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Techniques of an Auteur | STEVEN SPIELBERG

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David Lynch: Film Auteur or Genre Manipulator? (Video Essay)

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Name at least one director you think might be considered an auteur

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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was an English film director and producer, widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.He was born on 13 August 1899 and died on the 29 April 1980 in Bel Air, California.His films are suspenseful and his films and programs won immense popularity and critical acclaim over a long and tremendously productive career. His films are marked by a macabre sense of humour and a somewhat bleak view of the human condition.

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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was an English film director and producer, widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.He was born on 13 August 1899 and died on the 29 April 1980 in Bel Air, California.His films are suspenseful and his films and programs won immense popularity and critical acclaim over a long and tremendously productive career. His films are marked by a macabre sense of humour and a somewhat bleak view of the human condition.

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Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

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Alfred Hitchcock is a strong believer in pure cinema and its apparent in all of his. Pure cinema is when films focus on having strong visuals to tell stories opposed to extensive dialogue. This is likely due to the fact that he started his career as a silent movie director where the visuals are paramount.

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Hitchcock is an auteur. He often collaborated with the same people when make many of his films. This provided a consistency that is missing from many other filmmakers’ careers. For example, he often collaborated with Bernard Hermann, a brilliant composer, who helped create the scores to Psycho, North by Northwest, and Vertigo. In collaborating with the same people, he is creating a consistency within his filmography that is necessary for auteurism.

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most innovative and celebrated directors in the history of cinema. His style can be recognised immediately when watching one of his films. This exhibit celebrates him as a deserving member of the elite auteur class of directors. by showcasing three of Hitchcock’s most famous films and analysing five major aspects of Hitchcock’s style that make him a successful director: aesthetics, recurring themes and motifs, story composition, audience role, and portrayal of gender roles.

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Hitchcock - Auteur, "The master of Suspense"
His films are mostly thrillers which - suspenseful, features psychologically complex characters and twist endings.
All his films look at the complexities of everyday life.
His characters are your typical American ones who live ordinary lives until things are turned upside down. A lifestyle he had grown accustomed to since moving to America in an earlier part of his career.
The protagonists are always under investigation which links to his childhood when his parents would severely punish him even if it was not warranted.
A tumultuous mother and son relationship is often present
His female characters frequently have a femme fatale-esque quality about them - hints slightly at the film noir genre - women who are both charming and dangerous. They are usually portrayed villainously.
Confession and guilt - prominent themes

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* "The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema" - Alfred Hitchcock

* He preferred the sound, dialogue and music to be secondary with the visuals being front and center

* An english director

*Macabre sense of humour and a bleak view on humans

*Made his own cameos

*Themes evolved around murder, espionage while using deception, mistaken identities and chase sequences to further the plot
Normally an innocent man is frames and he tries to find the actual killer.
Or it's the guilty woman who enmeshes a male portents and ends up destroying him or being saved by him.
Or understanding who the killer is over a few shots

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"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

(Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitchcock loves using suspense in his films. He uses various camera viewpoints, elaborate editing and soundtrack to build it up. Also, Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films.

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Hitchcock films are most often thrillers, pegged as such because of their suspense, psychologically complex characters, and twist endings. He is so well known for creating films of this genre that he has been awarded the nickname ‘Master of Suspense’.

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'Women in peril' were a feature of many Hitchcock films, as they had been in cinema since its early days. Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden (1926), features a woman who falls victim to a deceitful and violent husband, while the victims of the killer in The Lodger are blonde women. Hitchcock himself favoured blonde actresses, and more than one was obliged to bleach her hair for a role. Several actresses complained that Hitchcock could be brutal on set, and he often seems to enjoy watching his female characters suffer.

Although it was during his Hollywood phase that Hitchcock earned the name 'Master of Suspense', he began experimenting with different ways of generating cinematic tension from quite early in his career

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Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over the use of surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth. Hitchcock often used public places as scenes to heighten terror and suspense.

https://youtu.be/_YbaOkiMiRQ Every Hitchcock cameo

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Watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Rear Window is an interesting and somewhat unusual experience.

