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region within a country. The variation in individual "accents" of MSA speakers tends to mirror corresponding variations in the colloquial speech of the speakers in question, but with the distinguishing characteristics moderated somewhat. It is important in descriptions of "Arabic" phonology to distinguish between pronunciation of a given colloquial spoken dialect and the pronunciation of MSA by these same speakers. Although they are related, they are not the same. For example, the phoneme that derives from Classical Arabic has many different pronunciations in the modern spoken varieties, e.g., including the proposed original . Speakers whose native variety has either or will use the same pronunciation when speaking MSA. Even speakers from Cairo, whose native Egyptian Arabic has , normally use when speaking MSA. The of Persian Gulf speakers is the only variant pronunciation which isn't found in MSA; is used instead, but may use j in MSA for comfortable pronunciation. Another reason of different pronunci |
ations is influence of colloquial dialects. The differentiation of pronunciation of colloquial dialects is the influence from other languages previously spoken and some still presently spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt, Berber, Punic, or Phoenician in North Africa, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian, and Old South Arabian in Yemen and Oman, and Aramaic and Canaanite languages including Phoenician in the Levant and Mesopotamia.
Another example Many colloquial varieties are known for a type of vowel harmony in which the presence of an "emphatic consonant" triggers backed allophones of nearby vowels especially of the low vowels , which are backed to in these circumstances and very often fronted to in all other circumstances. In many spoken varieties, the backed or "emphatic" vowel allophones spread a fair distance in both directions from the triggering consonant; in some varieties most notably Egyptian Arabic, the "emphatic" allophones spread throughout the entire word, usually including prefixes a |
nd suffixes, even at a distance of several syllables from the triggering consonant. Speakers of colloquial varieties with this vowel harmony tend to introduce it into their MSA pronunciation as well, but usually with a lesser degree of spreading than in the colloquial varieties. For example, speakers of colloquial varieties with extremely longdistance harmony may allow a moderate, but not extreme, amount of spreading of the harmonic allophones in their MSA speech, while speakers of colloquial varieties with moderatedistance harmony may only harmonize immediately adjacent vowels in MSA.
Vowels
Modern Standard Arabic has six pure vowels while most modern dialects have eight pure vowels which includes the long vowels , with short and corresponding long vowels . There are also two diphthongs and .
The pronunciation of the vowels differs from speaker to speaker, in a way that tends to reflect the pronunciation of the corresponding colloquial variety. Nonetheless, there are some common trends. Most noticeable |
is the differing pronunciation of and , which tend towards fronted , or in most situations, but a back in the neighborhood of emphatic consonants. Some accents and dialects, such as those of the Hejaz region, have an open or a central in all situations. The vowel varies towards too. Listen to the final vowel in the recording of at the beginning of this article, for example. The point is, Arabic has only three short vowel phonemes, so those phonemes can have a very wide range of allophones. The vowels and are often affected somewhat in emphatic neighborhoods as well, with generally more back or centralized allophones, but the differences are less great than for the low vowels. The pronunciation of short and tends towards and , respectively, in many dialects.
The definition of both "emphatic" and "neighborhood" vary in ways that reflect to some extent corresponding variations in the spoken dialects. Generally, the consonants triggering "emphatic" allophones are the pharyngealized consonants ; ; a |
nd , if not followed immediately by . Frequently, the fricatives also trigger emphatic allophones; occasionally also the pharyngeal consonants the former more than the latter. Many dialects have multiple emphatic allophones of each vowel, depending on the particular nearby consonants. In most MSA accents, emphatic coloring of vowels is limited to vowels immediately adjacent to a triggering consonant, although in some it spreads a bit farther e.g., 'time'; 'homeland'; 'downtown' sometimes or similar.
In a nonemphatic environment, the vowel in the diphthong is pronounced or hence 'sword' but 'summer'. However, in accents with no emphatic allophones of e.g., in the Hejaz, the pronunciation or occurs in all situations.
Consonants
The phoneme is represented by the Arabic letter and has many standard pronunciations. is characteristic of north Algeria, Iraq, and most of the Arabian peninsula but with an allophonic in some positions; occurs in most of the Levant and most of North A |
frica; and is used in most of Egypt and some regions in Yemen and Oman. Generally this corresponds with the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects. In some regions in Sudan and Yemen, as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or , representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic. Foreign words containing may be transcribed with , , , , , or , mainly depending on the regional spoken variety of Arabic or the commonly diacriticized Arabic letter. In northern Egypt, where the Arabic letter is normally pronounced , a separate phoneme , which may be transcribed with , occurs in a small number of mostly nonArabic loanwords, e.g., 'jacket'.
can be pronounced as . In some places of Maghreb it can be also pronounced as .
and are velar, postvelar, or uvular.
In many varieties, are epiglottal in Western Asia.
is pronounced as velarized in , the name of God, q.e. Allah, when the word follows a, , u or after i or it is unvelarized bismi llh . Some speakers velar |
ize other occurrences of in MSA, in imitation of their spoken dialects.
The emphatic consonant was actually pronounced , or possibly either way, a highly unusual sound. The medieval Arabs actually termed their language 'the language of the d' the name of the letter used for this sound, since they thought the sound was unique to their language. In fact, it also exists in a few other minority Semitic languages, e.g., Mehri.
Arabic has consonants traditionally termed "emphatic" , which exhibit simultaneous pharyngealization as well as varying degrees of velarization depending on the region, so they may be written with the "Velarized or pharyngealized" diacritic as . This simultaneous articulation is described as "Retracted Tongue Root" by phonologists. In some transcription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the letter, for example, is written ; in others the letter is underlined or has a dot below it, for example, .
Vowels and consonants can be phonologically short or long. Long geminate cons |
onants are normally written doubled in Latin transcription i.e. bb, dd, etc., reflecting the presence of the Arabic diacritic mark , which indicates doubled consonants. In actual pronunciation, doubled consonants are held twice as long as short consonants. This consonant lengthening is phonemically contrastive 'he accepted' vs. 'he kissed'.
Syllable structure
Arabic has two kinds of syllables open syllables CV and CVVand closed syllables CVC, CVVC and CVCC. The syllable types with two morae units of time, i.e. CVC and CVV, are termed heavy syllables, while those with three morae, i.e. CVVC and CVCC, are superheavy syllables. Superheavy syllables in Classical Arabic occur in only two places at the end of the sentence due to pausal pronunciation and in words such as 'hot', 'stuff, substance', 'they disputed with each other', where a long occurs before two identical consonants a former short vowel between the consonants has been lost. In less formal pronunciations of Modern Standard Arabic, superhea |
vy syllables are common at the end of words or before clitic suffixes such as 'us, our', due to the deletion of final short vowels.
In surface pronunciation, every vowel must be preceded by a consonant which may include the glottal stop . There are no cases of hiatus within a word where two vowels occur next to each other, without an intervening consonant. Some words do have an underlying vowel at the beginning, such as the definite article al or words such as 'he bought', 'meeting'. When actually pronounced, one of three things happens
If the word occurs after another word ending in a consonant, there is a smooth transition from final consonant to initial vowel, e.g., 'meeting' .
If the word occurs after another word ending in a vowel, the initial vowel of the word is elided, e.g., 'house of the director' .
If the word occurs at the beginning of an utterance, a glottal stop is added onto the beginning, e.g., 'The house is ...' .
Stress
Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard |
Arabic. It bears a strong relationship to vowel length. The basic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are
A final vowel, long or short, may not be stressed.
Only one of the last three syllables may be stressed.
Given this restriction, the last heavy syllable containing a long vowel or ending in a consonant is stressed, if it is not the final syllable.
If the final syllable is super heavy and closed of the form CVVC or CVCC it receives stress.
If no syllable is heavy or super heavy, the first possible syllable i.e. third from end is stressed.
As a special exception, in Form VII and VIII verb forms stress may not be on the first syllable, despite the above rules Hence 'he subscribed' whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced, 'he subscribes' whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced, 'he should subscribe juss.'. Likewise Form VIII 'he bought', 'he buys'.
Examples 'book', 'writer', 'desk', 'desks', 'library' but 'library' in short pronunciation, Modern Standard Arabic 'they wrot |
e' dialect, Modern Standard Arabic 'they wrote it' dialect, Modern Standard Arabic 'they dual, fem wrote', Modern Standard Arabic 'I wrote' short form or dialect. Doubled consonants count as two consonants 'magazine', "place".
These rules may result in differently stressed syllables when final case endings are pronounced, vs. the normal situation where they are not pronounced, as in the above example of 'library' in full pronunciation, but 'library' in short pronunciation.
The restriction on final long vowels does not apply to the spoken dialects, where original final long vowels have been shortened and secondary final long vowels have arisen from loss of original final huhi.
Some dialects have different stress rules. In the Cairo Egyptian Arabic dialect a heavy syllable may not carry stress more than two syllables from the end of a word, hence 'school', 'Cairo'. This also affects the way that Modern Standard Arabic is pronounced in Egypt. In the Arabic of Sanaa, stress is often retracted ' |
two houses', 'their table', 'desks', 'sometimes', 'their school'. In this dialect, only syllables with long vowels or diphthongs are considered heavy; in a twosyllable word, the final syllable can be stressed only if the preceding syllable is light; and in longer words, the final syllable cannot be stressed.
