⁷⁸⁄₅₂

Catchy title eh? It refers to the ratio of edits to sec­onds dur­ing the famous show­er scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho while also allud­ing to the sub­ject of this doc­u­men­tary, which is a foren­sic exam­i­na­tion of the del­i­cate archi­tec­ture of what sure­ly stands as one of cinema’s most icon­ic sequences. Many saw this moment as a water­shed in pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment – a visu­al caden­za of florid vio­lence that, when first screened in cin­e­mas, pro­voked ful­some screams from unwit­ting audi­ence members.

This is a bag­gy film, how­ev­er, as its run­time filled out with attempts to cov­er the scene in every way imag­in­able. The sheer num­ber of talk­ing heads that direc­tor Alexan­dre O Philippe has man­aged to rope in is in itself aston­ish­ing, but it also means that there’s far to much emp­ty exal­ta­tion and hyper­bole to get through before we get to the meat of the mat­ter. Unlike Hitch­cock, Philippe is cer­tain­ly no acolyte when it comes to the mat­ter of cut­ting a film back to its very essence.

Lots and lots and lots of peo­ple from with­in the world of hor­ror movies line up to affirm, re-affirm and then affirm once more as to the vital impor­tance of this scene, not just on their own work, but on the cin­e­mat­ic land­scape at large. Which is a shame, as the close read­ing mate­r­i­al that arrives lat­er on makes all of these gush­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als implic­it, so you have to endure the love-in before any­thing of real val­ue is offered up. Plus, there’s not a sin­gle per­son who has any­thing crit­i­cal to say about Hitch­cock, Psy­cho, or the scene, just in the name of edi­to­r­i­al balance.

Then Philippe trawls through all the occa­sions where the scene has been par­o­died, which feels like a YouTube super-cut that been inel­e­gant­ly spliced in to pro­ceed­ings. Per­haps this focus on over­stat­ing the impor­tance of the scene sig­nals Philippe’s inten­tion for it to trav­el beyond the paid-up Hitch­cock faith­ful, but the man­ner he has exe­cut­ed it means that the film falls between the stools of pop­ulism and esoterica.

Yet when things get tech­ni­cal, and a num­ber of behind-the-cam­era per­son­al­i­ties are ush­ered in to comb through the sequence frame by frame, ⁷⁸⁄₅₂ final­ly takes off. Mae­stros such as Wal­ter Murch, along­side a pha­lanx of vet­er­an movie edi­tors, offer insight in to how indi­vid­ual frames lock togeth­er and how cogent visu­al sequenc­ing is achieved through care­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion. This is actu­al­ly far more inter­est­ing as a film about edit­ing than it is about the show­er sequence, even though there are a num­ber of juicy triv­ia tid­bits from var­i­ous peo­ple involved in its mak­ing – includ­ing Janet Leigh’s body dou­ble, Mar­li Ren­fro, who also worked as a Play­boy pin-up.