To stay with the audience, Hitchcock set out to win it over by reawakening all the strong emotions of childhood. In his work the viewer can recapture the tensions and thrills of the games of hide-and-seek or blindman’s buff and the terror of those nights when, by a trick of the imagination, a forgotten toy on the dresser gradually acquires a mysterious and threatening shape.
All of this brings us to suspense, which, even among those who acknowledge Hitchcock’s mastery of it, is commonly regarded as a minor form of the spectacle, whereas actually it is the spectacle in itself.
Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film’s narrative material, or, if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations. Here’s a case in point: A man leaves his home, hails a cab and drives to the station to catch a train. This is a normal scene in an average picture. Now, should that man happen to look at his watch just as he is getting into the cab and exclaim, “Good God, I shall never make that train!” that entire ride automatically becomes a sequence of pure suspense. Every red light, traffic signal, shift of the gears or touch on the brake, and every cop on the way to the station will intensify its emotional impact.
The manifest clarity and persuasive power of the image are such that it simply will not occur to the viewer to reason: “What’s his hurry? Why can’t he take the next train?” Thanks to the tension created by the frenzied imagery on the screen, the urgency of the action will never be questioned.
Obviously, this insistence on the dramatization cannot avoid the “arbitrary,” and although Hitchcock’s art is precisely the ability to impose the “arbitrary,” this sometimes leads the die-hards to complain about implausibility. While Hitchcock maintains that he is not concerned with plausibility, the truth is that he is rarely implausible. What he does, in effect, is to hinge the plot around a striking coincidence, which provides him with the master situation. His treatment from then on consists in feeding a maximum of tension and plausibility into the drama, pulling the strings ever tighter as he builds up toward a paroxysm. Then he suddenly lets go, allowing the story to unwind swiftly.
In general the suspense sequences of a film are its “privileged moments,” those highlights that linger on in the viewer’s memory. But Hitchcock wants each and every scene to be a “privileged moment,” and all of his efforts throughout his career have been directed toward achieving pictures that have no gaps or flaws.
It is this determination to compel the audience’s uninterrupted attention, to create and then to keep up the emotion, to sustain the tension throughout, that makes Hitchcock’s pictures so completely personal and all but inimitable. For it is not only on the crucial passages of the story that he exercises his authority; his single-mindedness of purpose is also reflected in the exposition, the transitions, and all the sequences which in most films are generally inconsequential.
Even an episode that merely serves to bridge two key sequences will never be commonplace, for Hitchcock loathes the “ordinary.” For instance, a man who is in trouble with the law—but who we know is innocent—takes his case to a lawyer. This is an everyday situation. As handled by Hitchcock, the lawyer will appear to be skeptical and rather reluctant to become involved. Or he may, as in The Wrong Man, agree to go along only after warning his prospective client that he lacks experience in this kind of legal work and may not be the right man for the case.
By introducing this disturbing note, a feeling of apprehension and anxiety has been created that invests this ordinary situation with potential drama.
Another illustration of this approach is his out-of-the-ordinary twist to the conventional scene in which a young man is introducing his girl friend to his mother. Naturally, the girl is anxious to please the older woman, who may one day become her mother-in-law. In contrast to her boy friend’s relaxed manner, hers is clearly shy and flustered. With the son’s introductory ritual fading into the offscreen background, the viewers will see a change come over the woman’s expression as she stares at the girl, sizing her up with that purely Hitchcockian look so familiar to cinephiles. The young girl’s inner turmoil is indicated by a slight movement of retreat. Here again, by means of a simple look, Hitchcock creates one of those domineering mothers he excels at portraying.
From this point on, all of the family scenes in the picture will be charged with emotion and taut with conflict, with every detail reflecting Hitchcock’s determination to keep banality off the screen.
The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film. In this area of the spectacle, film-making is not a dual interplay between the director and his picture, but a three-way game in which the audience, too, is required to play. In the filmic context, suspense, like Tom Thumb’s white pebbles or Little Red Riding-hood’s walk through the woods, is a poetic means that serves to heighten the emotions and to make the heart beat faster.
To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner. The nature of Hitchcock’s cinema is to absorb the audience so completely that the Arab viewer will forget to shell his peanuts, the Frenchman will ignore the girl in the next seat, the Italian will suspend his chain smoking, the compulsive cougher will refrain from coughing, and the Swedes will interrupt their love-making in the aisles.
Hitchcock is universally acknowledged to be the world’s foremost technician; even his detractors willingly concede him this title. Yet, isn’t it obvious that the choice of a scenario, its construction, and all of its contents are intimately connected to and, in fact, dependent upon that technique? All artists are indignant—and rightly so—at the critical tendency to separate form from content. This procedure is particularly illogical when applied to Hitchcock, who, as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol correctly point out in their book,I is neither a simple storyteller nor an esthete. “Hitchcock,” they write, “is one of the greatest inventors of form in the history of cinema. Perhaps the only film-makers who can be compared with him in this respect are Murnau and Eisenstein . . . Here, form does not merely embellish content, but actually creates it.”
