Never having seen this Hitchcock film in a decent print before, but only in the dreadfully worn-out prints that distributors have been content to release to the public, I had never appreciated it.
However, the recent Talking Pictures TV showing of the scintillatingly pristine Criterion restoration, with the original hand-tinted blood-red splash of the point-of-view suicide, has remedied that: This astonishing movie drew me deep into the disturbing labyrinth that lurks just on the other side of our brittle, but complacently smooth, veneer of consciousness.
This vertiginous plunge down the slippery slope of our frail human illusion into an horrific trance of frozen terror, as the piercing lights of Hitchcock's camera and projector bear down on us and sweep away our complacent psychological defences against the reality we strive to keep at bay, is the work of an artist of irresistible hypnotic power.
Such mastery of cinematic means to produce precise effects in the viewer is the equal of psychological analysis. The levels of mental disturbance displayed in this film put the viewer into a region of the mind beyond surrealism, where the hyper-realism of raw psychic disturbance makes ordinary reality fade into a pale and unconvincing ghostly parody of the truth.
Hitch must have intuited that the whole art of cinema is based on the powerful illusion known as Pepper's Ghost - an illusion which depends for its effect upon the readiness of the viewer to believe it. Hitch was a magician, and the High Priest of an ancient craft who employed the most modern technology of the moving picture to seduce his acolytes into the consciousness of the mysteries hiding within all of us, that both terrify and fascinate.
Many have sought to unpack the utterly brilliant matching of cinematic form to purpose in this film, and have properly extolled the excellence of Hitchcock's sheer technical craft. Yet among these generally positive critics there is always one reservation: The alleged technical incompetence of the backward- racing backgrounds to the close-ups of the downhill-skiing couple's rush towards the psychological crisis.
At this moment, it has been thought, Hitchcock's genius abandoned him, and allowed him to insert a carelessly shoddy and unconvincing studio backdrop, which is in stark and disturbing contrast to the documentary long-shots taken on the actual ski slopes, and into which the studio shots are amateurishly inserted.
Apart from the improbability of a perfectionist and directorial disciplinarian like Alfred Hitchcock fudging a scene, the fact is that his detractors, in this instance, have chosen to see as a flaw the jarring contrast, which seems obviously intended as the means whereby we are enabled to feel the disembodied nature of the psychological reality, that is removing the two chief characters from their false, surface consciousness, as they plunge towards the literal cliffhanger denouement of either destruction or deliverance.
In other words, the studied artificiality of the intimate close-ups is absolutely essential to the successful impact of this allegedly defective scene! The characters seem suspended in an airless region of their own intimate crisis, oblivious of the rushing world that would sweep them away from themselves - and as they are out of their mind, they come to their senses, and the vertiginous self-abandonment instantly ceases.
Hitchcock's deployment of precise yet mysterious symbolism to imprint our minds without our really appreciating what we are seeing until it is allowed to become clear at this necessary crisis, with the disturbingly irrational appearance of parallel lines, fields of stark white, and toboggans or skis on snowy slopes, puts us in the same unstable mental state as his protagonists: We become as intent on their salvation from their personal psychic predicament as if we were their analyst - or indeed shared their own tormented and doomed psychological state.
Orson Welles' 'Rosebud' was the toboggan symbolising the psychological disturbance of the protagonist in his 'Citizen Kane' of three years before 'Spellbound,' and i.m.h.o. Hitchcock's symbolism is not forced like Welles's, and is much more closely and meaningfully integrated into the film it appears in. Welles' symbol is cynically cast into the fire, whereas Hitchcock's is triumphant and redemptive.
I think the location of the psychic denouement of 'Spellbound' in a place called 'Gabriel Valley' is Hitch's Catholic upbringing haunting him, this time in a positive sense; and (for me at least) this imbues his drama with a humanising spirituality that is magnificently at odds with both scientific psychiatry and unforgiving morality - and far beyond the somewhat mechanical and cynical contrivance of Welles, whom I increasingly find cold and shallow and pretentious.
But this breathtakingly brilliant film-making by Hitchcock produces an unsettling sense of perfection, like having stared too long at an intensely bright light: One reels out of the cinema - or out of one's hallucination - into the common light of day, stumbling as one tries to come to terms with this dull, unmeaning gleam that passes for ordinary consciousness.
I cannot believe that this film should not be considered one of the finest ever made, or that it is considered one of the Master's lesser achievements!
And nor can I forgive the littleness of the age we presently live in, that forces the entirely admirable 'Talking Pictures TV' to place before this superb study of the agonies and glories of heterosexual desire - among other complex traits of our suffering humanity - the shallow and insulting warning that, 'This film may contain scenes which some viewers may find distressing.'
It seems to me that our entire era requires psychoanalysing, before we can again be permitted to embark on that dark and dangerous pursuit of passion, that may as easily be hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of the mind, as it might lead us into redemption.
