The documentary 78/52 operates under the year's most nerdily niche title - a dog whistle to movie buffs and horror aficionados, who may well intuit exactly what it refers to: the 78 camera set-ups and 52 cuts that make up the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in which (spoiler alert) Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is stabbed to death by Anthony Perkins' crossdressing Norman Bates. As Alexandre O. Philippe's film reframes it, this fevered, 45-second hack-and-slash - staged over a week on set, after storyboarding input from legendary graphic designer Saul Bass - changed what the movies could do and show forever. Suddenly it wasn't so taboo to kill off your star a third into the running time, and to do so while she was naked: with this none-more-forceful jab in the ribs, Hitch simultaneously pushed back against the censorship that had mollycoddled American movies since the imposition of the Hays Code, and pulled back the curtain separating cinemagoers from the bloody, murderous chaos of the world beyond the foyer. It took a touch under sixty years to get from The Great Train Robbery's final shot to the Bates Motel bathroom, but only a further seven to get from there to the bloodbath of Bonnie and Clyde. The technique, too, was to change the game. Previously, the cinema had broadly been either impressionist or Expressionist; Psycho demonstrated it could be Cubist, cutting round and at its characters in an attempt to create something other than the usual unities of time and space. All bets were suddenly, shockingly off, anything newly possible.
Philippe is not the first to slow this sequence down in order to pick over its meaning. 78/52 folds in (and builds on) successive waves of analysis by such scholarly figures as Francois Truffaut (in his celebrated Hitchcock interviews), conceptual artist Douglas Gordon (in his installation 24 Hour Psycho) and critic David Thomson (in his monograph The Moment of Psycho). His film, however, is by far the paciest and most enjoyable stab, acknowledging the wicked spirit of a film Hitch always shrugged off as "a joke", even while it rolls up its sleeves and enters into serious, engaged digging. Playful montages frame Psycho within wider social developments, Hitchcock's own entertainments, and this original auteur's long history of scopophilic bathroom intimacies; the second half cuts to the quick of the matter, pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding through the scene in question to highlight key details as one might in a film-studies class, and doing so in the presence of a stellar parade of guest speakers.
We start with testimony from Peter Bogdanovich, who sensed the tectonics shifting when he attended the film's altogether fraught New York premiere as a critic, then move on to hear out a splattering of post-Psycho horror mavens (Guillermo del Toro, Eli Roth, the Moorhead-Benson partnership, Karyn Kusama, Perkins' emergent son Osgood), plus related performers (Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, sometime Maniac Elijah Wood), editors who spy in this scene a prototype for today's accelerated cutting, composers hymning the genius of Bernard Herrmann's shrieky strings, even an art historian, brought in to talk us through the significance of the painting Master Bates removes from the motel wall to spy on Leigh - and even this fleeting item of set dressing turns out to factor into the overarching thesis of Psycho as pivotal moment. No detail is off-limits; so wide-ranging are Philippe's inquiries that we're also offered a segment on which variety of melon might provide the best sound match for the Foley work of knife slicing through flesh, a careful identification of the hand shown clutching the shower curtain via its owner's disfigured forefinger, and - at the last - an aside on the fact Leigh's eye can be seen flickering briefly in her final close-up. (Is there some connection between this flicker and the one moving image in 1962's La Jetée?)
There was scope for 78/52 to become more critical yet. This is essentially a fanboy project, its baseline insistent that every last thing the movies do is awesome, and every technical innovation particularly awesome. Some of its purring is justified: however a documentarist slices it, that match-fade from the plughole swallowing up bloody water to the life slipping out of Marion Crane's eye remains capital-C Cinema. Yet as Thomson noted in his monograph, the shower scene was also the beginning of a sustained campaign of onscreen violence against women, not to mention Hitch opening up new fronts in his efforts to prey on his female personnel. Leigh's body double Marli Renfro is the first voice we hear, describing how she had to undress for her director's approval, but thereafter becomes no more than a first-hand source of scene trivia, where you and I might perhaps see in her a warm-up girl for the tyrannised Tippi Hedren of The Birds and Marnie. The long-term effect of Psycho's provocation was to encourage directors to work even harder to shock their audience: 78/52's final half-hour works in clips from Frenzy, Irreversible and From Dusk Till Dawn 2, all signs of the troubling direction Hitchcock pointed the cinema in. Perhaps the most telling detail here comes via the Belgian composer known as Kreng, who - while offering a note-by-note analysis of those strings, apparently from memory - reveals a tattoo of the scene's soundwave on his inside wrist. Whatever else got washed away in Marion Crane's final minutes, her death was one of cinema's under-the-skin moments: it's marked us for life, and arguably sullied everything we watch today.
78/52 is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream online.
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