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Some interesting parallels can be seen in the careers and works of Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. Both are practitioners of suspense and masters of horror; both have appealed to a popular as well as critical audience; both have been somewhat deified and emulated by French critics, poets, and filmmakers. Poes influence on French poets and critics - principally Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry - has been discussed in several articles and full-length studies.1 Mallarmé said that he went to London in 1862 in order to learn the English language - "the better to read Poe."2 Baudelaire's translations of Poe are well known, and his poem "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe" is an elegy to the American poet.3 Likewise, Hitchcock's reputation as a serious artist was spurred by French film critics. The study of Hitchcock by Erich Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in 1957 was one of the earliest extended critical works on the Anglo-American film-maker, and it was followed by a series of extensive interviews with Hitchcock by François Truffaut, who himself in interview has acknowledged Jean Renoir and Hitchcock as his mentors in film style. 4
However, aside from the question of influence, more important is the similarity of attitudes towards the composition of art held and practiced by Poe and Hitchcock. This parallel is most apparent when we examine Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and some of Hitchcock's comments in interview with Truffaut in the late 1960s. After comparing Poe's and Hitchcock's theories of composition, we will briefly consider Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) as an example of the well-wrought film. This particular film is used not because its thousands of birds are direct descendente of Poe's raven, but because it is probably Hitchcock's most technically complex achievement in film composition and compilation. Poe discusses writing a poem and a short story as if he were working out a "mathematical problem"; and in The Birds Hitchcock proves himself the master of montage - the mathematical though creative process of planning, shooting, cutting, and reassembling moments on celluloid which achieve an integrated and artistic whole. Hitchcock is a conscious artist whose working methods are carefully executed and whose desired ends are mathematically calculated; in this way, he is a poet of...