Essay Research Post

The Birds DVD

All About The Birds

Documentary Notes

 “the image that came to me was Munch’s Scream, I saw that as the icon for the whole thing”

Hitchcock chose to set the movie in northern California because it reminded him of England. “it was something about the weather, which was very unpredictable”

“It was a moody strange area both forbidding and foreboding”

“I believe that’s what intrigued him it had a kind of mystical quality”  

Robert Boyle (production designer)

“It’s a movie about the dangers of complacency; we all take things for granted and birds for granted what if they suddenly turned.”  

“it’s a theme that runs through a lot of Hitchcock’s pictures, people take things for granted, they go through their lives unthinkingly and then something happens and they have to think.”

“I Think the scene were Lieder discovers the body its typical Hitchcock in the sense that he shows you from a distance what’s happening.  Then when it gets to the key moment he cuts it. He does it in an unusual way with a triple cut were it gets closer and closer each time.”  

“That’s the way you might see it, look look look, it’s an unusual subjective use of the camera.”

“It is a kind of judgment day film, it also basically says that it’s all going to go back to mother earth, she will prevail.”  

Peter Bogdanovich (film Maker)

“The Birds represent the eruption of chaos, of unpredictability, and which can be taken to be everything that we don’t understand, and can’t control about our world. Not only the physical world but also the world inside us, underneath all the protective coverings that we use to get through life, and which at the same time seal us off from other people. ” (the bird attacks bring characters together who otherwise might never have met)

Robin Wood (Author of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited)

“Hitchcock’s movies are always very suspenseful, and one of the ways that they are so successful is that Hitchcock lets the viewer in on more than the people in the scene.”

“As an example at the schoolhouse when Maloney comes to take Cathy out of school she sits down on the bench and you see the on bird land on the jungle gym, then it cuts back to Maloney sitting on the bench. We cut back to the jungle gym, and then you see a few more birds. Now the audience is aware that birds are coming into the school ground and the audience is also aware that we are getting closer to her. Then when we finally get to a big head close up it holds on it until the audience can’t stand in anymore.  Then you cut back again and it’s covered with birds.”

Jessica Tandy (Star)

“Hitch would say, do you think we should explain it? And we decided that it would be science fiction if we explained why the birds are attacking. It would have a greater meaning if we never knew, if it were this kind of unsettling thing that these creatures we see in the park every minute can suddenly come at our heads with no reason.”

Evan Hunter (Screen Writer)

“I toyed with the idea at one time, there in the car and they look and there’s the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds.”

Alfred Hitchcock

"Hitchcock wanted to communicate the sense that the birds were thinking at the end of the movie when everyone is leaving the house. They created this tremendously unsettling effect that is very quiet but dose give these creatures much more of a personality, or a far more sinister quality.  Secondly he creates a kind of final note by increasing the sound of those birds in the final shot. It is very ambiguous as to whether they are on the verge of another major attack or if this is just a psychological effect.”

Stevn C. Smith (Bernarn Herrmann Biograther)