For ordinary film fans or professional film researchers, or industry insiders involved in all aspects of film production, the name "Alfred Hitchcock" has almost become part of the gene of film creation and viewing. Born in London, England in 1899, the director has been labeled by countless street-known people, such as "master of suspense" or "fatter than fat", and countless latecomers have followed his "MacGuffin" ideas and tried to imitate his creative intentions in countless genre films. He is an icon of the French New Wave and an object of great interest to cultural scholars, and at the same time appears in his own-led images with a very comedic appearance and a cold-faced funny appearance.
On the occasion of Hitchcock's 120th birthday, the German Turbine Blu-ray label released a set called Horror: Heritage Collector's Edition, featuring eight films, including hitch's classic Horror, which was shot in 1960, and subsequent remakes and inspired related works. The 1960 edition of Horrors in this set is the most complete uncut version of German television. The $800,000 film, which was directly taken from hitchcock's TELEVISION series, not only shocked audiences at the time, but also became a psychoanalytic model for thriller films decades later, many of which are classic scenes that are the shooting and editing bible of many creators. Its full version is still included in the publication plan this time, which in itself proves the important classic status of "Horror".
【Youth】
As we face all the "great directors" in the history of world cinema, we must admit that behind the "greatness", there must be irreplaceable growth experience and frustration process as a support. Born on August 13, 1899 in London, England, Hitchcock was the third child in the Catholic family, and in this Catholic family, the strict discipline of the younger Hitchcock by his father, who was a fruit merchant at the time and an older brother and sister who was more than 7 years older than him, formed a gap in his communication.
Whether it is Hitchcock's own memories or the rumors heard by biographers, his childhood was a mixture of deep impressions of the family's main business and Mass scenes and insurmountable barriers to the outside world. Being beaten by a priest at school and detained by the police for five minutes became the key to interpreting the "perverted" details of Hitchcock's childhood and later works, and it was also a source of fear that gradually accumulated in his heart. He is a child who feels lonely and locks his heart, but it does not mean that he is an autistic person, on the contrary, he has developed his keen observation of the world and his thick and thin style.
As a young man, Hitchcock became interested in and delved into plays, films, paintings, etc., and at the age of 20 published his first novel, "Narcotics", in the journal of the Henry Telecommunications Company, where he worked, in a series of homicide-like scenes that constituted the dream of a woman during the process of tooth extraction.
This may have been the earliest germ of Hitchcock's "authorship", and his career as a technician at a telecommunications company did not last long before he jumped ship to Lasky Star as a subtitle designer. At a time when British cinema was still at a low ebb in the silent film era, Hitchcock absorbed a lot of film concepts from predecessors such as Griffiths and practiced them in the design of silent film subtitle cards. In fact, from the beginning of the film, Hitchcock did not aspire to be a director, but the strong desire for art itself must urgently push him forward at the right time.
Hitchcock made his debut in the film industry with "Always Tell Your Wife" as an assistant director, and was appreciated by the producer Michael Bowen, in 1923 he joined the fan company Bauken-Saville-Katz Company, as an assistant director of several films such as "White Shadows" and "Villains", went to Germany and other places to shoot films, tasted bitterness, and repeatedly made up the pot for the unreliable director Katz, showing excellent ability to control the filming scene, and also learned the image modeling method from expressionism from the German film of the Weimar period This later appeared repeatedly in his films.
At this stage, he successfully became engaged to the editor Alma, the woman he had been his first love for and had accompanied him for almost every rest of his career.
【Getting better】
Beginning with the filming of Garden of Joy in 1925, Hitchcock became an official film director. The feud between the two pairs of men and women in "Garden of Joy" and the Middle Eastern style scene completed in the Mediterranean Sea present a very obvious Heath's interest, and the shot of the girls running down the spiral staircase at the beginning of the film, the picture content and shooting angle, are very "voyeuristic" interest, which is also an important theme of later Heath's films. Filmed in 1926, "The Lodger", based on the setting of innocent people being misunderstood as murderers, borrowed from the German style of hanging rail shooting, softened the method of handling horror scenes and simulating the psychological imagination of the characters, and played the great charm of silent film images, although it was almost hidden, the film finally received the evaluation of the British media after the internal screening that "may be the best film ever produced by the British".
