FILM TECHNIQUE

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21974, 24 December 1936, Page 9

FILM TECHNIQUE

METHODS OF FAMOUS DIRECTOR HITCHCOCK ON "GLAMOUR" The creed that I chalk up in front of me to-day is that we are making motion pictures, writes Alfred Hitchcock, the noted British film director. Too many men forget that A film has to be interesting to the eye and above all it is the picture which is the thing. So much do I try to tell my story in pictures that if by any chance the sound apparatus broke down in the cinema, the audience would not fret and get restless. The pictorial action would still hold them! Sound is all right in its place but it is a silent picture training which counts to-day. Naval men have a theory that the finest navigators are the men who learnt their craft in the now out-of-date sailing ships. Similarly I maintain that the young men of America and Britain who strike out into the film game should first go through a course of silent film technique. There is not enough visualising done in the studios, and instead far too much writing. People take a sheet of paper and scrawl down a lot of dialogue and instructions, and call that a day's work. It leads them nowhere. There is also a growing habit of reading a film script by the dialogue alone. I deplore this method, this lazy neglect of the action, this lack of reading action in a film story, or, if you like it, this inability to visualise. I try to do without paper when I begin a new film. I visualise my story in my mind as a series of smudges moving over a variety of backgrounds. Often I pick my backgrounds first and then think about the action of the story. This was the case in "The Man Who Knew Too Much." I visualised the snow-clad heights of the Alps and the ill-lit alleys of London and threw my story and characters in amongst them. The Appeal to the Eye I do not despise sound in my preference for pictures first, but when I am told that the talking picture has a bigger range of subjects, I argue that it also lessens the field of appeal.

What appeals to the eye is universal; what appeals to the ear is local. My methods of film making and the introduction of those legendary "Hitchcock touches" are quite straightforward. I like to keep the public guessing and never let them know what is going to happen next, I build up my interest gradually and surely, and, in thrillers, bring it to a crescendo. There must be no half measures, and I have to know where I am going every second of the time. If there is a secret in doing this, it is perhaps in knowing your script by heart. Then you know automatically the tempo of each succeeding scene and it matters not whether they are shot out of proper order. But also I have to guard against going too fast in a film. This is fatal. I have to remember that, whereas I know the story backwards, the audience has got to absorb it gradually. Otherwise the whole thing would be too sketchy to be intelligible. My artists, too, must behave as human beings, and in my determination to achieve this ideal, arises perhaps the story about my loathing of women in films. I don't loathe them,

but if they, are going to appear in on« of my pictures, they are not going to look too beautiful or be too glamorous. Glamour has nothing to do with reality and I maintain that reality is the most important factor in the making of a successful film. . The very beautiful woman who just walks around, avoiding the furniture, wearing fluffy negligees, and looking very seductive, may be an attractive ornament but she does not help the film at all. I hate it when actresses try to be ladies and in doing so become cold and lifeless, and nothing gives me more pleasure than to knock the lady-likeness out of chorus girls I don't ask much of an actress and I have no wish for her to be able to play a whole list of character roles, but she must be a real human person. That is. why I deliberately deprived Madame Carroll of her dignity and glamour in "The Thirty-Nine Steps." and I did exactly the same thing in "Secret Agent." In this last film, the first shot you saw of her was with her face covered with cold cream! Accent on Comedy Next to reality, I put the accent on comedy. Comedy, strangely enough. makes a film more dramatic. A stage play gives you intermissions for reflections on each act These intermissions have to be supplied in a film by contracts and. if a film is dramatic or tragic, the obvious contrast is comedy. In all my films I try to supply a definite contrast I take a dramatic situation up and up to its peak of excitement and then, before it has time to start the downward curve. I introduce comedy to relieve the tension. After that. I feel safe with the climax. If the film petered to an end without any contrast it would have an anticlimax. I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilisation has become so sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish and jellified, we have to experience them artificially, and the screen is the best medium for this. In "The Man Who Knew Too Much," in "The Thirty-Nine Steps," and in "Sec ret Agent" I have been all out for whole-hearted thrills, the more exciting the better. But my thrills are not horror thrills, but full-blooded, healthy stuff for which there is always an eternal demand.

Humour in Hollywood is a pretty serious business. The Marx Brothers, who have just launched their **A Day at the Races," have decided to do but one picture a year in future, so difficult is it to get material. With their writers, they worked seven months on the original. They took it on the road for five weeks, with two weeks* rehearsal. Then they took three weeks to reduce the tested material for the picture, and they will probably devote 10 weeks to shooting and editing. The comedians found by bitter experience that when they attempted to sandwich two films a year in between their theatre appearances the pictures slid badly, while the time they took in making their lone 1935 feature. "A Night at the Opera,'* more than repaid them.