Special Features of Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Benefits and Criticism - Essay Example

The crux of the cinematic technique of Alfred Hitchcock is in being spectator centric. He plays with the potential for fantasy in the minds of the people. The cinematic art developed from man’s incorrigible wish to record the movement and the moving objects, because it was the moving objects and not the static ones that interested him. The first film show, the Lumiere Show by Lumiere brothers in 1895 was just a little shot of a train pulling up into the railway platform. The viewers were not sure whether what they were seeing on the screen was real or not. They were startled thinking that the train would come forward towards them and many were reported to have sat back on their chairs, scared. On one side this cinema is documenting reality, the reality of the train coming to the platform. On the other hand the same cinema is making the unreal look real, by making the viewer believe that the train coming towards him is real. (According to Ingmar Bergman “When film is not a document it is a dream”—The Magic Lantern, PP73) These two qualities of Cinema led to the division of it into documentaries and feature films or fantasy films .It was the French magician Georges Melies who first explored the possibility of fantasy created through cinema. With his inventiveness, humor and the visual power Melies could create magic on the screen, so that he was called the “Cine magician”. According to Robert Philip Kolker, “Lumiere and Melies are posited as progenitors of two separate modes of cinematic expression, the photographing things existing in the world, the other creating fantasies in the studio.” MIND OF THE AUDIENCE: Alfred Hitchcock is one such director who took this fantasy part of cinema to an extreme. He got into the minds of the audience and took them to where ever he wanted to. Right from the screen play, Hitchcock’s cinematic effort is oriented to the mind of the audience. Reviewing Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), François Truffault, the French film critic and film maker, wrote: “There are two kinds of directors: those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don’t consider the public at all. For the former cinema is an art of the spectacle; and for the latter, it is an individual adventure” (The Films in My life, PP77) Truffault considers Hitchcock belonging to the former category for whom “a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production.” (Ibid). Thus every scene in the Hitchcock screen play is written in such a manner to make the audience’s mind engaged.The characters are used in such a way that they go on teasing the viewer. The viewer gets teased so much that he will always be hungry for more. This point is very strongly expressed by Hitchcock himself to Truffaut, in the book long interview in1967. Commenting on Psycho (1960) Hitchcock says: My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject-matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound-track and all the technical ingredients that made the audience scream…. They were aroused by pure film.” (As quoted by Sam Rohdie in Totems and Movies, Movies and Methods PP, 472) The effect of the famous “shower sequence” in the Psycho on the audience was terrible. Marion Crane is a Phoenix secretary. She steels money from her boss, thinking she can start a new life. She leaves for California to live with her boy friend. On her way she stays in a motel. Before retiring to her room she had a long talk with the inn keeper. He is a worried man, worried about his sick old mother and the failing motel business. After that talk Marion changes her mind; decides to return to the Phoenix the next day and give back the money to the boss. Before retiring to her bed she goes to take a shower bath. Here under the shower she gets killed by an old woman in long dress. The inn keeper, like a dutiful son, cleanses the room and disposes the body and evidence. This sequence shot in black and white is supposed to be one of the most horrifying sequences in the whole history of cinema. The shooting of this sequence took seven days; using more than seventy camera angles. The scene is unique because here the camera is the knife that kills the lady. The scene is shot in close up in the point of view of the knife (that is the camera). This made the act of stabbing a very personal and intimate experience that people were screaming in the theatre. Some vomited and fainted .And the sequence is said to have created a shower phobia in many of the viewers later. People go to the cinema to have this sort of thrilling fun. They want to be tossed around, knowing well that they are safe when the lights are on again after the show. So Hitchcock plays with their minds with high speed, tense drama and horror mixed with moments of humor, and love. The viewer is confident that he can go through all these without getting hurt and come out of the theatre safe, when the lights are on again. Hitchcock gives them such a unique experience that they come back again asking for more. That’s where the success of Hitchcocks cinematic art lays. CAMERA AND IMAGES: Hitchcock fills every scene with high emotions of varied types from fear and laughter to surprise, sadness or anger. The camera positioning depends on the emotion and the intensity with which Hitchcock wants audience to feel it. A wide angle shot is used to reduce the intensity of the emotion felt .The camera closes in according to the accenting intensity of the emotions. A quick cut from wide shot to close up shakes the audience with surprise. Hitchcock even uses strange top angles above the actor to enhance the dramatic elements of the scene. Panning shots are used to pump in dramatic elements into his plot. Camera pans around in rooms, over the close ups of objects which later become plot elements of the film. These frequent panning shots not only built up the plot but also make the audience more involved in the plot of the film. Hitchcock started his career in the silent era and his first nine films (1925-29) were silent films. His first sound film Blackmail (1929) was released in two versions, silent and sound. The strong visual explanation of the plot in most of Hitchcock films can be seen as a left over legacy of that silent era. The dominance of the uttered word, which became a bane of the talkies later, didn’t affect directors like Hitchcock, because of their training in the silent era. Rear Window (1954) is a film with no dialogues most of the time. The plot and suspense is kept alive through intriguing camera shots and the facial expressions of the protagonist acted by Jimmy Stewart, who portrays the photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, whose fantasies and fears make the film progress. Dialogue and sound always remained secondary to the images through out in Hitchcock films. So the lament of Gilles Deleuze doesn’t apply to Hitchcock as much as it applies to many other film makers. Lamenting about the uttered word dominating the images in films, Deleuze writes: “At the very point that image is replaced by an utterance, the image is given false appearance, and its most authentically visible character, the movement is taken away from it. … If movement is taken from moving bodies, there is no longer any distinction between image and objects.” (Cinema 2 PP 26) Thus in this digital age when in cinema, objects remain objects and the uttered words lead the film, in Hitchcock objects turn into images that carry forward the plot. He was very conscious of the importance of translating things into signs and getting expressive meanings from them. So he tells Truffault: “The placing of the images on the screen in terms of what you are expressing should never be dealt with in factual manner. Never! You can get anything you want through the proper use of cinematic techniques… no reason to settle for a compromise between the image you wanted and the image you get.”(As quoted by Sam Rohdie in Totems and Movies, Movies and Methods PP473) In the same article Rohdie quotes Hitchcock thus:” One of the reasons most films aren’t sufficiently rigorous is that so few people in the industry know anything about the imagery” (PP 469). Hitchcock used powerful imagery, turned the objects into images to get maximum impact on the audience. That’s why, while talking about impact of Psycho on the audience he says. “They were aroused by pure film.” People screamed seeing the shower sequence because of the impact created by the use of camera and images in that sequence. Another example is a scene from The Lodger (1926). A ripper like murderer reaches a lodge to stay for a night. The presence of the mysterious guest raises suspicions and fears in the minds of the residents there. The tension of the lodger is shown by making the character pace up and down on a floor made of glass and shooting it from below. This shot is superimposed with the shot of the ceiling with the chandelier swaying back and forth. The effect is superbly strong. Remember The lodger was a silent film. This shows the master’s great ability to create imageries (“pure film”) strong enough to make impact on the audience. LOOKS: Hitch cock is often described as the director of looks. He knew that cinema itself was an art close to peeping through the key hole and the audience come to films to enjoy peeping into somebody else’s affairs. In Rear Window (1954) the man in wheel chair is spying the neighbor by peeping. In Psycho (1960) the inn keeper is secretly watching Marion undressing before the famous shower sequence. A sequence in The Manxman (1929) is famous for the looks that three characters exchange to express feelings of a situation. The protagonist leaves to the sea hoping to make a fortune so as to live with his lover girl. But while he is away in the sea the rumor that he is killed spreads in the village. The lover girl falls in love with the protagonist’s friend. But the protagonist comes back. With his return, the other two are tone by shame and guilt. In the scene in which the three meet Hitchcock expresses the whole emotions of the situation through the looks of the three characters inter cut brilliantly. This film again is a silent film. Hitchcock also allows the viewers to see things which the characters are not able to see. In Blackmail (1929) the camera intrudes into the back of the heroine while she is undressing. The camera’s intrusion creates a fear of threat to the heroine in the mind of the audience, even before she gets assaulted by a man whom she stabs to death. The viewer thus gets a hint of the danger before the character. The informed audience and the innocent characters juxtaposed create tension in the minds of the audience. In Sabotage (1936) a young boy is to deliver a package given by his step father. The package contains a time bomb, a fact which the viewer knows but the boy doesn’t. As the boy gets delayed to deliver it, the images of clock needles and the package inter cut in a particular tense rhythm, get the audience tensed up. In Young and Innocent (1938) the unknown murderer’s identity is that he is a “blinking man’. As the protagonists search him in a dance hall, the camera joins in the search. When the camera zooms into the drummer in the band he starts blinking. Thus the audience catches hold of the criminal before the protagonists know who he is. MONTAGE: Hitchcock was the master of the use of montage or the editing technique that gives maximum emotional impact. The .impact of the bathing sequence in Psycho is not only due to the way the sequence is shot but also due to the style of editing of the shots. Here the montage is used to hide the real violence. Analyzing the sequence closely, academicians point out that the knife, which is nothing but the camera, penetrates the skin of the heroine below the navel in just three frames. So the hidden action is so sudden for the audience because of which the stabbing happens with in the minds of the viewer more strongly than it happens on the screen. This made them scream. Hitchcock used parallel montage, invented by the famous Hollywood Film master W.D Griffith, very unconventionally, but