Levels of pronunciation
The final short vowels e.g., the case endings a i u and mood endings u a are often not pronounced in this language, despite forming part of the formal paradigm of nouns and verbs. The following levels of pronunciation exist
Full pronunciation with pausa
This is the most formal level actually used in speech. All endings are pronounced as written, except at the end of an utterance, where the following changes occur
Final short vowels are not pronounced. But possibly an exception is made for feminine plural na and shortened vowels in the jussiveimperative of defective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'".
The entire indefinite noun endings in and un with nunation are left off. The e |
nding an is left off of nouns preceded by a t marbah i.e. the t in the ending at that typically marks feminine nouns, but pronounced as in other nouns hence its writing in this fashion in the Arabic script.
The t marbah itself typically of feminine nouns is pronounced as h. At least, this is the case in extremely formal pronunciation, e.g., some Quranic recitations. In practice, this h is usually omitted.
Formal short pronunciation
This is a formal level of pronunciation sometimes seen. It is somewhat like pronouncing all words as if they were in pausal position with influence from the colloquial varieties. The following changes occur
Most final short vowels are not pronounced. However, the following short vowels are pronounced
feminine plural na
shortened vowels in the jussiveimperative of defective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'
secondperson singular feminine pasttense ti and likewise anti 'you fem. sg.'
sometimes, firstperson singular pasttense tu
sometimes, secondperson masculine pasttense ta and |
likewise anta 'you masc. sg.'
final a in certain short words, e.g., laysa 'is not', sawfa futuretense marker
The nunation endings an in un are not pronounced. However, they are pronounced in adverbial accusative formations, e.g., 'almost, approximately', 'usually'.
The t marbah ending is unpronounced, except in construct state nouns, where it sounds as t and in adverbial accusative constructions, e.g., 'usually', where the entire tan is pronounced.
The masculine singular nisbah ending is actually pronounced and is unstressed but plural and feminine singular forms, i.e. when followed by a suffix, still sound as .
Full endings including case endings occur when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added e.g., 'usour'.
Informal short pronunciation
This is the pronunciation used by speakers of Modern Standard Arabic in extemporaneous speech, i.e. when producing new sentences rather than simply reading a prepared text. It is similar to formal short pronunciation except that the rules for droppin |
g final vowels apply even when a clitic suffix is added. Basically, shortvowel case and mood endings are never pronounced and certain other changes occur that echo the corresponding colloquial pronunciations. Specifically
All the rules for formal short pronunciation apply, except as follows.
The past tense singular endings written formally as tu ta ti are pronounced t t ti. But masculine is pronounced in full.
Unlike in formal short pronunciation, the rules for dropping or modifying final endings are also applied when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added e.g., 'usour'. If this produces a sequence of three consonants, then one of the following happens, depending on the speaker's native colloquial variety
A short vowel e.g., i or is consistently added, either between the second and third or the first and second consonants.
Or, a short vowel is added only if an otherwise unpronounceable sequence occurs, typically due to a violation of the sonority hierarchy e.g., rtn is pronounced as a threecons |
onant cluster, but trn needs to be broken up.
Or, a short vowel is never added, but consonants like r l m n occurring between two other consonants will be pronounced as a syllabic consonant as in the English words "butter bottle bottom button".
When a doubled consonant occurs before another consonant or finally, it is often shortened to a single consonant rather than a vowel added. However, Moroccan Arabic never shortens doubled consonants or inserts short vowels to break up clusters, instead tolerating arbitrarylength series of arbitrary consonants and hence Moroccan Arabic speakers are likely to follow the same rules in their pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic.
The clitic suffixes themselves tend also to be changed, in a way that avoids many possible occurrences of threeconsonant clusters. In particular, ka ki hu generally sound as ak ik uh.
Final long vowels are often shortened, merging with any short vowels that remain.
Depending on the level of formality, the speaker's education level, etc., va |
rious grammatical changes may occur in ways that echo the colloquial variants
Any remaining case endings e.g. masculine plural nominative n vs. oblique n will be leveled, with the oblique form used everywhere. However, in words like 'father' and 'brother' with special longvowel case endings in the construct state, the nominative is used everywhere, hence 'father of', 'brother of'.
Feminine plural endings in verbs and clitic suffixes will often drop out, with the masculine plural endings used instead. If the speaker's native variety has feminine plural endings, they may be preserved, but will often be modified in the direction of the forms used in the speaker's native variety, e.g. an instead of na.
Dual endings will often drop out except on nouns and then used only for emphasis similar to their use in the colloquial varieties; elsewhere, the plural endings are used or feminine singular, if appropriate.
Colloquial varieties
Vowels
As mentioned above, many spoken dialects have a process of emphasis sp |
reading, where the "emphasis" pharyngealization of emphatic consonants spreads forward and back through adjacent syllables, pharyngealizing all nearby consonants and triggering the back allophone in all nearby low vowels. The extent of emphasis spreading varies. For example, in Moroccan Arabic, it spreads as far as the first full vowel i.e. sound derived from a long vowel or diphthong on either side; in many Levantine dialects, it spreads indefinitely, but is blocked by any or ; while in Egyptian Arabic, it usually spreads throughout the entire word, including prefixes and suffixes. In Moroccan Arabic, also have emphatic allophones and , respectively.
Unstressed short vowels, especially , are deleted in many contexts. Many sporadic examples of short vowel change have occurred especially and interchange . Most Levantine dialects merge short i u into in most contexts all except directly before a single final consonant. In Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand, short triggers labialization of nearby consona |
nts especially velar consonants and uvular consonants, and then short a i u all merge into , which is deleted in many contexts. The labialization plus is sometimes interpreted as an underlying phoneme . This essentially causes the wholesale loss of the shortlong vowel distinction, with the original long vowels remaining as halflong , phonemically , which are used to represent both short and long vowels in borrowings from Literary Arabic.
Most spoken dialects have monophthongized original to in most circumstances, including adjacent to emphatic consonants, while keeping them as the original diphthongs in others e.g. . In most of the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian except Sahel and Southeastern Arabic dialects, they have subsequently merged into original .
Consonants
In most dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed in the chart above. For example, is considered a native phoneme in most Arabic dialects except in Levantine dialects like Syrian or Lebanese where is pronounced and |
is pronounced . or is considered a native phoneme in most dialects except in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects where is pronounced . or and are distinguished in the dialects of Egypt, Sudan, the Levant and the Hejaz, but they have merged as in most dialects of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Tunisia and have merged as in Morocco and Algeria. The usage of nonnative and depends on the usage of each speaker but they might be more prevalent in some dialects than others. The Iraqi and Gulf Arabic also has the sound and writes it and with the Persian letters and , as in "plum"; "truffle".
Early in the expansion of Arabic, the separate emphatic phonemes and coalesced into a single phoneme . Many dialects such as Egyptian, Levantine, and much of the Maghreb subsequently lost fricatives, converting into . Most dialects borrow "learned" words from the Standard language using the same pronunciation as for inherited words, but some dialects without interdental fricatives particul |
arly in Egypt and the Levant render original in borrowed words as .
Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is how they render the original velar and uvular plosives , ProtoSemitic , and
retains its original pronunciation in widely scattered regions such as Yemen, Morocco, and urban areas of the Maghreb. It is pronounced as a glottal stop in several prestige dialects, such as those spoken in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. But it is rendered as a voiced velar plosive in Persian Gulf, Upper Egypt, parts of the Maghreb, and less urban parts of the Levant e.g. Jordan. In Iraqi Arabic it sometimes retains its original pronunciation and is sometimes rendered as a voiced velar plosive, depending on the word. Some traditionally Christian villages in rural areas of the Levant render the sound as , as do Shii Bahrainis. In some Gulf dialects, it is palatalized to or . It is pronounced as a voiced uvular constrictive in Sudanese Arabic. Many dialects with a modified pronunciation for maintain the pr |
onunciation in certain words often with religious or educational overtones borrowed from the Classical language.
is pronounced as an affricate in Iraq and much of the Arabian Peninsula but is pronounced in most of North Egypt and parts of Yemen and Oman, in Morocco, Tunisia, and the Levant, and , in most words in much of the Persian Gulf.
usually retains its original pronunciation but is palatalized to in many words in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and countries in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula. Often a distinction is made between the suffixes 'you', masc. and 'you', fem., which become and , respectively. In Sana'a, Omani, and Bahrani is pronounced .
Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends to weaken in many of the spoken varieties, and to spread from emphatic consonants to nearby sounds. In addition, the "emphatic" allophone automatically triggers pharyngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects. As a result, it may difficult or impossible to determi |
ne whether a given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic or not, especially in dialects with longdistance emphasis spreading. A notable exception is the sounds vs. in Moroccan Arabic, because the former is pronounced as an affricate but the latter is not.
