The world of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography is a surreal one. Every man a murderer or spy.
Every woman a femme fatale or murder victim. It is a violent universe of crime, paranoia and sexuality, and yet, paradoxically, a world without blood, sex or nudity. Whilst the modern filmmaker resorts to violent scenes of dismembered heads, naked bodies and Bacchic revelry, Hitchcock’s approach is one of subtlety, symbolism and cinematic technique. For all the bluster of modern filmmaking, there is yet to have been a filmmaker able to create a world quite as dangerous or seedy, as Alfred Hitchcock.
His minimalistic approach is perhaps best exemplified by one of his most iconic scenes, that being the death of Marion Crane in Psycho (the ‘shower scene’). Despite depicting the murder of the film’s principal character, the sequence is notably restrained in what it actually shows. It features a very small amount of blood, and perhaps more significantly, never directly shows contact between the knife and the victim. Hitchcock famously recounted on an episode of the Dick Cavett show that he had rejected the opportunity to use a fake body in the sequence which could have been used to show the full stabbing. He opted instead to use camera trickery and fast editing to achieve the final effect, with the breakneck cutting between shots creating an unusual, almost optical-illusion-like effect where the mind fills in what is not actually shown. The stinging score, the rapid shunting of the knife and the screams of Janet Leigh create an effect that is far more chilling than if the stabbing was simply played out in full.
In general, Hitchcock makes a point where possible of avoiding showing the thing-in-itself.
Whether it be through editing or symbolism, he usually finds a way to represent or suggest a given event as opposed to simply portraying it outright.
While Psycho reflects this philosophy in relation to violence, North-by-Northwest sees Hitchcock take the same approach to sex. In the final moments of the latter film, we are shown the two lead characters climbing into bed on board a train. The Hays Code of the time strictly prohibited motion pictures from showing any kind of sexual activity, especially between unmarried couples, but Hitchcock uses this prohibition to his advantage. We see the two characters get into bed and kiss, and then immediately we cut to the infamous shot of the train entering the tunnel. The sexual symbolism of this shot is well-documented by film theorists and essayists, and we can see here Hitchcock’s aptitude for visual metaphor.
This sequence sees him employing a Soviet technique commonly referred to as ‘intellectual montage’ which is commonly thought of as having been pioneered by Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein. This refers to the practice of combining two seemingly unrelated and innocuous images in such a way that their combination creates new meaning. Instead of simply depicting a sexual act, Hitchcock utilizes this technique to subtly provide the information that the act has taken place. Contrast this scene to a modern work (e.g. something like Euphoria), in which the physical act of sex is constantly shown. The subtlety is gone. The symbolism is destroyed. We are shown the literal event, stripped of metaphor and intrigue, and it is boring. Foucault alluded to this in his History of Sexuality, in a bizarre oxymoronic twist of fate, as sex is shown more and more, sexuality itself completely disappears.
Hitchcock’s minimalist and economic approach applied not only to his portrayal of taboo
subjects, but also to other, more conventional aspects of his filmmaking. For example, having come from a silent film background, he was particularly known for a conservative use of dialogue in his films, long after the silent age had ended.
Vertigo, often seen as his masterpiece, is an excellent showcase of this, with a long stretch in the middle of the film which is almost completely silent. It was Hitchcock’s firmly held belief that film is above all a visual medium, and he was in vehement opposition to the idea of explaining everything with dialogue. Modern filmmakers’ thinking could not be further from this philosophy, with the modern screenplay inundated with fast-paced banter and a constant back-and-forth between characters. This is an approach to dialogue which was pioneered by various figures of the past thirty years but perhaps most notably by writers like Quentin Tarantino and Joss Whedon. While this style of writing was in some ways fresh and interesting when it first emerged in the late twentieth century, it is now endemic to modern filmmaking, to the extent that one would be hard-pressed to find a blockbuster that isn’t written in this cadence and syntax. Hitchcock’s constant fear, particularly in the later stages of his career, was that filmmakers would give up on the image entirely. It was his gravest worry for the future of cinema that it would one day be a dialogue-first medium. Considering the recent reports of Netflix encouraging its screenwriters to reiterate a film’s plot ‘at least three or four times’ in dialogue, it may well be that the future of Hitchcock’s nightmares is already here.
Does this mean that Hitchcock is a relic? A man from a forgotten age of filmmaking? Quite the contrary. Hitchcock’s filmography should be a template for young filmmakers today, a guide for emerging from the modern quagmire of dialogue-heavy, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination filmmaking. If we are ever to return to the golden age of film, Hitchcock will lead the way.
Image Credit – TheMovieDB
