Alfred Hitchcock's Auteur Theory

Lights, camera, and action! The audience never realizes how much thinking can go into a film and wonder how it is considered a classic. More specifically, film directors give an incredible amount of effort and thought through theme and style that can be seen in almost every one of their films. In particular, the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, would come to be one of the most noble auteur directors that film history has to offer. He has displayed themes such as voyeurism, birds, and identity mistake and technical styles such as the camera, actors, and lighting. Hitchcock’s masterpieces have been a symbol of art form and his unique style has inspired and transitioned into other films today. Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in London

The word auteur means author in French. Auteur theory means that the director is the most important person involved in the creation of film (Dixon 187). Directors have a very distinctive visual signature like how they work the camera, edit the film, and demonstrate thematic motifs. Hitchcock is nobley known to be one of the greatest auteurs of all time having strong themes and stylistic devices that makes the audience enjoy the film even more (Spoto 85). Author Neil Sinyard, in his book, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, explained one of Hitchcock’s recurring themes of identity mistake. In North by Northwest, the protagonist, Roger Thornhill, is mistaken for a CIA agent who is against foreign spies named George Kaplin. Identity mistake was the center of the film and showed an ‘average joe’ can be put into situations beyond belief. This theme is played out in Vertigo, involving Scottie Ferguson’s investigation of the fake Madeleine Elster and the woman who impersonated her. In his earlier film, Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie is the real ‘merry widow’ murderer, but the police ended up blaming a man in another

The lighting in his films is extremely crucial because it represents themes such as good vs evil. In North by Northwest, Roger meets a spy named, Phillip Vandamm, and as he’s talking to Roger, he is placed in the dark shadows of a room and Roger is positioned in the lighter part. This element foreshadows the theme and style used in his films. In The Birds, the birds eye view drives the ferocious intensity of bird attacks after the gas station explosion. We watch the fire unfold as the birds swoop in from off-camera to celebrate victory (Sinyard 104). His editing in films show a different point of view shot when he cuts back and forth from the main character to an object repeatedly. For example, in Rear Window, he will show an objective shot of Jeff when he looks out the window at one of his neighbors. Then, he will switch to the subjective point-of-view shot, showing us the character's perception of what he sees out the window. Lastly, Hitchcock will switch back to an objective view of the character, so that we may see their reaction to what they have just witnessed. He has a bold and effective montage editing from his famous Psycho shower scene where Marion gets stabbed by Mrs. Bates. However, the knife never enters her body, but the way it is edited in rapid clips makes it unbearable to watch and fools the audience into believing that she was stabbed (Sinyard 114). Similarly, in The Birds,