In Notorious, made immediately after the war, Devlin, the Cary Grant character, comes perilously close to forfeiting his humanity. He is a “fatheaded guy full of pain,” as he memorably describes himself, until he awakens to his responsibility to Alicia. At the moment of this awakening, which occurs off-camera (like Dexter’s awakening in The Philadelphia Story), it dawns on Devlin that Alicia, who told him she had a hangover the last time they met, was really sick. He suspects the truth, that Sebastian, having discovered that she is an American agent, is poisoning her. He senses that she is in mortal danger. And he recognizes that she would not be in peril had he not failed, from the beginning of their relationship, to have regard for her frailties and to declare his feelings for her. If he now fails to rescue her and Sebastian (and his mother) succeed in their plot to murder her, he would feel that her blood was on his hands as surely as if he had murdered her himself. In awakening to the reality that a “fat-headed guy full of pain” is who he is, who he has been, a man concerned only with his own feelings and indifferent to Alicia’s humanity, Devlin changes. That old self dies, and a new self is born.
When at the end of the film he leads the woman he loves to safety and (with her approval) locks a desperate Sebastian, reduced to groveling, out of the car, Devlin deliberately condemns Alicia’s would-be murderer to death, delivering him into the hands of his Nazi executioners. To be sure, by conspiring with his mother to murder Alicia, Sebastian had forfeited any claim on Devlin to show him mercy. But Sebastian is not Willi. He is far from indifferent to the fate of the woman he was poisoning; he was killing the thing he loved. Skillful actor that he was, Claude Rains conveys subtly but powerfully how much Sebastian, fallen back under his mother’s sway, nonetheless enjoys administering the poison to the woman he loves and watching her weaken. But Sebastian takes pleasure in her suffering not because he has contempt for her but because he loves her—and because he knows that she loves Devlin.
Sebastian feels betrayed. Surely, though, he always knew that Alicia never loved him the way he loved her, that loving him was more than he could ask of her when he proposed to her. The most he could ask was that she not act, in public or private, in ways that would keep him from sustaining the illusion that they had a real marriage. But he must have known that even this was more than he had the right to ask. By imposing that condition, he was imprisoning Alicia, inflicting “little deaths” on her every day and certainly every night. Why did his wife marry him when she doesn’t love him? He does not want to know. In keeping her from walking in the direction of the unattained but attainable self, he is at the same time denying reality and forgoing all hope of realizing his own dreams. For Sebastian loves Alicia no less deeply than Devlin does.
By his indifference to the fate to which he knowingly consigns Sebastian when he pushes down the car door lock, does Devlin forfeit his own humanity, then? Not in Alicia’s eyes. And far from punishing Devlin, Hitchcock rewards him as he drives away with her, marriage presumably next on their agenda. But if Hitchcock doesn’t condemn Devlin, neither does he share Devlin’s indifference to Sebastian’s fate. Rather than follow Devlin and Alicia as their car drives off, the camera remains with Sebastian, bearing respectful witness as he walks with dignity—no longer groveling but resolute now, like Stefan (Louis Jourdan) at the end of Letter from an Unknown Woman—toward the door that then closes behind him, sealing the fate whose necessity he no longer questions.
By the gravitas and formality of this framing, Hitchcock’s camera at once acknowledges Sebastian’s humanity and ratifies the death sentence that the Nazis in the house are ready to carry out. They will kill him not for poisoning his wife but for failing to succeed in killing her, not for loving unwisely but for loving at all, and not for crimes against humanity but for the crime of being human. Hitchcock is not ratifying their condemnation of Sebastian. He is ratifying the judgment Sebastian passes upon himself when he awakens, too late, to his own humanity.
