These essays overlap with those in the previous section on a variety of points, but here Hitchcock focuses more precisely on the details of his own artistic and technical methods, less concerned with the broad contexts of filmmaking than with the more immediate tasks and materials at hand. He took great delight in talking and writing about how he worked: this not only served publicity purposes, calling attention to his mastery of film art and catering to the public’s desire for behind-the-scenes views of how films are made, but also had important critical and theoretical functions. Hitchcock was indeed a theoretician but for the most part, concretely rather than abstractly, and the challenges and problems that most engaged him were practical ones. There are subtexts in the pieces in this section: Hitchcock kept up a continuing dialogue with critics and the filmgoing public and commented regularly, although sometimes slyly and indirectly, on a growing agenda of often-controversial film topics. But if he was always defending and situating himself, he was also, more simply, describing himself and his experiences as they came up, sharing with his readers fascinating stories of his methods, discoveries, and creative uses and adaptations of the materials of filmmaking.
The first four essays in this section are especially good examples of Hitchcock’s subtle balancing of text and subtext. “On Music in Films” is his most extensive commentary on a crucial aspect of his art that is sometimes underappreciated because of his characteristic emphasis on visual techniques. The immediate context of the essay is the release of Waltzes from Vienna, a rarely screened and deservedly neglected film whose main virtue may turn out to be that it helped prompt Hitchcock to examine cinematic uses of music that were elaborated in later, far more successful and innovative films. Perhaps Leonard Leff is right to say that in general, “Hitchcock had few original ideas about music” (Hitchcock and Selznick, 165), but originality is not the only basis of artistic achievement. Hitchcock’s comments on the atmospheric and psychological functions of music are unexceptional, but his overall awareness of how nonvisual techniques such as music, sound effects, and even silence can support visual techniques of cutting and counterpoint is an extremely important part of his effort to construct thoroughly integrated films, in which all cinematic resources work toward heightening the emotional experience. For this, of course, he needed creative collaborators, such as Bernard Herrmann, whose name is rightly linked to many of Hitchcock’s greatest films. In a curious way, “On Music in Films” looks ahead to creative tension as well as collaboration. Part of the underlying argument in this essay is Hitchcock’s assertion of the controlling power of the director. Even in the so-called silent era, there was almost always musical accompaniment, normally provided by the theater management, but sound technology placed music “at last entirely under the control of the people who made the picture.” That was, as he goes on to say, “surely an advance,” but one that was not without its problems, as illustrated by the tumultuous relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann many years later.
“Close Your Eyes and Visualize!” nicely summarizes some of Hitchcock’s most commonly expressed ideas about film in the 1920s and 1930s: his distrust of dialogue, his emphasis on realism that precludes glamour, his use of comedy as a necessary ingredient of the dramatic, and his overall intention of giving the audience “not horror thrills” but “good, healthy, mental shake-ups.” As the title suggests, film must always be approached as a visual medium, but it is interesting to note that Hitchcock’s rallying cry “It must be pictures first and last” is not so much a fine point of theory as part of an attempt to identify himself as a mainstream film director. His advice echoes that of many popular script-writing manuals of the 1920s, surveyed by Kevin Brownlow in The Parade’s Gone By (“The Scenario,” chap. 22), which crystallized contemporary conventions and formulas. For example, H. H. Van Loan’s How I Did It sets out basic principles strikingly akin to Hitchcock’s: establish a premise, he says, then “don’t waste any time en route,” add action and thrills, and mix comedy with tragedy. And Elinor Glyn’s recommendation to amateur photoplay writers in 1922 is almost exactly Hitchcock’s nearly fifteen years later: “Close your eyes and concentrate on your play. Don’t dream. Visualize!” (quoted in Brownlow, 277).
Even if we do not recognize what may be allusions to these manuals and contemporary commonplaces, Hitchcock draws himself into the mainstream by characterizing his earlier films as filled with “crazy tricks,” “arty theories,” and “directorial idiosyncrasies” that he no longer approves of. His continuing attraction to cinematic experimentation is not banished completely, and no one who admits “I visualize my story in my mind as a series of smudges moving over a variety of backgrounds” will ever make thoroughly conventional films, but at this point in his life Hitchcock evidently felt the need to confess his cinematic indiscretions and announce “I have stopped all that today.” Here as elsewhere, even in the midst of what was a creative and commercially successful period, we catch glimpses of Hitchcock “running for cover” (a term he explains to Truffaut, 186), questioning his methods and looking for at least the temporary comfort of the conventional. One of the most fascinating dramas of his career is this uneasy oscillation between acknowledging and repudiating “the Hitchcock touch.”
