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Arabic | Status in the Arab world vis-à-vis other languages | Status in the Arab world vis-à-vis other languages
With the sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – 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 "studying 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 mélange of code-switching practises."Suleiman, p. 93 |
Arabic | As a foreign language | 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 Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study the language.
Software and books with tapes are an 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. |
Arabic | Vocabulary | Vocabulary |
Arabic | Lexicography | Lexicography |
Arabic | Pre-modern Arabic lexicography | Pre-modern Arabic lexicography
The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about a millennium before the modern period. Early lexicographers ( lughawiyyūn) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin () who were perceived to speak the "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries.thumb|Arabic from the Quran in the old Hijazi dialect (Hijazi script, 7th century AD)Kitāb al-'Ayn (), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations—later called taqālīb ()—calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal () and those that are not used muhmal (). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots.
This lexicographic tradition was traditionalist and corrective in nature—holding that linguistic correctness and eloquence derive from Qurʾānic usage, , and Bedouin speech—positioning itself against laḥnu‿l-ʿāmmah (), the solecism it viewed as defective. |
Arabic | Western lexicography of Arabic | Western lexicography of Arabic
In the second half of the 19th century, the British Arabist Edward William Lane, working with the Egyptian scholar , compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon by translating material from earlier Arabic lexica into English. The German Arabist Hans Wehr, with contributions from Hedwig Klein, compiled the Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952), later translated into English as A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1961), based on established usage, especially in literature. |
Arabic | Modern Arabic lexicography | Modern Arabic lexicography
The Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo sought to publish a historical dictionary of Arabic in the vein of the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing the changes of meanings and uses of Arabic words over time. A first volume of Al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr was published in 1956 under the leadership of Taha Hussein. The project is not yet complete; its 15th volume, covering the letter ṣād, was published in 2022. |
Arabic | Loanwords | Loanwords
thumb|The Qur'an has served and continues to serve as a fundamental reference for Arabic. (Maghrebi Kufic script, Blue Qur'an, 9th–10th century.)
The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic,See the seminal study by Siegmund Fraenkel, Die aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen, Leiden 1886 (repr. 1962) which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic. Many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and (Classical) Persian,See for instance Wilhelm Eilers, "Iranisches Lehngut im Arabischen", Actas IV. Congresso des Estudos Árabes et Islâmicos, Coimbra, Lisboa, Leiden 1971, with earlier references. and Hellenistic Greek (kīmiyāʼ has as origin the Greek khymia, meaning in that language the melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, Histoire de la Médecine de l'Antiquité au XXe siècle, Tallandier, 2008, p. 251), alembic (distiller) from ambix (cup), almanac (climate) from almenichiakon (calendar).
For the origin of the last three borrowed words, see Alfred-Louis de Prémare, Foundations of Islam, Seuil, L'Univers Historique, 2002. Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persian languages are, as presented in De Prémare's above-cited book:
madīnah/medina (مدينة, city or city square), a word of Aramaic origin ܡܕ݂ܝܼܢ݇ܬܵܐ məḏī(n)ttā (in which it means "state/city").
jazīrah (جزيرة), as in the well-known form الجزيرة "Al-Jazeera", means "island" and has its origin in the Syriac ܓܵܙܲܪܬܵܐ gāzartā.
lāzaward (لازورد) is taken from Persian لاژورد lājvard, the name of a blue stone, lapis lazuli. This word was borrowed in several European languages to mean (light) blue – azure in English, azur in French and azul in Portuguese and Spanish.
thumb|Evolution of early Arabic script (9th–11th century), with the Basmala as an example, from kufic manuscripts:
(1) Early 9th century, script with no dots or diacritic marks;(2) and (3) 9th–10th century under the Abbasid dynasty, Abu al-Aswad's system established red dots with each arrangement or position indicating a different short vowel; later, a second black-dot system was used to differentiate between letters like and ;
(4) 11th century, in al-Farāhidi's system (system used today) dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels.A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas & Manfredi (2020). |
Arabic | Influence on other languages | Influence on other languages
The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran. Arabic is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Amharic, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Chittagonian, Croatian, Dagestani, Dhivehi, English, German, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.) Saraiki, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Modern Hebrew has been also influenced by Arabic especially during the process of revival, as MSA was used as a source for modern Hebrew vocabulary and roots.
English has many Arabic loanwords, some directly, but most via other Mediterranean languages. Examples of such words include admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah, magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff, and zenith. Other languages such as Maltese and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.
Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber taẓallit, "prayer", from salat ( )), academic terms (like Uyghur mentiq, "logic"), and economic items (like English coffee) to placeholders (like Spanish , "so-and-so"), everyday terms (like Hindustani lekin, "but", or Spanish and French , meaning "cup"), and expressions (like Catalan , "galore, in quantity"). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as (ṣalāh), "prayer", and (imām), "prayer leader".
In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly via other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic. For example, most Arabic loanwords in Hindustani and Turkish entered through Persian. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri. Most Arabic loanwords in Yoruba entered through Hausa.
Arabic words made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. Variants of Arabic words such as kitāb ("book") have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders.
Since, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a position similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of the Arabic concepts in the fields of science, philosophy, commerce, etc. were coined from Arabic roots by non-native Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian translators, and then found their way into other languages. This process of using Arabic roots, especially in Kurdish and Persian, to translate foreign concepts continued through to the 18th and 19th centuries, when swaths of Arab-inhabited lands were under Ottoman rule. |
Arabic | Spoken varieties | Spoken varieties
thumb|center|upright=3|Geographical distribution of the varieties of Arabic per Ethnologue and other sources:
Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken dialects of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the varieties within and outside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that between sedentary varieties and the much more conservative Bedouin varieties. All the varieties outside of the Arabian peninsula, which include the large majority of speakers, have many features in common with each other that are not found in Classical Arabic. This has led researchers to postulate the existence of a prestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries immediately following the Arab conquest, whose features eventually spread to all newly conquered areas. These features are present to varying degrees inside the Arabian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula varieties have much more diversity than the non-peninsula varieties, but these have been understudied.
thumb|274x274px|A copy of the Qur'an by Ibn al-Bawwab in the year 1000/1001 CE, thought to be the earliest existing example of a Qur'an written in a cursive script.
Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the non-Egyptian North African dialects, especially Moroccan Arabic, and the others. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other media).
One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided many new words and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order. However, a more weighty factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine and Peninsular fīh and North African kayən all mean 'there is', and all come from Classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different. |
Arabic | Koiné | Koiné
According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:
Loss of the dual number except on nouns, with consistent plural agreement (cf. feminine singular agreement in plural inanimates).
Change of a to i in many affixes (e.g., non-past-tense prefixes ti- yi- ni-; wi- 'and'; il- 'the'; feminine -it in the construct state).
Loss of third-weak verbs ending in w (which merge with verbs ending in y).
Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., 'I untied' → .
Conversion of separate words lī 'to me', laka 'to you', etc. into indirect-object clitic suffixes.
Certain changes in the cardinal number system, e.g., 'five days' → , where certain words have a special plural with prefixed t.
Loss of the feminine elative (comparative).
Adjective plurals of the form 'big' → .