The art of film-making is an especially difficult one to master, inasmuch as it calls for multiple and often contradictory talents. The reason why so many brilliant or very talented men have failed in their attempts at directing is that only a mind in which the analytic and synthetic are simultaneously at work can make its way out of the maze of snares inherent in the fragmentation of the shooting, the cutting, and the montage of a film. To a director, the greatest danger of all is that in the course of making his film he may lose control of it. Indeed, this is the most common cause of all fatalities.
Each cut of a picture, lasting from three to ten seconds, is information that is given to the viewer. This information is all too often obscure or downright incomprehensible, either because the director’s intentions were vague to begin with or he lacked the competence to convey them clearly.
To those who question whether clarity is all that important, I can only say that it is the most important quality in the making of a film. By way of explanation, here is a typical example: “At this point, Balachov, understanding that he had been cheated by Carradine, went to see Benson, proposing that they contact Tolmachef and share the loot between them,” etc., etc.
In hundreds of films this dialogue, or a variant thereof, has left you bewildered, or worse, indifferent to the proceedings on the screen. For while the authors know all about Balachov, Carradine, Benson, and Tolmachef, you, the viewer, are utterly confused by virtue of that cardinal rule of cinema:
Whatever is said instead of being shown is lost upon the viewer.
Since Hitchcock chooses to express everything by purely visual means, he has no use whatever for Messrs. Balachov, Carradine, Benson, and Tolmachef.
One of the charges frequently leveled at Hitchcock is t
hat the simplification inherent in his emphasis on clarity limits his cinematic range to almost childlike ideas. To my mind, nothing could be further from the truth; on the contrary, because of his unique ability to film the thoughts of his characters and make them perceptible without resorting to dialogue, he is, to my way of thinking, a realistic director.
Hitchcock a realist? In cinema, as on the stage, dialogue serves to express the thoughts of the characters, but we know that in real life the things people say to each other do not necessarily reflect what they actually think and feel. This is especially true of such mundane occasions as dinner and cocktail parties, or of any meeting between casual acquaintances.
If we observe any such gathering, it is clear that the words exchanged between the guests are superficial formalities and quite meaningless, whereas the essential is elsewhere; it is by studying their eyes that we can find out what is truly on their minds.
Let us assume that as an observer at a reception I am looking at Mr. Y as he tells three people all about his recent holiday in Scotland with his wife. By carefully watching his face, I notice he never takes his eyes off Mrs. X’s legs. Now, I move over to Mrs. X, who is talking about her children’s problems at school, but I notice that she keeps staring at Miss Z, her cold look taking in every detail of the younger woman’s elegant appearance.
Obviously, the substance of that scene is not in the dialogue, which is strictly conventional, but in what these people are thinking about. Merely by watching them I have found out that Mr. Y is physically attracted to Mrs. X and that Mrs. X is jealous of Miss Z.
From Hollywood to Cinecitta no film-maker other than Hitchcock can capture the human reality of that scene as faithfully as I have described it. And yet, for the past forty years, each of his pictures features several such scenes in which the rule of counterpoint between dialogue and image achieves a dramatic effect by purely visual means. Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions as suspicion, jealousy, desire, and envy. And herein lies a paradox: the director who, through the simplicity and clarity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal audience is also the director who excels at filming the most complex and subtle relationships between human beings.
In the United States, the major developments in the art of film direction were achieved between 1908 and 1930, primarily by D. W. Griffith. Most of the masters of the silent screen who were influenced by him, among them Von Stroheim, Eisenstein, Murnau, and Lubitsch, are now dead; others, still alive, are no longer working.
Considering the fact that the Americans who entered the film medium after 1930 have barely scratched the surface of the limitless potential Griffith opened up, I believe it is not an overstatement to conclude that, with the notable exception of Orson Welles, no major visual sensibility has emerged in Hollywood since the advent of sound. If the cinema, by some twist of fate, were to be deprived overnight of the sound track and to become once again the art of silent cinematography that it was between 1895 and 1930, I truly believe most of the directors in the field would be compelled to take up some new line of work. In this sense it would seem as if the only heirs to the Griffith secrets in the Hollywood of 1966 are Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock. One wonders, not without melancholy, whether that legacy will survive when they retire from the screen.
I know that many Americans are surprised that European cinephiles—and the French in particular—regard Alfred Hitchcock as a “film author,” in the sense that the term is applied to Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, or Jean-Lue Godard.
When the Americans counter Hitchcock’s name by citing others that have enjoyed prestige in Hollywood for the past twenty years, there is clearly a divergence in the viewpoints of the New York critics and their Parisian counterparts.
Among the big Hollywood names, the Oscar “collectors,” there are undoubtedly many men of talent. And yet, as they switch from a Biblical opus to a psychological western, or from a war epic to a comedy of manners, how can we look upon them as anything else than simple craftsmen, carrying out instructions, dutifully falling in line with the commercial trends of the day? Why establish any distinction between these motion-picture directors and their counterparts in the theater when, year in and year out, they follow a similar pattern, going from the screen version of a William Inge play to an Irwin Shaw best seller, while working on an adaptation of the latest Tennessee Williams?
