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Schindler's List, Hitchcock, and "Psycho"

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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In his seminal chapter on Psycho in his seminal 1965(original edition) book, "Hitchcock's Films," Robin Wood wrote:

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"Psycho is one of the key works of our age....its themes are of course not new-- obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness...but the intensity and horror of their treatment and the fact that they are grounded in sex belong to the age that has witnessed on the one hand the discoveries of Freudian psychology, and on the other the Nazi concentration camps. I do not think I am being callous in citing the camps in relation to a work of popular entertainment. Hitchcock himself accepted a commission to make a compilation film of captured material about the camps. The project reached the rough cut stage, and was abandoned there, for reasons I have not yet been able to discover; the rough cut now lies, inaccessibly, along with similar quantities of raw material, in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum.

But one cannot contemplate the camps without contemplating two aspects of this horror: the utter helplessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormentors and butchers. We can no longer be under the slightest illusion about human nature, and about the abysses around and within us, and Psycho is founded on, precisely, those twin horrors."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Also this: Wood in this paragraph mentions Hitchocck's "commission" to do something with footage of the Nazi death camps. That one sentence led nowhere in 1965, but decades and decades later, SOMEBODY finally went into those vaults and FOUND that project. Its weird, closer in time to WWII(1965), there was no chance to find the Hitchcock concentration camp material at the Imperial War Museum -- decades LATER, in THIS age, that material was found.

Back in 1966, Hitchcock gave us, in his film Torn Curtain, the HERO brutally murdering a German man(Communist, not Nazi) by putting his head into a gas oven, and Hitchcock himself noted the connection to the means of death at the camps.

But this: the gas killings at the concentration camps were carried off, often, by sending the victims into SHOWERS.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

PS. An interesting HBO "movie" about how the concentration camps were created can be found in "Conspiracy" starring Kenneth Branaugh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth. Some of the dialogue in the film is from real transcripts, the rest is invented, but it is about a meeting of the Nazi high command at a very nice castle in the snow. Topic of discussion: creating the death camps and Exterminating the Jew.

Its a harrowing watch, sort of "12 Angry Men" in reverse, as Branaugh and Tucci "steer" any dissenters to concensus about creating the camps and killing all the Jews...post haste. One realizes that even psychopathy can be organized around Robert's Rules of Orders. (Or whatever Germans used for parliamentary procedure in the 40's.)