Desire Roped In
Notes on the Fetishism of the Long Take in Rope
1. Let us count the ways. Rope
is simultaneously Hitchcock’s
first independent production, his
first colour movie, his first
of four films with James Stewart
(and, incidentally, his first with
Farley Granger, whom he
would cast again a few years
later in Strangers on a Train),
the first filmed stage play of his
American career and the first of
his single-set films (although
Lifeboat [1944] already induced
– albeit in the open air – the
claustrophobia associated with
the one-set Rope, Rear
Window and Dial M for Murder
[1954]). It may also be noted
that Rope introduced (or at the
very least pushed much further
than previously) a type of
macabre humor that would later
become the trademark of the
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
television series.
2. The much-written-about
technique consisted of shooting
the whole film in one single
take, or, more accurately, in ten
single-take reels (each 950-foot
reel running approximately ten
minutes – however, Rope’s
reels are uneven in length;
reels 9 and 10 could easily fit
on a single one), with close-ups
(mostly of a character’s back)
occupying the entire screen at
reel ends so as to make the cut
from one reel to the next
invisible. Hitchcock actually
broke this demanding self-
imposed rule three or four times
– including the after-credits cut
from outside to inside the
apartment – using ‘ordinary’
cuts here and there, but by and
large he adhered to it faithfully.
Ten-minute takes were unheard
of then, and while they became
less uncommon later, both in
Hollywood (Samuel Fuller in
Forty Guns [1957], Pickup on
South Street [1953], The
Crimson Kimono [1959]) and
abroad (Miklós Jancsó and
Andrei Tarkovsky, among
others, were addicted to them,
and let us not forget Jean
Jean-Pierre Coursodon
Rope (1948) is, in many ways, a pivotal film in Hitchcock’s
career, (1) and an eccentric, aberrant work (in the literal,
but also to some extent in the more common, figurative, sense
of those words), both in relation to the Hitchcock corpus and
to cinema in general. Chronologically the first of the long
unavailable ‘group of five’, it was reissued last and, it
almost seems, somewhat reluctantly. Its low-key American
release in April 1984 was acknowledged by a largely tepid
critical reception (many critics did not even bother to review
it), in strong contrast with the enthusiastic response to the
earlier re-releases of Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).
Nothing surprising, really. Rope remains today as problematic
a piece of work as it was in 1948. Wearing for the first time
a producer’s hat (Rope was the first offering of his short-
lived Transatlantic Pictures – Warners only distributed it),
Hitchcock nevertheless seems to have given little
consideration to playing it safe commercially. Not only did he
select as his vehicle a somewhat obscure 1929 British play
(one, moreover, lacking a leading lady), but he used his top-
billed star, James Stewart, against type in a rather thankless
(and non-heroic) role, co-starring him with two almost unknown
newcomers. Far from ‘opening out’ the one-set play, he shut
himself in, even adopting a filming technique that precluded
any wandering away from the set. (2)
Nor was the subject-matter particularly viewer-friendly. Two
young men, clearly a homosexual couple, murder a friend in
cold blood to punish him for his ‘mediocrity’ and give a
cocktail party for his parents and friends – serving food over
the body which they have stored away in a chest in their
living room, and chatting away about murder considered as one
of the fine arts. Such a subject could only arouse the wrath
of puritan leagues and upset a large number of spectators,
even the more open-minded among them. That the film failed to
be a popular success was thus to be expected; one must truly
admire Hitchcock’s chutzpah in putting his own money into the
production of a project he had undertaken strictly to please
himself and impress his peers (clearly, the general public,
unfamiliar with, and not caring much about the way movies were
made, was unprepared to appreciate – or even to notice –
Hitchcock’s stylistic tour de force and the film’s formal
originality; likewise, many reviewers of the time did not even
mention it.)
While not a box office disaster like Under Capricorn (1949),
which scuttled Transatlantic Pictures, Rope hardly found a
sizeable audience in its day. Reviews were mostly lukewarm or
worse. A number of associations and leagues condemned the film
as immoral and likely to corrupt youth (that Hitchcock had
managed to hoodwink the Production Code about the characters’
homosexuality and thorough immorality is attributable to the
Rouch’s experiment in Paris vu
par [1964] … ), no one (except
Warhol in his minimalist, fixed-
camera non-narrative marathon
indulgences) had ever
attempted such a thing as a
one-take feature. It will take
video to make the first real one-
take feature possible: Alexandr
Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002).
The alleged rationale for this
highly unconventional formal
option was the fact that the
action of the play (which
Hitchcock had seen in London
in 1929 and had wanted to
make into a film ever since)
took place in ‘real time’ – from
7:30pm to 9:15pm according to
Hitchcock interviewed by
Truffaut (the filmed version
reduces it to eighty minutes).
Thus filmic continuity would
mimic and duplicate dramatic
continuity. One may assume
that this superficially logical and
seductive concept, which
pushes to its extreme limit the
principle of congruence
between form and content, was
a mere pretext for Hitchcock. It
could prompt the question
(among others): How does a
continuous take of a continuous
action more faithfully reflect the
actual duration of said action
than a series of separate
shots? Which raises the
interesting although purely
theoretical issue of establishing
what takes place between the
shots when the filmed action is
continuous.
