Journal of American Studies of Turkey
1 (1995): 49-52.
Alfred Hitchcock - A Silent Vision
Michael Oppermann
Alfred Hitchcock has left us with an incredible legacy of outstanding films.
Traditionally regarded as a master of flawlessly edited, fast-paced suspense movies
that make the audience's hair stand on end, Hitchcock's work has also been met
with considerable critical acclaim. The groundbreaking studies by Lindsay
Anderson, Jean Domarchi and Eric Rohmer/Claude Chabrol initiated a critical
discourse that has not come to a standstill. (Note 1) Raubicheck's and Srebnick's
collection of essays provides the reader with a fairly comprehensive introduction to
the contemporary diversity of critical approaches to Hitchcock's films. (Note 2)
This study will focus on an element in Hitchcock's work that has been strangely
marginalized by the critics. David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film is one of
the very few sources that highlight the influence of the silent film on Hitchcock's
conception of the cinema. In fact, Hitchcock is one of the very few directors who
managed to transport some of the qualities of the silent era into the canon of
Hollywood mainstream. For Hitchcock, the silent film always remained the purest
kind of cinema (Truffaut 53). Especially the short stint at the German UFA in 1924,
"where he fell under the spell of Expressionism" (Cook 294), influenced his work
to a much greater degree than most critics are willing to concede.
While the pot-boiler or suspense movie admittedly became an ideal canvas for
Hitchcock to project some of his basic fears and nightmares to the screen, (Note 3)
my argument is that in Hitchcock's world the mode of representation is as important
as the script. In Psycho (1961), it can even be regarded as the primary source of
interest. Hitchcock's specific use of the language of film reveals a strong influence
by Eisenstein and such German directors as Lang and Murnau. Hitchcock loved
German silent films, especially because of their outstanding technical qualities. In
his conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock points to their suggestive use
of light and shadow, their audacious way of moving the camera and experimenting
with unusual camera angles, and their attempt to reduce the amount of titles to a
minimum in order to create an entirely visual style of representation. Apart from
that, German silent film directors displayed a high degree of commitment towards
their films which turned into very personal, private visions. I will try to show how
all of these qualities manifest themselves in Hitchcock's art and how they are
complemented by an equally skillful use of sound.
a) The German Touch
The Lodger (1926) was Hitchcock's first stab at the suspense genre. It was also the
first film that established a typical Hitchcock style. Fear and horror are entirely
conveyed from the perspective of the prospective victim (a landlady who suspects
her new lodger to be a terrible murderer). The whole tension of the situation is
reflected in her facial expression. For the first time, Hitchcock manages to create a
purely visual style that conveys a story with a bare minimum of narrative
explanations. The film displays the director's ability to elicit highly committed
performances from his actors, a quality that is complemented by a marvellous use
of light and shadow, and a superior editing. The film also underlines Hitchcock's
inventiveness on the set which he shared with his German colleagues. In one of the
film's best scenes, for example, Hitchcock presents us with a simultaneous shot of
the lodger walking up and down in his upstairs room and the landlady listening
downstairs, her face filled with fear. The outstanding effect was not achieved by the
(already established) technique of juxtaposing two different images, but by the
construction of a ceiling made out of glass. Even Hitchcock himself regarded this
idea of his as rather eccentric (Truffaut 41). It is this moment of eccentricity,
though, that makes Hitchcock a true contemporary of the better known of the silent
film directors who would take any effort to make a scene correspond completely to
a specific image in their minds. For this reason, Hitchcock was always prone to all
kinds of bizarre (but highly effective) ideas.
In Suspicion (1941), he hid a small lamp in a glass of milk in order to create a
frightening effect of illumination. For Spellbound (1945), he used a specially
designed model of a gun that seemed to be big enough to blow both Ingrid
Bergman and the viewer into pieces. The outstanding staircase sequence
in Psycho (1961) was created by a careful use of backprojection, (Note 4) while the
old man in the breathtaking roundabout sequence in Strangers on a Train (1951)
literally risked his life for Hitchcock's "vision" of the scene--one false move, and
his head had been chopped off. The film also reveals Hitchcock's predilection for
experimenting with unusual camera angles when we witness the first murder
through one lens of the victim's glasses, inverted and distorted. No silent film
director could have shot this more intensely.
