A Film Canon

The apotheosis of Hitchcock's tendency to invite identification with criminals - and, more specifically, with the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of his revelatory object relations - Rope also represents his first foray into Technicolour, fusing the two into one of the most brilliant expositions of the medium's lurid aestheticism, in the form of a murder that is committed solely for the dual aesthetic pleasures of the act itself, and of the orchestration of a dinner party around the concealed body; that is, murder as a perverse extrapolation of the pleasures of etiquette, such that being caught is ultimately less traumatic than being accused of bad taste, and every ancillary object - from the food served to the eponymous murder weapon - takes on an uncanny, defamiliarised, fetishistic sheen.  To this end, Hitchcock introduces the most excessive, astonishing flourish of his career to date - shooting the film in only a few takes, and connecting them in such a way as to make it appear as a single take, thereby bringing the thought-lines of Shadow Of A Doubt to their logical conclusion - while making a sustained argument for suspense as an aesthetic experience worthy of the highest contemplation and most systematic pursuit. From this perspective, the implicit characterisation of the murderous project as a consummation of the perpetrators' homosexual inclinations is merely a convenient deflection of the extent to which it correlates to Hitchcock's own, contextualising the subsequent proliferation of such deviants as a cipher for his own increasingly radical cinematic vision. That said, Hitchcock doesn't merely thematise Technicolour, but, with the aid of cinematographers William V. Skall and Joseph Valantine, offers an impressionistic counterpoint to Black Narcissus' technics, largely by virtue of the omnipresent window which, depicting the gradual onset of dusk and, combined with the challenges of fitting lighting to the extended takes, renders the most subtle gradations in light palpable, as if he had moved beyond thought- lines to a thought-medium, sensitive to the most minor perceptions and cognitions of its inhabitants.