In Hitchcock's suspense films, the audience is always told the results of the suspense at the beginning, which makes the cases in his films more willing to focus on those who are suffering from the murder, while the perspective of the external detective is often placed aside. In this way, Hitchcock's film, under the framework of the murder, shows more of a human heart's response.
It can be said that there is suspense in Hitchcock's movies, but it is not the suspense of solving the case, but the suspense of people's interpretation.
Confessions is a 1953 film by Hitchcock, and like Hitchcock's overall cinematic style, the film begins by telling the audience the truth about a murder. The film does not deliberately conceal the truth, but sells the truth to the audience, and the interest of the following film to focus on is to follow up the inner torment of the parties who have grasped the truth in the face of step-by-step investigation.
What the film reflects is that knowing the truth is not a pleasant thing, on the contrary, the truth is often unbearable, and what is more frightening is that the pursuit of the truth often leads the snake out of another truth. This is the chain reaction of the truth, so the unveiling of the truth often forms a domino linkage effect. People even end up with no end in order to prevent this effect, and they do not hesitate to kill the truth in the cradle.
It is in this sense that "Confession" in today's we enter its connotation system, the truth still revealed by the film will always trigger the profound theme of pressing the gourd to play the delay effect of the scoop when it is searched, and it will re-button the door of life and be empowered.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" >, the story routine of "Confession", reversely follows the logic of detection. </h1>
At the beginning of "Confessions", a murder was confessed, and then the party to the murder, Keller, came to Father Logan and confessed his murder to Father Logan, so that a heavy truth was thrown at Father Logan.
Judging from the film's confession, Father Logan was kind to Keller, a German immigrant, and introduced Keller and his wife to work, and Keller also knew this, and this gratitude to Dade was not the reason why he told Logan the truth about his killing.
However, knowing the truth is not a pleasant pleasure. Logan had to bear the heavy pressure that the truth brought to himself.
What is particularly incredible is that as the case is uncovered, Logan is not without motives, because the deceased who is a lawyer uses one of Logan's emotional secrets to blackmail him, so Logan is not without original motives for the death of the lawyer.
In this way, Logan has a motive, and he cannot prove that he did not have time to commit the crime on the night of the crime, so Logan is naturally the number one suspect in the murder case.
What is even more helpless is that Logan, because of his status as a priest, accidentally knows who the real murderer of the murder is, so that he, out of the dual pressure of profession and faith, cannot tell the truth that the confessor confesses to him, and at the same time, because of his suspicious appearance, he pushes himself to the role of the biggest suspect in the murder.
This is the two different character clues that Hitchcock unfolded to us in "Confessions", but they were parallel to the same murder result, and the yin and yang difference at the associated node made the clue of innocent Logan connect to the final murder result, so that Logan was convicted as a murderer in logical deduction.
In general, we will be in the detective drama, because instead of confessing the cause and effect like Hitchcock, but from an external detective perspective, the audience will be induced by the movie, following the pulse of the movie, thinking that Logan is the ultimate murderer, because he has a motive, has time, and thus becomes the most common obstacle in the detective drama.
The author has previously summarized a universal formula for reasoning, as follows:
The first: the trouble-seeking type (unplanned). It refers to an unrelated small factor, which has nothing to do with the main case, but in the accidental time, for accidental reasons, it just happens to bump into the scope of the subject case, thus being taken as the precursor of the main case and inducing misunderstanding. For example, in Sherlock Holmes's first novel, "The Study of Blood Words", the hostess once instigated her son to beat the deceased because of her shameless behavior of hating the deceased, and was considered a natural murderer by the police.
The second type: the dowry type (someone planned). There are two types of this.
The first is the shirking type. The mechanism is as follows: 1. Prove that you are not at the scene and have no time to commit the crime. In Poirot's "Evil in the Sun" and "Massacre on the Nile", the perpetrators are trying to create a false appearance that they are not on the scene. 2. Move the time of the crime. For example, in Poirot's "Diamond of Blood", the murderer has already killed the old man, but through the manual rope, he controls the items in the house and screams with toys to achieve the illusion that the deceased is dead. The passage of time can effectively evade suspicion. 3. The purpose of pretending to be a victim is also to change the time of the crime and cause a change in the time of the crime. This is the most profound kind of blindfold. If you pretend to be a dead person, in fact, people are not dead. One of the best recognized works in Christie's novel, "No One Survives", writes about a person who was killed, who is actually the real perpetrator.
