Hitchcock, suspensetik harago



Beyond suspense

Introductory text

Known as a master of suspense, the work of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) goes beyond stereotypes. Much has been written about the director, considered one of the most brilliant artists of the 20th century, and if more than 35 years after his death he continues to be difficult to categorize, no one doubts the sheer visual fascination of movies like Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho and the power of their imagery, which have become veritable icons of modernity.

Hitchcock was one of the most successful directors of his time, but he knew how to combine the demands of commercial success with the development of a body of work marked by his own style based on a spirit and approach repeated in film after film. The key to his style was can be found in his idea of the role to be played by the director, controlling every phase of the production –rare in the motion picture industry at the time–, from the choice of plot to the marketing of the finished film. Nevertheless, recognition of Hitchcock as an artist only began in the 50s, through the efforts of French critics. Since then, interpretations of his work have proliferated: precursor of non-narrative film, a director exploring above all the psychology of the characters, a filmmaker who captured the essence of the times in which he lived and worked…

This exhibition offers some of the keys to Hitchcock’s style: his command of the techniques of avant-garde art and film; his skill in choosing effective collaborators, from technical specialists and actors to script writers and production designers, who he controlled with an iron fist; the crucial role played by female characters in his work and the complex relationships between the sexes; and of course his ability to evoke the atmosphere and reflect the period in which each of his films was made.

Icon Panel

Icons

For the fifty years that he made movies, Alfred Hitchcock always employed powerful images. Among these, especially striking were details that were greatly magnified by the screen. This was a visual strategy fashionable among the surrealists and photographers of the new objectivity in the 1920s, the same years that saw Hitchcock’s first incursions as a director.

Biography panel

Alfred Hitchcock

He is born in Leytonstone, near London, in 1899, to a Catholic family that manages a chicken and vegetable shop. Upon the death of his father he abandons his studies and takes a job in a telegraph company; he enrolls in various courses, including art history, drawing and painting.

The young Hitchcock writes numerous short mystery stories and humorous sketches inspired by Poe and Chesterton. In 1921 he joins the Famous Players-Lasky production company where for the next three years he fulfills many functions, including writing, art direction and wardrobe, among other tasks.

At 27 he marries Alma Reville, who will be his companion for the rest of his life. Until then he had lived in the family home.

1925

In 1925 he directs his first film, The Pleasure Garden. Critical reception is positive and Hitchcock is proclaimed “a young man with a brilliant mind.”

He directs 24 movies, nine of them silent, in the U.K., and he becomes the most popular director working there.

1939

In 1939 he moves to the U.S., where, in association with David O. Selznick, he directs Rebecca (1940), a big hit which wins the Oscar for Best Picture. He’s nominated for Best Director for the same movie, but fails to win the award, as will occur four more times in his career.

Following Rebecca he’ll direct other celebrated titles, including Saboteur (1942) and Notorious (1946).

1948

Founds his own production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with which he makes two movies Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949). Following poor results at the box office, he decides to return to the protection of the studios.

With Warner Bros. he makes films like Strangers on a Train (1951) and I Confess (1952), with lower budgets than he was used to and which he would have again in the future, but where he was given much more creative freedom.

1953

His most prolific period, as well as his most artistically intense. Directs Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) for Paramount, as well as North by Northwest (1959), his only collaboration with Metro. Budgets are large and creative freedom ample. He strengthens his ties with James Stewart and Cary Grant, his two favorite actors.

In the mid-50s young French critics begin to vindicate his career and praise him as an auteur. In addition, in 1955 the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents –372 episodes of which he directs 20 and introduces each program –makes him one of the most popular figures in the world.

1962

He begins his collaboration with Universal, where he is a major shareholder. The Birds (1963) is a huge success in all senses, while the controversial Marnie (1964) begins a period of commercial, and soon after, artistic decline.

Hitchcock realizes that times are changing and attempts to change his style accordingly, in line with his customary spirit. Kaleidoscope, a project that was never realized, and Frenzy (1972) mark this change. Family Plot (1975) is his last film.

He dies in Los Angeles in 1980.

Filmography panel

Filmography

1925 - The Pleasure Garden

1927 - The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. The figure of Jack the Ripper served Hitchcock to establish his interests, both technically and thematically.

1927 - The Ring

1927 - Downhill. Or the influence of avant-garde film on Hitchcock.

1927 - Easy Virtue

1928 - Champagne

1928 - The Farmer's Wife

1929 - The Manxman

1929 - Blackmail. His first sound film, which includes the famous chase scene in the British museum.

1930 - Elstree Calling

1930 - Juno and the Paycock

1930 - Murder!

