how Hitchcock changed the role of architecture in film

United Nations Headquarters - North by Northwest, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959)

From Vertigo to Psycho, how Hitchcock changed the role of architecture in film

Writer: Pete Collard

This summer sees a limited cinema re-release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, timed to celebrate the film’s 60th Anniversary. Although originally released to a lukewarm reception, the film has today become one of the most acclaimed cinematic works of the 20th century and marks an important moment in the director’s pioneering approach to architecture and interiors.

Podesta Baldocchi florists - Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958)

Ernie’s Restaurant/Shipyard offices - Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958)

As a director Alfred Hitchcock was responsible for some of the most seminal moments in cinematic history. His career in film began as a production manager and set-designer, formative experiences that would later help to develop his unique visual style when in charge of the camera. For each of his films he would sketch pages of storyboards and layouts, often based on real locations, that his design teams would then build. For Hitchcock, a film set was never simply a background for the actors, each acts as a supporting character within the plot and is used to channel the psychological mood of the scene.

Based on the 1954 novel D’Entre les Morts, Vertigo follows ex-detective Scottie Ferguson (played by James Stewart) as he searches for the elusive Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) across San Francisco and the surrounding coastline. Due to debilitating bouts of agoraphobia, Scottie is at times unable to physically act or intervene as events unfold, with dramatic perspectival shifts in the camerawork emphasising the fragility of his mental condition.

Hitchcock’s symbolic use of architecture was developed further in North by Northwest, bringing high modernism to the screen as a cinematic language

Reviewing the film in 1958, The Los Angeles Times described Vertigo as ‘part thriller and part panorama’, acknowledging the director’s lingering, almost obsessive, gaze over the city. Hitchcock selected many of the locations before the script was completed, emphasising the importance of the vertiginous city to his narrative, as Scottie’s investigations take him to a series of major city landmarks. These include the dramatic Civil War-era Fort Point at the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, the fine dining rooms of Ernie’s Restaurant on Montgomery Street and Podesta Baldocchi, one of the city’s oldest florists.

Midge’s apartment - Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958)

North by Northwest opening titles, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959)

An equally fastidious attention to detail was given to the film’s interior sequences. Each was shot on sets built at the Paramount Studios, but intricately planned and designed to further emphasise the roles of the individual characters in the plot. The grandiose wood panelled offices of shipping magnate Gavin Elster act as a theatrical stage, as the industrialist narrates to Scottie the tale of his wife Madeleine’s unusual behaviour. Scottie’s first sighting of Madeleine takes place in the plush setting of Ernie’s Restaurant, where the red silk walls instantly frame her as an object of his desires and mark the beginning of a descent into paranoia.

Across town, overlooking Russian Hill, the homely studio apartment of his fashion designer confidant Midge Wood offers a safe haven for Scottie from the unexplained events spiralling out of control outside. With her pastel yellow walls, George Nelson daybed and Harry Bertoia chairs, Midge (played by Barbara Bel Geddes, daughter of industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes) is presented as a character living very much in the present, a stark contrast to Scottie’s increasing obsession with incidents seemingly connected to the distant past.

Hitchcock’s symbolic use of architecture was developed further with his next film, North by Northwest, bringing high modernism to the screen as a cinematic language. Advertising executive Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) becomes drawn into a complex tale of mistaken identity and stolen government secrets, pursed by a group of mysterious foreign agents across urban and rural America. As Thornhill finds himself in ever graver danger, Hitchcock uses a mixture of real and imagined American landscapes to heighten the suspense, concluding with a gunfight atop the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. 

Vandamm House - North by Northwest, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959)

The film begins in New York and brings several notable modernist landmarks onto the screen, including Oscar Niemeyer’s newly completed headquarters for the United Nations. Equally contemporary was Harrison & Abramovitz’s CIT Building on Madison Avenue, finished in 1957, and presented here as the offices of Thornhill’s advertising company. The slick black granite and stainless steel facade was used by Hitchcock to capture reflections of the rush hour chaos of downtown Manhattan below, with the grid-like exterior also used as the template for Saul Bass’ iconic graphic identity and title sequences.

