116 BILL KROHN
proud, beautiful rider, filmed against a process screen. 27A, the
production report number for the extreme close-up that follows,
which transforms her into a human letter-box, indicates that it was
an afterthought, the last "additional" shot filmed on M:ay 12-as if
the name that invisibly shaped so many details of the film could
only be set down at the end of the process, like the answer to a
riddle or the signature of a letter.
81. Miller, "Hitchcock's Suspicions and Suspicion," 245, 252-54.
See Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: "She constantly interprets
events in terms of her reading, not her firsthand experience. . . .
Lina Maclaidlaw's dull life, nourished on romantic fantasies, has
made her the self-styled heroine of a Gothic novel" (116-17).
82. Miller, "Hitchcock's Suspicions and Suspicion," 253-54.
83. The tapes of the Truffaut-Hitchcock interviews are
preserved in the Hitchcock Collection at the Herrick Library.
84. Ken Mogg, personal communication. See Ken Mogg,
"Mood Swings: Hitchcock's 'Young and Innocent' (1937)," The
MacGuffin, 13 (August 1994), 20-21.
85. Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles (1936; rpt. New York:
Berkeley Medallion Books, 1960), 263.
86. See Tom Cohen, "Expropriating 'Cinema'-or, Hitchcock's
Mimetic War," in Ideology and Inscription (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 145-46.
87. Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots (Paris: Gallimard,
1971), 30.
88. Miller, "Hitchcock's Suspiqons and Suspicion," 241-51.
89. Ken Mogg, "The Universal Hitchcock: The Trouble With
Harry (1956)," posted at the MacGuffin website, sec. 2, para. 2.
90. Ken Mogg, "Hitchcock's The Lodger': A Theory," The
Hitchcock Annual (1992), 115-27. Mogg is building on the
observations of William Rothman, Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
91. Tmffaut, Hitchcock. 43-44.
92. Mogg, personal communication.
93. Other comments suggest that even the preview ending
struck viewers as ambiguous. For example. Viewer #54 in
Inglewood says that the ending "left a doubt."
94. Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, 509-10.
95. Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase (New York: Harper and
Bros., 1932), 431.
96. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 141.
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR
RICHARD ALLEN
The final long delayed publication of an English
language translation of Raymond Bellour's seminal work' The
Analysis of Film, edited by Constance Penley, is a cause for
celebration for serious students of Hitchcock's films. At the
core of the original book published by Editions Albatros in
1979 were studies of four Hitchcock films/ The Birds, North by
Northwest, Marnie and Psycho, together with essays on
Hawks's The Big Sleep and MinnelU's Gigi. To be sure/ all but
two of these essays have been readily available in English
translation for some time, but these are the two most
important essays in the book. "Le blocage symbolique"
(translated as "Symbolic Blockage")/ on North by Northwest,
occupies well over one hundred pages of text and illustra-
tipns. And while Bellour's essay on The Birds, "System of a
Fragment," became influential through Janet Bergstrom's
detailed discussion of it in the pages of the journal of
feminism and film. Camera Obscura, it has been accessible in
English only as a mimeograph from the BFI Education
Department (1972; reprinted in 1981).1 Four short texts which
belong to an earlier period of writing than the main essays
have been eliminated in the English translation/ including,
regrettably, a short essay called //Ce que savait Hitchcock"
( What Hitchcock Knew"). However, one important previously
translated article that fits the overall approach of the volume
has also been added: "To Alternate/to Narrate/' on D.W.
Griffith's Biograph film. The Lonedale Operator.
The value of having these seminal essays available for the
first time for the English language reader is complemented by
the opportunity to read them together in one place alongside
the rest of Bellour's essays on film analysis. For the book
allows us not only to perceive the remarkable consistency in
Bellour's thinking about narrative cinema during this period
of his writing, but also to grasp and hence to better evaluate
its scope and ambition. Taken together/ these articles not
118 RICHARD ALLEN
only offer an original perspective on Hitchcock's films, they
also propose a new way to analyze films and a provocative
thesis about the nature and character of classical American
cinema. Any assessment of Bellour's contribution to our
understanding of Hitchcock, which is my primary concern
here, must, along the way, evaluate the relationship that his
study of Hitchcock bears to the other two goals of the
volume. Since, for Bellour, the study of Hitchcock is
exemplary of the way to understand narrative film/ this
review of Bellour's work is also an occasion to reflect upon
the very nature of what film criticism is and should be.
Science, Poetics, and Interpretation
Bellour's approach to understanding film in The Analysis
of Film originates in the "structural" analyses of myth and
narrative in the writings of Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes
and in the semiotics of cinema that had been developed by
Bellour's colleague, Christian Metz. In his highly influential
analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine in S/Z/ Barthes develops
a "poetics" of narrative; that is, he seeks to describe the
structure and form taken by narratives, or narrative kinds, in
general. He characterizes narrative form in terms of the
relationship between codes that are sequential in nature and
propel the narrative forward, and codes that are static or
reversible that propose alternative narrative possibilities or
meanings. For example, the "hermeneutic code" describes
the creation of narrative questions or enigmas whose answer
is deferred or delayed until the resolution of the narrative,
whereas the "symbolic code" structures the enigmas in
terms of antithetical narrative outcomes. Barthes is not
simply concerned with identifying these codes, but with
understanding the manner in which they interact and are
transformed during the course of a narrative. He makes an
analogy between narrative structure and rhyme: "Just as
rhyme . . . structures the poem accordmg to expectation and
desire for recurrence, so the hermeneutic terms structure the
enigma according to expectation and desire for its solution."2
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 119
Thus the "work" of the narrative is at once to maintain the
enigma through constantly restating its elements in terms of
an opposition between two narrative possibilities and to offer
some sense of progression by resolving one of the narrative
possibilities and setting up the enigma in a new way. Barthes
seeks to illuminate the complex way in which narrative
enigma^ is at once sustained and transformed by breaking
down Balzac's narrative sentence by sentence, though he
does it in a very arbitrary and allusive fashion.