3. In his biography of Hitchcock,
Patrick McGilligan writes: ‘In
cities and states across the
country the Hitchcock film was
forbidden, or passed by local
censor boards only after
‘eliminations’ in certain scenes’
(which of course could only
result in breaking up the long
takes, thus destroying the very
purpose of the film.) McGilligan,
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in
Darkness and Light (New York:
Regan Books, 2003), p. 420.
4. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side
of Genius: The Life of Alfred
Hitchcock (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1983), p. 308. However,
contrary to what McGilligan
maintains (Alfred Hitchcock, p.
420), the film was not ‘banned
outright’ in France. As far as I
can remember, it ran into no
censorship problems there.
5. ‘Cold’ has often been used to
describe Rope. Spoto calls it
Hitchcock’s ‘coldest work’ (The
Dark Side of Genius, p. 308)
But has a Hitchcock movie ever
been warm?
6. François Truffaut, Hitchcock
(London: Paladin, 1986), p.
literal-mindedness of the censors as much as to the director’s
and writer’s slyness; after all, the homosexuality remains
implied and the murderers are punished in the end after a
moralising tirade that condemns their theories) – yet the
protest did not generate the kind of publicity that Baby Doll
(1956) would later enjoy. Not unreasonably, the National Board
of Review rated the film ‘for mature audiences’, which did not
help at the box office. (3) Reactions were equally lukewarm in
Europe (although in France, at least, the film spurred
considerable critical interest), where Rope also triggered
some protest from shocked moviegoers (according to Donald
Spoto in his Hitchcock biography: ‘In Zurich, irate theatre-
owners begged for prints of Life With Father [1947] to calm
their angry patrons’). (4) No one is irate or shocked any
longer, but the lack of enthusiasm still prevails. At the time
of the American reissue, publicists could only manage to
extract, from a rather favourable New York Times review, a
quote referring to the film’s extreme ‘coldness’. (5)
Unavoidably perhaps, the critical discourse on Rope has mostly
dealt with the legitimacy of Hitchcock’s formal option, about
which most commentators have expressed more or less serious
reservations (Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, the pioneers of
Hitchcockian exegesis, were among the few who did not
cavil). Hitchcock himself judged it very harshly, calling it a
‘stunt’ and telling François Truffaut in 1963: ‘I really don’t
know how I came to indulge in it.’ (6)
Of course there would be no reason to grant any special
importance to the director’s statement about a rather unloved
picture were it not for the fact that it expresses the
auteur’s symptomatic denial of an intense desire he had
experienced fifteen years earlier – a desire all the more
pressing that it appeared, to most observers, incomprehensible
(and therefore perverted). ‘I really don’t know how I came to
indulge in it’; ‘When I look back, I realise that it was quite
nonsensical’ (7) – what ‘victim’ of a former passion (whatever
its object might have been) would not be tempted, in
retrospect, to make similar remarks? But desire works in the
present, and does not ‘reflect’. Nor can it be ‘explained’. It
is its own, sole justification. Its subsequent denial by the
desiring party (quite understandable: ‘Passion is a brief
madness’) should not reflect on the effort spent to assuage
it, an effort which in the present case has left an indelible
trace: Rope, a film that wholly asserts itself as an act of
desire.
The mere existence of Rope being, to my mind, sufficient
justification of its mode of manufacturing, I have no
intention to add yet another voice to the tedious debate over
the long take vs traditional editing. (8) My main reason for
writing is my own fascination with the film, which is quite
independent from the issue of whether it succeeds or fails
artistically. I am quite willing to accept that Rope (like
most extreme formal experiments) be considered a megalomaniac
wager (either daring or silly), leading to an aesthetic dead
end. I have no objection to such an approach, except that it
belongs with a rather drably prescriptive concept of
criticism, always preoccupied with what the artist should have
done (or, more often, not done), rather than with what he has
actually done and why and how, and with the effect it
259.
7. Ibid.
8. The key argument against
Rope is probably André Bazin’s
remark that Hitchcock’s long
takes, through constant
reframings, actually recreate
traditional découpage – a fact
of which Hitchcock was
perfectly aware (he told Truffaut
exactly the same thing). I feel
that Bazin (who appears to
blame Hitchcock for remaining
faithful to himself even while
innovating) totally missed the
point, and did so probably for a
simple reason of temperament:
he was obviously insensitive to
the peculiar kind of pleasure – a
sensual, even perhaps erotic
pleasure – that an uninterrupted
long take can engender.
9. In 1962 Hitchcock told
Truffaut that MGM had recently
bought the negative of Rope
and exhibited the film, but this
does not seem to have been
the case. At any rate, some
years later Hitchcock acquired
the rights to Rope and four of
his ‘50s Paramount pictures,
adamantly refusing to have
them shown until the package
re-release of 1984. The only
public showings of Rope I am
aware of during that period
were two screenings at The
American Film Institute in
Washington, D.C. in November
produces. I am more interested in an investigation of the
pleasure I derive from the film – a rather unique pleasure in
its nature if not its intensity – which I like to imagine as a
sort of echo of the director’s own pleasure. It would be
difficult indeed to identify another source of this pleasure
than Hitchcock’s (itself unique) formal project and its
execution.
