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Film Analysis - Psycho

            Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho released in 1960 was one of the films that shocked the audience in a way that was never done before. Hitchcock shocked the audience by showing them nudity, the amount of money that was involved on screen and Norman Bates as a villain. The writer counts Psycho as a classic film in my film library. The film involves key aspects that make it the film that it is today. Some of the key aspects are cinematography, editing, sound and mise en scene which make the film extraordinary. The writer will be mainly discussing about the cinematography aspect of it but the writer will be inter-linking with mise en scene, sound and editing since all of them form a sort of a web that relate to each other and one cannot exist without the other. .
             "The point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of leaving them to watch it from outside, from a distance. And you can do this only by breaking the action into details and cutting from one to the other so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning" (Hitchcock, 1937). Alfred Hitchcock is known as a master cinematographer and editor. He created overall brilliance in the craft of choosing black and white film over color even after it had been five years in the market. Hitchcock did a fantastic job in psycho speaking regarding cinematography. The writer feels that the use of black and white created a huge impact and that it would not have been the same if it was in color. It wouldn't have been horrific enough in the writer's opinion. cinematography, lighting and color go hand in hand. .
             The black and white in the writer's opinion added quality into the film. It showed the flat truth about the characters. The contrast in the image also shows the mood or emotional state in the scene. This was very accurately curated by Hitchcock. The scenes such as the one in the shower, it shows that Marion is vulnerable with the black and white and this would have in no way looked the scary as it is originally.


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