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Motifs
A.Storyboarding
When film professors vote Hitchcock the best director for teaching they are only recognising the way he worked. No director more thoroughly conceived his pictures in advance, and designed them as storyboards (The Birds, above). And so Hitch often confessed that there was, for him, an inescapable tedium in shooting itself. (The master of surprise - but without surprise himself!) He knew the thing would work; he had tested it all in advance, in his mind's eye. That's one reason why the notion got around that he regarded actors as cattle. But storyboarding is more formative than that. It permits the intense, acute and essentially unnatural (or unexpected) angling of his shots. For Hitch saw psychologically and in terms of plot suspense, and very seldom naturalistically, or as an onlooker or participant. The edifice of angles at its best is watertight - and airless. There is a stylistic claustrophobia that comes from so few shots ever seeming ordinary, casual or other than decisive. So Hitch loves odd, spectacular locations, but has scant feeling for real places: he needed locations, decor, angles, mise en scène, and instead of people he saw characters or figures in the design.
B. In and out
The diagrammatics lead to erotics, as Hitchcock establishes some much-desired but mysterious or perilous vortex towards which a searcher is drawn. This can be Rebecca's room, preserved after her death, and so lit as to seem under water - will Joan Fontaine's "I" and eye get there? It is the hallowed light around Madeleine, mist before mystery, that beckons James Stewart and builds his infatuation in Vertigo. Gradually, in America, Hitch worked out a style for filming this compelling attraction. It was cross-cut tracking shots at first, moving forward towards the place (as if from the searcher's POV), and backing off in front of the forward movement. A fine example comes in Psycho, when Vera Miles resolves to search the Bates house and find the old lady. But in that case the ploy is merely (and very) suspenseful. Hitch had an extra refinement - the two at once, tracking in and zooming out. That effect of giddiness or madness comes notably in Vertigo and Mamie (above). In and out: it is sexual, of...