Hitchcock and the secrets of his films

By: Myles Burke / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

"I believe in bringing horror to the mind of the audience and not necessarily on the screen," he said to with the BBC in 1964, film director Alfred Hitchcock, after being asked how he perfected his uncanny ability to keep cinema audiences on edge for what's about to happen next in the film.

The director, who would have turned 125 this week, explained to Huw Wheldon with the BBC- that his skill in building and sustaining cinematic anxiety was based on his instinctive knowledge of human psychology.

Hitchcock had already revolutionized the thriller genre, with a string of classic films that played with the audience's psyche, such as Vertigo [Dizziness], Psycho [Psycho] and Strangers on a Train [Strangers on the train]. A master of the art of slowly building tension on screen, he believed that the key to suspense was not simply shocking viewers, but subtly manipulating their perception and emotions.

In movie scenes, he would slowly build up the threat, straining the audience's fear that something terrible could happen at any moment. Then, when things finally unfolded, moviegoers were overwhelmed with relief.

In a chilling sequence in the film The Birds 1963's [The Birds] – where the creatures suddenly start making strange and inexplicable violent attacks on humans – Hitchcock had demonstrated this art. In that scene, Melania – played by Tippi Hedren – is seen smoking a cigarette near a playground, where the voices of school children could be heard singing. The camera intercuts scenes between Melania and the crows that gradually increase in the spaces of the playground behind her. Each scene of Melanie is a close-up of her face, heightening the audience's awareness of the danger posed by the swarm of birds.

Hitchcock likened himself to the operator of the crazy train – an early form of the roller coaster – who knows how far to shock the audience, but doesn't take it so far that it becomes an unpleasant experience. "In some ways I'm the guy who says during construction, 'how steep can we make the first slope?' and 'this will make them scream,'" he said.

"If you go downhill too deep, the screams will continue until the whole car loses control and destroys them all." So you don't have to go too far, because you want them to get off the crazy train laughing with delight, just like that woman who comes out of a movie—a very sentimental movie—and says, 'Oh, how much I cried'".

The director called this feeling "the pleasure of temporary pain". People will "endure the agonies of the thriller" provided you give them some form of cathartic release from the tension.

He had learned the cost of going too far when he made his 1936 spy thriller, Sabotage [Sabotaji]. The film tells the story of a woman who slowly discovers that her husband is planning a terrorist attack, and when it premiered, the film was received lukewarmly by audiences and critics.

Hitchcock blamed a particular scene in the film for this. There, the tension steadily builds as a boy travels across London to deliver a package – unaware that he is actually carrying a bomb. He had already shown the public the bomb, thus increasing their expectation of the impending disaster. The sequence then intercuts with scenes of the boy, the package bomb, and the various clocks he passes through which show that time is running out.

"The hands move, it's time for the bomb to explode right at that time and I did that and lost the effect," Hitchcock said to with the BBC. "At that moment someone would have to say, 'Oh my God, there's a bomb here,' which he grabs and throws out the window. Blast! Well, everyone is relieved. But I was wrong, I let the bomb go off and kill him. Bad technique. I never did it again."

Hitchcock knew that to achieve tension, it had to be based on the audience's anticipation of danger. So the viewers would have to be aware of things which were unknown to the characters of the movie. Then, they could think ahead of time about what might happen and deal with the end result.

He meticulously planned his scenes, to give the viewer these necessary facts and to enable situations of anxiety. In his 1959 classic, North by Northwest [North-northwind], in the famous scene where Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is terrorized by the pilot of a small plane, the wide opening scenes show how flat and open the landscape is. So when Grant is attacked by the flying plane and his would-be assassin starts shooting, the audience already knows he has nowhere to go.

From time to time, Hitchcock magnified small revealing details, forcing the viewer to look at them.

In a key scene in Rear Window [Rear window] of 1954, the camera zooms in to show Lisa Fremont's (Grace Kelly) hands signaling to LB Jeffreys (James Stewart) – who was watching from the apartment opposite – the discovery of the murdered Mrs. Toruald's ring. The camera focuses closely on the face of the murderous man, Lars Toruald (Raymond Burr), who notices that Lisa is sending signals. And then he looks up to see who he's communicating with, when he suddenly realizes that Jeffrey is watching. Without any dialogue, the audience realizes that Lisa and Jeffrey are in danger.

Although Hitchcock was very adept at using sound or silence to intensify cinematic power – as p. sh. Bernard Herrmann's iconic violins in Psycho of the 1960s – he primarily thought of himself as a visual storyteller.

He began his career as a silent film director in the 1920s, and learned how to push the boundaries of what the camera could normally do. He constantly experimented with bold camera movements and innovative editing to convey essential narrative details, character motivations or their emotional state of mind.

He often used scenes from the character's point of view to get the audience more involved in the narrative, enticing them to empathize with the main character's plight. You can see this in his 1958 thriller, which deals with obsession – Vertigo. In it he used the vertigo effect – a disorienting technique where the camera widens the angle of focus while pulling back – so that viewers simultaneously experience a sense of fear, shock and confusion as the protagonist becomes dizzy, thus helping to create an emotional connection.

in Rear Window, for much of the film the audience watches from Stewart's perspective in a wheelchair as he spies on his neighbors. Viewers see events unfold through Stewart's eyes, jointly uncovering clues to his neighbor's murder and thus adding to the film's voyeuristic tension.

Getting his audience involved in this emotional entanglement was crucial to Hitchcock, as he could manipulate how they felt. That, he thought, was far more important than what the film was actually about. It was Hitchcock who popularized the term McGuffin – a plot device that without internal meaning drives the motivation of the characters and the narrative forward.

"I don't care about the content at all," he said of Wheldon with the BBC-'s. "The film can be about anything, as long as it manages to make the audience react in a certain way to whatever it shows on the screen."

And Hitchcock knew that to bring out these feelings, it was not necessary to show everything to the audience, and that what the audience imagines is often more terrible than what they actually see.

in Psycho it's the famous scene that showcases his mastery of composition and editing to elicit the maximum emotional response from moviegoers. As Tom Brook has said about Talking Movies of with the BBCin 2020: "No verbal description of Psycho-s cannot account for its true psychological impact".

In that scene, the character Merion Crane (Janet Leigh) is stabbed in the shower. The moment is shown in a fast-paced montage that cuts between images of the attacker and the knife in motion, interspersed with close-ups of her horrified face, all accompanied by a dissonant, screeching score. The fast pace of the montage, impeccably executed and in rhythm with the eerie sounds, creates for the viewer a strong sense of violence, violation and panic, without actually showing the images of the knife being inserted into the victim or the wounds. clear.

"Well, I made it so messy on purpose," Hickoku said. “But as the film developed, I put less and less physical horror into it, because I left it to the audience's mind, and as the film went on, there was less and less violence. But, in the mind of the viewer, the tension was constantly increasing. That tension, from the film, was carried to their minds. So, towards the end I had left no violence. But the public at that time screamed in agony: Thank you God! /Telegraph/