The Man behind the Camera

The film finished an hour ago, and on my way back home I've tried to hold on to all I was feeling while watching Hitchcock.

It would be too simplistic to say that it's a great film, and a must-see for whoever loves films, Hitchcock and, above all, how these films are made. It would be too simplistic too to say that Anthony Hopkins' and Helen Mirren's performances are precious and intense portraits of two great artists.

Yes, two artists, because, you see, a director can be a genius, as Hitchcock was, but the important thing to notice is that Alma Reville wasn't only his wife, and life companion, she was an artist, an excellent screenwriter, and, as the film shows, she was even greater in the editing room. Hitch chose well, he couldn't have found a better woman, a companion sharing both life and love for films with him.

There is so much you can find if you dig deeply into the film's corpus: references to classical Hollywood cinema: the studio system, the power of producers, the censorship. We see exactly what Hitchcock had to go through (even if he already was a successful and appreciated artist) to find the approval for his film. Psycho.

He wanted to be different, he wanted to leave his sign through something that could give him a thrill, the thrill he felt when he first started making movies.
In one scene he is talking to Alma about financing the film with their money. She asks him: "Is it really what you want to do? Isn't it because so many people are saying no?"
And he replies saying that when they started working together they had no money, they took risks and they invented new ways of making films because they had to. He wanted to feel those feelings again.

If a single piece of a dialogue could explain the entire inner world of a single director this would be the piece.
Taking risks, because making movies is an art, is free expression, is exploration, and is thrill. It is a love story which lasts a lifetime, because behind those works of art there are the artist, his thoughts, his touch and signature, his final cut.

The film's other great achievement is reached through the freshness and lightness it uses to deal with the intricate personality of Hitch, his problems with alcohol, his marriage, the obsession towards his blonde leading ladies, his nightmares concerning the film.

The film's style is very accurate, with an incredible attention to details, in the Hitchcockian style, the mise-en-scene is fantastic: costumes and colours, taking us back to 1959, the sequences on the set highlighting some of the epic scenes of Psycho as Marion's escape and the shower-scene.
It's especially thanks to the subtle and sarcastic lines of the script that the picture works so well: every single detail is important and remarkable to reference to Hitchcock's career: the beginning and the ending shot as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, TV series running between 1955 and 1962, the reference to The Birds at the end of the film,and many others that an attentive viewer will appreciate.

As the film reminds, Hitchcock never won an Oscar, but he was prized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, if you're interested I recommend to watch this video on Youtube in which the critic and director Francois Truffaut pays homage to Hitchcock:

In addition to this I highly recommend the book from which the film was adapted: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello, first published in 1990.

"I am just a man hiding in the corner, with a camera...watching. My camera will tell you the truth."