Introducing Hitchcock, Pure Cinema and Production Day
INTRODUCING HITCHCOCK -
Who was Alfred Hitchcock?
Alfred Hitchcock was a British-born director, notorious for his works within the thriller genre. He is most well known for his works such as Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960),The Birds (1963) and many more including Frenzy (1972).
His works have not only influenced many of the modern styles of thriller films, but they have inspired many directors and their own individual styles when it comes to film-making, and within his own time, he began a new age of cinema. Hitchcock is looked up to by many film enthusiasts as his style revolves much around a certain term he helped define known as 'Pure Cinema'.
PURE CINEMA
What is 'Pure Cinema'?
‘Pure Cinema’ is Alfred Hitchcock’s method to storytelling visually, and without the need of dialogue to move a plot forwards, since it is a lazy way of communicating story information. Hitchcock tells an interviewer in 1964 that modern films are just “Photographs of people talking, and there’s no relation to the art of the cinema”. This is because it was Alfred Hitchcock who believed that a truly good film could be enjoyed with or without sound/dialogue. And that is what the art of ‘Pure Cinema’ is.
PRODUCTION DAY
On production day, we were tasked with recreating some of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous techniques from his thriller films from over 40 years ago. As someone who really shaped the film making world as it was and still is today, we were really keen on creating the most perfected replications of some of his greatest works.
Some of the notorious directors techniques that we needed to try and replicate were...
One of the tasks we were set was to do Silhouettes inspired by Notorious (1946) when Ingrid Bergman is poisoned.
My group and I decided to also primarily work in black and white in order to more closely replicate the original feel of Hitchcock's greatest works. For ease, we worked with still imagery so we could focus more on our work of lighting and composition.
From the video below, we managed to capture some very eye catching and striking shots, however, we weren't able to perfectly imitate the unnerving frames from Notorious.
I did learn from the results that to work with black and white footage you need to emphasis the contrast between the light and dark tones to create impact, but when it does work it can look atmospheric and professional.
Rather than use silhouettes in my work I may consider working black and white for my final film opening. This depends on my choice of sub-genre, whether it be psychological or action (etc...).
I find it really interesting to see films such as Parasite (2019) and Mad Mad Fury Road (2014) be re-release in black and white due to the impact it has on mood and tone of the films. I think this also presents the consideration that must be implemented in order to perfect the lighting so that exposure is just right, making the shot look at good as it can be.
Whilst my group and I experimented different ways to replicate Hitchcock methods of lighting, we decided to try a lot of flickering lighting, where one person would turn one light on and another person would turn the light opposite off. We did this to try and replicate one of Hitchcock's works by the name of Vertigo (1958), where the main character is having a terrifying dream/nightmare sequence as well as the green lighting shot shown below where the character shown has a half lit face. I think that this was the most recreation of any of the Hitchcock techniques
(Vertigo, 1958)
(Vertigo. 1958)
Another element of Hitchcock's cinema that we were tasked with recreating was the pull-away from the British-set thriller, Frenzy (1958). The main focus was to try and nail the recreation of the long and eerie take after the two character go through the together and Bob says, "You are my type of woman". However, I don't think it was as successful, this is possibly due to the fact that we improvised the scene and so it then did not have the thrilling feeling that the original movie had.
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