Figure 7.1
And what of Devlin and Alicia? They are not murderers, but until the film’s penultimate scene, when they achieve the mutual forgiveness that comedies of remarriage require for a true marriage, they are guilty of inflicting “little deaths” on each other, locked as they are in a perverse pattern they are unable, or unwilling, to break. They love each other but avoid acknowledging their love. With scrupulous attention Hitchcock’s camera tracks the violence they do to each other, and to themselves, by their words and their silences.
In the racetrack sequence, as Alicia is dutifully reporting to Devlin, as per her assignment, the impressions gleaned from her dinner with Sebastian and his fellow Nazis, Hitchcock frames their conversation in a frontal two shot that underscores that they are in a public place and have to appear as if they just happened to have run into each other and are simply chatting. But when Alicia says, “You can add Sebastian’s name to my list of playmates,” the camera registers, and expresses, the jump in the emotional intensity of their conversation by cutting to a pair of shots that are closer and more intimate, but which also isolate Devlin and Alicia in separate frames. First, a shot of Devlin, in which he says, “Pretty fast work.” Then a countershot of Alicia, who says, “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
With these provocative words, Alicia reveals to Devlin for the first time her private understanding of his behavior in an earlier scene. Her revelation of how she really thinks, albeit offered in a mode of attack, constitutes a significant development within a closed, repetitive pattern that seemed to allow for no new developments. This revelation will turn out to be an important moment within Notorious as a whole, but its full significance will reveal itself to us only retroactively. It initiates a series of revelations by both parties, each a response to the preceding one—a series that is not completed until the end of the film, when Devlin finally confesses to Alicia not only that he loves her but that he has loved her from the beginning. To underscore both that this moment is meaningful and that its meaning as yet remains unknown (indeed, unknowable) by us, Hitchcock composes this shot so that we experience it as spatially disorienting.
As Alicia begins to speak, she turns her head screen left. But because she performs this gesture before we have a chance to grasp how this new camera angle relates, spatially, to the ones that preceded it, we literally cannot tell whether Alicia is turning her head toward Devlin or away from him.1 The following close-up of Devlin, framed in profile, compounds our disorientation. Does the fact that we are viewing him from this angle mean that he has turned away from Alicia as she, perhaps, has turned away from him? Are we, perhaps, viewing him from her point of view? Or has only the camera changed position?
If Alicia and Devlin were characters in a stage play, these expressive effects would not be possible. Onstage, an actress either does or does not turn away from an actor. The actor either does or does not turn his profile to the actress. And if he should turn his profile to the audience, it is he who performs this gesture; the audience’s position remains fixed. Again, it is not merely that such ambiguities need the camera to capture them; without the camera they cannot be. Classical movies regularly employ a number of expressive postures and gestures—including, but not limited to, turning away from the camera, almost facing the camera, looking “through” the camera, and meeting the camera’s gaze—that in this way can only be real (it is not merely that they can only be captured) within the world of a film. Such postures and gestures, which are particular to film, affect the moods in which we perceive all the “faces and motions and settings” by which movies express themselves, thus the moods cast by entire sequences, entire films.
Wounded by Devlin’s words—” You almost had me believing in that little miracle of yours.…Lucky for both of us I didn’t. It wouldn’t have been pretty if I’d believed in you.…”—Alicia is pretending to be looking through her field glasses.
Figure 7.2
Figure 7.3
Phenomenologically, a film is a moving picture, not a succession of still frames. Every shot has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. When a film moment is reduced to a frame enlargement printed on a page, its motions are stilled, its temporal dimension stripped away. The film stops being a film and turns into a still photograph. This particular frame enlargement of Alicia holding the field glasses to her face does a minimum of violence to the film moment I am using it to invoke only because up to this point in the shot her face has been motionless, as has the camera. Visually, this is a moment of stasis within the film, a moment in which the film has stopped in its tracks, as it were. Still photographs, like paintings, cannot but be static, of course. But few still photographs convey the sense of time itself standing still, as this frame enlargement must if it is to evoke this moment of stasis within the film.
