Essay: Film as Visual Art Paper

Sample Essay

The horror film “The Birds” is a visual masterpiece directed by noted and celebrated filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. The film is an adaptation based on a short story written by Daphne Du Maurier and follows the impact of a massive bird attack on a remote community situated in Northern California known as Bodega Bay. The film main protagonist is Melanie Daniels who along with the other townspeople attempts to escape the attacks eventually resulting in Melanie’s demise (Needham and film facts man). The film is notable for not ending with the customary “The End” title since Hitchcock wanted to afford a sense of continuous terror after the conclusion of the film (Kapsis p.65). Using the viewpoints of different critics and the director himself, this paper will explore the impact of the film as a visual art paper.

The primary film genre in which ‘The Birds’ houses itself firmly lie within the field of horror. Hitchcock himself stressed the need for the script to be as suspenseful as possible, a thriller which would captivate his audience throughout its playtime (Kapsis p.65). Additional to its intended genre, the film also encapsulates the disaster movie genre almost perfectly. The entire story is predicated upon the tenants enacted in such survival flicks such as the need for an isolated setting with an emphasis on the conflict between the main protagonists and their helplessness against the forces which surround them (Grant p.286, 278). According to Hitchcock himself, he made the film as a form of social commentary directed at the complacency of society towards the dangers which exist all around them, basing the events of the film on actual real life bird attacks, the factual basis of which provide the precedent for the attacks in the film (Gottlieb p.44-45).

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