Discuss Psycho

Look at this image which comprises 9 sequential frames from minute 44 to minute 46 of Psycho.

These images demonstrate how incredibly precise Hitchcock was as a film-maker. He lines up the verticals in the shot of Norman in the kitchen with those in the shots of Marion's room and bathroom that both precede and follow the kitchen shot. And the room/bathroom shots and the kitchen shot are the same sorts of shots: relatively deep focus with a lot of darkness relatively close to the camera and to the sides of the frame with the light coming mainly from the deepest, recessional point in the center of the frame, i.e., from the bathroom, then the kitchen, then the bathroom again.

The shots rhyme visually, tying Marion and Norman together, notwithstanding that they've apparently separated for the night. We 'know' that they're not done with each other.

Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and David Fincher are probably the directors people most associate these days with a kind of extreme control of the frame and the contents of the image, which often manifests itself in highly symmetrical images. Sometimes you can all but see with Kubrick et al. that there's been a kind of graph-paper overlay of the image and every prop. and actor etc. has been placed at an intersection point of that graph/grid. Hitchcock's shot-making is just as precise and controlled as those film-makers but it's achieved in a more fluid way as Hitchcock and his DPs build visual rhymes out of the natural geometries of scenes and out of changing patterns of light and dark and focus and editing rather than simply by imposing a grid.

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