Change of nisba suffix > .
Certain lexical items, e.g., 'bring' < 'come with'; 'see'; 'what' (or similar) < 'which thing'; (relative pronoun).
Merger of and in most or all positions. |
Arabic | Dialect groups | Dialect groups
Egyptian Arabic, spoken by 67 million people in Egypt. It is one of the most understood varieties of Arabic, due in large part to the widespread distribution of Egyptian films and television shows throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Levantine Arabic, spoken by about 44 million people in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey.
Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic spoken primarily in Lebanon.
Jordanian Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by the population of the Kingdom of Jordan.
Palestinian Arabic is a name of several dialects of the subgroup of Levantine Arabic spoken by the Palestinians in Palestine, by Arab citizens of Israel and in most Palestinian populations around the world.
Samaritan Arabic, spoken by only several hundred in the Nablus region.
Cypriot Maronite Arabic, spoken in Cyprus by around 9,800 people (2013 UNSD).
Maghrebi Arabic, also called "Darija", spoken by about 70 million people in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It also forms the basis of Maltese via the extinct Sicilian Arabic dialect.Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). Maltese. Routledge. . Maghrebi Arabic is very hard to understand for Arabic speakers from the Mashriq or Mesopotamia, the most comprehensible being Libyan Arabic and the most difficult Moroccan Arabic. The others such as Algerian Arabic can be considered in between the two in terms of difficulty.
Libyan Arabic, spoken in Libya and neighboring countries.
Tunisian Arabic, spoken in Tunisia and north-eastern Algeria.
Algerian Arabic, spoken in Algeria.
Judeo-Algerian Arabic was spoken by Jews in Algeria until 1962, now it is spoken by a few elderly Algerian Jews in France and Israel.
Moroccan Arabic, spoken in Morocco.
Hassaniya Arabic (3 million speakers), spoken in Mauritania, Western Sahara, some parts of the Azawad in northern Mali, southern Morocco, and south-western Algeria.
Andalusian Arabic, spoken in Spain until the 16th century.
Siculo-Arabic (Sicilian Arabic), was spoken in Sicily and Malta between the end of the 9th century and the end of the 12th century and eventually evolved into the Maltese language.
Maltese, spoken on the island of Malta, is the only fully separate standardized language to have originated from an Arabic dialect, the extinct Siculo-Arabic dialect, with independent literary norms. Maltese has evolved independently of Modern Standard Arabic and its varieties into a standardized language over the past 800 years in a gradual process of Latinisation. Maltese is therefore considered an exceptional descendant of Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Maltese is different from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, Italian and Sicilian. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script. In terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are reported to be able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic, which is related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese. This asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between Maghrebi Arabic dialects. Maltese has its own dialects, with urban varieties of Maltese being closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties.Isserlin (1986). Studies in Islamic History and Civilization,
Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken by about 41.2 million people in Iraq (where it is called "Aamiyah"), eastern Syria and southwestern Iran (Khuzestan) and in the southeastern of Turkey (in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeastern Anatolia Region).
North Mesopotamian Arabic is a spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq, in western Iran, northern Syria, and in southeastern Turkey (in the eastern Mediterranean Region, Southeastern Anatolia Region, and southern Eastern Anatolia Region).
Judeo-Mesopotamian Arabic, also known as Iraqi Judeo Arabic and Yahudic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by Iraqi Jews of Mosul.
Baghdad Arabic is the Arabic dialect spoken in Baghdad, and the surrounding cities and it is a subvariety of Mesopotamian Arabic.
Baghdad Jewish Arabic is the dialect spoken by the Iraqi Jews of Baghdad.
South Mesopotamian Arabic (Basrawi dialect) is the dialect spoken in southern Iraq, such as Basra, Dhi Qar, and Najaf.
Khuzestani Arabic, spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan. This is a mix of Southern Mesopotamian Arabic and Gulf Arabic.
Khorasani Arabic, spoken in the Iranian province of Khorasan.
Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait.
Sudanese Arabic, spoken by 17 million people in Sudan and some parts of southern Egypt. Sudanese Arabic is quite distinct from the dialect of its neighbor to the north; rather, the Sudanese have a dialect similar to the Hejazi dialect.
Juba Arabic, spoken in South Sudan and southern far Sudan.
Gulf Arabic, spoken by around four million people, predominantly in Kuwait, Bahrain, some parts of Oman, eastern Saudi Arabia coastal areas and some parts of UAE and Qatar. Also spoken in Iran's Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. Although Gulf Arabic is spoken in Qatar, most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic (Bedawi).
Omani Arabic, distinct from the Gulf Arabic of Eastern Arabia and Bahrain, spoken in Central Oman. With its oil wealth and mobility it has spread to various areas of the former Sultanate of Muscat, especially Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast.
Hadhrami Arabic, spoken by around 8 million people, predominantly in Hadhramaut, and in parts of the Arabian Peninsula, South and Southeast Asia, and East Africa by Hadhrami descendants.
Indonesian Arabic, spoken in Arab ethnic enclaves in Indonesia, especially along the north coast of Java. It has about 60,000 speakers according to a rough estimate in 2010.
Yemeni Arabic, spoken in Yemen, and southern Saudi Arabia by 15 million people. Similar to Gulf Arabic.
Najdi Arabic, spoken by around 10 million people, mainly spoken in Najd, central and northern Saudi Arabia. Most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic (Bedawi).
Hejazi Arabic (6 million speakers), spoken in Hejaz, western Saudi Arabia.
Saharan Arabic spoken in some parts of Algeria, Niger and Mali.
Baharna Arabic (800,000 speakers), spoken by Bahrani Shias in Bahrain and Qatif, the dialect exhibits many big differences from Gulf Arabic. It is also spoken to a lesser extent in Oman.
Judeo-Arabic dialects – these are the dialects spoken by the Jews that had lived or continue to live in the Arab World. As Jewish migration to Israel took hold, the language did not thrive and is now considered endangered. So-called Qəltu Arabic.
Chadian Arabic, spoken in Chad, Sudan, some parts of South Sudan, Central African Republic, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon.
Central Asian Arabic, spoken in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan by around 8,000 people. Tajiki Arabic is highly endangered.
Shirvani Arabic, spoken in Azerbaijan and Dagestan until the 1930s, now extinct. |
Arabic | Phonology | Phonology
While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, contemporary spoken Arabic is more properly described as a continuum of varieties. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions. MSA is used in writing in formal print media and orally in newscasts, speeches and formal declarations of numerous types.
Modern Standard Arabic has 28 consonant phonemes and 6 vowel phonemes. All phonemes contrast between "emphatic" (pharyngealized) consonants and non-emphatic ones. Some of these phonemes have coalesced in the various modern dialects, while new phonemes have been introduced through borrowing or phonemic splits. A "phonemic quality of length" applies to consonants as well as vowels. |
Arabic | Grammar | Grammar
thumb|upright=1.5|right|Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works
The grammar of Arabic has similarities with the grammar of other Semitic languages. Some of the typical differences between Standard Arabic () and vernacular varieties are a loss of morphological markings of grammatical case, changes in word order, a shift toward more analytic morphosyntax, loss of grammatical mood, and loss of the inflected passive voice. |
Arabic | Literary Arabic | 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 "root-and-pattern" 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. |
Arabic | Nouns and adjectives | 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 ā, 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 ā, add a final /-n/ to the case-marking vowels, giving /-un/, /-an/ or /-in/, which is also referred to as nunation or tanwīn.
Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns. The plural of all non-human 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 first-person singular pronoun has a different enclitic form used for verbs ( /-nī/) and for nouns or prepositions ( /-ī/ after consonants, /-ya/ after vowels).
Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. Non-human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. A verb in a verb-initial 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. |
Arabic | Verbs | 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 non-past); 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.Rydin, Karin C. (2005). A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. New York: Cambridge University Press. There are two participles, active and passive, and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.
The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes 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 non-past, and the future tense is signaled by prefixing or onto the non-past. The past and non-past differ in the form of the stem (e.g., past vs. non-past ), and 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 non-past, a combination of prefixes (primarily encoding person) and suffixes (primarily encoding gender and number) are used. The passive voice uses the same person/number/gender 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 has the same meaning, is almost never used. |
Arabic | Derivation | Derivation
Like other Semitic languages, and unlike most other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology, applying many templates applied to 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 non-past 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 IX, which is limited to colors and physical defects):
+ Most of these forms are exclusively Classical Arabic Form Past Meaning Non-past Meaning I 'he wrote' 'he writes' II 'he made (someone) write' "he makes (someone) write" III 'he corresponded with, wrote to (someone)' 'he corresponds with, writes to (someone)' IV 'he dictated' 'he dictates' V nonexistent nonexistent VI 'he corresponded (with someone, esp. mutually)' 'he corresponds (with someone, esp. mutually)' VII 'he subscribed' 'he subscribes' VIII 'he copied' 'he copies' IX 'he turned red' 'he turns red' X 'he asked (someone) to write' 'he asks (someone) to write'
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 work-related 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 corresponding masculine, e.g. 'library' (also a writing-related 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. "public-ness", < 'multitude, general public'), and the Gaddafi-specific variation 'people's republic' (lit. "masses-ness", < 'the masses', pl. of , as above). |
Arabic | Colloquial varieties | 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.
+ Example of a regular Form I verb in Egyptian Arabic, kátab/yíktib "write" Tense/Mood Past Present Subjunctive Present Indicative Future Imperative Singular 1st katáb-t á-ktib bá-ktib ḥá-ktib" 2nd masculine katáb-t tí-ktib bi-tí-ktib ḥa-tí-ktib í-ktib feminine katáb-ti ti-ktíb-i bi-ti-ktíb-i ḥa-ti-ktíb-i i-ktíb-i 3rd masculine kátab yí-ktib bi-yí-ktib ḥa-yí-ktib" feminine kátab-it tí-ktib bi-tí-ktib ḥa-tí-ktib Plural 1st katáb-na ní-ktib bi-ní-ktib ḥá-ní-ktib" 2nd katáb-tu ti-ktíb-u bi-ti-ktíb-u ḥa-ti-ktíb-u i-ktíb-u 3rd kátab-u yi-ktíb-u bi-yi-ktíb-u ḥa-yi-ktíb-u" |
Arabic | Writing system {{anchor | Writing system
thumb|Arabic calligraphy written by a Malay Muslim in Malaysia. The calligrapher is making a rough draft.
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 alphabet—in particular, the faʼ 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 schools (zaouias) of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semitic languages (except for the Latin-written 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 ruqʻah, 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 nuqaṯ) 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.
Arabic AlphabetWikipedia
RomanizationValue in MSA
(IPA)Contextual formsIsolated formNo.FinalMedialInitial123 or 4*56 or 78 or 9101112 or 1314151617 or 18 or 1920212223242526 and , 27 and , 28ʾ or -
Notes:
Modern Standard Arabic (Literary Arabic) can be pronounced or (or only in Egypt) depending on the speaker's regional dialect.
The Hamza can be considered a letter and plays an important role in Arabic spelling but it is not considered part of the alphabet, it has different written forms depending on its position in the word, check Hamza. |
Arabic | Calligraphy | 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 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. |
Arabic | Romanization | 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 spelling 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 "š" for the sound equivalently written sh in English. Other systems (e.g. the Bahá'í 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 combination of two sounds, as in gashouse. The ALA-LC romanization solves this problem by separating the two sounds with a prime symbol ( ′ ); e.g., as′hal 'easier'.
During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented 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.
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 or IM Arabic. 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. |
Arabic | Numerals | Numerals
In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. However, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals ( – – – – – – – – – ) are in use. When representing a number in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right 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 Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said "a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy" or, more eloquently, "a thousand and nine-hundred five seventy". |
Arabic | Arabic alphabet and nationalism | Arabic alphabet and nationalism
There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize the language. Currently, the only Arabic variety to use Latin script is Maltese. |
Arabic | Lebanon | Lebanon
The Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin letters in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at Romanization failed as the academy and population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the academy, mentioned that the movement to Romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon.Shrivtiel, p. 188 Said Akl created a Latin-based alphabet for Lebanese and used it in a newspaper he founded, Lebnaan, as well as in some books he wrote. |
Arabic | Egypt | Egypt
After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and re-emphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. There was also the idea of finding a way to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but this was seen as too complicated to use.
A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made it difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization.Shrivtiel, p. 189
The idea that Romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. This effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet. In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic alphabet had strong connections to Arab values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189) in Muslim societies. |
Arabic | Sample text | Sample text
+From Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human RightsModern Standard Arabic, Arabic scriptALA-LC transliterationEnglishAll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. |
Arabic | See also | See also
Arabic Ontology
Arabic diglossia
Arabic language influence on the Spanish language
Arabic Language International Council
Arabic literature
Arabic–English Lexicon
Arabist
A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
Glossary of Islam
International Association of Arabic Dialectology
List of Arab newspapers
List of Arabic-language television channels
List of Arabic given names
List of countries where Arabic is an official language
Arabic-based creole languages
Varieties of Arabic
List of French words of Arabic origin
Replacement of loanwords in Turkish |
Arabic | Notes | Notes |
Arabic | Further reading | Further reading |
Arabic | References | References |
Arabic | Citations | Citations |
Arabic | Sources | Sources
Suileman, Yasir. Arabic, Self and Identity: A Study in Conflict and Displacement. Oxford University Press, 2011. .
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Arabic | External links | External links
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Arabic | Table of Content | Short description, Classification, History, Old Arabic, Classical Arabic, Standardization, Spread, Development, Neo-Arabic, Nahda, Classical, Modern Standard and spoken Arabic, Status and usage, Diglossia, Status in the Arab world vis-à-vis other languages, As a foreign language, Vocabulary, Lexicography, Pre-modern Arabic lexicography, Western lexicography of Arabic, Modern Arabic lexicography, Loanwords, Influence on other languages, Spoken varieties, Koiné, Dialect groups, Phonology, Grammar, Literary Arabic, Nouns and adjectives, Verbs, Derivation, Colloquial varieties, Writing system {{anchor, Calligraphy, Romanization, Numerals, Arabic alphabet and nationalism, Lebanon, Egypt, Sample text, See also, Notes, Further reading, References, Citations, Sources, External links |
Alfred Hitchcock | Short description | Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director. He is widely regarded as 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", Hitchcock became as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo appearances in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65). 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 copywriter before entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. His directorial debut was the British–German 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 British "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 also received Oscar nominations for Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).
