Themes, Plot Devices and Motifs
Hitchcock returned several times to cinematic devices such as suspense, the audience as voyeur, and his well-known "MacGuffin," a plot device that is essential to the characters on the screen, but is irrelevant to the audience. Thus, the MacGuffin was always hazily described (in "North By Northwest," Leo G. Carroll describes James Mason as an "importer-exporter.")
Read more about this topic: Alfred Hitchcock
Famous quotes containing the words plot, devices and/or motifs:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”
—Jean Arp (1887–1948)
“The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)