Some Came Running

Sartre, Kafka, Welles

"I'm The Jewish Question, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Delighted to meet you." Yvonne Blake (who was also the assistant art director on the film) in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, 1966

In October of 1944, a few months after the liberation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote short book called Réflexions sur la Question Juive. Its first English translations were titled The Jewish Question—it is one of the living books that announce themselves at the end of Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The currently available English translation has been retitled Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.

Like much of Sartre, this work is noticeably imperfect, but what flashes of genius it contains are brilliant indeed, and remain pertinent. One passage that struck me is this: “Today these Jews whom the Germans did not deport or murder are coming back to their homes. Many were among the first members of the Resistance; others had sons or cousins in Leclerc’s army. Now all France rejoices and fraternizes in the streets; social conflict seems temporarily forgotten; the newspapers devote whole columns to stories of prisoners of war and deportees. Do we say anything about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the newspapers. That is because we must not irritate the anti-Semites; more than ever we need unity. Well-meaning journalists will tell you: ‘In the interest of the Jews themselves, it would not do to talk too much about them just now.’ For four years French society has lived without them; it is just as well not to emphasize too vigorously the fact that they have reappeared.”

As I said, Sartre wrote this in October of 1944. At that point in time Lublin was the only death camp the Allies had found. By the time Orson Welles began work on The Stranger, in the fall of 1945, the other camps had become known to the world. Welles had been cast in the film in the role of Hans Kindler, a fleeing Nazi war criminal (by the movie’s lights, a kind of wunderkind of genocide, a slightly ironic position in which to place Welles in a Hollywood picture) and was eventually persuaded to direct it as well. In the second volume of his protean Welles biography, Simon Callow writes “[t]he degree of [Welles’] input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyzes the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’ own speeches, articles and columns.” “Rankin” is the alias Kindler has taken in America; another way this true believer goes undercover is to pretend to be not just thoroughly anti-Nazi, but anti-German. One of his speeches occurs at a dinner scene; Edward G. Robinson’s secret agent, posing as an antiques maven, is dining with Rankin/Kindler, Kindler’s new bride, played by Loretta Young, and her father and teen brother. The scene has many pleasures, one of them being Loretta Young pronouncing the word “Carthaginian,” it is most notable for the way the real Kindler reveals himself to Robinson’s character. Growing increasingly heated in anti-Teutonic fervor (and Callow is right; the words and the way Welles pronounces them are kind of like an inverted, zealous variant of Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man), Kindler says: “The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘Liberté egalité fraternité,’ but, in German…”

Kindler’s eager young brother-in-law, played by a very appealing Richard Long, butts in:

“There’s Marx. The proletarians unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains…”

“But Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew,” Kindler responds, almost instantaneously, calm but definite. This differentiation is what gives away Kindler to Robinson’s character. It is also a staggering dramatic manifestation of anti-Semitic thought, which Sartre dissects with incredible vigor in his own book: You’re not THIS, you are THAT, a Jew.

Elsewhere in Sartre, he writes, of the frustrations the Jew experiences in French society: “…it seems to him at one and the same time that his efforts are always crowned with success—for he knows the astonishing successes of his race—and that a curse has made them empty, for he will never acquire the security enjoyed by the most humble Christian.” Sartre continues; “This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jew, Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jew is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off—for a week, two weeks—he takes advantage of these to prove his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens sometimes, as in the novel, that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs.”

Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Max Haufler in The Trial, Welles, 1963

Orson Welles made a film of Kafka’s The Trial in the early ‘60s. Like The Stranger, it was not a project of his own conception. The picture was brought to him by the producer Alexander Salkind, and while the project was plagued by intense money problems it turned out to be one of the very few productions up until that point on which Welles enjoyed complete artistic autonomy right down to the release cut. Setting the story in a stark, black-and-white, completely commerce-and-media-free version of then-contemporary Europe, Welles deracinates the story in particular by casting Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. I have not been able to dig up anything in my Welles library to suggest that Welles located a particular kind of otherness in Perkins’ being a thoroughly closeted gay man. Callow addresses the situation thusly: “Perkins’ performance—inherently neurotic, though not notably anxious—does indeed suggest a man with a secret (not much acting called for there).” Perkins’ all-American mode of nervousness suggests Edgar Allan Poe more than Kafka and of course it also suggests Alfred Hitchcock. One thing it never suggests is Jewishness.

