Hitchcock movie

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Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

The Hitchcock film (also Hitchcock film , Hitchcock thriller or just Hitchcock for short ) is a form of thriller that has been shaped by the British-American director Alfred Hitchcock since the 1930s .

features

The Hitchcock film is characterized by the use of the same or similar stylistic devices, motifs and symbols , by the drawing of recurring figure patterns and by an explicitly visual narrative style, as well as by a close connection between tension and humor.

“ Hitchcock may have succeeded in making a 'Hitchcock film' from time to time, but in fact there is hardly a filmmaker who has managed to be consistently Hitchcock himself. "

- Georg Seeßlen , 1999

Motifs

According to Truffaut , the three overarching main motifs that have pervaded Hitchcock's work from the start are fear, sex and death. The main elements and motifs associated with Hitchcock are loss of identity, transfer of guilt and double or split personalities. Hitchcock's narrative style includes suspense as a means of generating tension and MacGuffins as elements that drive action. Typical figures associated with Hitchcock are male anti-heroes , the innocently persecuted, mysterious or enigmatic blonde women, possessive mothers and charismatic or sympathetic villains .

Symbols occupied by Hitchcock are birds as harbingers of misfortune and chaos, as symbols for a life that has fallen apart or as an immediate symbol for death, as well as stairs as a symbol for the unknown and dangerous, which separate the real, down-to-earth level from the mysterious, separate abysmal level of perdition. Hitchcock mirrors, masks and disguises are also symbols for double or split personalities.

Another typically Hitchcockian motif is the connection between ingestion of food, sex and violence or death, which runs like a red thread through Hitchcock's work: When eating, people talk about sex or killing, love scenes are staged like murders and vice versa, like kisses (Vampire) bites, murders take place with the help of kitchen utensils or in the presence of food.

term

The term “Hitchcock Picture”, in German “Hitchcock film”, was coined as a trademark and quality mark in England in the 1930s when Alfred Hitchcock shot six outstanding thrillers in succession between 1934 and 1938 and became the new British star director. After crime films had previously played either in the police or in the gangster milieu, Hitchcock put “ordinary people” at the center of criminal activities for the first time. He shaped the thriller genre for decades.

Alfred Hitchcock himself used the term. In an interview with David Brady in 1950, he confessed: “Some time ago I directed a comedy called Mr. & Mrs. Smith . A commercially successful film, however, it was never considered a Hitchcock film because there were no car chases. It was the same with Lifeboat . Under Capricorn (1948) wasn't really a Hitchcock film either - that was Bergman. ” In an interview with François Truffaut in 1962, he explained that his third film and first thriller The Tenant from 1927 was actually the“ first real Hitchcock film ”while he was from other films such as Rebecca (1940) said they were "not Hitchcock films ". Hitchcock used this term to differentiate between those of his films in which he was able to implement his artistic understanding of film largely without compromise, and those in which he had to submit to various external constraints, whether caused by the producers, by lack of time or money, or by other circumstances .

The Hitchcock film is not established in the professional world either as an independent film genre or as a sub-genre of the thriller . However, due to its formal and stylistic delimitation, it is de facto treated as such. Hitchcock is given a prominent role in film studies for the development and importance of the thriller (as a genre). Hitchcock's 50-year thriller and film vocabulary have become role models and quarries for the entire genre. The term Hitchcock represents a quality feature and is used as such in formulations such as "exciting as a Hitchcock" far beyond cineast circles.

hitchcockish

Films by other directors are sometimes referred to as "Hitchcock films" if they are strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock's own films through the use of typical Hitchcock style elements. This property of such films is called "hitchcockian" in the British-speaking area , in the German-speaking area the term "Hitchcock touch" is also occasionally in use, as an adjective also "hitchcocksch" or "hitchcockisch" . Jean-Luc Godard once said that a Hitchcock film can be identified as such from the very first images.

Films by other directors (selection)

literature

Footnotes / individual references

  1. ↑ See Beier / Seeßlen , p. 185
  2. ↑ See Truffaut , pp. 15, 271
  3. ↑ Gottlieb , p. 131
  4. ↑ See Truffaut , pp. 31, 103
  5. ↑ On the use of the above terms see, inter alia, Krohn , pp. 9ff, 40; Karasek (1994), p. 420; Truffaut, p. 9ff; Weber, p. 17; Beier / Seeßlen , p. 185
  6. ↑ See Beier / Seeßlen, p. 45
  7. ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: Why we're fighting back on Basic Instinct ): “ Basic Instinct owes a lot to Hitchcock's Vertigo and the homage is so obvious that it's embarrassing. "@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / pqasb.pqarchiver.com
  8. ↑ Decent Films Guide: Charade
  9. ↑ David Boyd: After Hitchcock. University of Texas Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-292-78323-2 , p. 145 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  10. ↑ Doris Day ( Memento from July 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Gilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Light in Darkness and Light . New York City: HarperCollins, 2004
  12. ↑ Chris Hicks: Paul Newman flick from 1963 is a real prize. In: The Deseret News. June 23, 2011, accessed April 19, 2019 .
  13. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-27/news/ol-4299_1_mirage-thriller-hitchcock
  14. ^ The large personal lexicon of films, Volume 2, p. 477. Berlin 2001
  15. ↑ http://www.prisma.de/filme/Marrakesch,231875
  16. ↑ https://www.kino.de/film/der-haftbefehl-1968/
  17. ↑ Review: 'Panic Room' Screams Hitchcock ( Memento from July 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  18. ↑ An American in Paris . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1988, pp. 179 ( Online - Aug. 22, 1988 ).
  19. ↑ "... Hitchcockian ..." - 12 Monkeys review from Time Out Film Guide ( Memento of March 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Polanski does the Hitchcock. In: n-tv. February 14, 2010, accessed April 19, 2019 .