hitchcock lectures 2&3 “blackmail” 1929 hitchcock's first sound film

Hitchcock Lectures 2&3

“Blackmail” 1929

Hitchcock's first sound film

Cinematic shot language and film grammar.

Establishing shot Extreme long shot

(ELS), Long shot (LS) Medium shot (MS) pan (right, left or

vertical) aerial shot

Close-up (CU Extreme Close up

(ECU) Keyhole shot Traveling or dolly

shot Crane or aerial shot Wide angle shot

and edit language Short reverse shot cross cut jump cut sequences, scenes, ensembles of shots Montage, dialectical and additive Audio image, sound image, flash back Back story

Shot reverse Shot Buster Keaton in Sherlock Junior

Shot reverse shot in the Maltese Falcon

And the 180 degree rule

Production: British International Pictures, (1929), Producer: John Maxwell. Director: Alfred HitchcockScenario: A. Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy and Charles Bennett, from the play by Charles Bennett. Adaptation: A. Hitchcock. Dialogue: Benn W. Levy. Director of Photography: Jack Cox. Sets: Wilfred C.

Arnold and Norman Arnold. Music: Campbell and Connelly, finished and arranged by Hubert Bath and Henry Stafford, performed by the British Symphony Orchestra under the direction of John Reynders. Editing: Emile de Ruelle'.

Studio: Elstree. Distributors: Wardour & F., 1929, 7,136 feet; USA, Sono Art World Wide Pict., 1930. Blackmail

Blackmail (1929)

Actors: Army Ondra (Alice White), Sara Allgood (Mrs. White), John Londgen (Frank Webber, the detective), Charles Paton (Mr. White), Donald Calthrop (Tracy), Cyril Ritchard (the artist), and Harvey Braban, Hannah Jones, Phyllis Monkman, ex-detective Sergeant Bishop. (Joan Barry read Army Ondra's part in the talkie version.)

Donald Calthrop

Black Mail (1929)

Lecture 3

Cohen's Basic Arguments re: Hitchcock and Art, artists and art history Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde & Thomas De

Quincey Screening: Murder (1930)

Cohen's basic arguments:

1) Regarding Hitchcock

2) Media/ Cinema

3) Modernity

4) The future of cinema

5) The future of film studies.

1. Regarding Hitchcock

H is a cryptologist’s dream. A communication in cipher or code. A cryptogram is a type of word puzzle popularly printed in some newspapers and magazines. A short piece of text is encrypted with a simple substitution cipher in which each letter is replaced by a different letter.

Cryptometry

Cryptometry: assuming a richly woven totality...Signature effects Deleuze (demark) and Zizek (the sinthom)

2. Media/ cinema

Citation signature/ system in Hitchcock terms, objects, aural and visual puns, signature effects and agents display three traits:

Has to do with the cinematic. Turn the ‘symbolizer’ into the symbolized Read the reader

3 Modernity

Allographic the figure of a spectral event Hitchcock’s tropology (metaphoric discourse)

Hitchcock as the arche-modernist (con-) figuring all of his work in terms of cinematic invention, production= reproduction. Modern life perceived at 1/24th second (Walter Benjamin)

4 The Future of Cinema

Hitchcock as prototypical modernist innovator – an avant-garde artist projecting his work into cinema's future as a multi-media (telematic) event and/or experience.

Prophesizes The ‘death’ of cinema (c.w. Guy Debord, Peter Greenaway, Lars von Trier).

5. The future of film studies.

The future of film studies as a task for cryptologists and deconstructive agents? Film studies as the handmaiden of the arts/artist in the venture called the construction of meaning?

Murder 1930

This 1930 drama was an important foundation for Alfred Hitchcock particularly with respect to his developing ideas about the blurring of opposites: reality and illusion, guilt and innocence, observing and doing, men and women.

“We use life to create art and art to criticize life” A

Wildean Proposition uttered by Sir John

Principal Actors:

Herbert Marshall (Sir John Menier), Nora Baring (Diana Baring), Phyllis Konstam (Dulcie Markham), Edward Chapman (Ted Markham), Miles Mander (Gordon Druce), Esme Percy (Handel Fane), Donald Calthrop (Ion Stewart) and Amy Brandon Thomas, Joynson Powell, Esme V. Chaplin, Marie Wright, S. J. Warmington, Hannah Jones, R. E. Jeffrey, Alan Stainer, Kenneth Kove, Guy Pelham, Matthew Boulton, Violet Farebrother, Ross Jefferson, Clare Greet, Drusilla Vills, Robert Easton, William Fazan, George Smythson.

Production information:

British International Pictures, 1930, Producer: John Maxwell. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Scenario: Alma Reville, from the work by Clemence Dane (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton) and Helen Simpson, Enter Sir John.Adaptation: A. Hitchcock and Walter Mycroft. Director of Photography: Jack Cox. Sets: John Mead. Editing: René Harrison. Supervision: Emile de Ruelle. Studio: Elstree. Distributor: Wardour & F., 1930, 92 minutes.

Hitchcock and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

Apothegm/ Aphorism

A short pithy instructive saying

Art is long life is short (ars longa vita brevis)

Hippocrates

“We use life to create art and art to criticize life.” (Wilde)

“ A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”

Aphorisms

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. Albert Einstein

That which does not destroy us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche

One man's meat is another man's poison. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Murder as one of the fine arts

Art has two constant, unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. (Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960)

Violent acts [such as murder] compel an aesthetic response in the beholder in the form of awe, admiration or bafflement. If an action evokes an aesthetic response then it is logical to assume that this action- even if it is murder-must have been the work of an artist. (Thomas De Quincey)

Serialised in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,Oscar Wilde’s single novel The Picture ofDorian Gray (1890) has been the subject ofmuch discussion, a few scholars teasing outthe repressed homo-eroticism, othersexploring the story as a quintessentialVictorian morality tale, and still othersreading it as a parody of Goethe’s Faust: ATragedy (1808-32).

“It is only shallow people who donot judge by appearances.The true mystery of the world is thevisible, not the invisible.”

Since the 1890's the aesthetic and narrativemotifs in Oscar Wilde’s novel have had aremarkable vitality, appearing in literallyscores of books, plays and films of all genres.The Pygmalion figure has also appeared indozens of paintings – the myth was afavourite subject of the Pre-Raphaelitepainters.

The Picture of Dorian Gray & the Pygmalion Effect