Alfred Hitchcock - The master of suspense
For all the funs of Alfred Hitchcock, there is a dedicated website for his life and his filmography. I believe there are many more websites like this, but this one have an clean design and a lot of usefull information for the master of suspense. Who is Alfred Hitchcock?
Born As: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Born: August 13, 1899, Leytonstone, England
Died: April 28, 1980 from Liver Failure and Heart Problems
Education: St. Ignatius College, London; School of Engineering and Navigation (mechanics, electricity, acoustics, navigation); University of London (art)
The acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at Paramount’s Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922. That year he directed an unfinished film, No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody . His first completed film as director was The Pleasure Garden (1925), an Anglo-German production filmed in Munich. This experience, plus a stint at Germany’s UFA studios as an assistant director, help account for the Expressionistic character of his films, both in their visual schemes and thematic concerns. The Lodger (1926), his breakthrough film, was a prototypical example of the classic Hitchcock plot: an innocent protagonist is falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue.
An early example of Hitchcock’s technical virtuosity was his creation of “subjective sound” for Blackmail (1929), his first sound film. In this story of a woman who stabs an artist to death when he tries to seduce her, Hitchcock emphasized the young woman’s anxiety by gradually distorting all but one word “knife” of a neighbor’s dialogue the morning after the killing. Here and in Murder! (1930), Hitchcock first made explicit the link between sex and violence.