However, Barthes is not simply concerned with
describing narrative (or perhaps specifically classical
narrative) as a formal system, but with interpreting the
formal system of narrative in relationship to the thematics of
desire, castration, and lack. Balzac's novella provides Barthes
with an occasion to do this because the enigma it presents is
none other than the question of sexual difference as it is
posed by the body of a castrato, La Zambinalla, whose
identity the narrator constantly withholds from the reader, as
it is withheld from the eponymous hero. For Barthes,
Balzac's novella shows the way that narrative form activates
and sustains the desire of the subject through enigma and
lack by "making the search for truth (hermeneutic structure)
into the search for castration (symbolic structure)." Thus, in
the manner that a psychoanalytic case study is said to
illustrate the truth of psychoanalytic theory, Barthes's
psychoanalytic interpretation of Balzac's novella demon-
strates the psychoanalytic or oedipal character of all
narrative.3
Bellour largely embraces Barthes theory of narrative and
adapts Barthes method of narrative segmentation and close
analysis. Indeed, with some justice he could be called the
Roland Barthes of film studies. But what is arguably most
distinctive about Bellour's work, as well as the source of its
complexity and difficulty, is the way in which his interest in
codes of narration is linked to the investigation of codes
specific to the cinema. Here the influence upon Bellour is as
much the work of Christian Metz as Barthes, since it was
Metz who first proposed analyzing the manner in which
120 RICHARD ALLEN
codes that were both specific and non-specific might be
organized into a textual system conceived as "the process
which displaces codes/ deforming each of them by the
presence of the others, contaminating some by means of
others, meanwhile replacing one by the other, and finally-as
a temporarily arrested result of this general displacement-
placing each code in a particular position in regard to the
overaU structure/
Bellour's adaptation of Barthes's theory and method to a
mode of analyzing the organization of narrative and stylistic
codes in the cinema is exemplified in his essays on Hitch-
cock's The Birds and North by Northwest. Bellour undertakes
a painstaking shot-by-shot analysis of patterns of alternation,
like the opposition between near and far, movement and non-
movement of the camera, seeing and being seen, and departure
and arrival (movement within the shot) in two specific
scenes/ the Bodega Bay sequence of The Birds and the crop-
dusting sequence of North by Northwest. Bellour's specific
concern is to examine the moments in which patterns of
alternation shift both within a given stylistic register and
between one stylistic register and another. The significance
of these shifts in the code of alternation is to at once
dramatize the narrative enigma of couple formation versus
the threat that is posed to the couple and to propel the
narrative forward toward resolution. The scenes he chooses
to analyze are unusual in the sense that they almost wholly
lack dialogue and convey the story through visual means, but
in this way, for Bellour, they also crystallize Hitchcock's
story-telling technique. They provide ideal examples of the
way that Hitchcock concretely embodies narrative form and
narrative process in objects and situations: the movement
of the story is embodied in the movement of characters; the
psychological relationships between characters are embodied
in glances between characters; objects and situations are
given a psychological valence.
Bellour is certainly less explicit than he might be about
how the patterns of alternation he purports to detect and the
shifts that occur within them are linked to the creation of
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 121
narrative enigma in his analysis of the sequence from The
Birds-perhaps because this is, as he says, a "fragment" of
an analysis. But the connection is made more explicit in his
essay on North by Northwest, where Bellour refers to what he
calls "repetition-resolution. One looks in vain for a clear
definition of "repetition-resolution" in the book, and the
term does not appear in the index. This is an egregious
editorial oversight/ given both the difficulty of grasping the
concept and the fact that it is, alongside the principle of
alternation, Bellour's central contribution to the theory of film
narrative. However, we can gain some help from Janet
Bergstrom's interview with Bellour, where he states that
repedtion-resolution "allows for the development of the
film," and is "linked above all to the form of the
hermeneutic narrative characteristic, on the whole, of the
classical American cinema."6 In other words, I think we can/
without undue conceptual violence, assimilate Bellour's code
ofrepetition-resolution to Barthes hermeneutic code (another
term that is not indexed). Repetition-resolution describes how
patterns of alternation are structured with a view to
progressively resolving narrative enigmas until narrative
closure is achieved.
BeUour, like Barthes, interprets repetition-resolution in
terms of the psychoanalytic narrative of lack, castration, and
desire. It is Hitchcock's films, and supremely North by
Northwest, that play the role of Balzac's Sarrasine by
demonstrating the "narrative coalescence" of the
hermeneutic code with the themes of castration and lack
structured across the axis of sexual difference (81).
Furthermore, following Metz, Bellour speaks of the way in
which codes are "condensed" and "displaced" in relation-
ship to one another, and he speaks of the subtle shifts that
take place with a particular code within a sequence as
perversions of that code (120). The choice of this vocabulary
does not seem to be arbitrary on Bellour's part. It suggests
the way in which the structuring of narrative progression is
to be modelled upon the operation of the primary process as
it is described by Freud. Just as for Freud the processes of
122 RICHARD ALLEN
condensation and displacement in dream and fantasy work
to at once preserve and disguise the unacknowledged sexual
motive that serves to generate them, narrative, for Bellour/
preserves through strategies of delay and displacement the
oedipal wish that animates it. Hitchcock in this sense is again
exemplary, for his films manifest what we might call the
highest degree of formal refinement that is nonetheless at the
service of narrative embodiment.
In his concern to examine the combination, breakdown,
and displacement of codes that specify the uniqueness of the
text, Bellour's writing demonstrates a laudable emphasis on
the aesthetics of narrative and textual construction that aligns
his work with the mainstream of literary and poetic structur-
alism that did so much to reinvigorate the discipline of
poetics in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as a struc-
turalist, Bellour is committed to the idea that poetics-an
activity of descriptive generalization-can be recast as a
theoretical enterprise modeled upon scientific inquiry that
seeks to explain by a theory the principles or properties,
hitherto unknown, that underlie apparently disparate natural
phenomena. Bellour's code of alternation is a deep structure
or principle underlying the construction of the textual system
that is unknown to the ordina.ry viewer or critic, in the way
that underlying properties of a material object may be
unknown to the average observer. Furthermore, the principle
of alternation unifies apparently disparate phenomena: for
example/ it defines Griffith's narration and classical cinema,
literary and cinematic narrative, and narrative and non-
narrative film. It also functions as much at the level of the
individual sequence as at the level of the whole film, and as
much in terms of the formal parameters of the work as in
terms of the narrative action. However/ unlike the principles
or properties that the scientist uncovers, there is nothing that
could count as disconfirmatton of Bellour's theory of
alternation. In this sense, Bellour's theory (like structuralism
in general) is not scientific but scientistic: it operates within
a scientific "imaginary" and conceives of its activity as if it
were scientific even though it is not. Bellour's scientific
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 123
construal of poetics yields insights, but they can be redeemed
only if we respect the differences between texts as we form
generalizations about them, rather than presuppose an
underlying truth that the differences between texts disguise.
However, Bellour not only conflates poetics with scientific
theorizationas opposed to descriptive generalization, he also,
following Barthes, conflates poetics with interpretation
through his insistence upon casting the insights of narrative
poetics in terms of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic
themes that are discerned in individual texts and expressed
through their narrative form are taken by Bellour to describe
the meaning of narrative in general, regardless of whether or
not these themes are discernable by a'critic not wedded, in
advance, to the truth of psychoanalytic theory. In Bellour's
analyses of film/ the investigation of the structures and forms
of narrative, the subject matter of poetics, becomes
seamlessly interwoven with the explication of narrative
meaning in a way that conflates the exercise of critical
judgment and evaluation with the descriptive generalizations
of poetics. Given the fact that poetics is conceived by Bellour
as a scientific enterprise, his conflation of poet'ics with
interpretation recasts interpretation as a scientific enterprise
that uncovers the objective meaning of the text, one that is
free from the "subjective" viewpoint of the critic. This is/ of
course, a conflation that is encouraged by psychoanalytic
theory itself, where the patient's interpretation of the
meaning of his symptoms, if it is to be correct, must conform
to the conclusions predicted by the analyst on the basis of
the theory.
In fact, Bellour realizes that his desire for an objective
rendering of the structure of the text cannot be fulfilled. The
essential impossibility of such analysis is the subject of the
first short essay in the volume after the introduction/ entitled
The Unattainable Text." In this essay, Bellour construes the
impossibility of the kind of textual analysis he wishes to
practice as an empirical problem: namely, that a film text is
unquotable, unlike say a photograph, and hence the analyst
can only resort to interminable approximations of the actual
 r
124 RICHARD ALLEN
thing. There are certainly empirical difficulties in quoting
films, though Bellour recognizes that new technologies help
us. However, the real problem here is a conceptual one.
