Watch a video essay examining how Alfred Hitchcock set up a motif.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a critic who does not count Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious among the director’s best works. Francois Truffaut called it his favorite black-and-white Hitchcock film, saying that it is “the very quintessence of Hitchcock.”
Notorious begins in a courtroom, where a judge finds the father of Ingrid Bergman’s character, Alicia, guilty of treason for being Nazi spy. His conviction is the reason Alicia decides to marry a Nazi sympathizer and share his secrets with the US government.
In a video essay originally published in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye dissect this opening scene and its relationship to the rest of the film. They begin with a mostly unknown fact: Hitchcock substantially altered the sequence in reshoots during the first week of post-production.
Their essay asks a simple question: why?
Gibbs and Pye say the change is Hitchcock’s way of better introducing many of the films motifs, character arcs, and “ways of seeing.” The opening sequence concerns various parties — the judge, journalists, American spies, and we the viewer — and the way in which all see Alicia. The judge sees her as the daughter of a guilty man. The journalists she her as the day’s news. The spies see her as a potential asset. And through a close-up Hitchcock uses to introduce her to us, the audience sees a woman in distress. We immediately sympathize and identify with her.
I won’t go into any more detail. This essay, using the moving images Hitchcock so meticulously crafted, delivers an argument about a masterpiece that words will never be able to truly capture. Watch it for yourself below.
The article Why Hitchcock Altered the Opening Sequence of ‘Notorious’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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