The second is the pass-through type. This type is relatively simple, that is, the murderer finds a substitute for the dead ghost to guide attention. In "The Study of Blood Letters", the perpetrator deliberately left a mysterious organization's "blood letter" symbol on the wall to achieve the purpose of diverting attention.
Comparing this formula, we can see that the story structure of "Confession" is the first type in the formula, that is, the disaster type. Luo Genlai had nothing to do with the case, but because of an accidental factor, there was a logical connection with the case, thus becoming the "antecedent of the main case and inducing misunderstanding." ”
If in the detective film, the antecedent of the main case is hidden, but Hitchcock's film abandons the position of the detective film and directly shows the whole process with the eyes of the parties involved in the case, so this "trouble-seeking" model is used by Hitchcock in reverse, which is Hitchcock like Sun Wukong in the belly of the case, dissecting the truth from the inside to the outside, which is a kind of reasoning logic that cuts inward from the outer layer to the outside under normal circumstances.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, "Confessions" hides another factor that is difficult to open, showing the chain reaction after the truth is revealed</h1>
The difficulty of uncovering the truth is because the unveiling of "this truth" often makes it difficult for the "other truth" to have a hiding place, causing the parties to find ways to block all the truth from blooming, and this is precisely what is worthy of our deep consideration.
This also makes us see that the truth that was thought to be easy to do is often stuck in the way of the truth unsealed by the participation of various factors.
Instead, what we see is that it is often an accidental cause that is revealed, leading to the exposure of another hidden truth.
For example, we can see that in the midst of the epidemic, because of the tracing and tracking of the whereabouts of the parties, more hidden corners of personal lives have been uncovered, which is the domino effect brought about by the dumping of the truth.
The mystery of this thought-provoking and interlocking truth revealed in Confessions is that in a murder case, there is also an unethical mystery of love.
Murder is evil, but stealing is ugly, it is difficult to put into the sun to be examined, so when these two things meet together, they will escape the truth together and be afraid of exposure, which is also the standard setting that will inevitably appear in "Confessions" to juxtapose the murder and theft.
In "Confessions", Logan, when confronted with the suspicion of murder, has to uncover the hidden intention of his other emotion. His private dealings with his wife with a husband are the secrets he has always wanted to hide, but when he has to confess his truth in the face of the murder, he has to encounter this secret emotion.
"Confessions" shows a love story associated with war. Logan and Mrs. Granfour used to be young plum bamboo horses, and they were in love, just as young people often do in this situation, "it is inevitable that a love will happen", originally such feelings came naturally, towards perfection, but a war broke out, Logan bid farewell to his lover and went to the battlefield.
When he returned to China, his former lover had become an adult wife, but he did not know the truth, but had become Mrs. Granfour's lover, and out of the selfishness of love, he did not tell him the truth about the adult wife. The two men wander the wild, and this private affair is discovered by the later deceased in the movie, the lawyer. The lawyer also blackmailed Mrs. Granfour, so that Logan's private affair with Mrs. Granfour became a secret that Logan had to bring out of the water after becoming a murder suspect.
It can be seen that "Confession" does not create more moral accusations in this unruly but reasonable emotion, Mrs. Granfour in the film in order to save Logan, at the cost of telling the truth, and at this time she is the most difficult to face is her husband, but her husband maintains considerable restraint and tolerance in defending his wife, he does not have his wife because of the suspected red apricot out of the wall and fell out of the face, but conformed to his wife's motivation to save her former lover and helped her through the crisis.
In this way, Logan has been attacked by the weak ribs he has been encountering, but with the financial support of Mrs. Granfour, he has successfully passed the most difficult hurdle, it should be said that Logan seems to have turned the corner, even if the date with the wife of a husband seems to make him face the crisis again, but fortunately, he met the courageous Mrs. Granfour and her reasonable husband, and Logan did not lose himself in another emotional obstacle encountered in the process of investigating the truth of the murder.
