HANS-ULRICH MOHR Hitchcock and Dark Romanticism 1. Hitchcock as a Dark Auteur In 1966, François Truffaut, the later renowned film director, published a book entitled Hitchcock that recorded his conversations with Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut 1978). With this book he was the first one to praise Hitchcock not only as one of the Greatest inventors of forms and expressions in the history of film but also as the ideal case of what is called an auteur. That is, he considered him a film director who shaped his highly creative films down to the minutest detail, despite the many people who had a share in the production (Rebello 2013, 168-170). No one has seriously contradicted this assessment. Consequently, Hitchcock's films must be regarded as the outcome of his personality and activities. Hitchcock's attitude can already be found in the imaGes he propaGated to the public about himself and his works. The following picture shows him with what looks like a raven (or, possibly, an American crow). This was one of the ways Hitchcock announced his film The Birds (1963). In this film, an aGGressive large flock of birds attacks a small Californian coastal villaGe and more or less destroys it. Optically, black corvidae, i.e. crows and ravens, dominate. Acoustically the croaking/cawing of ravens and crows is mixed with the panic-inducinG screech of Gulls. These birds symbolise the psychological tensions between several women: mother, sister, discarded love and sweetheart-to-be, who rival for the affections of one man. In fact, bird is also a vernacular British word for girls and women. Figure 1: Hitchcock posing with a (trained) raven /American crow (Harris and Lasky 1976, 221). This imaGe alludes to Edgar Allan Poe's famous ballad The Raven (cf. Hitchcock 1997), which deals with a poet who recently lost his young love Lenore and wants to drive away his bleak thoughts by reading ancient lore. In that dull winter night, suddenly a raven knocks at the window shutter and, when it is opened, flies into the room and seats itself on the helmet of a bust of Pallas Athena – as if claiming dominion over this goddess of rationality and wisdom. With its deep blackness and its mysterious Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.3 (Winter 2020): 205-225. Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 3 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 206 HANS-ULRICH MOHR oracle-like utterances this raven seems to establish a telepathic relationship between the poet's mind and his unconscious as well as with the world beyond. A similar imaGe propaGated by Hitchcock, which is widely circulated on the dust jacket of Patrick McGilligan's copious book on Hitchcock's life and work, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (McGilligan 2003), shows Hitchcock with a crow/raven resting on top of his head and covering it, similar to Poe's raven on top of Athena's helmet (available by 'GooGlinG'). These examples underline that Hitchcock was much aware of the fact that his manifold and rich opus was particularly informed by what is termed Dark Romanticism. But, of course, our imaGe does not simply present an equation between Hitchcock's mind and (dark) Romanticism. Rather, it presents an interaction. Slightly unlike the situation in Poe's poem, the raven seems to communicate in a more direct way with Hitchcock. Obviously, there is a more complex reciprocity underlyinG this scene, and this will require comprehensive investigation. This means we will have to trace Hitchcock's specific dependence on and his continuation of the Romanticist heritaGe. 2. Romanticist Ideas in Hitchcock's Films The themes and contents of Dark Romanticism have been lined out in a catchy and almost effusive way in a book published in 1930 by the Italian Mario Praz under the title La Winter Journals Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella Litteratura romantica. The EnGlish title The Romantic Agony (1933) restricts itself – somewhat prudishly – to the element of depressive and disturbing inner conflicts, as if this were the only content of romantic art and literature, neglecting its sources in the interplay of sexuality, desire, madness, delusions,Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) and death.1 Praz's book provides a lot of material and cross-references and suGGests transmedial continuities, correlating literature and the arts. It deals with love, ecstatic as well as for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution forbidden, the metamorphoses of Satan, vampirism, mythical creatures, monsters, and the beauty of the Terrible. Praz considers these themes the expression of a radical change in mentality, called Romanticism. For him Romanticism is more than a temporary attitude. It is a period in which artistic creativity emancipates itself from the dictates of external purposes such as religion, aristocratic representation, ideologies, and morals and thus can spread out