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Auteur Criticism: Alfred Hitchcock

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I've taken much too much time with those themes, so I'll speed up through the rest. Sex is present in nearly every Hitchcock film, and he loved to push the envelope with it, as well as with everything else. Just note his censor-defying three-minute-long kissing scene in Notorious, the innuendos in North by Northwest, and the sick obsession in Frenzy. Despite what one might think, Hitchcock often places his women in positions of power or independence. Ingrid Bergman is the psychologist who may be able to cure Gregory Peck in Spellbound; Grace Kelly does all the real work in Rear Window, usually against Stewart's orders, and she also initiates all of the romance; Kelly reverses the tables in Dial M For Murder, killing the man sent to assassinate her. There are as many examples, though, where the woman is in trouble and must be saved by the man, so perhaps this sporadic view of women should be credited more toward general post-war movements (women in noir films tend to be leaders, for better or worse-usually worse) rather than any definite Hitchcockian tendency.

Hitchcock's body of work is one of the consistently finest of any director I've had the pleasure of becoming so well acquainted with (through his films…). There are almost no complete misfires (Under Capricorn comes to mind), a few mediocres, many very good films, and more masterpieces than most directors can claim. Throughout this body of work, comprised almost totally of suspense films, Hitchcock also shows a fear and mistrust of policeman (it's said he had a frightening experience with the police as a child), and poor parental models where any exist at all. In short, he gives short shrift to traditional authority figures. Thus his characters have to figure things out for themselves and take care of themselves. Even the young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt cannot depend on her (for once) loving parents to protect her from Uncle Charlie, the Black Widow Murderer. Roger Thornhill's mother in North by Northwest might be good for getting him away from the police once, but that's about it. Hitchcock's films are about paranoia, but paranoia that turns out to be justified. By making his films so voyeuristic and so personal, he forces us to ask what we would do in the same situation. Would we, if we witnessed a possible murder out our rear window, try to prove that we had, or would we mind our own business? Which would be right? Though Hitch's films are supremely and possibly primarily entertaining, he always includes some thought-provoking questions, if we are willing to ask them.

Besides having the several themes above recurring through his work (which could arguably be attributed to screenwriters, scenarists, etc., though I think Hitchcock was certainly involved in them to some extent), Hitchcock also has a distinctive visual style that can be credited to him alone.

Wide shots that track and zoom into a single face or item are popular (Young and Innocent uses this to good effect in the climactic scene). He likes moving shots in general…the camera is rarely completely stationary and often follows people from room to room, from place to place. What is the point of this? If done properly, this can be more natural than cutting when someone changes rooms-after all, if we're with someone, we don't automatically disappear and reappear in the other room without the transition of walking through the door. But Hitchcock doesn't seem to be otherwise interested in realism. However, we do feel more a part of the action and less like disinterested spectators, and Hitchcock is interested in involving his audience.

He also loves to experiment with technology, testing its limits, just at he tests the limits of propriety. Many of his films use special effects, trick shots, and technological experiments. But these are rarely, if ever, used simply for the sake of using them (although I get the impression that Hitchcock had a childlike glee in doing things that hadn't been attempted before). One of the more memorable single shots in Strangers on a Train is when Bruno shows up at Guy's tennis match and is watching from the audience. Everyone's head is turning back and forth, watching the ball. Bruno, on the other hand, is staring straight at Guy, his head never moving. This is an eye-catching shot, but it also reveals Bruno's singleness of purpose, his never-wavering intent to get Guy to kill Bruno's father. As I mentioned above, in Rear Window, confining the camera to a single room forces us to identify with the barely-mobile Stewart. Rope takes this idea one step further, and places the camera in at a single point, from which it can pivot, but not track. We cannot get away from the fact that the two college boys have killed a classmate and hidden him in the trunk, so close to the point from which we are forced to see the whole movie. The most classic of all is the famous Vertigo tracking zoom, used to show us what Stewart, suffering from vertigo, sees climbing up a steep and winding stairway. This was homaged as recently as Road to Perdition. Nearly all of Hitchcock's eye-catching shots put us in a very specific psychological position, or reveal something about a character's psychosis.

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