However, fate seems to be playing tricks on him, and the police once again put him in crisis, because the latest test results show that the deceased was killed within a period of time after he dated his former lover, and Logan still has the possibility of killing.
In this way, after the film finally unravels one truth and covers another truth with unspeakable secrets, it must face the final truth disclosure.
< h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > three, the final murderer in "Confession" is revealed, but it seems conceptual, weakening the depth of the film's performance. </h1>
Logan knew who the murderer was, but he didn't say his name because he had to live up to his work ethic, which was that the confessor was repentant of God, not to him, and he had to hide the truth for the confessor.
The confessional Keller's motive for killing in the film is inevitably a little too simplistic, which is defined as poor and money-seeking, and has to take the risk of killing the lawyer.
Confessions portrays Keller as a representative of utter evil. When he saw the police investigating Logan, he was very nervous, threatened Logan not to tell the truth, and later prepared to kill Logan, and even his wife was tortured by conscience, ready to tell the truth, he actually shot his beloved wife to death, completely blackening the character, with a very obvious facial feature.
In fact, the film can completely redesign Keller's personality characteristics and behavioral dynamics here. In the film, Keller's motive for killing the lawyer is entirely for the purpose of money, but in fact, with the help of Logan, Keller's work is quite smooth, his wife is doing a fairly good job in the church, the family has no worries about food and clothing, there is no need to rob and kill the lawyer.
That is to say, Keller's motive for killing was a lack of credibility. If you change his motives here, Keller learned that the lawyer was secretly blackmailing his benefactor, Father Logan, so he removed one of Logan's threats and hidden dangers for the purpose of repaying Father Engrogan, so that his motives would be justified, rather than becoming a demonic character in the film.
It is precisely because of this dogmatic setting that in the second half of the film, the plot takes a sharp turn, and he blindly kills wildly, without warning, extremely unreasonable, showing that the film only needs to quickly end the plot.
In the creation of the camera, it can be seen that Hitchcock completely bid farewell to the fascination with long shots in the previous film, but used frequent lens cuts to create a rhythm that looked very comfortable.
Let's take a shot and compare it. Even in the same scene, Hitchcock produces a kind of hint and reinforcement of the picture through the cutting of the lens in the same direction from the far to the close-up.
For example, in the following shot, Mrs. Granfour is tidying up the table when her husband appears at the door.
First a long-range shot, and then the same perspective is replaced by a mid-shot, and in these two shots of different depths of field, Mrs. Granfour's movements are coherent, and this same perspective lens cut produces a powerful film rhythm that looks very comfortable.
But if we look closely, these two seemingly coherent shots were not shot at the same time. If we compare the shadows cast by Mrs. Granfour's husband on the door in the film, we can see that the two shots are not coherent, but the director shoots the seemingly coherent shots at different times and then groups them together.
In the following set of shots of Mrs. Granfour's appointment, we also see that the film cuts through the cut, cutting the camera forward, highlighting the main body of the character, it seems to be different in depth of field, it seems to be coherent, but the character is not coherent after a closer look between the two front and back shots, but this subtle difference is difficult to identify in the movie, the overall feeling, or feel that the character is in a coherent and smooth state of motion.
Hitchcock's combination of shots from different scenes produces a relaxed sense of rhythm, which also makes the film focus on the portrayal of the characters, and to get rid of the redundant problems caused by the excessive fascination with long shots in the previous films he directed.
The biggest flaw of "Confession" is the simplistic setting with the black and white of the characters, and the depth of the film is obviously lacking. The moving place in the movie is instead a hidden love story, and the aesthetics of this love will inevitably encounter the sniper of reality in the movie. The movie does not have much interest in discussing how this kind of love will face the barriers of life in the future, and after completing the pursuit of the real murderer, the film has happily completed its suspense setting, and love has only become a passing smoke behind the murder. However, what is worth remembering in the whole movie is precisely the love past created by the soft lens in the movie and the indictment of the war to break the love beautiful point to the end.
However, compared to the suspenseful focus of the whole movie, all of this has become a vassal in the movie. This may be Hitchcock's habitual focus on his suspenseful thrillers, giving up his desire for a more rigorous, grander, and deeper performance of social reality.