Figure 7.1. Hitchcock’s silhouette drawing was a part of his branding image, starting as early as 1927.
The branding image he painted was of a jovial master innocently sneaking around behind the scenes, slyly creating practical jokes for the viewer to enjoy. Leitch described this character he embodied as an “impresario, naïf, fat Cockney, and funhouse architect.” This is the persona you saw in interviews, and on TV, and probably the presence you feel behind the camera while watching his movies.
His on-camera introductions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the 1950s further helped shape his public perception as a director and craftsman. Each episode of his TV show begins as if we’ve caught a mad scientist in his lab, creating gags and jokes he may try out in the next episode.
During his movie cameos, he feigns innocence as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. His facial expression knowingly pretends to carry on with some everyday task, fully conscious of being watched. But, of course, this is all part of the gag—as a wink and a nod to his loyal audience.
Viewers of his films would pick up on it, too, and came to expect the cameos. Hitchcock’s cameos facilitate this viewer connection by evoking sympathy, often as the butt of self-depreciating gags. In Blackmail (1929) he’s being harassed by a child on the train; in Torn Curtain (1966) his leg has been peed on by a baby; in North by Northwest (1959) he misses the bus; and in Strangers on a Train (1951) he has trouble lifting a large double bass onto a train.
These self-effacing gags elicit a likeable giggle in the viewer. Hitchcock is our buddy. He’s on our side. He’s up there on the screen to get a front row seat of the action—to watch the movie right along with us. But of course the audience knows full well that behind this innocence is a prankster preparing the next tease.
These cameo roles were slightly on a different plane of reality than the other characters, almost like an apparition—they never affected the story. His coy presence is a reminder that he is in control of the film.
And that was the game that he set up.
GAME BETWEEN DIRECTOR & VIEWER
This game goes much further than the cameo appearances. Think of the Triad of Secrets in chapter 2. Secret information being hidden from parts of the triad provoke the audience into involvement. And with the knowledge that the director may hide certain things from the audience, too, it engages our detective hat. We become involved in a game of hide-and-seek with the director.
The ultimate goal of this game is to amuse. Just like when a creepy hand grabs at us in a carnival funhouse, we giggle and laugh because we’re in on the joke. We know the experience is going to be full of shocks, facetious dangers, optical illusions, and that we are the butt of all the pranks orchestrated by all the ghosts, ghouls, and zombies in the funhouse.
That’s the relationship that Hitchcock set up with his audiences, and it’s why his suspense was so effective. This relationship not only trivialized the horrors to make them more palatable, but it makes us the subject rather than the story.
Here’s how Leitch explains it:
[The audience’s] suffering does not feel like real suffering but like a teasing game, a necessary prelude to the pleasures they expect eventually and therefore a pleasure itself. In other words, the pleasure audiences take in thrillers … is essentially projective and anticipatory, a pleasure defined and guaranteed by the promise of what is to come. Audiences who feel sufficiently reassured by a thriller’s generic conventions can enjoy what would otherwise seem like perversely violent, sensational, or shocking stories.
When you’re designing your close-call scenarios (covered in Part 1), you’ll want both the protagonist and antagonist to have well-defined boundaries. Just like in a football game, each side has certain plays at their disposal and the fans anticipate the strategy. When Herbert is trying to lure his wife into the basement in the TV episode “Back for Christmas” (1956), she must clean house first. In order to speed her up, Herbert must help her cleaning. If he doesn’t help, she might get frustrated with him and refuse to go to the basement.
The game is set, and the Hitchcock hand is in full force, shaping, manipulating, and ultimately giving you a pleasurable fun-house ride. You’ll be tricked, shocked, on the edge of your seat, and you’ll come back begging for more. House cleaning has never been so much fun!
RED HERRINGS
A Hitchcockian film actually encourages misidentification and misinterpretation. It intentionally tricks us into siding with the wrong person, or into siding with a criminal to question our own morals (Leitch). Setting up red herrings to mislead the audience is a key aspect of this audience game.
Great storytellers and orators have known down through the eons that it’s not the story, but how you tell it—the showmanship behind it—that makes it enjoyable.
Audiences need to feel that the movie isn’t just meandering randomly, that the events aren’t just happening “because.” They need the satisfaction that the story has an intelligent plan, that there’s something profound to be learned from the events on screen, and that the director has found a way to outwit our skepticism and make us feel it unexpectedly. They want to be playfully manipulated and tricked.
A red herring teases the viewer by misdirecting them. It’s like a dead end in a maze, or a trap door that leads to a secret tunnel in a video game. It adds to the fun of the experience and makes us feel privileged—that we’re seeing something that no one else usually does.
Red herrings are a way to play with the audience’s allegiance. Here’s an example, from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956):
A man walks up to a female bank teller. Hitchcock cuts to a point-of-view shot from the teller as the man reaches into his coat pocket. The teller gets frightened as the music score swells up. At this moment the music and the framing suggest that he’s pulling out a gun. Then the actual object is revealed from his pocket—it’s his insurance policy. False alarm. But unfortunately this move causes the teller to falsely recognize him as the man who robbed the bank earlier. She is sensitive to suggestion, and falsely accuses our hero as the robber.