In fact, many of Hitchcock's best scenes are the result of a very silent conception of
the screen. To the climactic attack of The Birds (1964), which was based on 371
individual trick shots (Cook 304), to the Salvador Dali designed dream sequence in
Spellbound or to the crop-dusting and Mount Rushmore sequences in North by
Northwest (1959), sound comes only as an addition.5 The same holds true for the
opening sequence of Rear Window (1954), in spite of its expressive use of various
layers of music. The film, a highly influential and profoundly modern study of the
moral complicity of the voyeur,6 begins with a wonderful panning shot of the
courtyard that introduces us to the perspective of James Stewart, the man behind
the telescope. After that, the camera focuses on Stewart himself, his broken leg, a
broken camera and a number of journals on the table. Finally, we see pictures of
race cars overturning. Thus, Hitchcock does not convey the history of Stewart's
accident by traditional elements of narrative cinema (dialogue or flashbacks) but by
a series of carefully selected images, a technique that has very rarely been used in
American films ever since.7 Rear Window, in other words, shows Hitchcock at the
height of his craft. b) Sound and Montage Hitchcock was clearly aware of the fact
that the transition towards sound did not necessarily enrich the medium of film. In
many cases it implied a shift towards a more theatrical style of representation, as
opposed to Hitchcock's notion of pure cinema (Truffaut 53). Accordingly, the
sound version of Blackmail (1929) shows an expressive use of natural and non-
natural sounds beyond the level of mere representation. The film contains the first
experiment with interior monologue on the screen, and it shows how to use sound
as a means of conveying a certain psychological condition (when the heroine's
feeling of guilt is conveyed by the seemingly endless clanging of a shop bell). In
yet another scene, the word "knife" emerges from a harmless conversation,
tormenting the heroine's soul as a constant echo. In The 39 Steps (1935), Hitchcock
develops a new way of blending sound and image by inter-cutting the scream of a
cleaning lady with the whistle of a train, thus creating an outstanding audio-visual
montage (Cook 296). Psycho carries the use of montage even further. The shower
scene, a series of 87 rapidly alternating fragmentary shots, turned into a masterful
vindication of a technique that had made Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence one of
the most harrowing moments in the history of world cinema. Just like Eisenstein,
Hitchcock was a master of audience manipulation. He used to conceive a scene
entirely from the perspective of the viewer who, as in the shower scene, seems to
be almost part of the action. The same holds true for the second murder scene in
which an unusually high camera position seems to draw victim and audience alike
into a deep abyss. In one of the film's quieter moments, Hitchcock combines the
use of interior monologue with a subjective camera perspective. When Janet Leigh
imagines how her boss finds out about her theft, the camera follows her eyes that
try to protrude the streams of water on the windscreen of her car. Thus, the scene
invites the viewer to a strange ride into darkness and-- silence. By the time Janet
Leigh's eyes capture the sign of Bates Motel, sound and words have ceased
completely. The transition is very indicative of the film in general that comes closer
to a silent movie than any other of Hitchcock's sound films. Three reels of film
contain no dialogue at all, and about 50% of the movie is totally silent. It seems to
me that with Psycho Hitchcock's cinematic vision had come full circle. Psycho is
pure cinema, a highly manipulative ride into a bleak world full of desolation and
despair. Hitchcock's finest films combine the qualities of an excellent script with an
immaculate understanding of the medium of film, a union which has been critically
labelled as "the Hitchcock touch." While many contemporary American directors
have tried to imitate that specific "touch" of Hitchcock's, very few of them have
been successful. Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), Damian Harris's Deceived
(1992) and especially Peter Hyams's powerful Narrow Margin (1991) are rare
exceptions. Like Robert Altman and Orson Welles, Hitchcock presented
Hollywood with a very personal vision of the screen that could hardly be imitated.
