CHAPTER 10 - Three Elements of Hitchcock

The drastic transformation in the cinema industry during the ’60s, in so many ways, had delayed Hitchcock's films’ true artfulness and elements of pure cinema to be fully appreciated by the viewers and critics.

So much so that one of his best works, Vertigo (1958) a story about a past trauma and psychosis, wasn't considered to be anything special until its re-release in 1983. Today it’s not only named Hitchcock's masterpiece by the cinematic community but also at the time claimed the throne of ”Greatest Films of All Time" from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

One of the aspects that made Hitchcock’s work so unique was the use the camera as an extension of himself. It fetishized, expressed and focused on its interests in the same way a human would, which wasn't common at the time.

“If you can think you can hide what your prurient or your noble interests are in your work as a film director, you’re nuts! And he was one of the first guys that just said: ‘I'm gonna go with it, I gotta be me.’” says David Fincher about Hitchcock’s work.

Second… He was a true master of self-promotion. Hitchcock is one of the earliest to instinctively understand the power of branding. He embraced television appearances, put himself in his own movie trailers, made cameos and posed with the stars during set breaks.

“He created a comedic persona and created a name recognized and marketable, therefore every generation will encounter Alfred Hitchcock” as Ingo Kammerer points out.

But the most fascinating part of Hitchcock’s work was the way he designs his narrative, and how the audience engages with it. A neuroscientist, Uri Hasson, who studies the brain activities of subjects while they’re watching Hitchcock films, puts this in a scientific way:

“Hitchcock style of cinema is an experiment on the audience. He leads you to one place, then surprises you and take a turn; then he builds you up again and let it go. He doesn’t leave any area of freedom to the audience. The brains of the audience are constantly stimulated. It’s like a machine that forces you from one state to the other and take control of your brain and align it with the movie in a very powerful and complicated way.”

CHAPTER 9 - The Historical Context

The importance of the French New Wave Cinema, and the works of directors like Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda helped to construct a different type of filmmaking that changed the film industry to this day…

Instead of relying on the assumption that successful pieces of work have to come from big budgeted studios, and from the re-enactment of the stories based off literary pieces, these new auteurs rebelliously proved that quality filmmaking could be done with their own visions and grounded stories that touch on important subject matters, like pains of the past (trauma), sexual experiences, time and repressed memories that were extremely taboo at the time to expose on the big screen.

According to one critic Roger Ebert: “With the unconventional use of editing, using hard jump cuts and disrupting the expected smoothness, Resnais aimed to break the dreamlike-movie-watching state of the audience; making them conscious of the fact that they are watching a movie about real life.”

One other rebellion against the film industry, and to everything that was taboo at the time, was the short “Un Chien d’Andolou” which would later become the manifestation of the surrealist movement in cinema.

It’s was a film born of the visualization of the literal dreams of Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali which for the first time brought forward the dream logic, the subconscious and the hidden layers of life out in the open for everyone to face… And it was outrageous.

"For the first time in the history of the cinema, a director tries not to please but rather to alienate, offend nearly all potential spectators and wake them up. It’s disturbing, frustrating, maddening” wrote the critic Ado Kyrou.

Also a breakthrough in trauma documentaries “The Child of Rage”, the actual therapy footage of a 7-year-old Beth Thomas, a girl severely abused by her parents for years admitting her murderous thoughts against her little brother on camera; and “Century of the Self” a one of a kind documentary about the rise of psychoanalysis as a powerful means of persuasion for both governments and corporations using commercials and films.

CHAPTER 8 - The Inspiration & The Story

inspiration:

My current story is entirely based on the fact that, me finding out that I’ve been imitating an image of someone else for all my life, afraid of being exposed to who I really am.

What got my attention in my past work, are the common themes that were mesmerizingly repeating themselves… childhood innocence, lost identities, prophecies, magical journeys, searching for eternal happiness and one’s true purpose in life. And of course my tireless efforts to hide them in plain sight within my narratives.

But no more hiding!

Now I am inspired by artists who are not afraid to be themselves. Now I am inspired by artist who have the courage to expose the system and not being afraid by the consequences. My biggest inspiration in this life is Laura Poitras (hello NSA:) and her courageous subjects and her calm, distant, strong narrative and vision.

Bottom line is I am tired of being afraid… I just want to tell my story!

story:

A feature documentary about an adult filmmaker who starts life over again after recollecting a hidden childhood memory of his own; trying to learn how to live, tracing how he got here in the first place… One narrative simultaneously examining 3 perception of realities:

1) The journey (actual timeline of the documentary)

Narrating the story from the beginning, I wish to show how big of a silent issue ‘childhood traumas’ are in our daily conversation, how it affects the people who go through with it, and what is the role of our system in it.

