Themes and Plot Devices in The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Themes And Plot Devices In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock's films show an interesting tendency towards recurring themes and devices, such that one can almost feel that he was in some way making the same movie, or at least telling the same story, over and over again throughout his life as a director.

Here are some of the themes that show up repeatedly in his films.

Read more about Themes And Plot Devices In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock:  Birds, Suspense, Audience As Voyeur, MacGuffin, The Ordinary Person, The Wrong Man or Wrong Woman, The Double, The Likeable Criminal, Aka The Charming Sociopath, Staircases, Food and Death, Trains, Transference of Guilt, Mothers, Brandy, Sexuality, Blonde Women, Silent Scenes, Number 13, Tennis, Falling From High Places, The Perfect Murder, Violence in A Theatre

Famous quotes containing the words themes, plot, devices, films and/or hitchcock:

    “I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
    —Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    “Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”
    —Jean Arp (1887–1948)

    “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
    —Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)