Since 1952, the British film magazine "Sight and Sound" has gathered film experts around the world every ten years to select the best films in film history.
Since 1962, Orson Wells' Citizen Kane has topped the charts, but in 2012 it came in second for the first time after dominating the charts for half a century. Pulling it off the horse is the suspenseful film directed by Alfred Hitchcock .
Ecstasy
However, seeing here many people have to wonder: how can "Ecstasy" become the first masterpiece in film history?
In terms of prestige and popularity, it is not as popular as popular classics such as "The Godfather" and "The Shawshank Redemption", and even in Hitchcock's entire works, its popularity is not as good as "Psychopath" and "Rear Window"; in terms of commercial achievements, it cannot be compared with blockbusters such as "Star Wars" and "The Lord of the Rings", it only barely recovered the cost when it was released that year, and its box office performance was far below Hitchcock's average.
And if we talk about artistic value, "Ecstasy" is indeed excellent, but Wen Wu is the first, Wu Wu is second, and the measurement criteria for artistic value are too diverse, so why do you say that "Ecstasy" is the film with the highest artistic value in history?
The above questions are completely reasonable. But Ecstasy does have a series of fascinating and complex qualities that make it an extremely interesting text.
As a classic Hollywood studio film, its style is very traditional, but its exploration of many themes is very avant-garde and radical.
As a director, Hitchcock is very good at dreaming and manipulating the audience, but "Ecstasy" is his most self-revealing work: he shows his magic skills in full view to the world.
As a story, "Ecstasy", although seemingly absurd and bizarre, is actually extremely complex: because the protagonists each hide secrets, almost every scene has two narrative meanings at the same time.
As for the infinite loop structure carefully designed by the two screenwriters, it is like pulling the ground on which everyone depends from the soles of their feet, allowing the audience to suspend themselves in mid-air forever, and at that moment, the audience will actually experience the feeling of vertigo.
It is precisely because of these contradictory and complex characteristics that "Ecstasy" can make countless fans and scholars deeply immersed in it and unable to extricate themselves.
It is a complex text that is constantly constructing and disintegrating; it is constantly confirming the rationality of fantasies and obsessions, and at the same time it is constantly puncturing their false side. This makes the whole film look like an insatiable ouroboros, and even swallows its own tail.
However, as long as we are patient enough, we will also willingly fall into this vortex of infinite circulation, because we, like the Ouroboros, are equally greedy for its mystery and beauty.
So, what's so good about Ecstasy?
On the surface, Ecstasy is all about another Hitchcock-esque murder.
In order to embezzle his wife Madeleine's property, the rich man Gavin Esther concocts a bizarre lie to his old college friend Scotty (James Stewart): he says that his wife has been possessed by her great-grandmother who died by suicide, and he is afraid that his wife will repeat her great-grandmother's mistakes, so he asks Scotty, who is a private investigator, to follow her and keep an eye on her safety.
During this stalking, Scotty falls in love with the beautiful Madeleine (Kim Novak), but when Madeleine commits suicide by running to the roof of a church, Scotty, who is suffering from a fear of heights, is powerless to prevent the tragedy from happening.
It was a year later that Scotty recovered from a nervous breakdown, and he found Judy (Kim Novak), a woman who looked incomparable to Madeleine, on the street. He began to approach her, pursue her, and despite her resistance, dressed her up as Madeleine.
It is not until Judy inadvertently pulls out jewelry that originally belonged to Madeleine that Scotty realizes that Esther took advantage of his fear of heights, and Judy played the role of mistress and stand-in in Esther's plot.
Mixed with a sense of justice and jealousy, Scotty takes Judy back to the roof of the church where Madeleine was killed, where the guilt-ridden Scotty gets rid of her fear of heights, but Judy falls from the roof of the church because of her fright.
The experience of watching Ecstasy at first glance can be a bit boring, because you won't be able to see the subtext hidden under the masks of the characters until you understand the full truth of the story.
At first glance, you may think that Scotty is hiding the truth from "Madeleine" that he is following her, but as the story progresses, you find that "Madeleine" is the one who really controls the relationship between seeing and being watched.
However, when you revisit the film, you will find that all this is not as simple as you thought before: in the process of seducing Scotty through the "Madeleine" persona, Judy is actually willingly immersed in this persona and falls in love with Scotty.
But deception and lies are the original sins in their relationship, so Judy has to complete her murder mission and bring the relationship to an abrupt end.
When she says to Scotty, "It's not fair," she's not talking about herself, she's saying it's really unfair to Scotty; when she says, "We shouldn't know each other that way," her words don't belong to Madeleine's lines, but come from the heart. Only Scotty, blinded by illusions and illusions, does not realize in the end that Judy has always loved him.
Through the "hiding" and "revealing" of the truth, "Ecstasy" allows the audience to have a complex emotional relationship with its two protagonists.
What is more interesting is that this emotional relationship often collides with the audience's inherent moral concepts.
For example, in the first half of the film, Scotty is obviously a middle-aged man who is secretly obsessed with young women, but Hitchcock empathizes with him by showing his first-person perspective, and then understands and even identifies with his infatuation, so when Scotty loses Madeleine for the first time, we can also feel his pain and powerlessness.
