The 9th Annual Cornwall Film Festival

There will be a short break from the Philip K. Dick marathon, what with the Hitchcock Director's Chair this weekend (if you haven't done so already, check it out here) and the Cornwall film festival next weekend.

Speaking of the festival, which starts on Friday, there are some great films and documentaries on offer which I'm really looking forward to. Here is a selection:

• The Arbor tells the true story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar (writer of Rita, Sue and Bob Too!) who tragically died at the age of 29.
• Another Year is Mike Leigh's new film, which shows the relationship of a couple nearing old age and their two friends.
• Catfish is a documentary about the consequences of social networking.
• Countdown to Zero is a documentary that takes a stark look at the history of the nuclear arms race and the threat of present-day nuclear war.
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final part in the trilogy of Swedish film adaptations of Steig Larsson's novels.
• Red Hill is a western-genre tale from Australia about the first day of a young police officer, an action-packed thriller shot on location in the outback.
• Restrepo is a documentary that follows the men stationed at an outpost in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley, looking at daily life on the battlefield.
• Skeletons is a dark British comedy about two 'mystic detectives' who literally exorcise skeletons from people's closets.

...plus more!

Not long to go now and I'm getting very excited. Be sure to visit my page at flickfeast.co.uk for reviews of all the films I get to see. And I'll also be tweeting throughout the weekend so follow me on Twitter.

The Saturday Screen Shot #13

Aptly, this Halloween special is also my 13th screenshot. Here's an image from the film I watch every October 31st.

Shot from the Screen: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Screenshot: The citizens of Halloween Town celebrate in style

Shot from the Scene: The film kicks off with a rendition of 'This is Halloween' with everyone in town joining in the festivities. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, engulfs his costume in flames and leaps into the fountain. He emerges in his iconic black and white to cheers and clapping. The annual celebrations have been a success! This scene sets the film up really strongly and showcases the brilliant job Henry Selick and his team have done with the stop-motion animations  

Review: The Birds

Based on the story by Daphne Du Maurier, The Birds introduces Tippi Hedren as another of Hitchcock’s blond leading ladies. She plays Melanie Daniels, a rich, confident young woman who starts the film in a pet shop buying a bird and ends it never wanting to see a bird again, after a traumatizing series of events.

The bird shop is where she meets Mitch Brenner, who comes in under the pretence of looking for a pair of love birds for his sister’s birthday. But it is Melanie he is really interested in. And he makes quite the impression on her. After he leaves, she calls in a favour and finds out his address from his car licence plate. She buys the love birds for his sister Cathy and heads north of San Francisco to the small fishing town of Bodega Bay. She leaves the birds inside the family home as a surprise and makes her way back across the bay in a small rented boat. As she finishes her return journey, she is suddenly swooped upon and attacked by a seagull.

There follows a series of bird attacks in the town; at Cathy’s party, at a farm, outside a school, and several people are killed. The Master of Suspense sure knows how to raise the tension and there are a number of thrilling moments in this movie, including the scene where Melanie sits on a bench outside the school. Birds gather on the playground behind her without her knowledge, growing in number every time. She spots one flying, follows its flight, and watches it come to rest with the others, suddenly seeing how many there are of them. A very clever idea to show the audience something our protagonist cannot see and then slowly reveal it to them while we watch their reaction. Another great scene finds our leading lady trapped in a phone box, with birds swooping and crashing all around her. There is carnage and mayhem out on the street and a sense of isolation and terror inside the claustrophobic phone box.

The attacks by the birds are still quite nasty to watch today, which means audiences back when it was released must have been horrified! Hitchcock’s rapid editing techniques evoke shock and terror, accelerating cutting so that the shots move at a fast pace, leaving viewer’s little time to reflect on what they see, just experiencing the raw emotion of the scenes.

Sound is used to great effect in The Birds. The lack of a musical score makes way for composer Bernard Herrmann to create a soundtrack made up of elements such as electronic bird cries and wing-flaps. A lot of the film is eerily silent, raising the tension as we wait for the next attack, trying to listen for even the faintest sound, which could indicate an imminent attack.

A number of Hitchcock’s recurring themes appear in this film. The most obvious one of course is birds, also used in Psycho, Vertigo, and Sabotage. There is also the MacGuffin, the domineering mother, the blond woman, and the Hitchcock cameo (he appears at the beginning, walking two dogs past the pet shop).

Hitchcock described the message of The Birds as “too much complacency in the world: that people are unaware that catastrophe surrounds us all”. Its everyday scenario scared audiences then and is still effective today. The interactions between the characters, the moments of tension and terror, the ominous atmosphere and the threat of something ordinary suddenly becoming something sinister, all add up to make this a classic film.

An essay on the visual style, narrative and themes of two Hitchcock films

The following is an edited version of an essay I wrote for my Film Studies degree.

'Examine the visual style, narrative form and thematic concerns of two of Hitchcock’s British thrillers (1927-38)'

During the period of 1927 – 1938, Alfred Hitchcock made a number of films in Britain including The Thirty Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) which are part of his classic thriller sextet. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol believe the sextet constitute a new cinematic genre; “This new genre – ‘le feuilleton d’espionage intelligent’ – produces a type of film characterisable in terms of an abundance of action, chases and journeys, a variety of locales, gloomy and macabre plots.”