Interpretation cannot be construed as an activity of
anatomizing through words and images the objective
meaning of a text because it requires an act of aesthetic
judgment or evaluation to determine what is salient or
meaningful to that analysis and what is not. This is a
significant conceptual confusion, for it tends to result in the
denigration of interpretation that seems, in comparison with
science, merely a subjective enterprise. While judgments
about what an artwork is and does cannot be assimilated to
the objectivity of fact secured by scientific inquiry, they are
not thereby irredeemably subjective. The objectivity of
interpretation lies not in the fact that it is, per impossible, a
science, but in the manner in which the reasons for it are
adduced: Does it accurately characterize the film? Does it
weigh the evidence for and against different viewpoints? Is
it internally contradictory? Is it informed by a wider
knowledge of the relationship the film bears to other films
and the culture of which it is a part? It is by these criteria
that I would like to assess Bellour's work in the remainder of
my essay.
To Alternate/To Narrate
Narrative seems to imply a patterned sequence not
simply because it is a sequence of events a, b, c, linked
together by chains of causality, as David Bordwell's work has
demonstrated, but because it is a sequence of events both the
nature and ordering of which is endowed with human
significance.7 That is, at a minimum, narrative is designed to
sustain human interest. It is indeed plausible to think of the
way in which narrative sustains human interest, at least
abstractly, in terms of an overarching enigma that is
maintained by being deferred or delayed through a series of
partial resolutions that serve only to raise further questions.
In this sense, too, we may conceive story-telling in terms of
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 125
a pattern of repetition and difference. Furthermore, if
narrative enigmas set up alternative resolution to a story or
two possible answers to a narrative question, the progression
and resolution of the story involves "passing through" these
narrative alternatives. This narrative structure, as Noel
Carroll has observed, is characteristic of the classical
suspense perfected in film by D.W. Griffith that resolves the
narrative enigma into two (or perhaps more) opposed possi-
bilities.8 Classical suspense clearly creates narrative
progression via a pattern of alternation. But not all stories
take the form of classical suspense and there is no reason to
assume that a narrative pattern of repetition and difference
must take the form of an alternating pattern. If alternation is
not a feature of narrative in general, then we should not pre-
suppose, as Bellour does, that it is a defining characteristic of
classical cinema. Furthermore, there are good reasons to be
cautious in making such a claim, as I shall show.
. Bellour was one of the first scholars to point out the
manner in which Griffith's Biograph narratives are con-
structed through the repetition of interior and exterior spaces
that create the parallel structures out of which suspense
develops. Furthermore, as Bellour argues, this alternation in
Griffith's films is constructed across the axis of sexual
difference. However, Griffith's narration is distinctive in the
way that he places the emphasis of cutting upon the con-
struction of narrative parallelism. Shot transitions often occur
between non-contiguous or ambiguously contiguous spaces
(micro-scenes) in order to cue the temporal simultaneity of
two or more depicted actions. Griffith's approach to editing
differs fundamentally from the typically classical sequence
exhibited in the short segment from Hawks's The Big Sleep
analyzed by Bellour, where shot/reverse-shot editing serves
to break down a single space (scene) into its constituent
parts. Here, the repetition involved is a repetition of shot set-
ups. within the scene, and the cutting is an index of sequence,
not simultaneity.9 Furthermore/ although the particular scene
he analyzes is edited across the axis of sexual difference in a
manner that, for Bellour, illustrates the way in which women
126 RICHARD ALLEN
in classical cinema are reduced to the status . of man's
narcissistic double/ it would be implausible to suggest that
classical editing is either motivated by or invariably articu-
lates an opposition between or narcissistic doubling of the
sexes/ or indeed an opposition-doubling of any kind. In
short, Bellour's analysis fails to discriminate Griffith's
parallelism from the linearity or sequentiality that charac-
terizes the typical classical sequence.
How then does narrative parallelism feature in
Hitchcock's work, and how typical are his films of classical
style? In his analysis of the Bodega Bay segment from The
Birds, Bellour notes that the status of this segment is
somewhat ambiguous. Although most readily described as a
scene (the depicted events take place consecutively in the
same place), the rigorous alternation of point-of-view shots
that structure the eighty-four shots of the sequence creates
the impression of parallel spaces. In this manner/
Hitchcockian editing recalls the "creative geography" of
Kuleshov that gives different spaces the appearance of
contiguity but nonetheless retains their sense of
separateness. While it is certainly important to grasp, as
Bellour does, the manner in which Hitchcock's sequence is
patterned as a series of alterj-iations between shots, it is
equally important to understand the manner in which
Hitchcock's film relates at once to classical norms and to
Griffith's narration, thereby working suspense into the
structure of the scene in a manner that is wholly
characteristic of his film-making practice.12
J-Iitchcock's narration stretches the conventions of
classical editing by his hyperbolic, obsessive rendition of the
shot/reverse-shot structure and his consequent expansion of
the scene both temporally and spatially, yet he does not
break the unity of the scene, or the sense in which the
editing transitions mark temporally successive moments. At
the same time/ Hitchcock's obsessive repetition of the
shot/reverse-shot structure allows him to evoke the effect of
Griffith's cross-cutting while remaining within the confines
of a scene. Hitchcockian narration effectively turns the
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 127
ordinary question-answer function of shot/reverse-shot
editing within the scene into a situation of suspense" or
anxious uncertainty. Furthermore/ he effects this trans-
position by transforming Griffith's objective structure of
suspense, where the spectator is shown what the character
cannot see or does not know, into "subjective suspense," in
which the spectator's knowledge is restricted to what the
character knows and the audience shares the character's
anxiety about what is about to happen.13 At the same time,
the^ viewer who grasps the threatening significance of the
birds that hover in the visual field will experience the kind of
suspense that comes from knowing more than the character.
we might note here that the crop-dusting sequence from
North by Northwest is conceived in a similar way. As BeUour;s
analysis demonstrates, the sequence is structured around a
rigorous alternation of point of view which creates a dramatic
opposition between the person looking and what is looked
at.-This opposition is thrown into relief by the fact that the
spectator, unlike the character, knows that the character is
being sent to his death. But since Grant's character is
desperate to find out the identity of George Kaplan, his non~-
existent double he thinks he is meeting but whose identity he
has in fact unwittingly assumed, "he is curious about
everything that emerges in the empty horizon of his view.
Thus we are pulled into suspense through an objective
structure which casts the incipient threat against the
character's innocent awareness of it. This threat gets more
intense with every passing vehicle/ the diminution of time
between their approach, and through the effect of some~of
the formal parameters that Bellour examines/ such as the
shifts in shot scale. Yet we are also oriented toward a
subjective identification with the character and his fascination
to discern the significance of what is going to happen next,
signalled most emphatically by Hitchcock's signature use of
a farward-tracking point-of-view shot combined with a
backward-tracking reaction shot as he approaches-"the
character (yet another double) whom he thinks might "be
George Kaplan.