This little red herring plays with our allegiance toward the man, and also gives us a little empathy for his accusers, since we were tricked right along with the teller. It’s a brief moment in a scene that goes a long way.
This kind of blatant deception from the director—even going through the trouble to add the ominous music score—gives us pleasure. It’s just like the magician fooling us with his card tricks. It makes us keenly aware that the director is actively in there shaping the story.
Red herrings can also be used as a ruse to build suspense around them, like a magician’s sleight of hand. There’s a fun “that was close!” scene in The Trouble With Harry (1955) where several of the characters are in Jennifer’s house waiting for the town doctor to come examine the dead body. Unexpectedly, the local deputy shows up first and they all scramble around to hide the body off-camera. As the deputy enters, everyone is playing cards and Sam is casually leaning against the closet door. This door has been notorious for not staying shut. Hitchcock has fooled us into thinking they’ve hidden the body in the closet. Like a magician making you think the coin is in the left hand, the whole scene plays out with close calls surrounding the door. Sam makes extra effort to keep leaning on it while he’s being questioned, making sure it doesn’t open. At the end of the scene the closet door opens and it is empty—like the magician’s empty hand. Then, like a magician revealing the other hand, Arnie opens the bathroom to reveal the body has been in the bathtub the whole time.
This scenario is a great example of teasing, building a red herring into a scene, getting our worries up and then deflating them with an unexpected yet comical outcome. The result is that our expectations, hopes, and allegiances have been fully manipulated. We want them to get away with hiding the body even more now!
Entire characters can be red herrings. The sister-in-law in Marnie is a good example of a character designed solely to lead the
audience astray. She gets suspicious about Mark’s activity and begins snooping around his desk and listening to his phone calls. This eavesdropping activity is known only by the audience, and leads us to believe she will do something significant to turn the stakes and flip the plot in a new direction. She doesn’t. It turns out to be a joke to her, and a great way to lure the audience into the depths of the story.
By activating the presence of the storyteller through a cameo, and perpetuating this presence through red herrings, the audience is more actively alert, waiting to be tricked. This makes them that much more susceptible to be lured into those secrets and close calls that you constructed in previous chapters. There are other ways to keep this directorial presence alive—through the overt personality of the camera and the editing. We’ll explore these in the next chapter.
SUGGESTED VIEWING
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Dir. Jim Gillespie—watch for his storyteller’s presence behind the camera.
Marnie (1963)
The Trouble With Harry (1955)
The Wrong Man (1956)
FURTHER READING
Kapsis, Robert 1992. Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Leitch, Thomas 1991. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games, University of Georgia Press, Athens.
Van der Poll 2005. Kaapse Bibl, Sept/Okt 2005, p. 37.
Walker, Michael 2006. Hitchcock Motifs, Amsterdam University Press.
CHAPTER 8
PERSONIFIED SHOOTING & EDITING
TO CREATE SUSPENSE WITH A CAMERA you want the viewer to stop being a passive sponge for the material and become part of the storytelling game. In the previous chapter you saw how Hitchcock activated his audience’s awareness of him through his cameos and red herrings. Everyone knows going in that they’re watching a Hitchcock film, and his presence can be felt while watching it.
But, if you’re a relatively unknown indie filmmaker and haven’t had time to develop a brand and distinctive style throughout a career, inserting your cameo may be useless if nobody knows who you are. Even teasing the audience with red herrings may go unnoticed if the viewer still doesn’t recognize your storyteller presence. I blame this as a big reason my film Offing David doesn’t play well in its opening scenes. Only after the method has been established throughout the first thirty minutes does it begin to be effective.
How else, then, can you impose the director’s persona onto the film and awaken that storyteller’s presence early?
CAMERA AS STORYTELLER
It’s often suggested that filmmakers should never call attention to themselves within their work. It is a common idea that the story should stand on its own without the director getting in the way. Showboating—creating shots simply for the sake of showing off—is discouraged by practitioners and moviegoers alike. The idea is that a self-aggrandizing shot will take the audience out of the story, so therefore it shouldn’t be done. After all, if the viewer is spending time consciously thinking about how the movie was made, how can they follow the story?
In the case of suspense, however, Hitchcock clearly demonstrated that carefully crafted, obvious camera moves are effective at luring audiences in. Most of his works are filled with self-advertising shots which clearly call attention to the fact that he’s the director (Leitch). The reason it works is because, once again, it awakens that audience awareness of the storyteller’s hand. It brings alive that audience-director bond that allows the audience to feel like part of a cinematic game.
That’s why, even decades after his death, we still clearly feel his presence while watching his films. His personality, felt through his camera moves, was an integral part of why his films resonate.