Hitch was full of such very human complexes: In this film he gives to those miseries and glories a poetic power that transfixes and transforms our sensibility.
However, the recent Talking Pictures TV showing of the scintillatingly pristine Criterion restoration, with the original hand-tinted blood-red splash of the point-of-view suicide, has remedied that: This astonishing movie drew me deep into the disturbing labyrinth that lurks just on the other side of our brittle, but complacently smooth, veneer of consciousness.
This vertiginous plunge down the slippery slope of our frail human illusion into an horrific trance of frozen terror, as the piercing lights of Hitchcock's camera and projector bear down on us and sweep away our complacent psychological defences against the reality we strive to keep at bay, is the work of an artist of irresistible hypnotic power.
Such mastery of cinematic means to produce precise effects in the viewer is the equal of psychological analysis. The levels of mental disturbance displayed in this film put the viewer into a region of the mind beyond surrealism, where the hyper-realism of raw psychic disturbance makes ordinary reality fade into a pale and unconvincing ghostly parody of the truth.
Hitch must have intuited that the whole art of cinema is based on the powerful illusion known as Pepper's Ghost - an illusion which depends for its effect upon the readiness of the viewer to believe it. Hitch was a magician, and the High Priest of an ancient craft who employed the most modern technology of the moving picture to seduce his acolytes into the consciousness of the mysteries hiding within all of us, that both terrify and fascinate.
Many have sought to unpack the utterly brilliant matching of cinematic form to purpose in this film, and have properly extolled the excellence of Hitchcock's sheer technical craft. Yet among these generally positive critics there is always one reservation: The alleged technical incompetence of the backward- racing backgrounds to the close-ups of the downhill-skiing couple's rush towards the psychological crisis.
At this moment, it has been thought, Hitchcock's genius abandoned him, and allowed him to insert a carelessly shoddy and unconvincing studio backdrop, which is in stark and disturbing contrast to the documentary long-shots taken on the actual ski slopes, and into which the studio shots are amateurishly inserted.
Apart from the improbability of a perfectionist and directorial disciplinarian like Alfred Hitchcock fudging a scene, the fact is that his detractors, in this instance, have chosen to see as a flaw the jarring contrast, which seems obviously intended as the means whereby we are enabled to feel the disembodied nature of the psychological reality, that is removing the two chief characters from their false, surface consciousness, as they plunge towards the literal cliffhanger denouement of either destruction or deliverance.
In other words, the studied artificiality of the intimate close-ups is absolutely essential to the successful impact of this allegedly defective scene! The characters seem suspended in an airless region of their own intimate crisis, oblivious of the rushing world that would sweep them away from themselves - and as they are out of their mind, they come to their senses, and the vertiginous self-abandonment instantly ceases.
Hitchcock's deployment of precise yet mysterious symbolism to imprint our minds without our really appreciating what we are seeing until it is allowed to become clear at this necessary crisis, with the disturbingly irrational appearance of parallel lines, fields of stark white, and toboggans or skis on snowy slopes, puts us in the same unstable mental state as his protagonists: We become as intent on their salvation from their personal psychic predicament as if we were their analyst - or indeed shared their own tormented and doomed psychological state.
Orson Welles' 'Rosebud' was the toboggan symbolising the psychological disturbance of the protagonist in his 'Citizen Kane' of three years before 'Spellbound,' and i.m.h.o. Hitchcock's symbolism is not forced like Welles's, and is much more closely and meaningfully integrated into the film it appears in. Welles' symbol is cynically cast into the fire, whereas Hitchcock's is triumphant and redemptive.
I think the location of the psychic denouement of 'Spellbound' in a place called 'Gabriel Valley' is Hitch's Catholic upbringing haunting him, this time in a positive sense; and (for me at least) this imbues his drama with a humanising spirituality that is magnificently at odds with both scientific psychiatry and unforgiving morality - and far beyond the somewhat mechanical and cynical contrivance of Welles, whom I increasingly find cold and shallow and pretentious.
But this breathtakingly brilliant film-making by Hitchcock produces an unsettling sense of perfection, like having stared too long at an intensely bright light: One reels out of the cinema - or out of one's hallucination - into the common light of day, stumbling as one tries to come to terms with this dull, unmeaning gleam that passes for ordinary consciousness.
I cannot believe that this film should not be considered one of the finest ever made, or that it is considered one of the Master's lesser achievements!
And nor can I forgive the littleness of the age we presently live in, that forces the entirely admirable 'Talking Pictures TV' to place before this superb study of the agonies and glories of heterosexual desire - among other complex traits of our suffering humanity - the shallow and insulting warning that, 'This film may contain scenes which some viewers may find distressing.'
It seems to me that our entire era requires psychoanalysing, before we can again be permitted to embark on that dark and dangerous pursuit of passion, that may as easily be hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of the mind, as it might lead us into redemption.
Hitch was full of such very human complexes: In this film he gives to those miseries and glories a poetic power that transfixes and transforms our sensibility.