Alfred in Wonderland: How Hitchcock Used Sound to Create "Pure Film"

“During its 400-year history, the novel has missed many of its possibilities; it has left many great opportunities unexplored, many paths forgotten, calls unheard.”—Milan Kundera, “An Introduction to a Variation”

Hitch slips on a pair of headphones to direct Anny Ondra on the set of his first sound film, Blackmail (1929). From the beginning, he exploited the audio track's Expressionistic potential.

The war hero crushes the leading lady against his chest as rain gently falls on her creamy, blemish-free cheeks. They kiss. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a 100-piece orchestra swoops in to deliver an orgasmic crescendo. That's non-diegetic music for you. Always wandering in, squelching the realism of a movie scene. You can see, though, why film makers love it. Such music helps cue the audience how to feel about or react to a scene. It's an easy way to manipulate an audience's emotions—if that's all you want it to do. But what if you want a deeper level of engagement that moves your audience to participate in the movie more actively? In that case, non-diegetic musical underscoring could be a barrier to such intimacy. Alfred Hitchcock understood that naturally occurring sounds are more suited to putting an audience inside the film—that is, to putting them through a “pure film” experience.

Interestingly, three of Hitchcock's films whose settings were restricted to a single location—Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954)—restrict the use of non-diegetic music to the opening and closing credits. The rest of the time, the only music you hear comes from within the movie.

In the 1944 movie, Joe Spencer's (Canada Lee's) penny whistle helps relieve the tedium of being lost at sea. Other characters take turns singing as well. Hitch also takes godlike control over the weather to provide a naturalistic soundtrack. These organic sounds make it easy to forget that they do double duty on behalf of both the setting and the the story. Thus, while the seeming intent of that solo music is to boost the spirits of the castaways (as well as the audience), it ironically draw attention to just how isolated the tiny crew is on that vast ocean. Likewise, the sea and wind sounds provide a textured, nuanced point and counterpoint to the travails of the castaways. For instance, the sea waves are temporarily hushed as the castaways pause in mournful silence to honor the watery burial of Mrs. Higgins' (Heather Angel's) baby. Later, though, as capitalist shipping tycoon Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) prepares to beat socialist John Kovac (John Hodiak) at a round of poker, the Atlantic wind heads off this unfair monetary trickle-up with a gust that blows their makeshift cards away. The irony is so strong that “Ritt” blames Kovac for what you can really call an act of God. I take this scene to mean that, though the strong may prevail over the weak in this life, there is a greater justice at work that levels all humans. (Of course, that is the implicit theme of the entire movie: the group of characters in the lifeboat are a microcosm of society.) But it all happens so naturally that you can simultaneously laugh at the irony, wince at Ritt's loss (which he can well afford), and rejoice at Kovac's escape from financial ruin without feeling artificially forced to perceive a “moral” to the incident. Or you can just watch the movie and let the weather effects pull you deeper into the setting.

Anticipating the musicless killing of Gromek in Torn Curtain, the beating to death of Willy in Lifeboat is rendered more realistic by the absence of music. The brutality of the characters who set upon the German like a "pack of dogs," as Hitch described them, is brought into relief by the absence of music. The sea and wind are as passive as the camera itself, which stands at a discreet distance from the violence.

In this regard, part of the beauty of Hitch's films is that they let viewers choose between finding a deeper meaning or simply enjoying them for entertainment. To Hitch (and for me, as a Hitchcock Geek), both ways of looking at his movies are acceptable. Though some critics, notably Andre Bazin, call Hitch to task for the tyranny of his camera that only allows for one set of perceptions, his themes allow for a variety of conflicting interpretations. That multiplicity was misunderstood in 1944 when the supposed propaganda film Lifeboat was scorned for sympathizing with the Axis powers. Such is the two-edged nature of Hitchcockian “pure film,” which brings life in all of its rich contradiction to the screen.

Brandon and Phillip's isolation from society in Rope is accented by their swank apartment with its lofty Manhattan view displayed through a large window that resembles the framework of a gilded birdcage or hothouse.

