Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.
- editing
- audio
- mise en scène
- camerawork
- hitchcock
- horror
- thriller
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano from Robert Bloch's novel; shot in black and white by John L. Russell with the television crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for around $800,000. Paramount didn't want it, so Hitchcock financed it through his own Shamley Productions and deferred his fee for ownership — a decision that made him extraordinarily rich and is itself a lesson in production context (Rebello tells the whole story).
This is the hub note. Everything Psycho-related links from here.
Scenes
- Psycho — the opening — crane into the hotel window; the camera as intruder.
- Psycho — the parlour scene — mise en scène doing the narration.
- Psycho — the shower scene — the most-analysed 3 minutes in cinema.
What it demonstrates
Codes
The shower scene is the canonical case of Montage and of Non-diegetic sound — see Herrmann scored the shower against orders and The shower scene is built from 78 setups. The parlour scene is the canonical case of Mise en scène — see Norman among the birds. The opening's date-and-time captions are a rare, teachable use of printed language (codes/printed-language ↗).
Conventions
Psycho breaks the structure conventions on purpose: Killing the protagonist at minute 47 transfers Point of view from Marion to Norman mid-film. The money dies with Marion is the cleanest example of The MacGuffin there is.
Contexts
Made at the exact pressure point of the collapsing studio censorship system — The Production Code and Psycho — sold through an exhibition gimmick that changed cinema-going — Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy — and legible to its 1960 audience through Psychoanalysis in postwar America.
Sources for this film
Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990) for production; Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966) for Hitchcock's own account of directing the audience; Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002) for a shot-by-shot reading; Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) for the voyeurism argument via The camera as voyeur.