Word: hitchcock
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ROBIN WOOD'S book, the best in English on Hitchcock, analyzes seven of his later films in terms of guilt and cleansing. For Wood Hitchcock's plots implicate his characters in some immoral action, often a murder, and then let them make restitution. Overcoming a psychological paralysis of spirit and action that characterizes guilty men. Hitchcock's characters increase their moral breadth through their confrontation with their capacity for evil. At the same time Hitchcock involves his audiences in the guilty action or in condemnation of the guilty man, then makes them reconsider this endorsement. Wood's structural analysis explains...
After analyzing one film this way, one can usually apply one's conclusions to a director's other works. Hitchcock, however, tailors his shooting style to each film. One can't even abstract a typical Hitchcock shot that shows how his characters fit into his world. His dramatic structures are just as varied. A strict analysis cannot attempt any more than a one by-one description of his films...
...takes much of its style and action form the American gangster film. His Farenbeit 451 is adapted from a second-rate novel and takes after the sci-fi films of the fifties. The Bride Wore Black is a product of Truffaut's consuming interest in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, to whom the film is dedicated and the imitation detracts from the individuality of the film...
...make way for Greer Garson's car? Or that his housekeeper used to smuggle whisky into Shaw's soup? Still Minney has unearthed a few memorable anecdotes in which Shaw appears as the witty Irishman, some of his cracks as old as the Wicklow Hills. Alfred Hitchcock, on meeting Shaw: "One look at you, and I know there's famine in the land." Shaw, replying: "One look at you, Mr. Hitchcock, and I know who caused...
...OTHER films, Jean Rouch's "Garedu Nord" is perhaps equally stunning and disturbing. Rouch who, along with Chris Marker, invented Cinema-verite (the difference between Maker and Rouch and the recent American copies is roughly that between the incredible Hitchcock of Vertigo and the bankrupt Polanski of Repulsion) is a master at forcing an audience to change their sympathies. Fantastically aware of the possibilities of a frame, Rouch can totally confuse a complacent viewer by having an actress turn her body about thirty degrees and in so doing undermine her earlier sympathetic position. In "Gare du Nord" these abrupt shifts...