1931 - Rich and Strange

1931 - The Skin Game

1932 - Number Seventeen

1933 - Waltzes from Vienna

1934 - The Man Who Knew Too Much. His first commercially successful movie.

1935 - The 39 Steps. The best known of his British films, and the first instance of the innocent man pursued by the police, one of his most frequent themes.

1936 - Sabotage

1936 - Secret Agent

1937 - Young and Innocent

1938 - The Lady Vanishes

1939 - Jamaica Inn

1940 - Rebecca. His first American film, a huge commercial and critical success, and an anomaly in classic Hollywood movies: a story told by a dead woman.

1940 - Foreign Correspondent

1941 - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The only explicit comedy among his movies.

1941 - Suspicion

1942 - Saboteur. In which he tries out many of the techniques that would characterize his movies from then on.

1943 - Shadow of a Doubt. He leaves behind gothic settings for realistic everyday life. Or the dualism of the same character: good and evil.

1944 - Bon Voyage (Short)

1944 - Aventure malgache (Short)

1944 - Lifeboat. His first tour de force: nine people in a boat, the film’s only location.

1945 - Spellbound

1946 - Notorious. The longest kiss in movie history. Objects as expressive icons.

1947 - The Paradine Case

1948 - Rope. His second tour de force: a single shot (only apparently, there were actually nine).

1949 - Under Capricorn

1950 - Stage Fright. His return to London locations.

1951 - Strangers on a Train. The struggle between good and evil, or the close connection between them.

1953 - I Confess

1954 - Dial M for a Murder. His only 3D movie.

1954 - Rear Window. Voyeurism as a source of satisfaction and anxiety. The war between the sexes.

1955 - To Catch a Thief. His most sophisticated film: Europe as opulent setting.

1955 - The Trouble with Harry

1956 - The Man Who Knew Too Much. Curious traveler, his most exotic setting: Marrakesh’s Jamaa el Fna square.

1957 - The Wrong Man. The influence of Italian neorealism.

1958 - Vertigo. His most romantic and autobiographical film; a man without qualities falls for the ideal woman, spurning the real thing.

1959 - North by Northwest. His most frenetic, and fun, movie.

1960 - Psycho. His biggest hit despite being the most modest of his films; an experiment influenced by television.

1963 - The Birds. How to humiliate a self-confident woman.

1964 - Marnie. A harsh version of To Catch a Thief: about a psychotic woman.

1966 - Torn Curtain

1969 - Topaz

1972 - Frenzy. A return to London for his most morbid movie.

1976 - Family Plot. The final divertimento.

Field text 2

The Hitchcock Touch

From early on Hitchcock was aware of his desire to make films in a particular manner, in which the visual style and emotional response of the public were crucial. In the beginning, he drew on a commonly accepted language, that of silent films before 1927, above all German expressionism, which, however, fell into disuse as sound was introduced into movies. Throughout his entire career he remained faithful to this manner of doing things, with distinct nuances, and it was this that marked his uniqueness with respect to his own era. The popular success of the majority of his movies allowed him to maintain this difference as well as a creative freedom which few of his colleagues working for the major studios enjoyed.

Text 2.1

AH: “Movie directors live with their films while they’re being made. They are their children (…). And all this seems to indicate that the most moving films are really artistic when they were created entirely by a single man.”

Text 2.2

The London Film Society was founded in 1927. It showed films by the European vanguard and Hitchcock was a frequent attendee. Very influenced by their experimental techniques, he refused to make comparable films for commercial reasons, though he appropriated their methods for isolated sequences. This was the case in Downhill (1927) for the scene where the hero returns home through the streets of London.

Text 2.3

To determine the rhythm of certain scene before shooting them, Hitchcock sometimes made diagrams with the ups and downs of the action, as he did for Torn Curtain (1966) in the long sequence on the bus, which lasted 12 minutes.

Text 2.4

Even during his American period, Hitchcock always envisaged a distinct way of telling his stories, above all visual, in which the resources he chose were atypical and very personal. In the second version of The Man Who Knew too Much (1956), he had the camera move forward in successive shots while Doris Day’s song was heard, as if the music itself was moving through the space until it reached the kidnapped child.

Text 2.5

Have You Heard? (The Story of Wartime Rumors) was a photo-novel by Hitchcock that had been commissioned by Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, and published in Life Magazine in 1942. Early himself dictated the plot, about the danger of speaking to strangers in time of war. The photos were made by Eliot Elisofon based on instructions from Hitchcock, who chose the locations, narrative structure and cast.

