Week 5 Blog Post: North by Northwest

The scene at 1:41:50 where Thornhill and Eve meets up after she supposedly shot him is a great example of how skillful Hitchcock is as a director. It is also a great example of a transition. Before this, Hitchcock had tactfully skipped past the scheming scene and simply threw the audience into the action. The only clue of Thornhill working with the Professor is Thornhill’s line: “I think he’s [Roosevelt’s stone head] telling me not to go through with this hair-brain scheme”. The entire time the audience is left in confusion and anticipation of what the scheme is when suddenly Eve starts struggling against Thornhill and “shoot” him. Then while the excitement of Thornhill being killed is still fresh and the audience is left wondering what happened, Hitchcock smoothly transitions into a new scene. The director uses the movement of the car heading out of the screen to transition straight into another scene by showing the same car moving into the frame from the same direction. With the audience still in confusion, having just seen Thornhill confirmed dead by the professor, Hitchcock throws a twist at viewers with just one cinematography technique. The technique of zooming out at 1:42:16 allows Hitchcock to expand the frame to include Eve as well as reveal the characters’ scheme. With this same technique, the viewers are once again in tune with Thornhill and the FBI, finding out that their plan was to keep Eve in the good graces of Vandamn. Instead of using a different technique, like cutting to some kind of close-up on Eve or panning over to Eve waiting there, Hitchcock’s choice of zooming out gives the audience not just surprise but a sense of revelation as well. In other words, they can literally see the whole picture of what is happening. Another interesting point in this scene is that in the background between the trees we can see the Presidents of Mount Rushmore. This mise-en-scene choice implies that those statues will come to play an important role in the future. Because Eve has just narrowly escape danger from being under Vandamm’s suspicion in the previous scene, Hitchcock includes the statues in this scene as a clue that she will be escaping death again on them.