Word: hitchcock
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...sequence reveals the tenor of the girl's growth. She has gone to the town library just at closing time to check on her uncle's possibly criminal past. As she finds the relevant newspaper, Hitchcock cuts to a shot from the ceiling of the dark deserted room, showing her surrounded by space seventy feet below. Unlike the usual Hitchcock high-angle, this shot expresses with a sort of warm detachment the romantic dimension of her personal anguish. The same attitude follows her and her uncle through the darkening stages of a deep love-attachment. Throughout they are true personalities...
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...
...more speculative analysis some films reveal the preoccupations of entire periods of his career. Those that do so the most likeably are the east manipulated. Almost all of Hitchcock's films feel excessively structured, designed to make the audience draw the morals he intends. Only in a few does his subject balance his frightening formal control and let the characters seem real individuals. Hitchcock's audience-manipulation, involving an attitude of superiority toward his viewers, generates the unpleasant feeling that his characters merely illustrate a narrow moral design-Hitchcock's. Only in Shadow of a Doubt, Under Capricorn, and Psycho...
...HITCHCOCK'S British and early American films seem well-made and not very personal. Their thematic preoccupations-guilt or accusation of guilt, sexual re??rsesion, voyeurism-are roughly those of his later films, but they never take over these films. One sees a dreary succession of slickly put together films relieved by such brilliant sequences as the kitchen-knife killing in Sabota?e, and by that minor romantic masterpiece The Lodger...