Rope takes place inside the apartment of a gay couple who push their rarefied Ivy League intellectualism too far, committing murder as a Nietzschean experiment and following the act up with a macabre celebratory dinner served from the wooden chest that conceals their victim. Logically enough, each of the dinner guests arrive with the sound of a doorbell. Its shrill ping punctuates the scene, in effect replacing the visual stimulation of a cut. An exception is made, however, for James Stewart, who quietly lets himself in. In one of my favorite star entrances, he simply appears, like an inspecting angel, when the camera dollies out to a wide shot, as unannounced as one of Hitch's own cameos. The audience feels surprised, caught as unaware as Brandon, who scrambles, stuttering, to regain his composure. By setting up a rhythm of doorbells and then flipping it with Rupert's silent entrance, the audience feels the movie right alongside the characters. This, too, is “pure film.”

Brandon and Phillip are far above “the madding crowd” and when their apartment windows are shut, the silence emphasizes their social disconnection. Helen Cox and David Neumeyer note in their essay “The Musical Function of Sound in Three Films by Alfred Hitchcock” that noises from the street below are heard three times: following David's murder; after Brandon's obnoxious defense of murder as an art for the privileged few; and at the end of the film. Like air hissing out of an escape valve, street noise is used to release tension from these scenes. In the final case, Rupert opens the window, fires the gun into the air and for about two minutes we sit with him, Brandon and Phillip in a wordless funk as the latter plinks his final notes at the piano over the distant hum of traffic and voices and approaching sirens, which drift upward and curl about the room. For Brandon and Phillip, that cathartic burst of fresh air also carries the scent of their own impending death as murderers.

Rear Window is one of the greatest masterpieces of audio design in all film. Not only is all the sound diegetic (except for a musical overture that bookends the movie), but it all seems to waft in through L. B. Jefferies' (James Stewart's) apartment apartment window, keeping audiences rooted in his point of view. With most of Hitch's films you can turn off the sound and follow only the imagery. With Rear Window, however, you can turn off the picture and the main dialogue and still get a strong sense of mood. Yet, like the weather in Lifeboat, that ambient noise serves a further purpose.

Hitchcock wasn't just a realist. His background in German cinema made him a lifelong Expressionist. Those commonplace neighborhood sounds—distant conversations, the tinkling laughter of a house party, Greenwich Village traffic, a yapping dog—reflect off the walls of L. B. Jefferies' courtyard community, echoing his own state of mind. If the scenes he witnesses in his window are a projection of his own inner state, these noises are its soundtrack. When Jeff overhears the bitter sniping that takes place between Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald, or the wife's nagging “Ha-a-a-a-rry” from the newlyweds' apartment, it echoes his own fears about commitment and marriage.

Early in the film, the afternoon's drowsy white noise of neighborhood life aurally approximates Jeff's own slumber as he takes a break from peeping on his neighbors. Though he may feel omnipotent, with a front-row view into his neighbors' apartments, he isn't God. And so later, while sleeping, he misses seeing a crucial detail: Mr. Thorwald leaving his apartment with a mysterious woman who is not his wife. This beautiful panning shot is scored to the anodyne sound of steady rain and the ghostly call of a distant foghorn. It is as though Jeff, whose suspicions have been aroused by Thorwald's late night trips, has subconsciously willed his neighbor into the role of murderer.

Nothing could have been more natural in Greenwich Village in the 1950s than to overhear a composer laboring over a new tune. So it makes perfect sense that Jeff would overhear that. Yet, murder mystery aside, the real story of Rear Window is about Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who adores Jeff, who, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with marriage. That incomplete tune (and its writer's struggle to make something worthwhile out of it) stands in for their relationship—particularly Lisa's side of the story. Every time the tune drifts in through the window, Lisa's ears perk up. Jeff, however, is constantly annoyed by it. Enchanted by its romantic melody, Lisa remarks that it's “almost as if it were being written especially for us,” while, Jeff quips: “No wonder he's having so much trouble with it.” By the end of the movie, when the composer has finished it (and Jeff and Lisa seem to have found a way to unite in something that looks like love), it's a forgone conclusion that that song should be titled “Lisa.”

