Last week marked the 40th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's death. Hitchcock's name represents the spirit of a cinematic approach, synonymous with suspense thrillers and pioneers. As the years passed, while countless filmmakers paid tribute to him, the works of art he created remained unmatched.
In 2007, Hitchcock was selected by total Film, an authoritative British film magazine, as the first of the 100 great directors in history. Born in London on 13 August 1899, he was also a talented techie who cleverly blended sex, suspense and humor. In 1919, he began his film career, subtitling silent films at Paramount's famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There, he studied scripting, editing, and art direction, and was promoted to assistant director in 1922.
His first film as a director was 1925's Garden of Joy, an Anglo-German co-production in Munich. This experience, combined with his experience as an assistant director at German UFA Studios, helped shape the expressionist character of his films in terms of visual design and themes.
In 1926, the self-written and directed suspense film "The Tenant" became the work that established his filming style, and in 1929, Hitchcock made his first sound film "Blackmail", which was loved by the audience and praised by film critics. During this period, his career as a director in the UK was extremely successful. In 1939, Hitchcock went to the United States to begin his film career in Hollywood.
In 1940, he made the film "Butterfly Dream", which marked the success of the golden age of cinema belonging to Hitchcock. He has been in the international film industry for more than half a century, directing a total of 59 films and more than 300 TV series in his lifetime, most of which take people's tension, anxiety, snooping, fear, etc. as narrative themes, leaving many heirlooms, but at that time, this new film method was also resisted and criticized by some mainstream filmmakers, so he did not win an Oscar, but his contribution and influence in the history of film development are obvious to all.
His artistic style has had a profound impact on a generation of directors, including French director François Truffaut, American directors Stephen Spielberg, David Ritchie and Claude Chabrol.
The American Film Institute selected AFI's 100 Best Thrillers of the Decade, and its list of 100 greatest thrillers in the past century includes several Hitchcock directors, and the first seven include three Hitchcock works.
No one in the film industry is better at storytelling than Hitchcock. Screams in the bathroom, black birds circling, the smiling gaze of the mentally ill... Hitchcock's classic scenes in the history of cinema are impressive and set an excellent standard line for thriller films. Many of the film narrative techniques created by the shrewd director are still regarded today as the most effective and emotionally impactful film models.
So what defines Hitchcock's style, that has to be his skill. There are all kinds of very famous scenes in his work, and when I think of Hitchcock, those stunning four-seat shots immediately come to mind, not necessarily because of what the scene says, but often because of how the scene was shot.
The shower scene in Horror is not remembered because of the murder scene, but because of its editing skills, and although the dagger is not seen in the picture, the effect is shocking. That's why he's deeply involved in the essence of storytelling, that if anything is just to set off something else, then aesthetics itself may not be groundbreaking, but Hitchcock's insistence on an aesthetic sensitivity disrupts this scriptivity, which is where the vitality of his work lies.
All of Hitchcock's films show what they should look like, not necessarily the final film effect is exactly what the film director wants to present, these decisions made to advance the narrative, he uses the best narrative method, and none of the choices in his work feel random or unintentional. Hitchcock would orchestrate the strongest single emotion he could capture at the time.
There is a scene in Blackmail where the character is worried about being accused of being a murderer, so he makes the only part of the entire dialogue that the audience can hear is the "knife" content.
There's also the movie "Hot Hands Destroying Flowers", where the male character sits at the dinner table, which is a subjective shot, after which he looks directly at the camera. This is the heart of the film.
Compared to other directors, Hitchcock basically makes a living by interacting with the audience, such as a passage promoting "Horror": "Except for 'Nobody', no one can enter the cinema after the opening of each "Horror", which of course is to make you better watch "Horror", we only care about your viewing experience." 」 ”
Hitchcock's works have always emphasized the concept of space, he always takes into account the passivity of the picture, so that the distance between the audience is getting closer and closer, so that we have a sense of crisis. Remember the scene in "Horror" when Norman Bates and the detective talk, the distance between the picture and the audience is uncomfortably close, and the opening scene of "Horror", the close-up of the eyes, Hitchcock let the audience observe closely, so daring operation makes the audience feel timid.
In this way, Hitchcock did know how to interact with the audience, and in movies, the audience is always interacted with, and in many films, it is rare for the character to look directly at the camera.
The shot itself is an excellent metaphor for a scene in Flock of Birds when all the women are looking at the characters, and all the women in the town blame the new female individual, which is also Hitchcock's use of archetypal characters.
Regarding Hitchcock's lifelong relationship with the audience, he has several cinematic techniques and through these techniques to produce attractive cinematic images.
Rear Window is considered one of Hitchcock's best films and one of the greatest films in film history. The film is known for its delicate camera movements and themes about voyeurism, about peeping and being spied on. Rear Window is often classified as a thriller, but actually includes multiple genres in the film narrative. This indie story takes place in the only scene and perfectly presents what Hitchcock called pure cinema.
The apartment windows of the whole neighborhood are like screens showing various types of movies, dramas, musicals, horror movies, and so on. In one of the apartments, a middle-aged woman lives alone, having dinner with her imaginary lover, yet a bad date makes her suicidal thoughts. Her story contains all the elements of a drama film.
And the story of the other apartment is like a musical, about a struggling composer who eventually succeeds by sacrificing sleep. There is also an apartment that is the focal point of the entire film, where the husband is suspected of murdering her wife in the apartment and cutting her body to pieces, essentially a real horror movie.
