rule.[xi] In Lifeboat, the sovereign’s most crucial exercise of power, namely, deciding who shall live and who shall die, taken either with a vote or without one, remains illegitimate, a self-parody because it necessarily takes sides, even if the side involves a new combination of previously allied or antagonistic characters.[xii]
By putting into question what it means to read, the scene of newspaper reading, to which we are now just about to return, is exceptional in taking the form of a “paralinear” reading; that is, reading in Lifeboat either advances and retreats by moving from side to side: as the reading of one text closed, another text opens up that in turn is closed. Paralinear reading both advances and retreats, but only as a recursive and precursive return to and an anticipation of similar reading open and shut interpretive moments, consequently putting deconstructive pressure on the differences between variously conflicting political sides. Political and social differences may be put temporally aside as alliances shift, allowing the group to suspend or alter democratic norms and procedures that enable succession of awkward but peaceful transitions from one leader to another (the old rich man Charles D. 'Ritt' Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), then Kovac, then Willy, then Connie). Yet the suspensions are so extreme that they make a mockery of democratic justice (notably, secret ballot elections of a leader, trial by jury). A deceptive, determined Nazi is put in charge of the lifeboat by mistake, for example, giving him the time to push the dying Gus overboard while the others sleep, and, in the film’s most disturbing scene, a would be execution of the Nazi turns into a lynching near the end of the film. [xiii] Although Willy, the Nazi villain, and the democratic heroes have been clearly established by this point, a new exception appears as Willy is murdered: George 'Joe' Spencer (Canada Lee), the one black man on the lifeboat, votes with all the others to execute who initially saving Gus by amputating his leg, later quietly pushed him overboard. Yet as the others fall on him, Joe is shot in close up, standing apart, uninvolved in the violence and looking horrified by the way the others viciously hammer Willy’s hands, grasping the boat rail, with Gus’s (William Bendix) shoe Willy had dropped into the boat after throwing Gus’s amputated leg overboard. The other shoe drops, as it were, but literally, and it is pointedly the same shoe dropping twice that creates a political scandal. Deciding how to resolve a conflict by closing down reading displaces the conflict elsewhere: the news will still report disasters on native soil origin (as in the newspaper column headlined “Fire Destroys Arsenal,” figure three, left).
Paralinear reading and listening (we take reading [in] Hitchcock to be stereophonic, reading a silent activity in the films that competes with sound) not only rupture (the boat sinking), but what Tom Cohen calls the “semioclasm” (vol 1, 49) left in boat’s wake, a catastrophe that makes reading into an Überreading and deciding a “sui-siding,” that is, a taking of sides that resolves political conflicts only by going way overboard with a high-handed pre-emptive strike “justified” both retroactively and with a bad conscience. “Überreading” is not “über” in the sense of “super,” as in Nietzsche’s Übermensch, echoed in the fascist distortions of Willy, but in the more sense of “over.”[xiv] The reliability of any reading is weakened in Lifeboat because only surfaces are legible: the film’s characters (and the spectator identifying with them) either over-read or under-read the surface, looking literally from above or below, sometimes moving from one side of a text to another or from one side one text to one side of another text. Reading always lies at sea in Lifeboat, unable to establish truth by occupying a starting position above the fray and unable to stop, be over and out. By the same token, we shall see, reading in Hitchcock’s film constitutes micro-states of exception that threaten to collapse juridical, ethical and political justice and criminality, by suspending norms that differentiate democratic from totalitarian regimes. Decisions and actions by the characters are paradoxical, either lawfully unlawful or unlawfully lawful.
Up, Para-scope: Ueberlesen (Overreading)
We would now, at long last, like to return to the scene of newspaper paper reading with which we began this chapter to show how reading in Lifeboat is specifically a repetition that literal or figuratively rupture a surface. The rupture may as well take the form of continuity (the opening extended take with no break in sound) as discontinuity (a tear in a newspaper). In the shot of the editorial page (figure one, upper left), an index finger amusingly pokes through the page, accompanied by a tearing sound. [xv] The almost detached finger not only points to a problem of reading the future but itself becomes legible as a metaphor for intelligence gathering, questioning, and enemy capture: the finger resembles a little periscope, looking around, and when bent, both a question mark (and viewed as inverted), the fishing hook on which Constance (“Connie”) Peterson’s (Tullulah Bankhead) expensive bracelet (strangely turned into a ring when seen below the surface) is hung as fish bait. Like a periscope, the finger figures reading alternately as both “over the shoulder” reading and reading from below. On both cases, reading disrupts Kovac’s (and our) reading of the text at hand, or, more precisely, disrupts the reading of a text about the future as a solvable, problem, as I noted earlier, but a text about the future as a problem that possibly lacks a (final) solution in future: Can there be such a thing as a "post" war? Or will war continue even after victory has been declared and one side has officially surrendered to the other (as indeed happened with Cold War)?
“Dive, Dive, Dive!" Untenlesen (Under Reading)
The two, more rapid shots that follow the shot of the editorial page about Post War Germany disclose who is reading whom and thereby demonstrate that this sequence constitutes an interpretive state of exception we call paralinear reading. In a shallow focus medium shot, wealthy journalist Connie’s smiling face moves, in close up and more or less in focus, from left to right across the bottom of the screen, with Willy rowing the becalmed lifeboat while the Stanley “Sparks” (Hume Croyn) quietly plays a flute, both characters being out of focus in the background (Figure two, upper left and upper right).
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Figure Three
The next shot, in deep focus, (Figure two, left), now from a 90 degree angle from the previous shot, shows her resting in the lap of the working man, John Kovac (John Hodiak), who has laid aside reading the newspaper he was just reading. Connie then proceeds to read Kovac from below by looking at him from another, eroticized side, testing the emotional waters by guessing the meaning of various and variously tattooed initials on Kovac’s beefy chest.