The point is, in a Hitchcock film, incidental sounds aren't just part of the fabric of realism. They aren't just part of the story, they are the story, another implement in Hitch's “pure film” toolkit.

In 1888, art critic Walter Pater wrote that "all art aspires towards the condition of music" in that music unifies subject matter and form. By means of editing, camera movement, long and short takes, visual design, sound design all the rest of “the technical ingredients,” Hitch's works achieve that musical quality. In a tribute to the maestro, written in 1963, Truffaut remarked that Hitch understood cinema to be “an art of sustained impression, like music. And, like music, it is subject to laws of progression and rhythm, which, for example, have nothing to do with the laws of writing a novel. Many films resemble novels. Those of Alfred Hitchcock resemble a symphonic concert.” That is as good a definition of “pure cinema” as you will find anywhere. Hitch's films don't merely aspire, they attain the “condition of music.”

Hitch achieved that mastery by the most honorable means possible: he paid his dues. In the 1920s, he cut his directorial teeth using mostly stationary cameras to create soundless films shot in grainy, low-resolution black and white. With those basic materials, he was able to move audiences like few directors then or since.

As time went on, he accepted each technological advancement—sound, improved film stock, color, 3-D, Vistavision—with skeptical aloofness. Understanding the value of such “enhancements,” he also comprehended their limitations and often longed for those innocent days of the silent era, when you had to no choice but to work in “pure film.” Embedded in his tissues was the knowledge that the essential capability of film, its magic, lies, not in this or that technological capability, but in its very nature: that it can flow through a projector and create a sense of reality on an otherwise blank screen. As the world's foremost practitioner of pure cinema, he knew when to cut away and when to leave his audience alone in the dark. He knew there was a time to speak and time to keep quiet, passive as a camera, taking it all in.

Hitchcock Talks to Bogdanovich about Pure Film

Peter Bogdanovich in 1972.

In 1963, cult movie director Peter Bogdanovich sat down with Alfred Hitchcock for a lengthy interview. At times, Hitch was more forthcoming about his artistic intentions in this talk than he was with his famous week-long interview with Francois Truffaut. Put another way, when you place the two interviews together, you can get a more well-rounded view of the inside of Hitch's head. Since we've been talking about Hitchcock's view of "pure film," I thought I'd share this revealing portion from Hitch's sit-down with the director of The Last Picture Show and other great films.

This isn't Part Three of my series, it's just an interlude.

Bogdanovich: In Psycho, aren't you really directing the audience more than the actors?
Yes. It's using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote. It was done by visual means designed in every possible way for an audience. That's why the murder in the bathroom is so violent, because as the film proceeds, there is less violence. But that scene was in the minds of the audience so strongly that one didn't have to do much more.

I think that in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn't time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They're just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture. I wasn't interested in them. And you know, nobody ever mentions that they were ever in the film. It's rather sad for them. Can you imagine how the people in the front office would have cast the picture? They'd say, "Well, she gets killed off in the first reel, let's put anybody in there, and give Janet Leigh the second part with the love interest." Of course, this is idiot thinking. The whole point is to kill off the star, that is what makes it so unexpected. This was the basic reason for making the audience see it from the beginning. If they came in half-way through the picture, they would say, "When's Janet Leigh coming on?" You can't have blurred thinking in suspense.

"It's using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote." Wow. In exactly ten words, that could be Hitch's mission statement.

Another tidbit, regarding character development: Hitch's statement that "we didn't have time to develop the characters" is only partly correct. While there may not have been time in the movie for more character development, the fact is that screenwriter Joseph Stefano developed his characters to a much greater extent than we see in the final cut. To the writer's chagrin, Hitchcock repeatedly excised that material from his drafts. For instance, Stefano wrote in hints of a budding romance between the Vera Miles and John Gavin, but Hitch took that material out. In his comments to Bogdanovich, we can see why.