128 RICHARD ALLEN
It is easy/ then, to see how Hitchcock's films provide
Bellour with such elegant proof that the hermeneutic of
narrative (at least classical narrative) is sustained by the
replication of structures of opposition or doubling. But the
nature of the proof that Hitchcock films provides is mis-
leading. Bellour conceives Hitchcock's films, and especially
the sequences he analyzes in detail from The Birds and North
by Northwest, simply as an exaggeration or hyperbolic
rendition of the classical narrative. This is indeed true in the
sense that Hitchcockian suspense dramatizes and distends
the question and answer format that is characteristic of
narrative in general. However, Bellour's identification of
narration with alternation is just too general to capture the
precise significance of Hitchcock's approach to film form. He
at once tends to distort the uniqueness of Hitchcock's
narration-the manner in which it departs from the typical
classical Hollywood sequence through an obsessive pre-
occupation with repetition and parallelism within the
structuring of a scene-and to overemphasize the extent to
which alteration and parallelism define classical Hollywood
narration.
If Bellour is indifferent to the distinctions between
narratives that exhibit alternation and those that do not, his
investigation of individual films and segments of films is
compromised by a tendency to see the principle at work,
always and everywhere, in a manner that at the same time
over-interprets the salience of the code of alternation and
undermines the significance of formal elements that cannot
be conceived of in terms of alternation. Let us look more
closely at his analysis of The Birds.
One of the features of the sequence that Bellour chooses
to analyze is the way in which it involves a journey, a device
Hitchcock uses to render in concrete visual terms the
movement of a story. As Bellour rightly points out, the
sequence is structured as a journey out by one and a journey
back by two: the couple. We could say more precisely that
the sequence involves a chase and that it is a chase or pursuit
structure that informs the dynamic of on-screen and off-
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 129
screen space here as elsewhere in Hitchcock's work. The
journey outward by Melanie consists of a provocation in
pursuit of Mitch-a seduction. The journey back consists of
a chase and a capture. Bellour claims that meaning emerges
through the progression of alternation through three codes
of the film: seeing vs. being seen, camera movement vs.
stasis and distance vs proximity. Analysis of the sequence
is broken down according to the manner in which patterns
0 alternationare configured, interrupted, and reconfigured.
Bellour's breakdown of the sequence has the merit of
pointing out the rigor of Hitchcock's approach to editing and
therole that shifts in patterns of alternation have in cuing
shifts of power or authority in the relationships between the
protagonists. Nonetheless, his characterization of the
sequence is misleading. Bellour describes the point-of-view
shots of what Melanie looks at in her outward bound and
return journey as "static." However, the shots are not static:
they are informed by both the movement of Melanie's boat
laterally and the movement of the water up and down.
Furthermore, halfway through the outward journey
Hitchcock shifts the point of view of the camera looking at
Melanie to the position of the boat itself, so while the camera
position is fixed, it is not a static shot, since the boat appears
to be moving relative to the background (though not to
Melanie) The point here is less that BeUour is" factually
inaccurate, that he fails to see movement, but that his failure
to see manifests a failure to interpret the significance of
movement. Bellour, driven by his singular obsession with
codes structured as oppositions, is interested only in the
relationship of movement versus non-movement, and thus
the small yet pervasive movement in these shots is barely
registered in his analysis (save for the suggestion in a couple
of shot descriptions of half-movement). However, for the
analyst less obsessed with seeking out elusive bmary codes,
the movement in these shots is extremely important.
The movement in the shots of what Melame is looking at
registers the gaze as Melanie's, a gaze of constant movement
and peripheral vision. Her gaze is a "fluid" or "liquid"
130 RICHARD ALLEN
gaze, registering the relationship the female character bears
to the ocean. It is one that thus contrasts sharply with the
gaze of Mitch, marooned in the family homestead, as if on a
lighthouse: seen but unable to see. Indeed, when Mitch does
finally look, it is through the focused gaze of binoculars that
mask out the surrounding landscape. The shots of Melanie
looking are equally instructive. By combining as they do
movement with stasis in the same shot, they serve to self-
consciously place Melanie in relationship to her environment
in a manner that is very characteristic of Hitchcock's
commentative mise-en-scene. The significance of the landscape
as a real space is minimized in the sequence (there is, as it
were, absolutely no possibility that Melanie could get wet).
The combination of stasis (Melanie in front of the camera)
against movement (the water passing by) bestows a sense of
autonomy, indeed transcendence, upon the character, as if
she is flying like a bird across the water.
In analyzing the significance of Hitchcock's careful
orchestration of this sequence, Bellour astutely focuses on a
key scene in which the pattern of alternation is broken: a
series of five shots in which Melanie enters Mitch's house
and deposits the love birds. The structure of the look, he
notes correctly, is interrupted by the cut that takes us across
the threshold of the house tcr.an "objective" camera position
that registers Melanie's entrance. Furthermore, he argues
that the relationship between camera distance and the
structure of seeing is overturned in the scene. While there is
shot/reverse-shot alternation in the sequence, the shots are
marked by an equal distance in which "Melanie ceases to be
the seer and becomes the seen, explicitly so/ although, not by
a character but by the camera and the cameraman" (51).
In addition, the one spatial transition that takes us from
the insert shot of the letter to Melanie looking out of the
window inverts the relationship between seeing/seen and
close/distant that governs the patterns of alternation that
surround this shot series into a relationship of non-
seeing/seeing and close/distant. Finally, Bellour argues, the
pattern of stasis and movement he discerns across the five
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 131
shots in the scene-movement/stasis/movement/stasis/
movement-at once "condenses" a global opposition
between movement and stasis in the surrounding sequence,
and inscribes the "displacement" of the code ofalternation
from seeing/seen and close/distant to a different "level."
While Bellour correctly recognizes the break in shot/
reverse-shot alternation (reinforced by distance) and the shift
in camera point of view that signals it, he chooses curiously
to emphasize the way that the code of alternation continues
in terms that are "displaced" and "transformed" across the
sequence. He thus emphasizes continuity in alternation when
arguably the scene is not significantly governed by alternation.
Yet, ironically, because Bellour focuses upon alternation, he
fails to register other kinds of continuity that link this series
of five shots to the sequences on either side of it.
With reference to overlooked continuities: to claim that
Melanie in this sequence ceases to be the seer and becomes
the seen is misleading in the sense that although the
audience does not see for a couple of shots from her point of
view, Melanie continues to look. Furthermore, Melanie has
always been "the seen" as she moves across the water.
Although there is a break in alternation here that marks the
fact that she has achieved her goal of entry into the house,
there is also a marked continuity in the way that the reverse
tracking shot, which has framed her approach to the house,
is picked up and emphatically inscribed at the moment of her
arrival within it. This continuity emphasizes the way she has
reached the culmination of her goal.'As I have already noted,
the reverse-field tracking shot combined with the forward
moving point-of-view shot is a signature aspect of
Hitchcock's style, and, as featured in Psycho and Vertigo, it
suggests, among other things, the way in which a character
is propelled forward by forces beyond their control. What is
distinctive about this sequence in The Birds is the way it
combines this sense of a lure or compulsion that is propelling
the character forward (registered by the reverse-field tracking
shots) with a strong sense of agency registered in Melanie's
alert, searching gaze. At the moment" Melanie enters the
132 RICHARD ALLEN
house, the sense of lure (perhaps intensified) is comple-
merited by character movement that the camera follows, first
as she moves left to place the love birds, then as she moves
right and is shown looking out of the window. Here, character
movement in relationship to the camera underscores Melanie's
sense of agency, her panache, at her moment of greatest
vulnerability as she enters the house.