If we are watching a DVD of Notorious and hit the pause button, we not only stop the film’s motions; we also silence the film’s voices. Frame enlargements on a page do not silence the film in the same way; the film is already silenced. A frame enlargement invites the reader to pause for a moment, to suspend his or her reading of the writer’s words to contemplate this still image. At best, a frame enlargement can evoke a moment of a film, not enable a reader to experience it. Yet in that moment of contemplation, the writer’s voice—or, rather, the reader’s “inner voice,” speaking the writer’s words (when they’re printed on the page, can they be said to be the writer’s own words?), falls silent. Or, perhaps, that voice has already achieved its own silence, has said all that the writer finds words to say about this moment of the film, so that the reader is already in the mood for the contemplation invited by the frame enlargement, which comes as if in response to a silent call. When reading resumes, the reader’s “inner voice” breaks its silence.
Then how can I provide evidence to back up my impression that at this moment of the film Alicia does not wish for Devlin to finish his sentence, which she fears will wound her deeply—my sense that if she could make time stand still, she would? In any case she cannot stop time in its tracks. The camera remains on Alicia, framing her closely, as Devlin completes his thought. “…If I’d figured…” Alicia begins slowly lowering her field glasses, or lets them fall of their own weight. “…she’d never be able to go through with it—she’s been made over by love.”
The mesmerizingly slow lowering of her field glasses gradually unblocks Alicia’s eyes from the camera’s view, revealing them to be already downcast, turned inward, to avoid meeting Devlin’s gaze and to keep him from seeing the tears—and the rage—welling up in them. No frame enlargement alone can capture the mood, or succession of moods, conveyed here, because Alicia’s train of moods is expressed by movements within the frame, not by any static expression. Her face is anything but static. Her expressions paint as many hues as any string of beads Emerson could ever have seen or imagined. And like the earlier spatially disorienting shots of Alicia and Devlin, this close-up has an expressive impact impossible to achieve onstage. Eyes do not reveal their intimate expression to those who view them from a distance. If a stage actress were to hold a pair of field glasses to her face, the expression in her eyes would remain inaccessible to the audience, as it is at the beginning of this shot, but it could not be revealed to the audience when the glasses are lowered.
At this moment there seems an attunement, not a complicity, between Ingrid Bergman, behaving as if she were Alicia, and the camera, which is a presence in the actress’s world but an absence in the character’s world. It just seems to happen that when Alicia holds the field glasses to her face to hide her eyes from Devlin’s gaze, this woman’s eyes—that is, Bergman’s eyes—are hidden from us as well, as it just seems to happen that as the glasses lower, her eyes become unveiled to our view, as well as to Devlin’s. That these things do happen, however, has a profound, traumatic impact on our experience of this shot and, indeed, the sequence—and the film—as a whole.
Emerson could be describing our experience of the moment Bergman’s eyes are unveiled when he writes, “We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there.”2 If Devlin is looking into her eyes as we are at this moment, he will know her as we know her. He will know she loves him. He will know she is worthy of love. If he is not looking into her eyes, is unmoved by their confession, or fails to acknowledge how he is moved, he is inflicting upon her as grievous a “little death” as it is possible to imagine.
Up to this point, the focus of this close-up has been Alicia’s silent reaction to Devlin’s cruel words, which wound her as he means them to do. But there is something they pointedly leave unsaid. His “…she’s been made over by love,” for all its bitter sarcasm, belies his assertion that he had never believed in her. His implication is that he had never loved her. But then how could she have been made over by love? What Devlin is saying to Alicia without saying it—what his silence is saying—is that he now knows that she is unworthy of love but that he had once loved her. This leaves open the possibility, of course, that this “knowledge” has not stopped Devlin from loving Alicia, that he is silently revealing what his words are denying. In any case the motion of the field glasses continues the whole time he is speaking the hateful words that nonetheless reveal that he had once loved her.
