Hitchcock - a very brief Overview
I have chosen to show and discuss excerpts from the following films of Alfred Hitchcock since they are intriguing examples (as is most of the work of this director) of how film may be constructed very deliberately while still retaining freshness, originality and a sense of mystery or 'ungraspability' (there is no key which unlocks them completely).

Hitchcock is often referred to as an auteur - a director who is understood to be the centre of a body of work, providing thematic consistency and a distinguishable, coherent approach (there are even film courses which explore this idea). The notion of the auteur however is a challengable one: it may be argued that Film is the product of the work of a whole team of people and not ascribable to the vision of a single individual. It is certainly true that Hitchcock surrounded himself with technically very able people (e.g the composer Bernard Hermann, the designer Saul Bass etc.) It is also true that Hitchcock's apprenticeship in the days of the development of 'silent' film gave him experience in many aspects of film production and his contribution to and choice of screen play (often in collaboration with his wife Alma), storyboards etc. was crucial to the development of many projects.

Hitchcock had a controlling kind of temperament; spontanaeity and improvisation did not feature very much in his practice as a director:
'I like to have a film complete in my mind before I go on the floor' (Gottlieb 1995: 253).
All work was planned in meticulous detail - the actual shooting of the film was one of the last links in the creative chain.

For more details on Hitchcock's working method, biography etc. please consult the reading list.

You may wish to compare this approach to that of other directors: a useful starting point would be to look at the work of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and the rest of the Nouvelle Vague and also the work of the american independent director John Cassavetes. For a radically different model of film-making explore the filmic work of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono (and the rest of the Fluxus group).

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Montage
Film is a technology by which light (and sound) are converted into a material substance. We can also call this a translation or a mediation. Like any representational medium, Film is artificial: it does not (and cannot) present reality directly but offers an opportunity to construct works which may be understood in terms of shared cultural codes.

Once you have turned something ephemeral (e.g light or the spoken word) into a physical object (e.g. a piece of film/tape or the printed word) then all of the qualities of that physical object may be exploited. In the case of Film, one of the most used aspects is the splicing together of different pieces of film (film editing) to create a new work (the director Tarkovsky called his book on Film 'Sculpting in Time'). Out of film editing grew the more sophisticated notion of Montage:

'Montage (at least in its European sense) is characterized by a particular film editing method: shots, rather than just 'edited' together, are constructed.'

'Overall, what is produced from montage is a construction of a specific notion that the director has in mind. A particular sequence uses montage for an identifiable purpose... This notion is usually thematic, but it can produce far deeper connotations...'

(www.imperica.com/sofia/editing/montage.html)


Sergei Eisenstein is often credited with developing the first theory of Montage which he referred to as 'Montage of Attractions'.

In Shadow of a Doubt we have a film that looks forward to some of Hitchcock's darkest work: 'Strangers on a Train' (1951) and 'Psycho' (1960), both in terms of themes and techniques.
In all three we have a mentally unstable, demonic agent that explodes the complacency of the characters whose lives he touches.
These films also share the use of 'doubleness': in each work there are many paired units (see, for example Durgnat 1974: 218 - 223 and Spoto 1988: 327 -330; 422 - 423)
'Shadow of a Doubt' has two characters with one Christian name: 'Charlie' - stressing both how the characters are intertwined and their seperateness, by comparison (they are male and female, old and young, corrupt and innocent etc).
The opening of the film (again without using dialogue) conveys a great deal of the narrative to come. The music (the 'Merry Widow Waltz') is over-rich and disturbing; the urban landscape is bleak and suggests moral decay; the opening vision of Uncle Charlie reclining on his bed tell us that he is a dead man - both dead inside and dead in terms of his approaching fate.