How does Alfred Hitchcock explain creating suspense in a film by using the example of his movie, Rope, starring James Stewart? Refer to one or more details from the text to support your answer.

Alfred Hitchcock, the king of suspense; created his most interesting experiment ever attempted by a major director in this movie; he used an innovative film technique and nobody dared to repeat it since then; this technique was undoubtedly, as well, another way of creating suspense in this movie, it consisted in running each scene continuously for up to ten minutes without stopping. Camera moves were carefully planned and there was not much editing in this movie, also this was Hitchcock’s first Technicolor film.

annyksl annyksl · Answer 2 · 2021-09-14T18:34:49+02:00

Hitchcock creates suspense by letting the viewer know what is being hidden.

For Hitchcock, suspense is not created out of mystery, but out of revelation.

He believed that viewers had to participate in the creation of suspense, knowing exactly what was happening in the story and allowing the suspense to be built on the unpredictability of the facts for the characters and not for the viewers.

In this case, Hitchcock lets the viewer know what's happening but the characters don't, letting the viewer feel the suspense about how the characters will discover what they already know.

In The "Rope" this tactic can be seen as follows:

The assassins are the main characters in the movie.
After killing someone important they hide the body in a crate.
This crate is taken to a party, where it serves as a base for a table.
The party is full of people and although the viewer knows that one of the tables hides a corpse, the people, in the scene, don't know.

With this, we can see that Hitchcock created a new way to establish suspense. This form was so efficient that it consecrated him as one of the great names of this genre.