J. Kelly - Hitchcock in Focus

The opening scenes of Hitchcock's film were always memorable because he created them to tell a story through moving images and no dialogues. He used his early years of silent film techniques to incorporated pulsating visuals for his audience. An illustration of this was, "throughout his career he preferred to convey information wordlessly, as in the superb opening of 'Rear Window'. The camera pans from a sleeping Jimmy Stewart to the plaster cast on his leg (whose sardonic inscription reveals his name), to a series of thrilling sports photographs, culminating with a shot of violent car crash with an airborne tire rocketing toward the lens, and finally to a smashed camera. Here we learn that Jimmy Stewart is an action photographer who broke his leg when a car race he was photographing ended in a crash. The entire sequence could easily have been in a silent movie" (461). The moods of his films were felt from its onset as the audience watched. Hitchcock recognized how commanding those moments on the screen were and capitalized on it. To further my point, "he was convinced that what we see is more absorbing than what we hear, and more memorable. He recognized that the essential truth of any social situation is revealed by the gestures, body movements, and unguarded looks of its participants, and not by the words they say, most of which consist of platitudes or white lies" (461). This was a signature trademark in all of Hitchcock's films to create memorable opening scenes. There were intriguing details that were shown in the opening scenes to establish depth for the various narratives directed by him.