Hitchcock's other notable films include Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Frenzy (1972), all of which were also financially successful and are highly regarded by film historians. Hitchcock made a number of films with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant, four with James Stewart, three with Ingrid Bergman and three consecutively with Grace Kelly. 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 world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics. , nine of his films had been selected for preservation in the United 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 of that year, four months before his death on 29 April 1980. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Biography | Biography |
Alfred Hitchcock | Early life: 1899–1919 | Early life: 1899–1919 |
Alfred Hitchcock | Early childhood and education | Early childhood and education
thumb|upright|William Hitchcock, probably with his first son, William, outside the family shop in London, 1900; the sign above the store says "W. Hitchcock's". The Hitchcocks used the pony to deliver groceries.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, which was then part of Essex (now part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest). He was the son of greengrocer and poulterer, William Edgar Hitchcock (1862–1914) and Emma Jane (née Whelan; 1863–1942). The household was "characterised by an atmosphere of discipline". He had an older brother named William John (1888–1943) and an older sister named Ellen Kathleen (1892–1979) who used the nickname "Nellie". His parents were both Roman Catholics with English and Irish ancestry. His father was a greengrocer, as his grandfather had been.; There was a large extended family, including uncle John Hitchcock with his five-bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road in Putney, complete with a maid, cook, chauffeur, and gardener. Every summer, his uncle rented a seaside house for the family in Cliftonville, Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals.
thumb|left|Petrol station at the site of 517 High Road, Leytonstone, where Hitchcock was born; commemorative mural at nos. 527–533 (right)
Describing himself as a well-behaved 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 with a lifelong phobia of law enforcement, and he told Tom Snyder in 1973 that he was "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the law" and that he would refuse to even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket.For the police story: ; ; Cavett, Dick (8 June 1972). "Interview with Alfred Hitchcock", The Dick Cavett Show, ABC, 00:06:52 .
For the Snyder interview: Snyder, Tom (1973). "Alfred Hitchcock interview", Tomorrow, NBC, 00:01:55 . When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fish-and-chip shop and fishmongers' respectively; they lived above the former. Hitchcock attended 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 Hitchcock was eleven, this time to Stepney, and on 5 October 1910 he was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline.; As corporal punishment, the priests used a flat, hard, springy tool made of gutta-percha and known as a "ferula" which struck the whole palm; punishment was 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; biographer Donald Spoto says he was deliberately enrolled as a ten-year-old because he was a year behind with his schooling. While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or slightly above-average, 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."
Hitchcock's favourite subject was geography and he became interested in maps and the timetables of trains, trams and buses; according to John Russell Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the Orient Express. He 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", he would whisper "Woodford, Hampstead"Woodford being the terminus of the route 23 tram, and Hampstead the end of route 3.Patrick McGilligan, 2003. Buckley, R. J. 1984. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (). Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Henley's | 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 book-length interview in 1962, he told François 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 political 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").; "Military service (medical grading") , Hansard, vol. 107, 20 June 1918, 607–642. 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 in-house 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 müde Tod (released in Britain in 1921 as Destiny). |
Alfred Hitchcock | Inter-war career: 1919–1939 | Inter-war career: 1919–1939 |
Alfred Hitchcock | Famous Players–Lasky | Famous Players–Lasky
thumb|alt=An early 1920s image of Hitchcock while directing his film titled Number 13|Hitchcock (right) during the making of Number 13 in London
While still at Henley's, he read in a trade paper that Famous Players–Lasky, 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 title-card designer.
Donald Spoto wrote that most of the staff were Americans with strict job specifications, but the English workers were encouraged to try their hand at anything, which meant that Hitchcock gained experience as a co-writer, 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 problems - the 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 ... [n]one other than Alfred Hitchcock". |
Alfred Hitchcock | Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany | Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany
thumb|left|Hitchcock sculpture at the site of Gainsborough Pictures, Poole Street, Hoxton, north London
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, writing 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 The Last Laugh (1924).; ; also see 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 co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka at the Geiselgasteig studio near Munich. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was assistant director-editor. 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". In March 1926, the British film magazine Picturegoer ran an article entitled "Alfred the Great" by the film critic Cedric Belfrage, who praised Hitchcock for possessing "such a complete grasp of all the different branches of film technique that he is able to take far more control of his production than the average director of four times his experience." 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 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, Adrian Brunel and Walter Mycroft. Hitchcock recognised the value in cultivating his own brand, with the director aggressively promoting himself during this period. In a 1925 London Film Society meeting he declared directors were what mattered most in making films, with Donald Spoto writing that Hitchcock proclaimed, "We make a film succeed. The name of the director should be associated in the public's mind with a quality product. Actors come and go, but the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audience."
Hitchcock established himself as a name director with his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). The film concerns the hunt for a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who, 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. Hitchcock had wanted the leading man to be guilty, or for the film at least to end ambiguously, but the star was Ivor Novello, a matinée 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. Upon its release, the trade journal Bioscope wrote: "It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made". 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." In a strategy for self-publicity, The Lodger saw him make his first cameo appearance in a film, where he sat in a newsroom.
Continuing to market his brand following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock wrote a letter to the London Evening News in November 1927 about his filmmaking, participated in studio-produced publicity, and by December 1927 he developed the original sketch of his widely recognised profile which he introduced by sending it to friends and colleagues as a Christmas present. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Marriage | Marriage
thumb|Hitchcock and Reville on their wedding day, Brompton Oratory, 2 December 1926
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 flat 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 eleven acres on Stroud Lane, Shamley Green, Surrey, for £2,500.; ; Their daughter and only child, Patricia (Pat) Alma Hitchcock, was born on 7 July that year. Pat died on 9 August 2021 at the age of 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 co-wrote on many of Hitchcock's films, including Shadow of a Doubt, Suspicion and The 39 Steps. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Early sound films | Early sound films
thumb|upright|left|alt=An advertisement for the film Blackmail Surrounding text describes the film as "A Romance of Scotland Yard" and "The Powerful Talking Picture"|Advertisement for Blackmail (1929)
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).; also see ; Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, which includes an early example of a red telephone box being used for criminal activity, while the climax takes 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 the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film to create tension, with a gossipy woman (Phyllis Monkman) stressing the word "knife" in her 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.
thumb|upright=0.8|Madeleine Carroll (the archetypal "Hitchcock blonde") and Robert Donat in The 39 Steps (1935)
In 1933, Hitchcock signed a multi-film contract with Gaumont-British, 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 US. It also established the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, 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". John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps on which the film is loosely based, met with Hitchcock on set, and attended the high-profile premiere at the New Gallery Cinema in London. Upon viewing the film, the author said it had improved on the book. This film was one of the first to introduce the "MacGuffin" plot device, a term coined by the English screenwriter and Hitchcock collaborator 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. In his positive review of Sabotage for The Spectator, the writer and journalist Graham Greene identified the children's matinée scene as an "ingenious and pathetic twist stamped as Mr Hitchcock's own". (reprinted in: ) Secret Agent starred Madeleine Carroll and John Gielgud, with Peter Lorre playing Gielgud's deranged assistant, and typical Hitchcockian themes include mistaken identity, trains and a "Hitchcock blonde"."'Secret Agent' – Exciting Spy Film by Alfred Hitchcock", The Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1936, p. 13; "New Films in London", The Times, 11 May 1936, p. 10; and "'Secret Agent' at the Gaumont", The Manchester Guardian, 13 October 1936, p. 13
thumb|left|Alma Reville, Joan Harrison, Hitchcock, and Pat Hitchcock, 24 August 1937
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 crime 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.
thumb|Margaret Lockwood (middle) and Michael Redgrave (right) in a publicity shot for The Lady Vanishes (1938)
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 in the world." The film was based on the novel The Wheel Spins (1936) written by Ethel Lina White, and starred Michael Redgrave (in his film debut) and Margaret Lockwood.
