Alfred Hitchcock as Auteur

Alfred Hitchcock – auteur and creator

Those French film critics believed that film directors could – and should – impose a personal vision on their films. They argued that a director like Hitchcock stamped a number of creative features on his films. Such as position of the camera, specific shots to convey emotion, creative use of sound and complex montage editing.

One way of approaching the auteur theory is by identifying common threads and unique themes that run through a director’s work, if it is possible to recognise the director’s signature imprinted on a film in some ways mentioned above then it may be possible to argue that the director qualifies for auteur status.

The vertigo shot - http://youtu.be/je0NhvAQ6fM

Steven Spielberg if often quoted in this context. Many of his film plots are about ordinary people having to confront the extra ordinary – ‘Jaws’ a small fishing community and the local police confront a killer shark, ‘E.T’ a young boy makes friends with an alien and has to help get him back to his home planet, and of course ‘Schindler’s list’ a normal German factory owner stands up to the might of the Nazi regime and manages to save over a 1000 Jews.

Hitchcock was a very well known and well-respected director, both in the UK and US specialising in mystery thrillers involving espionage, theft, plots, betrayal and murder for both film and TV.

Hitchcock believed that it was the director’s responsibility to trigger the audience’s emotional and psychological response by what he called ‘pure film’. In order to achieve this, he concentrated much of his attention on the preparation of his films. He created elaborate storyboards and planned every camera position and movement in painstaking detail.

So what is Hitchcock’s ‘pure film’? Certainly all the elements mentioned above, together with others designed to draw the audience right into the film’s narrative and plot. Hitchcock’s main focus when creating a film was the effect that it would have on the audience like any good director does – he paid close attention to their reactions and this resulted in audiences watching with a curious, prurient interest. We stand outside the narrative as observers, but our emotions are engaged directly with the characters and actions, so we are both subjective and objective participants within the action.