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Hitchcock - Master of Suspense

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, (1899 – 1980) was a British film director. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres.

 His stories frequently feature fugitives on the run from the law alongside "icy blonde" female characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys  meant only to serve thematic elements in the film.

In his 50 film career spanning 6 decades, did more than any director to shape modern thriller cinema. His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else. The "Hitchcockian" style includes the use of camera movement to mimic a person's gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs, and framing shots to maximize anxiety and fear. The film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot. A Hitchcock film is an organism, with the whole implied in every detail and every detail related to the whole." Below is an example of the spectacular story telling angle Hitchcock used.

These styles put him in a unique position of success in Hollywood. Some of his greatest hits include:

 The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.
Rebecca (1940) won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
By 1960 Hitchcock had directed four films often ranked among the greatest of all time: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).
Vertigo replaced Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its world-wide poll.
By 2018 eight of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favorite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before he died.

 My personal favorite is The Birds (1963). The sheer use of common birds to scare the whole town and the audience watching was pure brilliance. Even his marketing angle for the film was so distinct from any other director of his time. Below is his sarcastic lecture before the trailer of his movie.


Even Hitchcock himself said it was his most technically challenging film yet, using a combination of trained birds against a backdrop of wild ones.

Never again will there be a director who shaped thriller cinema the way Hitchcock did in the 50 films he made.

HOW DOES THIS UNLOCK CURRENT MOVIE MAKING
For years after "Vertigo" came out, directors such as Spielberg, Scorsese, Landis etc. implemented in their own work. Below is a scene from "Goodfellas"

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