40th anniversary of Hitchcock’s death

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (1899 – 29 April 1980) was one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema and the father of the thriller genre.

He was a master of pure cinema, able to reconcile aesthetics with the demands of the box-office.  He used of the camera angle to draw the viewer’s eye into the frame in a particular way, turning viewers into voyeurs, mounting shots to build suspense or create a sense of expectation.

In his long carrier he directed over 50 feature films and created, hosted and produced the television anthology “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (1955–1965), a series of unrelated short stories (25 minutes long), dealing with people of different backgrounds committing murders, suicides, thefts, and other types of crime.

In the opening   we see his shadow approaching his outline (sketched by Hitchcock himself). The music that has become almost synonymous with the program is “Funeral March Of A Marionette,” by Charles Gounod, written in 1872.

The caricature drawing and that piece of music have become permanently associated with Hitchcock in popular culture.