I love Hitch's concluding statement: "You can't have blurred thinking in suspense." That explains why he famously 'directed his audience.' Like an orchestra composer and conductor, he was eliciting a very specific set of emotional responses. Such an approach took a great deal of control over all aspects of the film, including even its marketing, of which Psycho is a case study!

Following Hitchcock Down the Pure Film Rabbit Hole

Like many film geeks, I fell down the Hitchcock rabbit hole at the impressionable age of 12 or so. I was initially attracted to his reputation as the master of the macabre, a genre custom-tailored to pubescent boys. But if those thrills were all I had been looking for, I would have been disappointed and to be honest, I was—at first. What grabbed me then and still hasn't let me go, was his mastery as a film maker. In interviews and articles, he often spoke of his work in “pure film,” a phrase he occasionally alternated with the more majestic phrase “pure cinema.” 30 years after first hearing those words, I'm still exploring what he meant by that. My next two posts will explore some of the filmmaking techniques Hitch employed in his pursuit of the grail of “pure cinema.”

At first glance, Hitch seemed to have been talking only about the unique visual power of film, as when he told Peter Bogdanovich in 1962: “'Pure cinema' is complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.” He even once claimed that Rear Window was the finest example of "pure film," because the camera adhered to a rigorous scheme that insisted on telling the story from the viewpoint of a single individual—photographer L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart)—thus placing the audience inside his head and keeping it there throughout the entire film.ⁱ From this, it might be easy to conclude that, for Hitch, the idea of “pure film” has to do only with what happens in the cutting room. But I would say that he had much more in mind and that his use of Rear Window as an example might have made for a good sound bite, but it sidestepped his deeper intentions.

As I see it, for Hitchcock, “pure cinema” was the art of using cinematic techniques—both visual and aural—to create an experience for audiences that would take them out of their daily lives to inhabit a dreamscape constructed by the director. Of course, even the most basic entertainment does that: I don't know about you, but three minutes into the most banal soap opera and I'm hooked. The quantum difference is that Hitchcock's films take cinema's innate quality and create a heightened reality that's the result of deliberate, masterful and intentional control over all aspects of their creation.

In Hitch's comments to Bogdanovich above, he drew a comparison between individual pieces of film that make up a scene and individual music notes that make up a melody. This wasn't the only time he used a musical analogy to describe film making as an art form. For instance, he often compared bright colors and extreme close-ups to the loud notes in a symphonic passage. He compared himself to an orchestra conductor. I'm going to come back to that, but first notice how, a year later, he expanded on his idea of "pure film" in his interview with Francois Truffaut. This time he tipped his hand regarding his grander ambitions to use film to engage his audience in profound ways:

“I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream.... [In the case of Psycho,] it wasn't a message that stirred audiences, nor was it a great performance or the enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.”

Hitch's aim was to bring his audience into the world of his movies, to feel emotions alongside his characters; better yet, to feel what Hitch himself felt. Using the camera as an audience surrogate, you could say that he wanted the audience to actually be a character in the film—not just as a silent observer, but as an active participant, asking questions that the film would go on to either answer or deflect. Last night I was watching Lifeboat with Amanda. At one point she turned to me and said, “Am I supposed to like Willi” the Nazi U-Boat captain? My answer was, “Yes. And you're supposed to feel guilty about it.” She did.

With Psycho, the film's drama and terror derived as much from Bernard Herrmann's musical score as it did from Hitch's vaunted montage techniques. While Hitch himself privately acknowledged that Herrmann's score contributed to 30 percent of the film's emotional impact, the composer himself claimed it accounted for 70 percent. (I say we find the mean between their two egos and call it 50-50.) Whatever the case, music was a large part of that movie's “pure film” impact. As Hitch indicated in his Truffaut interview, pure film is the sum of all its parts, including editing, camera movement, background noise and, of course, music—both diegetic and non.ⁱⁱ

Dialogue held a special place in Hitch's "pure film" aesthetic, because, for him, it wasn't so much the words that mattered, but the sound they make: recall that Rope's Brandon accused Rupert of choosing “choose words more for their sound than their meaning.” Also recall that Hitch told Truffaut, “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”

Thus, pure cinema is a combination of all the individual elements that go into a movie, working together to serve this single purpose: to draw the audience mentally, psychologically and emotionally into the world of the film.

