He often used point-of-view shots to draw the audience deeper into the story and help them empathize with the protagonist’s plight, as can be seen in his 1958 obsession thriller Vertigo, where he used his now-famous dolly zoom (a disorienting technique in which the camera zooms in and pulls back at the same time) to allow the audience to experience the fear, shock and confusion of the protagonist as he becomes dizzy, helping to create an emotional connection.
In Rear Window, the audience sees much of the film from the perspective of Stewart, in a wheelchair, spying on his neighbors. The audience sees events unfold through Stewart’s eyes, discovering clues to the neighbors’ murders at the same time as Stewart, heightening the film’s uneasy, voyeuristic tension.
Playing mind games
Audience empathy was important to Hitchcock because it allowed him to manipulate their emotions. He considered this to be far more important than the actual content of the film. It was Hitchcock who popularized the term “MacGuffin”, a plot device that advances a character’s motivations or story without any intrinsic meaning.
“I don’t really care about the content,” he told the BBC’s Weldon, “so long as the audience has some kind of reaction to what I put on the screen, the film can be anything. If I start worrying about the details of what documents the spies are trying to steal, that’s complete nonsense. It doesn’t concern me what documents the spies are after.”
And Hitchcock knew that he didn’t have to show everything to elicit such intense emotions from the audience, and that what the audience imagines is often more frightening than what they actually see.
There is an infamous scene in Psycho that demonstrates his mastery of composing and editing to elicit the maximum emotional response from the audience. Tom Brook of BBC Talking Movies states: Said in 2020“No description of Psycho can convey its true impact.”
In this scene, the character Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is stabbed in the shower. The scene is set to a montage of alternating shots of the knife-wielding assailant and close-ups of her terrified face, all while a cacophonous, shrieking score plays out. The fast-paced editing pairs perfectly with the harsh soundtrack, instilling in the viewer a keen sense of violence, vulnerability and panic without ever actually showing the knife being plunged into the victim or any explicit gore.
“Well, I made it deliberately pretty rough,” Hitchcock said, “but as the film went on I put less and less physical horror in the minds of the audience. And as the film went on, there was less and less violence, but a lot more tension in the minds of the audience. I was transferring it from the film to their minds.”
“So, towards the end, I didn’t get violent at all. But by that time the audience was screaming in pain. Thank goodness!”
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