Grammar
Literary Arabic
As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and unusual morphology i.e. method of constructing words from a basic root. Arabic has a nonconcatenative "rootandpattern" morphology A root consists of a set of bare consonants usually three, which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root 'write' with the pattern 'I Xed' to form 'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. 'I read', 'I ate', 'I went', although other patterns are possible e.g. 'I drank', 'I said', 'I spoke', where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix is always |
used.
From a single root , numerous words can be formed by applying different patterns
'I wrote'
'I had something written'
'I corresponded with someone'
'I dictated'
'I subscribed'
'we corresponded with each other'
'I write'
'I have something written'
'I correspond with someone'
'I dictate'
'I subscribe'
'we correspond each other'
'it was written'
'it was dictated'
'written'
'dictated'
'book'
'books'
'writer'
'writers'
'desk, office'
'library, bookshop'
etc.
Nouns and adjectives
Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases nominative, accusative, and genitive also used when the noun is governed by a preposition; three numbers singular, dual and plural; two genders masculine and feminine; and three "states" indefinite, definite, and construct. The cases of singular nouns other than those that end in long are indicated by suffixed short vowels u for nominative, a for accusative, i for genitive.
The feminine singular is often marked |
by at, which is pronounced as ah before a pause. Plural is indicated either through endings the sound plural or internal modification the broken plural. Definite nouns include all proper nouns, all nouns in "construct state" and all nouns which are prefixed by the definite article al. Indefinite singular nouns other than those that end in long add a final n to the casemarking vowels, giving un, an or in which is also referred to as nunation or tanwn.
Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns. However, the plural of all nonhuman nouns is always combined with a singular feminine adjective, which takes the at suffix.
Pronouns in Literary Arabic are marked for person, number and gender. There are two varieties, independent pronouns and enclitics. Enclitic pronouns are attached to the end of a verb, noun or preposition and indicate verbal and prepositional objects or possession of nouns. The firstperson singular pronoun has a different enclitic form used for v |
erbs n and for nouns or prepositions after consonants, ya after vowels.
Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. However, nonhuman plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. Furthermore, a verb in a verbinitial sentence is marked as singular regardless of its semantic number when the subject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun. Numerals between three and ten show "chiasmic" agreement, in that grammatically masculine numerals have feminine marking and vice versa.
Verbs
Verbs in Literary Arabic are marked for person first, second, or third, gender, and number. They are conjugated in two major paradigms past and nonpast; two voices active and passive; and six moods indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, shorter energetic and longer energetic, the fifth and sixth moods, the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA. There are also two participles active and passive and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.
The past an |
d nonpast paradigms are sometimes also termed perfective and imperfective, indicating the fact that they actually represent a combination of tense and aspect. The moods other than the indicative occur only in the nonpast, and the future tense is signaled by prefixing or onto the nonpast. The past and nonpast differ in the form of the stem e.g., past vs. nonpast , and also use completely different sets of affixes for indicating person, number and gender In the past, the person, number and gender are fused into a single suffixal morpheme, while in the nonpast, a combination of prefixes primarily encoding person and suffixes primarily encoding gender and number are used. The passive voice uses the same personnumbergender affixes but changes the vowels of the stem.
The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb, 'to write'. In Modern Standard, the energetic mood in either long or short form, which have the same meaning is almost never used.
Derivation
Like other Semitic languages, and unlike mo |
st other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology applying many templates applied roots to derive words than adding prefixes or suffixes to words.
For verbs, a given root can occur in many different derived verb stems of which there are about fifteen, each with one or more characteristic meanings and each with its own templates for the past and nonpast stems, active and passive participles, and verbal noun. These are referred to by Western scholars as "Form I", "Form II", and so on through "Form XV" although Forms XI to XV are rare. These stems encode grammatical functions such as the causative, intensive and reflexive. Stems sharing the same root consonants represent separate verbs, albeit often semantically related, and each is the basis for its own conjugational paradigm. As a result, these derived stems are part of the system of derivational morphology, not part of the inflectional system.
Examples of the different verbs formed from the root 'write' using 'red' for Form I |
X, which is limited to colors and physical defects
Form II is sometimes used to create transitive denominative verbs verbs built from nouns; Form V is the equivalent used for intransitive denominatives.
The associated participles and verbal nouns of a verb are the primary means of forming new lexical nouns in Arabic. This is similar to the process by which, for example, the English gerund "meeting" similar to a verbal noun has turned into a noun referring to a particular type of social, often workrelated event where people gather together to have a "discussion" another lexicalized verbal noun. Another fairly common means of forming nouns is through one of a limited number of patterns that can be applied directly to roots, such as the "nouns of location" in ma e.g. 'desk, office' 'write', 'kitchen' 'cook'.
The only three genuine suffixes are as follows
The feminine suffix ah; variously derives terms for women from related terms for men, or more generally terms along the same lines as the correspondin |
g masculine, e.g. 'library' also a writingrelated place, but different from , as above.
The nisbah suffix iyy. This suffix is extremely productive, and forms adjectives meaning "related to X". It corresponds to English adjectives in ic, al, an, y, ist, etc.
The feminine nisbah suffix iyyah. This is formed by adding the feminine suffix ah onto nisba adjectives to form abstract nouns. For example, from the basic root 'share' can be derived the Form VIII verb 'to cooperate, participate', and in turn its verbal noun 'cooperation, participation' can be formed. This in turn can be made into a nisbah adjective 'socialist', from which an abstract noun 'socialism' can be derived. Other recent formations are 'republic' lit. "publicness", 'multitude, general public', and the Gaddafispecific variation 'people's republic' lit. "massesness", 'the masses', pl. of , as above.
Colloquial varieties
The spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions and make only limited use of the dual it occurs only on nouns |
and its use is no longer required in all circumstances. They have lost the mood distinctions other than imperative, but many have since gained new moods through the use of prefixes most often bi for indicative vs. unmarked subjunctive. They have also mostly lost the indefinite "nunation" and the internal passive.
The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm in Egyptian Arabic.
Writing system
The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. Traditionally, there were several differences between the Western North African and Middle Eastern versions of the alphabetin particular, the fa had a dot underneath and qaf a single dot above in the Maghreb, and the order of the letters was slightly different at least when they were used as numerals.
However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandoned except for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb itself, and remains in use mainly in the Quranic s |
chools zaouias of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semitic languages except for the Latinwritten Maltese, and the languages with the Ge'ez script, is written from right to left. There are several styles of scripts such as thuluth, muhaqqaq, tawqi, rayhan and notably naskh, which is used in print and by computers, and ruqah, which is commonly used for correspondence.
Originally Arabic was made up of only rasm without diacritical marks Later diacritical points which in Arabic are referred to as nuqa were added which allowed readers to distinguish between letters such as b, t, th, n and y. Finally signs known as Tashkil were used for short vowels known as harakat and other uses such as final postnasalized or long vowels.
Calligraphy
After Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi finally fixed the Arabic script around 786, many styles were developed, both for the writing down of the Quran and other books, and for inscriptions on monuments as decoration.
Arabic calligraphy has not fallen out of use as calligraphy has |
in the Western world, and is still considered by Arabs as a major art form; calligraphers are held in great esteem. Being cursive by nature, unlike the Latin script, Arabic script is used to write down a verse of the Quran, a hadith, or simply a proverb. The composition is often abstract, but sometimes the writing is shaped into an actual form such as that of an animal. One of the current masters of the genre is Hassan Massoudy.
In modern times the intrinsically calligraphic nature of the written Arabic form is haunted by the thought that a typographic approach to the language, necessary for digitized unification, will not always accurately maintain meanings conveyed through calligraphy.
Romanization
There are a number of different standards for the romanization of Arabic, i.e. methods of accurately and efficiently representing Arabic with the Latin script. There are various conflicting motivations involved, which leads to multiple systems. Some are interested in transliteration, i.e. representing the spe |
lling of Arabic, while others focus on transcription, i.e. representing the pronunciation of Arabic. They differ in that, for example, the same letter is used to represent both a consonant, as in "you" or "yet", and a vowel, as in "me" or "eat". Some systems, e.g. for scholarly use, are intended to accurately and unambiguously represent the phonemes of Arabic, generally making the phonetics more explicit than the original word in the Arabic script. These systems are heavily reliant on diacritical marks such as "" for the sound equivalently written sh in English. Other systems e.g. the Bah' orthography are intended to help readers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists with intuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases. These less "scientific" systems tend to avoid diacritics and use digraphs like sh and kh. These are usually simpler to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret sh as a single sound, as in gash, or a comb |
ination of two sounds, as in gashouse. The ALALC romanization solves this problem by separating the two sounds with a prime symbol ; e.g., ashal 'easier'.
During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Westerninvented text communication technologies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using the Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script, sometimes known as IM Arabic.
To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter . There is no universal name for |
this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization to represent the "emphatic" counterparts of certain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, the letter , may be represented by d. Its emphatic counterpart, , may be written as D.
Numerals
In most of presentday North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 are used. However, in Egypt and Arabicspeaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals are in use. When representing a number in Arabic, the lowestvalued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in lefttoright scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone numbers are read from left to right, but numbers are spoken in the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens reversed from the modern English usage. For example, 24 is said "four and twenty" just like in the German language vierundzwanzig and Classi |
cal Hebrew, and 1975 is said "a thousand and ninehundred and five and seventy" or, more eloquently, "a thousand and ninehundred five seventy"
Languagestandards regulators
Academy of the Arabic Language is the name of a number of languageregulation bodies formed in the Arab League. The most active are in Damascus and Cairo. They review language development, monitor new words and approve inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts.
