Wednesday 5 December 2012

OUGD401 - Lecture Notes: Film History

The Auteur
Hitchcock
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen..."

What is an auteur
  • A filmmaker usually the director whose movies are characterized by a filmmaker's creative influence
  • An individual who
  • Aureur French for 'author'
  • Politique des auteurs, a manifesto drafted in the 1950s by a group of French film directors and critics
  • Celebrated the role of the director as the author of a film
  • History of Film as the history of Auteurs - like artists, original work, creative control, personal film language, auteus often start the concentions of genre, but do not follow them
  • Auteurs break the rules

Notes of the 'Auteur' Theory by Sarris 1962 (American)
  • What makes an auteur...
  • The technical competence of the director
  • The director's distinguishable personality (style)
  • an interior meaning
Why Hitchcock?
  • Long career beginning in early years of film industry
  • Work in Europe and America
  • Innovation in film making
  • Master of suspense and audience's reception of the film
  • Influential in later genres like the American Slasher, Italian Giallo or the psychological thriller
  • Inspuired by avant-garde expressionism, surrealism, but films still attracted mainstream audiences
  • French New Wave acknowledged him as an auteur
  • He worked in a time when we didn't have sound and had to convey visually
The technical competence of the director
  • Expressionist lighting
  • Story telling visually in silent area
  • Use of the subjective camera
  • Dolly zoom
  • Clever use of montage and cutting to create tension in spite of the production code (1939-60)
1920
  • It was around 1920 when Hitchcock joined the film industry
  • Starts off as an art director
  • He is a very skilled artist
  • Worked for a film company in Britain called Gainsborough
  • Known as an expressionist studio
  • In 1925 they send Hitchcock to Germany
  • The film Nosferatu 1922 about emotion and suspense, frightening film
  • The Lodger 1927 - One of his first films set in London
  • Shadows across the face inspired by European visual arts and cinema
Creative Camera Shots Champagne (1928)
  • Someone seeing their lover through the bottom of the champagne glass kissing someone else
  • Putting yourself as another character in the film
  • Peering through a hole - this was a technique of Hitchcock's
The dolly zoom
  • Vertigo zoom
  • Telescoping
  • Shown in a film called Vertigo - seen as his masterpiece
  • Used to show a man's fear of heights
Cutting and Montage
  • "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?" Hitchcock
  • Psycho 1960 storyboard - Drawn by Hitchcock
  • Fragments everything
  • Couldn't show naked bodies, blood etc
  • Murder shown in shower
The director's distinguishable personality (style)
  • Expressionism - Form evokes emotion
  • Cameo appearances of the director
  • Narrative is often visual rather than told through dialogue
  • Continuous of certain actors (Cary Grant, James Stweart, Tippi Hedren, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine)
  • Obsessive use of the blonds
  • Suspense
  • "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."
  • When the hair is up it shows sexual repression and when the hair comes down it shows relaxation and relief 
Suspense
  • Generated when the audience can see danger his characters cannot see
  • His earlier work could create vivid terror in the mind of the viewer with very little splatter on the screen
Expressionism
  • Hitchcock films are not concerned with realism or naturalism
  • He is interested in telling a story and evoking emotional responses
Vertigo
  • Famous film
  • Hitchcock's Mona Lisa
  • Stylistically and thematically you can tell it is a Hitchcock film
  • Vision, sight, trauma, the mind and the effects of events on an individual
  • Idea of madness
  • Voyeurism
  • Subjective point of view - we see her back as if someone is watching her
  • "Madeline" profile and blonde hair
  • Watching her through doorways and shops
  • Doubling of blondes, uncanny likeness
  • Through the film she is doing her hair very much like the painting
  • She jumps in to the river
  • Bought flowers from the flower shop and then she is saved by Scottie
  • Scottie "Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens - always green, ever living."
  • Suicide of Madeline - He has lost this woman that he has been watching
  • He begins to descend into madness
  • To evoke the irrational mind he has used colour filters to create surreal world
  • The meaning of the tree forever living - woman dressed in green which is very significant and looks like Madeline
  • Idea of rebirth
  • Through the film he transforms Judy into Madeline
  • Colour is used in an expressionistic way
Cameo of the director
  • Hitchcock is in the film for a short amount of time
Interior meaning
  • 1938 Hitchcock leaves Gainsborough studios to work in America
  • David O Selznick introduces him to psychoanalysis
  • They make Rebecca 1940, Spellbound 1945 and Notorious 1946 which is about a spy
  • He collaborated with Salvador Dali
  • He evokes the idea of the eyes visually
The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Spoto
  • Bird's eye view
  • To convey fear and doom
  • Crows pecking people to death
  • Dial M for Murder - introduces birds here too - very symbollic
  • He is scared of small children, poilicemen, high places and that one of his movies won't be as good as the last one
Themes that are revisited
  • Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events
  • Murder
  • Mistaken identity
  • Sexual themes
  • Macabre humour
  • Always 'Hitchcockian" suspense
  • Interested in gender and spectators
Critique of the auteur
  • Presents a canon of films made by 'elites' (many male auteurs)
  • It disguises the work of others
  • Offers a universal view of quality
  • It is a capitalist device by selling a film by virtue of it's director
  • His wife worked on every film so surely she should take some credit
The idea that Hitchcock tells us what he wants us to know
Louis B Mayer - Idea of an auteur is an illusion



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