Some Impressions of Hitchcock

Hitchcock has a compelling style of portraying scenes on film; some things that struck me were his short, concise story-telling, use of humor, inclusion of odd details in scenes, and his ability to incite emotional responses in the audience.
Hitchcock's short, concise story-telling is something I can personally learn from and even emulate when making my own movie. One of his strengths is that there is no wasted time on film, or at least very little. In Frenzy (1972), the dialogue is short and to the point; when describing the boss who fired him for no reason, the character Richard Ian 'Dick' Blaney simply says, “He's a bastard.” (0:08:40). The effective use of dialogue is something that Hitchcock excels at, especially in scenes where the exposition is vital to the plot. Take for instance, in Frenzy again, the plot twist that places the Blaney character unbeknown to himself at the scene of a murder-theft, which happens to have happened at an adult dating agency where a secretary happens to see him exit the building wearing a specific jacket and holding a specific raincoat that Blaney later sends out to be cleaned from the hotel room he buys with the money that was slipped into his pocket the night before that alerts the hotel manager because the secretary at the dating service has a keen eye for describing men, coincidently. Hitchcock's characters happen to be masters of being in the wrong place at the right time, where circumstances send their lives careening in an unexpected direction. Or another example, in Torn Curtain (1966), the character Professor Armstrong the physicist who in Copenhagen acts suspiciously while trying to hide the fact that he is going on a secret mission to the Soviet bloc, so his wife follows him to East Germany where he seems to defect to the Soviets, but in actuality he is only trying to steal a secret mathematical formula from a professor in Leipzig. All this is explained by cursory characters as needed to keep the story going. When the Armstrong character first arrives in East Germany, he steps off the plane where he is greeted by a rush of reporters, we the audience learn that he seems to have defected due to the announcements that the media make about him. Point of view, privileged knowledge and whose perspective the audience identifies with are all important aspects in Hitchcock's storytelling.
One thing that makes Hitchcockian drama interesting is his inclusion of odd details in shots on the screen. The way in which he directs the camera, thereby controlling where the audience's attention is focused, sometimes includes odd details for no particular reason, but in the process make the shot all the more realistic. In Torn Curtain, there is a scene in the beginning in which a shot panning a large room with extensive marble floor tiling; the pan begins on a shot of four women scrubbing the floor. Or in the very first opening scene, the ICOP physicists' badges are the first detail the audience sees and it is left up to each individual audience member to read that it is the international congress of physicists which the acronym on the blue badge symbolizes. The odd details force the audience to see scenes in a certain way, to see what exactly Hitchcock wanted to show in his specific order. The odd details add realism and variety. In some cases the odd details are humorous. For instance in Frenzy, the killer ends up in the back of a potato truck with a body, but he has no room to maneuver and knocks some potatoes out of the truck. I found this entire scene hilarious. Or in some cases the minor details that were intentionally included are the funniest; in one of the first scenes of Torn Curtain, the Professor Armstrong character gets up out of the bed he is sharing with his fiancée in order to answer a knock at the door, stands and slips into a suit jacket all in one motion. Maybe it was intended to be humorous, maybe not; I found the efficacy and speed with which he does this action worth a laugh – he's too comfortable. And sometimes in the details, Hitchcock has something more significant than a mere laugh in store for the audience. In torn curtain he has a happily-ever-after love story that takes very little camera time to tell. The fiancée gets found out when she follows Armstrong into Soviet territory, and the officials leave it up to her to decide, in which case she decides to stay by Armstrong's side for their eventual escape (how daring and blinded by love she must be!) and, of course, the movie ends with a closeup of their embrace and a kiss in the final few seconds of the movie. Hitchcock is all about how the details come into play in a specific context, but keeping in mind that there is no wasted effort.