On one hand you're a passive spectator watching a film about a recently-incapacitated photographer spying on his neighbors out of boredom, but on the other you are an extension of good ol' Jimmy Stewart's intrusive gaze. In essence, you become another person confined to that stuffy old apartment with nothing more than a pair of binoculars and a morbid curiosity that goes a little too far.

But how does Hitchcock put you into that voyeuristic role? That's a question that Matt Draper answers in this interesting video essay.

For all intents and purposes, Rear Window is a film about voyeurism, so it makes sense that Hitchcock's approach to the film would be to force audiences to become voyeurs. And there are a lot of cinematic elements at play in Rear Window that help put audiences into the role.

Set design

The set is designed to give you an easy map to follow of their surroundings. You get a master shot of all of the neighboring apartments that Jimmy Stewart's character can see, so you too can see each player clearly. This allows you to make as much sense of the diegetic world within the film as you would the real world that surrounds you, which is an important element of being a successful voyeur.

Camera movement

Hitchcock's POV shots are classic in this film. The camera movements mimic those of a real person slowly panning over a scene to understand what's going on. These kinds of shots help sell you the illusion of voyeurism, to give you the feeling that you are there in the room with Stewart looking at the goings-on of all of these unusual neighbors.

Shot size

The size of a shot can often indicate the subject's importance. If you move in on a subject, it's like saying, "Hey, pay extra close attention to this thing." So, when this occurs in Rear Window, Hitchcock is trying to communicate that what Stewart is looking at is of heightened importance to him, like a woman putting on clothes or a man seemingly committing murder.

Editing

One often overlooked element that Hitchcock employs in Rear Window turn viewers into voyeurs is editing. Our own Justin Morrow delved into this a few years ago, suggesting that because the film is essentially one "about looking," Hitchcock uses the Kuleshov Effect, something that was well understood by the director, to sell the idea that Stewart's character is constantly looking and observing his surroundings. Morrow states:

Rear Window is yet another great example of how Hitchcock manages to influence and even manipulate his audience into believing and participating in his cinematic experience. By simply using POV shots, clever editing, and camera work, the director transformed his audience from mere spectators into active participants of the voyeuristic exploits of Rear Window's main character.
Rather than an objective POV shot, we are seeing what Stewart sees, so we as audience members become even more voyeuristic than we already are (because movies are nothing if not exercises in voyeurism, in looking into other people's lives).
Source: Matt Draper

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4 Cinematic Techniques Alfred Hitchcock Uses in 'Rear Window' to Turn You into a Voyeur

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This is how the Master of Suspense made audiences become voyeurs whether they wanted to be one or not.

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Hitchcock is often noted for utilizing beautiful young blonde women as his leading ladies.

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Hitchcock’s has been used as an example in favour of the Auteur Theory nu+merous times. That being said one needs to note the paradox posed by such action since he was not given the title of auteur since intellectuals in film during the 50s and 60s noted a number of negative reactions towards La politique des auteurs.

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Hitchcock's films are marked by his mastery of cinematic technique which is exemplified in his use of camera viewpoints, elaborate editing and soundtrack to build suspense. Notorious includes an incredible zoom-in from a high shot to an extreme close-up of a significant plot detail and suspense building inter-cutting of the final scene. In a scene in Blackmail, Hitchcock uses a complex pattern of sound and dialogue based around the word knife to reflect feelings of guilt and in the The Thirty-Nine Steps there is a cut from a woman's scream to the similar sound of a train whistle. His personal stamp is typified by the use of a lightbulb to produce the effect of an ominous, glowing glass of milk in Suspicion. This attribution of symbolic power to inanimate objects is another hallmark of Hitchcock: a bread knife (Blackmail), a key (Notorious). He also places great focus on the creation of set pieces where he is able to exercise his talent for detail and suspense.
http://gillonj.tripod.com/alfredhitchcock/