With reference to mistakenly conceived continuities: in
comparison to the significance of Hitchcock s elegant
choreography of camera and character movement within the
house/ the brief cuts in the scene that involve first an insert
shot of a letter to Mitch's sister, Cathy, that Melanie leaves
with the lovebirds, and secondly, a brief shot of the barn as
she looks for Mitch outside the window seem stylistically
insignificant. While Hitchcock is a director who thinks shot
by shot in many sequences and hence is appropriate to
analyze in terms of shot-by-shot significance and relations,
Bellour's method leads him at times to over-interpret the
significance of these relationships by conceiving them in
terms of alternation.
It simply makes no sense to claim, as Bellour does, that
in the cut from the insert of the letter to the shot of Melanie
(followed in part by a camera gan) going to the window to
check on Mitch the alternation seeing/seen and close/distant
is transformed into the alternation non-seeing/seeing and
close/distant (thereby "displacing" the symmetry of the
rest of the series). No alternation occurs between these
two shots, unless by definition all cutting is alternation, in
which case the concept would be entirely vacuous. Further-
more, it is unconvincing to describe the insert shot as "non-
seeing." Ostensibly, at least, Melanie knows what she is
doing.
Bellour claims, finally, that the sequence is marked by a
symmetry among the five shots of movement/stasis/movement/
stasis/movement. The sequence certainly does have a
symmetrical structure that underscores Melanie's entrance
into the house as a pivot between her journey to and from
the house, and this symmetry is partially reflected in the
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 133
choreography of movement and stasis. However, the
relationship between camera movement and stasis is not one
of strict alternation, for Bellour's analysis involves
discounting both the fact that the first shot of the sequence
contains movement but does not begin with movement, and
that the insert shot re-frames Melanie's actions as she moves
the letter from her purse to the table in a manner that serves
to continue rather than interrupt the movement of the
camera that has taken her to the table.
Furthermore/ Bellour ignores the symmetrical movements
of the camera and of the character within the scene that are
arguably more significant than the mere fact that the camera
moves (or doesn't move). Hedren's character first moves
toward the camera, then to the left with the camera
following/ then to the right with the camera following, then
back away from the camera. It is this choreography of
character movement in relationship to the camera that seems
a-Hcial to the symmetrical effect of the scene. In this respect,
Bellour's analysis of North by Northwest is a profound
improvement upon his analysis of The Birds, because in the
former he tries to take account of the fundamental
importance of character and object movement in relationship
to the camera.
Bellour wants to claim that the continuity and rhythm
established by the shot/reverse-shot point-of-view structures
supported by contrasts in camera distance that book-end this
scene create a continuity in patterning that is carried across
the sequence by the contrast between movement and stasis.
It is not clear to me that such a claim is even plausible, for
there is a radical difference between, say, the self-evident
alternation in the shot/reverse-shot as a structure of
continuity and opposition in Hitchcock's cinema and any
putative difference between movement and stasis from shot
to shot No doubt we can sometimes think of patterns of film
style, echoing each other at different levels like the patterns
on a carpet. However, in practice, as we have seen, this
sequence does not display strict alternation at the level of
movement and stasis.
134 RICHARD ALLEN
Sexual Difference
Thus far I have focused my comments on the formal
parameters of Bellour's theory of narrative, but equally
important for Bellour, and arguably more important to the
reception and citation of his work in the field of film studies,
is his argument about the oedipal character of narrative and
the manner in which classical film, exemplified by Hitchcock,
is organized around an axis of sexual difference that operates
at women's expense. What does it mean to say that classical
Hollywood narrative, and Hitchcock's films in particular, are
oedipal narratives that work to situate the woman as the
narcissistic double of the man?
Bellour's starting point is the centrality of the role of the
formation of the heterosexual couple in both Hitchcock and
classical cinema, a formation that is linked to the renewal of
the social order that is symbolized in marriage. North by
Northwest, for Bellour, is an archetypal instance of such a
narrative. No one would deny the centrality of the romance
narrative to classical cinema/ nor the exemplary status of
North by Northwest, but many might argue that the Hollywood
ideal of romance contributes to the achievement of an
equality between the sexes, rather than subordination of
women to men, since women m the Hollywood romance
function so centrally as agents of social regeneration.15 But,
as Janet Bergstrom originally pointed out, Bellour's unique
contribution to the debate about the representation of women
in Hollywood cinema was to argue that the agency that is
apparently accorded to women in the romance narrative is
both transient and illusory, because it exists only to
differentiate the identity of the woman from the man as a
prelude to her subordination as man's partner and double.
As Bellour himself puts it, woman occupies a central place in
American cinema "only to the extent that it's a place
assigned to her by the logic of masculine desire."16
For Bellour/ the position of women in classical Hollywood
narrative can be diagnosed using psychoanalytic theory, for
Freudian theory describes exactly the cultural logic of gender
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 135
subordination that lies beneath the surface of the Hollywood
lI^LThi^ losic is PerhaPS famUiar enough in its vague
outlines, but important to reconstruct because the place of
psydloanalytic theory in Bellour's argument is'wholly
enthymematic; that is, he fails to clarify or define "the
psychoanalytic concepts he invokes in 'advance of the
arguments he makes with them, for they are taken to be self-
evident.17 For psychoanalytic theory/the genesis of the
relationship that the infant bears to the external world and'to
others'; and the whole direction of its subsequent develop-
ment lies in the relationship that the infant bears towardYts
mother and to her real and imaginary presences and absences'.
To know anything as "external" to oneself and hence"to
understand oneself as a self that is "external" to the other-a
necessary and inevitable feature of human development-is
to experience a sense of loss or lack that engenders a
.c^mTondins desire,to negate differentiation" through
imaginary fusion with the other. This ambivalent desire is"at
once^superseded and consolidated in the life of the subject by
being rendered unconscious through the force of social
prohibition and taboo embodied in" the father's threat~of
castration.
Unwilling to yield to literal castration, yet unable to
literally assume the father's place that he still desires to
occupy, the little boy, in order to grow up, is forced to
differentiate himself from the mother he now perceives as
castrated internalize his own sense of lack (symbolic
^a!t.r.ation^.,and.assume a sodal position, cemented by
marriage/ that rivals and displaces that of the father. The
figure of woman bears the mark of sexual difference/ and
hence the mark of the gap between self and woridThatThe
male sub]ect has always sought to efface by assuming the
fSe^'s_place in rclationshiP t-o the mother. Thus, in uniting
with the woman (who replaces his mother) the man seeks'to
abolish difference, either by idealizing her'image as oneThat
exist only to complete his desire "(woman conceived in
Bellour's terms as man's narcissistic double), or by effacin$
her.
136 RICHARD ALLEN
Hitchcock's late films are exemplary for Bellour not only
because they provide an archetypal staging of the romance
narrative but also because they offer their own psycho-
analytic emplotment of that romance. Hitchcock's late films
do not themselves require psychoanalyzing for, to a greater
or lesser degree, they wear their diagnosis on their own
narrative sleeves. As Bellour writes, in characteristically
elliptical fashion: "In North by Northwest, the symbolic is
never beneath the film or above it; it constitutes its matrix
only through the movement that carries it from enigma to
enigma and from action to action. The other film is truly the
same film. Oedipus is truly the subject who both answers the
Sphmx and bears the weight of its demands" (81). The
"narrative code" of North by Northwest is identical to its
"psychoanalytic code" in a manner akin to the identity that
Barthes claimed for Balzac's Sarrasine. However, Bellour goes
beyond anatomizing and interpreting the explicit or implicit
presence of the psychoanalytic narrative in Hitchcock's films.