Before commenting on Connie’s reading of Kovac’s tattooed initials, we want to press pause momentarily to observe that Connie’s rupturing tear in the newspaper is only the film’s most literal version of a writing allegorized as incision we can see now in Kovac’s tattooed initials. All newspaper pages seen in the film figure inscription as incision in the form of montage, a graphic design page layout that places one story randomly next to another and uses advertisements that often take the form of montage.[xvi] The first scene of newspaper reading in the film makes this figurative incision of newspaper graphics explicit in a comic advertisement for a “Reduco” weight loss program (see figure three, left). In his typically self-effacing, de rigeur and cameo appearance, Hitchcock's appears in two contrasting profile images of his entire body, the words “before” and “after” above each profile to show how highly effective the "Obesity Slayer" weight loss program is (figure two, left).
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Figure Four
In addition to word “slayer,” the name of the company, “Reduco” marks a more literally linguistic incision: a new company brand name is coined as a hieroglyphic neologism by deforming two words, “Reduce” and “Corporation,” into a single, compound word that is apparently pronounced “reducko.” If so, “Reduco” may call up the sense of “reduction” as “cutting down,” but only by repeating the name a second time at the bottom of the advertisement and following it with the word “Corporation.” The combination text / image advertisement left open to be read by the spectator is the by-product of a capitalist public news machine (the cost to the consumer reduced largely through advertising) that presents an indexical problem: even the photos of the body shows what has gone missing (in the “Obesity Slayer” advertisement), with political bodies being metaphors.[xvii] (Similalry,Connie’s finger through the newspaper is like a book manicule, a trope emptied of meaning.) For example, the headline of the story to the far left of the advertisement juxtaposes Hitchcock’s cut down body weigh made possible by a legally created “Corporation” to collective building as body enlargement: “civic bodies” of “prominent citizens” make the city park a success because they “join together.” Civic and corporate entities separate and combine like human bodies, which in turn are figures as well (the photos of Hitchcock’s doubled body being both split and joined through “before” and “after” labels).
We may now begin to see how the repetition of newspaper reading scenes in Lifeboat makes reading itself a literal or figurative rupturing of a linear narrative structure or temporal sequence having to do with “before and after.”[xviii] Connie’s reading of Kovac’s various tattooed initials attaches a question of narrative sequence to the question of the (presumed to be an) identity of the initials (figure two, right), that are themselves repeated but not in serial form. Reading the future, in this case, a specifically romantic future in which Connie and Kovac might fall in love, is represented as the disruption of a man reading by a woman's finger and then her ability to read (as in put her finger on, or, possibly in) that man's romantic history inscribed and exhibited on his bared, beefcake chest. The largest and most prominent initials are tattooed at the center of Kovac’s chest, also the center of the shot (figure one, lower right). Unlike the other initials, "B.M." are written on a banner, and the banner covers an image of a human heart while, in contrast, all of the other initials have no images.[xix] An acute reader Connie remarks that the letters “B.M” are larger than the others tattooed on Kovac’s chest and asks Kovac provocatively if they stand for the name his first love or his last, taking the difference in the size of the various initials to initiate and close a narrative or narratable sequence (figure three, right). If she guesses correctly, the beginning and ending of Kovac’s love story remains indeterminate since Kovac refuses to answer. Given the frequency with which Hitchcock uses initials in his films, we reasonably may ask if "B.M." refers not to a person signifies any word or words with the letters “B” and “M,” especially given an oddity of punctuation: the letters "B.M." are followed by dots midway level with letters (figure one, lower right) rather than, as is the custom (conformed to elsewhere on Kodiak’s chest) at the bottom right of the letter: "Best Man?" "Black Mail?" Or are we to invite the blockage of reading the scene presents us with an allegory of reading the signification of insignificance as a problem of reading in motion, of creating a movement, in political terms: read in an anal register, "B.M." might stand for either “bowel movement” or "blocked movement (constipation)."[xx] More crucial than any specific translation, however, is the resistance to any particular translation Kovac offers. He is a kind of block-head to Connie’s “bankhead.”
Alles ist in Ordnung?
The central interpretive and political problems paralinear reading present the survivors in Lifeboat are, first, how and when to make their move(ment) to find safety and, second, who to trust or deceive. [JULLIAN: WORK In Serres etc. here] My notes on your comments:
Lifeboat in eco-discourse as a metaphor of lifeboat for earth—ship of state metaphor—a leveling gesture that enables the renegotiation of social contracts. Shot of the empty chairand closeof Captain’s hat Hume Croyn puts on it. The captain is dead. A kind of uniformity in war—in uniforms as remarkers, remains—auniside unisize.
In Serres’s natural contract—reduction of boundaries—being on a ship, reduction of boundaries leads to a renegotiation of social contracts automatic. Lifeboat reading we are embarked on is an automatic critique.
Lifeboat brings you face to face with the threat of extinction and there free you totally change what you've been doing.
Lifeboat stages a series of problems between temporality and narrative—a short circuit, there’s no way out of the lifeboat. We never see the rescue imaged,
Joe is an excluded or included middle of a set—the disintegration of sameness, which is the lifeboat, and the immediate problems that come into defining life. Just like Gus and Willy and are both German.
Could also link eco sci--fi films like Silent Running and Sunshine as versions of the ship as lifeboat.
60th anniversary of Geneva convention—NPR report on the origins of it—had to do with the creation of different classes of persons—postwar management to create different classes of civilians, non-combatants—attempt to regulate the violence of the state by various non-governmental organizations who could prevent the refugee thing from happening.
Ny Times
US airs alien files kept o immigrants –like the Stasi files—kept on immigrants
The document is lillegible—because of its poor reproduction –it’s really about genealogy-nothing in the files has been redacted.
