By Ileana López
Throughout the history of film, there's been few figures that scream creative genius quite as loudly as Alfred Hitchcock. It's not a coincidence that critics of the Nouvelle Vague—detractors of traditional screenwriting—admired this filmmaker, whose career was truly immersed in the Hollywood production system.
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A visionary for all time
You see, Hitchcock was nothing short of a visionary. From his earlier years in the business, he showed the importance of the intimate link between script and technique, to the point that one ultimately relies on the other. Hitchcock's works look handcrafted, and they all feature these two elements tightly and deliberately joined together. Indeed, separating them would be nearly impossible.
Hitchcock was a transforming force in the film industry. Throughout his career, spanning nearly five decades, he changed the landscape in Hollywood, creating a unique language in cinematography and influencing hundreds of new filmmakers. One of the earliest examples of Hitchcock's unmistakeable mark—which purports to show that form does not merely decorate content, but creates it—is The Lodger(1927) an outstanding piece of filmmaking that, though reminiscent of earlier German expressionist films, proposes new styles that distance silent movies from traditional theatre.
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Suspense and technique
The director is often considered to be the indisputable master of suspense, as his incursions into the thriller and dark movie genres were a thing to remember. But it's worth noting the underlying importance of Hitchcock's technique in the creation of his particular brand of suspense. The image frenzy that flawlessly produces so much tension, uncertainty and instability in the audience is achieved through an efficient visual drama, a stage that's both analytic and synthetic in nature.
For example, in Spellbound, 1945, we can clearly see a radical change of attitude in Dr. Edwardes when Dr. Patersen draws a pool on the tablecloth with a knife—a sign of possible mental instability. On the other hand, there's the trope of finding oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time—a victim of fate. This is a recurring theme in Hitchcock's films.
The pioneers of Nouvelle Vague, such as François Truffaut or Claude Chabro, also admired Hitchcock. For them, the possibilities of narrative in cinema afforded by enunciation were of the utmost importance. Enunciation has the power to take over objects, people, and environments within the film.
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There are several scenes in Hitchcock's work that suitably exemplify this principle, like the iconic scene in Vértigo(1958), where the audience can experience what Scottie feels when running up the bell tower. We can also find it in Rebecca(1940), when the second Mss. De Winter says she dreamt of going back to Manderley as a first-person sequence plays out.
By any standard, talking about dark cinema and not mentioning Hitchcock is nothing short of impossible. In his films, the mysterious atmosphere riddled with a detective-genre feel lets suspense run loose, after all. Can we even imagine an Alfred Hitchcock film without intrigue, secrets, or mysteries? On the path to figure out the answer to the plot's riddles, the main characters often find themselves in sceneries typical of dark cinema.
Two scenes 20 years apart illustrate this fact well: the close-up on the plate at Scotland Yard in Blackmail, and the same close-up on the plate at the Empire State Hotel in Spellbound, which shows us the world of steel and iron that characterizes Hitchcock's works. The urban scenery, the detective figure—from the real detective to the character who are thrown into the task of figuring out the secrets around them—, and death itself are the main elements that will forever bound Hitchcock's movies to the poetics of dark cinema.
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Analyzing Hitchcock's cinematic poetry
This kind of poetic language, however, can be analyzed from several perspectives, from the nature of his plots to the details of his technique—which is as original as it is unmistakeable. Analyzing Hitchcock's visual poetry from one perspective is, necessarily, talking about another perspective at some point.
The whole thing is so well crafted that all the films features are ultimately in an inseparable unity and synergy, in which every single element acts like a cog in a finely-tuned clock. Can we imagine, say, Psycho's plot without the famous shower scene? During this groundbreaking sequence, a purely technical detail plays a narrative role of central importance to the film's overall success.
This is how Hitchcock's legend still lurks over the history of films. It's not only that he stood in the center of the industry for half a century—a time when cinema changed and got consolidated as we know it in large part thanks to him—, but also that his creative genius is palpable when watching any of his films.
Though Hitchcock became a filmmaker by chance, he left behind a valuable legacy that revolutionized Hollywood's language and created an everlasting impression in his audience across generations.
Translated by Oliver G. Alvar
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