And yet Welles, in interviews years after making the film, discusses The Trial in terms of Kafka’s Jewishness. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, explaining why he tampered with the ending of the book, Welles extrapolates: “In the end of the book he lies down there and they kill him. I don’t think Kafka could have stood for that after the deaths of six million Jews. That terrible fact occurred after the writing of The Trial and I think it made Kafka’s ending impossible. If you conceive of K as a Jew, as I did. I don’t mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it morally impossible for me to see a man who might even possibly be taken by the audience for a Jew lying down and allowing himself to be killed that way.”

Is that true? We have no way of knowing. People on social media today frequently cite a quote from Kafka about there being an infinite amount of hope—but not for us. The quote’s source is a statement he made to his friend and biographer Max Brod, translated in 1947 as “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—but not for us.” More reliable, perhaps, is the aphorism: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world.” Welles’ argument with Kafka is summed up by Callow thusly: “man is guilty but mankind is not doomed.” Welles’ confusion concerning Kafka has theological roots, as well: “K is not metaphysically guilty at birth as conceived by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian,” he said to Bogdanovich.

Sartre insists: “The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical, it is social.” In Welles’ film, the anxiety is not social as such, it’s free-floating, often hovering between the stools of the metaphysical and the erotic, as Perkins’ Josef K is befuddled in turn by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. Andrew Sarris called The Trial “the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film ever made,” but the movie’s particular feel comes from Welles’ specifically American form of optimism abrading Kafka’s pessimism. Which, as Sartre teaches us, was far less abstract than we sometimes like to make it. And as visually beautiful and thrilling and unsettling as Welles’ movie is, one constantly senses that it is a work that is tortuously uncertain of what it wants to mean. This is never in doubt, I think, when reading Kafka.

In the prologue to the film proper, Welles observes of Kafka’s novel: “It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Of a nightmare.” Welles’ film is best seen as the filmmaker’s own dream/nightmare of Kafka. While I would not go so far as to say that a work of art palpably changes with the times, the times compel us to see works of art differently. Today’s circumstance does not compel a new reading of Welles’ Trial, but it does demand that we adopt Sartre’s reading of Kafka.

Literary Interlude: Two Passages From "Pinocchio In Venice," By Robert Coover

Below, the opening and closing passages of "Art And The Spirit," the eleventh chapter of Robert Coover's 1991 Pinocchio In Venice. This elaborate, highly profane philosophical fantasy is a direct sequel to Carlo Collodi's original serial fable and also, Coover being Coover, refers extensively to Disney's version, and any reader looking to look further into this book would be well advised to become conversant again with both of those works (NYRB put out a good translation of Collodi a couple of years back). In Coover's novel, the real live boy our hero became at the end of both tellings is now an ancient and celebrated academic—Professor Pinenut, the "he" of the passages below—who has returned to Venice ("The Island of Busy Bees" in Collodi) to complete a magnum opus entitled Mamma. Think about it. At any rate, all manner of disasters befall the already deeply melancholy fellow almost immediately upon disembarking at Santa Lucia. (Do the cat and the fox return? They certainly do.) To make matters worse, he's turning back into wood. "Art And The Spirt" sees Our Hero deposited for safekeeping at San Sebastiano, one of Venice's plague churches, featuring notable works by Paolo Veronese and Paris Bordone.

I

The monster fish that swallowed Jonah, sucking him up as a raw egg is sucked, was a pious creature devoted to virtue and orthodoxy, a kind of blubbery angel, conjured up by a God who liked to flesh out his metaphors. He—or she, the anatomy is uncertain, "belly" perhaps a euphemism—kept the runaway prophet dutifully in his or her belly or whatever for three days and three nights, long enough for Jonah to get a poem written and promise to do as he was told, and then, with a kind of abject courtesy, vomited him up, if that is not also a euphemism, on dry land. This is what Bordone's dark stormy picture, sitting like a mummy-brown bruise on the stone wall near the front entrance, is trying to show: Jonah disgorged like the metaphor's tenor emerging gracefully from its vehicle. He has often tried to see his own experience in the same light. In his now-lost Mamma chapter, "The Undigested Truth," for example, he has compared his brawling, boozing, recalcitrant father with the wicked Ninevites whom Jonah was reluctant to exhort, and from whom the prophet felt even more estranged once he'd saved them, has asked whether it was really truancy that landed Jonah in the fish's entrails, or whether God, like the Blue-Haired Fairy in her goat suit, might not somehow have lured the prophet into his crisis for reasons of pedagogy, and has indicated thereby how both his and Jonah's maritime adventures, often interpreted symbolically in Christian terms of baptism and rebirth, or else Judaic ones of exile and return (in Hollywood, quite literally: the raw and the cooked) might be understood more accurately—and more profoundly perhaps—as violent forms of occupational therapy.