Just as, for Barthes, Balzac's novella makes explicit the
oedipal logic underlying narrative, Hitchcock's films, for
Bellour, exemplify classical cinema in general. They make
explicit the oedipal logic that lies beneath all Hollywood
romances.
Bellour's analysis of the way that Hitchcock's films
explicitly invoke psychoanalytic themes in their own
narrative and stylistic construction is both important and
eminently defensible, for it does not require committing
oneself to the truth of psychoanalysis. Instead, we can
readily trace Hitchcock's preoccupations to the same
Victorian cultural milieu from which the discourse of
psychoanalysis emerged, as Bellour himself suggests in his
interview with Bergstrom. In this respect, Bellour's
psychoanalytic criticism demonstrates a subtlety and
sophistication that is lacking in the work of many of his
contemporaries and followers. However, once the psycho-
analytic narrative in Hitchcock's works is assumed by Bellour
to exemplify the hidden subtext of classical cinema in
general, his argument adopts the same uncritical allegiance
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 137
to psychoanalytic explanation as the correct way of explaining
human behavior that compromised so much psychoanalytic
film theory of the 1970s and 1980s.18
Bellour's main claim for the oedipal character of Hitch-
cock's narrative lies in his analysis of North by Northwest as
a male oedipal fantasy. In this film, the hero is ripped from
his anodyne existence as a corporate everyman/where he
exists in a state of adult mfantilism embodied in his relation-
ship to an over-protective mother who looks as young as he
is, and he is plunged into a nightmare world where nothing
is as it seems and his existence is threatened at every turn".
He encounters the figure of a beautiful alluring woman, aptly
named Eve, who seems to help him only to betray him: an
apposite symbol of his "symbolic castration" is embodied in
the tiny razor he uses to shave his face before Eve sends him
to his death. Yet Thornhill is a hero impervious to death. The
threats to him are not real but symbolic-a prelude to his
assuming his own place in the social order. He is implicated/
again in a symbolic way, in the murder of the father (the
death of Townsend, for which he is framed)/ and he at once
comes to take the place of the older "bad father" (Vandamm)/
and supersede "the good father" (the Professor) in both
rescuing the microfilm and saving Eve. Eve for her part is
transformed from being a double agent in the service of
national security and the embodiment of a threatening
alluring sexuality into Thornhill's domestic partner in
pajamas.
But to what extent is the self-consdously wrought male
oedipal fantasy, for which North by Northwest provides an
archetype, a defining characteristic of Hitchcock's work?
From his earliest adaptations of authors like Marie Belloc
Lowdnes and John Buchan, Hitchcock introduced a female
role that balanced the male-centered adventure with elements
of romantic comedy, and once he arrived in Hollywood he
began to adapt works like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca,
whose inspiration lies in the nineteenth-century gothic
romance that narrates the heroine's encounter' with a
threatening and alluring older man. Bellour's claim, as I have
 r
138 RICHARD ALLEN
suggested, is that female agency is represented only to be re-
contained within a masculine narrative, but this does
insufficient justice to the female-centered nature of these
narratives, as Tania Modleski was the first to point out.
Rebecca, Modleski writes, is a female oedipal drama that
shows the heroine's attempt to detach herself from
the mother in order to attach herself to a man. In
order to do so, it is true, she must try to make her
desire mirror the man's desire, and in this respect the
ideological task of the film is similar to that which
Bellour sees at work in other Hitchcock films (most
notably in Marnie). Yet the film makes us experience
the difficulties involved for the woman in this
enterprise.19
In Rebecca it is the man, not the woman, who is the enigma
of whom the question must be asked "What is it that men
want?"
Modleski's emphasis, while important, takes for granted
the authority of a psychoanalytic account of human
motivation. The more fundamental question to ask is
whether the psychoanalytic pict.ure of human motivation that
Bellour discovers in Hitchcock's text is the most important
one for interpreting his films. This question is particularly
significant for assessing the putative logic of male domination
in Hitchcock's work, since feminist criticism of psycho-
analysis has involved not simply plotting the female oedipal
trajectory but challenging altogether the place that Freud
assigns to woman as a signifier of sexual difference.
Psychoanalysis/ it might be conceded, successfully maps a
culturally dominant male fantasy, but the authority it accords
desire in human development serves to naturalize a reductive
picture of that development and enshrine the logic of male
domination it describes. As pediatridans and psychologists
have shown, there is no reason to think that the bonds of
love between mother and child are overdetermined by or
reducible to the male fantasy of castration, and in this context
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 139
mother-daughter relationships provide a different picture of
human relatedness in which love cannot be reduced to a
function of oedipal desire.20
In this respect/ two of the late Hitchcock films that
Bellour chooses to focus on are particularly interesting. In The
Birds, as Robin Wood was the first to point out, thepsycho-
analytic narrative of the film in which the destructive actions
of the birds are keyed to the Brenner "family romance" is
countered by the role accorded to Melanie Daniels as "family
therapist."21 The "death birds" in The Birds are counter-
balanced by the "love birds." The love birds signal the
human capacity for "mating," conceived less in terms of
sexual desire than m terms of care and companionship that
are registered in the bonds of family, particularly mother-
daughter relationships. It is this "mating instinct" in humans
that makes the themes of proximity and distance (and hence
of touching) of central importance in the film.22 In Mamie,
these themes are even more explicit and more fundamental
to the overall aesthetic of the work. For while the ostensible
narrative of the film is a story about desire/ and in particular
a story in which the desire of a female character is
straightened out in order to mirror the dominant desire of
the male, the most interesting aspect of the film is the
narrative of the mother-daughter relationship and the
excruciatingly painful double-bind it involves. To be sure,
Marnie cannot express herself sexually (save with her horse,
Forio!) but this masks a deeper problem. Marnie cannot love
because her mother withheld all love from her. Marnie
reminds her mother of a secret that she just cannot bear.
Marnie/ like her mother/ is dead to all touch/ and in this
respect there is nothing that Mark can do about it, try as he
might.23 In focusing on the oedipal plots that characterize the
surface of these works, Bellour/ I think, misses much of their
subtlety and their force. For, arguably/ a central concern of
these films is not the oedipal plot they adhere to at all, but
the way in which women in Western culture are at once
responsible for the possibility of emotional connection
between human beings and the source of its breakdown.
140 RICHARD ALLEN
Yet Bellour's insight into the role of oedipal plots in
Hitchcock remains a fundamental one, and I want to con-
elude my discussion of his work by considering what I
believe to be the most important feature of his analysis/ but
one that has been overlooked by his commentators. This is
the manner m which Bellour locates a "perversion" of
morality in the oedipal narrative that he links to Hitchcock's
style. Bellour's femmist commentators, and Bellour himself
in response, have tended to emphasize the logic of gender
subordination involved in the oedipal narrative, but Bellour
is equally interested in what he calls its "perversity." By this
I think he means the way in which the oedipal narrative
highlights the murderous desires that subtend the formation
of the couple and renewal of the social order it enables.
Bellour seems to suggest that these murderous desires, to the
extent they are enacted, exemplify a logic of gender
subordination. It is, after all, women who are the victims of
male sexually-motivated violence. Yet, paradoxically, to the
extent that Hitchcock's films make human perversity explicit
to the point of literally realizing it, as Bellour demonstrates
in his analysis of Psycho, they undermine the role of the
romance narrative in maintaining gender subordination. To
play that role effectively, the. moral surface of human
relationships must remain intact and the formation of the
couple must be achieved.