Notes
1
Jean Domarchi's interpretation of Rear Window initiated a highly intellectual discourse on Hitchcock by
establishing a parallel between the situation of the viewer behind his telescope and the audience at the cinema.
Chabrol and Rohmer, on the other hand, focused heavily on Catholic themes of guilt and innocence, thus starting
an entire line of Freudian and post-Freudian criticism. Contemporary variations include Price's study
onHitchcock and Homosexuality, Modleski's feminist approach that analyzes typical plot elements from the
perspective of a neo-Freudian model view of the male and female spectator, and Ann Cvetkovich's essay on
"Postmodern Vertigo: The Sexual Politics of Allusion in De Palma's Body Double." In my opinion, some of
these and similar approaches fail simply because they refuse to realize that film is, first of all, a language that can
be broken into various constituents. Stefan Sharff's analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's High Vernacular is the most
convincing of the more recent publications simply because Sharff (a former student of Eisenstein's) works
exactly from this premise. His study categorizes Hitchcock's specific use of the language of film in a highly
satisfying and detailed manner by focusing on its principles of organization.
2
The collection is remarkable because of Anthony J. Mazella's essay on Rear Window which continues a "meta-
cinematical" line of thinking started by Domarchi.
3
In this context, I have to mention Truffaut's (highly illuminating) interviews with Hitchcock which provide the
reader with a comprehensive view of the man and his vision of the screen.
4
Of course, Hitchcock did not film Martin Balsam falling down the stairs. Instead, he shot the fall without the
actor by using a dolly. Then he placed Balsam in a chair in front of a creen and made him wave his hands about
(Truffaut 268).
5
This quality of Hitchcock's art was marvellously captured by Vincent Gallo's pantomime approach to the crop-
dusting sequence from North by Northwest which turned out to be the sole climax of Emir Kusturica's
recentArizona Dreams (1992).
6
Until today,Rear Window has inspired an impressive amount of films. Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), Francis Ford
Coppola's The Conversation (1973), Brian De Palma's Body Double (1978), Claude Miller's The Eye (1982) and
Philip Noyce's Sliver (1993) come to mind almost immediately.
7
A fairly recent example can be found in a film by American experimental director Jon Jost whose Frame
Up (1993) opens with a series of quickly presented items like keys and postcards that, in their rapid succession,
introduce the film's central characters.
Works Cited
Anderson, Lindsay. "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock" in Sequence 9. (1949).
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York and London: Norton, 1981.
Cvetkovich, Ann. "Postmodern Vertigo: The Sexual Politics of Allusion in De
Palma's Body Double" in Hitchcock's Released Films: From Rope to Vertigo, eds.
Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1991,147-162.
Domarchi, Jean. "Le Fer dans la Plaie" in Cahiers du Cinema 63 (1956).
Mazella, Anthony J. "Author, Auteur: Reading Rear Window from Woolrich to
Hitchcock" in Hitchcock's Released Films. From Rope to Vertigo, eds. Walter
Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, 62-
75.
Modleski, Tania. The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory. New York and London: Methuen, 1988.
Price, Theodore. Hitchcock and Homesexuality. His 5O-Year Obsession with Jack
the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute - A Psychoanalytical View. London: The
Scarecrow Press, 1992.
Raubicheck, Walter and Srebnick, Walter Hitchcock's Released Films: From Rope
to Vertigo. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Rohmer, Eric and Chabrol, Claude. Hitchcock. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1957.
Sharff, Stefan. Alfred Hitchcock's High Vernacular: Theory and Practise. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Truffaut, François. Mr. Hitchcock, Wie Haben Sie das Gemacht? München: Heyne,
1973.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films. London and New York: Zwemmer and Barnes,
1965.
