Opinion – Normalitas: The thousand psychoanalytic eyes of Hitchcock and Dalí

On Halloween 1945, a film was released in the United States that would become one of the first to approach and use leitmotif a then nascent discipline of theoretical and clinical investigation of things of the soul, psychoanalysis.

Freud had died just 6 years earlier. The end of the Second World War had just happened at the beginning of September.

It was a historic moment, hmm, interesting to say the least to enter the heart of darkness, the thousand eyes of the unconscious, the world beyond the world.

“When the Heart Speaks” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945 – “Spellbound” or “Recuerda”, in Spanish, based on the work of John Palmer and Hilary Saunders) would not enter cinematographic eternity as one of the great films of the master of suspense.

That, yes, marked by a thousand little things – the affair scandalous of the protagonists Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, then married to other people; the Oscar for the composer Miklós Rózsa, who, some time later, would comment that he didn’t even keep in touch with the director, for whom the score was too intrusive in the film; the studio’s conservatism, which eliminated much of the role of the nymphomaniac Mary Carmichael, one of the patients in the psychiatric asylum where the plot is set.

AND, last but not leastO plot centered on a psychoanalytic enigma, reimagined by Spanish artist Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, aka Salvador Dalí, for the famous.scene.of.dream.

EDITED DREAMS

To dwell on the backstage of a work of art is to dispel myths.

For “When He Speaks…”, Hitch, it is said, wanted Cary Grant in the role of Dr Edwardes, aka John Ballantyne; Hollywood mogul-producer David O. Selznick wanted Joseph Cotten; in the end, they opted for the young, statuesque Gregory Peck.

Ingrid Bergman, yes, was the top choice to play the cool-pretty-smart Dr. Petersen, though Selznick vaguely wanted to rescue Greta Garbo from retirement for the role.

This was the first of three iconic roles that Bergman would play under the hitchcocickckckjcician baton.

About Dalí, at that time living in the USA and already a consecrated artist, they say that Selznick didn’t even want to hire, considering the costs.

Publicly, Hitchcock, on the other hand, is said to have said, “I could have chosen De Chirico or Max Ernst, but no one was as imaginative and flamboyant as Dalí”.

Dalí was asked to draw, with the director, the dream scene that is described by Peck in a psychoanalytic session with Doctor Constance Petersen and Doctor Alexander Brulov — the latter, played by Michael Chekhov, the only actor in the Oscar-nominated cast of best supporting actor and, by the way, Anton’s nephew, that-him-self.

The original scene of the dream, according to Ingrid Bergman herself, would have been 20 minutes long and included herself dressed as a Greek goddess. To this day, the only records of this entire footage are excerpts from the Selznick archive.

In fact, Hitch’s idea was to shoot outdoors (for a more “sharp” dream look, he said) and would include simple things like fifteen grand pianos suspended over dancers or, at Dalí’s suggestion, a statue breaking and releasing. 70841708 ants that would cover Ingrid’s body (this idea Hitch refused, finding it horrible and impossible).

“Dream scenes in movies have always been enveloped in swirls of smoke and shot slightly out of focus to make them look hazy and blurry, but dreams are not like that; they are very, very vivid,” Hitchcock tells François Truffaut in one of his anthological conversations.

The director wanted the photography of the dream scene to be “vivid as Dalí painted”. He wanted the artist’s “architectural precision”.

The final cut reduced the scene from 20 minutes to just under 3 minutes, much to both Dali and Hitchcock’s deep dissatisfaction. Per rightsay that the latter did not even direct the scene, and would only assume his authorship after the film was already released and acclaimed-licked-applauded by the critics.

Still, and even though the film has not entered DuCinema History as one of the Greats of the English director who loved black birds and martinis after 6 pm, the petita scene is memorable.

The thousand velvet eyes, the card game, the faceless man, the melting wheel, the seven of clubs and the kissing dancer, Peck climbing a pyramid and being chased by giant pliers, all in a fluid narrative dance, are a masterpiece. of free art-psychoanalytic interpretation, a flirtation with the nascent study of dreams and the unconscious — frontiers that, to this day, maintain many mysteries, between marvelous and profound, like life itself.

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I went far, huh.

The dream was the enigma: to decipher it was to decipher a crime, to undo the fog of amnesia, to mend the ends undone by mental illness. The plot was innovative for the time. Not free from criticism, by Tutatis, but innovative.

It was not Dalí’s first foray into cinema. Before, he had collaborated with Buñuel. But it was their first comeback after more than a decade of trying to land film collaborations.

Even Dalí had his difficulties, look.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN NUMBER

“I just wanted to make the first film about psychoanalysis,” Hitchcock would tell Truffaut years later.

Other rumors suggest that Selznick is the one who came up with the idea for the film in the first place, excited by what would be Supa Dupa Results with his own therapist, psychoanalyst Mary E. Romm.

Romm became a consultant for the film, and Hitchcock had to put up with the saying on his neck on set. There were, therefore, quite a few quarrels between the two. Clear.

“When the heart speaks” took 6 Oscar nominations and, as mentioned before, won the golden statuette for best soundtrack. Among other peculiarities, it is worth mentioning the use of the theremin as a conducting instrument for suspense.

Theremin: one of the most wonderful musical pieces ever invented.

Both Hitchcock and Dalí would say little about the film later in their lives. Such is the artist’s pout when things don’t turn out as dreamed. Dreams…

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