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A
master director stamps his class not only with what he shows on screen
but also with what he does not. Leaving something to the viewers’
imagination, instead of revealing or explaining it all, is a gamble
very few film-makers are keen to take. Alfred Hitchcock’s first
American film, Rebecca (1940), deservingly ranks among the
greatest classics of cinema. Its unique feature is that the title
character never appears in the movie, even though the whole story
revolves around her. Based on Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic
bestseller, this suspense drama is about an aristocratic widower, Max
De Winter (Laurence Olivier), who falls in love with a "Plain
Jane" (Joan Fontaine) and brings her after marriage to his
country mansion. The innocent girl has to contend with the surreal
presence of Max’s dead wife, Rebecca, a woman famed for her beauty
and wit. To make matters worse, the sinister housemaid, Mrs Danvers
(Judith Anderson), remains loyal to her deceased mistress. Hitchcock
could have shown Rebecca in a flashback sequence, but he chose not to
do so, thereby intensifying her mysterious aura. It’s all up to the
spectator to visualise how alluring she was. Actor Robert Montgomery
turned director with Lady in the Lake (1946), playing the lead
role of detective Philip Marlowe himself. This film is best remembered
for the extensive use of the "subjective camera", a
technique in which the viewer sees things only through the eyes of the
narrator or protagonist. Montgomery remained "invisible" for
the better part of the movie, and he was seen only when he looked into
a mirror! When somebody punched him, the fist was aimed straight at
the camera (and at the surprised viewer). Renowned Spanish
surrealist Luis Bunuel loved to tease or mislead his audiences. Belle
de Jour (1966) is the story of Severine (Catherine Deneuve), a
masochistic married woman who turns to prostitution on the sly. In one
scene, an East Asian customer opens his little box and shows it to the
girls at the brothel. We never see what’s inside it, but the
prostitutes do, and they recoil in horror. Severine, however, just can’t
take her eyes off it. In his autobiography, My Last Breath,
Bunuel recalled that countless people — especially women — had
asked him what was in the box. "Since I myself have no idea, I
usually reply, ‘Whatever you want there to be,’" he
wrote. In the last scene of Roman Polanski’s spine-chiller Rosemary’s
Baby (1968), Mia Farrow comes to know that the child she has just
given birth to has been fathered by none other than Satan. Desperate
to have one look at her baby, she stares into the cradle. The sight
horrifies her, to say the least, but we don’t get to see the devil’s
offspring. Subtle strokes like this one have made Polanski’s first
Hollywood film a horror classic, even though it has virtually no
bloodshed or grotesqueness. John McTiernan’s sci-fi thriller Predator
(1987), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, packed a punch as long as
the monster from outer space remained camouflaged in the jungle. What
a big letdown it was on becoming visible—just an ugly and clumsy
alien thirsty for human blood. Its menacing power, made stronger by
its invisibility, was all gone. Like most directors, McTiernan
succumbed to the temptation of showing rather than hiding.
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