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 June 1938, Hitchcock sailed to New York aboard the RMS Queen Mary, 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 four-film contract, approximately $40,000 for each picture (). Before finalising any American deal, Hitchcock had one last film to make in England, as director of the Charles Laughton-produced picture Jamaica Inn (1939), which he had signed on to make in May 1938, right before his first trip to the US. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Early Hollywood years: 1939–1945 | Early Hollywood years: 1939–1945 |
Alfred Hitchcock | Selznick contract | Selznick contract
Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in April 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood.. The Hitchcocks lived in 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 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. As 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 me—and it shows you the amount of control—he said I was the 'only director' he'd 'trust with a film'."
thumb|Trailer for Rebecca (1940)
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 insisted 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 naïve 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Early war years | 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 English-style 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).
thumb|upright|left|Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in a publicity shot for Suspicion (1941)
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 Johnnie 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, according to the book, Before the Fact by Francis Iles, but the studio felt that Grant's image would be tarnished by that. Hitchcock would have preferred to end with the wife's murder. Instead, the actions that she found suspicious are a reflection of his own despair and his plan to commit suicide. 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 wanted Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck or Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney to star, but was forced by Universal to use Universal contract player Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, a freelancer who signed a one-picture deal with the studio, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas. The story depicts a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock took a three-day 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, "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 make-up man Guy Pearce.
thumb|Shadow of a Doubt (1943) trailer with Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright|alt=Shadow of a Doubt trailer depicting Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright
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 back 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 U-boat 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 was solved by having Hitchcock's image appear in a newspaper that William Bendix is reading in the boat, showing the director in a before-and-after advertisement for "Reduco-Obesity 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Wartime non-fiction films | Wartime non-fiction 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 "treatment 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 post-war 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 full-length version of the film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was restored in 2014 by scholars at the Imperial War Museum. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953 | Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953 |
Alfred Hitchcock | Later Selznick films | Later Selznick films
thumb|left|Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945)
Hitchcock worked for David Selznick again when he directed Spellbound (1945), which explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. 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 point-of-view 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 out-sized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-coloured red on some copies of the black-and-white film. The original musical score by Miklós Rózsa 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 François Truffaut that Selznick sold him, Ingrid Bergman, 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Transatlantic Pictures | Transatlantic Pictures
thumb|A typical shot from Rope (1948) with James Stewart turning his back to the fixed camera|alt=A typical scene from Rope showing James Stewart
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 film. 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 to 10 minutes each; a 10-minute 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 19th-century Australia, also uses the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black-and-white for several years. Transatlantic 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 "boy-next-door" roles, played the villain. I Confess (1953) was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Peak years: 1954–1964 | Peak years: 1954–1964 |
Alfred Hitchcock | ''Dial M for Murder'' and ''Rear Window'' | Dial M for Murder and Rear Window
thumb|left|alt= Still image from the film Read Window featuring Stewart and Kelly|James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954)
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 self-defence, 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 Ritter and Raymond Burr. Stewart's character is a photographer named 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 close-ups 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 | ''Alfred Hitchcock Presents'' | Alfred Hitchcock Presents
thumb|upright|The Hitchcocks with their daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughters, c. 1955–1956
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 title-sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile (he drew 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 (1818–1893).
His introductions always included some sort of wry humour, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair, while two are shown with a sign "Two chairs—no 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 short-story 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 Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, a monthly digest specialising in crime and detective fiction. Hitchcock's television series were very profitable, and his foreign-language versions of books were bringing revenues of up to $100,000 a year (). |
Alfred Hitchcock | From ''To Catch a Thief'' to ''Vertigo'' | 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 thrill-seeking 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 good-natured 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 The 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 low-key black-and-white production based on a real-life 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.thumb|alt=Still image from the film Vertigo|Kim Novak by the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo (1958)
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 Pygmalion-like 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 Sebastián International Film Festival, and Hitchcock won the Silver Seashell prize. Vertigo is considered a classic, but it attracted mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time; the critic from Variety opined that the film was "too slow and too long". Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it was "devilishly far-fetched", 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | ''North by Northwest'' and ''Psycho'' | North by Northwest and Psycho
After Vertigo, the rest of 1958 was a difficult year for Hitchcock. During pre-production 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.
thumb|upright|alt= Photo of Alfred Hitchcock & Janet Leigh from the 1960 film Psycho|Hitchcock shooting the shower scene of Psycho (1960)
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 two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056 (equivalent to $ million in ), setting a non-holiday gross record for that theatre. Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining".
Psycho (1960) is arguably Hitchcock's best-known 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 black-and-white 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 horror-film genre. The film proved popular with audiences, with lines stretching outside theatres as viewers waited for the next showing. It broke box-office 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 Hitchcock'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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Truffaut interview | Truffaut interview
On 13 August 1962, Hitchcock's 63rd birthday, the French director François Truffaut began a 50-hour 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 Hitchcock was not simply the mass-market 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". |
Alfred Hitchcock | ''The Birds'' | The Birds
thumb|left|Trailer for The Birds (1963), in which Hitchcock discusses humanity's treatment of "our feathered friends"
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 October 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 HBO/BBC television film, The Girl (2012), depicted Hedren's experiences on set; she said that Hitchcock became 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 co-star in Marnie, said: "[N]othing 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 elbow-length 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | ''Marnie'' | Marnie
thumb|Trailer for Marnie (1964)
In June 1962, Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in Marnie (1964). Hedren had signed an exclusive seven-year, $500-a-week contract with Hitchcock 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 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 during 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.
thumb|upright|The Hitchcocks with First Lady Pat Nixon and first daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower in 1969
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!", citing Evan Hunter (1997). Me and Hitch. When Hunter submitted two versions of the script, one without the rape scene, Hitchcock replaced him with Jay Presson Allen. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Later years: 1966–1980 | Later years: 1966–1980 |
Alfred Hitchcock | Final films | 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 War-related themes. Torn Curtain, with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, precipitated the bitter end of the twelve-year 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 both critics and the studio.
