NEWCASTLE SCREENINGS 2012 N - Australia's Silent Film Festival

The Lodger - A story of the London Fog (1927) Great Britain 99 minutes
Saturday November 10 @4pm
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Novel written by Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Cast : Ivor Novello, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen, Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville.
The Festival acknowledges the generous assistance Park Circus Ltd.
Highly acclaimed as Alfred Hitchcock’s best and most popular silent film, The Lodger is also an outstanding example of the visually
artistic heights cinema had reached in the year 1927. In fact, the entire decade of the 1920s experienced rapid artistic and dramatic
development, just as the previous two decades of motion pictures were revolutionary and ground-breaking.
When editing, narrative and dialogue using title cards or intertitles had been mastered by the end of the 1910s, filmmakers began turning
to the world of art and culture around them for new ideas and inspiration. Two of the most influential styles successfully expressed in
early cinema were German Expressionism and Soviet Avant Garde.
Alfred Hitchcock acknowledged that he was greatly inspired by German Expressionist directors F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang when he
worked at the famous old Babelsberg Studio in Berlin in the mid-1920s where he became well acquainted with the techniques and ideas
behind Expressionism. In film, this art genre inspired the use of stark light and shadow to create mood and atmosphere, unusual camera
angles and motion, and highly stylized and expressive acting, all in varying degrees.
Hitchcock took the best of these techniques and blended them with his own style and ideas to create The Lodger, which is now regarded
as his first true Hitchcockian film, although his lesser-known earlier film, Blackmail (1926), also clearly reveals all the famous hallmarks of
the classic Hitchcock mystery thriller.
The Lodger was adapted for the screen from the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes, who based this ‘story of the
London Fog’ on the Jack the Ripper murders. Such a subject is ideally suited to the Expressionist style, but Hitchcock uses these
techniques sparingly and subtly, while adding other poignant qualities.
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