110th Birth Anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock

During the 12th Shanghai International Film Festival, people can take a closer look at 10 of Hitchcock\'s key works in order to understand both his artistic methods and the impact these films have on the modern audiences. 2009 marks 110 years since the birth of Sir Alfred Hitchcock, one of Britain\'s greatest directors, who has managed to establish himself both as a master craftsman and, above all, as one of the most important mavericks in the cinematic world.

The acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at Paramount\'s Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922. That year he directed an unfinished film, No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody . His first completed film as director was The Pleasure Garden (1925), an Anglo-German production filmed in Munich. This experience, plus a stint at Germany\'s UFA studios as an assistant director, help account for the Expressionistic character of his films, both in their visual schemes and thematic concerns. The Lodger (1926), his breakthrough film, was a prototypical example of the classic Hitchcock plot: an innocent protagonist is falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue.

Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. He remains one of the most popular and most recognised filmmakers of all time and his works are still popular today. His image has endured partly due to cameo appearances in his own films and the series of television dramas he hosted, the eponymous Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of film making. In the film Lifeboat, Hitchcock stages the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition (his trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the limitations of the setting; so Hitchcock appears in a fictitious magazine for a weight loss product). Similarly, the entire action in Rear Window either takes place in or is seen from a single apartment. In Spellbound, two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and out sized props for it to hold.