Like a census—its’ a border monitoring—a prephotographic archive.
The Origins of the Geneva Conventions
ALEX CHADWICK, host:
U.S. Bares ‘Alien Files’ Kept on Immigrants
By JANIE LORBER
“Immigration files containing a wealth of information
collected by American border agents, some of it dating from the late
19th century, will be opened to the public soon and permanently
preserved, providing intriguing nuggets about such famous immigrants
or visitors as Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí.”
These political problems are also a narratological problem of the order and ordering of movement (figuring out the sequence or of events to decide of, as the Germans say, everything is “in Ordnung”). How these political problems also constitute a narratological problem may best be grasped if we turn back now to the film’s opening title sequence over the single high angle shot of the sinking ship into the following overhead shot pf the surfacing detritus and then to the echoing repetition at the ending when another ship sinks. While many films, Hitchcock’s included, have a loop narrative structure, Lifeboat complicates this loop by twisting it the very beginning of the film so that a distinction between norm and rupture is deconstructed: the opening event is a rupture, a rupture that precedes a continuous semioclasmic aftermath that does not fold over into two, symmetrically sized sides. The elliptical opening shot puts into question cause and effect. Lifeboat opens with the sinking of an Allied ship, but the last item seen in the lengthy first take as the ocean flows to the left is a corpse face down of a German sailor with a German life preserver--so the sinker has also been sunk, which is also where the film ends, sort of, but we have to read the narrative only by looking at the flotsam left on the surface; reading involves depth charges, as it were, but explosions have no timer attached them, as in the bomb hidden in a film canister that Stevie caries on the bus in Sabotage).
Infra-reading and Ex-humanization
If we turn to the opening title sequence and the following shot, we can recast the terms of Hitchcock debate as one if subjectivation (and identification, auteur, etc) and desubjectivation as a dynamic between what we have earlier called “infrareading,” now understood as reading side to side in paralinear fashion, on the one hand, and reading after, both toward the future and from the past, or ex-humanization, on the other: anthropomorphism and anthrompomorphization, as Paul de Man put it is a trope. Here the troping of detritus, or things shown, with equal amounts of screen time, floating on the ocean surface, turns, at the end of the shot, into the unexpected thingness of the trope, when a face down, German sailor’s corpse floats into view. Though a presumed enemy of the Lifeboat’s audience, the sailor’s corpse provides no emotional relief but instead constitute a s chock—how could supplies from an English freighter we saw sinking be in the same stream as a dead German sailor? The corpse appears at the end of a series of things, as another text—his lifeboat jacket identifies him as a sailor in the “Deutches Reich”--so the folds not only between opposed sides politically but between things to be recovered and corpses to be recovered by survivors who are also salvagers. Infrareading is a life and death chain, the first sunken boat an unnamable death boat, that makes the reading of the human things an exhumation that is ex-human, that decides what is alive or dead.
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“The End” marks a ruination of signification that stands outside the film that precedes it, framed by the black fade and fade in, but perhaps recalling the fade to black over Willy says “Danke schoen” as well as the first long shot of the detritus from the freighter just after we see the corpse of the German sailor. The “The End” sequence marks a figurative monument to ruination and ex-termination; that is puts into play as an excess the very notion of the terminus, making it more a terminus, a transfer point back into the film that a way out of it. This sort of playful excess of signification constitutes form in general, but in Lifeboat, it indirectly and unknowingly allows for a rethinking of the state of exception as the norm with no end, but of suspension as not merely of the law but of play itself. Giorgio Agamben and Samuel Weber have noted a structural similarity in the logic of Carl Schmitt critique of the law in Political Theology and Walter Benjamin’s critique of “law preserving violence” in “A Critique of Violence.” On the basis of this structural similarity, Agamben deconstructs Schmitt into Benjamin, finding no political difference between the fascist and the Marxist; seizing on Benjamin’s appreciate letter to Schmitt, Weber supports Agamen’s reading. In “Force of Law,” Derrida goes even further in a postscript, ignoring chronology and asking if Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence,” a violence that cannot always be recognized and may be a catastrophe, not a resolution, is essentially the same as Nazis’ “Final Solution” hammered out in 1942 and executed in the death camps until 1945, well after Benjamin died in Port Bou (in 1940).
If we follow Derrida’s lead in reading “A Critique of Violence” by ignoring chronology, however, and read Benjamin’s essay in light not of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” but in the light of Benjamin’s late, undated “Concept of History,” and if we similarly read Schmitt’s Political Theology in light of Schmitt’s later, post-war book Hamlet or Hecuba, we may see more clearly that their respective legitimations of specific kinds of violence turn on how they read the ability of the sovereign to control the play of law and their adoption of a specific kind of aesthetic. In an appendix to Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt returned to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play and differentiates his reading of Hamlet as a tragedy of state from Benjamin’s reading of Shakespeare’s play as a “mourning play,” or failed tragedy. For Schmitt, the state has too little control over what Benjamin calls “law preserving violence.” In Schmitt’s Hobbesian terms, government can function well only with a dictator who interrupts the play of politics as usual, that is to say, politics as theater: the state of exception is a declaration that politics is serious business, not just a declaration of martial law; liberal democracies will fail necessarily, according to Schmitt, because they are too playful, they allow for too little control over law-preserving violence.