Indeed, Rope is different from Hitchcock’s other films as well
as, in a sense (and Bazin notwithstanding), traditional cinema
as a whole. This is because it does not concern
itself primarily with telling a story (there is no plot to
speak of; the script has nothing to narrate and the often
amusing, sometimes brilliant dialogue is just non-stop
drawing-room chatter, even at times mere aural padding), but
rather with inscribing on the screen the perpetual motion of a
camera in relation to some objects (actors, furniture, props …
) circumscribed within a cramped space bathed in a gradually
decreasing light. In other words, a most abstract project. Of
course, all of Hitchcock’s movies may be defined as abstract
constructions; but, in spite of frequent bravura moments
flaunting their technique, they usually remain respectful
enough of the sacrosanct transparency for this abstraction,
concealed by the narrative flow, to become obvious only in
retrospect. With Rope, on the other hand, Hitchcock makes (in
Truffaut’s words) ‘a director’s dream’ come true – a sort of
forbidden dream at that, a professional taboo of sorts.
At this point I must make a confession which my rather
peculiar relationship to Hitchcock’s film renders, if not
necessary, at least useful to an understanding of this article
and the desire that urged me to write it.
Any long take – especially a ten-minute (or close to ten-
minute) take – grabs my attention, even fascinates me, almost
regardless of what it contains (and which is not its content,
duration itself being part of the latter). This undoubtedly
fetishistic taste can be traced back to my first viewing of
Rope, or even earlier, since I became very excited after
reading an article on Hitchcock’s long-take technique, rushing
to the very first session on the film’s opening day in Paris
(in a now-vanished first-run movie theatre on the Champs
Elysées, the only one that showed the film in a subtitled
rather than dubbed version). I was fourteen or fifteen at the
time … and an early reading may reveal to an adolescent a
future sexual orientation (a fetish, for example) of which he
still had not become aware.
One major reason that prompts me to ponder Rope is the amazing
continuity of my relationship to it over a period of nearly
thirty years, a continuity confirmed by its 1984 reissue after
a gap of nearly twenty years (Rope was not shown theatrically
in the United States, or anywhere else that I know of, after
1965). (9) I experienced pretty much the same kind of pleasure
in 1984 as I did at that distant first viewing and the
numerous others that followed during the ‘50s – a more sensual
than intellectual quality of pleasure. As far as I can
remember, I paid very little attention, on that first day, to
the story, even less (if any) to the thesis. I did enjoy the
dialogue (I was beginning to learn English seriously and
picked up a few new words – like ‘exhilarated’, used by
1976, for which the AFI
undoubtedly had to obtain
Hitchcock’s authorisation. As
far as television showings,
although Rope was theoretically
available for TV (Leonard Maltin
always listed it in his Movie and
Video Guide), I was never
aware of any in the New York
City area throughout the ‘70s
and early ‘80s (someone told
has told me, however, that they
saw it on TV in Los Angeles in
the early ‘70s). Of course, Rope
seen with commercial breaks
(which was the case for virtually
all TV screenings in those days)
would lose its reason for being.
10. Actually there are three
end-of-reel close-ups on John
Dall’s back, one on Douglas
Dick’s, none on Farley
Granger’s.
11. One can go even further.
Thus Noël Simsolo in Hitchcock
(Paris: Seghers, 1959)
assigned equal responsibility to
Brandon to describe what he felt while strangling his victim,
and which rather accurately described my own feelings watching
the film), but more, I think, as a kind of musical
counterpoint (the dialogue more or less stands in for the lack
of music and works as sound background to the camera’s solo
ballet) than for its actual substance.
On the other hand, first and foremost, I was enchanted by the
supple, almost leisurely yet relentless motion of the camera,
its tight, stifling reframings (you feel that you are always a
little too close to the characters, as though in the room with
them, sticking to them), but also by the cosy set, the huge,
slightly curved living-room window bay (the ‘40s had a thing
for streamlined design) displaying, with pre-Cinemascope
horizontality, an improbably vast New York panorama, the eerie
beauty of the artificial twilight, Stewart’s slightly stiff,
oblique stance as Rupert (due, we are told, to a war wound –
which has no dramatic function but makes for a very
Hitchcockian attitude), the aggressive angles formed by John
Dall’s and Farley Granger’s often symmetrically displayed jaws
and their elegantly broad shoulders in their exquisitely
tailored suits (an important detail with all those end-of-reel
closeups on their backs) (10), the balance, always on the
verge of unbalance, between their three bodies ...
As I saw the film again and again over the years I never asked
myself whether Rope was a good movie or (as it is so often
called) a failure, a major or a minor Hitchcock. I was (and
still am) too attentive to my pleasure (no matter how
irrational, and precisely because it was) to allow critical
objectivity to intrude upon it. So shouldn’t I disqualify
myself from dealing with the film as a critic?
I don’t think so. First, for the obvious reason that our
opinions, our tastes and distastes, always have more or less
irrational motivations, or at least have little to do with the
reasons we give (and give to ourselves) for them. Ultimately
it is possible to read any critical text as an unconscious
autobiography of its author, even when hidden behind the mask
of the most abstract and impersonal intellectual cogitation.
