Alfred Hitchcock's Auteur Theory

The emergence of Auteur theory in cinema can be associated with, among other things, the permanence of the medium. With regard to other art forms, especially theatre, the director is held hostage to the lack of repeated viewing and analysis concerning their final product. With cinema, this is not the case. In fact it’s repeated viewings that originally led to the advent of auteur theory when French film critics were able to view multiple films by a specific director in succession. They studied these films and recognized a series of reoccurring motifs, both narrative and formal, that created a signature style and form consistent in all of the director’s works. Alfred Hitchcock is widely considered a master filmmaker and one of the quintessential
Depicting a murder, placing the protagonist in the role of “the wrong man”, and putting them on the run within the first 20 minutes of the film is standard Hitchcockian procedure, and The 39 Steps stays true to this. Richard is placed in the role of “the wrong man” early on in the first act and is sent searching for truth immediately. The term “role” plays a key part in the previous statement, as it relates to another one of Hitchcock’s classic narrative motifs; role-playing amongst characters. The element of performance is perhaps the strongest of Hitchcock’s motifs depicted in The 39 Steps. As in all of his films, our protagonists are forced to play a series of roles in order to escape danger and gather information. However, The 39 Steps examines role-playing further by addressing and examining the role of the audience, the role of the camera, and the relationship between
Fundamentally speaking, Hitchcock’s authorship is dependant on the critical reading and interpretation of his films, which requires a subjective viewing from the participant. It is in The 39 Steps that Alfred Hitchcock addresses this issue head on with his implication of the theatre as a means to examine the importance of subjective viewer-ship. By utilizing the subjective cinematography to associate us as an audience member, the element of view-ship in the theatre is focused on immediately. When we enter the first theatre experience with Richard, he is in passive viewing state, a simple tourist from Canada eagerly watching a performance. At this point in the film, we , the viewer and Richard, are held in the dark as to what’s going on regarding the film’s plot and storyline. Richard is spectator in this first theatre scene, a passive observer, and as the events unfold, we continue to know less and less about