This main part of the documentary is dark, calm and slow paced where the character begins a journey to find one’s true self and begins to heal the pain of the trauma.

2) The healing (the animation)

With the guidance of experts and neuroscientists, I wish to use Lucid Dreaming and re-enact my dreams to connect with my subconscious and visualize the trauma.

This will be a ‘Petit Prince’ like drawn ‘Don Chiote’ story of a child against an invisible monster who has been haunting him for his entire life. The illustrations of the dreams will be innocent, chivalrous and heroic.

3) The culprit (Hollywood)

On this part I wish to introduce a basic, formulated Hollywood movie about a college freshman who one day gets a surprise visit from his future self; to prevent him to go through the biggest trauma of his life that will change the entire outcome of his future forever.

The visuals of this ‘made up’ movie, as a contrast will be extremely commercial, and the snippets of the film that we’re going to see will aim to expose insider film industry tricks, subtle commercial messages and pre-designed triggering words that only aims to create an idealized unreachable idea of reality for its consumers.

Same 3 characters, in 3 different realities, in 3 different textures. One narrative.

hdigis.

keywords:

“childhood”, “memory”, “loss”, “childhood trauma”, “hidden trauma”, “story”, “narrative”, “storytelling”, “documentary”, “feature”, “subconscious”, “guardian angel”, “lucid dreaming”, “smells”, “choices”, “vulnerability”, “escape”, “reality”, “fiction”, “commercial”, “film”, “industry”, “starting over”, “revolt”, “pain”, “dreams”, “journey”, “adult”, “grounding”, “behavior”, “pattern”.

CHAPTER 7 - keywords. 150words. 300words.

150 words:

I’ve always been interested in the hidden reasons and motivations that drive people do the things that they do. In the same regard I’ve always found so fascinating the role that our childhood, the most vulnerable and the most impressionable part of our lives, plays in forming our world view as an adult.

But it was only after recently, and only after recollecting a hidden childhood memory of my own that I managed to develop a new and decent understanding of the role of our subconscious mind and started to pay more attention to it…

So now I want to further investigate the outside influences that shape our subconscious mind that eventually shapes our every decision that ultimately shapes the outcome of our lives... and I want to connect this question with, how do we form our new understanding of the world surviving through a trauma. I want to find out: Can it be fixed, can it be healed?

300 words:

A hidden childhood trauma is any experience that presents the child’s mind with a stimulus too powerful to be assimilated in a normal way hence resulting the subconscious mind taking over the system by blocking the memory from processing as normal.

But this protective action doesn’t come without its consequences. And this interference on the psyche of the child, by turning on the survival mode, creates a difficult threshold moving forward where the child has a hard time establishing a base of normality in his life therefore starts to gradually retreat from the real world.

Furthermore, this tendency of escaping the reality makes the child more likely to unconsciously buy-in and connect in a deeper level with the idealized fictional identities, goals and messaging that he has been constantly exposed through commercials, films and television.

And not so surprisingly most children with hidden childhood trauma, later in life, describe the period around their age of 20-30, as their darker moments in their lives; at which time they get out to the real world where for the first time and realize that the fantasy and the promise of a normal life that they were aspiring simply wasn't there like it was in the movies.

This is the journey of a hidden childhood trauma survivor, at this exact phase, starting life all over again trying to re-learn how to live as an adult.

This is the grounding efforts of a dreamer, connecting with its subconscious in order to find one’s true self and purpose in life while struggling to heal the pain of a trauma.

This is a revolt against an industry and an effort to create a road-map on how to reverse-engineer the obnoxious behavioral patterns that the commercial film industry carved into our minds for years.

keywords:

“childhood”, “memory”, “loss”, “childhood trauma”, “hidden trauma”, “story”, “narrative”, “storytelling”, “documentary”, “feature”, “subconscious”, “guardian angel”, “lucid dreaming”, “smells”, “choices”, “vulnerability”, “escape”, “reality”, “fiction”, “commercial”, “film”, “industry”, “starting over”, “revolt”, “pain”, “dreams”, “journey”, “adult”, “grounding”, “behavior”, “pattern”.

my inspiration:

For this project, I was inspired by a feature documentary called “Minding the Gap” where the filmmaker Bing Liu, is dealing with his own family trauma by exposing himself in front of the camera and connecting the story to his other passion skateboarding that made him survive his troubled childhood.

And I want to do the same, except, I want to go on a journey and make a film about my life long passion to make films that helped me survive my childhood and uncover the hidden motivations behind it.

Minding the Gap: bit.ly/2Nj6t9d