Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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inadvertently gives away the whereabouts of herself and her fugitive husband. All of
these examples demonstrate the use of the eye/camera in an attempt to establish
cinematic specificity, or, an aesthetic unique to cinema, and indicating a movement
away from the theatricality of early American cinema. Filmmaker Brian De Palma
addresses the issue of cinematic specificity, saying:
Film is one of the only art forms where you can give the audience the
same visual information the character has. I learned it from Hitchcock.
It’s unique to cinema and it connects the audience directly to the
experience – unlike the fourth wall approach, which belongs to the Xerox
school of filmmaking. (Pally, 1984; 100)
Hitchcock provides consistent examples of the eye/camera as it changes
throughout early and classical cinema. While maintaining the expressionistic sense
of experiential perception, Hitchcock manipulated elements internal and external to
the camera, creating a greater sense of movement more closely acquainted with the
modern eye/camera. In Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock used the zoom out/push in camera
technique to enhance spatial differences between compositional foreground and
background elements. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Scotty, has a fear of heights, and
in a key scene, he climbs an open spiralling staircase and intermittently looks
downward. When he does so, the stairway seems to elongate and drop beneath him,
enhancing the sense of height. The push-in portion of the camera movement keeps
the figures in the foreground in place within the composition, while the zoom out
separates the distance between the compositional elements. The viewer is
experiencing Scotty’s fear of heights through his own perception in this eye/camera