The MacGuffin: News and Comment (29/Sep/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
Sep 29
First, I've slightly abridged and simplified last week's entry, which should make clearer what I intended to say there about the painter Edvard Munch and the filmmakers Peter Watkins and Alfred Hitchcock. Second, I attended this week in Melbourne a talk by Dr Francis Macnab on the 'other' side of Munch, the positive, life-enjoying side of the painter. Returning to Norway after spending time in Dr Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen in 1908, Munch eventually settled on a farm. The subsequent period produced some nice paintings of fruit trees, horses, etc. Dr Macnab felt that Munch maintained an 'existentialist' self-awareness throughout much of his life (1863-1944). So that rather confirms what I noted here last time, about Munch's mature detachment and witty acceptance of life. (However, I note from the 'Columbia Encyclopedia' and other sources, the following, which sums things up: 'His painting became brighter of palette and less introverted until the 1920s, when he again was moved to portray his dreadful anguish.') Third, I began last time to suggest that both Munch and Hitchcock were attracted to 'the primitive' - whether in subject-matter or technique or both. Both kinds of 'the primitive' are on show, for example, in The Trouble With Harry (1955), whose titles are modelled after paintings by Hitchcock's favourite painter, the faux-naïve Paul Klee, and whose 'pastoral' subject-matter simplifies the elements of life to roughly the same as Munch's 'Frieze of Life' cycle: Angst, Love, Sex, and Death. (Call it 'Symbolism'.) Now let me bring in Peter Watkins again. I said last time that his 3½-hour film Edvard Munch puts the audience inside Munch's intense subjectivity in a way that reminds me of how Hitchcock involves us in Marnie. Marnie, like Munch, comes of a repressive, religious upbringing, full of pain, and, again like Munch, she is affected by bloody images that she, at any rate, doesn't understand but which have to do with events in her childhood. Watkins shows Munch drawing on memories whose trigger is the pain of a love affair with a promiscuous married woman. True, Marnie is in denial of what is happening to her for much of Hitchcock's film, whereas Watkins shows Munch engaged in an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-shaping, but the basic trajectory of both films is still close, and is one in which the respective audiences are invited (even forced) to share, as if that process or trajectory were expressive of some universal condition. Which brings me to this. Munch scholar Sue Prideaux, in her book 'Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream', notes that the painter's most famous painting 'is often linked with Schopenhauer's concept of dread'. Citing the latter's 'Philosophie der Kunst' (which I confess I don't know), she notes a passage in which Schopenhauer claims that the expressive potential of pictorial art is limited by its inability to represent a scream. In other words, pictorial art can't convey the absolute nature of the cosmic Will itself. But Munch certainly rose to the challenge (while claiming that he didn't come across the passage in Schopenhauer until much later in his life) - as did the master of 'pure film', Hitchcock. As I have often said, the Albert Hall scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), where Jo McKenna gives expression to the 'ineffable' with her scream, epitomises just how closely 'pure film' and the working of invisible Will are near-allied. In turn, there is an expressive affinity of 'pure film' (film-as-flow) and suspense. I'll conclude by coming back to the excellent article on Peter Watkins's Edvard Munch I mentioned last time, posted on the World Socialist Web Site. There, Joanne Laurier writes: 'The relationship between the objective and subjective in art is obviously a complex one. Watkins' film succeeds in demonstrating that Munch's ability to penetrate into the subjective, an ability itself that has an objective component, generates an immense ... tension.' Hmm. Substitute 'immense suspense' for 'immense tension', and Laurier could be talking about Hitchcock. For example, her remarks put a fresh perspective on why Hitchcock always emphasised that suspense requires giving the audience information that the characters don't have. The suspense, or tension, proceeds from our superior knowledge, or objectivity, compared with the characters'. Indeed, I would say that what Hitchcock called the 'God's-eye view' of Bodega Bay in The Birds has its special role in giving that film its cosmic suspense. Interestingly, in the pre-planning for The Birds, Munch's 'The Scream' was at the forefront of Hitchcock's and art designer Robert Boyle's thinking ...
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