Bellour also locates the perversity of Hitchcock's films in
the way that the emplotment of the oedipal narrative through
the "hermeneuticcode" is "transposed" into formal patterns
that repeat themselves en abyme; that is, they replicate
themselves within themselves in the manner of a Chinese
box. For Bellour/ the elaborate formal patterns of alternation
and suspense that he analyzes in such detail in the crop-
dusting scene in North by Northwest provide a kind of endless
foreplay, a perverse delay/ through repetition/ of narrative
resolution, even as they advance the narrative to closure. But
just as Bellour's emphasis on the way in which the perversity
of the oedipal narrative is made explicit in Hitchcock's films
calls into question the effectiveness of the romance narrative
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 141
in securing a logic of gender subordination/ Bellour's
argument that the trajectory of the formation of the couplets
mlerr^pted and delayed by Hitchcock's choreography of "a
'murderous gaze" seems to challenge his insistence that
Hitchcock's films work to re-establish the authority of hetero-'
sexual masculinity rather than to consistently undermme'it.
?L?!der- t^lar?y lh^ claim/ T want to return briefly to
Barthes's S/Z. As Bellour notes, apologeticaUy, his"own
?^o^u^ation,with chartingthe trajectory'of the oedipal plot
and its formal attenuationcontrast sharply withBarthes's
own interest m a logic of "atemporality, substitution,
reversibility" (87) _ But what he does not point out"is"the
' ^n^rjnwhid? Barthe.s..own concern with "atemporality^
substitution/ and reversibiUty" is essentially bound up'with
diagnosing and criticizing the authority of the heterosexuai
presumption that underlies narrative form.
For Barthes, Balzac's novella only appears to be
constructed upon the axis of sexual difference-Sarrasine
(male) versus La Zambinella (female)-but this is' not'~'the
underlying organization of the narrative. While Sarrasine falls
m love with La Zambinella, believing he/she is a woman/the
feminine persona he falls in love with is a fiction "or
^!qufrade whose real status he refuses to acknowledge on
?!L?.o,f_e,xpo,sing his ownfears of being less than a ma^'(his
?Trote,ct^d UPbrmgm§ has denied him prior sexual experience^
He defends against the knowledge of the real nature" o/f
Zambinella's difference and hence against a desire that is
taboo by aesthetidzing the body of"ZambmeUaand"bva
narassistlc aggrandizementof his adoration: "I am justified
in loving her because she is beautiful, and if I love her~(Ywho
cannotbe mistaken), it is because she is a woman."24 in this
Ught, Balzac's narration-his elaborate postponement and
deferral of narrative resolution-might itself appear as'a form
of aestheticism, as a displaced expression of a desire that
cannot be narrated within the terms of a love that" "is
heterosexually conceived.
^This^implicit aspect of Barthes's analysis is not one that
Bellour himself seems to recognize, yet it casts a different
142 RICHARD ALLEN
light upon Bellour's identification of the role of perversity in
Hitchcock's films. The manner in which Hitchcock makes
oedipal themes explicit and attenuates narrative progression
through the formal construction of the work itself manifests
a form of aestheticism in which the making of art functions
as a displaced expression of a sexuality that is conceived as
something perverse and hence as something that cannot be
directly articulated. Hitchcock's elaborate formal con-
structions often provide a displaced expression of sexual
themes that are at once concealed and revealed through the
artistic forms in which they are expressed. Yet as Barthes
intimates in his analysis of S/Z, a sexuality that is
characterized as perverse exceeds the boundaries or con-
straints of the heterosexual romance narrative that it coexists
with. The perversity that for Bellour inheres in the oedipal
scenario, the incipiently murderous sexuality that he links to
the formal delaying tactics of Hitchcockian suspense, cannot
easily be divorced from the "perversity" of a sexuality that
transgresses the logic of sexual difference altogether.25
Hitchcock's deployment of cross-cutting and parallelism
in Strangers on a Train exemplifies how perverse sexuality is
displaced into form in a manner that interrupts and delays
the resolution of the romance. In the scene where Guy
Haines (Farley Granger) tries to beat his tennis opponent
while Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) seeks to plant the
incriminating lighter, Hitchcock presents to us what is
ostensibly a straightforward "moral" suspense structure in
which Guy Haines must win his tennis match and foil the
villain in order to win the girl. But rather than pursuing the
progression and resolution of the suspense, Hitchcock uses
the suspense structure to create a mise-en-abyme of
parallelism. While we root for Guy to defeat his opponent/
Hitchcock also goes out of his way to encourage us to root
for Bruno by having him drop the lighter down the drain and
struggle in excruciating close-up to retrieve it. In this way the
opposition between the characters takes the form of a parallel
between them.
Similarly, the to and fro of the ball and the sound it
I
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 143
make,s,m the tennis match transpose an opposition mto a
lism that functions as a formal analogue to the ~cross~-
cutting.between. GUY and Bruno. This m^-en-a&vm7"of
pa"uelism functions not to Promote narrative progress"but
tLeffect/ kind.of narrative stasis or mtermptio^"l7is"a
aesthetic expression of the impossible homoerotic
or attraction between the "two characters that
narrative of the film must finally work to overcome.26"
^Compared with Strangers on a Train and The Bird^North
is something of an anomaly in Hitchcock's late
in its undeniable affirmation, even celebration of the
romance. And yet even here the "perversity" that Bellour
identifies in the film is not simply contained "withm"t:he
heterosexual logic of the romance narrative Fpor example "as
Bellour points out, in the crop-dusting sequence'Hrtcrhcocuk
stages a calibrated assault on the hero that draws'ouVo'r
postpones the resolution of the narrative/ as much as "it
propels the story forward. To be sure, the force here That
to undermine the romance is linked to the fieuratic
the deadly castrating female, but it is also' lmke(?"to"the1
agency ofVandamm, who forms with Leonard anmcestuous/
homoerotic father-son couple and implicates'"Eve^ilnuoa
perverse family structure.
That said, the link between aesthetidsm and the idea of
sexualperyersity or theidea of human sexuality as i
is undeniably attenuated here in comparison with^. Rove.
strrtmge^ona Train'or even The Bnds, "and m"thTs7 senTe;
North by Northwest points ahead to those Hitchcockmmslwith
which it..lsusually contrasted/ like ropaz-and~rom"Curt^;
<whe.reHitchcock/,s aestheti"sm appears altogether severed
.hs links with the articulation of a perverse7mdpie
deadly human sexuality, and begins to ex^sY ~insteaJcTas"a
species of pure formalism.
^BeUour's identification of the "perverse" character of the
oedipal plotjhat is linked to his'analysis of"the"comprex
formal_ramifications of Hitchcockian suspense"pointrfoca
conclusion that^s precisely the opposite'to"thre"one thatt
Bellour ostensibly "draws: Rather \han remforcmg lthue
 r
144 RICHARD ALLEN
normative trajectory of the heterosexual romance, Hitchcock' s
aestheticism calls the normative trajectory of the romance
into question. The "perversity" that mheres in the oedipal
scenario, that of a murderous sexuality which Bellour links to
the formal delaying tactics of Hitchcockian suspense, is of a
piece with the "perversity" of a sexuality that transgresses
the logic of sexual difference altogether, whether from
standpoint of a male homosexual or a female lesbian desire,
whose displaced articulation is registered all across
Hitchcock's oeuvre.