Hitchcock tasked production director Robert F Boyle with designing a residence that could imitate the eponymous style of Frank Lloyd Wright, then the most celebrated architect working in America

The film’s script also specified a series of purpose-built sets, including the famous mountaintop residence of the film’s nefarious villain, Phillip Vandamm. Hitchcock tasked production director Robert F Boyle with designing a house that could imitate the eponymous style of Frank Lloyd Wright, then the most celebrated architect working in America. With its bold horizontal projections, the exterior evokes Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater, while the interior is typical of his ‘Usonian’ housing concepts of the 1930s and 1940s, a simplified but modern American style, featuring informal open-plan living areas centred around a fireplace.

Yet despite the level of design detail, the house was was never actually built as a complete design. The interiors were built as separate stage sets, with Boyle and his production team painting the exterior views onto vast ten-metre-high matt canvas backdrops, which was later cut into separately filmed sequences of Cary Grant. The exaggerated concrete cantilever of the house, extruding high out over the mountain, is matched by the deliberately angular perspective of the camera’s viewpoint, building tensions as the film nears its climatic conclusion.

United Nations Headquarters - North by Northwest, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959)

Similar matt painted backdrops were needed to replicate the interior of Oscar Niemeyer’s United Nations Headquarters. Despite Hitchcock’s high profile and a production budget of $3 million ($25 million today), permission was refused to film inside or outside the recently completed modernist masterpiece. Instead, views of the building’s interior were painted as backdrops, with the brief exterior scenes shot clandestinely. A van housing a hidden camera was parked across the street, and using a long lens the team was able to capture the actors as they performed with the unwitting public walking around them.

North by Northwest is perhaps the definitive expression of high-modernism seen in Hitchcock’s films. Robert J. Boyle was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the production design and would later collaborate again with the director for The Birds, creating the gloomy, seaside atmosphere of Bodega Bay onto which horror descends from above. Throughout the initial storyboarding and production design process Boyle kept an image of Edvard Munch ‘The Scream’ in mind as his main point of reference.

Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958)

Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958). Image courtesy of Park Circus/Universal

Hitchcock’s next project was Psycho, a return to the voyeurism of his earlier film Rear Window but with murderous consequences. In contrast to the wide open panoramas of North by Northwest, Psycho is shot predominantly in close-up, creating terror through the simple reframing of mundane domestic spaces. The contrast between the anonymous but functional architecture of Norman Bate’s motel and his mother’s crumbling gothic house on the hill above, symbolises his split personality, yet one that is revealed only incrementally.

Such sequences reveal the mastery of Hitchcock’s films, by deliberately keeping dialogue to a minimum, tension is built instead through the gradual revealing of information and events, but dictated by the layout of the buildings themselves. For Rear Window, an everyday Greenwich Village city block is visible only through the limited perspective of the windows in the apartment opposite, becoming the sole means by which we understand the events glimpsed from distance, altering the mood significantly.

Vertigo, dir: Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount, 1958). Image courtesy of Park Circus/Universal

The influence and legacy of Hitchcock is visible throughout cinema history. His masterful use of architectural space can be seen in the empty yet haunting corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and the rainy, future-noir Los Angeles portrayed in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, a city of cavernous monolithic structures rising above crumbling street level apartments. More recently the enfolding architectural mazes created for the multiple dream levels of Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Wes Anderson’s obsessive interior styling in The Grand Budapest Hotel both owe a debt to Hitchcock’s ability to make architecture speak as loudly as the actors. §

Can Artists Bend Ethics for Art’s Sake?

Art

When Can Artists Bend Ethics for Art’s Sake?

Natasha Bell

Jul 20, 2018 1:32 pm

Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne, 1980. “At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. So I decided to follow him.” © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York, 2018. Courtesy of Perrotin.

