Correspondence with Hitchcock’s office suggests Sala and Gassmann were stressed by the workload but happy that Hitchcock trusted their ability to interpret his ideas. He was very satisfied with their labors and enjoyed seeing them work up close when he accompanied Bernard Herrmann to Berlin just before Christmas 1962. Back in Germany among avant-garde technologists, exposing himself to new elements of his craft, the trip was a homecoming of sorts. The machine that Sala and Gassmann used was a Mixtur-Trautonium, an electronic instrument based on the Trautonium, one of the world’s first synthesizers, which had been invented by Friedrich Trautwein in the late 1920s, and which Hitchcock had supposedly heard during a visit to Berlin around that time. As much as The Birds was an ambitious leap for Hitchcock, it was also a reinforcement of a core aspect of his identity as a filmmaker—a drive to realize a creative ambition through the exploitation of technology and technique.
The link with the German avant-garde is also a reminder of the milieu from which Hitchcock had emerged as a Hollywood director of note more than twenty years earlier. He had been part of a pioneering wartime generation of European filmmakers who came to Hollywood, what has been described as “an eruption of film talent” matched only by the arrival of the New Hollywood generation of the sixties and seventies. As a leading member of that wave of émigrés, Hitchcock’s first few American films helped to set patterns that would proliferate over the ensuing two decades. His focus on the trials of complexly alluring female characters, suspense, psychological themes, and expressionist filming techniques are the key elements of film noir, and they exerted a huge influence on the era of classical Hollywood cinema.
Hitchcock grumbled that he was forever being copied, which made it difficult for him to remain fresh and distinctive—though he often conveniently forgot the many debts that he owed to the directors from whom he borrowed, especially contemporaries such as Welles, Clouzot, and Antonioni. A sense that he needed to keep a step ahead of his imitators was surely behind his periodic reinventions, such as when he took on the multiple challenges of Rope and Under Capricorn, his flirtation with social realism in The Wrong Man, or the darker, more arthouse territory he entered with The Birds and Marnie. At every stage, the Hitchcock publicity machine—the man himself, allied with the producers, distributors, and promoters of his movies—stressed the daring inventiveness of these ventures. In promotional material published for Rope, Jack Warner, an establishment figure who thought of himself as a rebel and a rule breaker, hailed the film as “real pioneering on the part of Mr. Hitchcock and it foreshadows great potential improvements in motion picture production.” The same booklet contained a section that placed Hitchcock and Rope in the same rarified space as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Great Train Robbery, and the best work of Griffith and Méliès. Rather than selling the story of the film, Warner Bros. focused on the technological wonders involved in its production: the moving set that allowed the camera to rove without cuts; the electronic control boards from which technicians could control their equipment “with split-second accuracy”; the radical ways in which Hitchcock was using sound, lighting, and color to give a vivid sense of time and place. Hitchcock publicly boasted that Rope featured “the most revolutionary technique Hollywood had ever seen.” Given all this, it’s ironic that, to safeguard public morals, Rope was banned for a time in Germany, cradle of Hitchcock’s cinematic technique and of the Nietzschean philosophy that provides Phillip and Brandon with their chilling motivation. It wasn’t until 1963 that the ban was permanently lifted, just as The Birds, Hitchcock’s most technologically advanced film of all, was let fly.
In certain ways, The Birds was ahead of its time. Indeed, in its depiction of a panicked community sheltering in place against the assault of benign nature suddenly turned savage, it could be said that The Birds is a film more of our times than of Hitchcock’s. Yet this was also the last Hitchcock film to feel urgently relevant to the wider world. Some critics would dispute this, making the case that Marnie is the zenith of Hitchcock’s career, a forerunner of the emerging New Hollywood, and powerfully engaged with important issues that shape our society. However, key members of Hitchcock’s production team maintained that Marnie fell short of what they had hoped for. In particular, various technical aspects of the film undermine its impact, especially the backdrop of