As a foreign language
Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around the world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages, Middle Eastern studies, and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islami |
c terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims both Arab and nonArab study the language. Software and books with tapes are also important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries.
Status in the Arab world vs. other languages
With the sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan alGharnati who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior.
In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studyin |
g and knowing English or French in most of the Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mlange of codeswitching practises."
See also
Arabic Ontology
Arabic diglossia
Arabic influence on the Spanish language
Arabic Language International Council
Arabic literature
ArabicEnglish Lexicon
Arabist
Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
Glossary of Islam
International Association of Arabic Dialectology
List of Arab newspapers
List of Arabiclanguage television channels
List of Arabic given names
List of arabophones
List of countries where Arabic is an official language
List of French words of Arabic origin
List of replaced loanwords in Turkish
References
Citations
Sources
Suileman, Yasir. Arabic, Self and Identity A Study in Conflict and Displacement. Oxford Univer |
sity Press, 2011. .
External links
Dr. Nizar Habash's, Columbia University, Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing
Google Ta3reeb Google Transliteration
Transliteration Arabic language pronunciation applet
Alexis Neme 2011, A lexicon of Arabic verbs constructed on the basis of Semitic taxonomy and using finitestate transducers
Alexis Neme and Eric Laporte 2013, Patternandroot inflectional morphology the Arabic broken plural
Alexis Neme and Eric Laporte 2015, Do computer scientists deeply understand Arabic morphology? , available also in Arabic, Indonesian, French
Arabic manuscripts, UA 5572 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Online Arabic Keyboard
Bilingual dictionary
Arabic Student's Dictionary
Languages attested from the 9th century BC
Articles containing video clips
Central Semitic languages
Fusional languages
Languages of Algeria
Languages of Bahrain
Languages of Cameroon
Languages of Chad
Languages of the Comoros
Languages of Djibouti
Language |
s of Eritrea
Languages of Gibraltar
Languages of Israel
Languages of Iran
Languages of Iraq
Languages of Jordan
Languages of Kurdistan
Languages of Kuwait
Languages of Lebanon
Languages of Libya
Languages of Mali
Languages of Mauritania
Languages of Morocco
Languages of Niger
Languages of Oman
Languages of the State of Palestine
Languages of Qatar
Languages of Saudi Arabia
Languages of Senegal
Languages of South Sudan
Languages of Sicily
Languages of Somalia
Languages of Sudan
Languages of Syria
Languages of the United Arab Emirates
Languages of Tunisia
Languages of Yemen
Stresstimed languages
Subjectverbobject languages
Verbsubjectobject languages |
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock 13 August 1899 29 April 1980 was an English filmmaker who was one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today. Known as the "Master of Suspense", he became as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents 195565. His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, although he never won the award for Best Director despite five nominations.
Hitchcock initially trained as a technical clerk and copy writer before entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. His directorial debut was the BritishGerman silent film The Pleasure Garden 1925. His first successful film, The Lodger A Story of the London Fog 1927, helped to shape the thriller genre, and Blackmail 1929 was the first Brit |
ish "talkie". His thrillers The 39 Steps 1935 and The Lady Vanishes 1938 are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century. By 1939, he had international recognition and producer David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to Hollywood. A string of successful films followed, including Rebecca 1940, Foreign Correspondent 1940, Suspicion 1941, Shadow of a Doubt 1943, and Notorious 1946. Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Hitchcock nominated as Best Director; he was also nominated for Lifeboat 1944 and Spellbound 1945. After a brief commercial lull, he returned to form with Strangers on a Train 1951 and Dial M for Murder 1954; he then went on to direct four films often ranked among the greatest of all time Rear Window 1954, Vertigo 1958, North by Northwest 1959 and Psycho 1960, the first and last of these garnering him Best Director nominations. The Birds 1963 and Marnie 1964 were also financially successful and are highly regarded by film historians.
The "Hitchcockian" style inc |
ludes the use of camera movement to mimic a person's gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs, and framing shots to maximise anxiety and fear. The film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot. A Hitchcock film is an organism, with the whole implied in every detail and every detail related to the whole." Hitchcock made multiple films with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant in the 1940s and 1950s, three with Ingrid Bergman in the last half of the 1940s, four with James Stewart over a tenyear span commencing in 1948, and three with Grace Kelly in the mid1950s. Hitchcock became an American citizen in 1955.
In 2012, Hitchcock's psychological thriller Vertigo, starring Stewart, displaced Orson Welles' Citizen Kane 1941 as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its worldwide poll of hundreds of film critics. , nine of his films had been selected for preservation in the Uni |
ted States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt 1943. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before his death on 29 April 1980.
Biography
Early life 18991919
Early childhood and education
Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased grocer's shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, on the outskirts of East London then part of Essex, the youngest of three children William Daniel 18901943, Ellen Kathleen "Nellie" 18921979, and Alfred Joseph 18991980. His parents, Emma Jane Hitchcock Whelan; 18631942, and William Edgar Hitchcock 18621914, were both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland; His father was a greengrocer, as his grandfather had been.
There was a large extended family, including uncle John Hitchcock with his fivebedroom Victorian house on Campion Road, Putney, complete with maid, cook, chauffeur and gardener. Every summer, his uncl |
e rented a seaside house for the family in Cliftonville, Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became classconscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals.
Describing himself as a wellbehaved boyhis father called him his "little lamb without a spot"Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate. One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him to the local police station with a note when he was five; the policeman looked at the note and locked him in a cell for a few minutes, saying, "This is what we do to naughty boys." The experience left him, he said, with a lifelong fear of policemen; in 1973 he told Tom Snyder that he was "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the law" and wouldn't even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket.
When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fishandchips shop and fishmongers' respectively; they lived above the former. Hitchcock att |
ended his first school, the Howrah House Convent in Poplar, which he entered in 1907, at age 7. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, he stayed at Howrah House for at most two years. He also attended a convent school, the Wode Street School "for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys", run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus. He then attended a primary school near his home and was for a short time a boarder at Salesian College in Battersea.
The family moved again when he was 11, this time to Stepney, and on 5 October 1910 Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, Tottenham now in the London Borough of Haringey, a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline. The priests used a hard rubber cane on the boys, always at the end of the day, so the boys had to sit through classes anticipating the punishment if they had been written up for it. He later said that this is where he developed his sense of fear. The school register lists his year of birth as 1900 rather than 1899; b |
iographer Donald Spoto says he was deliberately enrolled as a 10yearold because he was a year behind with his schooling.
While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or slightly aboveaverage, pupil", Hitchcock said that he was "usually among the four or five at the top of the class"; at the end of his first year, his work in Latin, English, French and religious education was noted. He told Peter Bogdanovich "The Jesuits taught me organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis."
His favourite subject was geography, and he became interested in maps, and railway, tram and bus timetables; according to John Russell Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the Orient Express. He also had a particular interest in London trams. An overwhelming majority of his films include rail or tram scenes, in particular The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train and Number Seventeen. A clapperboard shows the number of the scene and the number of takes, and Hitchcock would often take the two numbers on |
the clapperboard and whisper the London tram route names. For example, if the clapperboard showed Scene 23; Take 3; Hitchcock would whisper "Woodford, Hampstead" Woodford being the terminus of the route 23 tram, and Hampstead the end of route 3.
Henley's
Hitchcock told his parents that he wanted to be an engineer, and on 25 July 1913, he left St Ignatius and enrolled in night classes at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar. In a booklength interview in 1962, he told Franois Truffaut that he had studied "mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation". Then on 12 December 1914 his father, who had been suffering from emphysema and kidney disease, died at the age of 52. To support himself and his motherhis older siblings had left home by thenHitchcock took a job, for 15 shillings a week in , as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street near London Wall. He continued night classes, this time in art history, painting, economics, and po |
litical science. His older brother ran the family shops, while he and his mother continued to live in Salmon Lane.
Hitchcock was too young to enlist when the First World War started in July 1914, and when he reached the required age of 18 in 1917, he received a C3 classification "free from serious organic disease, able to stand service conditions in garrisons at home ... only suitable for sedentary work". He joined a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers and took part in theoretical briefings, weekend drills, and exercises. John Russell Taylor wrote that, in one session of practical exercises in Hyde Park, Hitchcock was required to wear puttees. He could never master wrapping them around his legs, and they repeatedly fell down around his ankles.
After the war, Hitchcock took an interest in creative writing. In June 1919, he became a founding editor and business manager of Henley's inhouse publication, The Henley Telegraph sixpence a copy, to which he submitted several short stories. Henley's promoted him to |
the advertising department, where he wrote copy and drew graphics for electric cable advertisements. He enjoyed the job and would stay late at the office to examine the proofs; he told Truffaut that this was his "first step toward cinema". He enjoyed watching films, especially American cinema, and from the age of 16 read the trade papers; he watched Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, and particularly liked Fritz Lang's Der mde Tod 1921.