What right does an artist have to use other people in their work—to invade their lives, violate their privacy, or cause them harm? What will we forgive in the name of art?

These are the questions I was asking a decade ago when, for a graduate performance art class taught by 

Tania Bruguera

, I paid a classmate $1 to befriend my best friend Laura and write reports on how she thought Laura was coping after a recent break-up. At our final class, I passed around a folder containing these reports and a photocopy of the $1 check I’d written. The folder reached Laura last. I watched across the table as she read the document of my simultaneous care and betrayal.

I got an A for the class, but lost my friend. It was a horrible thing to do, but I was 21 and obsessed with 

Sophie Calle

 and the line between art and life. Since the 1970s, Calle has repeatedly invited us to question whether artists should be held to the same standards as other people. In viewing her work, we must ask whether invading someone’s privacy or betraying their trust is an acceptable emotional cost to art.

Sophie Calle, The Hotel, 1981. “On Monday February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday March 6, the job came to an end.” © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York, 2018. Courtesy of Perrotin.

In 1979, Calle followed a man she’d met at an art opening in Paris to Venice, where she spent two weeks spying on and photographing him as he went about his business in the city. She presented the images alongside text detailing both her observations and emotions during the period, as Suite Vénitienne. This man, identified only as Henri B., was the first unwitting participant to Calle’s artistic game.

In 1983, she found a lost address book on the street and photocopied the contents before returning it. She then telephoned each of the contacts to question them on the identity of the owner, and published her findings as a series (“The Address Book”) in the French newspaper Libération. The owner, the documentary filmmaker Pierre Baudry, threatened to sue her, wrote open letters to Libération, and eventually sent the paper a nude photo of Calle that he demanded they publish as retaliation. This literal tit-for-tat response to her exposure of his identity did not perturb Calle; she ultimately incorporated it into the piece.

For The Hotel (1983), Calle worked as a chambermaid, exploring and documenting the private belongings and writings of hotel guests. Observing this piece, we experience both Calle’s curiosity and the unsettling thought that, at every hotel we have ever stayed in, our own possessions might have been subjected to similar scrutiny. What might someone like Calle have learned from our nightgowns and slippers, our diaries and postcards? How might she have misinterpreted us?

Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne, 1980. © Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York, 2018. Courtesy of Perrotin.

Arne Svenson

Neighbors #14, 2012

Robert Klein Gallery

A crucial element of these early pieces is Calle’s involvement of the viewer in her transgressions. By inviting us to immerse ourselves in the narratives of her observations, she makes us complicit in her voyeurism—even as we question it. It is not just Calle invading these strangers’ privacy and observing their lives without consent, but us, too. We may not agree with her methods, but by engaging with the work, we find ourselves tacitly condoning it.

Decades later, though, the question that still hangs over these pieces is whether or not they were ethical. Did Henri B., Pierre Baudry, or those hotel guests have a right to privacy? Can any of us expect to be protected from the artist’s gaze?

In 2013, 

Arne Svenson

 caused a Calle-like controversy for using a telephoto lens to take photos of his Manhattan neighbors, later exhibiting the work in a local gallery. Svenson was sued, but won the case based on his First Amendment rights, and “The Neighbors” went on to be exhibited across the country. Though the discussion continues as to whether Svenson’s photographs of families, children, pets, and intimate, private spaces is ethically acceptable, the judge’s ruling makes clear that legally, at least artists have a right to invade aspects of our privacy.

Santiago Sierra, 160 CM LINE TATTOOED ON 4 PEOPLE, El Gallo Arte Contemporaneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000, 2000. © Santiago Sierra. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

Considered in conjunction with conversations about digital surveillance, data protection, and online privacy—not to mention random strangers who might be livetweeting intimate exchanges—this ruling might seem rather scary. Belgian artist 

Dries Depoorter

 uses digital technology to explore this fear. For Tinder In (2015), Depoorter traced women (and some men) who appeared on his Tinder app to their LinkedIn profiles, then displayed and published their profile pictures from each side by side, pointing out both the ease with which individuals can be traced, and the split-personalities of online identities.

