This was an essay I wrote about Alfred Hitchcock's Legacy in a Alfred Hitchcock course I took in the Fall of 2013. I analyzed the first thirty minutes of Brian De Palma's 1973 film "Sisters" and also a piece written by Richard Allen titled "Hitchcock's Legacy".
As long as their are those who love film, Hitchcock’s legacy as a film maker will live on. As long as their are those who want to create their own films, his legacy will also live on. Occasionally those two types of people are the same person, like myself and countless others of my generation and past generations. In several interviews I have seen with William Friedkin, director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist”, he has numerous times said that he learned the craft not through formal film school but by watching the films of great directors like Hitchcock and implored others to do the same. His influence has impacted not only American cinema but foreign cinema as well.
In the reading, “Hitchcock’s Legacy” by Richard Allen, he writes that the young french film makers of the 1950s and 1960s were highly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and revered him as a great Auteur. Young French film makers like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard viewed Hitchcock’s films became a model for classical art cinema. According to Allen, Claude Chabrol explored the shadow world that lurks beneath the veneer of bourgeois values. Like Hitchcock he used the duality of delivering a story on the surface but providing hidden meaning through depth. For Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock appealed to him because of his cinematic technique. He was interested in how Hitchcock would frame a scene. Allen says that Truffaut concentrated on the plot surface and not quite as deep as Chabrol. He is also responsible for the fantastic interview he did with Hitchcock in the early 1960s. At first glance Godard seems like the antithesis of Hitchcock because his films seem so disjointed while Hitchcock contains such straight structure. But, Godard is similar to Hitchcock in the sense that he is on a different level of auteur than Hitchcock but took him as a base. Allen mentions that Rohmer’s films, while considered Hitchcockian, are cerebral, realist, lack drama, and suspense. So in a way they are the antithesis of Hitchcock.
American film makers, like the foreign ones mentioned above, also were influenced by Hitchcock. My favorite decade of American film is the 1970s. I view it as a period of American film renaissance. New young film makers arrived in Hollywood and provided a shot of new energy to American film that was desperately needed. well known film makers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and several others. While they all did not make Hitchockian films they all started out as film fans watching and learning from Hitchcock films. My favorite living Director is Martin Scorsese and while he is mostly known for his gangster films, his 1991 film “Cape Fear” is his Hitchcockian film. It is a remake of a 1962 with the same title and even uses the same wonderful Bernard Hermann musical score. He also uses the great Saul Bass to create one of his great title designs, like he did with Hitchcock on Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The character of Max Cady, although from the original film, is presented like a character straight out of a dark Hitchcockian nightmare in his relentless almost demonic presents on screen. He is frightening in the way that Norman Bates was frightening, on the surface a calm demeanor, but you get the feeling underneath lies something grotesque. While we get small glimpse through cracks in Bates‘ psyche in “Psycho”, we are treated to the frightening evil that is Max Cady.
It is interesting that Pat Hitchcock would say that Spielberg is the true heir of Hitchcock. I must admit that it has only been over the last year that I have been able to look upon Spielberg as a serious film maker. I used to think that he was too commercially successful and that he panders to a larger audience for financial success. Then I began to learn more about Hitchcock and how he was able to mesh both financial success and artistic film making into one. Spielberg has been able to do the same throughout his career. His first big success was “Jaws” a Hitchcockian film in the sense that it used its musical score by John Williams to create tension throughout the film. Also the use of implication throughout the the film was very Hitchcockian. Throughout the the film you never get a glimpse as to what the shark looks like until the later sequences. All that is shown the viewer is the victims being taken underwater by the shark and their screams. It gets to the point that beach goers in the film are so psychologically afraid of the shark that even a mention of the word could have people running out of the water. It is said that Hitchcock made people afraid to take a shower after “Psycho”, with “Jaws” Spielberg made people afraid to go into the ocean.
Now someone who took the most from Hitchcock is Brian De Palma. His early films in his filmography especially, like “Sisters”, “Carrie”, “Dressed to Kill”, and “Blow Out” all can be said as having Hitchcockian elements to them. The first thirty minutes of his 1973 film “Sisters” contains several Hitchcockian elements. Right from the opening credit sequence there is a Hitchcockian nature to the film with a Bernard Hermann score. The score is not only in the credit sequence but permeate throughout the film. The first scene features Margot Kidder as blind woman entering a locker room where she begins to undress with an on looker in the room. De Palma is showing someone who is being a voyeur, like Hitchcock did with Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window”. As she is undressing there is a freeze frame in which it is revealed that it is part of a “reality” game show called peeping tom, further displaying the voyeurism theme. De Palma also uses Hitchcockian camera movement in the film. The scene at the restaurant opens up on a closeup of a statue of a monkey and then pans slightly out then dolly shots over the restaurant to the table where Danielle and Phillip are sitting. It appears he uses a crane shot in the scene where Danielle and Phillip are lying on the couch kissing each other. The shot starts overhead and then slowly pans down to Danielle’s thigh to reveal a nasty scar, while an ominous Hermann score sends a message to the audience that this is something important. Another Hitchcockian element is the idea that Danielle has split personality between her and her sister Dominique, similar to Norman Bates from Psycho. Although it is not revealed within the first thirty minutes, I could deduce that based on how heavily the film is relying on Hitchockian elements. The murder scene seems like an homage to the shower scene in “Psycho”. The murderer even uses a knife similar to the one used in “Psycho” but in this case because it is the 1970s the scene can be much more violent on screen than in “Psycho”. The obsessive ex-husband reminds me of Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Vertigo” in the way he seems to be infatuated with Danielle.
No comments:
Post a Comment