Within this close framing, now devoid of motion, Alicia finally breaks her silence: “If you only once said that you loved me.” In movies the poetry—the lucidity—of speech resides in the way just this person, framed just this way, speaks just these words in just this tone of voice, looking just this way, with just this expression at just this moment in just this situation in just this setting. (The camera’s own gestures are performed, of course, in silence.) I hear Alicia’s line, as Ingrid Bergman hauntingly speaks it, less as an accusation than as a sorrowful expression of a wish she knows cannot come true—the wish that she could change the past.
If only…
Alicia has heard in Devlin’s hurtful words an acknowledgment—he had never admitted this before—that he had once loved her. If he only once had said he loved her, she is saying without saying it—said it one time, said it “once upon a time”—she would have acted differently, and they would have been happy all this time, would be happy now, and would live happily ever after. Heard this way, her words are also acknowledging something she had never admitted before, that her actions were no less responsible than his for leading them to the present desperate impasse. At the same time, she is mindful, as never before, that the clock cannot be turned back, the past cannot be altered, the happy times they could have enjoyed together are forever lost.
Figure 7.4
Just as she is on the verge of speaking the words, “If you’d only once said that you loved me,” Alicia turns her face slightly screen left. This time, her turning does not disorient us. She is turning toward Devlin, not away from him. She would be speaking these words directly to him were her eyes not still lowered, turned inward. I see her at this moment as suspended at the border between fantasy and reality, imagining she is speaking to a man who might, despite everything, still be moved to declare that he loves her, that he believes in her, even as she knows—or thinks she knows—that the man who is really in her presence is not the Devlin of her dreams. If only…And yet, in the end, the “real” Devlin will turn out to be—to become, or always to have been—her dream man.
Visually, this is another moment of stasis whose mood a frame enlargement is capable of evoking.
I am moved to say about this frame that when within it Alicia whispers longingly, and without visibly moving her lips, “Oh, Dev…,” she seems to be speaking entirely from within her fantasy, to be speaking only to the man of her dreams, not to the man in her presence who has just inflicted upon her yet another “little death” and is poised, perhaps, to strike a fatal blow by saying that he no longer loves her.
I discern in Bergman’s face both sadness and excitement. These are moods I am prepared to attribute to Alicia on the basis of what I see—what I believe anyone might see—in Bergman’s expression at this moment. Why is she sad? Because she cannot change the past, cannot turn back the clock. Why excited? Because she is looking forward to, almost as much as she is dreading, what will come next. But sadness at the time that has irretrievably been lost, and excitement compounded of anticipation and dread of what might come next, are not in the same way simply visible in this woman’s face. How could they be? They have to do with the way, for Alicia at this moment, the present is haunted by what might have been and by what might never come to be, both of which have no tangible reality and thus are out of reach (are they not?) of Hitchcock’s camera.
In attributing to Alicia sadness for the time with her dream man that she has lost, and excitement compounded of anticipation and dread of what might come next, I am advancing an interpretation, one might say an explanation, not simply a description—a way of making sense of, a way of tracing the implications of, what I believe can be perceived in this woman’s face at this moment of the film. Virtually all the claims I have been making for the past several pages attribute particular thoughts, feelings, and intentions to Alicia and Devlin, and particular thoughts, feelings, and intentions to Hitchcock in choosing to frame them the ways he does. On what grounds do I base such assertions? They can be based only on my perceptions, my experience of the film. But to perceive Alicia’s sadness as sadness for the time that has been lost, and her excitement as compounded of anticipation and dread of what may come next, I have to be in a particular mood—a mood that this moment of the film has the power to cast over me, given the train of moods cast over me, the emotions awakened, by the succession of “moods of faces and motions and settings” that have led to this moment.
