Rebecca Alfred Hitchock Analysis

Great Essays
In this essay it will be explained how Alfred Hitchock used influences of Soviet Cinema, German Expressionism and Classical Hollywood and how this is evident through the production of the film Rebecca (Hitchock, 1940).
Alfred Hitchock believed that everything within a film should be less important than the technique used to film. In his quote “I am against virtuosity for its own sake. Technique should enrich the action...The beauty of image and movement, the rhythm, and the effects- everything must be subordinate to the purpose”. This quote describes how Hitchock chose to direct his films. He chose, like in Rebecca, to focus on the purpose and technique opposed to everything else. However he was filming a Hollywood film with David O. Selznick
…show more content…
The film is a gothic thriller about a young, naive and plain woman who falls in love with a brooding aristocratic widower, Maxim de Winter. They get married and move into his estate called Manderley but while there the new bride begins to feel paranoia and fear caused by the memories and presence of Mr de Winter’s first wife Rebecca brought to surface through her loyal and trusted housekeeper Ms Danvers. The film ends with the discovery that Rebecca and Maxim’s marriage was built upon a lie and Rebecca in fact had cancer. Maxim killed her and dumped her boat and body in the sea and Ms Danvers burns down Manderley because she refuses to live with the fact that Maxim and the new Mrs de Winter live there and are happy (“Filmsite Movie Review”, n.d).
The film incorporates Classical Hollywood cinema, which focuses on finding a balance, symmetry and proportion (Fawell, 1959:41), immediately when the opening screen has a voiceover of woman’s speaking about Mandeley. She describes the drive up as well as the house itself. This is a characteristic of Classical Hollywood because it informs the audience at the beginning of the film where the duration of the film will be taking place as well as introduction the audience to a main character through her voice who is later found out to be Mrs de Winter and her name never given in the

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    German Expressionism and Soviet Montage are two styles of filmmaking that emerged in the early 1920’s. German Expressionism can be seen as a reactionary art movement to the poverty stricken Germany in the wake of a crushing defeat in WWI. Its stylistic techniques as well as subject matter embodied the tone of the German masses in the post war era. Soviet Montage was also stylized by the current state of the Soviet Union that created it, it was popularly used as a form of propaganda and the political messages of the time are hard to miss.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Domestic Violence can be used against one person, or everyone in the household. But, it never fails to create trauma. Moving on is the hardest part of the healing process, but it’s not impossible. These poems convey this through different perspectives. All these poems show the lasting affects domestic violence that a loved one can cause.…

    • 297 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Radcliffe’s authorial project was sensitive about the reality of women in a male oriented-society. She fictionalized their nagging worries about their mundane lives and trivial visibilities coupled with their innermost fears of being entrapped within the stifling private space of the home where they slavishly performed the role of docile wives and/or devoted mothers. In doing so, Radcliffe managed both to domesticate the Gothic, bringing a ‘realistic’ touch to the plot and to Gothicize the domestic transforming it metaphorically into a claustrophobically grotesque place. Maggie Kilgour further explained that “[t]he female gothic itself is not a ratification but an exposé of domesticity and the family […] by cloaking familiar images of domesticity in gothic forms, it enables us to see that the home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy of ominous patriarchal authorities” (9).…

    • 557 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One of the more interesting films of this time period was, Ivan the Terrible, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The film was actually commissioned by the Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who admired and idolized Ivan. This two-part historical epic, however, went against Party lines when it portrayed Ivan in a negative light. This resulted in the banning of the film on the order of Stalin which terminated the proposition of a third-part to the series. Oddly enough the first Part of the series, Ivan the Terrible, Part I, won the approval of Joseph Stalin as well as a Stalin Price for portraying the ruler as a national Hero.…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Here the narrator’s feelings about Manderley and its appearance are revealed. One particular example of the shift in mood is, “There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace” (lines 55-58). The details and the author’s word choice reveal that Manderley is a place dear to their heart. The words “our Manderley” create an emphasis and suggest that the narrator is very cheerful to see Manderley again, evoking feelings of remembrance and homesickness. The diction du Maurier uses like “shining”, and “moonlight”, and “dream”, create very wishful and positive imagery; setting a nostalgic mood.…

