Dean Richard Allen's lecture on Hitchcock and suspense in film editing

1. Hitchcock, Editing, and Suspense
Dean Richard Allen guest lecture
SM2002 Art of Editing, Prof. S. Walsh
School of Creative Media
City University of Hong Kong

2. Hitchcock and Editing
What is Editing?
1. Cutting
• Editing as Cutting. Hollywood editor is known as a cutter. Conventions of editing evolved as the
film-maker sought to bring the cinema audience closer to the action. For example cutting from a
long shot to a medium close up or close up.
• Continuity Editing. The rules of continuity editing developed to ensure that the activity of cutting
ensured consistent spatial orientation and constant screen direction from shot to shot as a film
unfolds in time.
• Hitchcock and Classical Editing. Hitchcock was trained in the American system. First 11 films
(1920—22) were at an American studio in London: Famous Players-Lasky. He respected the pace
and liner editing style of classical film.

3. 2. Montage or Assembly.
• Kuleshov and Eisenstein: Concept of Montage developed by Russian film maker, Sergei
Eisenstein, following Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov set up film workshop in the post revolution. No raw
stock. Experimented with pieces of film that were available. Developed theory of cinema based
upon editing.
• Kuleshov effect experiment: A close up of the face of actor Ivan Mozzhukin was combined with
three other shots: a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a girl playing with a toy bear. In each
case a different meaning and emotional response was conveyed: hunger, sadness, and joy.
• Meaning of the Kuleshov effect: The Kuleshov effect demonstrated that that meaning in the
cinema was created out of the juxtaposition of images, generating an idea and an emotional
impact that is not contained in any one of them taken individually.
Clip: Hitchcock’s version of the Kuleshov effect.

4. What is Suspense?
Suspense is an emotion: anxious anticipation. It is a future orientated emotion (unusually)
Suspense is a way of story-telling: designed to elicit the emotion of suspense as in “suspense
sequence.”
Suspense is genre of story-telling: The suspense genre specializes in eliciting anxious
anticipation usually by linking “suspense sequences” to a macro suspense situation.
Examples. The Man Who Knew to Much (1954): A child is abducted while a family North By
Northwest (1959): A innocent man is mistaken for double agent.
Hitchcock is known as “The Master of Suspense.” In what does that mastery consist?

5. Suspense and Editing
• Suspense is not equivalent to editing, an unedited shot can generate suspense. Hitchcock’s “mastery” of
suspense closely related to the “mastery” of editing.
• Standard or Classical suspense. We anticipate something bad is going to happen and we are anxious?
How does the film-maker control and manipulate our anxiety? How are we made to be more anxious?
• Temporal deadline: We give the audience information about a temporal deadline. Say: A bomb is going
to go off……at 1.45……and kill the innocent protagonist. As the deadline approaches it becomes
increasingly likely that the bomb is going to go off and increasingly less likely that the innocent
protagonist will be saved.
• Editing, Attention and Inference: editing is critical to suspense since it allows the director to direct
spectators attention and lead their inference about what is going to happen.
• Editing and Time: editing is critical to suspense since it allows the director to control and manipulate
time relative to an impending deadline.

6. Vicarious Suspense
Suspense vs Surprise
Surprise: Two people sitting at a table and a bomb explodes underneath it.
Suspense: Two people sit at a table and we are shown the ticking bomb and told when it is
going to go off.
• Editing draws our attention to information that the protagonists are unware We are thus
led to anticipate a negative consequence but we are powerless to intervene in the
narrative world and prevent it from happening.
Clip: Sabotage (1936)

7. Shared or Subjective Suspense
• Shared Suspense: H contrasts objective suspense with what he calls subjective suspense:
“letting audience experience it through the mind of a character.” This is a further way of
intensifying of suspense.
• Shared Suspense and Point of View Editing: Point of view editing is critical to shared
suspense, that is, to conveying the anxiety of a character.
• What is Point of view editing? Shot of object that is seen (pov shot), but most of all,
reaction shot, that is a shot of the person’s emotional response to what they have seen.
Clips: Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954)

8. Suspenseful Mystery
• Truffaut vs Hitchcock: Truffaut insists that suspense is “the stretching out of an anticipation” and
that “its possible to have suspense in connection with a hidden danger.” Hitchcock strenuously
denies this: “To my way of thinking mystery is seldom suspenseful. In a whodunit for instance
there is no suspense but a sort of intellectual puzzle. The whodunit generates the kind of curiosity
that is void of emotion and emotion is an essential ingredient of suspense.”
• Suspenseful Mystery and Restricted Narration. Suspense is put of mystery when we have an
emotional stake in finding out. Usually this kind of suspense is solicited by aligning us with a
character whose point of view is restricted.
• Moving Camera Point of View shot. Specific technique for creating suspense out of mystery.
Examples: Vertigo (1958)

9. Mixed Modes of Suspense
Hitchcock will typically combined different kinds of suspense and mix suspense with surprise
Examples: Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963)

10. Suspense and Playful, Unreliable Narration
• Hitchcock’s interest in editing as Montage or assembly is linked to particular
aspect of his aesthetic of suspense, which is to trick the spectator, that, is to
undercut the expectations generated by suspense or to create false expectations
Examples: The Lodger (1926), Suspicion (1941)

11. Suspense and Morality
• Melodrama: Typically happy ending we wish for is one in which moral goodness triumphs.
We wish for good to triumph and the romantic happy end and we wish for evil and villainy to
be vanquished. The is the conventional melodramatic idiom of popular cinema.

12. Suspense and Morality
• Melodrama: Typically happy ending we wish for is one in which moral goodness triumphs.
We wish for good to triumph and the romantic happy end and we wish for evil and villainy to
be vanquished. The is the conventional melodramatic idiom of popular cinema.
• Subversion of Morality: It is characteristic of H’s playful, and sometimes unreliable narration
to subvert this moral alignment. Linked to the enjoyment of suspense. The idea that we
derive (sadistic) pleasure from seeing virtuous characters in peril. Casts the sequence we saw
from Sabotage in a different light.
• Sympathy for the Devil. Hitchcock leads you to want to sympathize with morally undesirable
characters such as Norman in Psycho or morally ambiguous characters like Marnie. It is not
simply that Hitchcock creates a sympathetic devil whose point of view we can share, he
creates sympathy for the devil by inviting us (through structures of suspense) to share the
devils point of view.

13. • Identification: Hitchcock exploits a feature of identification fundamental to cinema. Human sympathy is
usually based on moral judgement. However, alignment with point of view creates feelings of identification
independently of moral judgement.
Examples: Notorious (1946), Rope (1948) Strangers on a Train (1951)