thumb|upright|left|Hitchcock with Karen Black during a press junket for Family Plot (1976)
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 murder-thriller genre. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), 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 Leigh-Hunt 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 mid-1960s. Yet, Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such material 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 taxi-driver 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Knighthood and death | Knighthood and death
thumb| by Jack Mitchell 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 published 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 London—he had a pacemaker and was being given cortisone injections for his arthritis—so 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 Sullivan, 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. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Filmmaking | Filmmaking |
Alfred Hitchcock | Style and themes | Style and themes
The "Hitchcockian" style includes the use of editing and 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's film production career evolved from small-scale silent films to financially significant sound films. Hitchcock remarked that he was influenced by early filmmakers George Méliès, D. W. Griffith and Alice Guy-Blaché. 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; he 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 the 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." In a 1963 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Hitchcock was asked how in spite of appearing to be a pleasant, innocuous man, he seemed to enjoy making films involving suspense and terrifying crime. He responded:
thumb|Hitchcock The Director mosaic in the London Underground
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 fifty-three films, eleven revolved 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 was 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 retained a feeling of ambivalence towards homosexuality, despite working with gay actors throughout 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 monster-mothers". 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 authority figures such as policemen and politicians; a theme which he has explored. Also, he used the "MacGuffin"—the use of an object, person or event to keep the plot moving along even if it was non-essential to the story.
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). |
Alfred Hitchcock | Representation of women | 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 double-crosser 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. "The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again", Roger Ebert wrote in 1996: "They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated."
thumb|left|Kim Novak and James Stewart in Vertigo (1958)
Hitchcock's films often feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers, such as Norman Bates in Psycho. In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him. In The Birds, the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself from a clinging mother (Jessica Tandy). The killer in Frenzy has a loathing of women but idolises his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion Lorne). Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflicting relationship with his mother, who is (rightly) suspicious of his new bride, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). |
Alfred Hitchcock | Relationship with actors | Relationship with actors
Hitchcock became known for having remarked that "actors should be treated like cattle". During the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Carole Lombard brought three cows onto the set wearing the name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and Gene Raymond, the stars of the film, to surprise him. In an episode of The Dick Cavett Show, originally broadcast on 8 June 1972, Dick Cavett stated as fact that Hitchcock had once called actors cattle. Hitchcock responded by saying that, at one time, he had been accused of calling actors cattle. "I said that I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. What I probably said, was that all actors should be treated like cattle...In a nice way of course." He then described Carole Lombard's joke, with a smile.
Hitchcock believed that actors should concentrate on their performances and leave work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. He told Bryan Forbes in 1967: "I remember discussing with a method actor how he was taught and so forth. He said, 'We're taught using improvisation. We are given an idea and then we are turned loose to develop in any way we want to.' I said, 'That's not acting. That's writing.'"
Recalling their experiences on Lifeboat for Charles Chandler, author of It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock A Personal Biography, Walter Slezak said that Hitchcock "knew more about how to help an actor than any director I ever worked with", and Hume Cronyn dismissed the idea that Hitchcock was not concerned with his actors as "utterly fallacious", describing at length the process of rehearsing and filming Lifeboat.
Critics observed that, despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors, actors who worked with him often gave brilliant performances. He used the same actors in many of his films; Cary Grant and James Stewart both worked with Hitchcock four times, and Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly three. James Mason said that Hitchcock regarded actors as "animated props". For Hitchcock, the actors were part of the film's setting. He told François Truffaut: "The chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds. He should be willing to be used and wholly integrated into the picture by the director and the camera. He must allow the camera to determine the proper emphasis and the most effective dramatic highlights." |
Alfred Hitchcock | Writing, storyboards and production | Writing, storyboards and production
Hitchcock planned his scripts in detail with his writers. In Writing with Hitchcock (2001), Steven DeRosa noted that Hitchcock supervised them through every draft, asking that they tell the story visually. Hitchcock told Roger Ebert in 1969:
Hitchcock's films were extensively storyboarded to the finest detail. He was reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder, since he did not need to, although in publicity photos he was shown doing so. He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there were no alternative takes to consider.Krohn, Bill, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 9. cited in
thumb|left|upright|alt= Image of Hitchcock pictured under Mount Rushmore during the filming of North by Northwest|Hitchcock at Mount Rushmore filming North by Northwest (1959)
This view of Hitchcock as a director who relied more on pre-production than on the actual production itself has been challenged by Bill Krohn, the American correspondent of French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, in his book Hitchcock at Work. After investigating script revisions, notes to other production personnel written by or to Hitchcock, and other production material, Krohn observed that Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film was originally envisioned. He noted that the myth of storyboards in relation to Hitchcock, often regurgitated by generations of commentators on his films, was to a great degree perpetuated by Hitchcock himself or the publicity arm of the studios. For example, the celebrated crop-spraying sequence of North by Northwest was not storyboarded at all. After the scene was filmed, the publicity department asked Hitchcock to make storyboards to promote the film, and Hitchcock in turn hired an artist to match the scenes in detail.
Even when storyboards were made, scenes that were shot differed from them significantly. Krohn's analysis of the production of Hitchcock classics like Notorious reveals that Hitchcock was flexible enough to change a film's conception during its production. Another example Krohn notes is the American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, whose shooting schedule commenced without a finished script and moreover went over schedule, something that, as Krohn notes, was not an uncommon occurrence on many of Hitchcock's films, including Strangers on a Train and Topaz. While Hitchcock did do a great deal of preparation for all his films, he was fully cognisant that the actual film-making process often deviated from the best-laid plans and was flexible to adapt to the changes and needs of production as his films were not free from the normal hassles faced and common routines used during many other film productions.
thumb|alt= Close-up of Hitchcock for a media clip of a 1966 interview|Hitchcock interview,
Krohn's work also sheds light on Hitchcock's practice of generally shooting in chronological order, which he notes sent many films over budget and over schedule and, more importantly, differed from the standard operating procedure of Hollywood in the Studio System Era. Equally important is Hitchcock's tendency to shoot alternative takes of scenes. This differed from coverage in that the films were not necessarily shot from varying angles so as to give the editor options to shape the film how they chose (often under the producer's aegis). Rather they represented Hitchcock's tendency to give himself options in the editing room, where he would provide advice to his editors after viewing a rough cut of the work.
According to Krohn, this and a great deal of other information revealed through his research of Hitchcock's personal papers, script revisions and the like refute the notion of Hitchcock as a director who was always in control of his films, whose vision of his films did not change during production, which Krohn notes has remained the central long-standing myth of Alfred Hitchcock. Both his fastidiousness and attention to detail also found their way into each film poster for his films. Hitchcock preferred to work with the best talent of his day—film poster designers such as Bill Gold and Saul Bass—who would produce posters that accurately represented his films. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Legacy | Legacy |
Alfred Hitchcock | Awards and honours | Awards and honours
thumb|left|upright=0.9|One of Hitchcock's stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Hitchcock was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960 with two stars: one for television and a second for motion pictures. In 1978, John Russell Taylor described him as "the most universally recognizable person in the world" and "a straightforward middle-class Englishman who just happened to be an artistic genius". In 2002, MovieMaker named him the most influential director of all time, and a 2007 The Daily Telegraph critics' poll ranked him Britain's greatest director. David Gritten, the newspaper's film critic, wrote: "Unquestionably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands, Hitchcock did more than any director to shape modern cinema, which would be utterly different without him. His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else." In 1992, the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll ranked Hitchcock at No. 4 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time. In 2002, Hitchcock was ranked second in the critics' top ten poll and fifth in the directors' top ten poll in the list of "The Greatest Directors of All Time" compiled by Sight & Sound. Hitchcock was voted the "Greatest Director of 20th Century" in a poll conducted by Japanese film magazine kinema Junpo. In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ranked Hitchcock at No. 1 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. Hitchcock was ranked at No. 2 on Empires "Top 40 Greatest Directors of All-Time" list in 2005. In 2007, Total Film ranked Hitchcock at No. 1 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.
thumb|right|An English Heritage blue plaque marks where Hitchcock lived at 153 Cromwell Road, Kensington, London.
