The research bench

Axis of Action is the field guide — the finished map of the codes and conventions of film. This is the bench behind it: working notes on films, scenes, concepts, contexts and the books that talk about them. Notes are small, dense with links, and always cite their sources. Follow anything.

All notes

Everything written up so far. The 45 further books indexed from the Reel library are listed separately.

• scene Psycho — the parlour scene Norman and Marion eat sandwiches while the mise en scène quietly explains the entire film.
• scene Psycho — the shower scene Three minutes, dozens of cuts, no knife ever shown entering flesh. Violence assembled entirely in the audience's head.
• source Biskind — Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) The New Hollywood chronicle: how the directors briefly took over the studios, told through interviews and gossip.
• source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
• source Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006) Ellen Burstyn's memoir: the Alice collaboration from the side of the star who commissioned it.
• source Criterion — At Home in the World The Criterion release essay on Alice: production history, the prologue fight, and the film's place in 1974.
• source Durgnat — A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002) A shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene reading of the whole film. The model for what a maximal close reading looks like.
• source Ebert — Alice review (1974) A first-run review: what a sympathetic 1974-75 critic saw before the film had a reputation.
• source Stuart Hall — Encoding/Decoding Eleven pages that gave audience study its vocabulary: encoding, decoding, and the three reading positions.
• source Stuart Hall — Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices The constructionist account of representation, and the chapter on stereotyping that most of the wiki's Values work rests on.
• source O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society The Australian media studies textbook. The closest thing on the shelf to the wiki's own framework, in a VCE-shaped vocabulary.
• source Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) The essay that named the male gaze. Sixteen pages that reorganised film theory.
• source David Bordwell — Narration in the Fiction Film Bordwell's theory of narration. Only the Soviet montage chapter is in the library — read the shelf mark before citing.
• source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.
• source Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990) The production history. Where nearly every behind-the-scenes claim about Psycho should be checked.
• source Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert Roger Ebert
• source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
• source Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey Mary Pat Kelly (Hachette Books, 1991)
• source Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) The director's own account, film by film, assembled from interviews. Intention straight from the source — with the usual caveats.
• source Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Scorsese Christopher Kenworthy (Michael Wiese Productions)
• source Truffaut — Hitchcock (1966) The book-length interview. Hitchcock's own theory of directing the audience, in his own words.
• film Psycho (1960) Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.
• idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
• idea The first flushing toilet Psycho is generally credited with the first toilet flushed on screen in a mainstream American film — and the flush is a plot point.
• idea Herrmann scored the shower against orders Hitchcock asked for the murder to play unscored. Herrmann wrote the strings anyway, and Hitchcock conceded on the spot.
• idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.
• idea The money dies with Marion The $40,000 sinks into the swamp wrapped in newspaper, and no surviving character ever learns it was there.
• idea Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent Alice's warmest feminist review ran in a magazine part-owned by the studio that made it — reception and commerce in one fact.
• idea Norman among the birds The parlour's taxidermy is the film's thesis statement in set decoration: predators, prey, and a man already stuffed.
• idea The shower scene is built from 78 setups Commonly cited: about 78 camera setups and 52 cuts in roughly 3 minutes — and the knife never enters flesh on screen.
• idea You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople Two songs across one cut: 1943 crooning smashed into 1974 glam — the whole backstory of a life told in an audio transition.
• person Martin Scorsese The wiki's first person hub: the filmmaker as walking film archive — personal context made visible.
• scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
• scene Psycho — the opening A crane over Phoenix, captions stamping time and place, then in through a half-open window. The audience enters as a trespasser.
• context Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
• context Personal The individual context: a maker's own history and style; a viewer's own position and memory.
• context The Production Code and Psycho Control context, production lens: Psycho was made by negotiating with a censorship system that was visibly dying.
• context Psychoanalysis in postwar America Values context: Psycho's 1960 audience had been primed by a decade of pop-Freud to accept a psychiatrist as the film's final authority.
• context Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy Commerce context, reception lens: Hitchcock engineered how the film would be watched, not just what it contained.
• context Values The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.
• context The women's picture, 1974 Values context, both lenses: Alice made inside the women's movement, marketed by a studio, and argued over by everyone.
• film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
• concept Acting Performance as a symbolic code: face, voice, body and the gap between what is said and what is shown.
• concept Audio Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence — and the line between sound the characters share and sound they can't hear.
• concept The camera as voyeur The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.
• concept Camerawork Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
• concept Character How films build people: introduction, goal, flaw, change — and the machinery of sympathy.
• concept Chronology The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.
• concept Colour Palette as meaning: what the frame's colours claim before the story does.
• concept Conflict The engine: who wants what, what stands in the way, and on how many fronts at once.
• concept Continuity The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.
• concept Editing The join between shots: cinema's only invisible code, until it decides to be seen.
• concept Format The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.
• concept Formula The genre convention of expected shape: the plot beats a genre's audience arrives already knowing.
• concept Iconography The genre convention of recognisable things: objects, costumes, spaces and images that carry a genre's memory.
• concept Lighting Light as language: key, fill, shadow, and who the film chooses to illuminate.
• concept Mise en scène Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.
• concept Montage Meaning made between shots, not within them. The editing code at its most assertive.
• concept Non-diegetic sound Sound the characters can't hear. The audio code's licence to address the audience directly.
• concept Point of view Whose experience organises the narrative — and how films reassign it without telling you.
• concept Printed language Words the audience reads: titles, captions, signs, headlines, credits — the written code inside the frame.
• concept Setting Where and when. The symbolic code that answers the first question a frame gets asked.
• concept Spoken language Dialogue, voice-over, accent and idiom — what is said, how, and what the saying conceals.
• concept Structure The architecture of the telling: acts, setups, payoffs, and the contract a shape makes with its audience.
• concept The MacGuffin The thing the characters care about and the film doesn't. Hitchcock's name for a structural decoy.
• concept Themes The genre convention of recurring meaning: the questions a genre exists to keep asking.
• context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.