For Benjamin, the opposite is the case. In “The Concept of History,” we see that the state has too much control, that revolution cannot mean merely taking control of he means of production, or redirecting and ration(aliz)ing the uses of technology in terms of its utility. All one can do is to hope to stop the train of history, to interrupt it, to bring time to a standstill and open a new time frame. Read in this light, Benjamin’s “divine violence,” impossible to recognizable as such with certainy, looks like an accident. If technology is one of the hallmarks of modernity, then so is the workplace accident: with the assembly line comes injuries to worker’s bodies, their fragmentation; by the same token, with modern warfare comes “friendly fire” and “co-lateral damage” to civilians. For Benjamin, the state’s excessive, unstoppable control and rationalization of technology can only be suspended by the politicizing of aesthetics, in Benjamin’s oft-cited formulation. Yet while for Schmitt, Hamlet is key because it is “purely” Catholic tragedy, (not because Hamlet is often a joker), Benjamin adopts a playful modernist aesthetic (even the Mourning Play is a modernist simulation of tragedy). What Benjamin means by an anti-fascist political aesthetics at the end of “The Concept of History” is far from clear, but any attempt to interpret it should, in our view, address Benjamin’s recurrent interests in toys, as we have seen, and but film but, more specifically, in Charlie Chaplin, whom Benjamin effectively reads as a Dadaist.[xxi] Read in Benjamin’s terms, Chaplin in Modern Times, turns out to be an incredibly playful deconstructor, not only because he doesn’t keep up with the assembly (even falling into the machine itself and then getting so it out when it is put in reverse) but because he continues to mime his work behavior after he gets off and is on his own “free” time: he acts as if he were still turning screws as he did on the assembly line after when he was at work. Benjamin interrupts not only the time of seriousness (the plays while at work) but also the time of play, leisure (he “works” when is not at work). Interruption here takes the farcical form of hypercontinuous suspension and deconstruction of oppositions work and play, tool and part, human and machine, seriousness and playfulness, ability and disability, going forward and going in reverse, competent and incompetent, not a decisive break from the practices of everyday life taking the form of espionage, for example. Schmitt adopts the rhetoric of serious decision, while Benjamin adopts the Dadaist practices of stop and go suspension.
Go to Jitchcock UFA Expressionist connection, number seventeen
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From Number Seventeen
Go into shot below as fake out, then the apparatus and indexicality and the Nazification of all politics (via Kovac and Connie) and then into stereophonic paralinear linear—takes place as silent reading and dialogue over it (like intertiles) or music. The text is foregrounded visually, but sounds and silence detract or interfere with the audience’s reading of the foregrounded text.
The first life or death decision is suicide—first attempt is blocked—because baby has drowned, mother tries to kill herself----and second attempt succeeds. But she blames the baby, wrapped in black , on Willy, into whose arms it lands, and begins beating him.
Mrs. Higley, the mother, leads the charge on Willy. Connie spokesperson for the film (in a speech like Bob Cummings in Saboteur) as he figures the books on the bookshelf to try to get Peggy’s attention but only gets the Nazi leader’s instead.
Rijkels pun on nazi as not see..
Adaptation of novel—a retrofitting of an earlier media by film—or reshelving operation.
Bankhead's intrusion into the newspaper with her finger echoes her use of the camera at the start of the film and her typewriter, both means of inscription and both thrown overboard (what Kodiak calls her "handcuff," or bejeweled bracelet, is also lost later to a fish, and transformed through a continuity error into a ring). Similarly, her blurred face and Sleazak's blurred body echo their linkage through their command of foreign languages (they both are fluent in English, German, and French). Moreover, Bankhead is the first on the boat (it's something of a mystery exactly how she got there; "ladies first" doesn't explain it) and U boat captain is the last one on. The one continuity error in a fakey movie (all studio shots of the actors and rear projection footage of the ocean) involves the one underwater shot in the film, namely, the shot of the fish taking the bracelet turned into a ring as bait.
The depths are not to be trusted (to trust them is to "take the bait"). Yet the spectator's reception of the surface is set at a paranoic default. How much is the surface to be trusted? Are we overreading (reading into things) by reading the film very closely? Or are we underreading, not reading closely enough?
A simple anti-Hitchcockian feministic criticism (see The Women Who Knew Too Much) would see here a struggle over power reduced to an instrumental understanding of communications technology as a weapon (to be wielded like a club)--who controls it, who writes the script of history and who shoots it. But Hitchcock figures that gender struggle much more precisely in spatial terms as a question of over and underreading that arises from an inability see below the surface. Note the recurrent use of zooms on significant objects, like the empty chair of the woman whose baby drowned (was she murdered? or did she finally succeed in committing suicide?) and Gus's empty shoe after his leg is cut off). Neither Kodiak nor Bankhead are reliable authority figures in the film, and she shares unsavory aspects of the U-Boat captain, especially when she defends their murder of him on grounds that he would have taken them to concentration camps. Her feminism is just as aberrant and queer as Kodiak's macho posing.
Kodiak is initially a worker figure (John Steinbeck as proterlarian
novelist). But he becomes a sort of sellout by the end of the film--Henry Hull grabs some
cash before he gets in the boat--but Kodiak wins the poker game (we don't
know if Hull is lying or not)--we don't see his cards. So the deal is
at the end that Hull will give Kodiak the 50k he owes him and Kodiak
will apprently manage one of his plants with his new but as yet unarticulated
labor management plan.
Nachlesen / Nachleben
Example of a side to side reading—what closes off reading, taking sides, necessaity of pararreading, paralinear. There is a paralinear reading, but one which puts deconstructive pressure on differentiating two sides and imaging a future free of war and explosion, if in the form of payback.
Before and After Cameo of Hitchcock
reading has been pushed aside in cultural history / material culture studies by articulating a practice of unpacking that goes from “side to side” rather than a (non)reading that takes sides or differs with itself (reading with Freud). “Thinking Through the Box” (neither inside nor outside, but, again, side to side in a “paralinear” or “para-tactical” manner. The storage unit would be historicize to situate current work on the archive as funding source, but we would also deconstruct it—it’s a unit without unicity; it is about configurations: self-storage allows us to “do things” with things (like the archive).
