With Hitchcock, everybody talks about their favourite sequences, not their favourite lines; and this is as it should be. The art of cinema, he would insist again and again, did not consist of taking “photographs of people talking”, and the director’s cardinal sin, when plotting a film, was to say: “It’s all right – we can cover that with a line of dialogue.” Hitchcock started working, after all, in the silent era, and it’s the grammar and vocabulary of silent cinema that really underpins his work. In other words, Hitchcock’s films, viewed today, take us back to the very roots of cinema, and that is what makes them perennially modern.
Jonathan Coe's one of my fave novelists - I'll be reviewing his latest, The Rain Before it Falls, soon - and anyone who's read What a Carve Up! will know how obsessed he is by old films. I think he's dead right about Hitchcock, whatever Norman Geras says: Hitchcock's works are very visual and for what it's worth, aural. Sound and vision - the use of green in Vertigo, for instance, and of Bernard Herrmann's music and soundscape in The Birds - are at least as important as plot and dialogue. It's for this reason probably more than any other that his best films have serious artistic credibility and are not merely commercial thrillers.
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