We might as well admit this evidence and take advantage of it
rather than deceive readers and ourselves. The fact that my
reading of Rope comes with an examination of my (very)
personal, almost intimate relationship to the film should not
be detrimental to whatever interest it may present – quite the
contrary.
But, above all, it may be argued that when the creator’s and
the consumer’s desire so ideally coincide, the complicit
sympathy established between the spectator and the work is
likely to be enlightening enough to push the (at any rate
questionable) preoccupation with objectivity into the
background. ‘Perverts’ understand each other, and I am
grateful to Hitchcock to have made the film that I, without
knowing it, wanted to see even before it was made; and to have
made it, without knowing it, for me alone, as it were.
Rope as a Knot of Hitchcockian Themes and Tropes (A
Digression)
the professor and the two
young men, writing: ‘These
three, by killing God, became
the Devil, and the party given
by Brando and Charles [sic] is a
veritable black mass.’ Note the
interesting double slip of the
pen whereby Simsolo
rechristened Brandon and
Philip. In his flexography,
Simsolo called the Farley
Granger character Philip
Charles. Actually Charles was
the first name of the character
in Patrick Hamilton’s play.
Neither in the film nor in any
other filmography I am aware of
is the character called anything
but Philip.
12. Gérard Legrand, in an
article on the re-issued
Hitchcocks (Positif, July-August
1984) but more specifically
focused on Rear Window and
Vertigo, remarked that the
structure of both films, like
those of Rope and The Man
Who Knew Too Much, ‘implies
a suggestion, or a threat, of
strangling.’ One might add that
the literal strangling which, in
Rope, is executed by means of
the title rope, is duplicated by
one of the killers’ figurative and
suicidal strangling: Brandon,
who cannot resist the desire to
allude to the ‘work’ he is so
proud of, gleefully scatters
clues around (including the
rope itself), thus manufacturing
the rope with which he will hang
himself.
13. This episode of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, directed by
Hitchcock himself in 1957, has
interesting common points with
Rope, as well as with Psycho.
As in the two films, the camera
in the opening shot is placed
outside a window, getting ready
to spy on a couple. The
spectator’s voyeurism is both
satisfied and (as almost always
with Hitchcock) frustrated: in
Rope the murder is committed
behind drawn curtains as the
camera is still outside. Similarly,
in One More Mile to Go the
camera gets inside the house
only after the deed (again, a
murder) has been done, while
in Psycho we enter the hotel
room through the window only
after the act being spied on (in
this case sexual intercourse)
has been completed. Rope’s
visual frustration is echoed, in
One More Mile, by an auditory
frustration: we cannot hear the
words of the husband and wife
fighting because the window is
closed. Finally, this opening
scene of One More Mile is
filmed, Rope-style, in a single
take.
14. ‘What to do with the
Since this article is not primarily concerned with the
relationships between Rope and the rest of the Hitchcock
corpus, I shall merely mention a few of the more notable as
clues [for the reader who might not have seen the film].
Although somewhat clumsily characterised, Rupert Cadell, the
philosophy professor played by James Stewart, already exhibits
some of the ambiguities later developed in the characters he
will play in Rear Window and Vertigo. Both innocent and guilty
(his teaching has – against his will – ’corrupted’ his two
students), he is forced by their crime to question his
complacency. A catalytic investigator, he discovers the murder
(like in Rear Window) through his ‘unhealthy’ but justified
curiosity. Brandon Shaw, a cynical, if not frankly Satanic
character (he is the tempter who talks his fainthearted
accomplice into breaking the Law to become the equal of God)
(11) recalls, with his elegance, charm, black humor and total
depravity, Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and
heralds Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train (1951). His
domination of Philip (a character whose last name is never
mentioned, which suggests his subjection, while his mentor-
friend is always called by his last, never his first, name)
also announces, to a certain extent, the Bruno-Guy
relationship (with Granger again playing the
weaker, manipulated party). While there is no actual exchange
of murders in Rope there is, at the very least, an exchange of
ideas of murder: Rupert planted the seed in the two young
men’s minds; Brandon talks Philip into acting upon it; in the
end, they both hand the responsibility over to him.
In both films, moreover, the crime is (or claims to be)
‘perfect’ because it is gratuitous. Strangulation also takes
place in both, as it does in many other Hitchcock films;
actually shown or suggested, there is strangling in more than
one third of his movies (and it was the subject of many a
Hitchcockian joke, including a lot of publicity stills showing
him strangling some actress). (12)
Food, the importance of which in both Hitchcock’s life and
work is well-known, occupies a central place in Rope, since
the killers serve a meal to their guests, and, as is often the
case in Hitchcock’s films, is linked to murder and death –
Brandon perversely chooses to serve the food on the chest
containing the victim’s body, rather than on the table where
the maid had originally displayed it. The chest itself
anticipates other confining containers that will store later
Hitchcockian corpses: a car trunk in Psycho (1960) and on
television in One More Mile to Go (13), a potato sack in
Frenzy (1972) … The opening of the chest at the end will be
echoed in the last shot of Psycho (Marion Crane’s car being
hauled out of the swamp) – Hitchcock’s dead bodies do not stay
in closets (or chests), they always return to the surface.