The political consequences of this metaphor of reading a-side (side to side is not a “full” reading that covers all the spaces) will unfold especially clearly in the Lifeboat chapter. After the ship sinks, by the way, the first object we see is a Red Cross box. The film begins by generating a problem of taking sides by failing to cut, showing us a continuous, evenly spaced series of objects (from Red Cross box to the corpse of German sailor). My account of the film has to do with the way it forces us to read the surface as aftermath.
Playing cards also have one legigble side. We never learn who really won.
Super as in Over—getting on top, above, periscope a kind detached finger, or a detached leg—the empty shoe—the same shoe is used to kill U-Boat captain.
Peri-reading
GIve context of the film, how it resists going toward a future that
would break,--the parabolic structure of the film--beginning with blown
up ship and ending it; one shoe drops then the other. Discussion of
Superman--Ubermensch and what de Man calls the super-reader--Uberleser
getting on top of anything--his spatial metaphor--kind of like Freud's
--impossible topography, but also no destination--serality means
going nowhere. See Anthropomorphism and Trope” on public transportation and transfer. Correspondence and Obsession—a kind of serial repetition compulsion that takes one nowhere.
The lifeboat is adrift.
After this moment go to newspaper reading and then underwater--the ring
all we have is the surface
go back to opening title sequence and step the wake--the serial--the
lack of a fold--film in a film--no position of exteriority vis a vis
the boat--also the typewriter--no transcription either.
No record of what happens aboard.
Return to close reading of Hodiak's initials and Bankhead's finger
No connection between the indexical, newspaper, and the tattoo (already broken connection by the camera, the typewriter
no finger writing, tattooed permanent, unlike Ms Froy and trash on
outside of window versus her signature on inside and then blown off by pollution somehow in the dark.
She even loses the ring from her finger.
The Lynching
Hitchcock and blackface
Black character in the Ring
Blackface in Young and Innocent
Blackface in To Catch a Thief
Blackman in Lifeboat plus oil smeared characters getting into the boat, and Canadian woman
African setting for remake of the Man Who Knew Too Much
Half-caste character in Murder!
Black woman and “foreigner” at the openig of Frenzy.
U-571 [Blu-ray]
Uber/Unterlesen:
In the Wake . . . Up Call
The important thing is that the first chapter will serve as an
analytical exposition of turning a thing into a trope (with some
attachments) that will set up the next chapter on Lifeboat as the
consequence of this procedure for close/d reading (namely, side to
side, over and under).
(fleshed out with some other scenes of reading in Hitchcock and maybe Lang too). Work in glass house scene from Army of Shadows, The Man Escaped, La Mer (Hitchcock as British lapsed Catholic critics (fake nun in The Lady Vanishes, nun at end of Vertigo, et, etc, etc) versus Bresson (Mozart Requiem soundtrack) –and Bazin—as total Catholics).[pic]
I’ll bring in de Man’s “super-reader”-or Ubermensch-Leser—in my discussion of Lifeboat, since there we have the discussion of the master race—de Man’s ironized super-reader is the one, for Hitchcock, who necessarily overreads, and who, by going over or beyond the page, underreads, at the cost of his life. I can flank the film with Rope (Nietzsche made explicit), no cut, and Stage Fright (Cut as guillotine).
Up Peri-text
Up, Para-Scope
(continues reading side to side idea and in Lang film of reading backwards (and upside down from chapter two). Lifeboat puts in play the relation between the side and the edge in terms of the cut, editing determining length of the take and, in this film, a stationary shot. The cut produces a kind of reading from the ledge rather than on a cutting edge, a dangerous place where one looks down or up, as in the opening and closing sequences of Vertigo, Mt Rushmore in N by NW, the hotel ledge in Foreign Correspondent, the church tower in The Man who Knew Too Much (first version), etc., etc. Survivors in the boat as Nachleben, uberleben, life beyond life (that perhaps should have died).
Other related titles or subheadings: “S(h)elf-Help”; “Reading Aside”--Deals with the way
And the end of chapter two, on Lifeboat, add two versions of landlocked lifeboats, the glass structure in the library of Army of Shadows and the Coffin at the end of Missing (a film about U.S. citizenship, in many ways). Brief discussions of both films to elaborate on the complexity of close(d)reading and the politics of resistance inside Resistance whether the book / reading / eating room inside the library reading is open or closed.
I was watching Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows again last night
(it's like a work of art masterpiece version on an action movie) and
noticed two strange moments in which a book written by the leader of
the Resistance group in the film, who happens to be a catholic priest, is shown in close up. The first shot of this book is seen as a flashback, the last of, I
believe, four flashback shots, as the hero is being marched by two rows of Nazi guards to be executed along with his fellow prisoners, who have just had their Last Smoke, using up the hero's remaining cigarettes. Only one prisoner
crosses himself, however, before they get up to go. The music gets kind of Catholic as the prisoners are being marched through prison and the hero gets his
voice-over and we see the book. Now I thought that the title of the
book Transfini et Continum "pre-echoed," as it were, QM's conception
of "transfinitude." I thought, "what a strange coincidence, sort
of." Just a random connection somewhere that seemed to confirm to me, as crazy it was to think it, that I was right about QM's covert
anti-Semitism. But as nothing more than a cool moment, and I would never say
anything about it. But after the hero escapes, there's a scene with
him in hiding putting on a table the five books he has to keep him
company, all by the same theologian / Resistance leader (who is
merciless when it comes to killing their most effective members if
they are caught by the Nazis. He is Jesuitical, and his merciless is
ironized by the hero.) But here's the thing. All of the titles are
about math, set theory, and formalism and logic, all written before
the war, the hero says in voice-over. The Transfini book comes last,
and then there's a shot of the hero's hand on the stack of five books (there are
several great shots of hands in the film, one when the heroine takes the hero's
right hand in both of hers for a few moments by way of consoling him and
another when another hero holds one cyanide capsule in the wounded (by SS torture) palm of his hand, shot in close up, and offers the capsule to a
dying fellow prisoner while lying (the hero saying he has two capsules when we’ve just seen that he only has one). The film cuts away before we know if the offer is accepted or not by the nearly dead man.