Text 2.6

At the start of his career, Hitchcock created an agency whose only task was to feed the press news relating to himself; a clue as to what extent he controlled promotion down to the least detail. Psycho (1960), which he produced himself, was a masterpiece of publicity, using resources uncommon up until then, such as insisting on his own figure as an icon or the establishment of screenings with a fixed hour instead of the more typical continuous showings.

Texto 2.7

In his struggle against censorship Hitchcock managed various milestones with Psycho: showing a naked breast, even if it was blurred; releasing a poster that for the first time showed a star wearing just a bra; beginning the movie with a long sequence of a semi-nude couple kissing; and, the most offensive for the censors, twice showing a toilet –unseen until then in Hollywood- including the sound of the emptying cistern.

Text 2.8

The most famous scene in all of Hitchcock’s movies is the shower scene in Psycho. Created as an exercise in visual montage, the director originally conceived it without music, using only expressive sounds of various kinds. Only later, during post-production, did Bernard Herrmann suggest adding music. Once the results were compared, Hitchcock opted for the composer’s idea: an unusual piece lacking melody and written solely for the highest tones of the violins.

Field text 3

Women and Men

Relations between the sexes is one of the main themes in the director’s work, and desire one of the central motives in his films, often displayed through voyeurism, especially in Rear Window (1953), his cinematic manifesto. Desire is also shown through complex emotional relationships, as in Vertigo (1958), its maximum expression, with its hero incapable of loving a real woman and enamored of the sublime. At other times, the protagonists must simply confront the impossibility of loving, as in Marnie (1964). There are also frequently filial relationships, like the possessive desire of the son for his mother in Psycho (1960), or the opposite, as in The Birds (1962). This all entailed the creation of erotically charged images, and others replete with tension.

Text 3.1

Ideal and Humiliated Woman

Women came to occupy a crucial role in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. He employed various actresses in succession to embody his female characters, and like Pygmalion, he attempted to convert them into incarnations of ideal creatures. The most emblematic were Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren, all of whom left their indelible imprint on his films from the 1930s to the 1960s. The difference in his treatment of them ranges from the respect and fascination before the image of Grace Kelly and the humiliation suffered by the characters embodied by Tippi Hedren, who was subjected to brutal physical trials during filming.

Text 3.2

The active attitude of the women and the passive attitude of the men in his films was common. The long conversation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest (1959) is the best example among many possibilities. This took place in the dining car of a celebrated train, the 20th Century Limited, whose versatility was exploited by the director in many situations.

Text 3.3

The filming of the final attack in The Birds (1962) took five days, in which Hitchcock had a huge number of birds tossed toward Tippi Hedren’s face and body, putting the actress at grave risk. She resisted stoically until a bird pecked her very close to her eye and she exploded in fury, bringing the filming to a stop. The sequence completed the female character’s journey, from the self-confidence displayed in the first scene at the pet store, to the punishment suffered in the last.

Text 3.4

In Vertigo (1958) Scottie has met successively a woman who doesn’t exist –an actress made up as an ethereal blond with the evocative name of Madeleine –and a real woman –Judy from Arkansas, with dark hair. The former captivated him, but is beyond reach, a mere invention. The latter is in love with him but he’s certain that’s not a good idea.

In preparation for the film, Hitchcock was also creating the character in a manner similar to how Scottie revives Madeleine in the second part: he had Kim Novak try different hair colors, designed the costumes she would wear, instructed her how to move, etc…

Field text 4

Hitchcock and his Time

Hitchcock was always conscious of his time and the artistic and cultural context it offered. His stay in Berlin provided an early contact with the resources not only of expressionist film but of elements employed by the artistic avant-garde. He soon became convinced, however, of the advisability of setting his films in contemporary and familiar surroundings. It was in the 1950s when he began including explicit signs of architectural and visual modernity in an explicit manner. The roster of artists he worked with or was inspired by is enormous: Len Lye, Julio Le Parc, Picasso, Dalí, the Whitney brothers, Balenciaga, Christian Dior… The triumph of modernity among the American middle class was captured in the movies he made in Technicolor, which at time look like they were inspired by the women’s magazines of the period.

Text 4.1

Hitchcock and Architecture

Throughout his English period, Hitchcock employed architectural elements in a mostly theatrical way, making them appear sinister. From Shadow of a Doubt (1943) on, the ordinary began to play a more fundamental role, and other later films like North by Northwest (1959) made explicit references to the architects Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, reflecting the triumph of the International Style. As a director he appropriated its elements for his plots. He specifically asked for postcards from East Germany on which to base the spaces of Torn Curtain (1966), which were created from their imagery.

