Hitchcock - Genre and Audience

Psycho (1960) is a Hitchcock film based off of the novel of the same name by Ed Gein. It is a film belonging to the suspense horror/thriller genre. The features that set this film apart as a suspense horror/thriller include monochromatic filming, an aggressive, suspenseful soundtrack, and tense, close shots emphasizing fear and exciting moments.

Some of the influences for this film were the novel Psycho by Ed Gein and Robert Bloch, the films Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and M (1958), and the expressionist genre of art.

The movie was first envisioned by Alfred Hitchcock, who was shown the novel by his production assistant, Peggy Robinson. He went on with the project in order to recover from two previously abandoned projects, and to film new material compared to his previous work.

Psycho fits with his other works in the way that he incorporates darker elements, like murder, crime, and insanity.  

• More specifically, Psycho incorporates the theme of birds, “audience as voyeur” (Rear Window (1954)), “the charming sociopath” (Notorious, Frenzy), and “transference of guilt” (also seen in Vertigo (1958), Suspicion (1941), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943)). There are others, but do you honestly expect me to list all of them. What is this, IB?

The major theme of Psycho is that of multiple personalities and/or roleplay. The narrative structure itself is said to be as fractured as the characters who play in it, most notably Norman Bates, the central character of the movie.

From Silents to Studio' Golden Years

Movie studios were not prepared to accept sound at first because they felt like it would be a passing fad, would not be liked by audiences, was too expensive to implement everywhere, etc. It became more mainstream when Warner Brothers made the “talkie” The Jazz Singer. It instantly became a major hit, and Warner Bros started to make more sound films. Then most studios followed suit. 

As an immediate effect, many actors were fired as they couldn't fit their voices to the characters they were portraying, and many sound producers went out of business as films only had to have sound recorded one time.

Some of the downsides of the inclusion of sound include scenes being very bland and staying in the same place, as the camera couldn't move without making noise and microphones were usually placed as a prop between two characters, so they would lean over it menacingly. 

The studio years followed this. In this era studios formed a sort of monopoly over film, and shut everyone else out of the industry. On the plus side, nearly everyone could watch a movie, and studios were dedicated to designing well done sets for their films. On the downside, it was hard for people who weren’t part of studio’s to exhibit their films to the public and actors were bound by extremely restrictive contracts.

Outside links: http://cybercollege.com/frtv/frtv003.htm

Writing About Film

Read something on the Internet the other day. It was an article about writing about film. Here’s the lowdown.

There are 5 main types of film writing: formal analysis, film history, ideological papers, cultural studies, and discussion of the auteur. 

Film analysis concerns breaking down the film to it’s base components and, well, analyzing it. Concepts such as sound design, lighting, composition, and narrative structure are some of the things analysed.

Film history papers are about looking into the production history of the film, the challenges involved, the process of distribution and release, and the reactions of different audiences in different cultures, along with how the film made history in the context of film in general.

Ideological papers focus on analysis of the message the film was trying to give to the audience, and how it did so through the camerawork and sound design.

Cultural studies mainly look into the film’s importance to the culture it was made in. More specifically, how did the culture influence the FILM?

Lastly, discussion of the auteur focuses on the idea that one man and his vision created the film. This type of papers looks into this, and are used to understand broad concepts such as the theme of the film.

In the article, the author uses the phrase “think beyond the frame”. By this, the author means that when watching films we should focus on the things that go on in making it, like who the director was, what the development process was like, the genre, and how the film relates to cultural phenomena.