He won two Golden Globes, eight Laurel Awards, and five lifetime achievement awards, including the first BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award in 1971, and, in 1979, an AFI Life Achievement Award. He was nominated five times for an Academy Award for Best Director. Rebecca, nominated for eleven Oscars, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940; another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, was also nominated that year. By 2021, nine of his films had been selected for preservation by the US National Film Registry: Rebecca (1940; inducted 2018), Shadow of a Doubt (1943; inducted 1991), Notorious (1946; inducted 2006), Strangers on a Train (1951; inducted 2021), Rear Window (1954; inducted 1997), Vertigo (1958; inducted 1989), North by Northwest (1959; inducted 1995), Psycho (1960; inducted 1992) and The Birds (1963; inducted 2016).
In 2001, a series of 17 mosaics of Hitchcock's life and work, which are located in Leytonstone tube station in the London Underground, was commissioned by the London Borough of Waltham Forest. In 2012, Hitchcock was selected by artist Sir Peter Blake, author of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, to appear in a new version of the cover, along with other British cultural figures, and he was featured that year in a BBC Radio 4 series, The New Elizabethans, as someone "whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character". In June 2013 nine restored versions of Hitchcock's early silent films, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), were shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre; known as "The Hitchcock 9", the travelling tribute was organised by the British Film Institute. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Archives | Archives
The Alfred Hitchcock Collection is housed at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood, California. It includes home movies, 16mm film shot on the set of Blackmail (1929) and Frenzy (1972), and the earliest known colour footage of Hitchcock. The Academy Film Archive has preserved many of his home movies. In 1984, Pat Hitchcock donated her father's papers to the academy's Margaret Herrick Library. The David O. Selznick and the Ernest Lehman collections housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, contain material related to Hitchcock's work on the production of The Paradine Case, Rebecca, Spellbound, North by Northwest and Family Plot. |
Alfred Hitchcock | Hitchcock portrayals | Hitchcock portrayals
Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock (2012)
Toby Jones in The Girl (2012)
Roger Ashton-Griffiths in Grace of Monaco (2014)
EpicLLOYD in the YouTube comedy series Epic Rap Battles of History (2014) |
Alfred Hitchcock | Filmography | Filmography |
Alfred Hitchcock | Films | Films
Silent films
Sound films |
Alfred Hitchcock | See also | See also
Alfred Hitchcock's unrealized projects
List of cameo appearances by Alfred Hitchcock
List of film director and actor collaborations
Remakes of films by Alfred Hitchcock
List of Academy Award winners and nominees from Great Britain |
Alfred Hitchcock | Notes and sources | Notes and sources |
Alfred Hitchcock | Notes | Notes |
Alfred Hitchcock | References | References |
Alfred Hitchcock | Works cited | Works cited
Biographies (chronological)
Miscellaneous
Free PDF download
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Alfred Hitchcock | Further reading | Further reading |
Alfred Hitchcock | Articles | Articles
Hitchcock's Style – BFI Screenonline
Alfred Hitchcock: England's Biggest and Best Director Goes to Hollywood – Life, 20 November 1939, p. 33-43
Alfred Hitchcock Now Says Actors Are Children, Not Cattle – The Boston Globe, 1 June 1958, p. A-11
'Twas Alfred Hitchcock Week in London – Variety, 17 August 1966, p. 16
McArthur, Colin, "The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm", in Film Studies no. 2, (2000), pp. 15 - 28, |
Alfred Hitchcock | Books | Books
Deflem, Mathieu. 2016. "Alfred Hitchcock: Visions of Guilt and Innocence." pp. 203–227 in Framing Law and Crime: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by Caroline Joan S. Picart, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, and Cecil Greek. Latham, MD; Madison, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Slavoj Žižek et al.:Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, London and New York, Verso, 2nd ed.. 2010. |
Alfred Hitchcock | External links | External links
Alfred Hitchcock at the British Film Institute
Alfred Hitchcock Papers from Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections (Details (archived 2024))
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Alfred Hitchcock | Table of Content | Short description, Biography, Early life: 1899–1919, Early childhood and education, Henley's, Inter-war career: 1919–1939, Famous Players–Lasky, Gainsborough Pictures and work in Germany, Marriage, Early sound films, Early Hollywood years: 1939–1945, Selznick contract, Early war years, Wartime non-fiction films, Post-war Hollywood years: 1945–1953, Later Selznick films, Transatlantic Pictures, Peak years: 1954–1964, ''Dial M for Murder'' and ''Rear Window'', ''Alfred Hitchcock Presents'', From ''To Catch a Thief'' to ''Vertigo'', ''North by Northwest'' and ''Psycho'', Truffaut interview, ''The Birds'', ''Marnie'', Later years: 1966–1980, Final films, Knighthood and death, Filmmaking, Style and themes, Representation of women, Relationship with actors, Writing, storyboards and production, Legacy, Awards and honours, Archives, Hitchcock portrayals, Filmography, Films, See also, Notes and sources, Notes, References, Works cited, Further reading, Articles, Books, External links |
Anaconda | pp | Anacondas or water boas are a group of large boas of the genus Eunectes. They are a semiaquatic group of snakes found in tropical South America. Three to five extant and one extinct species are currently recognized, including one of the largest snakes in the world, E. murinus, the green anaconda. |
Anaconda | Description | Description
Although the name applies to a group of snakes, it is often used to refer only to one species, in particular, the common or green anaconda (Eunectes murinus), which is the largest snake in the world by weight, and the second longest after the reticulated python. |
Anaconda | Origin | Origin
The recent fossil record of Eunectes is relatively sparse compared to other vertebrates and other genera of snakes. The fossil record of this group is effected by an artifact called the Pull of the Recent. Fossils of recent ancestors are not known, so the living species 'pull' the historical range of the genus to the present. |
Anaconda | Etymology | Etymology
thumb|upright=2.5|An anaconda skeleton at the Redpath Museum
The name Eunectes is derived from .
The South American names anacauchoa and anacaona were suggested in an account by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. The idea of a South American origin was questioned by Henry Walter Bates who, in his travels in South America, failed to find any similar name in use. The word anaconda is derived from the name of a snake from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) that John Ray described in Latin in his (1693) as .
