Film OUGD401

Film

What is an auteur?

• Andre Bazin - Cahers du Cinema 
• Auteur French for 'author'  - French film directors and critics - 1950s
• Celebrated the role of the director as the author of a film.
• Alfred Hitchcock
• History of Auteurs - Original work , Creative Control , Personal film language.
•  1962 the technical competence of a director , Distinguishable personality & interior meaning.

Why Hitchcock?

• long career
• Work in Europe and America
• innovation in film making
• master of suspense and audiences reception of the film
• influential in later genres like the american slasher , Italian Giallo or the psychological thriller.
• Inspired by the avant-garde expressionism , surrealism , but films still attracted mainstream audiences
• French new wave acknowledged him as an auteur.

The technical competence of the director

• expressionist lighting
• story telling visually in silent area
• use of the subjective camera
• dolly zoom
• clever use of montage and cutting to create tension in spite of the production code 1939-60.

1920 

• First Dracula film Nosferatu. F.W Murnaus 1922
• The lodger 1927

Cutting & Montage 

Pyscho 1960

The directors distinguishable personality (style)

• Expressionism form evokes emotion
• cameo appliances of the director
• narrative is often visual rather than told through dialogue
• Continuous of certain actors
• Obsessive use of the blonds
• Suspense

'Blondes make the best victims they're like virgin snow that hoses up the bloody footprints.' - Hitchcock

Suspense

• Suspense is generated when the audience can see danger his characters cannot see..
• "Theres no terror in the band of the gun , only the anticipation of it."
• His earlier work could created vivid terror in the mind of the views with very little spatter on the screen.

Expressionism

• Hitchcock films are not concert with realism or naturalism
• He is interested in story telling.

Voyeurism - Vertigo , Decent in maddness. 
The art of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Spoto - Birds-Eye View
Self -Proclaimed fears. - Small children , High places & Police men

Themes Revisited- 

• mistaken identity
• espionage
• murder and madness
• sly wit and moments of macabre humour
• strong sexual themes
• explorations of the darkest corners

Described 

• Relationship between order and chaos 
• search for identity
• existential anxiety , free will
• guilt, transference of guilt
• death drive, other themes from freudian psychology
• relationship between spectator and an image
• projection of guilt and desire.

Critique of the auteur

• It presented a canon of films made by 'elites' 
• It disguises the work of others
• It offers a universal view of quality
• It is a capitalist device by selling a film by virtue of its director.

The death of the author (Barthes, 1977 , p143)