Only when sounds fall silent do we become aware of the reality of silence, and only when motions run their course do we become aware of the reality of stillness—as if when motion ceases, time itself is suspended, the way it is for Scottie at the end of Vertigo. For Scottie, as I have said, no change is possible, no dawning of a new day, no future, no becoming. Alicia, at this moment, is not in the same place as Scottie. She, too, finds herself suspended. But she is not beyond suspense the way he is. Alicia has not yet lost all hope for the future, as Scottie has. She has reason to believe, now, that Devlin had once loved her. Her reaction to his words confirms that despite everything she has not stopped loving him.
I take Alicia, as blind to the future as we are in our own lives, to be feeling at this moment that all her hopes and dreams are staked on what Devlin now goes on to say and do. Hitchcock liked to distinguish between surprise (when a time bomb goes off that neither we nor the characters knew to be there) and suspense (when we know, but the characters do not, that there is a bomb set to go off any moment). Alicia knows, as we do, that Devlin might be about to detonate a bomb, figuratively speaking. If so, she is as powerless as we are to keep this from happening. For Alicia, as well as for us, this is suspense, Hitchcock style.
Like every moment of every film, this moment of Notorious has a double temporal existence. This moment is special, though, in that it precisely marks Alicia’s own awakening. She now knows that every moment of her experience is both transient and permanent. She can see now that her own past actions and failures to act, her own words and silences as surely as Devlin’s, have left permanent marks. Now she can trace their implications, discern necessity in the way her past has led her to this place—a place where she finds herself wishing for a future in which she might be saved, and at the same time wishing for time to stand still. We can say that what Alicia does not see at this moment is that it is not only impossible for her to undo her past actions; it was never possible for her to have acted differently. She does not see that in her world there are no accidents, that nothing that is not real is possible, that every moment of her life is scripted. We can also say that what she does not see is that there is a camera filming her—a camera that is always there, a camera that knows the script, because it is an instrument of that script’s author. We can say, in other words, that the place where Alicia now finds herself is precisely the border that separates her world, the projected world, from our world, the one existing world. And, it seems to me, unless we say such things, we are not fully tracing the implications of this moment.
In The “I” of the Camera I wrote that films “speak to us in an intimate language of indirectness and silence. To speak seriously about a film, we must speak about that silence, its motivations and depths; we must speak about that to which the silence gives voice; we must give voice to that silence; we must let that silence speak for itself.”3 There may seem to be a conflict between the imperatives of giving voice to silence and letting the silence speak for itself. When one puts into words what a film consigns to silence, does one not drown out the film’s silence? The point, though, is that it is not one’s words but rather the silence they achieve when they reach the limits of what words can say—a silence within which the film’s own silence echoes—that gives voice to that which the film consigns to silence.
In writing about films, it is my experience that we always can find words to evoke their “moods of faces and motions and settings.” This suggests that the border that separates words from film is also where the two touch, or at least come face-to-face. It is when it reaches this border that film achieves its poetry. For writing about film to acknowledge this border, the poetry of film—the perception that every human posture and gesture, however glancing, has its lucidity—must artfully be evoked by the writing itself, by its own voices and silences. Such writing perceives film—the medium limited to surfaces, to the outer, the visible—as also a medium of mysterious depths, of the inner, the invisible. The “inner voice” that “speaks” the words on the page expresses, and casts, moods of its own—moods that color the reader’s perception, hence contemplation, of the frame enlargements, which in turn color the way the reader gives “inner voice” to the words on the page.
It has been a recurring theme of my writing that many great and influential films, Hitchcock’s preeminent among them, meditate on the border, the barrier-that-is-no-real-barrier, that is the movie screen and that they envision themselves as possessing the power to pass back and forth across this border, a passage that “overleaps the wall,” to borrow a metaphor Emerson invokes in “Intellect” to characterize the power of thought.4
Is this not a power that a film’s moods of faces and motions and settings possess? Is it any wonder, then, that writing like mine, which envisions itself as passing back and forth between giving voice to movies and finding my own voice in saying what I have to say about them, is especially drawn to films like Hitchcock’s? And to writing like Emerson’s?
