Hitchcock
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen..."
What is an auteur
- A filmmaker usually the director whose movies are characterized by a filmmaker's creative influence
- An individual who
- Aureur French for 'author'
- Politique des auteurs, a manifesto drafted in the 1950s by a group of French film directors and critics
- Celebrated the role of the director as the author of a film
- History of Film as the history of Auteurs - like artists, original work, creative control, personal film language, auteus often start the concentions of genre, but do not follow them
- Auteurs break the rules
Notes of the 'Auteur' Theory by Sarris 1962 (American)
- What makes an auteur...
- The technical competence of the director
- The director's distinguishable personality (style)
- an interior meaning
- Long career beginning in early years of film industry
- Work in Europe and America
- Innovation in film making
- Master of suspense and audience's reception of the film
- Influential in later genres like the American Slasher, Italian Giallo or the psychological thriller
- Inspuired by avant-garde expressionism, surrealism, but films still attracted mainstream audiences
- French New Wave acknowledged him as an auteur
- He worked in a time when we didn't have sound and had to convey visually
- Expressionist lighting
- Story telling visually in silent area
- Use of the subjective camera
- Dolly zoom
- Clever use of montage and cutting to create tension in spite of the production code (1939-60)
- It was around 1920 when Hitchcock joined the film industry
- Starts off as an art director
- He is a very skilled artist
- Worked for a film company in Britain called Gainsborough
- Known as an expressionist studio
- In 1925 they send Hitchcock to Germany
- The film Nosferatu 1922 about emotion and suspense, frightening film
- The Lodger 1927 - One of his first films set in London
- Shadows across the face inspired by European visual arts and cinema
- Someone seeing their lover through the bottom of the champagne glass kissing someone else
- Putting yourself as another character in the film
- Peering through a hole - this was a technique of Hitchcock's
- Vertigo zoom
- Telescoping
- Shown in a film called Vertigo - seen as his masterpiece
- Used to show a man's fear of heights
- "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?" Hitchcock
- Psycho 1960 storyboard - Drawn by Hitchcock
- Fragments everything
- Couldn't show naked bodies, blood etc
- Murder shown in shower
- Expressionism - Form evokes emotion
- Cameo appearances of the director
- Narrative is often visual rather than told through dialogue
- Continuous of certain actors (Cary Grant, James Stweart, Tippi Hedren, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine)
- Obsessive use of the blonds
- Suspense
- "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."
- When the hair is up it shows sexual repression and when the hair comes down it shows relaxation and relief
- Generated when the audience can see danger his characters cannot see
- His earlier work could create vivid terror in the mind of the viewer with very little splatter on the screen
- Hitchcock films are not concerned with realism or naturalism
- He is interested in telling a story and evoking emotional responses
- Famous film
- Hitchcock's Mona Lisa
- Stylistically and thematically you can tell it is a Hitchcock film
- Vision, sight, trauma, the mind and the effects of events on an individual
- Idea of madness
- Voyeurism
- Subjective point of view - we see her back as if someone is watching her
- "Madeline" profile and blonde hair
- Watching her through doorways and shops
- Doubling of blondes, uncanny likeness
- Through the film she is doing her hair very much like the painting
- She jumps in to the river
- Bought flowers from the flower shop and then she is saved by Scottie
- Scottie "Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens - always green, ever living."
- Suicide of Madeline - He has lost this woman that he has been watching
- He begins to descend into madness
- To evoke the irrational mind he has used colour filters to create surreal world
- The meaning of the tree forever living - woman dressed in green which is very significant and looks like Madeline
- Idea of rebirth
- Through the film he transforms Judy into Madeline
- Colour is used in an expressionistic way
- Hitchcock is in the film for a short amount of time
- 1938 Hitchcock leaves Gainsborough studios to work in America
- David O Selznick introduces him to psychoanalysis
- They make Rebecca 1940, Spellbound 1945 and Notorious 1946 which is about a spy
- He collaborated with Salvador Dali
- He evokes the idea of the eyes visually
- Bird's eye view
- To convey fear and doom
- Crows pecking people to death
- Dial M for Murder - introduces birds here too - very symbollic
- He is scared of small children, poilicemen, high places and that one of his movies won't be as good as the last one
- Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events
- Murder
- Mistaken identity
- Sexual themes
- Macabre humour
- Always 'Hitchcockian" suspense
- Interested in gender and spectators
- Presents a canon of films made by 'elites' (many male auteurs)
- It disguises the work of others
- Offers a universal view of quality
- It is a capitalist device by selling a film by virtue of it's director
- His wife worked on every film so surely she should take some credit
Louis B Mayer - Idea of an auteur is an illusion
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