OUGD401: Context of Practice - The Auteur: Alfred Hitchcock

• Auteur - Film maker, who's films have had creative influence 
• Other Auteurs - Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and Tim Burton

• Auteur - French for Author
• Politique des auteur - A Manifesto

History of film as the history of auteur

• Like artists
• Original work
• Creative Control
• Personal film language
• Start conventions of drama

Notes on the auteur theory - Sarris, 1962

• technical competence of the director 
• Distinguishable personality 
• Interior meaning

Hitchcock, why?

• Long career, in the early years of the film industry
• Worked in Europe and America
• Innovation in film making
• Master of suspense
• Influenced slasher Italian Giallo and Psychological thriller movements

• Inspired iconic expressionism and surrealism

Technical competence of the director 

• expressionist lighting
• story telling visually in silent era
• use of the subjective camera

1920 - Hitchcock joined the film industry

• Noskeratu, 1922 - F.W. Murnau
• The Lodger, 1927: Glass floor which showed figure from below - innovative
• Champagne, 1928 - Subjective camera shot, put yourself as part of the film

• Hitchcock invented the 'Dolly Zoom'
• Vertigo - uses shape and perception to show anxiety and mans fear of heights
• I look up, I look down
• Perspective and scale

Cutting and montage

• "what is drama but life with bits cut out?"

• Iconic shower scene in Psycho - 78 pieces of film condensed into 45 seconds
• Restrictions meant it had to be filmed expressionistically

• "Position of imagery in various sizes"

Personal Style

• expressionism - form evokes emotion (suspense, darker)
• Cameo appearance from the director
• narrative is often visual rather than through dialogue
• Works with the same actors - Cary Grant, James Stewart, Tippi Hedren, Doris Day
• Hitchcock blondes - 'Blondes make the best victims"
• Suspense - audience can see the danger the character cannot - "No terror in the bang of the gun, only the anticipation of it"

Expressionism

• Not concerned with realism
• He is interested in the story

• Voyeurism - Vertigo
• Trauma - Effects on the individual
• Decent into madness
• "Spy on my wife, she's acting strangely"
• Subjective point of view
• Uses repetition

• Vertigo - Surrealist dream sequence, Colour filters (symbolism)
• Cameo of the director - 'Signing the film'

Interior Meaning

• 1938 - Hitchcock leaves Gainsborough studios - To work in America
• David O Selznick introduces him to psychoanalysis 

• Rebecca 1940, Spellbound and Notorious

• Collaborated with Salvador Dali

• Birds eye view - Motif of fear and doom

Hitchcock's self proclaimed fears

1. Small children
2. Policemen
3. High places

Themes within his film plots

• Mistaken Identity
• Sly
• Murder
• Madness
• Sly Wit
• Darkest corners of the mind
• Relationship between order and chaos

Critique of the auteur

• Canon of films made by the 'elite' males
• It disguises the work of others - Cinematographer, Art Director, etc.
• It offers universal view of quality 
• Capitalist device by selling a film by virtue of its director