Hitchcock and the Mechanics of Cinematic Suspense

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s likening of a film to a short story provides a good starting point for any consideration of his contribution to the suspense genre. It draws attention first of all to the fundamental difference between film, as a visual medium, and its literary counterpart. In the novel, plot and character development can be more extensive than in the film and more can be left to the imagination of the reader — in this sense the role of the reader of the novel is a more active one than is that of the viewer of the film, for whom the work of visualisation, of characters and settings, has already been performed. The act of consumption is also qualitatively different. A novel can be read at one’s own leisure, in the comfort of one’s home, in one sitting or over a period of days or weeks. A film, on the other hand, might be viewed in a cinema — a less private experience — at one sitting, with no opportunity to turn back the page and check an earlier plot point — although it must be said that a shared viewing experience, in the darkness of a crowded cinema, can actually enhance the tension of a suspenseful situation. Or a film might be viewed in one’s own home, on television, but still without the opportunity to turn back — unless one is watching the film on video, where there is the opportunity to interrupt the otherwise uncontrollable flow of the narrative.