Like Hitchcock, Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) had a lot on his mind.

The way I see it, film in the 20^th century was the summit of achievement toward which all art had been aspiring for the previous three centuries. By the end of the 16^th century, composers were writing works that marshaled the talents of a variety of performance artists. By calling it opera—plural of the Latin opus—meaning “works” or “labors”— they thus declared their intention to offer audiences a combination of many art forms, including solo and choral singing, acting and dance. Later, elaborate sets and costumes were added to the spectacle, offering up a total art experience. By the middle of the 19^th century, Richard Wagner had taken this holistic notion of opera to a new level, referring to his operas as Gesamtkunstwerks, or, “total works of art.” His aim was not merely to combine music, lyrics, vocals, theater and dance into one performance, but to actually unify them into a single, synthesized whole. In 1849, he wrote about his objective to create a “consummate artwork of the future” that would result in “the integrated drama” that would liberate popular stories from their nationalist moorings to become a universal humanist fable.ⁱⁱⁱ

By then, opera had become quite an elaborate production, supported by ticket sales priced for the wealthy. Viewed in that light, it seems almost like a destiny of zeitgeist that film came along right on time, to offer up an operatic experience, available at a price the masses could afford.^iv

As a pure cinema practitioner, Hitchcock was the leader of that charge.

I think it's entirely possible, if not probable, that Hitch, who was keenly aware of his genius as a film maker, saw himself as a modern-day Wagner. Though he never publicly articulated it as such—he was shrewd enough to avoid such grandiosity—his practice of pure cinema is analogous to Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.

In an online discussion, Hitchcock author Dan Auiler observed that Bernard Herrmann's work makes the films he worked on “operatic.”(He cited the composer's work on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's Vertigo specifically, though many more titles could be added.)^v Dan feels that Herrmann's film music can be said to be “operatic in the sense of the music speaking for the character. But even that falls short of what Herrmann does, as the music speaks for the character and the director in ways that respond to the image we are seeing.” (Italics added.) As Hitch told Truffaut above, he practiced "pure cinema" in the service of eliciting a profound audience reaction. In Herrmann, he found a talent as great as his own for bringing that about.

Bernard Herrmann's star turn in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

While Vertigo might be the most profound collaboration between composer and director of any film ever undertaken, the Hitchcock/Herrmann alliance in The Man Who Knew Too Much is the most transparent example of the heights they could achieve working in concert (pun fully, shamelessly, intended). By showing him conducting the London Symphony Orchestra during the Royal Albert Hall sequence, Hitchcock awarded a cameo appearance to Herrmann—the only time he shared the screen with a member of his non-actor team. And what an exquisite example of "pure film" that scene is! Arthur Benjamin's Storm Cloud Cantata provides the perfect underscore for dramatic tension as Jo McKenna (Doris Day) agonizes over her choice between saving her son from his kidnappers and averting an assassination. It's 10 minutes of wordless suspense, in which the audience shares subjectively in Jo's predicament. A tour de force of editing that serves the music, the story and a maternally ferocious performance by Day, it's a textbook example of "pure film" in which the audience is literally put through the same feelings as the characters on screen.^vi

Hitchcock pursued the art of "pure film" as a Platonic ideal. The notion took hold during his silent years and it was a grail that he pursued all of his life. I believe that every single choice he made was in service to that ideal, for, in his mind, only pure film could arouse audiences sufficiently to 'wake them as from a nightmare.' Sometimes music served that purpose, but at other times, it could be an obstacle. Initially, Hitch envisioned Psycho's murder in the shower without music, but he was persuaded to change his mind when he heard Herrmann's iconic musical accompaniment. The entire length of The Birds contains not a single note of non-diegetic music—though Herrmann was brought in to help orchestrate the squawks and screeches of that film's star chorus. Still, As William Rothman wrote in his essay "The Universal Hitchcock," "pure cinema"

