Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Foreign Correspondent
1940 · Alfred Hitchcock · Foreign Correspondent on Sightlines
3 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the assassination filmed from directly overhead. (camera)
Hitchcock cuts to a bird's-eye angle right as the shot is fired, a perspective he would return to throughout his career.
Payoff: The height turns a street-level shock into something you watch happen from a cold, distant vantage.
Listen for rain and crowd noise swallow a gunshot. (sound)
Hitchcock buries the shot inside ordinary ambient sound, crowd murmur and rain, right as dozens of umbrellas snap open at once.
Payoff: A whole crowd of separate people becomes one abstract, moving mass that hides the shooter inside it. In the reading: dividual. The reading calls the umbrella crowd a dividual: many individuals turned into a single affective unit onscreen.
Notice how many people chase a secret you are never told. (structure)
A locked-away clause inside one man's memory drives the entire plot, and the film never reveals what it actually says.
Payoff: The secret does not need contents to work. It only needs everyone wanting it. In the reading: symbol (the MacGuffin). The reading calls this a MacGuffin: a symbol whose meaning is the tension of pursuit, not what it actually contains.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice the small details in every scene. Hitchcock trusts you to catch them.