The visual style of Hitchcock’s British thrillers is very realistic. Everyday locales such as the crofter’s cabin in The Thirty Nine Steps; a detailed depiction of a lower middle class setting, and the inn in The Lady Vanishes, are very authentic. Tom Ryall states that “Hitchcock’s early training as a set designer undoubtedly contributes to such a detailed use of the mise en scene to achieve surface realism.”

Hitchcock also uses innovative sound and editing techniques to add to the effect of the visuals. In The Thirty Nine Steps, there is a shot of the landlady’s screaming face and the sound of a train whistle, then the scene cuts to an actual train: the source of the whistle. Bordwell and Thomson believe this nonfaithful sound has a serious function; “Though the whistle is not a faithful sound for an image of a screaming person, it provides a dramatic transition. Fidelity of sound to source is a strong convention of classical cinema and here Hitchcock deviates from it in order to provide a ‘striking transition’ between two disparate images.”

There are also memorable visuals from the film The Lady Vanishes. The ‘stain’ – a type of Hitchcockian prop where everything is proceeding normally until someone notices something that isn’t right – is present here. In this film it is the packaging of Miss Froy’s herbal tea, which is thrown out from the train with the rubbish and blows against the window in front of Gilbert for a few seconds, before blowing away. This convinces Gilbert that Iris was telling the truth about Miss Froy. Another clever visual used is the word ‘FROY’ written on the window, it is visible throughout the scene where Iris sits with Gilbert until she notices it, and then it disappears.

Both The Thirty Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes are full of Hitchcock motifs; the long knife used in the fight sequence with the illusionist, the birds that are let loose in the luggage compartment and cause chaos, the long corridors, trains, public buildings like the music hall and the London Palladium, etc. Elisabeth Weis discusses the links between the images and sounds in Hitchcock’s films; “his soundtrack is also distinctively contrapuntal to the visuals. That is to say, the sounds and images rarely duplicate and often contrast with each other. During a Hitchcock film we are typically looking at one thing or person while listening to another.” There is an example of this in The Thirty Nine Steps where we hear the crofter saying a blessing before supper but what we see is his wife anxiously looking at the newspaper headline and then at Hannay.

In Hitchcock’s films, elements of the mise en scene are often used to great effect in order to further the narrative. In The Thirty Nine Steps, the crofter’s wife gives Hannay her husband’s coat to wear to disguise himself when he runs away from the police. This saves his life later in the film when he is shot by the professor at the country house. He is saved by the Bible the crofter kept in the coat’s breast pocket. In The Lady Vanishes it is the herbal tea packet that convinces Gilbert that Iris is telling the truth about Miss Froy.

A difference in the narrative form is the episodic structure of The Thirty Nine Steps which has lots of different locations; the music hall, Hannay’s apartment, the train, the Scottish Highlands, the crofter’s cabin, the country house, the town hall, the sheriff’s office, the inn, the London Palladium. In The Lady Vanishes there are much fewer locations, there is a clear divide between the beginning of the film, the middle, and the end; these are set in the inn, the train, and the government offices.

Tom Ryall notes another difference between these two films; “In The Thirty Nine Steps, the initial emphasis is on the male character (Hannay) with the woman (Pamela) a sceptical and unwilling partner in the adventures until the later stages of the film. The Lady Vanishes reverses this pattern with the woman (Iris Henderson) in the central position to begin with and the man (Gilbert) playing the sceptical and unwilling partner for part of the film.”

Although some of the films in Hitchcock’s classic sextet deviated from the spy thriller genre, the final film in the sextet, The Lady Vanishes saw a return to it. The Thirty Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes have similar themes in that they are both espionage films with some comic and romantic elements, and they both deal with a conspiracy.

In both of the films, the role of the ‘hero’ is occupied by individuals who have been involved in the espionage situation by accident. Both of the protagonists are ‘ordinary people’ who have been drawn into the world of espionage by accident and they are somewhat forced to occupy these heroic roles because the real spies are unable to do so.

A major theme in The Thirty Nine Steps is that of the falsely accused hero. Hannay is an innocent man who has been accused of murdering a young woman and has gone on the run from the police. This theme is also present in The Lady Vanishes as Iris is accused of lying or possible madness by many of the passengers on the train as they don’t believe she’s telling the truth about Miss Froy. The hero’s purpose in both of the films is to try to prove they are telling the truth.

Overall, Hitchcock’s classic British thrillers of this period all offer the spectator an adventurous and intriguing story. The films provide an innovative visual style, an interesting narrative and a number of themes that became indicative of Hitchcock’s work. Audiences flocked to see ‘the new Hitchcock movie’ because they knew they wouldn’t be disappointed.

Bibliography

• Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K., Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001
• Rohmer, E. and Chabrol, C., Hitchcock, Frederick Ungar Publishing, New York, 1979
• Ryall, T., Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, The Athlone Press Ltd, London, 1996
• Weis, E., ‘The Sound of One Wing Flapping’, Film Comment, vol. 14, no. 5, 1978

Filmography

• The Lady Vanishes (1938) Alfred Hitchcock
• The Thirty Nine Steps (1935) Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is the subject of Director's Chair #11 over at The LAMB