Interwar career 19191939
Famous PlayersLasky
While still at Henley's, he read in a trade paper that Famous PlayersLasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, so he produced some drawings for the title cards and sent his work to the studio. They hired him, and in 1919 he began working for Islington Studios in Poole Street, Hoxton, as a titlecard designer.
Donald Spoto wrote that most of the staff were Americans with strict job specifications, but the Engli |
sh workers were encouraged to try their hand at anything, which meant that Hitchcock gained experience as a cowriter, art director and production manager on at least 18 silent films. The Times wrote in February 1922 about the studio's "special art title department under the supervision of Mr. A. J. Hitchcock". His work included Number 13 1922, also known as Mrs. Peabody; it was cancelled because of financial problemsthe few finished scenes are lostand Always Tell Your Wife 1923, which he and Seymour Hicks finished together when Hicks was about to give up on it. Hicks wrote later about being helped by "a fat youth who was in charge of the property room ... none other than Alfred Hitchcock".
Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany
When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock worked on Woman to Woman 1923 with the director Graham Cutts, designing the set, writ |
ing the script and producing. He said "It was the first film that I had really got my hands onto." The editor and "script girl" on Woman to Woman was Alma Reville, his future wife. He also worked as an assistant to Cutts on The White Shadow 1924, The Passionate Adventure 1924, The Blackguard 1925, and The Prude's Fall 1925. The Blackguard was produced at the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, where Hitchcock watched part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film The Last Laugh 1924. He was impressed with Murnau's work and later used many of his techniques for the set design in his own productions.
In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden 1925, starring Virginia Valli, a coproduction of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka at the Geiselgasteig studio near Munich. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiance, was assistant directoreditor. Although the film was a commercial flop, Balcon liked Hitchcock's work; a Daily Express headline called him the "Young man with a master mind". Production |
of The Pleasure Garden encountered obstacles which Hitchcock would later learn from on arrival to Brenner Pass, he failed to declare his film stock to customs and it was confiscated; one actress could not enter the water for a scene because she was on her period; budget overruns meant that he had to borrow money from the actors. Hitchcock also needed a translator to give instructions to the cast and crew.
In Germany, Hitchcock observed the nuances of German cinema and filmmaking which had a big influence on him. When he was not working, he would visit Berlin's art galleries, concerts and museums. He would also meet with actors, writers, and producers to build connections. Balcon asked him to direct a second film in Munich, The Mountain Eagle 1926, based on an original story titled Fear o' God. The film is lost, and Hitchcock called it "a very bad movie". A year later, Hitchcock wrote and directed The Ring; although the screenplay was credited solely to his name, Elliot Stannard assisted him with the writing |
. The Ring garnered positive reviews; the Bioscope magazine critic called it "the most magnificent British film ever made".
When he returned to England, Hitchcock was one of the early members of the London Film Society, newly formed in 1925. Through the Society, he became fascinated by the work by Soviet filmmakers Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. He would also socialise with fellow English filmmakers Ivor Montagu and Adrian Brunel, and Walter C. Mycroft.
Hitchcock's luck came with his first thriller, The Lodger A Story of the London Fog 1927, about the hunt for a serial killer, wearing a black cloak and carrying a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays. A landlady suspects that her lodger is the killer, but he turns out to be innocent. To convey the impression footsteps were being heard from an upper floor, Hitchcock had a glass floor made so that the viewer could see the lodger pacing up and down in his room above the landlady. Hitch |
cock had wanted the leading man to be guilty, or for the film at least to end ambiguously, but the star was Ivor Novello, a matine idol, and the "star system" meant that Novello could not be the villain. Hitchcock told Truffaut "You have to clearly spell it out in big letters 'He is innocent.'" He had the same problem years later with Cary Grant in Suspicion 1941. Released in January 1927, The Lodger was a commercial and critical success in the UK. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the film was the first of his to be influenced by German Expressionism "In truth, you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture." He made his first cameo appearances in the film; he was depicted sitting in a newsroom, and in the second, standing in a crowd as the leading man is arrested.
Marriage
On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married the English screenwriter Alma Reville at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington. The couple honeymooned in Paris, Lake Como and St. Moritz, before returning to London to live in a leased fla |
t on the top two floors of 153 Cromwell Road, Kensington. Reville, who was born just hours after Hitchcock, converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, apparently at the insistence of Hitchcock's mother; she was baptised on 31 May 1927 and confirmed at Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal Francis Bourne on 5 June.
In 1928, when they learned that Reville was pregnant, the Hitchcocks purchased "Winter's Grace", a Tudor farmhouse set in 11 acres on Stroud Lane, Shamley Green, Surrey, for 2,500. Their daughter and only child, Patricia Alma Hitchcock, was born on 7 July that year. Patricia died on 9 August 2021 at 93.
Reville became her husband's closest collaborator; Charles Champlin wrote in 1982 "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." When Hitchcock accepted the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said that he wanted to mention "four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is |
a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter, Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville." Reville wrote or cowrote on many of Hitchcock's films, including Shadow of a Doubt, Suspicion and The 39 Steps.
Early sound films
Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail 1929, when its production company, British International Pictures BIP, converted its Elstree studios to sound. The film was the first British "talkie"; this followed the rapid development of sound films in the United States, from the use of brief sound segments in The Jazz Singer 1927 to the first full sound feature Lights of New York 1928. Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy as he reads a book on the London Underground. In t |
he PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder. During this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP revue, Elstree Calling 1930, and directed a short film, An Elastic Affair 1930, featuring two Film Weekly scholarship winners. An Elastic Affair is one of the lost films.
In 1933, Hitchcock signed a multifilm contract with GaumontBritish, once again working for Michael Balcon. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much 1934, was a success; his second, The 39 Steps 1935, was acclaimed in the UK and gained him recognition in the United States. It also established the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" Madeleine Carroll as the template for his succession of icecold, elegant leading ladies. Screenwriter Robert Towne remarked, "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The |
39 Steps". This film was one of the first to introduce the "MacGuffin" plot device, a term coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail. The MacGuffin is an item or goal the protagonist is pursuing, one that otherwise has no narrative value; in The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of design plans.
Hitchcock released two spy thrillers in 1936. Sabotage was loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent 1907, about a woman who discovers that her husband is a terrorist, and Secret Agent, based on two stories in Ashenden Or the British Agent 1928 by W. Somerset Maugham.
At this time, Hitchcock also became notorious for pranks against the cast and crew. These jokes ranged from simple and innocent to crazy and maniacal. For instance, he hosted a dinner party where he dyed all the food blue because he claimed there weren't enough blue foods. He also had a horse delivered to the dressing room of his friend, actor Gerald du Maurier.
Hitchcock followed up with Young and Innocent in 1937, a cr |
ime thriller based on the 1936 novel A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey. Starring Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney, the film was relatively enjoyable for the cast and crew to make. To meet distribution purposes in America, the film's runtime was cut and this included removal of one of Hitchcock's favourite scenes a children's tea party which becomes menacing to the protagonists.
Hitchcock's next major success was The Lady Vanishes 1938, "one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era", according to Philip French, in which Miss Froy May Whitty, a British spy posing as a governess, disappears on a train journey through the fictional European country of Bandrika. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. Benjamin Crisler of the New York Times wrote in June 1938 "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas i |
n the world." The film was based on the novel The Wheel Spins 1936 written by Ethel Lina White.
By 1938 Hitchcock was aware that he had reached his peak in Britain. He had received numerous offers from producers in the United States, but he turned them all down because he disliked the contractual obligations or thought the projects were repellent. However, producer David O. Selznick offered him a concrete proposal to make a film based on the sinking of , which was eventually shelved, but Selznick persuaded Hitchcock to come to Hollywood. In July 1938, Hitchcock flew to New York, and found that he was already a celebrity; he was featured in magazines and gave interviews to radio stations. In Hollywood, Hitchcock met Selznick for the first time. Selznick offered him a fourfilm contract, approximately 40,000 for each picture .
Early Hollywood years 19391945
Selznick contract
Selznick signed Hitchcock to a sevenyear contract beginning in April 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood. The Hitchcocks lived i |
n a spacious flat on Wilshire Boulevard, and slowly acclimatised themselves to the Los Angeles area. He and his wife Alma kept a low profile, and were not interested in attending parties or being celebrities. Hitchcock discovered his taste for fine food in West Hollywood, but still carried on his way of life from England. He was impressed with Hollywood's filmmaking culture, expansive budgets and efficiency, compared to the limits that he had often faced in Britain. In June that year, Life magazine called him the "greatest master of melodrama in screen history".
Although Hitchcock and Selznick respected each other, their working arrangements were sometimes difficult. Selznick suffered from constant financial problems, and Hitchcock was often unhappy about Selznick's creative control and interference over his films. Selznick was also displeased with Hitchcock's method of shooting just what was in the script, and nothing more, which meant that the film could not be cut and remade differently at a later time. A |
s well as complaining about Hitchcock's "goddamn jigsaw cutting", their personalities were mismatched Hitchcock was reserved whereas Selznick was flamboyant. Eventually, Selznick generously lent Hitchcock to the larger film studios. Selznick made only a few films each year, as did fellow independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, so he did not always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Goldwyn had also negotiated with Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. In a later interview, Hitchcock said "Selznick was the Big Producer. ... Producer was king. The most flattering thing Mr. Selznick ever said about meand it shows you the amount of controlhe said I was the 'only director' he'd 'trust with a film'."