Hitchcock repeatedly commented that once he had visualized a film and planned out all the shots and sequences, shooting it was of little interest to him. In his short sketch “Search for the Sun,” he describes some of the real conditions of making a film, especially outside a studio, and conveys why he might find this aspect of directing tiresome. Should serious artists have to worry about vanishing sunlight, traffic noise, disappearing dogs, and uncooperative babies and sheep? His real underlying complaint, though, is against audiences who, “lying back in upholstered comfort,” have little understanding of how films are made. To combat stereotyped notions about the easy and luxurious life of directors and respond to the impatient “clamor” for realistic dramas in recognizably British settings (which, as we have seen in some of the essays in the previous section, he had some sympathy for), Hitchcock humorously but pointedly sets out to educate the “ever critical” public that was “perpetually rising on its hind legs.”
He does not envision his audiences in exactly that posture in the following three essays, but still his primary motive is the desire to help make them, as he says in “Search for the Sun,” less “apt to take a film for granted”—his films in particular, one might add. In “Direction,” he continues his earlier attempt to disassociate himself from “arty” techniques and “obvious camera devices,” but his intention is markedly different: instead of apologizing for “directorial idiosyncrasies,” he is determined to overcome the likelihood that “anything subtle may be missed.” The task, then, is not to stop what he is doing but to do it better. Hitchcock’s acknowledgment “I have become more commercially minded” needs to be understood in its full context: it is balanced and explained by his concluding statement, “The art of directing for the commercial market is to know just how far you can go.” Unwilling to let the audience or the market completely direct the director, his underlying premise is the manifestolike assertion “The screen ought to speak its own language, freshly coined,” and he sets out to describe that language and teach it to his audience by writing about his directorial method and analyzing key scenes in his films. In doing so, Hitchcock becomes a master of the twice-told tale, repeating himself constantly; indeed, “Direction” is a compendium of already familiar and soon-to-be familiar anecdotes and statements. But the important point to note is that these tales are not only twice-told but fascinating as well—the description of “how Mr. Verloc comes to be killed” in Sabotage, for example, establishes this sequence as Hitchcock’s major tour de force of montage until the shower scene in Psycho—and serve their dual purpose of instructing the audience and freeing the director to be even more adventurous and subtle.
Much of what is in “Direction” reappears in the two subsequent essays but alongside intriguing new topics and illustrations. For example, in “Some Aspects of Direction,” his description of the first sequence of Secret Agent calls attention to his slyly cinematic way of beginning his films, a characteristic touch that will become even more prominent in some later films like Rear Window. Such sequences instantly acclimate the spectators and, perhaps more important, make them “more receptive to further impressions.” He goes on to note that even the title of a film can contribute to this effect. His particular example is Mutiny on the Bounty, which, he points out, would have lost a great deal of suspense and audience anticipation if it were instead titled Boys of the Bounty or some such thing. As usual, Hitchcock has at least one eye on his own films and on how his titles suggest hidden dimensions to come. Although he does not refer specifically to it, the film current at the time this essay was written provides a perfect illustration. The title The Lady Vanishes obviously announces to the audience the main action forthcoming, but it also cleverly introduces what in some respects is the real theme of the film. Miss Froy is not the only lady who vanishes: the lady in Iris—that is to say, the stuffy, privileged, self-centered character that she is at the beginning of the film—disappears, replaced by the down-to-earth heroine that she is at the end of the film. Once we are alerted to this dimension by Hitchcock, the titles of many of his films appear to be that much more witty and significant.
