Alfred Hitchcock: Guidelines
Hitchcock began his filmaking career in 1920 illustrating title cards in silent films in England.
He was art director, writer, editor till 1925 when he directed his first film.
The most interesting films before he went to America were made in the thirties.
The man who knew too much
Sabotage
and especially The 39 steps (1935).
In 1939 he is hired by David O' Selznick (Gone with the wind producer) and he went to the States.
His first film there is Rebecca and during the 40's he is going to make films very related to its time.
They are psychological dramas and espionage stories.
Spellbound. The main characters are psychologists and the film has to do with psychoanalysis.
Notorious. It's a love story with espionage, nazis and uranium.
The psychological time lasts until Strangers on a train (1951)and then he began his most personal work.
This range from Rear Window to The Birds and in this period are his masterpieces:
Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest.
And in the sixties he made Marnie or Torn Curtain which are considered minor works but they aren't.
In fact he returned to his beginnings and it's a summary of his whole career.
As we know Hitchcock is the master of suspense, but what is suspense?
He gave us his own definition. It's the tension created when you know something,
always dangerous which is not known by the character and it's so nearby.
Hitchcock involves us in the film , and because of this Hitch was criticised for making only entertaining films.
But, in fact, Hitch was very interested in cinema technique and its resources.
Rope It's an interesting technical exercise. He tried to make a film that appeared to be a single shot,
without cuts. In fact it was shot in 8-10 minutes takes, the maximum amount of film a camera could hold
and when the film ended the camera zooms in on a dark object right to do a zoom out to begin the next take.
In his films there are a few key topics:
Characters in a very difficult situation even for their own lives.
This happens in all his films.
False Guilty.
Falsely accused of something we know they haven't commited, like in The 39 Steps or North by Northwest. Hitchcock always allows us to know who the true culprit is.
Espionage
Often the character plays a double personality. He/she shows a different attitude depending on the situation he/she is in:
Notorious Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are deceiving each other throughout the film.
Torn Curtain Paul Newman seems to be performing a different role in front of his girlfriend or
the east-germans
North by Northwest: Eva Marie Saint is the final straw of ambiguity. We don't know,
at several times in the film, whether she is a woman in love, Vandamm's ally or a infiltrated spy.
Ambiguity with moral and with sex:
And this characters are on the edge of good and evil. And this ambiguity again is in every film he made.
The baddies are attractive and the goodies have dark aspects:
Psycho: Norman Bates is sinking Marion's car after the murder by "his mother",
but it's seems to float and we feel pity to him.
The relationships between the main characters are on the edge of erotism such as in
Notorious: They kissed each other in order to hide their spy job.
They prefer to be catched as lovers than as spies.
Humour
Everything is packed with humour. Sometimes it's a mean of relieving a stressful situation.
The 39 Steps
North by Northwest
Both are chasing movies and in both the main character let him be arrested to escape from the baddies.
In the fist one in a political meeting and in North by Northwest a auction. Cary Grant behaves absurdly,
so as to be arrested by the police.
And finally all his work is different from the others, but the films have similarities because of his
collaborators. The most remembered is Bernard Herrmann as the composer of the scores and Saul Bass
as the author of the credits:
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Credits: Saul Bass
Editor: George Tomasini
Art Director: Hal Pereira