(14)
A whole article could be devoted to the importance of the long
take technique in Hitchcock’s work. While the systematic use
of the ten-minute take may at first sight seem utterly alien
to the highly fragmented découpage of his other films (except
for Under Capricorn, in which the Rope experiment persists in
corpse’, a question that is the
very subject of The Trouble
With Harry (1955), is one of the
practical problems that
fascinated Hitchcock. Rope
offers a paradoxical solution:
instead of trying to get rid of the
body, the murderers place it
right in the middle of their
apartment and give a party
around it: this is the principle of
Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’.
Brandon, however, shares with
other Hitchcock killers – who
are clever enough to conceal all
trace of their act – a feeling of
pride and a decidedly aesthetic
delight in his deed. In that
regard he may be seen as a
forerunner to the especially
inventive murderers featured
in such segments of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents as The
Perfect Crime (1957) or Arthur
(1959) – both directed by the
Master. In the latter, the
murderer feeds his victim’s
ground remains to the chickens
he raises (again, food and
murder go hand in hand). In the
former, a detective looking for
the perfect crime, which he
ends up by committing himself,
burns his victim in a kiln and
turns it into an elegant little
vase. Like Brandon, as a
finishing touch to his ‘work’,
served the meal on the chest-
coffin or used the strangling
rope to tie up a pile of books he
gave to the dead man’s father,
Arthur sends some of the
chickens he has fed as
described above to the
policemen who had
investigated the victim’s
disappearance and had first
suspected him, while Arthur
displays the vase among
souvenirs of the various
criminal cases he solved during
his life. Asked by journalists
about the case related to the
mysterious vase, he gives
ambiguous answers that sound
like a veiled confession. Those
characters, like Brandon, are
artists who cannot bring
themselves to keep their
masterpiece from public
recognition.
15. Ann Todd, who played
Gregory Peck’s wife in The
Paradine Case, told Donald
Spoto a significant anecdote:
‘Hitch prepared an elaborate
five-minute take in the film – up
a staircase, into a room, with
me and Greg Peck talking all
the while. We rehearsed it with
all its complications, then shot it
about thirty times to get it
exactly right. But then Selznick
heard about it, and came down
to the set, demanding that the
whole thing be done in the
ordinary way, in short takes and
intercuts. "We’re not doing a
theatre piece!" [Selznick] cried.
a number of very complex single takes reaching or coming close
to ten minutes), his interest for elaborate camera moves in
long takes neither appears nor subsides with his two
independent productions – see the long crane shots through a
huge room ending up in an extreme closeup in Young and
Innocent and Notorious. Shooting The Paradine Case (1948), the
film he made immediately prior to Rope, Hitchcock had used a
new, more compact dolly allowing long continuous movements
going in and out of rooms without a cut. (15)
More than twenty years later, he would devise one of the most
famous camera moves of his career for Frenzy: the long
tracking-out shot starting from the murderer’s apartment,
going down the stairs, out of the building and across the
street to the sidewalk opposite (Hitchcock used a device
similar to the ones that mask reel ends in Rope, so that this
tracking shot – actually filmed in two sections, one on a
sound stage, the other in exteriors – seems uninterrupted).
Playing with Fire/Double-dealing
Pleasure and anguish – the pleasure of anguish and the anguish
of pleasure – are inextricably linked in Hitchcock’s cinema.
With Rope he both wanted to please himself (give himself
pleasure) – this is Truffaut’s dream coming true – and to play
at frightening himself. The particular anxiety involved here
is that experienced by the film director, uncertain as to
whether his long takes are going to come out successfully – an
uncertainty that increases with the length of the take. (16)
The pleasure of filming is all the more intense as the anguish
is greater. This playing with fire on the part of the
filmmaker echoes the murderer, who derives his pleasure from
creating the conditions of his own downfall: if there is no
danger, no anxiety, then there is no jouissance. Hitchcock and
his character become unsettling mirror images of each other –
both God-like, both believing in their limitless power.
Brandon is convinced of his own impunity, which leads him to
pile up provocatively careless actions (either deliberate or –
as in the case of the victim’s hat, mistakenly handed to
Rupert – accidental … but isn’t this a Freudian slip?);
Hitchcock was convinced of his absolute mastery of technique,
which led him to pile up seemingly insurmountable
difficulties.
Thus the congruence of form and content reaches far beyond the
formal principle of the continuous take espousing and
buttressing the real-time narrative unfolding. The
superimposition of the filmmaker’s and his character’s playing
with fire, of their respective anxieties, of their desire and
scheming, turns the film’s anecdote into a mise en abyme of
its manufacturing principle.
A Substitute Fetish
In most of his films (and certainly all his major works)
Hitchcock’s fetishism is openly sexual and naturally focuses
on the heroine, played by a series of fetishised actresses
most consciously desired by Hitchcock – a desire probably
(certainly, according to Donald Spoto) unfulfilled and thereby
most likely to exacerbate the fetishist compulsion. The
And that was that. Of course
Hitchcock had to give in; he
knew who he could bully, but he
also knew who he had to obey.’