"was not the art to which Herrmann was dedicated. Herrmann swore allegiance to the art he called "melodram,"... which restored to music what he felt was its rightful primacy. In the case of [the shower scene in] Psycho, Hitchcock allowed Herrmann to prevail, but the incident must have opened his eyes to the fact that he and his friend, whose genius was as undeniable as his own, did not ultimately share the same artistic vision."

Music was a useful tool in Hitch's pursuit of "pure film," but it was only a tool. Some of his most sublime and impactful scenes contain no music whatsoever. In fact, he even dispensed with editing at times, delivering his "pure film" experience in a single, seemingly endless, take. Check back and I'll tell you how.

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i That point is slightly overstated, as there are moments when the camera continues to roll while Jefferies sleeps.

ii Diegetic music is what you hear from a source within the story, as when Vertigo's Midge plays Mozart records for Scottie. Non-diegetic music is the musical score that is overlayed on top of the movie, such as the orchestral music that accompanies Scottie's wandering around San Francisco.

iii Similarly, Hitchcock reveled in his films' ability to reach across all cultures, bragging that Psycho shocked audiences in Japan in the same way they did America.

iv In another fascinating burp of destiny, just as realistic painting reached its zenith in the 19^th century, photography came along to put those realist painters out of work, especially in the portrait business.

v Herrmann's contributions to Hitchcock's films include The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Torn Curtain (regrettably unused, 1966).

vi Herrmann was given the choice of composing new music for the sequence—Hitch used the same material in his 1934 version of the film—but declined when he saw that Benjamin's music was still an ideal fit 22 years after the first film had come out.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Grail of Pure Film

Hitch and Francois Truffaut, during the famed interview.

More than perhaps any other director in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock understood the energy potential of the material of film itself. “To me,” he said, “pure film, pure cinema, is pieces of film assembled” to create an emotional effect. In interviews, he extolled "pure film" and longed for the good old days of the silent era, when movies were constrained to tell their stories visually, with as few interruptions as possible from those distracting dialogue title cards. Like modern poets who learned their craft writing sonnets, the discipline was good for directors who carried those techniques into the sound era.

Nevertheless, Hitch didn't learn those lessons overnight. His early silent films made in Germany faced lukewarm reviews from critics who complained that they were too wordy. But learn he did, soon enough teaching his mentors a thing or two about visual storytelling.

Though he may have popularized it, Hitchcock didn't invent "pure film." The phrase itself originated in the Japanese film industry's Pure Film Movement of the 1910s and 20s, and the theories behind it were developed largely by Russian directors and film theorists, notably Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Kuleshov devised an experiment to demonstrate that film editing can be far more powerful than an actor's performances. He put together a short movie in which an actor looked off screen at a bowl of soup and then at a little girl's coffin. The audience "raved about the acting," according to one observer, who was praised for his powerful expressions of hunger and of sorrow respectively. The upshot? Kuleshov used the exact same footage of the main character, only replacing the middle piece of film, the object of his gaze. He was directing, not the actor, but the audience's reaction.

With its insistently subjective point of view, Rear Window is little more than a series of such action/reaction shots, a movie that could easily be subtitled, "Variations on a Theme by Kuleshov."

In 1964, Hitch repeated Kuleshov's demonstration, casting himself in the role, first, as benign grandfather figure...

...and, second, as dirty old man.

Hitch kept his eyes on one prize – the audience reaction – and that provided the focus for every single decision he made. It's why he took such care to pre-plan his shooting scripts – themselves analogues to the final product – and why he sometimes seemed diffident during shooting, a stage of production he viewed almost as a necessary evil, and it also explains why he sometimes dawdled in post-production, futzing around in the editing room more than he liked to publicly admit, milking his last chance to get the movie right. As he told Roger Ebert in 1969, “Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all... I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts.”