In the second half of the film, Hitchcock reveals to the audience the deception of Esther and Judy, and we should have condemned Judy, but as the story continues, we find that she is the most recognizable character for the rest of the film.
At this time, although she owes Scotty morally and legally, her desperate risks for love, and even let Scotty dress up like a doll, let us see how much she loves the latter.
Scottie, on the other hand, who occupies the moral high ground at this moment, is paranoid to the point of impersonality and obnoxiousness: he cannot see this soul that loves him at all, and all he can see is the illusory, artificially constructed apparition.
Through moral and emotional collisions, Hitchcock constantly places us in a moral and emotional dilemma: we know Scotty has reason to try Judy, but we don't know if he needs to do so; we know that Judy deserves to be punished for her crimes, yet her unreserved love for Scotty has made us forgive her.
So when Judy "falls" down the tall building again at the end of the film, we, like Scotty, are suspended in an unsolvable dilemma: in this moment, what makes us dizzy is no longer a fear of heights, but an eternal paradox between morality and emotion.
The rich and well-used visual elements of Ecstasy also fascinated film experts.
Ecstasy has a large number of shots of character silhouettes. The silhouette is one of the photographer's least emotional representations of a character: it sits between the front and back, giving enough information about the person's face without pouring much personal affection into the character, like a file photo taken by the police for a suspect.
In Ecstasy, we repeatedly see Judy's silhouette through Scotty's perspective, which seems to imply that Scotty has been treating Judy as an object, rather than as a flesh-and-blood person, and there has never been any substantial emotional interaction between the two.
Set in San Francisco is undoubtedly one of the protagonists of Ecstasy: Hitchcock captures the city's feminine temperament precisely, making it an extension of Madeleine/Judy's personal temperament.
Several notable locations filmed in the film are the Fort Spires area next to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Legion of Honor Memorial at the San Francisco Museum of Art, The World's Steepest Street, The Nine-Curved Flower Street, and San Juan Bautis Church in nearby San Benito County.
Vortex is an important visual motif that has appeared in the plot of "Ecstasy":
Madeleine's swirling bun at the back of her head corresponds to her great-grandmother's hairstyle on top of the portrait.
The church staircase, which terrified Scotty, also had a swirling appearance.
The film's opening and poster designer, Saul Bass, captured this motif in the film and played it further. So we see the psychedelic vortex pattern in the opening paragraph and on the poster, which has become the visual symbol of the entire film.
The contrast between high and low often hints at the balance of power between the characters.
When Scotty is drawn into Esther's deception, and when Judy is at the mercy of Scotty and the clothing store clerk, the film uses elaborate compositions to emphasize the power relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated.
At the beginning and end of the film, Scotty is suspended in mid-air (between high and low), which creates a nightmare-like temperament for the film and makes the whole story a complete and closed loop.
The reason why "Ecstasy" has fascinated film experts is not only because of the film's story and skills, but also because this superficially simple but complex film provides endless interpretation space for various cultural theories.
First of all, it's clear that Ecstasy is a psychology movie in the popular sense. Scotty, who lost the lives of two close people (police colleague, Madeleine) because of a fear of heights, experienced apparent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during her hospitalization.
As the saying goes, the bell must also be tied to the bell, and the psychologist in the film believes that the best cure for this psychological disorder is to let Scotty experience a stimulus of the same nature. At the end of the film, Scotty does cure his fear of heights by revisiting the murder scene. This healing not only freed him from feelings of guilt, but also restored his long-lost masculinity.
The mixture of psychological theory and gender theory is also one of the reasons why Ecstasy is outstanding.
Before Ecstasy, there were many films (Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Hitchcock himself) that addressed psychological issues, but none of them combined it with gender issues as well as Ecstasy.
The socially disciplined relationship between men and women, the power and fantasy that men who hold the initiative in sight to the women who are watched, are important topics of concern for feminist theory in the post-Lacan era, and they are all prominently expressed in Ecstasy.
Madeleine, whom Scotty loves, is not a real woman, but merely an objectified object, so that when this object presents its own will, Scotty can only brutally strangle her in a moral, yet subconsciously, extremely violent way.
Judy's failure as a woman lies in her abandonment of herself and does not win her love. For Oscar Wilde has long said, "Everyone will kill and love, so that everyone can live." ”
Similarly, the Pygmalion complex, obsessed with reinventing actresses, is also hitchcock's lifelong obsession as a film director.
Every beautiful actress who appears in his films is transformed into a mysterious and sexy blonde woman by him, a process similar to the process by which Esther and Scotty transform Judy into Madeleine! It is no wonder that some people say that Ecstasy is Hitchcock's most autobiographical work.
But at the same time, the production insider of "Ecstasy" is denying the "authorship theory" of the director's supremacy.
Although Hitchcock was also the director and producer of the film, the most critical flashback passage in the film was not his idea, but the work of the film's screenwriter Samuel Taylor; as for the most classic "stun effect shot" in the film, it was also not Hitchcock's own idea, it was designed by the film's second film crew cinematographer Ermin Roberts.
So, while Ecstasy is a collection of Greek-style works, many facts about its filmmaking process prove that filmmaking is a collective process, and it does not belong to any one individual in the group.