Spoto, The Dark Side of
Genius, p. 300. Hitchcock
would take his revenge in his
next film: being his own
producer, he no longer has to
take orders from anybody, and
can afford to shoot takes as
lengthy as he pleases – the
longest takes possible, in fact.
One may actually wonder
whether the Rope enterprise
was not conceived as a
response to the humiliation
inflicted by the producer upon
the director on his set.
16. This was clearly expressed
by Hitchcock himself, telling
Truffaut about the filming of the
first take of the first reel of
Rope: ‘I was so scared that
something would go wrong that
I couldn’t even look during the
first take.’ Hitchcock, p. 265.
17. Under Capricorn had been
intended as the first
Transatlantic production, but
Ingrid Bergman was committed
to a play on Broadway followed
by Arch of Triumph (1948), so
Hitchcock switched to Rope
instead. He managed, however,
to sneak Bergman into the film
through a bit of dialogue whose
sole purpose is to praise her
charm – ‘Oh, I think she’s
lovely,’ Janet says of Bergman
in the comical conversation in
which no one can remember
the title of any of the movies
they discuss.
18. A curiously dissenting view
was expressed by Maurice
Schérer (Eric Rohmer) in the
first issue (May 1950) of the
short-lived Gazette du cinéma.
Writing about Rope (which he
considered ‘the most important
[film] we have seen in many a
year’) he claimed that some of
the objections made by the
film’s detractors might be
partially justified if the film had
been made in black and white.
His argument (not very
absence, at the time of Rope, of the desired woman (Ingrid
Bergman), added to her sexual non-availability, (17) is
concretely reflected in Rope by the lack of a heroine. The
ever-present Hitchcockian couple is, this time, a homosexual
(sterile) couple, and the only woman (aside from the maid and
the eccentric aunt, both excluded, by virtue of their age and
unsexy appearance, from the category of possible objects of
desire), the nondescript Joan Chandler, is physically the
opposite of the director’s favorite actresses (Hitchcock seems
to have deliberately chosen for the role an almost unknown
actress – beyond brief parts in Humoresque [1946] and The
Street With No Name [1948], Rope seems to have been her last
film). Defined in the film only as David’s fiancée, she hardly
exists at all, since David is dead.
Lacking a heroine, Hitchcock came up with a substitute fetish
for Rope: the ten-minute take. His exclusive concern for
camera work on this film replaces the attention he lavished on
his leading ladies in other films (it is easy to understand
the performers’ displeasure, starting with Stewart who
complained that Hitchcock only rehearsed the camera). This
technical fetishism is actually quite similar to the sexual
fetishism it substitutes for (besides, Hitchcock’s interest in
some classic sexual fetishes – such as women’s shoes – is
well-known; there are traces of them in many of his films –
but not, in point of fact, in Rope). And just as the sexual
fetishist’s desire remains beyond the comprehension of all but
his fellow perverts, Hitchcock’s desire as expressed through
Rope’s continuous take was understood neither by his peers
and actors nor by the critics who, in most cases, discussed
the technical device from the sole viewpoint of its narrative
and dramatic efficiency – or lack thereof.
My bringing together two apparently very different kinds of
fetishism is not merely metaphorical. The tension resulting
from the practice of the long take, while not erotic in
itself, is not unlike sexual tension itself, especially in the
course of shooting. The concentration required to bring a long
take safely to its end creates a suspense similar to the one
engendered, in sexual intercourse, by the concentration that
postpones orgasm in order to prolong pleasure. The jouissance
of the long take is erotic precisely in that it essentially
consists in making the pleasure last. In comparison, short
takes, on which traditional découpage mostly relies, tends to
suggest premature ejaculation, an analogy confirmed by the
atmosphere that prevails on a movie set during and after a
take: extreme tension and concentration of all participants
for a few seconds, sudden relaxation with the director’s
‘cut!’ – the ambiance becoming positively post-coital.
Hitchcock’s megalomania, which drove him to control (to
direct) everything both in his public/professional and private
life, does blossom in Rope, not only because the camera and
its technique are sovereign, but because such supremacy, which
is the director’s, allowed Hitchcock to create a metaphorical
representation of the perfect sexual act – one entirely
controlled throughout its proceeding up to its culmination.
Thus this technical experiment so often decried for being
gratuitous is actually characterised, at a certain level, by a
high degree of necessity. If it is gratuitous, it is in the
same way as the act of the two murderers, which they
convincing at the time, and
even less so now) was that the
jump from one shot to the next
‘which the eye doesn’t even
notice’ in a black and white film
‘gives us a shock every time
colour brings to the image the
only element it lacked to create
a perfect illusion of reality.’
19. James Agee, Agee on Film
(London: Peter Own, 1967), p.
360.
20. Stanley Cavell has
pondered the curious paradox
of a belief in the greater realism
of black and white even though
the real world is ‘in colour’. He
suggested that it is the result
not of the alleged unnatural
look of the Technicolor palette,
but of a de-dramatising effect
peculiar to colour (‘Movies in
colour seemed unrealistic
because they were
undramatic.’) According to him,
black and white (first in
photography, then in motion
pictures) presents ‘reality
dramatised’, and we accept it
as reality because of our
natural tendency to ‘take reality
dramatically.’ (Incidentally,
James Agee’s remark on colour
in Leave Her to Heaven seems
to anticipate this theory). ‘I have
recorded my experience of the
work of colour in serious films
as a de-psychologising or un-
theatricalising of their subjects.’