Teresa Wright, who played Charlie Newton in Shadow of a Doubt concurred. In prepping her for the role, Hitch sat her down in his office and told her the story of the film. "He told me everything," she recalled, "including the sounds and the music. When I went to see the film after [the shooting] was all over... I thought, 'I've seen this film before.'" And, really, she had. She went on to say, "I saw it in his office that day."

For Hitch, the final product – the film itself – was the only real talent he had to worry about. No wonder his reputation (not universally held, it should be noted) for being manipulative or emotionally distant on the set precedes him. In his single-minded pursuit of the final cut he had neither time, patience nor budget for distractions.

All film is animation.
The way Hitchcock saw it, motion pictures can impart vitality to otherwise innocuous props, while denaturing somewhat even the most animated actors. (Why else do only a few talented individuals transcend the screen to become stars?)

That's what was behind his famous dictum that “actors should be treated like cattle.” Tongue in cheek though his pronouncement may have been, it wasn't really meant to disrespect actors, but simply to return them to the context of the other elements that make up a movie, such as framing, editing and production design. The movie screen is the ultimate democracy, a land in which people, places and things are stripped of their hierarchy and equalized.

Hitch liked to say that “the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well" – the better to work him into his overall design. For years, he tried to work with Gary Cooper, who once confessed, "The general consensus seems to be that I don't act at all." And so the city of Quebec is as much a character in I Confess as Montgomery Clift's Father Logan, while the key to the wine cellar in Notorious takes on a hyperreal, talismanic quality as it passes from hand to hand. (Even after the movie ended, the key continued its travels: in 1980, at the American Film Institute's tribute to Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman returned the key to the one who'd breathed life into it decades earlier.)

No wonder the Surrealists, whose manifesto called for the elevation of the ordinary to the extraordinary, glommed onto filmmaking so quickly and so early. It was their medium, made to order. In Rope, a Dada experiment if there ever was one, the murder weapon is what the script calls an “ordinary window sash cord,” yet for the first third of the movie, it drives Phillip (Farley Granger) and the audience to distraction. Hitch perfected such animism, eventually raising up a generation of people unable to step into a motel shower and who glance nervously at a plain old flock of birds gathered on a telephone wire.

The movie is the message.
After the crew has been paid, the sets dismantled and the stars have finished their press junkets, the only actor left standing is a mile-long length of celluloid, stitched this way and that, spiked with visual effects and layered with dialogue, incidental noise and music to create a single time-based, mixed-media collage. This Frankensteinian mishmosh of visual and audio bits is doomed (or released or liberated) to solo appearances at the Bijous, Paramounts and Roxies of America, alone, night after night to endure taunts and jeers (or, the 'laughter and the screaming,' as Norman Bates would put it) to which no audience would subject live actors.

More than the sum of its parts: like a filmmaker's use of close-ups, or a montage that combines bits of film to tell a story, Picasso's 1913 collage, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, fractures the space of the picture frame, using both close up and montage to tell a story.

It's that very patchwork process that makes film so emphatically a product of modernism. For centuries, visual, sound and text collage were oddities. Sure, you may have heard Tchaikovsky borrowing folk themes here or Moses lifting text from the Epic of Gilgamesh there. But viewed from the perspective of A. D. 2010, such appropriations are comparatively unusual. The explosion of Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art, along with output from writers like T. S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs and hip hop artists like Kanye West all have one common denominator: the slam-bang assembly of previously manufactured art and artifacts, a.k.a. collage. In borrowing from art, history, popular culture and found sources, they synthesize them into new, original work.

I hate to gush on about my favorite director, but when it came to mashups, nobody did it better or with more gusto than you-know-who – and, by the way, he was among the first to do so. Here's a sampling of his work:

• When the housekeeper in The 39 Steps discovers the dead Annabella and opens her mouth to scream, her voice is replaced by a train whistle from the next scene.
• The voice of Psycho's Mrs. Bates was provided by at least three women and one man, while her body was supplied by one actor, one actress and one mannequin.
• The nun who appears at the end of Vertigo to say “I heard voices” was overdubbed by the voice of Kim Novak, who'd already served in the dual roles of “Madeleine” and Judy.