Take for example a long continuous shot from the opening of Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The camera pans across a sunny courtyard, passing many apartment windows and people doing various tasks. Then we move backward through a window and look down upon a man sitting in a wheelchair. The camera pans down to reveal a cast on his leg, then pans over to a shelf where the man’s items are strewn out—a lens, camera flash bulbs, and a professional camera. All still within the same long shot, Hitchcock then pans upward across the wall to show various framed war photographs. Finally, the camera moves to another shelf where a proof image of a woman’s photograph is sitting, then pans down to reveal the same photo on the cover of a magazine.
Now, this shot clearly tells a story: the man is a war photographer for a magazine. He broke his leg and can’t go outside to enjoy the sunny day.
But who is moving the camera?
Later a similar sequence plays out. The camera stops to watch a cat walking through the courtyard, pans with the cat, then up across the courtyard and down to the photographer’s sweating forehead. Cut to: a thermometer showing it’s a hot day. It’s another great example of a visual sentence (it’s a hot day), but, again, who is moving the camera?
What’s notable about these examples and true for most of Hitchcock’s films is that these camera moves tend to have a hesitating pace, as if mimicking the thought and perspective of a person standing in the room. The personified camera thinks, hesitates, looks around, follows moving objects, and stops when it sees something curious.
But it’s not the perspective of a character in the scene. It’s as if Hitchcock has handed the camera to us to look around for ourselves. A precursor to virtual reality goggles, perhaps?
This kind of anthropomorphic camera movement calls attention to itself big time, but because it’s actively revealing story, it becomes part of the narrative. The viewer easily accepts this kind of exploratory viewpoint and doesn’t necessarily search for a character to attribute the viewpoint to. Rather, the viewer immediately feels it as the storyteller’s hand guiding them through the discourse.
So yes, it is certainly like Hitchcock handing us the camera, but even more than that it’s like he’s standing next to us saying, “Here, look at this. No, look over there.” He’s clearly in control, and inviting us to play along. He’s designed this little world for us to play in and, like an exuberant kid, is proudly showing us what he’s done.
With this personified camera, by the time the suspense setups start playing out, the movie is no longer just characters on a screen. It has become an immersive, director-led, storytelling experience that you can’t help but feel a part of.
CHARACTERS ACKNOWLEDGING CAMERA
Characters addressing the audience is common (think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Office, or any Woody Allen movie) but when it’s clear that they, too, are in on the director’s game against the audience, that’s an even greater level of tease.
The wink toward the camera from Blanch at the end of Family Plot (1976) is so surprising that it not only makes viewers self-aware they are watching a movie (placing them in a reflexive stance), but also provokes us into actively wondering how much of what we just saw was a trick. Did Blanch know more than she or Hitchcock let on? How did she know where the diamond was hidden? Is she really psychic?
When we are forced to question everything we believe about the plot and the very storytelling act itself, it puts the audience into a wholly active position. The audience is no longer passive toward the material, and guess what—that means they’re not likely to walk away from it.
PERSONIFIED EDITING
When the editing becomes an obvious arm of the storytelling presence, it, too, awakens the bond between director and viewer. This is specifically true when the passage of time and the sequence of events are manipulated to enhance the story. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction comes to mind as a film that shuffles its timeline in a way that provokes the audience to be reflexive on the form.
In Hitchcock’s rare TV episode “Incident on a Corner” (1960), the only episode he directed for the Ford Startime series, he begins by repeating the opening scene three times from three different points of view.
In the first pass, the titles read: “Here is the
incident.” We watch as a woman breezes through a crossing guard’s stop sign and the subsequent argument between the two.
Then, Hitchcock repeats the scene from a different vantage point, beginning with the title: “Here is the incident again.” Immediately we are pulled out of the role of passive viewer and provoked to become a quasi-detective, examining evidence. It’s as if the director is giving you all of his footage and letting you pore over the details. This time, we watch the same scenario, as the woman speeds through the traffic stop and argues with the crossing guard.
On the third pass, we get the title: “Another view of the incident.” By this time, the viewer is accustomed to this new format, and anticipates what new details will be revealed in this third camera angle. We aren’t disappointed, as this time a second car is foregrounded, and we watch a couple nervously get out and run into a house. Simultaneously, we can hear the familiar argument with the crossing guard playing out in the background.
Similarly, Dan Trachtenberg shakes up the audience with his bold editing of the opening title sequence in 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). He intercuts opening titles within a car crash as shock cutaways between each moment of the crash. The sound abruptly goes quiet with each title and then bursts back into the car. The presence of the titles shakes up the audience to such an extent that they are keenly aware of the storyteller.
This kind of narrative construction calls attention to itself by essentially inviting us into the editing room. We become aware that we are watching a film and forced into a reflexive stance toward the material and toward the conventions of sequential time. Through the film’s overt editing and on-screen text guides, the viewer is immediately placed into an engaged mode and given secret information that drives our anticipation as the story plays out.
Suspense With a Camera Page 10