In conclusion, there is, as I have suggested, much to
contest in the pages of Bellour's book/ and the reader's task
is not made easier by the dense opacity of Bellour's prose,
which makes the task of Bellour's translators a truly heroic
one. The book sorely needs a systematic introduction to
Bellour's work that would orient the reader to the essential
contours of Bellour's argument and its historical importance
in the development of the study of film, subjects that I could
only sketch in the opening pages of this essay. Instead, we
have a short and superficial preface in which Penley spends
half the time explaining Bellour's subsequent repudiation of
textual analysis and his turn to using images to analyze
images. '.
Nevertheless/ The Analysis of Film is a foundational book
for film study because it was one of the first to treat works of
film as texts that deserve the same degree of attention to
their form as, say, works of poetry. In spite of its sometimes
extreme theorizing and over-zealous interpretation, Bellour's
book provides a model for how to take popular film seriously
as an artistic practice and to respond with imagination to it.
Bellour's analysis of the role of alternation illuminates a
central aspect of Hitchcock's works. Equally, his under-
standing of the role of the oedipal narrative in Hitchcock, not
to mention the relationship between perversity and film
form, remains an indispensable starting point for conceiving
the relationship between Freud and film for believers and
unbelievers in psychoanalytic theory alike. Read carefully and
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 145
wiA a critical eye. The Analysis of Film remains as ir
sdty a,swhen lt was first comPued twenty-four"yea'rsxasol.L
SLthi<Llong overdue Engush translation^Raymuo6nd
Bellour's^work can fully assume its place~m"the Ta^Fof
film theory.
Notes
Ir.amgratefuLto.Thomas Elsaesser, Sid Gottlieb, and Sam Ishii-
for their comments on this paper.
1. Janet Bergstrom, "Enunciation and Sexual Difference."
Obscura 3/4 (Summer 1979), 33-69. ~"~ '""""""-/
,2'RolandBarthes/ s/z/ trans- Richard Miller (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1974), 75.
3. Barthes, S/Z, 164; also 62-63.
^4:.<?mtlan.Metz/ Lan8^8<- and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean
miker-Sebeok (The Hague :'Mouton, 1974), 103.
_ ^Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penle
ton: Indiana University Press, 2000), 188.
quotations from this book are cited Parenthetically in the text';
.lJaneLB^gstrom' ,/Alterati0"' Segmentation, Hypnosis:
Interview with Bellow," Camera Obscura 3 ^(Summer '1979^82°
^Je.eD^V;dBordwell/ Janet staiSer' and'Kristin Thomson,
T^aasslc^Houywood. cinem^^ Style'and~M^Prtod^aovni'to
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 64?
8T?l.N.oel.carr011' .</Toward a"Theory'of'FUm^Suspense// in
Tl^zi!l^Movin8 Image (New York: cambridgeUni^stty Press"
9;This.paragraph draws_on criticisms made by Thomas Elsaesser
^nd_Adam Barker in Earlv cinema: SPac^ Fr^Narmtw'e^.
Jlsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFl7l990), "296-97'.
,,,lo»Be!lourwas also the first'.in his analysis-ofMmnem'sG^f,
to_illuminate themann" in which the American fflm musical^
^lstmctedj)ut_of a principle of alternation centered~upon"s^ual
£erc.nce: ^argument was taken UP by'RickATtm^Tn^TricZ
Musical (Bloommgton: Indiana University Press~1987)"'28^58"
Altman offers a qualified defense of Bellour/s'claim"tha7aTternatio"n
is a general principle of classical cinema in "Dickens, Griffith~and
146 RICHARD ALLEN
HlTCHCOCK AFTER BELLOUR 147
Film Theory Today/' in Classical Hollywood Narrative:-The Paradigm
Wars, ed. Jane Gaines (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 9-47. .22uFOLfurtherdiscussion.of_these issues' see my "Avian
11. See Charles Barr, Vertigo (London: BFI, 2002), 42. ^tltmmJhe,Krds'^mpmmin^^^^^^
12. As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out to me, the ^S?^""?.ed-_sidney Gottueb ^d;Chris\7phe7B7ookh'otusec
'paranoid" structure of alteration in this sequence, as elsewhere in
t: wayne State University Press, 2002), 281r-309.
Hitchcock's work, is undoubtedly indebted to the influence of r,.n2LA^lnLloyd SJruthproyides an insightf"l-Psychoanalytically-
Murnau and Lang, who "mediate" Griffith's influence on ^nT.teddiscus_sion of the mother:daughte^elationshipfrom an^n-
Hitchcock. ?e,udmn -v;eToint_in ;/Mflme/.the Dead"Moth^7andllt'he
\" in this issue of the Hitchcock Annual, 164-80'.
13. On the distinction between "objective" and " subjective"
suspense, see my "Hitahcock and Suspense: Theory and Practice," ,.24"JSh^s/z^144' T am not the first to point out the queer
in Camera Obscura/ 'Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette
aspecto^BarthesIS interPretation. J.G. MerquiOT commenteu^nTt
Michelson, ed. Richard Alien and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: ^Tjr,Tetopans: A criti^°fStructurcdistand^^^^^^
Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 163-82. Thought (New York: Versa/1986), 138:"Barthe^7failu'rel'To"b;'e
14. In the context of applauding Bellour's work, Adrian Martin Zl£it^ammed_critically inDA- Mmer'~ "BrinsinFou't Rolan'd
has some valuable comments on the pitfalls of shot-by-shot analysis , Barthes (Berkeley. University of California Press,' W^, 8-Ts.
in "Shot-By-Shot Follies," Hitchcock Annual (2001-02), 133-39. -i25.0n_?eroleof perverse sexualityin disrupting'the formation
15. See, for example, Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The
of the couple^see Lee Edelman's analys^~o7T^"B^7in"^Haitcuh-1
Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University <Ss^w^lmAvredHltchcock: ^n^'E;^;ed: R^ha;d
Press, 1981), and, in the context of Hitchcock scholarship, Lesley Lan^S.Ish^Gonzales (London: BFI, 1999), 239~-62.~Ede[manrs
Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films w.ori^nHitchcock amPlif!es the 1ueer P^t-struc'turali^dTmen^o^
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). .lncontrast.to Bellour/s structuralist reading. This'places
16. Bergstrom, "Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis," 93. EodSrs writing in a close/ though unacknowledgS reTatioSps
17. On the role of enthymematic reasoning in Bellour's writing, _26'For. further. analysis of the relationship between
see David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989),
homoeroticismjmd doubling in this" film "se7sab^naL'Ba*rtcocnu
235-38. ,lc.nss^oss/:_ paranola.and"prolection in "StrangeroFa Tra^^'
Camera Obscura 25-6 (1991), 74-100. --~ '"""6~"" "" " "ltl"'
18. See Richard Alien, "Psychoanalytic Film Theory/' in A
Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Maiden,
MA: Blackwell, 1999), 123-45.
19. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock
and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 50.
. 20. There is a large body of literature on this subject that gains
its inspiration from the writings of the English pediatrician D.W.
Winnicott. The implications of this tradition in psychology for
feminism are discussed by Nancy Chodorow in Feminism and
Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Jackie Byars attempts to understand Hollywood film in the light of
this tradition in All that Heaven Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s
Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
21. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989), 152-72.