The interesting thing about all of these pieces is that, while their controversy lies in the question of an individual’s right to privacy, the works themselves actually reveal very little about their subjects. In reading the texts accompanying Calle’s work, we learn much more about the stalker than the stalked. It’s easy to understand the sense of invasion felt by Henri B. and Pierre Baudry, as well as Svenson’s neighbors and Depoorter’s Tinder matches, but perhaps the true grievance is that the artists have used these strangers’ images and identities to create works that have nothing to do with them.

Spanish artist 

Santiago Sierra

’s use of anonymous individuals raises similar ethical questions, though rather than invading their privacy, he asks them to submit to him bodily. For 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000), he paid heroin-addicted prostitutes the price of a shot of the drug to allow him to tattoo them. For Group of Persons Facing a Wall (2002), he paid homeless women the price of a night in a hostel to stand facing a gallery wall. And for 10 People Paid to Masturbate (2000), he paid workers $20 to masturbate in front of a camera.

Santiago Sierra, 10 PEOPLE PAID TO MASTURBATE, Tejadillo Street, Havana, Cuba. November 2000, 2000. © Santiago Sierra. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

Unlike Calle, Svenson, and Depoorter, Sierra does seek consent from his subjects, but the nature of this consent is highly questionable. These pieces draw attention to the exploitative, transactional nature of our society, pointing to the commodification of bodies and exposing the power structures that operate within our everyday lives. Conceptually and politically, the works might be seen as noble, but in actually using the bodies of vulnerable individuals, Sierra must enact the very exploitation and dehumanization he critiques. He forces us to ask if it is okay for an artist to use people. Can the end justify the means?

In 1992, Paul Auster based a character in his novel Leviathan on Sophie Calle, borrowing some of her works as well as inventing new ones. This depiction of Calle is heavily critiqued in Chris Kraus’s autofictional novel I Love Dick (1997); she claims Auster’s version of Calle is “a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition and career.” Ironically, this criticism—that using a real person as the subject for art strips that person of their individuality and complexities—can be levelled just as fairly at Suite Vénitienne, The Address Book, and The Hotel. Like Auster, Calle presents her subjects as simplified versions of themselves, and treats them like fictional characters in a narrative she remains in control of.

It is, I think, this relieving of complications that is most disturbing and, in the end, most painful. Should we find ourselves the subject of an artist’s gaze, most of us would like them to see the whole of us, to render us fairly and try to understand our complexities. Unfortunately, the artist’s motive is often more to do with projecting or reflecting a part of themselves rather than reaching an empathetic understanding of their subjects. What they were looking for, really, is a mirror.

Dries Depoorter, Tinder In, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

In the play between the private and the public, artists have both the ability and the right to provoke, shock, and disturb. What we often fail to recognize, however, is that by giving them a platform, it is us as viewers who have bestowed this position of power upon them. By consuming and applauding Calle’s early works, we effectively opened our own curtains to Svenson and gave our profile photos to Depoorter. Perhaps the question is not whether artists have the right to invade our privacy or cause us harm, but why we’ve allowed them to.

I’m not proud of what I did to Laura back in grad school. A decade later, I’m appalled by my callousness and can hardly remember my own justifications. But I do remember the surprise I felt at her anger. I remember expecting her to understand, wanting her to acknowledge my cleverness, to think about the nuances of privacy and trust, and sense as I did the precarious power wielded by the word “art.” I wonder if it is this kind of optimistic thinking that drives Calle and other artists. For those who have devoted their lives to their work, perhaps it doesn’t seem so extraordinary for them to imagine others should be willing to devote theirs, too. 

Natasha Bell is an author living in London. Her debut novel “Exhibit Alexandra” is about love, loss, and art.

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