ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Movie buffs know Alfred Hitchcock, of course, mostly for his American films- "Rebecca", "North by Northwest", "The Birds", "Marnie", "Vertigo", and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (among others). But, what really sets Hitchcock apart - beginning with his earliest films done in England prior to World War II, is the fact that he was as much a writer as a director, even if the screenplay was actually "written" by someone else.

"Although one aspect of Alfred Hitchcock's rhetoric drastically privileged the image over the word, he also insisted that it was during the screenwriting that his most serious work was done. He defined the screenwriting process as the space where all fundamental directorial decisions have already been made; he did not think of "writing" apart from the work he planned for the camera to do. Screenwriting meant not only creating the imagery that would be the bone-structure of the story but also forming a total system where the literary and visual elements of the movie would be designed in a dynamic interaction" (Gross, 1999, p. 34). In other words, Hitchcock was so involved in the creation of the script- not just the words per se, but how they would be spoken, and from what angle they would be filmed, that he was literally a one-man production "crew" in the planning stage. Even from his earliest films, he never gave the actors or other crew members more than a puppet status. Does this make him what the French refer to as "aute

Related Essays

Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock was a film director who was steeped in the two major traditions of the motion picture, the fluid camera of FW Murnau and the editing .... (1681 7 )

Alfred Hitchcock The expressionism exhibited in Alfred Hitchcock films is a combination of individual aesthetic decisions and specific pre-established formal resources. .... (1038 4 )

The Life and Films of Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock was a British film director who emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. .... Spoto, D. (1979). The art of Alfred Hitchcock. .... (1443 6 )

Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot Unlike most of Alfred Hitchcock's (1976) films where the director prefers to tell a story more in visual images than dialogue, there is a great deal of talk in .... (1262 5 )

Alfred Hitchcock's Films 1. One interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds hold that the film is really two movies, one the love story between Mitch and Melanie, the other the bird .... (1105 4 )

hn Gielgud, the star, "recalls that Hitchcock�overhauled this material considerably in shaping the screen story" (Phillips, 1984, p. 77). "Sabotage", according to Hitchcock himself, had some scenes where he "wrote" scenes without dialogue. The climax, a stabbing scene caused consternation in the leading lady. "Sylvia Sidney was initially upset by the director's insistence that this scene be shot without recourse to dialogue" (Phillips, 1984, p. 82). In fact, to prove the thesis of early Hitchcock as "writer" regardless of who actually wrote the original screenplay, Hitchcock himself proclaimed that "the screen ought to speak its own language�and it can't do that unless it�can be woven into an expressive visual pattern" (Phillips, 1984, p. 77). Then came two of his classics, "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes" both fast-paced anti-Nazi films. "The Thirty-Nine Steps" is another good example of how Hitchcock took someone else's screenplay and remade it to fit his needs. "The original author was at first affronted, but later confessed Hitchcock's version was better" (Perry, 1965, p. 49). There is more evidence about Hitchcock as "writer", as in the case of "The Thirty-Nine Steps": In overhauling Buchan's story for

Category: Film - A