1927 was a milestone in Hitchcock's life, the release of The Lodger (with the previous work "Garden of Joy", "Mountain Eagle") was released, married Alma, entered a relatively stable period of film creation, and received a warm welcome from the British audience, at the same time, a quiet game began: a passer-by with his back to the camera in "The Tenant" was Hitchcock himself, and the audience at this time still did not realize that he would see himself passing by in almost all Heath films in the future.
In the years that followed, in works with different themes and styles, such as "Downhill Road" and "The Man on the Isle of Man", Hitchcock continued to develop his own creativity, and also experienced ups and downs at the box office, and he even tried to make a more pure comedy, which became more and more intense after he switched to the British International Pictures Company, which had a strong commercial smell. In the transition from silent to sound films, Hitchcock's work gave the impression of being basically inconsistent, neither mediocre nor astonishing, until the birth of Blackmail in 1928. The most famous scene in the earliest sound film in the history of British cinema is the synchronization of the "knife" in the heroine's mouth and the "knife" in the picture, and Hitchcock consciously collides with the picture, stimulating the audience's sensitive nerves. The era of sound films also brought new business opportunities, and he even made a German version of the same content after the filming of "Murder", which promoted the release of the film in Europe.
After several famous adaptations and films depicting middle-class life, 1934's "Catch the Dead" and 1935's "Thirty-Nine Steps" fully proved Hitchcock's strength in the field of suspense genre films, the former fusing scenery, humanities and "last-minute rescue" style thrilling reversals in one furnace, the latter placing the suspense background in the grander European international relations, with the help of the protagonist's escape process, showing the audiovisual charm of the film. Many of the bridge sections in "Thirty-Nine Steps" have become classics for later generations, grafting the shouts of women and the chirping of trains, and the focus of the camera is inadvertently shifted to the core clues of the play. The key character "Memory Master" in the film who carries key information is even more loaded with his childhood memories. Later, in "The Spy", "Young ignorance" and the highly prestigious "The Missing Lady", the ambiguous role of the boundary between good and evil and the decent protagonist who is guilty of moving forward appeared repeatedly, becoming an important feature of Hitchcock's mature works in the British period.
【Heyday】
Viewers familiar with Hitchcock will naturally appreciate the modified "McGuffin" concept and the famous "bomb under the table, the audience knows it will explode, but does not know when". The most direct manifestation is probably in 1936's "Sabotage", the little boy with a film box containing a time bomb walking the streets, constantly blocked by the world of flowers and flowers, the audience knows the existence of the bomb, seeing the boy walking on the streets of London, can't help but beat his heart for his fate. While creating tension, the film evokes the conditions of the working class in Britain and the shadow of war. The tragedy in the film is controversial, and Hitchcock's film implies a certain factor of instability, whether it is his personal, or the anxiety of the European continent or even the world.
After the filming of the unpleasant Jamaica Inn, in March 1939, Hitchcock, who had become the backbone of british cinema, left England and began working with producer David Selznick. The relationship between the two began as early as the 1920s, and David's father was his best friend.
In the nearly forty years since, Hitchcock has dedicated many classic works that are admirable, such as "Horror", "Rear Window", "Bird" and so on. His first two Hollywood films, Butterfly Dreams (1940) and Deep Doubts (1941), seem today far more than the actual value of the film, as it seems today that winning the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Actress is far greater than the actual value of the film. Truffaut praised Hitchcock for completing his author's expression under the Hollywood industrial system, and the manor atmosphere in "Butterfly Dream" and the scene of her husband walking up the spiral staircase in "Deep Doubt" resemble some of the designs of his fledgling films. The two films were very different from the conservative style of British cinema at the time, which was what made Hitchcock hate the British film industry the most. Of course, avoiding the direct impact of the Flames of World War II allowed him to make a big difference. More importantly, Hollywood's industrial system and star system have brought the possibility of commercial success for Hitchcock films, such as "Beauty Plan", "Doctor Edward", and "Flowing Night", all starring Ingrid Bergman, of which the dream scene designed by Dali himself in "Doctor Edward" in 1945 directly substituted the complicated spiritual dilemma of surrealism into the film text, making the film not only a star-studded suspense production, but also an important text enough to be included in the modern film review system.
