Mise-en-scène

HITCHCOCK

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was a master of suspense achieved through mise-en-scène. In his best films, the actors were part of a greater visual plan. Psycho (1960) is a perfect example. It holds an almost involuntary, hypnotic grip on viewers because it touches on a primal fear of unknown terror and seemingly unstoppable madness. It works profoundly and economically because Hitchcock makes a convincing visual case for a claustrophobic world of fear and psychosis communicated not merely through action but through the visual construction of that world.

Hitchcock built his mise-en-scène with abstract visual pattern of verticals and horizontals—like Antonioni, he drew upon modern techniques of painting. The pattern is prefigured in the credit sequence and provides a blueprint for almost every shot that follows, culminating in the horizontal presence of the motel against the verticality of the old dark house. This rigid pattern is partly responsible for the shock that occurs when the pattern is

broken, as in the arcing thrusting of the knife, or Marion Crane's blood flowing in circles down the drain in the shower. Visual rhymes abound throughout the film: movements up and down the stairs; the famous parlor scene where Norman Bates and his stuffed birds silently expose the "surprise" of the film's climax. The entire film is shot within a tightly controlled gray scale—a dull, oppressive world in which the normal, "outside" world barely existed. Sequences like the opening one in the hotel room, Marion's office, and her road trip to the Bates motel were composed to make Marion seem entrapped. When Hitchcock's camera creeps up the steps or tracks from Marion's dead eye to the money on the table, it does not open out space but further closed it down. Everything is of a visual piece; the film's puzzle gets pulled together before our eyes.

In Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock, like many mise-eǹne filmmakers, created a careful color scheme and sce situated characters in the frame so that viewers knew what was happening to them by the way they were seen. The characters were part of the larger, carefully articulated spatial configurations that Hitchcock developed in order to indicate to the audience what was not said outright. The main character of the film, James Stewart's Scottie, reacts during the first half of the film under the influence of a lie and his infatuation based on that lie; in the second half, he responds through a kind of psychosis caused partly by having being fooled. This crucial narrative information is presented to us through spatial placement: the way he is seen in the frame, what he looks at, who looks at him. He is not an actor as much as he is part of the mise-en-scène.