Hitchcock – Basics of Cinema and the Creative Process
Transcribed from The Men Who Made The Movies: Alfred Hitchcock – American Film Institute – 1973
When I say that I’m not interested in content, it’s the same as a painter worrying about whether the apples that he is painting are sweet or sour.
Who cares?
It’s his style, his manner of painting them, that’s where the emotion comes from. Same as in sculpture. Any art form is there for the artist to interpret it in his own way and thus create an emotion. Literature can do it by the way that language is used or the words are put together. But sometimes you find that film is looked at solely for its content without any regard to the style or manner in which the story is told and after all – that basically is the art of the cinema.
One reads a book and providing all the story elements are there, the characters are there, it’s best then to lay the book aside and start with scene one in cinema terms. In other words we don’t have pages to fill. We have a rectangle of screen in a movie house. Now this rectangle of screen has got to be filled with a succession of images and the mere fact that they are in succession: that’s where the ideas come from. One picture comes up after another. The public aren’t aware of what we called montage or in other words, the cutting of one image to another. They go by so rapidly so that they are absorbed by the content that they look at on the screen – but such content is created on the screen and not necessarily in a single shot.
For example devising in a picture like Psycho the murdering and the stabbing of a girl in a shower in a bathroom. This scene is 45 seconds long, but was made up out of 78 pieces of film going through the projector and coming on to the screen in great rapidity.The overall impression given the audience is one of an alarming, devastating murder scene.
Now – this has to be written out on paper. In other words, you can’t walk onto the set – well you can if you want to – but for my money I would prefer to write all these things down, however tiny, however short the pieces of film are, just in the same way as a composer writes down those little black dots from which we get beautiful sounds.
But what do we have? We have a girl who has stolen $40,000 all of the sudden, out of the blue, attacked by a woman with a knife in the shower. Now, this is such a shock, and because the shock comes because we have been leading the audience along the lines of $40,000 dollars stolen, and suddenly the twist and the shock is this thing in the shower. From that point on, the audience’s mind is full of apprehension, but as the film went on, you got less and less violence on the screen.