    • 1457 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A great number of people enjoy the feeling of being frightened whether by a movie, story, play, or whatever else. Even so, most like to have a little scare every now and then. In Lucille Fletchers, The Hitchhiker, a man is taking a road trip from Brooklyn to California. However, it is not just an average road trip. The main character, Ronald Adams, comes across a mysterious man on the way.…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article “Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”, Tom Gunning argues that the first people who watched Lumiere’s Arrival of a Train at the Station were not in shock because they believed that the train was real, they were astonished by the illusion they witnessed before them on the screen. In contrary to the myth that people feared that they were going to be killed by a train, Gunning stresses that the Audiences’ astonishment was derived “from a magical metamorphosis”(Gunning, 119). This metamorphosis is essentially cinema itself and the illusions it produces on screen. Gunning calls cinema a “magic theatre”(Gunning,117) where filmmakers strived to make the impossible, appear believable through visual representations.…

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Strangers on a Train Alfred Hitchcock is an auteur that is recognizable as a director. He is known as the master of suspense and through his artistic choices he is the author of his films. Hitchcock has his own persona and often appeared in cameos in his films. His unique style leaned away from studying films as a genre but through an auteur approach, Cashiers du Cinema written by the father of auteruirsm, Andre Bazin. Bazin stresses on mise-en-scène, the content of images, that reveals the filmmaker’s vision.…

    • 1103 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gary D Rhodes Movie

    • 946 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Critical Assessment of a Work by Gary D. Rhodes Gary D. Rhodes of Queen’s University Belfast challenges many current conceptions about Hollywood in his work “ ‘Movie’: How a Single Word Shaped Hollywood Cinema.” Specifically, Rhodes argues that the audience has power over the corporation in this industry. He explains how the word “movie” is a major representation if this idea. Rhodes presents this argument because he has seen how common it has become to accuse corporate Hollywood of finessing it’s viewers. However, Rhodes pushes the idea that the audience is responsible for the way that Hollywood cinema works today.…

    • 946 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Truffaut's Auteur Theory

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The auteur theory is a necessary evil to referencing and cataloguing cinema; a form of critic by analyzing a specific director’s body of work. Contrastingly to Truffaut who believes the filmmaker should place himself inside his work, Bazin contests that the auteur theory should be utilized to assist in evaluating how societal context and the uprising of the auteur theory influences how a director’s work is…

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In a movie the director’s style and purpose can be determined by his or her unique approach in presenting the story. Beside the director, a movie that we watch is a collective effort of many specialist artists and technicians. Each has their own ways of highlighting their views to the audience. These film styles can be defined as political, economical and social representation of the director’s point of view. The film making styles can also have an effect on the audience’s perception of the movie.…

    • 784 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Alfred Hitchcock was a film director from England who moved the United States in 1939. He was famously known as the “Master of Suspense”. Hitchcock’s golden years of his cinema career were from the 1950’s to the 1960’s. During this time, he made various famous films, such as Vertigo, North by the Northwest, and Psycho. When we compare these films it’s hard to find something they might have in common.…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pedro Almodovar’s twentieth feature film, Julieta, chronicles the title character’s life as she is forced to reflect upon her riddled past and confront the tragic circumstances that surround the disappearance of her daughter. Almodovar based Julieta off of a series of short stories written by Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro, which follow three stages of a Canadian woman’s life who faces similar circumstances. At it’s conception, Julieta was intended to be Almodovar 's first English-language film; however Almodovar was not confident writing the script in English and settled on setting the film in Spain and making it in Spanish. The New York Film Festival was the film’s American debut and both leading actresses as well as Almodovar were present for the occasion. Julieta relates to the trends identified in global art cinema by displaying symbolic and ambiguous aesthetics, depending on festival circuits rather than studio distribution, and employing…

    • 1366 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    We will also look at how historical films on Tudor England were used to reflect current political issues taking place during this period, most notably the debate around rearmament. Throughout this essay we will show how many directors focused on particular figures from Tudor history to represent elements that were prominent in this period. It will become obvious that historical films on Tudor England were affected during this period because they were adapted to fit wartime themes and represent the film studios political agenda. The spread of Nazism and emerging threats of war led particular film-makers to create historical films on Tudor England that echoed anti-fascist sentiments.…

    • 1654 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Laura Movie Analysis

    • 1912 Words
    • 8 Pages

    In formalist filmmaking, style and technique are two of the construction elements used. Uniting rudiments of the narrative are crucial in shaping the analysis. Drawing the viewer’s attention into seeing the film beyond just the elements used in making the film is key in helping convey the film’s message. Using the formalist approach in the analysis of the film, Laura, includes editing, sound, camera techniques and plot structure. Namely, the plot structure, Laura (1944), unfolds as we follow the detective in upper-class, NYC, McPherson as he questions each character about the murder of Laura.…

    • 1912 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays