"I'm a believer that film belongs to the masses. It was the newest art of the 20th century and there always that feeling that commercial or box office are dirty words. It's nothing to do with it. It's to do with telling the story with the widest possible appeal but still applying all the artistic techniques and manner of story telling without degrading yourself to what is vulgarly called commercial".
I'm watching an interview with the great Hitchcock talking frankly about film. The interview had been cobbled together from rushes, a technician discovered.
In it Hitchcock confirms his extraordinary talent in the philosophy of film, the image-movement, and his innate understanding of audiences.
The image-movement in essence is an understanding of the images before and after. In other words the actual scene you're watching is not as important as the next one that will follow contextually, ie it's all in the edit.
Hitchcock made 60 films in his career and my ambition is to get through, in some cases revisit every single one of them starting with 15.
Hitchcock was fond of a roguish, seemingly affable phrase he coined ascribed to audiences called "moronic logic". Essentially it was the art or non art of asking the bleeding obvious, when in retrospect it would have been obvious why a film maker would have taken such a course of action.
It's a tad harsh but I can see how I might apply the phrase "loose logic" to some of the material I review.
His first director credit as 25 was The Pleasure Garden - a silent film which gives glimpses of his signature through out his career.
There is in this filmic cytoplasm lots to dissect.
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