Hitchcock approached American cinema cautiously; his first American film was set in England in which the "Americanness" of the characters was incidental Rebecca 1940 was set in a Hollywood version of England's Cornwall and based on a novel by English novelist Daphne du Maurier. Selznick ins |
isted on a faithful adaptation of the book, and disagreed with Hitchcock with the use of humour. The film, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, concerns an unnamed nave young woman who marries a widowed aristocrat. She lives in his large English country house, and struggles with the lingering reputation of his elegant and worldly first wife Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances. The film won Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards; the statuette was given to producer Selznick. Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director, his first of five such nominations.
Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller Foreign Correspondent 1940, set in Europe, based on Vincent Sheean's book Personal History 1935 and produced by Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year. Hitchcock felt uneasy living and working in Hollywood while Britain was at war; his concern resulted in a film that overtly supported the British war effort. Filmed in 1939, it was inspired by the rapidly |
changing events in Europe, as covered by an American newspaper reporter played by Joel McCrea. By mixing footage of European scenes with scenes filmed on a Hollywood backlot, the film avoided direct references to Nazism, Nazi Germany, and Germans, to comply with the Motion Picture Production Code at the time.
Early war years
In September 1940 the Hitchcocks bought the Cornwall Ranch near Scotts Valley, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their primary residence was an Englishstyle home in Bel Air, purchased in 1942. Hitchcock's films were diverse during this period, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. Mrs. Smith 1941 to the bleak film noir Shadow of a Doubt 1943.
Suspicion 1941 marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer and director. It is set in England; Hitchcock used the north coast of Santa Cruz for the English coastline sequence. The film is the first of four in which Cary Grant was cast by Hitchcock, and it is one of the rare occasions that Grant plays a sinister character. Grant plays Johnni |
e Aysgarth, an English conman whose actions raise suspicion and anxiety in his shy young English wife, Lina McLaidlaw Joan Fontaine. In one scene, Hitchcock placed a light inside a glass of milk, perhaps poisoned, that Grant is bringing to his wife; the light ensures that the audience's attention is on the glass. Grant's character is actually a killer, as per written in the book, Before the Fact by Francis Iles, but the studio felt that Grant's image would be tarnished by that. Hitchcock therefore settled for an ambiguous finale, although he would have preferred to end with the wife's murder. Fontaine won Best Actress for her performance.
Saboteur 1942 is the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal Studios during the decade. Hitchcock was forced by Universal to use Universal contract player Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, a freelancer who signed a onepicture deal with the studio, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas. The story depicts a confrontation between a suspected sab |
oteur Cummings and a real saboteur Norman Lloyd atop the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock took a threeday tour of New York City to scout for Saboteurs filming locations. He also directed Have You Heard? 1942, a photographic dramatisation for Life magazine of the dangers of rumours during wartime. In 1943, he wrote a mystery story for Look magazine, "The Murder of Monty Woolley", a sequence of captioned photographs inviting the reader to find clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock cast the performers as themselves, such as Woolley, Doris Merrick, and makeup man Guy Pearce.
Back in England, Hitchcock's mother Emma was severely ill; she died on 26 September 1942 at age 79. Hitchcock never spoke publicly about his mother, but his assistant said that he admired her. Four months later, on 4 January 1943, his brother William died of an overdose at age 52. Hitchcock was not very close to William, but his death made Hitchcock conscious about his own eating and drinking habits. He was overweight and suffering from ba |
ck aches. His New Year's resolution in 1943 was to take his diet seriously with the help of a physician. In January that year, Shadow of a Doubt was released, which Hitchcock had fond memories of making. In the film, Charlotte "Charlie" Newton Teresa Wright suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley Joseph Cotten of being a serial killer. Hitchcock filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa.
At 20th Century Fox, Hitchcock approached John Steinbeck with an idea for a film, which recorded the experiences of the survivors of a German Uboat attack. Steinbeck began work on the script for what would become Lifeboat 1944. However, Steinbeck was unhappy with the film and asked that his name be removed from the credits, to no avail. The idea was rewritten as a short story by Harry Sylvester and published in Collier's in 1943. The action sequences were shot in a small boat in the studio water tank. The locale posed problems for Hitchcock's traditional cameo appearance; it wa |
s solved by having Hitchcock's image appear in a newspaper that William Bendix is reading in the boat, showing the director in a beforeandafter advertisement for "ReducoObesity Slayer". He told Truffaut in 1962
Hitchcock's typical dinner before his weight loss had been a roast chicken, boiled ham, potatoes, bread, vegetables, relishes, salad, dessert, a bottle of wine and some brandy. To lose weight, his diet consisted of black coffee for breakfast and lunch, and steak and salad for dinner, but it was hard to maintain; Donald Spoto wrote that his weight fluctuated considerably over the next 40 years. At the end of 1943, despite the weight loss, the Occidental Insurance Company of Los Angeles refused his application for life insurance.
Wartime nonfiction films
Hitchcock returned to the UK for an extended visit in late 1943 and early 1944. While there he made two short propaganda films, Bon Voyage 1944 and Aventure Malgache 1944, for the Ministry of Information. In June and July 1945, Hitchcock served as "tr |
eatment advisor" on a Holocaust documentary that used Allied Forces footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The film was assembled in London and produced by Sidney Bernstein of the Ministry of Information, who brought Hitchcock a friend of his on board. It was originally intended to be broadcast to the Germans, but the British government deemed it too traumatic to be shown to a shocked postwar population. Instead, it was transferred in 1952 from the British War Office film vaults to London's Imperial War Museum and remained unreleased until 1985, when an edited version was broadcast as an episode of PBS Frontline, under the title the Imperial War Museum had given it Memory of the Camps. The fulllength version of the film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum.
Postwar Hollywood years 19451953
Later Selznick films
Hitchcock worked for David Selznick again when he directed Spellbound 1945, which explores psychoanalysis and featur |
es a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dal. The dream sequence as it appears in the film is ten minutes shorter than was originally envisioned; Selznick edited it to make it "play" more effectively. Gregory Peck plays amnesiac Dr. Anthony Edwardes under the treatment of analyst Dr. Peterson Ingrid Bergman, who falls in love with him while trying to unlock his repressed past. Two pointofview shots were achieved by building a large wooden hand which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took and outsized props for it to hold a bucketsized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was handcoloured red on some copies of the blackandwhite film. The original musical score by Mikls Rzsa makes use of the theremin, and some of it was later adapted by the composer into Rozsa's Piano Concerto Op. 31 1967 for piano and orchestra.
The spy film Notorious followed next in 1946. Hitchcock told Franois Truffaut that Selznick sold him, Ingrid B |
ergman, Cary Grant, and Ben Hecht's screenplay, to RKO Radio Pictures as a "package" for 500,000 equivalent to million in because of cost overruns on Selznick's Duel in the Sun 1946. Notorious stars Bergman and Grant, both Hitchcock collaborators, and features a plot about Nazis, uranium and South America. His prescient use of uranium as a plot device led to him being briefly placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Patrick McGilligan, in or around March 1945, Hitchcock and Hecht consulted Robert Millikan of the California Institute of Technology about the development of a uranium bomb. Selznick complained that the notion was "science fiction", only to be confronted by the news of the detonation of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945.
Transatlantic Pictures
Hitchcock formed an independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, with his friend Sidney Bernstein. He made two films with Transatlantic, one of which was his first colour f |
ilm. With Rope 1948, Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat. The film appears as a very limited number of continuous shots, but it was actually shot in 10 ranging from 4 to 10 minutes each; a 10minute length of film was the most that a camera's film magazine could hold at the time. Some transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place. The film features James Stewart in the leading role, and was the first of four films that Stewart made with Hitchcock. It was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Critical response at the time was mixed.
Under Capricorn 1949, set in 19thcentury Australia, also uses the shortlived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to blackandwhite for several years. Transatlant |
ic Pictures became inactive after the last two films. Hitchcock filmed Stage Fright 1950 at Elstree Studios in England, where he had worked during his British International Pictures contract many years before. He paired one of Warner Bros.' most popular stars, Jane Wyman, with the expatriate German actor Marlene Dietrich and used several prominent British actors, including Michael Wilding, Richard Todd and Alastair Sim. This was Hitchcock's first proper production for Warner Bros., which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn, because Transatlantic Pictures was experiencing financial difficulties.
His thriller Strangers on a Train 1951 was based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. Hitchcock combined many elements from his preceding films. He approached Dashiell Hammett to write the dialogue, but Raymond Chandler took over, then left over disagreements with the director. In the film, two men casually meet, one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder; he suggests that two people, |
each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's murder. Farley Granger's role was as the innocent victim of the scheme, while Robert Walker, previously known for "boynextdoor" roles, played the villain. I Confess 1953 was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest.