This is Hitchcock's most important film legacy from this period, and many of his works, rich in commercial immediacy, are also worthy of being written into film history and become part of the sequence of "art films". Hitchcock's avant-garde consciousness was revealed in 1948's The Rope: two men killed their friends, put them in boxes, spread tablecloths, and prepared to feast on the guests. The film has two mirrors to the end, complete reproduction of stage scheduling, the technical difficulty is very large, and the relationship between the two male protagonists in the film has triggered countless readings by later generations of commentators.
In the years of working with Selznick, Raidenhua and Warner, although the influence of the film was uneven, Hitchcock earned himself international fame and wealth as a producer and director, and his personal style became clearer. In 1951, the train freak, written by detective novelist Raymond Chandler, was filmed in a less pleasant collaboration, and the significance of the film even exceeded the story itself, and the dual contrast from the characters to the images set in the film actually surpassed Chandler's conception, making the film a veritable "Hitchcock work".
The entire 1950s and the first years of the 1960s were hitchcock's heyday, with Rear Window (1954), Ecstasy (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Birds (1963) all being released during this time. Ecstasy ranked first in the latest list of good films by Sight & Hear magazine in the UK, and the plane chase scene in North by Northwest became a model for scene scheduling. Comparing "Rear Window" and "Ecstasy", it is not difficult to find that the male protagonist played by James Stewart in these two films has a common characteristic, that is, to maintain the existence and motivation of his actions in the film with "peeping". Jeffries in "Rear Window" looks at various people in the building opposite the window every day, peeks at a murder mystery, and the police officer Scotty's watching of the woman he is obsessed with in "Ecstasy" makes the characters fall into a dilemma, and also gives the audience a dreamlike feeling of not knowing where to go, a dizzy animation reality collage clip in the film, with Bernard Herman ("Horror") very swirling spatial music, driving the overall complex expression of the film, becoming the most "obscure" and multi-meaning text in Heath's work.
【Fat Cold Master】
Regarding the intricate infatuation and masochistic relationship between Hitchcock and his blonde "Sea Girl," I wrote a detailed article a few years ago that for these actresses, playing hitchcock's films can be a turning point in their careers, or it can be a nightmare. Biographer John Taylor described him as dedicated and "a devoted husband who never met other women" in his only authorized biography, but also acknowledged that beautiful women in his late works were often abused miserably, from Kim Novak of Ecstasy to Janet Lee of "The Amazing Soul" to Tibby Headley of "Birds", most of the characters played by him, but often ended up in love and completely collapsed. This kind of perverted scene and character mentality is in fact the same as the mystery of the character or event through psychoanalysis or voyeurism in many films, stemming from Hitchcock's deep vigilance against the external environment and the difficult process of carving the work.
At the beginning of each episode of the TV series Hitchcock Theater, in 1971's "Berserk", he presented the slaughter of death with a backsliding shot and silent silence, and even insisted on a cameo appearance in the last film, "Family Conspiracy" (1976), Hitchcock always seemed to try to refresh his creative performance from the inside out, from all aspects. Although some disgraceful deeds in his biography of Donald Spert recorded in his last moments, as if the spirit of Dionysus returned to the light, until the last moment of his life on April 29, 1980, his words "I will retire when I die" still teach people to lament. He considered himself "born a Catholic," but his distrust of the clergy continued throughout his life.
Hitchcock has had a lot of chicken ribs in his directing career, which does not affect his status as a master of suspense. His life's films seem to be in dialogue with the fearful self, he controls his film career by controlling the writers, actors, and audience (even forbidding the audience to leave during the screening of "Horror"), and liberating the darkness of his heart by frightening others. In the end, he became himself: a brave film pioneer that no one could replace, and a "fat and cold master" who specialized in exploring the depths of the human heart.
Author: LoneLy Island Lord
Editor: Wang Xiaoli