When Hitch stows superstar Cary Grant away on the fortuitously named Twentieth Century Limited rail line and runs a rear projection of the terrain gliding by, the cut-and-paste job is so seamlessly executed you never see the Exacto knife.

And what are old school special effects, such as rear projection and matte paintings, if not forms of collage? One of the earliest "trick photography" devices was the Schufftan process, which used mirrors to insert miniature sets and small matte paintings in front of the camera, creating the illusion that the action was taking place on a much larger and more expensive set. It was Hitchcock who immediately grasped its potential, pushing the technique like no one before or since. He truly was ahead of his time: in 1929, on the set of Blackmail, he had to hide his miniature sets from incredulous producers who doubted the visual trick would work.

Hitch took special care to make his rear projection scenes, such the views from inside a moving car, appear lifelike.

In To Catch a Thief, the second unit filmed the exteriors for these two shots.

Perfect timing: notice how the tree in the first shot is matched in the second shot, recreated in Hollywood using rear projection. Also, the color values and lighting in the studio shot are balanced so as to render the trick photography utterly convincing. This is what happens when you give a first-rate crew time and money to do what it does best.

At other times, he seems to have hurried through the process, lending a slapdash, artificial quality to some scenes.

In this shot, Marlene Dietrich is quite obviously standing in front of a rear projection screen. Gratuitously fake, the shot is, if only subliminally, of a piece with the film's concerns regarding acting, performance, real life and deception. My favorite shot in the film, it's a collage effect worthy of Robert Rauschenberg.

For that reason, I agree with those who see the cheap, obviously fake special effects in Marnie as part of a deliberate aesthetic decision by a director who had spent decades toying with the artifice of film.

The artificiality of the white studio lighting and the obviously fake painting of the ship (you can almost see the brushstrokes) were, I believe, part of Hitch's overall design, an expressionistic approach that harkens back to the painted-on sets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919. In this case, the claustrophobic fakeness of these scenes echoes Marnie's psychological entrapment. Whether they "work" in terms of pure entertainment is one thing, but art-house fans and scholars get it. It would seem Hitch was making his film for a highbrow audience -- or hoping his mainstream audience would go along with him. Unfortunately, many didn't -- though it must be said the film has been vindicated in the test of time.

A painter or a novelist may work cheerfully for decades, with no intention of showing his or her work to another soul, never pausing to look back at it himself. For such individuals, it is the process, not the product, that matters. Film isn't like that. As Immanuel Kant would say, film is the thing-in-itself. It exists to be seen, awaiting its chance to be willed to life — even if by an audience of one in a darkened living room. Indeed, if it were not for film's inherent, intrinsic power, how else could we become entranced by a story whose author has moved on to other projects, whose fashions are out of style and whose performers are long dead?

Even Cary Grant had a hard time being Cary Grant. Nevertheless, though years have passed since his death, his Roger Thornhill, T. R. Devlin and John Robey continue to live. Howard Hawks had the genius to play against Cary Grant's charm and good looks in such romantic comedies as Bringing Up Baby, but it was Hitch who saw inside him the dark moods and the light, the fear and the longing, as displayed in Suspicion and Notorious. And it took more than Grant's considerable acting skills to convey those nuances. No wonder the usually obsessive Grant trusted Hitch so much. In that sense, the apocryphal story about about primitive cultures is true: the camera can indeed capture your soul, or at least make a convincing copy of it -- but only in the hands of a skilled director. That's pure film for you.

Movies are a dream so profound they can take root in our psyche and cause us to resent the intrusion of reality, whether it's the ring of a cellphone in the row behind us or the humdrum life we must face after the lights have come up. Only a genius like Hitchcock could internalize that basic insight and still say with equal conviction, “it's only a movie.”