Peak years 19541964
Dial M for Murder and Rear Window
I Confess was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly Dial M for Murder 1954, Rear Window 1954, and To Catch a Thief 1955. In Dial M for Murder, Ray Milland plays the villain who tries to murder his unfaithful wife Kelly for her money. She kills the hired assassin in selfdefence, so Milland manipulates the evidence to make it look like murder. Her lover, Mark Halliday Robert Cummings, and Police Inspector Hubbard John Williams save her from execution. Hitchcock experimented with 3D cinematography for Dial M for Murder.
Hitchcock moved to Paramount Pictures and filmed Rear Window 1954, starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, as well as Thelma Ri |
tter and Raymond Burr. Stewart's character is a photographer called Jeff based on Robert Capa who must temporarily use a wheelchair. Out of boredom, he begins observing his neighbours across the courtyard, then becomes convinced that one of them Raymond Burr has murdered his wife. Jeff eventually manages to convince his policeman buddy Wendell Corey and his girlfriend Kelly. As with Lifeboat and Rope, the principal characters are depicted in confined or cramped quarters, in this case Stewart's studio apartment. Hitchcock uses closeups of Stewart's face to show his character's reactions, "from the comic voyeurism directed at his neighbours to his helpless terror watching Kelly and Burr in the villain's apartment".
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. The titlesequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile he d |
rew it himself; it is composed of only nine strokes, which his real silhouette then filled. The series theme tune was Funeral March of a Marionette by the French composer Charles Gounod 18181893.
His introductions always included some sort of wry humour, such as the description of a recent multiperson execution hampered by having only one electric chair, while two are shown with a sign "Two chairsno waiting!" He directed 18 episodes of the series, which aired from 1955 to 1965. It became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and NBC broadcast the final episode on 10 May 1965. In the 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a colourised form.
Hitchcock's success in television spawned a set of shortstory collections in his name; these included Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV, and Tales My Mother Never Told Me. In 1956, HSD Publications also licensed the director's name to create Alfred Hi |
tchcock's Mystery Magazine, a monthly digest specialising in crime and detective fiction. Hitchcock's television series' were very profitable, and his foreignlanguage versions of books were bringing revenues of up to 100,000 a year .
From To Catch a Thief to Vertigo
In 1955, Hitchcock became a United States citizen. In the same year, his third Grace Kelly film, To Catch a Thief, was released; it is set in the French Riviera, and stars Kelly and Cary Grant. Grant plays retired thief John Robie, who becomes the prime suspect for a spate of robberies in the Riviera. A thrillseeking American heiress played by Kelly surmises his true identity and tries to seduce him. "Despite the obvious age disparity between Grant and Kelly and a lightweight plot, the witty script loaded with double entendres and the goodnatured acting proved a commercial success." It was Hitchcock's last film with Kelly; she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and ended her film career afterward. Hitchcock then remade his own 1934 film Th |
e Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. This time, the film starred James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song "Que Sera, Sera", which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a big hit. They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering with an assassination. As in the 1934 film, the climax takes place at the Royal Albert Hall.
The Wrong Man 1956, Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros., is a lowkey blackandwhite production based on a reallife case of mistaken identity reported in Life magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star Henry Fonda, playing a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is arrested and tried for robbery while his wife Vera Miles emotionally collapses under the strain. Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him to the subject and was embedded in many scenes.
While directing episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents during the summer of 1957, Hitchcock was admitted to hospital for |
hernia and gallstones, and had to have his gallbladder removed. Following a successful surgery, he immediately returned to work to prepare for his next project. Vertigo 1958 again starred James Stewart, with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. He had wanted Vera Miles to play the lead, but she was pregnant. He told Oriana Fallaci "I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress. We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant. I hate pregnant women, because then they have children."
In Vertigo, Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who becomes obsessed with a woman he has been hired to shadow Novak. Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock did not opt for a happy ending. Some critics, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree that Vertigo is the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the Pygmalionlike obsessions of a man who moulds a woman |
into the person he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death, than any other work in his filmography.
Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts, commonly referred to as a dolly zoom, which has been copied by many filmmakers. The film premiered at the San Sebastin International Film Festival, and Hitchcock won the Silver Seashell prize. Vertigo is considered a classic, but it attracted mixed reviews and poor boxoffice receipts at the time; the critic from Variety magazine opined that the film was "too slow and too long". Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it was "devilishly farfetched", but praised the cast performances and Hitchcock's direction. The picture was also the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. In the 2002 Sight Sound polls, it ranked just behind Citizen Kane 1941; ten years later, in the same magazine, critics chose it as the best film ever made.
North by Northwest and Psycho
Aft |
er Vertigo, the rest of 1958 was a difficult year for Hitchcock. During preproduction of North by Northwest 1959, which was a "slow" and "agonising" process, his wife Alma was diagnosed with cancer. While she was in hospital, Hitchcock kept himself occupied with his television work and would visit her every day. Alma underwent surgery and made a full recovery, but it caused Hitchcock to imagine, for the first time, life without her.
Hitchcock followed up with three more successful films, which are also recognised as among his best North by Northwest, Psycho 1960 and The Birds 1963. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant portrays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who is mistaken for a government secret agent. He is pursued across the United States by enemy agents, including Eve Kendall Eva Marie Saint. At first, Thornhill believes Kendall is helping him, but then realises that she is an enemy agent; he later learns that she is working undercover for the CIA. During its opening twoweek run at |
Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed 404,056 equivalent to million in , setting a nonholiday gross record for that theatre. Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining".
Psycho 1960 is arguably Hitchcock's bestknown film. Based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, which was inspired by the case of Ed Gein, the film was produced on a tight budget of 800,000 equivalent to million in and shot in blackandwhite on a spare set using crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, and the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the hallmarks of a new horrorfilm genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theatres as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke boxoffice records in the United Kingdom, France, South America, the United States and Canada, and was a moderate success in Australia for a brief period.
Psycho was the most profitable of Hit |
chcock's career, and he personally earned in excess of 15 million equivalent to million in . He subsequently swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for 150,000 shares of MCA, making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. Following the first film, Psycho became an American horror franchise Psycho II, Psycho III, Bates Motel, Psycho IV The Beginning, and a colour 1998 remake of the original.
Truffaut interview
On 13 August 1962, Hitchcock's 63rd birthday, the French director Franois Truffaut began a 50hour interview of Hitchcock, filmed over eight days at Universal Studios, during which Hitchcock agreed to answer 500 questions. It took four years to transcribe the tapes and organise the images; it was published as a book in 1967, which Truffaut nicknamed the "Hitchbook". The audio tapes were used as the basis of a documentary in 2015. Truffaut sought the interview because it was clear to him that Hitchcoc |
k was not simply the massmarket entertainer the American media made him out to be. It was obvious from his films, Truffaut wrote, that Hitchcock had "given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues". He compared the interview to "Oedipus' consultation of the oracle".
The Birds
The film scholar Peter William Evans wrote that The Birds 1963 and Marnie 1964 are regarded as "undisputed masterpieces". Hitchcock had intended to film Marnie first, and in March 1962 it was announced that Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco since 1956, would come out of retirement to star in it. When Kelly asked Hitchcock to postpone Marnie until 1963 or 1964, he recruited Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle 1954, to develop a screenplay based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, "The Birds" 1952, which Hitchcock had republished in his My Favorites in Suspense 1959. He hired Tippi Hedren to play the lead role. It was her first role; she had been a model in New York when Hitchcock saw her, in Octob |
er 1961, in an NBC television advert for Sego, a diet drink "I signed her because she is a classic beauty. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly was the last." He insisted, without explanation, that her first name be written in single quotation marks 'Tippi'.
In The Birds, Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner Rod Taylor in a bird shop; Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits him in Bodega Bay where The Birds was filmed carrying a pair of lovebirds as a gift. Suddenly waves of birds start gathering, watching, and attacking. The question "What do the birds want?" is left unanswered. Hitchcock made the film with equipment from the Revue Studio, which made Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He said it was his most technically challenging film, using a combination of trained and mechanical birds against a backdrop of wild ones. Every shot was sketched in advance.
An HBOBBC television film, The Girl 2012, depicted Hedren's experiences on set; she said that Hitchcock becam |
e obsessed with her and sexually harassed her. He reportedly isolated her from the rest of the crew, had her followed, whispered obscenities to her, had her handwriting analysed, and had a ramp built from his private office directly into her trailer. Diane Baker, her costar in Marnie, said "Nothing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was." While filming the attack scene in the atticwhich took a week to filmshe was placed in a caged room while two men wearing elbowlength protective gloves threw live birds at her. Toward the end of the week, to stop the birds' flying away from her too soon, one leg of each bird was attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her clothes. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted on doctor's orders.
