Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

• “Master of Suspense”
• He is the most Dionysian film maker of the whole history (Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense of the word).
• Dionysius was the God that represents our passions and instincts. He can also create beauty, but his beauty is not the beauty of balance, order and equilibrium (Apollo). It is the beauty of chaos, rapture, intoxication and passion.
• No other film maker was so clever and skilled playing the emotions of the audience (In his movies, you will never find ideas, but emotions).
• Cinéphiles value the ambiguity behind stories that seem very conventional.
  • The good characters are frequently rather dull, or even dumb.
  • The evil characters are always refined, intelligent, sophisticated and amoral.
  • Irony – deep and intelligent irony in all his movies –
  • Sometimes you have the feeling that he is making fun of the whole mainstream film industry.

McGuffin

• The McGuffin is a simple, sometimes even absurd plot, just the excuse to start a story.
• What happens to the characters in the story is what gives the movie a sense.
• Hitchcock used the McGuffin as a trigger of a succession of crazy events and breath-taking scenes that arouse strong emotions by the characters and the spectators.
• Sometimes the McGuffin, the plot of the story, is so irrelevant that one may not remember it after having seen the movie.

Suspense

• In most of the conventional thrillers, suspense is created because the audience does NOT know what is going to happen.
• Hitchcock created his own method looking for the complicity of the audience.
• The audience knows more than the protagonists do. We know that they are in danger, but the actual heroes of the story mostly ignore it.

Technical and Narrative Challenges

• Lifeboat (1944) The whole action takes place in a boat.
• Spellbound (1944) / Vertigo (1958) Hitchcock tried to visualize the world of dreams (He worked with Salvador Dalí).
• Notorious (1946) The longest kiss of the film history. The shot last several minutes. The camera is following the two main characters in a close-up.
• Rope (1948) The whole movie is designed as only one take (or shot). In spite of that, the film is not theatrical at all. The camera is constantly moving around and creating an alternative discourse to the action.
• Rear Window (1954) James Stewart spends the whole movie in a wheelchair and we see him in the same room. In spite of that, the film is extremely thrilling.
• North by Northwest (1959) We see the fight between a man and an airplane.
• The Birds (1963) A thriller without music.

Notorious

The Rope – Hidden Cuts

North by Northwest

Psycho (1960)