The document discusses Alfred Hitchcock as an auteur filmmaker. It outlines key aspects of auteur theory including a director having creative influence, personal film language and style. It examines Hitchcock's technical skills like use of lighting, montage and camera techniques. It explores his recurring themes of suspense, voyeurism and blondes. It also notes critiques of auteur theory for ignoring contributions of others and presenting a universal view of quality films.

2. The Auteur
Hitchcock
“Good evening,
Ladies and
Gentlemen…”

3. What is an auteur
• A filmmaker usually the director whose
movies are characterized by a filmmaker's
creative influence

4. Cahiers du Cinema
http://www.moviemags.com/main.php?title=CAHIERS
%20DU%20CINEMA&etos=1956
• Andre Bazin

5. History of Film as the history of
Auteurs
• Like Artists
• Original work
• Creative Control
• Personal film language
• Auteurs often start the conventions of genre,
but do not follow them

6. Notes on the 'Auteur' Theory by Sarris
1962 (American)
• the technical competence of the director
• the director's distinguishable personality
(style)
• and interior meaning.

7. The technical competence of the
director
• Expressionist lighting
• Story telling visually in silent era
• Use of the subjective camera
• Dolly zoom
• Clever use of montage and cutting to create
tension in spite of the production code (1939-
60)

8. 1920
• It was around 1920 when Hitchcock joined the
film industry, he started off drawing the sets
(Since he was a very skilled artist)
• Continued his apprenticeship alongside
Graham Cutts at Gainsborough.
• In 1925, studio head Michael Balcon
dispatched Hitchcock to Germany
• Saw firsthand the work of masters like F.W.
Murnau

9. A scene from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu.
1922

10. The Lodger 1927

12. The Lodger 1927
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52gSej7y
_E

13. Subjective Camera Shots Champagne
(1928)

14. The technical competence of the
director
• The dolly zoom is an unsettling in-camera special effect that appears to
undermine normal visual perception in film.
• A dolly counter zoom is also variously known as:
• Back Zoom Travelling
• Smash Zoom" or "Smash Shot"
• Vertigo zoom
• The " Hitchcock zoom" or the " Vertigo effect"
• "Hitchcock shot" or "Vertigo shot
• A " Jaws shot"
• A "zido"
• A "zolly"
• "Telescoping"
• A "contra-zoom" or "trombone shot"
• Push/pull
• A Stretch shot
• More technically as forward zoom / reverse tracking or zoom in / dolly out

16. I look up, I look down

17. Cutting and Montage
• “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut
out?”

18. the director's distinguishable
personality (style)
• Expressionism – form evokes emotion
• Cameo appearances of the director
• Narrative is often visual rather than told through
dialogue
• Continuous of certain actors (Cary Grant, James
Stewart , Tippi Hedren, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine)
• Obsessive use of the blonds
• Suspense

19. • “Blondes make the best victims. They're like
virgin snow that shows up the bloody
footprints.”

21. Suspense
• Suspense is generated when the audience can
see danger his characters cannot see…
• "There's no terror in the bang of the gun, only
the anticipation of it."
• his earlier work could create vivid terror in the
mind of the viewer with very little spatter on
the screen.

22. Expressionism
• Hitchcock films are not concerned with
realism or naturalism
• He is interested in story telling and evoking
emotional responses in his audience
• “Give them pleasure the same pleasure they
have when they wake up from a nightmare”

23. Voyeurism

24. Trauma

25. Voyeurism

26. Doubling of blondes, uncanny likeness

27. • Scottie: “Their true name is Sequoia
sempervirens—always green, ever living.”

28. “Suicide of Madeline”

29. Living through a break down

30. Judy – an accidental meeting

31. Judy/Madeline lives again

32. Transformation is complete

33. Colour is used in an expressionistic
way
• See film clip of Hitchcock
• “Always make the audience suffer as much as
possible.”

34. Cameo of the director

35. interior meaning
• 1938 Hitchcock leaves Gainsborough studios
to work in America
• David O Selznick introduces him to
pyschoanalyis
• They make (Rebecca,1940) (Spellbound,
1945), (Notorious, 1946)

36. Collaboration with Salvador Dali

37. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald
Spoto
• Bird’s-Eye View
• The Birds. They are the most prominent motif
in Sabotage, and they appear in Young and
Innocent (1938), The Lady Vanishes (1938),
Jamaica Inn (1939), and Saboteur, and
ominously presage the action in Psycho.

38. The Birds as harbingers of doom
(1963)

40. Self-Proclaimed fears
• “I am scared easily, here is a list of my
adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2:
policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next
movie will not be as good as the last one.”

41. Themes that are revisited
• ordinary people caught up in extraordinary
events,
• mistaken identity,
• espionage,
• murder and madness.
• sly wit and moments of macabre humour,
• strong sexual themes,
• explorations of the darkest corners of the human
mind
• always “Hitchcockian” suspense.

42. Classic films
• Gerald Mast "The best American films of the
present (and of the future), like those of the
past, can and will succeed in transcending
their immediate temporal, commercial,
technological, and cultural limitations... “
(1981, p45)

43. Critique of the auteur
It presents a canon of films made by ‘elites’
(many male auteurs)
It disguises the work of others
(cinematographer, art director, screen writer,
editor, sound technicians …)
It offers a universal view of quality
It is a capitalist device by selling a film by virtue
of it’s director

44. The Death of the author (Barthes,
1977, p143)
• The explanation of a work is always sought in
the man or woman who produced it, as if it
were always in the end, through the more or
less transparent allegory of the fiction, the
voice of a single· person, the author
'confiding' in us.

45. Barthes 1977 p148
• we know that to give writing its future, it is
necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of
the reader must be at the cost of the death of
the Author.

46. • http://www.alfred-hitchcock-films.net/Lodger-1926-1927.htm
• The Lodger Clip from YouTube
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52gSej7y_E
• Website dedicated to Hitchcock’s work http://www.alfred-hitchcock-films.net/
• Hitchcock explains about CUTTING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG0V7EVFZt4&feature=related
• Hitchcock interview from 1964 (part 1) showing his belief that pure cinema should be visual
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydvU64L758c
• Dreams designed by Dalí in Spellbound (1945)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxlbgPkxHE
• Find a text on Auteur theory at following:
• http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3185951
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=154265816642125228#
• Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 3d ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational
Publishing, 1981), 450.
•
• The Politics of Film Canons Author(s): Janet Staiger Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Spring,
1985), pp. 4-23 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225428
• Barthes, R (trans. S Heath) (1977) Image, music, text, London, Fontana
•
• Spoto, D (1999) The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock Da Capo Press
•
• Spoto, D 1991 The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures 2 Sub edition