effectively. Cutting two unrelated actions together and creating tension on the screen is what conventionally the parallel montage does as in the chase scenes of thriller films. In spellbound (1945) Dr Constance Peterson, the psycho analyst, sees a note that is slipped under her door. Before she could pick it up, her colleagues come and tell her about the mysterious disappearance of the new doctor to join in the hospital. These people are talking about the disappearance of the new doctor standing on the note from him, which is slipped under the door. Thus the note becomes the centre of the gaze of the audience. This is an example of using the parallel montage in an unconventional but effective way. HUMOUR: One of the strange components of Hitchcock’s horror is ironically the humor. His ability to mix horror and humor was so unique that it is one of the factors that made people come back to his films over and over again. He mixed them with out diluting the suspense or drama. In fact the humor often enhanced the suspense in Hitchcock films. He often puts his characters in ironically humorous situations which are surrounded by horror. In one of the “Alfred Hitchcock presents” Television episodes, named One More Mile to Go (1957/ directed by Hitchcock), a man accidentally kills his wife in the midst of a domestic quarrel. He decides to dump the dead body in a lake and takes off with the dead body in the trunk of his car. On the way, a motor cycle police man stops him repeatedly, after seeing the burned out tail light of his car. Finally the police man asks him to come to the police station so that the police mechanic can get the burned out tail bulb repaired or replaced! What an ironic situation for a casual murderer! MACGUFFIN: MacGuffin, a term made famous through the studies of Hitch cock films, is also a technique that is used to involve the audience on some plot objects that motivates the characters and take the story forward. But it has little relevance in the story. It is just a gimmick to keep the audience engaged in the plot. Augus Mcphail, the English screen play writer who worked with Hitchcock is the first to coin this term, according to Donald Spoto, the biographer of Hitchcock. (The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, PP 145) .Thus Hitchcock is not the inventor of the technique, though he used it very effectively. It often is a technique, of making viewers follow a visual object that is motivating the character on the screen as well, so that he never gets distracted from the main plot and the suspense. It is explained as an engine that drives the story forward. In Number Seventeen (1932), MacGuffin is a valuable jeweled necklace, which carries the mystery forward. In The 39 Steps (1935), it is some “secret information important for air defense.” In Strangers on a Train (1951), the MacGuffin is the guys lighter. In Blackmail (1929) it is the glove; In The Lady Vanishes (1938) it is a coded message carried through a piece of music. Hitchcock explains MacGuffin thus: It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, Whats that package up there in the baggage rack? And the other answers, Oh thats a McGuffin. The first one asks Whats a McGuffin? Well the other man says, Its an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. The first man says, But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands, and the other one answers Well, then thats no McGuffin! So you see a McGuffin is nothing at all. (Hitchcock: 1967 interview with François Truffaut) This technique became so much a part of the art of Hitchcock that Roman Polanski was forced to use the same when he made a Hitchcockian film, Frantic in 1988. May be it was Polanski’s homage to the great master of horror films. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM: Expressionism is a movement mainly connected with German paintings and films of early 20s. Hitchcock was a life long art collector and had worked in Germany in mid 1920s. These may be the reasons for the influence of German expressionism in his films. More over the expressionist elements sinister plots, horrifying events and chiaroscuro lighting used in German films like Cabinet of Dr. Caligary (1919) suited well for the cinematic purpose and style of Hitchcock. The Expressionist influence in Hitchcock is more evident in his early black and white films. THE AUTEUR: The powerful studio system that ran Hollywood from the late 20s through the 60s had wiped out the creative high status of the director as the author of cinema. The director was replaced by the production company. Director was only one of the employees of the company. The films came to be known after the production companies, like a MGM film, with the famous lion roar in the opening logo or a Paramount film or a film by Warner brothers. It was the group of critics who wrote for the famous French film journal Cahiers du Cinema (some of whom later became the New Wave film makers) who gave the authorship of cinema back to the film director by formulating the auteur theory. One of the most important Auteur they discovered was Hitchcock. Accidentally Hitchcock used to appear on camera in most of his film as a non entity like a passer by, there by leaving his signature on his films. He was not only the author of his films but also an author who left his signature on his films. =============================== Sources cited: 1) Bergman Ingmar, The Magic Lantern ,Penguin Books, Viking Penguin inc.,40 West, 23rd Street, New York, 1988 2) Deleuze Gilles, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, Continuum, New York, 1985. 3) Kolker Philip Robert, The Altering Eye, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983. 4) Movies and Methods, Volume 1 , Ed. Bill Nichols, University of California Press Ltd, London, England 5) Spoto Donald, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock Da Capo Press, August 29, 1999. 6) Truffaut François, Hitchcock, Simon &Schuster, Revised edition, Oct.2, 1985. 7) Truffaut François, The Films in My Life, Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue , New York, 1982 Read More