A filmmaker is usually
the director whose movies are characterized by a filmmaker's creative influence.
History of film as the
history of Auteurs
•Like Artists
•Original work
•Creative Control
•Personal film language
•Auteurs often start
the conventions of genre, but do not follow them
The technical
competence of the director
•Expressionist
lighting
•Story telling
visually in silent era
•Use of the subjective
camera
•Dolly zoom
•Clever use of montage
and cutting to create tension in spite of the production code (1939-60)
1920s
•It was around 1920
when Hitchcock joined the film industry, he started off drawing the sets (Since
he was a very skilled artist)
•Continued his
apprenticeship alongside Graham Cutts at Gainsborough.
• In 1925, studio head
Michael Balcon dispatched Hitchcock to Germany
•Saw firsthand the
work of masters like F.W. Murnau
F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu
The lodger 1927
The Lodger Clip
The technical competence of the director
•The dolly zoom is an unsettling
in-camera special effect that appears to undermine normal visual perception in film.
•A dolly counter zoom
is also variously known as:
•Back Zoom Travelling
•Smash Zoom" or
"Smash Shot"
•Vertigo zoom
•The " Hitchcock zoom" or the " Vertigo effect"
•"Hitchcock
shot" or "Vertigo shot
•A " Jaws shot"
•A "zido"
•A "zolly"
•"Telescoping"
•A
"contra-zoom" or "trombone shot"
•Push/pull
•A Stretch shot
•More technically as forward
zoom / reverse tracking or zoom in / dolly out
The director's distinguishable personality
(style)
•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 Stewart , 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.”
Suspense
•Suspense is generated
when the audience can see danger his characters cannot see…
•"There's no
terror in the bang of the gun, only the anticipation of it."
•his earlier work
could create vivid terror in the mind of the viewer with very little spatter on
the screen.
Expressionism
Hitchcock films are
not concerned with realism or naturalism
He is interested in
story telling and evoking emotional responses in his audience
“Give them pleasure
the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare”
Interior meaning
•1938 Hitchcock leaves
Gainsborough studios to work in America
•David O Selznick
introduces him to pyschoanalyis
•They make
(Rebecca,1940) (Spellbound, 1945), (Notorious, 1946)
Themes that are
revisited
• ordinary people
caught up in extraordinary events,
• mistaken identity,
• espionage,
• murder and madness.
• sly wit and moments
of macabre humour,
• strong sexual
themes,
• explorations of the
darkest corners of the human mind
• always
“Hitchcockian” suspense.
Critique of the auteur
It presents a canon of
films made by ‘elites’ (many male auteurs)
It disguises the work
of others (cinematographer, art director, screen writer, editor, sound
technicians …)
It offers a universal
view of quality
It is a capitalist
device by selling a film by virtue of it’s director
The Death of the
author (Barthes, 1977)
“The explanation of
a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were
always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the
fiction, the voice of a single· person, the author 'confiding' in us.”
Barthes 1977
“We know that to give
writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the
reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
Website dedicated to
Hitchcock’s work - http://www.alfred-hitchcock-films.net/
Hitchcock explains about cutting
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG0V7EVFZt4&feature=related
Hitchcock interview from 1964 (part 1) - showing his belief that pure cinema should be visual - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydvU64L758c
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