Text 4.2

Hitchcock and High Fashion

The director always worked with big stars who contributed their glamour, to which he added collaboration with fashion designers like Christian Dior and Balenciaga. Following the World War II, with the rise of the American middle class and the diffusion of a sophisticated style imported from Europe, women’s magazines enjoyed an unexpected surge in popularity. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar combined art with mass culture, a combination that produce an iconography that Hitchcock knew how to reflect better than anyone.

Text 4.3

Sophisticated Europe

The end of World War II brought with it the introduction of a new and sophisticated taste that Americans identified with Europe. To Catch a Thief (1955) is a Hitchcock thriller which borrows elements from the elegant comedies which were so popular during the 50s. It portrayed a Europe enamored of the French Riviera seen through the pages of women’s magazines: luxury, sensuality and sophistication.

Text 4.4

Hitchcock and Artists

Many of Hitchcock’s films, from the very beginning, feature characters with connections to the world of art. In Rear Window (1954), which portrays a microcosm of New York City, the two main characters are a professional photographer and an editor of a fashion magazine, and behind the windows of neighboring apartments live all kinds of artists. And the visual elements so common in the director’s work, from both popular and elite culture, are present in the film.

Text 4.5

Saul Bass was inspired by the work of John Whitney, an experimental artist obsessed with the relation between music and images, and who together with his brother James, had spent years trying to make animated movies featuring painted spirals. Just before the filming of Vertigo (1958), John Whitney had come up with an idea for moving them with a recycled motor from an anti-aircraft gun, fixing the images with a system that some have qualified as a precursor to the application of computers in movies and also Op art, which became trendy in the years following the film. After these experiments both brother, alone and together, followed artistic paths involving spirals.

Text 4.6

The Landscape of Everyday Life

Psycho (1960), which was filmed using techniques from television –a rapid shooting schedule, less sophisticated lighting, small technical crew…– was the most effective fusion between gothic horror and everyday settings. In the film’s first half, the appearance of new cars, a landscape of gas stations and neon, which helped create a feeling of normality, was produced through a magnification of signs which prefigured the aesthetic of Pop Art and large pictorial icons by artists such as Andy Warhol o Roy Lichtenstein.

Text 4.7

Hitchcock and 60s Cinema

After seeing Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), Hitchcock realized that the trend in movies was moving in directions distinct from his. For the music of Torn Curtain (1966) he tried to convince Bernard Herrmann, with whom he had made eight films, to use pop tunes. He sent a telegram to the composer saying as much:

AH: “Unfortunately, we do not have the freedom we would like to have because we are catering to an audience and that is why you get your money and I get mine. The audience is very different to the one to which we used to cater. They’re young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all the European filmmakers where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience…”

Herrmann’s answer was blunt: “Look, Hitch, you can’t outrun your own shadow. You don’t make pop pictures. What do you want with me? I don’t write pop music”.

Text 4.8

His American period systematically ignored by the critics, Hitchcock’s reputation began to grow due to the devotion of various French critics from the mid-50s on. Later, in 1962, the long interview with Truffaut definitively established his role as the complete auteur, who controlled every aspect of his films.

Text 4.9

On the suggestion of a Florida businessman, Hitchcock agreed to cede his name for a magazine, but he played no other role in the venture, creative or otherwise. The project, as was to be expected, meant an even greater expansion of his fame, also linked to other publishing schemes such as the series of children’s books “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.”

Text 4.10

Opening credits played an important role following his period at Paramount. From Rear Window (1954) the opening credits made direct reference to the film’s contents, by way of either real images or artistic interpretations. His collaboration with Saul Bass resulted in evocative visuals through the use of imaginative typography, dynamic graphics and allegorical allusions to the movie.

Field of Collaborators

Collaborators

Since the beginning of his professional career, Hitchcock was convinced that his movies needed to be under the director’s strict control. Nonetheless, he was good at surrounding himself with skilled collaborators and appreciated their contributions. He established relationships with them based on both freedom and control. As Dan Aulier said, referring to the writers Hitchcock worked, many of them professionals with strong character, “they had the freedom to make a Hitchcock film.”

Saul Bass (1920-1996)

The most famous title sequence artist of all time. He made three films with Hitchcock: Vertigo, Psycho and North by Northwest, where he created a dynamism unseen until then, always with his personal style: stylized images, with a marked tendency for synthesis and a powerful thematic evocation with respect to the film’s content. In 1974 he directed his only feature-length movie, Phase IV.

