I think Hitchcock was over rated. His films did use many techniques that make him a good topic to study in Art of Film, but I did not find them entertaining. Hitchcock was a good but over rated director.
His title was "the master of suspense." The use of suspense in his stories makes is spot on. In Virtigo, the evil plot twist is revealed in just the right way so that it makes you wonder when and how the main character will uncover it. He also makes great use of subjective shots for when the characters are looking at something. The example from Rear Window has been brought up many times in class. He does an amazing job telling these stories, but the stories are not that entertaining.
The plots for his movies are entertaining as stories but not as movies. Rear Window and Virtigo are very slow to begin with and do not noticably pick up the pace in any way. I did not find these movies as entertaining as some of the others that I watched, but that is ok. These movies were better learning tools than entertaining tools, and that is exactly what we should watch in school.
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2 comments:
You made several interesting points. Instead of looking at any films in particular, you looked at Hitchcock as a whole. However, I think you missed the point of the director’s study. You say that his film making is excellent, but he tells bad stories. In that case, isn’t that the fault of the writers and not his director’s skills? Even if Hitchcock wrote the film, you should complain about his writing skills, not his directing skills.
On the other hand, it’s the job of the director to make sure that the story presented makes sense, so he should have taken the initiative to make sure that the story made sense. In that respect, your observations were spot on.
I think you have a point there. While ben is right that there are writers to think up a story, the director has some say in it. For example, if a writer wrote that a ugly unicorn with seven legs comes up and kills Thorwald in Rear Window, hitchcock would have been able to change that to something better....like a ugly unicorn with EIGHT legs
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