I still do not know what to make of the book shots, especially the
fact that only the book shot in the execution scene is the only one
that is NOT a flashback (all of the other shots have appeared earlier
in the film, so it's kind of a montage "seeing your life before your
eyes before you die" kind of moment, except that it is quite drawn
out.
But the film inadvertently offers a frame, perhaps because of its
delayed release, for Badiou and QM as Catholic stinker / thinkers whose
writings are out-of-date, attempts or set up theories allowing
philosophy to go back before WWII but without going back to Sartre:
in the film, theology prefigures the Resistance, then becomes the
Resistance, the remains, remainder, and legacy of the Resistance
but only if the books remain unopened stacked neatly, and held in
place by a comforting hand. Theology is thus the resistance to the Resistance. The stack of books takes us back to the lunch scene in the theologian’s library (the priest closes books during this scene, puts one back on a shelf) with the lunch in the glass wooden box.
Maybe I've been reading too much Perec.
[pic][pic]
One odd thing is that the books were published AFTER the war, so the
dates are wrong, and the covers are indeed fakes.
There must be something in that film about set theory and
narrative--being unable to resist, or digging yourself deeper into
evil the more you try to resist (the hero murders a traitor, just as
another member of the Resistance murders a woman member of the
Resistance at the end of the film).
There's almost no on-screen violence, as if it were set apart, like the glass house within the library, which the shot by shot voice—over makes the space seem large rather than small.
A scene in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969). Two brothers, neither of whom knows the other is working for the Resistance) have breakfast in a
little glass room in the middle of the room, a personal library, because it's easier to heat that room. But there's something strange about the glass house in the library here (one brother is a priest and he’s the one who lives here) that seems well worth pursuing (glass offering no resistance) as a scene of non/resistant reading.
“Living in a Glass House”—Jesus’s admonition against rock throwing—as a reading of the glass house scene in Army of Shadows (translated into a new historicizing admonition: “don’t throw stones at those who didn’t resist, because those who did resist even resisted the resisters closest to them without either knowing it and in other cases collaborated with other resisters.”)
To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a oral exhibitionism, that we badly need.
Surrealism, 2:1, 209
Also the telephone booth scene in Blackmail when the couple think they are speaking privately but have been heard or read their lips by the blackmailer standing outside. In a later scene outside the booth, we can only hear some of what the cop says when takes the call.
-----------------------
[i] See Pierre Missac, “Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck,” in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), 220. Missac adds Benjamin’s “signals not being received, understood, or recorded, the shipwrecked figure clings hopelessly to the most fragile debris, to the last straw (I: 1243). In vain, of course, as he knew: his existence cannot be saved.”
[ii] Roger Callois, "The Sociology of the Executioner," in Denis Hollier, ed The
College of Sociology 1937-39. reverberated with my Lifeboat chapter
and that image in the Benjamin and play book of the toy guillotine
[iii] Texture of the rumpled newspaper, sort of the like ocean sometimes—perhaps an image of disfigured monumentality or monumentalization as disfiguration.
[iv] The manicule—the long history of the index as archiving—the trope of the finger gets emptied out. See Bill Sherman, Used Books
[v] See The 39th Steps (in the train car with the lingerie salesmen and Reverend, not connecting Hannay to the newspaper they read about him, an accused murderer) and again at the farmer's house (the young wife and Hanney exchange glances as the farmer says grace and opens one eye to see what's going on) and in Shadow of a Doubt (Uncle Charlie [Joseh Cotton] reads the newspaper). And in Suspicion, Fontaine identifies Grant by holding up a newspaper with a photo of him in it. Criminal reading newspaper on his bed and mirror reflection near the start of Blackmail; cameo of Hitchcock reading on the Tube train in .
[vi] On atomizing Hitchcock, see Frederic Jameson, Everything You Wanted to Know about Hitch, . For a critique see Cohen. Cohen’s own ”users guide” is hardly exhaustive, however, and contains “memes” (various letters) that might be collected under the heading of initials, for example. Cohen notes the repetition of the initials “HH” in many Hitchcock films, but he forgets “FF” in Foreign Correspondent and Hitchcock’s broader use of the same initial for the first letter of the first and last names. See also Peter Conrad’s Hitchcock Murders, discussed by Cohen p. 65. For an encyclopedic attempt to catalogue Hitchcock’s repetitions, see Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs
Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
[vii]
Morris, Christopher D. The hanging figure: on suspense and the films of Alfred Hitchcock
Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2002.
book
LIBRARY WEST General Collection PN1998.3.H58 M67 2002
. Find the director and other Hitchcock games
Thomas M. Leitch.
Author: Leitch, Thomas M.
Published: Athens : University of Georgia Press, c1991.
book
LIBRARY WEST General Collection PN1998.3.H58 L46 1991
Hitchcock's motifs
Michael Walker.
Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, c2005.
Deconstruction and the visual arts : art, media, architecture
edited by Peter Brunette, David Wills.
Published: Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1994.
ARCHITECTURE/FINE ARTS LIBRARY General Collection N71 .D43 1994
(REQUESTED ARCHI)
The encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock
Thomas Leitch ; foreword by Gene D. Phillips.
New York : Facts on File/Checkmark Books, c2002.
Hitchcock's motifs
Michael Walker.
Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, c2005.