Ray used a catalogue of snakes from the Leyden museum supplied by Dr. Tancred Robinson. The description of its habit was based on Andreas Cleyer, who in 1684 described a gigantic snake that crushed large animals by coiling around their bodies and crushing their bones. Henry Yule in his 1886 work Hobson-Jobson, notes that the word became more popular due to a piece of fiction published in 1768 in the Scots Magazine by a certain R. Edwin. Edwin described a 'tiger' being crushed to death by an anaconda, when there were never any tigers in Sri Lanka.
Yule and Frank Wall noted that the snake was a python and suggested a Tamil origin meaning elephant killer. A Sinhalese origin was also suggested by Donald Ferguson who pointed out that the word ( lightning/large and stem/trunk) was used in Sri Lanka for the small whip snake (Ahaetulla pulverulenta) and somehow got misapplied to the python before myths were created.
The name commonly used for the anaconda in Brazil is sucuri, sucuriju or sucuriuba.
thumb|A anaconda skeleton (center) on display at the Museum of Osteology, alongside other species for comparison |
Anaconda | Distribution and habitat | Distribution and habitat
Found in tropical South America from Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela south to Argentina. |
Anaconda | Feeding | Feeding
All five species are aquatic snakes that prey on other aquatic animals, including fish, river fowl, and caiman. Videos exist of anacondas preying on domestic animals such as goats and sometimes even young jaguars that venture too close to the water. |
Anaconda | Relationship with humans | Relationship with humans
While encounters between people and anacondas may be dangerous, they do not regularly hunt humans. Nevertheless, threat from anacondas is a familiar trope in comics, movies, and adventure stories (often published in pulp magazines or adventure magazines) set in the Amazon jungle. Local communities and some European explorers have given accounts of giant anacondas, legendary snakes of much greater proportion than any confirmed specimen.
Although charismatic, there is little known on the biology of wild anacondas. Most of our knowledge comes from the work of Dr. Jesús A. Rivas and his team working in the Venezuelan Llanos. |
Anaconda | Species | Species
SpeciesTaxon authorCommon nameGeographic rangeImageE. akayimaRivas et al., 2024Northern green anacondaEcuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and northern Brazil200px|centerE. beniensis (=E. notaeus?)Dirksen, 2002Bolivian anacondaSouth America in the Departments of Beni and Pando in Bolivia200px|centerE. deschauenseei (=E. notaeus?)Dunn and Conant, 1936Dark-spotted anacondaSouth America in northern Brazil and coastal French Guiana200px|centerE. murinus(Linnaeus, 1758)Green anacondaPeru, Bolivia, French Guiana, Suriname and Brazil200px|centerE. notaeusCope, 1862Yellow anacondaSouth America in eastern Bolivia, central-western Brazil, Paraguay and northeastern Argentina200px|center†E. stirtoniHoffstetter and Rage, 1977This species is extinct; its fossils have been found in the La Venta fauna (Miocene) in Colombia. Its validity, however, is questionable.
Rivas et al. revised the taxonomy of Eunectes, describing a new species of green anaconda (Eunectes akayima) and merging E. deschauenseei and E. beniensis with E. notaeus, which resulted in the recognition of only three species of anaconda. The result of their phylogenetic analysis is represented below:
In a response paper, Dubois et al. questioned the results of the mtDNA analysis above and the validity of Eunectes akayima. The name of the new species was considered a nomen nudum. |
Anaconda | Mating system | Mating system
thumb|upright=1.2|Eunectes murinus in Colombia
The mating seasons in Eunectes varies both between species and within species depending on locality, although the trend appears to be the dry season. The green anaconda (E. murinus) is the most well-studied species of Eunectes in terms of their mating system, followed by the yellow anaconda (E. notaeus); unfortunately E. deschauenseei and E. beniensis are much less common, making the specific details of their mating systems less well understood. |
Anaconda | Sexual dimorphism | Sexual dimorphism
Sexual size dimorphism in Eunectes is the opposite of most other vertebrates. Females are larger than males in most snakes, and green anacondas (E. murinus) have one of the most extreme size differences, where females average roughly and males average only around . This size difference has several benefits for both sexes. Large size in females leads to higher fecundity and larger offspring; as a result male mate choice favours larger females. Large size is also favoured in males because larger males tend to be more successful at reproducing, both because of their size advantage in endurance rivalry and their advantage in sperm competition because larger males are able to produce more sperm. One reason that males are so much smaller in Eunectes is that large males can be confused for females, which interferes with their ability to mate when smaller males mistakenly coil them in breeding balls; as a result, there is an optimum size for males where they are large enough to successfully compete, but not large enough to risk other males trying to mate with them. |
Anaconda | Breeding balls | Breeding balls
During the mating season female anacondas release pheromones to attract males for breeding, which can result in polyandrous breeding balls; these breeding balls have been observed in E. murinus, E. notaeus, and E. deschauenseei, and likely also occur in E. beniensis. In the green anaconda (E. murinus), up to 13 males have been observed in a breeding ball, which have been recorded to last two weeks on average. In anaconda breeding balls, several males coil around one female and attempt to position themselves as close to her cloaca as possible where they use their pelvic spurs to "tickle" and encourage her to allow penetration. Since there are often many males present and only one male can mate with the female at a time, the success of a male often depends on his persistence and endurance, because physical combat is not a part of the Eunectes mating ritual, apart from firmly pushing against other males in an attempt to secure the best position on the female. |
Anaconda | Sexual cannibalism | Sexual cannibalism
thumb| green anaconda skeleton on display at Museum of Osteology with other squamates and reptiles.
Cannibalism is quite easy in anacondas since females are so much larger than males, but sexual cannibalism has only been confirmed in E. murinus. Females gain the direct benefit of a post-copulatory high-protein meal when they consume their mates, along with the indirect benefit of additional resources to use for the formation of offspring; cannibalism in general (outside of the breeding season) has been confirmed in all but E. deschauenseei, although it is likely that it occurs in all Eunectes species. |
Anaconda | Asexual reproduction | Asexual reproduction
Although sexual reproduction is by far the most common in Eunectes, E. murinus has been observed to undergo facultative parthenogenesis. In both cases, the females had lived in isolation from other anacondas for over eight years, and DNA analysis showed that the few fully formed offspring were genetically identical to the mothers; although this is not commonly observed, it is likely possible in all species of Eunectes and several other species of Boidae. |
Anaconda | Indigenous mythology | Indigenous mythology
According to the founding myth of the Huni Kuin, a man named Yube fell in love with an anaconda woman and was turned into an anaconda as well. He began to live with her in the deep world of waters. In this world, Yube discovered a hallucinogenic drink with healing powers and access to knowledge. One day, without telling his anaconda wife, Yube decided to return to the land of men and resume his old human form. The myth also explains the origin of cipó or ayahuasca — a hallucinogenic drink taken ritualistically by the Huni Kuin.As visões da anaconda: a narrativa escrita indígena no Brasil. Por Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza. Revista Semear n°7O que nos diz a arte Kaxinawa sobre a relação entre identidade e alteridade? Por Elsje Maria Lagrou. Mana vol. 8 n°1 Rio de Janeiro abril de 2002 ISSN 0104-9313. |
Anaconda | See also | See also
Jaguar, a competitor or predator |
Anaconda | Notes | Notes |
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