II

Look on the bright side, he admonishes himself, beginning to wheeze. No more deadlines. No more biographical evidence to amass. No more words. Up on the Nun's Choir, there are representations of saints holding what he takes to be the instruments of their martyrdom. Some of them are holding books. He can appreciate this. A kind of plague, reading them maybe even worse than writing them, and no end to it. The terrible martyrdom of the ever-rolling stone. Saint Pinocchio. He and his father, a new heavenly host. And now, think of it, for the first time in his life, he does not have a book to write. That martyrdom at least is over. He is free at last. Which is probably just what they told poor Sebastian when they stripped his armor off him. "Free, my tortured chiappie!" he seems to be yelling, as they stuff him, up there beside the altar, into his second death. Trouble is, as martyrdoms go, the first was better than the second. This one hurts more and the compensations are more obscure. And this time: this time, no one's watching.

"Oh my Ga-ahd!" exclaims a loud nasal American voice, blowing in behind him. The professor makes a movement which to his own inner eye is that of shrinking down in his seat, though it may be invisible to others, as the intruder, stamping her feet and shaking herself audibly, comes blustering down the aisle. "Lookit this! Brrr! What a creepshow, man! Everybody's dead in here!" 

Literary interlude

Christelow said: "I must tell you how I played golf with Manchip once. I thought I'd take the
opportunity of learning something of his favorite poet, so I said to him as he teed off: 'Tell me, Master, what sort of a poet is Gynander?' 'Oh,' he said in that deep voice of his, 'a very interesting poet indeed.' 'Yes,' I said, 'I should have thought he was. But,' I said, 'what sort of a poet is he?' 'Why,' said Manchip, chipping away with his iron, 'do you realise, Christelow, there are only six fragments of Gynander still extant?' 'Really, Master?' I said. 'But what sort of poet was he?' 'And,' he went on, cutting the turf about, 'there is one construction that appears no less than twice in each, which is seen nowhere else in Greek literature. Now, what do you think of that, hey?' 'Very interesting,' I said. 'But Master, what sort of a poet is Gynander?' 'Surprisingly careless about genders,' he said, getting himself on the green, and rolling off the other side. 'Yes,' said I, 'But what sort of a poet is he?' 'Ah,' he said as I bunkered myself, 'you mean the gush side of criticism...'"

—Robert Robinson, Landscape With Dead Dons, Penguin, 1956

Lovecraft in Brooklyn

For my friend Bill Ryan's blog, The Kind of Face You Hate, I made a foray into the literary critical essay with a look at problem child H.P. Lovecraft and his seminal short story "The Horror At Red Hook." Enjoy!

Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity" and Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope:" not the same story

George Clooney in Gravity.

N.b.: I offer the below in the spirit of nipping what I believe to be a particularly noxious meme in the bud. I've tried to keep it as spoiler-free as I can, and believe I've succeeded, but those invested in going into Gravity as total virgins might want to skip this post for the nonce. 

Now that Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is getting rapturous reviews from the Venice Film Festival, with more no doubt to follow, I believe it’s not un-okay for me to let the cat out of the bag and report that I was able to see the movie a few months back thanks to the kind consideration of some Warner people who wanted some advance feedback from myself and a few other Internet-centric movie journalists. I would have kept the cat in the bag longer were I not a little disturbed by the mewlings of various and sundry folks who travel the digital spaceways, claiming that the movie, co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is somehow an ignoble enterprise in that it does not acknowledge the Ray Bradbury short story “Kaleidoscope” as its story source.

There’s a really simple reason that Gravity doesn’t contain the credit “Based on the short story ‘Kaleidoscope’ by Ray Bradbury,” and the reason is because it isn’t. I say this with confidence, my Everyman’s Library edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury open before me to page 184, on which “Kaleidoscope” ends. As you may know, Cuarón’s film, which star George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is about the adventures of two astronauts who find themselves stranded in outer space after debris from an exploding satellite makes return to their own spacecraft impossible. “Kaleidoscope” concerns the inner thoughts and verbal exchanges between the crew of a “rocket” (Bradbury’s word)  that’s been shattered by a meteor storm, leaving the members of that crew drifting this way and that in their spacesuits, facing their worst fears and worst selves as they head to the death each of them knows is certain.