Cavell, The World Viewed:
Reflections on the Ontology of
Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1979), pp. 89-
91. This intriguing thesis retains
much of its validity in a time
when colour has become the
norm and black and white the
exception, since one of the
characteristics of the cinema of
the past two decades is a
tendency to de-dramatising,
and some directors (including
Woody Allen and Martin
Scorsese) have been known to
return to black and white in an
effort to enhance the
impression of reality. At any
rate, it perfectly fits Rope to the
extent that the film is basically
anti-dramatic, the record of an
action in which nothing takes
place, where everything has
already been accomplished.
21. Ironically, the two
cinematographers who worked
on Rope, Joseph Valentine and
William V. Skall, received the
1948 Oscar for colour
photography (together with
Winton Hoch) for … Joan of Arc
with Ingrid Bergman.
22. Hitchcock said he had to
reshoot the last five reels of the
film (that would be more than
half the running time!) because
of their lurid orange tint. While
considered justified by its perfection.
The Colours of Hell
A few remarks on colour in Rope will provide me with a
transition to a different (but complementary) reading of the
film’s use of the ten-minute take and of its impact on the
spectator.
Colour is an essential constituent of Rope, even though its
function and certainly its effect may not be as obvious as it
initially appears. It is difficult to imagine Rope in black
and white in spite of the fact that, in the context of its
time, the use of Technicolor for such a film seems an oddity,
almost an anomaly. In 1948, most Hollywood movies were still
shot in black and white (it was the heyday of film noir,
which, as it name indicates, could not be conceived in
colour). Colour was still confined to the least realistic
genres (musicals, exotic adventures, fantasy, a few comedies,
a few westerns and other period pieces), based upon the rarely
questioned belief that Technicolor was ‘unrealistic.’ (18)
Rope obviously does not fall into any of these categories.
One of the few earlier uses of colour in a ‘psychological
drama’ set in the present was Leave Her to Heaven, released in
December 1945. Reviewing it for Time in January 1946, James
Agee merely expressed the traditional view as to the effect of
colour in movies: ‘The story’s central idea might be plausible
enough in a dramatically lighted black-and-white picture or in
a radio show with plenty of organ background. But in the rich
glare of Technicolor, all its rental-library characteristics
are doubly glaring.’ (19) Still, cinematographer Leon Shamroy
was awarded his third Oscar in four years for his colour
photography (after The Black Swan [1942] and Wilson [1944]).
Thus a certain ambivalence had begun to exist as to the role
of colour and its field of extension; the new thrill of
Technicolorised drama, while mocked by some, received official
consecration from the profession. (20)
In Rope, which was not even nominated for an Academy Award,
(21) the function of colour is deliberately naturalistic and
dramatic: to show daylight pass into dusk and night, and to
enhance the mounting tension. One immediately notices that
there is, if not a contradiction, at least a tension (another
one) between the two functions: the latter draws the film
toward expressionism (this is obvious, for example, in the use
of a blinking neon sign strategically placed outside a
window to intermittently light the faces ot the soon-to-be
unmasked murderers), while the former claims to be strictly
realistic. Besides, one should not neglect the most obvious:
the harshness of Technicolor (a result, maybe, less of the
supposed limitations of the process than of the use Hollywood
aesthetics had opted to make of it), which at the time tended
to impose a quasi-phantasmagorical atmosphere upon melodramas,
whatever their (quite modest) claim to realism might have
been. Such Technicolor dramas of the 1945-48 period as Leave
Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun (1946) and Rope have in common
perverse (or perverted) protagonists who break the most sacred
human and divine laws. Colour, and particularly red, often
he blamed his cinematographer
for this chromatic excess –
Valentine was replaced by W.V.
Skall for the reshoot – one may
wonder how he could shoot the
entire movie before noticing this
glaring defect, which should
have been obvious while
viewing the dailies (all made up
of very long takes, not the usual
bits and pieces). Isn’t it possible
that Hitchcock more or less
unconsciously wanted his
flaming sky?
23. Waiting – a facile
extrapolation – for Godot; or, if
one prefers, for God’s return?
24. From which we have cut
ourselves, one might say. In the
first shot of Rope, the camera is
pointed toward the street
(where Hitchcock can be seen
passing by with a lady) while
the credits unroll. Then the
camera turns away from the
outside world, pans to a window
aggressively enhanced, becomes emblematic of their perversity.
Which brings us back to the Satanic or infernal aspect of
Rope. The film’s characters are prisoners of a hell whose
flames are the reddish blaze of the sky and clouds at sunset.
(22) It is a hell they have created, over which they intend to
rule, but which becomes the trap to ensnare them. The
spectator – this is another effect of the long-take technique
– is as much a prisoner of it as they are: the movie, that
strip of film which, for once, no editing scissors have cut,
is the rope that ties us up, just as it unreels an invisible
bond around the characters.