What becomes apparent as we read through the pieces in this section is Hitchcock’s dedicated and thoughtful but also disarming way of talking about the art of film. This takes a number of different forms. Sometimes it surfaces in critical disavowals of “artiness,” although as we have seen such statements are not as simple as they first appear. At other times what is most disarming is Hitchcock’s tone. The talk, for example, at Columbia University is charming and down-to-earth, not so much a formal lecture as a free-flowing conversation on, among many other topics, how the pace of a film depends on editing but more on occupying the audience’s mind, the interaction of character and setting, the shape of a film, and the “springboard situation,” not the MacGuffin, the false or unspecified background of the action, but the real circumstances from which the plot proceeds. What is so engaging here is his ability to convey the techniques without the technicalities of filmmaking. And in “On Style,” Hitchcock patiently instructs an interviewer who, although he represents a national film journal, obviously—at least in Hitchcock’s opinion—needs to be gently straightened out about some of the basics of film theory and practice, including intellectual and emotional montage, subjective effects, and Hitchcock’s particular use of what he calls “visual counterpoint.”
Another way of downplaying or framing cinematic “artiness” is by emphasizing the craft of filmmaking, defining the imaginative in terms of the technical or even the mechanical. Rope, a brooding, claustrophobic drama featuring a small cast and shot in a very restricted indoor setting, might not be the first Hitchcock film that comes to mind as his “most exciting picture,” but his essay of this title describes not the subject of the film but how the film was designed, produced, and shot. Far from complaining “I wish I didn’t have to shoot the picture,” he conveys his tremendous delight in executing as well as planning Rope. This project began, he explains, with his desire to make an entire film in real time with as few cuts as possible. Hitchcock often insists that cinematic techniques must not call attention to themselves within the context of the film, but there is no reason why outside the film frame he should not take a great deal of pride in detailing the ingenuity that made such a film possible.
Hitchcock revels in the practical, and he and his collaborators, whose contributions he fully acknowledges, are portrayed not as “arty” artists but as inventive technicians, up to every challenge posed by the imagination. Aesthetic sensitivity—to color, for example—counts for little unless it is supported by the technological ability to make clouds out of spun glass, sunsets out of thousands of tiny bulbs, and neon light synchronizers out of war surplus bomb switches. Hitchcock frequently uses musical metaphors to describe the way he makes his films, imagining himself, for example, as a conductor or orchestrator. Here, though, his metaphors are strikingly lowbrow and wonderfully suitable: the choreography of camera movement is like baseball, specifically, a Tinkers to Evers to Chance double play (we can forgive Hitchcock for enthusiastically but mistakenly crediting them with triple plays); and the construction of the film is likened several times to a Rube Goldberg drawing. He is equally lowbrow and technically enraptured in “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s . . . The Birds,” where he describes in great detail the traveling matte process and attributes “one of the most spectacular shots” to the efforts of two women technicians who spent three months laboriously painting birds and silhouettes on tiny film frames.
Because he resolutely avoids high seriousness, critics sometimes underestimate Hitchcock’s self-conscious artistry. We tend to want our van Goghs to talk about their intense perception of madness rather than their brush strokes. But for Hitchcock, as for so many others, much of his art is in his craft. Early in the interview “Hitchcock Talks About Lights, Camera, Action,” he acknowledges “I’m a technician as well as a director,” and the practical details he goes on to discuss provide a great deal of insight into not only his current film, Torn Curtain, but also his ongoing work with color, image size, and setting to create a “reality effect” that will engage an audience in the fantasies that are his subjects. Mixed in with comments about the history of set lighting is Hitchcock’s boldest statement against “deep focus” photography and somewhat incredulous astonishment that the primary image in a shot should ever be merged with rather than separated from the background. André Bazin would not be convinced, but Hitchcock defines his technique as “realistic” and clearly establishes the technical basis for what many consider to be one of his greatest achievements: the simultaneous credibility and incredibility of the Hitchcock world.
It is fitting that the last selection in this section and in the entire volume is “Hitchcock at Work,” part of a transcript of one of the many production conferences he participated in during the making of Marnie. (There are tapes of other such production conferences in the Hitchcock Collection, which may yet, one hopes, be transcribed and published.) In some respects it is anticlimactic: there are no memorable pronouncements on film technique, and the subject matter is no more momentous than that which Virginia Woolf said used to occupy her for many an hour, getting fictional characters from one room to another. Still, we end where we should, with Hitchcock on the job, in collaboration, meticulously planning, and otherwise deeply engaged in his lifelong activity of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.