The specifics of the two stories are entirely different. In “Kaleidoscope,” almost half a dozen rocket crew members are named, but the main exchanges are between four: Hollis and Applegate, who had a kind of professional rivalry, and Lespere and Stone. It takes place in an unspecified future year, and is not merely science fiction but speculative science fiction; in the story Lespere alludes to having wives on several planets other than earth, which sets this story in a future when interplanatery travel is more routine and humanoid life on other planets has been shown to exist. Gravity, on the other hand, occurs in more or less the present time, so much so that one critic has opined that the movie isn’t even science fiction. I’d have to say that strictly speaking it is science fiction, not least because there are one or two technological advantages the characters have that aren’t fully-fledged practical realities for space workers at this point. That’s splitting hairs, perhaps, but it is useful to note that the realm in which Bradbury was working was necessarily much more fanciful than the one in which Gravity is set. (“Kaleidoscope” first appeared in book form as part of Bradbury’s collection The Illustrated Man, published in 1951.) 

Is the premise similar? Yes, but only insofar as Bradbury’s own premise was similar to that of a shipwreck story. As a science-fiction writer, a seer of rocketships and space travel and more, it was his innovation to set a shipwreck story in a non-terrestrial realm. Gravity, too, is a shipwreck story, but the fact that it has a smaller set of characters than “Kaleidoscope,” and the fact that one of the characters is a woman, already kind of sets it apart automatically, and throughout the movie’s brisk running time its emphases and circumstances differ from those of the Bradbury story substantially, and at nearly every turn. “Kaleidoscope” takes a premise that’s almost as old as storytelling itself and goes its own way with it; so does Gravity. And there’s more. The most finally significant difference between the two works is one of, well, theme. “Kaleidoscope” is about characters facing certain death, their anxiety over what their lives have ultimately been worth, their worries over whether their existences have ever meant anything at all. The story ends on a beautiful metaphorical/actual note that says, yes, there is a meaning, but you’re not necessarily going to be privy to it, and that is possibly the thing that makes the meaning beautiful. I haven’t given you too many specifics about the story line of Gravity but I will say that once the disaster strikes for the astronaut the crux of the matter is that their deaths are not a given. They are very likely, but not assured, and the story proceeds apace from that: these characters are going to do everything they can to get home. So it’s two completely different things at heart.

Every writer or filmmaker who endeavors in the realm of science fiction owes a debt to Ray Bradbury. I think we can all agree on that. But Ray Bradbury isn’t the secret writer of Gravity. I bet he totally would have dug the film, and I bet if had not passed away in June of last year he would have been invited to look at it well before I was. 

Literary/critical interlude

I don't read as much jazz journalism as I should, but of what I did read in 1969 it is Down Beat's account of the Rutgers Jazz Festival that has stayed with me most vividly.

Down Beat, as you know, is the principal magazine of the American jazz music profession; it has been going thirty-five years, and has correspondents in every land from Denmark to Japan. Its policy is a comfortable, middle-of-the-road tolerance: whatever is, generally speaking, is right. And the man they sent to Rutgers was clearly cast in the same mould: let 'em all come, DIzzy, Herbie Mann, Jethro Tull, B.B. King, the Adderley Brothers—the more the merrier. He sat patiently in his seat and tried to hear good in everything, even sermons from Stones had they been present, and on the whole he succeeded, though there is the occasional wince. ('I was beginning to wish I wore a hearing aid so I could turn it down').

The flashpoint, if one can call it that, came on the Sunday evening. Our man arrived late, to find the Miles Davis group launched into what proved their final number, or, as he puts it, 'in the throes of what I most deplore, a free-form free-for-all' that "degenerated into a musical catfight." One must salute his honesty: here was one of the groups he was most anxious to hear, and it was terrible, and he admits it was terrible. But then—and this is the point—there followed the Newport All Stars Braff, Norvo, Tal Farlow, and good old George Wein on piano, and the reporter's relief was so enormous that his encomia became almost pathetic in their hyperbole. Braff and his friends were sparkling spring water, they were 'Macbeth' and "David Copperfield', they were incomparable, they were as eternal as sex and sunlight: 'man, this is what it's all about.' In his enthusiasm he asked a 17-year-old girl what she thought of them. She said: 'It's music to go shopping at Klein's by.'

