Alfred Hitchcock, 120 years of one of the greatest geniuses of cinema

From Jordan Peele ("Get out", "Us") to David Fincher ("Gone girl", "Panic room"), through Martin Scorsese ("Cape fear", "Shutter island"), much of the trajectory of Brian de Palma and even David Lynch (“Mulholland drive”), references to Hitchcock's cinema follow each other in plots that turn the viewer into voyeurist, with false defendants, blonde victims and double identities.

Francois Truffaut even assured that Hitchcock was at the level of artists such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Edgar Allan Poe when describing the anxiety of man.

"Hitchcock is pure cinema, influence 'by fire' in the genre and source of inspiration for so many filmmakers," Spanish director Francisco Javier Gutiérrez ("Rings"), a great Hitchcock fan who paid tribute to the short film, told Efe "Norman's room", which revolved around the famous sequence of "Psycho" in the shower, "of brilliant execution and impact."

That murder of Marion Crane is for Gutierrez "referent and object of almost obsessive fascination", a "unique moment" of the seventh art that managed to "nail in the retina" of the spectators. Nominated for the Oscar five times as best director ("Rebecca", "Lifeboat", "Spellbound", "Rear window" and "Psycho", 1960), he only received recognition from the Hollywood Academy with the honorary statuette in 1968. In addition, four of his works obtained the nomination for best film ("Foreign correspondent", "Suspicion", "Spellbound" and "Rebecca", which won the award).

But his talent went far beyond what the awards could attest.

The prominent gill producer fund, born in Essex on August 13, 1899, built an unparalleled filmography over six decades.

His beginnings in the silent film era left pearls like "The Lodger", in which he began to work his peculiar ability to create tension and suspense (the so-called "Hitchcockian" style), this time with a story in which a woman suspects that one of his guests is a feared serial killer known as "The Avenger."

In addition, the film is remembered for being the first time the director made an appearance on the screen, a sign that would become characteristic of his cinema.

His first spoken work was "Blackmail", a film originally shot in dumb and, subsequently, was reissued with sound. And before making the big leap to Hollywood convinced by producer David O. Selznick (with whom he signed a contract for five films and $ 800,000), he left two of the best British thrillers in history (“The 39 steps” and “The lady vanishes ”) with such recurring elements of his cinema as espionage and identity confusion.

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With his departure to the US, we saw the brightest Hitchcock and could not begin that journey with a better foot than with a full-fledged classic like "Rebecca" (1940), a film starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine who won 11 nominations for Oscar. Fontaine, a year later, won the Academy Award for "Suspicion", something that no other actor (male or female) achieved with a film by the British filmmaker.

That film was also his first work with Cary Grant, with whom he returned to collaborate on "Notorious", "To catch a thief" and the mythical "North by northwest", whose scene of the plane stalking the protagonist happens to be one of the most celluloid remembered.

"Rope" (1948), his first color film, was also the beginning of his work with James Stewart, with whom he later filmed "Rear window", "The man who knew too much" and "Vertigo". And in that catalog there are still to mention titles such as the famous “The birds”, “Topaz”, “Torn curtain”, “Strangers on a train”, “Dial M for murder” or “Marnie”, among others, besides the famous “Alfred Hitchcock presents” television format, whose unforgettable tuning gave way to the appearance of the celebrated director's profile.