[viii] By describing Cohen’s book on Hitchcock “psychotic,” we mean that Cohen delivers close readings that Zizek and Jameson never mange, as well as an attention to writing in its broadest sense, including de Man's inscription, and media, in Benjamin and Kittler’s sense. What happens if the ocular state is sabotaged, its cognitive programming auto-interrupted as a regime of memory management (mass culture industry)? . . . This compels a detour to a site in Hitchcock that had been routinely occluded: an explicit recurrence to marking systems, cryptomony, letters, “reading,” mnemonic traces, sound, translation itself, telepathy and telegraphy, postal relays, and the ways these problems take shape within an order laced by espionage. . . . A spectographics prowls at the virtual interface of epistemology and event, trope and inscription, translation and mnemonics, an imaginary era of the book, on the one hand, and one of the image (Bild), video, the electronic archive, and so forth, on the other. For if the cinematic is distinguished, always, by accounting in advance for its own repetitions, it also divides, recedes before itself, re-marks and precedes its own apparition. . . . When [Hitchcock] uses the term pure cinema, it [sic] has little to do with the “visual.” The pure movement in question invariably involves citational networks and temporal folds, mnemonic explosions and cuts, the leads and telegraphic chains that accompany the cinematic rush or hiatus. This cinemallographics precedes figuration, predates hieroglyphics, traverses aural and visual chains, coalesces in and erases memory. Cinema knows that it precedes phenomalization” (247). Rather than an encyclopedia of Hitchcock that merely accumulates facts when analysis is needed, Cohen suggests, alternatively, that “one might need, if only to begin with, an awareness that there appears a signifying agency in Hitchcock irreducible to visual or linguistic precepts, yet which partakes aggressively of the ‘citational structure’ of the image. One might rather need a nonglossary, just the beginning of one, to turn over a first layer of what transformative nodes, puns, repetitions, secret agents, trace networks—ad these would have to be wired, incessantly, to self-marking cites of teletechnicity. That is, fundamentally and inclusively, what Hitchcock calls the “cinematic.” (48) But the price is Cohen pays for replacing an encyclopedia with what he calls a “user’s guide” made of up various motifs is not merely that he "relapses" (to use his word) into symbolic readings (candy as excrement in The Secret Agent; He constantly uses the word “like” or puts a word in scare quotes such as “bomb” to describe a film, and even cites images from the films to describe what is beyond the human, form, personification—bubbling water Manxman and Pyscho are the “bog,” “Mother,” the “prefigural”) and so remains with the trap of Zizek's Lacanian reading, but that, insofar as Cohen moving past Zizek's symbolic reading, Cohen hallucinates readings of letters (the in Dr. Hartz, the villain in The Lady Vanishes includes the initials “A” “H,” for “Alfred Hitchcock”; similarly, the Royal Albert Hall in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much mark the initials “A” and “H,” for “Alfred Hitchcock”;); relies on metaphors drawn from new media to describe invisible, secret agencies (interface, networks); sees resemblances between objects that are totally unlike (a statue and a helicopter); and alternates, often in the same sentence, between historicist and ontological terms (“predates,” “antefigural,” “before the advent,” “precessional,” and so on) derived from conflicting discourses of deconstruction and historicism.[ix]
Cohen’s text does not advance an argument but repeats and recites the same points. (writing the same
Hitchbook twice; writing the same book three times or four times,
depending on how you see the Hitchcock book(s). Compare the passage cited above to the passage we cite now from Cohen below:
Networks of repetitions, insignia, signature effects, and language experiments down to preletteral numeral logics run across this work (xii)
The ‘espionage’ of the teletechnic empire in Hitchcock occurs with the invocation, it seems, of every variant of the linguistic arsenal—every telegraphy and telephony, teletype and news press, glass-boothed taxidermy shop and solar church, phonographic relay and machine of transport, kitchen and chocolate factory. Every cryptonomy thrown up by the text, including the labyrinth of Hitchcock’s own signature systems, appears politically inscribed within a general challenge and overthrow of the ocularcentric state—one whose technical suppression forms the perpetual MacGuffuin of the narrative “MacGuffins” in lace. (73-74)[x] Compare quotations on p. 347 and 248, the every end of the book and the preface
While one could easily see a repetition compulsion at work in Cohen’s text that makes for turgid prose and overingenious readings, we take his psychotic texts to be major contribution to Hitchcock criticism: they open the possibility of reframing the problem of interpreting Hitchcock not as escaping the trap of the symbolic but of reading Hitchcock’s filmic “cryptonomies” as psychotic reading, a psychosis induced by a gap between repetitions of the proper name and of the graphic mark that mark a failure to bridge inscription and phenomenalization.
