WHO is he?
Legendary Hollywood
director known as “the master of suspense” who worked in Britain during
the 20s and the 30s and then in Hollywood till the early 70s. Widely
celebrated as a pre-eminent artist of the 20th century, Hitchcock’s body
of work is regarded as a clinching evidence for the possibility of
incorporating a strong authorial voice into popular genre cinema.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
The
films of Hitchcock regularly deal with themes such as loss of masculine
ideals, the incessant quest for control to remedy that loss (a desire
for control that was reflected in the director’s working methods), the
need for narratives in our lives and the fear of domesticity. But, most
importantly, they are about the banality of evil, the commonplaceness of
cruelty and the violent forces that simmer beneath the glossy veneer of
everyday, civilised life. They are a demonstration of fascism’s
sustained existence.
Style
A
pioneer of filmic suspense, Hitchcock frequently employed what could be
called the “bomb theory” — the idea that the tension an audience
experiences is multiplied when an impending catastrophe is disclosed
only to them beforehand. This makes way for several cross cutting
sequences in his films, where spatial or temporal tensions are
accentuated by way of delaying resolution. Hitchcock is also known for
his exemplary use of two classic narrative devices: the MacGuffin and
the Red Herring.
WHY is he of interest?
John
Frankenheimer once said, “Any American director who says he hasn't been
influenced by him is out of his mind”. There is arguably no other
director whose films have been so exhaustively analysed under the
microscope as Hitchcock’s. These films have been studied and critiqued
from Marxist, Feminist, Queer theorist, psychoanalytic and purely
aesthetic and narratological perspectives and what makes Hitchcock’s
cinema so special is that it still remains enchanting even when these
analyses reveal its working.
WHERE to discover him?
Imitated, parodied and paid tribute to over the ages, Psycho
(1960) is nothing less than a watershed in the history of cinema.
Hitchcock’s endlessly fascinating and seemingly timeless movie that
revolves around a bachelor named Norman Bates who lives with his mother
on an isolated motel is a masterpiece of narration, in which deviation
becomes both the central theme and the structuring principle. Few
sequences in cinema have been as thoroughly dissected as the shower
scene in this film.
courtesy,The Hindu.
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