A New Perspctive on Films: Strangers on a Train, Psycho

For this entry, I want to take you a ride to what goes on in my mind when I watch films. Personally, I'm not big on literature so movies are my escape from reality in a sense. The two movies that I can recall in my head clearly are Strangers On a Train and Psycho, both directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and fall under the genre Film Noir. Both are shot in black and white so you know that low key lighting is in effect. This lighting is so perfect for the Film Noir genre because the shadows are sharper and the natural light is sharper/bolder. The lighting could also signify something more poetic in such case if a shadow were to cast of a person making them appear larger than they already are, it shows the importance of the character. The lighting also goes hand in hand with mise-en-scene, the objects framed in a given shot. The way a light can be shined on a object shows the objects importance to the film. For example, in Psycho when the light is shined onto the newspaper in Crane's hotel room, what's inside the newspaper, the money, is the root of her paranoia and the curosity of Norman Bates. Alot of what I see in film, I question the purpose of it. You couldn't imagine the amount of questions that race throught my head when I watch ANY movie. Alot of this purpose has to do with the director's intent. The signifcance of director's intent is that it's imporant to know the purpose of a director putting something in a shot that catches your eye and understanding the poetic side of that object. This idea is the root of what mise-en-scene is all about. And with mise-en-scene, objects can be showed more than once, sometimes in a apparent pattern, and this idea of a recurring theme/object is known as a motif. Usually I notice motifs on the second viewing of the movie which are quite significant. The camerawork for these movies were very slow paced, alot of lingering shots, even when it came to moments of suspense, the pace still stayed the same. I guess Hitchcock relied on the score to do all the talking, due to it's frightening tempo that stays consistant. Alot of the audio was sweetned to acheive that level of suspsense in both thrillers. The slashing of the knife in Psycho was an obvious sound effect and the bang that came out of the tennis rackets in Strangers on A Train was louder than usual. What makes me so interested in movies is the characters that you can create. Hitchcock studied the human behavior, but mainly the fears we have in everday life. They evils we hide inside of ourselves or the very evils we try to runaway from. Me personally, I don't judge anyone else's opinions on the way they look at film. On any given day, I can have so much on my mind, but when it comes to watch a movie, my mind is blank and free. If you take a monster from a movie, many people will say "oh i've seen that before, it's not even scary". To that, I think of the makeup artists and the actors themselves who spend 9 hours in a studio just making the face of the monster, kinda like what Boris Karloff did for the orginal Frankentstein. If I see a action movie, I think of how ignorant the actor was before shooting the film, and how many hours it must have taken just to choreograph one scene of fighting. Filmakers test the viewer with imagination in their films, and it takes someone like me, who has a devotion to film, to recognize that.