As de Man writes at the end of “Hypogram and Inscription”, “the materiality (as distinct from the phenomenality) that is thus revealed [in Victor Hugo’s poem, “Ecrit sur la vitre d’une fenetre flamade,” or “Written on the windowpane of a window”], the unseen “crystal” whose existence becomes a certain there and a certain then which can become a here and a now in the reading “now” taking place, is not the materiality of the mind or of a time or of the carillon—none of which exist, except in the figure of prosopoeia (giving face)—but the materiality of an inscription.[xi] Description, it appears, was a device to conceal inscription. Inscription is neither a figure, nor a sign, nor a cognition, nor a desire, nor a hypogram nor a matrix, yet no theory of reading can achieve consistency if . . . it responds to its powers only by a figural evasion which [sometimes] takes the subtly effective form of evading the figural. (51). Cohen too evades the figural literally links the unfinished name “Mar-“ to marks. “it is more than peculiar that the recurrence in almost all of Hitchcock’s film of some variant of a name beginning Mar- has received no critical attention—where the work implants in some name or figure (central or minor), reference to a marking system that acknowledged the entire order of the visual in cinema to be immersed in a marking or marring event” (endnote 5, 250). In asserting the connection of the recurrent “name” “Mar-“ and the graphic system of “marking” through italics, Cohen offers the reader a hallucinatory account of connective repetition that passes from syllable to word and presented as if by way of compensation for Cohen’s frustration of the reader’s demand for closure and sense other critics provide through symbolic readings (readings the reader does not recognize are in fact foreclosed). In Cohen’s text, the hyphen, a typographic mark takes on unintended allegorical significance as a marker of that which separates names, or poetry, from language and concepts, or philosophy, as the unreadable figure that allows for symbolic readings of Hitchcock’s that gain their coherence either at the price of assuming that the films can be reduced to discrete signifying elements atoms, elements, motifs, and so on, that the critic then processes as the unity of the work or at the price of close reading altogether in favor of generalization.[xii] Zizek does not read The Wrong Man at all; Jameson mises the public park as the opposite of the private property that is the open cornfield. On The Wrong Man, see Zizek. Zizek’s reading may be easily countered if one were merely to list scenes simply he fails to observe, much less analyze: the spinning shot in the jail cell, etc). I would also maintain that the last four films, apart perhaps from Topaz, are all much better than they have been credit for being and would constitute a profitable point of departure for reading Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as opposed to the dominant mode, established by William Rothman, who reading Hitchcock from The Lodger through Psycho. Lifeboat sank, so to speak, upon its release in 1944 and has yet to receive sustained critical attention. The closest anyone has come is the chapter entitled “Lifeboat” in 87-120, which takes what we are calling the pre-fabricated allegory of he film at face value. Cohen mentions the film in passing in both volumes of Hitchcock’s Crpytonomies, notably in the context of the difficulty of trying to break Hitchcock’s into an encyclopedia. Cohen’s psychotic text remains stranded, perhaps even wrecked, between names and concepts, between poetry and philosophy, the sensory and non-sensory.[xiii] intra-sensory circulations [do] not occur between one kind of sense experience and another but between, on the one side, the sensory as such, and, on the other, the non-sensory mind” (de man, 50).
[xiv] See Zizek’s intro for an excellent discussion of the various ways in whichcritics have divided up hitchcock’s oeuvre.
[xv] See Carl Schmitt , Political Theology and The Concept of the Political and Walter Benjamin “Critique of Violence,” . For parallels between them, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Emergency, Homo Sacer and “Taking Exception” in Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities. See also Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law” in Acts of Religion trans Gil. Stanford)
[xvi] On the paradox of the state of exception, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology and The Concept of the Political and Giorgio Agamben, State of Emergency. For Schmitt, the paradox is not just a political problem but a reading strategy. In his reading of Hamlet, for example, Schmitt finds states of exception everywhere. See Hamlet or Hecuba.
[xvii] See WB, Origins of German Tragic Drama, and Weber. Agamben has not written on this very difficult text.
[xviii] In Young and Innocent, the opening theme music is the music we hear in the dance hall when the killer in black face drummer recognizes the tramp with a matching zoom (not as close as the extreme zoom of the drummer’s twitching eyes) and the superimposition of the tramp‘s old clothes over his new duds. After an instrumental, there’s an interval, an intermission, and then they come back and play the same theme song again until the drummer, having taken too much speed, to stop the twitching breaks down. Girl says “deblacken his face” about the villain in blackface who appears to have passed out so that she may properly have the champ recognize him.
See also the black character who is made the object of racist fun in the carnival scene at the beginning in The Ring. The racist laughter is made grotesque by close up shots of fully open mouths, especially the cop’s mouth.
Also, lawyer scene with eyeglasses. Cameo of Hitchcock outside the court after the hero steals the lawyer’s glasses and wears them to escape disguised. The earlier scene with the attorney, takes off his glasses efore asks him if he is representing the prosecution. “No, I’m on your side.” Later, girl says “Can’t you see I’m on their side.” The recognition of the villain seen only in the first scene. Depends on a break, in this case, the kids getting a break because the drummer misreads the cops and , in paranoid fashion, thinks they are after him when they are really after the tramp and the daughter . heroine. And she also repeats her first aid scene by helping the villain as she had helped the hero after he fainted.
A similar moment involving glasses and H’s cameo occurs in Stage Fright. Also part of the heroine’s disguise, but she can’t really see where she is going.
[xix] Nietzsche comes up explicitly in Rope, of course.
[xx] I am not regarding the film as an exception as Zizek does The Wrong Man (he) or late Hitchcock, or the British Hitchcock.
[xxi] See Matthew Titlebaum, ed. Montage and Modern Life (1919-1942) (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992) esp. pp. 14-47.
[xxii] Hitchcock weighs in, as it were, on film theory debate about the indexicality of the film image, with Hitchcock, pace Bazin, implying that pint is not “precessional” to film, as Cohen puts it, but a fingering as figuring of hwat is missing. The detached finger comlements the missing fourth finger in The 39 Steps (that Hannay mistaken recalled as thethird finger), and the inexplicable disppaearnce of Mis Froy’s name from the wndow in The Lady Vanishes. Robert Donat is also unable to transcribe musical notiations and of course fails to remember te tume Froy taught him to remember at the end of the film; he manages to establish that is correct only when he saees the lable of hher tea stickon the window, exteriror and trash, for a moment.
[xxiii] See the end of Sabotage where the Chief Detective cannot recall whether mrs. Verloc’s words flowed or preceded the explosion set off by the now murdered Verloc’s accomplice: scratching his head, he asks himself “Was it before? Or was it after?” End of film.
[xxiv] For a reading of the initials, "B.M." in Shadow of a Doubt, click here. See Tom Cohen's brief entry on "bm" in Crytpnomies (vol 1), chapter 2, "A User's Guide."
[xxv] Does this (a)reading put Lee Edelman's anal as opposed to phallic reading of Hitchcock in the shitter, as it were? Is reading closely a waste of time, a "shitty" passing the time, diversion and distraction?
[xxvi] See . See Also Erich Auerbach on Chaplin in Mimesis.
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