Now the point of this anecdote it two-fold: first, all kinds of jazz are not equally good, no matter what editorial policy might be; some of it is ravishingly exciting, and some a musical catfight scored for broken glass and bagpipes, and you only have to hear the two in succession to grab one and reject the other. Secondly, jazz (that is, the form of Afro-American popular music that flourished between 1925 and 1945) means nothing to the young. This should strengthen us in our devotion to it. True, we must give up any notion we may have been cherishing that beneath our hoary exteriors lurk hearts of May: we may dig jazz, but the kids want something else. Our passion for this extraordinary and ecstatic musical phenomenon that lasted a mere twenty or thirty years in the first half of our century must now take its place alongside similar passions for Hilliard miniatures or plain-chant.

—Philip Larkin, "Moment of Truth," The Daily Telegraph, January 10, 1970, reprinted in All What Jazz, Faber and Faber, 1985

Literary interlude

HOMAGE TO WBY

after you read all them books

all that history and philosophy and things

what do you know that you didn’t know before?

 

Thin sheets of gold with bright enameling

                                                                         23:xi:63

—Philip Whalen

Literary interlude

But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would think to thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children's plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls asif they'd pushed the water over by themselves. 

Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. "I won't interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won't prevent the crucifixion of the Savior." The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another's throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment of the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind...? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creepts. His father's plight had been desperate indeed, for where could one go, really, to stay clean—worse, who could one be to be tolerable?

—William Gass, Middle C,  Alfred A. Knopf, 2013

Literary interlude

    So having said, a while he stood, expecting

Their universal shout and high applause

To fill his ear, when contrary he hears

On all sides, from innumerable tongues

A dismal universal hiss, the sound

Of public scorn, he wondered, but not for long

Had leisure, wond'ring at himself now more;

His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,

His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining

Each other, till supplanted down he fell 

A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,

Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power

Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned

According to his doom; he would have spoke, 

But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue

To forkèdtongue, for now were all transformed

Alike, to serpents all as accesories

To his bold riot; dreadful was the din

Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now

With complicated monsters head and tail,

Scorpion and asp, and amphisbaena dire,

Cerasts horned, hydrus, and ellops drear,

And dipsas (not so thick swarm'd once the soil

Bedropped with blood of Gorgon, or the Isle

Ophiusa), but still greater he the midst

Now dragon grown, larger than whom the sun

Engendered in the Pythian vale on slime,

Huge Python, and his power no less he seemed 

Above the rest still to retain; they all

Him followed issuing forth to th' open field,

Where all yet left of that revolted tout

Heav'n-fall'n, in station stood of just array,

Sublime with expectation when to see

In triumph issuing forth their glorious chief;

They saw, but other sight instead, a crowd

Of ugly serpents; horror on them fell,

And horrid sympathy; for what they saw,

They felt themselves now changing; down their arms,

Down fell both spear and shield, down they as fast,

And the dire hiss renewed, and the dire form 

Catched by contagion, like in punishment,

As in their crime. Thus was th' applause they meant,

Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame

Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood

A grove hard by, sprung up with this their change, 

His will who reigns above, to aggravate

Their presence, laden with fair fruit like that

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve

Used by the Tempter: on that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes they fixed, imagining

For one forbidden tree a multitude

Now ris'n, to work them further woe or shame;

Yet parched with scalding thirst and huger fierce

Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,

But on they rolled in heaps, and up the trees

Climbing, sat thicker than the curly locks

Thar curled Megaera: greedily they plucked

The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew

Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed;

This more delusive, not the touch, but taste

Deceived; they fondly thinking to allay

Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit

Chewed bitter ashes, which th' offended taste

With spattering noise rejected; oft they assayed,

Hunger and thirst constraining, dragged as oft,

With hatefulest derelish writhed their jaws

With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell

Into the same illusion, not as man

Whom they triumphed once lapsed. 

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X. Illustration: Plate 43, Gustave Doré.

Literary interlude

François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Helen Scott during the interviews that created the book.

F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the piece of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic are to acheive something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely acheived this. it wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. 

F.T. Yes, that's true.

A.H. That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can't get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we're using now. People will say, "It's a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it. " I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional. 

—Hitchcock/Truffaut, by François Truffaut, 1966.