William C. Martell - Hitchcock: Experiments In Terror

by

William C. Martell

FIRST STRIKE PRODUCTIONS

Hitchcock: Experiments In Terror

First Edition

ISBN:

Copyright 2013 by William C. Martell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or telepathic, including photocopying, recording, or any information and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Writer, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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• The Language Of Film

• Restricted Point Of View

• Kuleshov Effect

• Ambient Score

• Serial Protagonists

• Out With The Old Protagonist

• Non Voice Over Voice Over

• Non Star Cast

• Intersecting Stories

• Extreme POV Chase

• Double Entendres

• Puzzle Set Piece

• Pulp Fiction Plotting

• Multiple Stories

• Stock Footage

• Single Take

• Shots

• Human Wipes

• Scenes?

• Poking The Tiger

• No Camera Move Suspense

• Chess Match

• Documentary Experiment

• Emotions Under Realism

• Religious Experiment

• Stage Play To Silent Film

• Visual Transformation

• Contained Thrillers

• Dog Juice

• More Personal Conflict

• Symbolism

• Endings

• Same Story Twice

• Repertory Cast

• Television!

• 3D Experiment

• Unlikeable Lead

• Suspense Triggers

• Killer Twists

• Focused Suspense

• One Shot Jury

• Flashback That Lies

• See Me Think!

• Identity Confusion

• Not My Problem

• Hero/Villain Confusion

• Leitmotif

• Visual Experiments

• Gags

• Psychiatry Experiment

• Extreme Point Of View

• Dali Dream Sequence

• Method Actors

• Location Shooting

• Confessions

• Character To Character Flow

• Reversals

• One Woman Jury

• Oddball Characters

• Color Cinematography

• The Love Corpse

• Double Entendre Dialogue

• Upside Down Suspense

• Wonderful World Of Irony

• Secret Suspense

• Other Film Experiments

  POST SCRIPT

• EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

  When you think of Alfred Hitchcock, what comes to mind? Killer birds pecking out your eyes? Men in drag with glittering knives? Crop dusters where there are no crops? Or maybe the host and producer of that cool vintage TV show where most of the episodes had great twist endings and he would open every show with Good evening and then make fun of his sponsors (decades before Letterman made fun of his network)? Or maybe you think of him as some old school director who was part of that studio system that crashed and burned in 1969 when the edgy indie filmmakers like Robert Altman (2 episodes of Hitchcock Presents) and method actors like Steve McQueen became stars (2 episodes of Hitchcock Presents) took over and the idea of some stodgy guy who did storyboards for every shot and believed the film was made before anyone set foot on the set was too old fashioned for todays world?

  I mean - can you imagine Hitchcock making something as innovative as A Place Beyond The Pines with its serial protagonists? Or some movie with a structure like Pulp Fiction? Or even a stunt contained thriller like Buried or Brake where the whole movie takes place in *only* one very small location? Let alone make a movie thats one continuous take like Russian Ark! No way hed do something like Memento that moved backwards through time - starting at the beginning and moving to the end! How about a story like Run, Lola, Run where the same story is told more than once with a different outcome each time? And you cant imagine him doing some sort of LSD influenced dream sequence thing! This is some old school fuddy duddy who was making films before anyone thought of doing wild experimental stuff like that!

  Well, the fact is, Hitchcock was the first one to do all of those things. A trail blazer who was constantly pushing the boundaries of cinema with his crazy experiments. He was a trail blazer both with technical experiments like trying to shoot an entire film in one continuous shot (Rope) and story experiments where he screwed with the basics of stories and tried to break all of the Three Greek Unities and any other rules people may have come up with in the 2,400 years since - as in the Pulp Fictionesque Topaz - which has four interconnected short stories.

  Hitchcock was a master of cinema - one of the few directors who really understood how cinema works. He knew that every angle, every camera movement, every composition of the frame, and every juxtaposition of shots and images created an *emotional response* in the audience. Though he didnt create the Kuleshov Effect, he understood how it worked - that simply editing two pieces of film together could create a performance in an actor. Wilson the Volleyball could give a heartbreaking performance in a film! As an experiment - he used this technique to create Jimmy Stewarts performance in Rear Window. In the original version of the Hitchcock/Truffaut book they had the actual stills from the sequence... and Jimmy Stewart had the exact same expression on his face in every shot! For the reprint, some idiot didnt understand what the images were demonstrating, and only used *one* still of Stewart to save space. That ends up the problem with many directors today - they just do not understand the language of cinema. Hitchcock not only understood the language of cinema, he played with it... doing things that no director had ever done before.

  The Language Of Cinema: A successful cinema experiment requires that you understand how cinema works in the first place, and many experimental films today end up being failed experiments. Hitchcock really understood the language of cinema and that is why we know his name today, and why he was able to do ground breaking experiments when others are not on solid ground in the first place. Before you can push the boundaries of cinema, you have to know where those boundaries *are*. Just making a feature film in one continuous shot is meaningless unless that shot is doing what the thousands of shots it is replacing would have done to visually tell the story. Many directors today do not understand that cinematic language, and end up kind of like me on vacation in Mexico with my two years of High School Spanish... fumbling around, trying to make sense as I order two Cokes to go.

  There are directors who shoot a warehouse full of random shots and hand these over to the editor to make sense of. This is what I call the Television Method, because TV sitcoms are often shot live with multiple cameras and then created in the editing room. Though producers often like directors who use this method because they get lots of coverage, all of those shots are *not* designed to tell the story. Its the same as prattling on and on in conversation in hopes that the listener figures out what it is you are trying to say. Having three or four or even ten angles of something doesnt matter if none of them are the *right* angle.

  Hitchcock understood cinema to the point that he seldom shot anything that was not used in the final cut. No chaff, just grain. He was brought to American by producer David O. Selznick, who was so insanely hands on that a book of his detailed memos was published in the 1970s which is both funny and frightening to read. The original micro manager. Hitchcock angered Selznick, because he delivered *only* the shots required to make the movie, and nothing extra that the producer could fool around with in the editing room to recut the film. There was nothing left over!