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How Does Alfred Hitchcock Use Of Suspense

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It can be argued that utilization of suspense is the single most connecting element in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. ?Suspense is a dramaturgy technique that plays of the difference in knowledge between the audience and the characters on the screen? (Allen
32). Hoffman and Fahr define suspense as: ?Suspense can be conceptualized as an enjoyable experience between hope and fear that relies on certain cognitive mechanisms and often goes along with autonomic, physiological arousal? (2). It often revolves around subjects such as: will the hero reach the right place and save the heroine before it is too late? Will the bomb expert defuse the in time? Will the detective see the murderer lurking in the alley? Suspense can be understood and defined …show more content…

History of thrillers dates back to 1920´s and 1930´s, thus all the way back to the era of silent films. One of the first important thrillers that shaped this genre for more than a decade was Hitchcock´s first successful thriller film The
Lodger in 1926. If we look closer at the stage where suspense films originated from, then the most common denominator is Alfred Hitchcock who truly was at the very beginnings of the entire genre along with Fritz Lang, an Austrian filmmaker, whose movie Spies is also considered as one of the first suspense movies. British directors such as Walter Forde or George A. Cooper were also one of the first major directors who developed the genre of thrillers in its first stages. The early stages of thrillers evolution clearly became an English matter during the decade of 1930´s when a large number of suspense films were released, in particular by Hitchcock, who would continue this trend also in the next decade and many years further. However, suspense is by no means limited to thrillers and horrors and it can be found and employed in any given film if there is an opportunity to exploit dramatic tensions. In his work Theorizing the

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