Alfred Hitchcock
Known as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock
is a fim maker that pushed back boundaries. To be able to
make a good film you first need to be able to tell a good
story and Alfred Hitchcock was a true giant among all story
tellers. He understood that fear stimulates the imagination
and once you have the imagination of your audience you hold
them spellbound. Hitchcock loved to challenge his own creativity
and took many risks and invented and innovated many cinemagraphic
techniques. In the film Lifeboat, for instance, Hitchcock
stages the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet
manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition
and his trademark signature, his cameo appearances in his
films, was a dilemma, given the limitations of the setting;
so Hitchcock appears in a fictitious magazine for a weight
loss product. Similarly, the entire action in Rear Window
either takes place or is seen from a single apartment. In
Spellbound, two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved
by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to
belong to the character whose point of view the camera took)
and out-sized props for the giant hand to hold: a bucket-sized
glass of milk and a large wooden gun.
Rope, made in 1948, was another technical challenge:
a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single
take. The film was actually shot in 10 takes of ranging from
four and a half to 10 minutes each; 10 minutes being the maximum
amount of film that would fit in a single camera reel. Some
transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object
fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those
points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera
in the same place. Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo contains
a camera technique that has been imitated and re-used many
times by filmmakers. It has become known as the Hitchcock
zoom. One of the more inventive aspects of Hitchcock's devices
is incorporating the number 13 into scenes for its superstitious
nature. For example, in Psycho, Norman Bates first chooses
cabin 3, then turns to cabin 1, for Marion Crane. She is spotted
driving in a car where the license plate numbers add up to
13.
With regard writing and film making Hitchcock
said, "Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon
not make the film at all...I have a strongly visual mind.
I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts. I write
all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then
I don't look at the script while I'm shooting. I know it off
by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at
the score...When you finish the script, the film is perfect.
But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original
conception."
Tim Rees
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