extensively (Praz 1970a, 374-379 [afterword]). For Praz, this manifests itself especially as Dark Romanticism, an uninhibited advanced dimension within the new space of artistic freedom. He draws a line from medieval narratives of the devil up to de Sade, M.G. Lewis, Beckford, Byron, Maturin, Poe, Flaubert, Soulié, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and D'Annunzio. He deals with the femme fatale in the works of Keats, Swinburne, Wilde etc. He also touches on the fields of aestheticism, decadence, occultism, and fin-de-siècle – thouGh not truly in an academic way. His book conveys the spirit of a sensationalist discovery made by a librarian turned connoisseur and dandy – all of which he was, in fact. ConsiderinG these topics, Hitchcock remains more in 'briGht' dayliGht althouGh his character and inclination may have been quite like Praz's. Hitchcock's relative brightness surely has to do with the filmic medium which is liable to relatively strict 1 The title of the German translation Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik (Praz 1970) adds a touch of relaxed acceptance and systematic literary history. Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 3 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) HITCHCOCK AND DARK ROMANTICISM 207 public censorship (cf. Medved 1992, 281-284; 320-336). Until recently, film production and viewing were under highly critical observation by religious, moralistic, and political factions: on the one hand, because film is a medium in the centre of the public sphere, and, on the other, because its pictorial quality has a realistic appeal that functions more directly than texts or speech. Hitchcock's first more developed film of a certain lenGth (88 min.), the intertitled silent film The Lodger (1926), deals with the search for a London serial killer of younG women with blond curls. Hitchcock narrates the events of the film in dimly-lit scenes, which were inspired by his encounter with German filmic Expressionism (black and white silent films) at the BabelsberG studios in 1924. Lotte Eisner has made an often quoted and widely accepted observation: "It is reasonable that German cinema is a development of German Romanticism and that modern technique merely lends a visible form to romantic fantasies" (Eisner 1969, 113). Expressionism tries to visualize the thematic heritaGe of Dark Romanticism – as there are psychological tensions down to the unconscious, sexuality, existential fears, the influence of irrational forces, and a dismal fate – by modelling the pictorial space in geometrical shapes, especially through the opposition and the configuration of light and shadow. Hitchcock attributes the stronGest influence on his earlier work to Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919) by the German film director Robert Wiene. Furthermore, he explicitly adds F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch (McGilligan 2003, 64). At the centre of action of The Lodger is a younG woman whose looks aGree with a serial killer's taste and who is thus – especially from the viewer's perspective – exposed to various risks. A younG man, who is a lodGer in her parents' house, behaves in a highly suspicious manner. The film, however, climaxes in the revelation that this alleGed murderer is innocent. He acted suspiciously only because he was in search of his sister's murderer. In fact, he turns out to be a kind of fairy tale prince, leadinG the young woman to marital bliss. This endinG may be seen as a bow to censorship or to an audience in expectation of harmony, but it is also a premonition of a topic that would continue to occupy Hitchcock's thoughts: the difficulty of keeping guilt and innocence apart – an idea already at the heart of (dark) Romanticism. In Blackmail (1929), a film which Hitchcock had first realized as a silent one but immediately after reshot as a sound film, a younG woman stabs a man who lured her into his apartment under the pretext to portray her and then tried to rape her. Nevertheless, in both versions, the subject of crime and murder is of secondary importance. Rather, the leadinG question is whether the woman is Guilty or not and this remains unresolved. Surveying Hitchcock's immense output – it comprises 53 films and many TV features – one can indeed see an increasing interest in the (dark) romantic topic of the abysses of the human soul and the ultimate impossibility to identify Guilt and innocence. This he effects via an intensification of the aesthetic appeal, based on an underlying irony. The films I will deal with in the followinG represent relevant steps in that process. In Rebecca (1940), the first film in Hitchcock's Hollywood phase (1939-1971), the question is whether the EnGlish aristocrat Maxim de Winter has murdered Rebecca, his first wife. This is presented to the viewer throuGh the perspective of his second wife, an insecure young woman, nameless throughout the film, naively in love with Maxim.