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To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. What's the ultimate in representative painting? Color photography. Don't you agree? There's quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it's not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.

<!--StartFragment--> Last month, director Sacha Gervasi’s highly anticipated Hitchcock was finally released in theaters. Set in 1959, the film follows the famous moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock as he stubbornly pursues a project that no one else believes in, Psycho. In a powerful performance by Anthony Hopkins, Alfred Hitchcock’s personality and love of mystery is captured on screen once again.

An exploration of echoes and variations — a few moments from Touch of Evil and Psycho reimagined through each other:

Angry birds — and especially smart, angry birds — aren’t just the subject of my latest NYT Mag mini-column. Because my mom collected and bred parrots, they’re something I’ve spent far too much time pondering.

Did you know that crows develop grudges against people and can impart them to their flocks? Or that African Greys are capable of labeling and counting objects and grasping the concept of zero? Or that birdsong appears to be in some sense grammatical? Often parrots use their powers for good, and not evil, of course. As far as we know.

Daphne du Maurier (above), who wrote “The Birds,” about an avian apocalypse, said the idea came to her after she saw a farmer ploughing a field while seagulls dived above him, and she imagined the birds “becoming hostile and attacking.” Evidently she disapproved of Hitchcock’s also harrowing, more famous adaptation.

If you click through to the BBC interview, you can watch her talking about her life and work for almost 50 minutes. The clip opens at her typewriter, “the standard ‘the author at work’ establishing shot except for du Maurier’s super-strong finger-punching technique on the keys.” Though du Maurier made her living as a writer, she also dabbled in painting.

I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good.  I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot, wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features.

In amidst it all, there was some reading.  Here are a few highlights...

• I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace after reading Ron Silliman's praise of it. And it does, indeed, provide plenty of interesting fodder for anybody interested in such things as gender and machismo. It's also pretty darn entertaining.
  
  
• Speaking of machismo, I picked up Richard Sellers's Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed from the library because it looked like a light read and I realized I knew nothing about the actual lives of the four actors it discusses. It is, indeed, a light read, but also a depressing one -- it is nothing but stories of four immensely talented people being drunk, boorish, irresponsible, and destructive. I couldn't help thinking of a much better book, Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, where the destructive effect of alcohol on the later work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway is contrasted with the blossoming of Eugene O'Neill's writing once he quit drinking. Sellers makes a point of noting that Burton, Harris, O'Toole, and Reed all said they had no regrets about the effect of alcohol on their lives, but it's obvious from the book that their lives were deeply hurt by their drinking.
  
  
• I finally got around to reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aka Not Before Sundown), which won the Tiptree Award for 2004, and which I've been meaning to read at least from the time it won the award. I should have read it then. Actually, I wish I had read it before it garnered any accolades, because I think my expectations for it pretty much ruined it for me. I expected a truly great book, and got a merely good one.  And sometimes a bit less than merely good.  I found the insertion of various excerpts from fictional texts tedious and obvious, the story itself at times rather silly, and the final images more goofy than affecting. I certainly would not have disliked it all as fully as I did had I come to it blind, and I expect I would have found it more surprising and more compelling if I'd had no expectations of it being of a particular quality when I began. Alas. My loss.
  
  
• James Naremo
  3 Comments on Here and Back Again, last added: 4/1/2010
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  TansyRR said, on 3/29/2010 2:44:00 AM
  

  Thanks for the link to the Rachel Wallace post - that is one of my favourite books ever, and I often recommend it to people for exactly the dialogue between feminism, machismo and the crime genre described.
  
  Not sure if I'd agree it's the only truly excellent Spenser novels, though - I'd hold up Early Autumn as equal to it, for what it has to say about manhood and fatherhood.
  
  I'm currently reading my way through the last few Parkers he wrote in the most recent decade, and while they are still worthy reads, I'm sad that they are just nowhere near the books he wrote in the 70's and early 80's.

  Joelle Biele said, on 3/29/2010 4:58:00 AM
  

  Thanks so much for the bits about these books & the Rachel Wallace. I'm going to have to take a look at Truffaut at Work. I was wondering if any other books pop to mind that also devote a significant portion to an artist's craft & sources? Thanks!

  zunguzungu said, on 4/1/2010 6:12:00 AM
  

  I'm psyched to see how this course comes together. My suggestion would be that Tarzan needs to be in the mix, both the book and the film (which are deeply different in really significant ways). Are you aware of this essay? And Coetzee's "White Writing" has some really choice nuggets that would be useful in framing Shreiner; the difference between how the Congo gets imagined as a dark heart of darkness and how a place like South Africa gets seen -- as the object of white settler colonialism -- is really crucial, something you want to take cognizance of too with respect to the difference between a Nigerian writer like Achebe and a Kenyan like Ngugi.
  
  Drop me a line if you want any more references; my entire dissertation is a riff on the basic theme of the course you're describing.

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My latest Strange Horizons column, "Revisiting Hitchcock", has been posted.  It's a first stab at what will, I hope, become a longer project eventually, but writing about Hitchcock is tough because he's been so thoroughly written about before that it's hard not to just reiterate what lots of other folks have written.  But his work maintains such a hold on me that I also feel at this point that I can't not write about it, so who knows...

The news of film critic Robin Wood's death came as a real shock to me because, in preparation for teaching an intro to film class next term, I've been spending a lot of time with his writings recently.  One of my projects, only vaguely justified by the class, has been to view or re-view all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Wood was one of the most important writers on Hitchcock.  Indeed, his Hitchcock's Films Revisited has been the book I've spent the most time with during my journey with Sir Alfred because it is richly provocative and unpredictable, and helped me reassess some films, such as Marnie, that I would otherwise have felt were minor.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book.  After the original Hitchcock's Films was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in England, politically uncommitted, with little knowledge of or respect for certain trends in film theory.  In the 1970s, he divorced, came out as gay, re-evaluated some of his stances on film theory, developed strong leftist political convictions, and moved to Canada.  These seismic shifts in his life inevitably affected his view of Hitchcock's films, and he chronicles those changes in the autobiographical sections of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, which includes the entire text of the original book and adds hundreds of pages of later material.  Even if I were not as interested in Hitchcock's work as I am, I would find Hitchcock's Films Revisited valuable as a model for the intersections of autobiography and criticism.  It forces readers to assess their own ways of evaluating and interpreting films by showing the ways Wood himself had done so over the years and, as importantly, the experiences that led him to choose particular techniques of evaluation and interpretation when he did.

There have been numerous eulogies for Wood written in the past few days.  The Auteur's Notebook has a roundup.  David Bordwell's blog post is typically thoughtful and well-written.  Film Studies for Free links to eulogies as well as works by or about Wood.  All worth reading.

With 11yo at a sleepover, we were finally able to see an adult movie: Babel. The screenwriter showed scenes out of order, but somehow it managed to never be confusing. First you see two goat-herder kids in Mongolia shooting at jackals, and rocks, and finally at a tour bus. Then you see a Mexican woman, caring for two American children, who gets a phone call from the dad whose wife has been injured in a shooting. Only later do you see the man and wife arguing in Mongolia, and you realize the scene is taking place before the shooting. Watching them later on the bus, the tension begins to build. You know she is going to be shot. She doesn't know it. She squeezes her husband's hand, then half-dozes , her head tipped against the window. The director lets that scene go on for what seems like forever, while you brace yourself. By the time she gets shot, your nerves are thrumming.

It reminded of Alfred Hitchock. In an interview, he said, "There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

"We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

"In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story."





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