Hitchcock is undoubtedly the master of episodic films, let's talk about his "Rope" (Rope, 1948, also translated "Reaper of Souls"). This is one of Heath's strange films, one that almost all of the critics dismissed as the most successful, but none of them avoided it.
Its story is truly gruesome: Brandon and Philip, two young men, strangle one of their college classmates, David, to death and put the body in a large bookcase. In order to show off his "superhuman qualities", Brandon insisted on inviting the deceased's parents, his fiancée, another classmate and a teacher who used to be strict with them to a party. The movie unfolds in the living room of Brandon's residence, which is actually the big box where the corpse is kept - because dinner is on that box on purpose.
Such a suspenseful layout is of course not His invention. To write and solve a case from the perspective of a criminal may have had such a model as early as ancient Greece. But Heis is indeed a daring artist, and he may have gone too far: a movie that takes more than 100 minutes will only do one scene, and it is said that he pioneered a scene for more than ten minutes of continuous shooting. All actors must be perfect. In such a long play, if one person takes a wrong sentence, the whole group of shots will have to be repeated. Sure enough, the filming of this scene took 10 months to complete.
Of course it's boring, but it's worth watching if you're interested in writing a script or making an engaging story.
At the beginning, there was a scream, and the person had been killed. Everything after that is driven by dialogue, no matter the introduction of characters or the connection of relationships. Step by step, in the end, the story revealed the two murderers by itself, the truth was revealed, and the police car roared.
Of course, Hitchcock would not have become a great filmmaker if the dialogues were well written in order to make up stories. The real classic lies in grasping the fate of the characters. Behind the dialogue is the drive of the characters and the collision of different personalities. This is not only the starkness of the conflict itself, but the fullness of the characters. It is character that causes crime, and it is character that makes crime manifest. If you can handle all these things like Master Xi, then you will learn the true meaning of drama.
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