Although it might only appeal to a specific kind of audience, the documentary 78/52 offers a commanding and deeply thoughtful experience in spite of its narrow premise. The film takes a deep dive into one of the most iconic sequences in movie history: The infamous “shower scene” from Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal thriller, Psycho. It’s a testament to the richness of Hitchcock that a single solitary scene could justify a comprehensive documentary feature, not to mention the wealth of analysis that exists in books and essays dating back to the year the film first hit theaters. With his take, director Alexandre O. Philippe focuses on a multitude of historical, cultural, theoretical and technical angles, revealing the depth of critical study that sustains the film and that famous scene to this very day. But he also underlines the crucial and often ignored notion that where the students of Psycho saw a moment of brilliance and mastery, Hitchcock himself saw little more than a “big joke,” an opportunity to shock the audience with an unexpected moment of harrowing violence. And shock them he did — shock them into decades of in-depth analysis and outright obsession, proving that moments can be bigger than movies.
Sometimes the moments are so big that they transcend the movies altogether. With 78/52, which takes its title from the 78 camera setups and the 52 edits that comprise the sequence, Philippe illustrates how the film in general and the shower scene in particular anticipates much of 1960s America, both onscreen and off. Commentators such as Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Murch, Guillermo del Toro, Stephen Rebello and Karyn Kusama deepen and expand our knowledge of the moment, and their testimonies are organized in such a way that illuminates the scene’s widespread cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. The commentary goes a long way in dispelling some of the film’s weaker stretches, such as the distracting opening sequence that reenacts moments from Psycho using a pair of stand-ins for Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. The moment feels like an attempt at meta-commentary — perhaps it’s a tongue-in-cheek jab aimed at Gus van Sant’s much maligned shot-by-shot remake? — but it’s an odd way to begin the film.
For all of its overarching observations, 78/52 is most interesting when it gets granular. There are utterly fascinating stretches that explore how the shower scene’s tiniest details, from the significance of the white bath tiles to the specific sounds of the water circling the shower drain to the painting that obscures Norman’s nefarious peephole, inform the film’s overall stylistic and emotional design. This is all thanks to the wealth of knowledge Philippe has at his disposal. The composer Danny Elfman is given the tall order of breaking down Bernard Herrmann’s musical accompaniment, which, as he elegantly points out, rises and falls with the action, beginning with the sharp and bracing strings that accompany the piercing stabs and the prolonged, bassy bump-bumms that coincide with the slow demise of Marion Crane. For his part, del Toro argues that the shower scene expresses Hitchcock’s deep sense of Catholic guilt: it shows Marion, guilty of theft and adultery, attempting to cleanse herself of sins she cannot wash away. And Kusama’s feminist reading — she describes the shower scene as an example of Hollywood’s assault on the female body — is particularly insightful, considering Hitchcock’s problematic treatment of his lead actresses.
That said, not every testimonial is particularly sharp, and it’s easy to tell the difference between those who’ve truly studied Hitchcock and his work and those who are simply fans. But the beauty of 78/52 is the space Philippe gives both groups. In this way, it’s a departure from Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237, which takes a similarly meticulous look at Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Ascher’s film occupies the realm of the fanatic, taking an organized approach to some truly harebrained theories regarding The Shining’s supposedly hidden themes and messages; 78/52, rooting itself in critical analysis and cultural history, offers a more intellectual pursuit, but the levels of obsession are remarkably similar, a testament to cinema’s unique ability to touch a collective nerve.
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