Como estou sem tempo para atualizar o blog, me lembrei desse persuasive essay que escrevi no Canada para um concurso que eramos obrigados a participar. O tema era "Herois", e podiamos escrever qualquer coisa que se relacionasse a isso de alguma forma, e qualquer tipo de texto tambem. Como tinhamos acabado de estudar retorica, e eu tinha acabado de ler o livro Hitchock/Truffaut e a unica coisa da qual eu entendo nessa vida é cinema, resolvi escrever sobre como Hithcock e Truffaut sao herois, mesmo que nao reconhecidos.
Como é so para manter atualizado, nao traduzi nem nada. Peço desculpas a quem nao sabe ler ingles. Talvez eu traduza mais tarde, mas acho pouco provavel ja que nao sou muito fa(til) desse texto.
There are all sorts of heroes, whose heroic acts have helped or saved people in most different ways. However, a lot of these heroes are not always recognized for their actions. Sometimes these people have had a lot of effect on most people’s lives, but are simply not recognized for it.
A person who is not interested in cinema or old enough usually doesn’t know who Alfred Hitchcock was, but he is actually pretty present in our lives. Well, maybe not in everybody’s life, but in anyone who sees thrillers, suspense, horrors, or any movie genre that somehow tries to transmit strong emotions to the public. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be this specific. I would say that anyone who watches movies once in a while will see something on the screen that was influenced by Hitchcock’s work.
People who don’t know much about Hitchcock usually recall the knife-murder in the shower and the music, that is still used a lot today to express fear on the screen. But these elements from his movie “Psycho” are far from being the only thing Hitchcock left to the world and the art of film-making. He always wanted to do something technically challenging and there was some equipment that was created exclusively for the scenes he wanted to shoot, for example. Unlike other directors of his time, he liked to move the camera a lot and tried different angles to pass all sorts of emotions and feelings to the public.
Hitchcock was exceptionally worried about the public, which led him to develop theories and techniques of shooting and “controlling” people’s feelings. He worked a lot with the differences between suspense and surprise. Surprise is when, in a simple chatting scene, a bomb explodes and the characters die. Suspense is if in this same scene, the bomb is shown to the public, even though the characters don’t know about it, and instead of only leaving the viewers confused and surprised at the moment it blows up, during the conversation, the public will be tense and nervous, wanting to shout “why are you talking about silly things while there’s a bomb hidden there?! Get out!”. Using this and other ideas, Hitchcock was able to change the audience’s emotions and reactions while watching the movie.
Cinema, which is something very present in our lives today, wouldn’t be what it is if it wasn’t for Alfred Hitchcock. To me, he is a great hero.
However, behind a not very recognized hero by the public, there’s another one (who is even less recognized), to whom great part of the attention and respect that Hitchcock’s work got from the film-makers and film buffs, is due to. This one is the French director François Truffaut.
Truffaut had a very interesting life since the beginning. Having problems with his family, he tried to spend most of the time away from home, and went to the cinema a lot, where he felt happier. At the age of 14, after being expelled from many schools, he decided to educate himself. His academic goals were to read 3 books per week and see 3 movies per day, something that I myself would love to do. When he was 20 he became a critic for the French cinema magazine, “Cahiers du Cinéma”. There he got famous for his unforgiving and brutal film reviews. In 1954, he wrote an article called “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”, which attacked the state of French cinema at that time. Obviously, he was very criticized for this complaint, and later he developed one of the most important, influent and revolutionary theories of the history of cinema: the author’s cinema.
His theory is that the director was the author of his work, not the producer or screenwriter as it was thought before. When a movie won an award, it was its producer who went up to the stage to receive it, not the director. In the old days, directors were considered to be technicians. It was needed somebody to direct the movie, just like it was needed a few actors to play the characters. That simple. Truffaut based his theory on directors whose work had distinct styles and themes, like Jean Renoir and, as I said before, Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock was already pretty respected, but only because the public liked him. His movies were considered the so called “B” movies, with little artistic merit, only for entertainment, and not treated with a lot of respect. The American critics didn’t care much about him.
But Truffaut and his fellows from the “Cahiers du Cinéma” considered Hitchcock a genius. Visiting the U.S.A., he was disturbed by the fact that every journalist asked him why the French critics took Hitchcock so seriously, as in their opinion his movies had no substance. Truffaut was sure the lack of respect for Hitchcock’s work was due to the fact that he never took interviews seriously, and thought that if he agreed to do a serious and systematic one, the idea the American critics had about him would change. That’s when Truffaut did a 26-hour long interview with Hitchcock, that was transcribed into a book published in 1967, called “Hitchcock/Truffaut”. It is full of details of his movies, and has all his theories of filmmaking and techniques explained. It accomplished its goal successfully. After that, Hitchcock became to be regarded as the great and important director he was.