Marnie
In June 1962, Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in Marnie 1964. Hedren had signed an exclusive sevenyear, 500aweek contract with Hit |
chcock in October 1961, and he decided to cast her in the lead role opposite Sean Connery. In 2016, describing Hedren's performance as "one of the greatest in the history of cinema", Richard Brody called the film a "story of sexual violence" inflicted on the character played by Hedren "The film is, to put it simply, sick, and it's so because Hitchcock was sick. He suffered all his life from furious sexual desire, suffered from the lack of its gratification, suffered from the inability to transform fantasy into reality, and then went ahead and did so virtually, by way of his art." A 1964 New York Times film review called it Hitchcock's "most disappointing film in years", citing Hedren's and Connery's lack of experience, an amateurish script and "glaringly fake cardboard backdrops".
In the film, Marnie Edgar Hedren steals 10,000 from her employer and goes on the run. She applies for a job at Mark Rutland's Connery company in Philadelphia and steals from there too. Earlier she is shown having a panic attack dur |
ing a thunderstorm and fearing the colour red. Mark tracks her down and blackmails her into marrying him. She explains that she does not want to be touched, but during the "honeymoon", Mark rapes her. Marnie and Mark discover that Marnie's mother had been a prostitute when Marnie was a child, and that, while the mother was fighting with a client during a thunderstormthe mother believed the client had tried to molest MarnieMarnie had killed the client to save her mother. Cured of her fears when she remembers what happened, she decides to stay with Mark.
Hitchcock told cinematographer Robert Burks that the camera had to be placed as close as possible to Hedren when he filmed her face. Evan Hunter, the screenwriter of The Birds who was writing Marnie too, explained to Hitchcock that, if Mark loved Marnie, he would comfort her, not rape her. Hitchcock reportedly replied "Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!" When Hunter submitted two versions of the script, one without the rape s |
cene, Hitchcock replaced him with Jay Presson Allen.
Later years 19661980
Final films
Failing health reduced Hitchcock's output during the last two decades of his life. Biographer Stephen Rebello claimed Universal imposed two films on him, Torn Curtain 1966 and Topaz 1969, the latter of which is based on a Leon Uris novel, partly set in Cuba. Both were spy thrillers with Cold Warrelated themes. Torn Curtain, with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, precipitated the bitter end of the 12year collaboration between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann. Hitchcock was unhappy with Herrmann's score and replaced him with John Addison, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Upon release, Torn Curtain was a box office disappointment, and Topaz was disliked by critics and the studio.
Hitchcock returned to Britain to make his penultimate film, Frenzy 1972, based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square 1966. After two espionage films, the plot marked a return to the murderthriller genre. Richard Blaney Jon Finc |
h, a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, becomes the prime suspect in the investigation into the "Necktie Murders", which are actually committed by his friend Bob Rusk Barry Foster. This time, Hitchcock makes the victim and villain kindreds, rather than opposites as in Strangers on a Train.
In Frenzy, Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time. Two scenes show naked women, one of whom is being raped and strangled; Donald Spoto called the latter "one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film". Both actors, Barbara LeighHunt and Anna Massey, refused to do the scenes, so models were used instead. Biographers have noted that Hitchcock had always pushed the limits of film censorship, often managing to fool Joseph Breen, the head of the Motion Picture Production Code. Hitchcock would add subtle hints of improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mid1960s. Yet Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such materia |
l and were actually amused, as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable inferences".
Family Plot 1976 was Hitchcock's last film. It relates the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler, played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxidriver lover Bruce Dern, making a living from her phony powers. While Family Plot was based on the Victor Canning novel The Rainbird Pattern 1972, the novel's tone is more sinister. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman originally wrote the film, under the working title Deception, with a dark tone but was pushed to a lighter, more comical tone by Hitchcock where it took the name Deceit, then finally, Family Plot.
Knighthood and death
Toward the end of his life, Hitchcock was working on the script for a spy thriller, The Short Night, collaborating with James Costigan, Ernest Lehman and David Freeman. Despite preliminary work, it was never filmed. Hitchcock's health was declining and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. The screenplay was eventually publi |
shed in Freeman's book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock 1999.
Having refused a CBE in 1962, Hitchcock was appointed a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire KBE in the 1980 New Year Honours. He was too ill to travel to Londonhe had a pacemaker and was being given cortisone injections for his arthritisso on 3 January 1980 the British consul general presented him with the papers at Universal Studios. Asked by a reporter after the ceremony why it had taken the Queen so long, Hitchcock quipped, "I suppose it was a matter of carelessness." Cary Grant, Janet Leigh, and others attended a luncheon afterwards.
His last public appearance was on 16 March 1980, when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award. He died of kidney failure the following month, on 29 April, in his Bel Air home. Donald Spoto, one of Hitchcock's biographers, wrote that Hitchcock had declined to see a priest, but according to Jesuit priest Mark Henninger, he and another priest, Tom Sul |
livan, celebrated Mass at the filmmaker's home, and Sullivan heard his confession. Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. His funeral was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills on 30 April, after which his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on 10 May 1980.
Filmmaking
Style and themes
Hitchcock's film production career evolved from smallscale silent films to financially significant sound films. Hitchcock remarked that he was influenced by early filmmakers George Mlis, D.W. Griffith and Alice GuyBlach. His silent films between 1925 and 1929 were in the crime and suspense genres, but also included melodramas and comedies. Whilst visual storytelling was pertinent during the silent era, even after the arrival of sound, Hitchcock still relied on visuals in cinema; Hitchcock referred to this emphasis on visual storytelling as "pure cinema". In Britain, he honed his craft so that by the time he moved to Hollywood, the director had perfected his style and |
camera techniques. Hitchcock later said that his British work was the "sensation of cinema", whereas the American phase was when his "ideas were fertilised". Scholar Robin Wood writes that the director's first two films, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, were influenced by German Expressionism. Afterward, he discovered Soviet cinema, and Sergei Eisenstein's and Vsevolod Pudovkin's theories of montage. 1926's The Lodger was inspired by both German and Soviet aesthetics, styles which solidified the rest of his career. Although Hitchcock's work in the 1920s found some success, several British reviewers criticised Hitchcock's films for being unoriginal and conceited. Raymond Durgnat opined that Hitchcock's films were carefully and intelligently constructed, but thought they can be shallow and rarely present a "coherent worldview".
Earning the title "Master of Suspense", the director experimented with ways to generate tension in his work. He said, "My suspense work comes out of creating nightmares for t |
he audience. And I play with an audience. I make them gasp and surprise them and shock them. When you have a nightmare, it's awfully vivid if you're dreaming that you're being led to the electric chair. Then you're as happy as can be when you wake up because you're relieved." During filming of North by Northwest, Hitchcock explained his reasons for recreating the set of Mount Rushmore "The audience responds in proportion to how realistic you make it. One of the dramatic reasons for this type of photography is to get it looking so natural that the audience gets involved and believes, for the time being, what's going on up there on the screen."
Hitchcock's films, from the silent to the sound era, contained a number of recurring themes that he is famous for. His films explored audience as a voyeur, notably in Rear Window, Marnie and Psycho. He understood that human beings enjoy voyeuristic activities and made the audience participate in it through the character's actions. Of his fiftythree films, eleven revolve |
d around stories of mistaken identity, where an innocent protagonist is accused of a crime and is pursued by police. In most cases, it is an ordinary, everyday person who finds themselves in a dangerous situation. Hitchcock told Truffaut "That's because the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It's easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run." One of his constant themes were the struggle of a personality torn between "order and chaos"; known as the notion of "double", which is a comparison or contrast between two characters or objects the double representing a dark or evil side.
According to Robin Wood, Hitchcock had mixed feelings towards homosexuality despite working with gay actors in his career. Donald Spoto suggests that Hitchcock's sexually repressive childhood may have contributed to his exploration of deviancy. During the 1950s, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited direct references to homosexuality |
but the director was known for his subtle references, and pushing the boundaries of the censors. Moreover, Shadow of a Doubt has a double incest theme through the storyline, expressed implicitly through images. Author Jane Sloan argues that Hitchcock was drawn to both conventional and unconventional sexual expression in his work, and the theme of marriage was usually presented in a "bleak and skeptical" manner. It was also not until after his mother's death in 1942, that Hitchcock portrayed motherly figures as "notorious monstermothers". The espionage backdrop, and murders committed by characters with psychopathic tendencies were common themes too. In Hitchcock's depiction of villains and murderers, they were usually charming and friendly, forcing viewers to identify with them. The director's strict childhood and Jesuit education may have led to his distrust of authoritarian figures such as policemen and politicians; a theme which he has explored. Also, he used the "MacGuffin"the use of an object, person or e |
vent to keep the plot moving along even if it was nonessential to the story. Some examples include the microfilm in North by Northwest and the stolen 40,000 in Psycho.
Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films. For example, he is seen struggling to get a double bass onto a train Strangers on a Train, walking dogs out of a pet shop The Birds, fixing a neighbour's clock Rear Window, as a shadow Family Plot, sitting at a table in a photograph Dial M for Murder, and riding a bus North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief.
Representation of women
Hitchcock's portrayal of women has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Bidisha wrote in The Guardian in 2010 "There's the vamp, the tramp, the snitch, the witch, the slink, the doublecrosser and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don't worry, they all get punished in the end." In a widely cited essay in 1975, Laura Mulvey introduced the idea of the male gaze; the view of the spectator in Hitchcock's films, she argued, is that of the heterosexual male protagonist. |
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