Mood and atmosphere can be explored in photography, film and video by identifying or creating particular settings and through the careful arrangement of props, models and lighting. Consider the work of Lucinda Chua, Sarah Hobbs and Alfred Hitchcock.
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Alfred HitchcockThe acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking career in 1919 illustrating title cards for silent films at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London. There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922. During his most inspired period, from 1950 to 1960, Hitchcock produced a cycle of memorable films which included minor works such as I Confess (1953), the sophisticated thrillers Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955). He also directed several top-drawer films like Strangers on a Train and the troubling early docudrama (1956), a searing critique of the American justice system.His three unalloyed masterpieces of the period were investigations into the very nature of watching cinema. Rear Window (1954) made viewers voyeurs, then had them pay for their pleasure. In its story of a photographer who happens to witness a murder, Hitchcock provocatively probed the relationship between the watcher and the watched, involving, by extension, the viewer of the film. Vertigo (1958), as haunting a movie as Hollywood has ever produced, took the lost-feminine-identity theme of Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and identified its cause as male fetishism.
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