Film Comparison Of North By Northwest, And Buster Keaton's The General

A film's technique is its own storytelling device. Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) and Buster Keaton's The General (1926) are prime examples of technicality used to further accentuate and propel an audience's understanding. Both works exhibit purposely directed camera and mise-en-scene choices, and it's these choices that provide an evocation of emotion for the spectator. Hitchcock's film works primarily with suspense , whereas Keaton's focuses on the comedy. These techniques, and their effects, allow the viewer to better pinpoint the essence or overall intention of a scene as it plays out.

With North by Northwest, Hitchcock has created a thriller that's elements of suspense and surprise are aided significantly by its technicalities.

The use of space as a result of framing conveys different levels of tension, as the crop-duster scene ”exhibits spatial tension which heightens the presented onscreen", as well as "foreshadowing the eventual attack"(Chastain 2009). The plane then appears as a looming menace, growing larger as it chases Thornhill from behind. The utilization of POV plays an important role in this ordeal too, as it provides the audience with Thornhill's experiences exclusively (Bergstrom 1999). Before the attack, a POV shot through Thornhill's eyes reveals a crop-duster dusting no crops, a oddity that he will soon make sense of as it attempts to hunt him down. Yet the audience is confined to him and only the extent of his knowledge, as Hitchcock "could have cut away from Roger waiting by the road in order to show us the villains plotting in their plane, but he does not" (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson 1985), ultimately sharpening the surprise. Similarly, when not a Thornhill-attached POV, many of the camera movements function as subjective realization. This occurs at the beginning of the film, when Thornhill is seated with three men in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel. As it appears as though Thornhill is answering to the name George Kaplan, the camera leaves his drinking companions and dollies-in on two henchmen watching on in the hotel's lobby: "The function of these shots in narrative,

One of the obstacles the Union hijackers ensue upon pursuing Johnny is a disconnected carriage on the tracks. To clear the path, Johnny exits his locomotive to move the impeding carriage onto a seperate track. Once he's done this, he returns to his locomotive and continues his pursuit. At this point, the camera is positioned overhead, looking out forward towards where the train is heading. As Johnny is attending the fuel in the foreground, the disconnected carriage can be seen in the background making its way back onto the main track ahead of Johnny's train, thus blocking him again. It's Johnny's inattentiveness that sets him back, and it's the camera position's attentiveness that predicts the point of comic conflict; his gradual realization of the situation shown through Keaton's responding facial