Unlike the “film author,” who is motivated by the need to introduce his own ideas on life, on people, on money and love into his works these men are mere show-business specialists, simple technicians. Are they great technicians? Their persistence in limiting themselves to an infinitesimal part of the extraordinary possibilities offered by Hollywood’s studios allows for some doubt on this score as well. Of what does their work actually consist?
They set up a scene, place the actors within that setting and then proceed to film the whole of that scene, which is substantially dialogue, in six or eight different ways by varying the shooting angle, from the front, the side, a high shot, and so on. Afterward, they do it over again, this time varying the focus. The next step is to film the whole scene, first using a full shot, then a medium shot, and finally in close-up.
This is not to suggest that the Hollywood greats, as a whole, do not deserve their reputations. To give credit where it is due, most of them have a specialty, something they do exceptionally well. Some excel at getting a superior performance from their stars, while others have a flair for bringing new talent to light. Some directors are brilliant storytellers and others have a remarkable gift for improvisation. Some are excellent at battle scenes and others have a knack with the intimate comedy genre.
If Hitchcock, to my way of thinking, outranks the rest, it is because he is the most complete film-maker of all. He is not merely an expert at some specific aspect of cinema, but an all-round specialist, who excels at every image, each shot, and every scene. He masterminds the construction of the screenplay as well as the photography, the cutting, and the sound track, has creative ideas on everything and can handle anything and is even, as we already know, expert at publicity!
Because he exercises such complete control over all the elements of his films and imprints his personal concepts at each step of the way, Hitchcock has a distinctive style of his own. He is undoubtedly one of the few film-makers on the horizon today whose screen signature can be identified as soon as the picture begins.
The suspense sequences are by no means the only cues to Hitchcock’s authorship. His style can be recognized in a scene involving conversation between two people, in his unique way of handling the looks they exchange, and of punctuating their dialogue with silent pauses, by the simplified gestures, and even by the dramatic quality of the frame. Just as unmistakably Hitchcockian is the art of conveying to the viewer that one of the two characters dominates, is in love with, or is jealous of, the other. It is the art of creating a specific dramatic mood without recourse to dialogue, and finally the art of leading us from one emotion to another, at the rhythm of our own sensitivity.
If I apply the term “complete” to Hitchcock’s work, it is because I find in it both research and innovation, a sense of the concrete and a sense of the abstract, intense drama as well as a subtle brand of humor. His films are at once commercial and experimental, as universal as William Wyler’s Ben Hur and as confidential as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks.
Psycho is a picture that rallied vast audiences throughout the world; yet, in its savagery and uninhibited license, it goes much further than those daring 16-mm. essays by youthful avant-garde film-makers that somehow never get past the censors. Some of the miniatures in North by Northwest and many of the special effects in The Birds have all the poetic flavor of experimental cinema that Jiri Trnka achieves with his puppets and that Norman McLaren achieves with his four-minute shorts designed directly on film.
When a director undertakes to
make a western, he is not necessarily thinking of John Ford, since there are equally fine movies in the genre by Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. Yet, if he sets out to make a thriller or a suspense picture, you may be certain that in his heart of hearts he is hoping to live up to one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces.
In recent years there have been countless imitations of Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho; whether it is acknowledged or not, there is no doubt that Hitchcock’s work has long influenced world cinema.
Overt or subconscious, bearing either on the style or the theme, mostly beneficial, occasionally ill-advised, this influence is reflected in the works of film-makers who are vastly different from each other:
Among others, there are Henri Verneuil (Any Number Can Win), Alain Resnais (Muriel, La Guerre Est Finie), Philippe de Broca (That Man from Rio), Orson Welles (The Stranger), Vincente Minnelli (Undercurrent), Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique), Lee Thompson (Cape Fear), René Clément (Purple Noon, The Day and the Hour), Mark Robson (The Prize), Edward Dmytryk (Mirage), Robert Wise (House on Telegraph Hill, The Haunting), Ted Tetzlaff (The Window), Robert Aldrich (Baby Jane), Akira Kurosawa (High and Low), William Wyler (The Collector), Otto Preminger (Bunny Lake Is Missing), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), Claude Autant-Lara (Enough Rope, Over Here), Ingmar Bergman (The Virgin Spring), William Castle (Homicide), Claude Chabrol (The Cousins, The Third Lover, Marie-Chantal contre le Dr. Ka), Alain Robbe-Grillet (L’Immortelle), Paul Paviot (Portrait Robot), Richard Quine (Liaisons Secretes), Anatole Litvak (Five Miles to Midnight), Stanley Donen (Arabesque, Charade), André Delvaux (L’Homme au Crane Rasé), François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), not to mention the James Bond series, which is nothing else than a rough caricature of all Hitchcock’s work, and of North by Northwest in particular.