In traditional decoupage, each cut introduces a change in
point of view, guaranteeing our free will, a possibility of
choice which we of course delegate to the director and the
editor, but which operates as though it were our own. A cut is
a respite, the invisible, out-of-time crack between two shots,
a breach that allows us to escape the bondage of the
continuous. Conversely, the uninterrupted take builds an
invisible yet solid wall that abolishes such freedom. The only
choice we have left is to close our eyes or look away – in
other words to refuse our role as spectators, which would
consign the film, and ourselves as spectators, to nothingness.
To the extent that we accept to play the game, we cannot
escape from a sustained, cut-less viewing. This is the extreme
of Hitchcockian voyeurism: the continuous shot turns the
spectator into a voyeur who literally cannot look away from
the spectacle ‘offered’ to his gaze.
Thus the Hitchcockian hell in Rope is this endless gaze (that
can only end with the film itself) which abolishes all
freedom. A hell curiously reminiscent of the metaphorical hell
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit). The theme of
the uninterrupted gaze, which is central to Sartre’s play,
reappears in Rope as a stylistic option which places the
spectator in a situation similar to that of the characters in
Huis Clos. At the beginning of the play the male protagonist
defines his new condition as ‘la vie sans coupure’ or ‘life
without a cut’, which accurately describes Rope’s continuous
take and the viewing experience it imposes upon us. Sartre’s
characters’ ‘atrophied eyelids’, unable to blink, echo the
sustained gaze of Hitchcock’s camera, rejecting the blinking
of editing. The living room in Rope, like the hotel room in
Huis Clos, provides the set for the infernal condition (a set
from which one cannot possibly exit), and the continuous take
is the formal snare that draws us to that set/trap and locks
us up in there for eighty minutes, ‘with our eyes open.’
Why does the predictable (indeed inescapable), anticlimactic
ending of the film (the two murderers and their teacher are
waiting, motionless and silent) (23) have so much impact on
the spectator (few critics have failed to mention its power)?
Probably because it reintroduces some amount of freedom after
eighty minutes of oppressiveness and confinement. The opening
of the chest brings the dangerous game and the abstraction of
the philosophical discussion to an end; the opening of the
window, which at last allows the sounds from the outside
world, from which we had been cut off, (24) to reach us,
brings the reassuring promise that the moral chaos engendered
by the perpetrators’ murderous perversity will be followed by
with drawn curtains. Our desire
to know what is taking place
behind those curtains will be
satisfied, but for a price
(Hitchcock’s pacts are always
with the devil): our freedom.
The pact is sealed by the only
cut in the entire film that is
intended as visible: the passing
from the outside to the inside, a
passing marked on the
soundtrack by the strangled
victim’s cry. The innocent
spectator is already complicit.
25. The other stretch of
prolonged camera stillness is
the famous shot in which the
chest is framed in the
foreground while the maid is
seen shuttling in depth of field
between the kitchen and the
living room as she clears the
chest. The stillness of the
camera, however, contrasts
with the methodical back and
forth motion of the maid, which
builds up a tension similar to
that engendered by the playing
of ‘Mouvement perpétuel #1’ to
the beating of the metronome
Rupert sets in motion while he
questions the pianist.
26. Barthes: ‘Law, Science, the
Doxa refuse to understand that
perversion, quite simply, makes
happy’. Richard Howard
(trans.), Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977), p. 64.
a return to balance and order, to the ever-threatened
‘normality’ – a return represented by the arrival of the
police summoned by Rupert’s gun shots out the window and
announced by the mounting wail of a siren.
Simultaneously, the camera frees (unties) us, positioning
itself for the first time in a space behind the chest that had
remained off-frame until then (and where our imagination
probably located a fourth wall); it stays there, motionless
like the characters, for the last feet of film, sole moment of
total immobility in a movie characterised by its perpetual
motion (which happens to be the title of the Poulenc
composition – the only music heard in Rope – which Philip
plays on the piano). (25) We are finally free – free (but only
for a brief moment) to direct our gaze toward whatever we
please; but mainly, we have to admit, free to leave the
theatre, since the film is over. Freedom was regained for
nought.
Therein, perhaps, the reason for my continued fascination with
Rope. As the endless shot comes to an end a spell is broken,
and regained ‘freedom’ seems lacklustre in comparison. Desire,
ever reborn, Phoenix-like, ever yearns for a reprise of the
experience.
Coming to the end of these reflections, a demanding reader may
take me to task for not shedding much light on the ancient and
never diminished fascination which I had set out to question.
A legitimate criticism. But questioning is one thing, getting
answers is quite another. Anyway, how could one satisfactorily
account for what I have identified, in opening, as a
fetishistic attachment? Psychoanalysis should probably be
called upon.
Except that this poetic discipline, with its pervasive
metaphors and analogies, tends to explain everything except
pleasure – which, in the last analysis, remains the essential
mystery, a mystery without which nothing else would have to be
explained. Besides, is it so surprising that pleasure (my
pleasure) should remain the same over several decades? One
cannot be cured of a perversion (which suggests that the
perversion, far from being bad, may fulfill a secret,
beneficial function). And furthermore, who could really desire
to desire no more? (26)
Translated, revised and updated by the author from a text
which first appeared in Cinéma 84 (November 1984).
© Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Rouge 2004. Cannot be
reprinted without permission of the author and
editors of Rouge.