Rear Window is an excellent film work, it is a great thriller, but it also contains continuous multi-layered, including the exploration of different types in its micro-narrative.
The first shot of the film is entirely based on visual language to tell the story, and the whole shot does not have a single line. Because Hitchcock treats the camera as the viewer's eye, it guides the viewer's curiosity and allows the audience to discover for themselves how the story develops. Hitchcock prefers to use visual language than dialogue, in part because he has directed nearly 12 silent films, and he doesn't fully accept the simultaneous sound of the film.
"For me, they're what I call visual character dialogue, and visual language has nothing to do with art in film." For him, character dialogue is just another ordinary voice. But that doesn't mean hitchcock's films don't have dialogue; on the contrary, important message subtexts are still visually conveyed to the audience.
About the difference between shock and suspense. "A suspenseful story is about giving the audience plenty of information before you start telling the story. Tell the audience that message, and they'll scream and say, 'Get out of here!' ’。 Hitchcock preferred to let the audience know more than the characters, so that the audience began to worry about the outcome, which was suspense. Suspense makes the audience feel like a needle in a haystack, and when surprise or shock appears again and again, "the audience will continue to be shocked for five seconds."
Unlike the shock that dissipates quickly, suspense can extend emotions to minutes or even longer through the emotional engagement of the audience. Suspense is probably the most important cinematic approach in Hitchcock's directorial career, and unlike other films that turn the audience into objective bystanders, Hitchcock's films not only appeal to the audience, but also draw the audience to actively tap into the fears behind the story and characters.
Hitchcock clearly embodies his film principle: there is and only one coincidence, and usually at the beginning of the film. Coincidence drives the plot forward, laying the groundwork for the plot, and from this moment on, the film progresses along the protagonist and the difficulties he faces.
Tell the story in visual language, think of the movie as a silent film (it's best not to let the characters tell the audience information); use suspense to keep the audience engaged, give the audience more information than the characters, so they can worry about what the result is; don't use more than one coincidental event in the movie, and let the characters' own actions drive the story. This is the most classic shooting method in Hitchcock's films.
More than any other director, Hitchcock is more than an author director, and whenever the camera moves or we focus on a body part or something, it is never just a design for the structure of the film, but more like Hitchcock is wandering around, and the viewer can see what he sees as if the camera is an extension of him.
Hitchcock in the newspaper in "A Lonely Boat in the Fury Sea"
Hitchcock in Young Girls
Hitchcock reading in Blackmail
Hitchcock reading a newspaper in The Overseas Commissioner
More interestingly, Hitchcock always liked to appear in his films as a minor character, but admittedly, he creatively told us what it means to be an author-director, and in his films we can see obvious developments and changes, but they still retain Hitchcock's style.
Thirty-Nine Steps and Berserk are basically two extremes, but the viewer can still see that they are Hitchcock's films, because in them you can always see his superb approach that can constantly trigger artistic change, and his philosophy of prioritizing visual grammar in film, which means that he can dig more objective ways to tell the story. And he seems to have been challenging himself in this regard, and it is clear that he will not easily switch film techniques unless he has reached the level of proficiency in the techniques he is currently using.
Hitchcock shot color films for nearly a decade, but just after he made a film that used color as the core of the story ("Horror"), he immediately made black and white films because he always knew exactly what he was doing, he was proficient in the process, and he was able to integrate his aesthetic into the story itself. That's why he's a pure film director.
Hitchcock had a very peculiar theory of film, the more second-rate the script, the more able to remake classic movies, and those film scripts based on famous books turned out to be mostly unpopular films. This may be where Hitchcock is clever.
Hitchcock once said: "I have a strong interest in suspense all my life, which is a special kind of piety and obsession. It won't surprise thousands of fans, who share my passion for suspense fiction. ”
Hitchcock's filming method has the characteristic of unfolding layer by layer, giving the audience the illusion that the story is unfolded by itself, which is a precise design to show the process of exploration. In North by Northwest alone, there are several times when the story unfolds further. Even if his work only looks at the surface, only at the shallowest narrative part of the work, it is still valid.
Exaggerated graphics and stunning sound effects were not important to hitchcock. The runaway world, the desperate life, this dark and oppressive atmosphere is the main environment of Hitchcock's films.
People are reluctant to express their innermost thoughts, always trying to find clues in each other's eyes, and communication has even become irrelevant, because Hitchcock has used his camera to guess the most sensitive and subtle emotions and desires in each character's heart.
Although he is a master of suspense, he also has something to fear. Hitchcock once said, "I'm afraid of eggs, no, I'm sick." Round, little thing without a hole, have you ever seen anything more disgusting than a broken egg? ”
He did not go to any professional film school, but many of his film techniques were not only compulsory for academics, but also borrowed from many commercial films, and he used a cleverly structured twisting thrilling story, but there was no lack of black humor scenes of the "Hitchcock mode", which attracted the attention of countless audiences.
Byron once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: one who writes about his life, and one who writes about his fantasies. Obviously, this law applies to all artistic creations. Undoubtedly, Hitchcock belongs to the latter.
Although the great director Hitchcock did not win the Academy Award for Best Director, of course, his achievements do not need a best director award to prove, after the washing of time, the love of hundreds of millions of viewers is the highest reward.
No director has ever dominated a certain genre as he has mastered thrillers, and Hitchcock, who is good at "scaring" audiences on screen, is a veritable "master of horror."