Robert Burks (1909-1968)

Director of photography, he collaborated with Hitchcock on 12 films, from Stangers on a Train to Marnie, the only exception during this period being Psycho. He won an Academy Award for To Catch a Thief, in recognition of the movie’s sumptuous colors and atmosphere. Burks was a multi-faceted cinematographer, able to carry off both the enveloping landscapes of The Trouble with Harry and the dreamlike ambience of Vertigo.

John Michael Hayes (1919-2008)

Though Hitchcock is not credited, his role in developing the screenplays was crucial. “I’m the writer of the film’s general design. I sit down with the writer and between the two of us we work out the film from beginning to end…Then the writer develops the characters and writes the dialogues.” Hayes, who wrote four consecutive films for Hitchcock, from Rear Window to The Man Who Knew too Much, said of the director, “What made us a good team was the brilliant technique and the visual knowledge that he possessed, and his ego and his conviction; and I think I was able to bring warmth to the characters

Edith Head (1897-1981)

A close collaborator of the director since Notorious, their first film together. From the 50s on she designed the wardrobe for all his movies, a period marked by the sophisticated tone of the costumes, allowing them to be showcased and contributing decisively to the eight Academy Awards she won throughout her career. She won more Oscars that any other woman in the history of film.

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975)

His work on seven of Hitchcock’s movies, plus general consulting on The Birds, which lacked music, brought the composer his greatest prestige, though he also worked with Welles, Mankiewicz and De Palma. Beyond composing the music to accompany the images, contributing the dramatic intensity they demanded, he understood the peculiar character of the British director’s often unorthodox films. It was he who suggested the use of electronic sounds for the soundtrack to The Birds.

Alma Reville (1899-1982)

Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator. She began in the movies as a production secretary and script writer. She received credit on many of her husband’s films up until Stage Fright, and though her actual role in his movies is controversial it’s generally agreed that her opinion was crucial at every stage, from choosing projects to their development and completion.

Field text 5

Behind the Plot: Appearances and Tricks of the Trade

Hitchcock, who never saw his films as a direct reflection of reality, fostered a stylized aesthetic. His movies are built on lavish iconography that aimed to capture the attention of viewers, and he didn’t always give them clear clues to the actual intentions of what they were seeing. Appearances to the contrary, it wasn’t just the form that was crucial to his work, but with growing determination as he got older, it was the diversity of themes that came to occupy a central place in his films. These were never revealed openly, however, but were trusted to suggestion and the effectiveness of rhetoric; a system of sleight-of-hand that had its symbolic roots in brilliant imagery charged with appearances and deceptiveness.

Text 5.1

The Birds (1963) was conceived of and realized as a technical feat, the most ambitious example of the link between the director and the genre of fantastic film. The filming was extremely complex. The attack scenes used thousands of birds, coordinated (some of the birds were trained) or simply supervised by numerous specialists. The final sequence was a composite of 32 distinct shots superimposed on a painted model.

Text 5.2

Despite its success, Rebecca (1940) was an eccentric film: a story told from the viewpoint of a dead woman, a never seen but always present ghost, which begins with a long introductory tracking shot while the voice of Rebecca describes Manderley, a large country home which in reality was a scale model.

Text 5.3

For the scene in the British Museum in Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock used the Schüfftan process.

AH: “You see, there was never enough light in the British Museum, so we used what is known as the Schüfftan process. You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some pictures taken with half-hour exposures. I had nine photographs taken in various rooms in the museum and we made then into transparencies so that we could back-light them.”

The process, which was used quite a lot in the film, was the essence of special effects: insert actors into a space where only a small part of the set was real and the rest, the most spectacular part, was painted and reflected in a mirror.

Text 5.4

The successive sets used in Under Capricorn (1949), above all the Australian city’s port and the protagonists’ country mansion, were obvious models that, especially in the latter case, reflected the passing of time through the use of different lighting according to the moment. Stylization was always a creative option for the director, influenced as he was by German expressionism of the 20s.

Text 5.5

In a cinematographic context that was tending more and more toward realism, with filming in actual outdoor locations, in his later movies Hitchcock allowed himself to emphasize the more stylized aspects, featuring obviously artificial elements that bewildered critics and gradually alienated audiences. Clear examples are the theatrical sets used in Vertigo (1958), Marnie (1964) and Torn Curtain (1966).

Text 5.6

From 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog on, Hitchcock decided to appear in his own films. What at the beginning was a necessity, replacing an extra, with time became a game, a knowing wink to viewers who looked for the appearance; this is why he declared that he preferred it occur toward the beginning of the film. Critics have passionately debated whether or not these appearances held some hidden meaning. His last appearance was in his last movie, Family Plot (1976): a dark silhouette behind the window of the Registrar of “births and deaths.”

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download