Blog 2

Connor McShane

Blog Assignment Two

October 4, 2010

Alfred Hitchcock

     Alfred Hitchcock’s career in film has a vast time frame which includes numerous great and influential achievements. His career started as an artist, in the early silent films, as a set designer. He then worked his way up and became a writer and later a director. As a director, Hitchcock had a very influential career and is seen as one of the greatest directors in film.

      Starting in silent films and moving toward talkies as technology advanced, he saw the potential in the advancing age of film. Because of his start in the silent era and his exposure to the German expressionistic style and the metamorphic editing of soviet Montage, he was able to use sound to his advantage. Combining his dramatic visual styles and the combination of silence and sound he created a style of his own that shined throughout the movie industry.

     Known as the man to make sublime thrillers—it is his most famous films that came in the 60s which coined his title. Even though his most famous films were created after the golden era, his successful career started way before this time. During, before, and after the golden era Hitchcock was creating influential films that stood as marvels in every criteria of filmmaking. Beginning in the early thirties “with his creative use of sound”, and movement into a “thematic, visual, and structural unity”[1] we see this throughout his collection of films. He is a man that stands apart from the film industry throughout his entire career—“Hitchcock did not simply accommodate himself to the studio system but sought independence from it”[2].

     It is Hitchcock’s use of sound that makes his thrillers so famous, creating suspense and anxiety using silent film and joining with it a suspenseful number. Hitchcock is the man that helped make thrillers the way they are—he is the one that “provided the stepping stone for the development of new theories of film”[3]. Hitchcock truly is a man that created a genre of film that dominates the box offices today. Considered to be one of the greatest directors in film, Hitchcock definitely made a name for himself with the products of his long and spectacular career—if not for his products to which made him largely known, his image was solidified because in every film Hitchcock created he always had cameo appearances. Because of this Hitchcock’s popularity skyrocketed. Hitchcock contributed to the film industry greatly, and he truly is a marvel to this day.       

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[1] The Oxford History of World Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

[2] ibid

[3] ibid