Alfred Hitchcock in the context of "Jaws (film)"

Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well suited to film and television.

A thriller generally keeps its audience on the "edge of their seats" as the plot builds towards a climax. The cover-up of important information is a common element. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists, unreliable narrators, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is often a villain-driven plot, whereby they present obstacles that the protagonist or hero must overcome.

Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress and Princess of Monaco as the wife of Prince Rainier III from their marriage on April 18, 1956, until her death in 1982. Prior to her marriage, she achieved stardom in several significant Hollywood films in the early to mid-1950s. She received an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards, and was ranked 13th on the American Film Institute's 25 Greatest Female Stars list.

Kelly was born into a prominent Catholic family in Philadelphia. After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1949, she began appearing in New York City theatrical productions and television broadcasts. Kelly made her film debut in Fourteen Hours (1951) and gained stardom from her roles in Fred Zinnemann's western film High Noon (1952), and John Ford's adventure-romance Mogambo (1953), the latter of which earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the drama The Country Girl (1954). Other notable works include the war film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), the romantic comedy High Society (1956), and three Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers: Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955).

Nathalie Kay "Tippi" Hedren (born January 19, 1930) is a retired American actress. Initially a fashion model, appearing on the front covers of Life and Glamour magazines (among others), she became an actress after being discovered by director Alfred Hitchcock while appearing on a television commercial in 1961. Hedren received worldwide recognition due to her work in two of his films, the suspense-thriller The Birds (1963), for which she won a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year, and the psychological drama Marnie (1964). She performed in over 80 films and television shows, including Charlie Chaplin's final film A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), the political satire Citizen Ruth (1996), and the existential comedy I Heart Huckabees (2004). Among other honors, her contributions to world cinema have been recognized with the Jules Verne Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Hedren's strong commitment to animal rescue began in 1969 while she was shooting two films in Africa and was introduced to the plight of African lions. In an attempt to raise awareness for wildlife, she spent over a decade bringing Roar (1981) to the screen. She started her own nonprofit organization, the Roar Foundation, in 1983; it supports the Shambala Preserve, an 80-acre (32 ha) wildlife habitat in Acton, California that enables her to continue her work in the care and preservation of lions and tigers. Hedren has also set up relief programs worldwide following earthquakes, hurricanes, famine and war. She was also instrumental in the development of Vietnamese-American nail salons.

The Birds is a 1963 American natural horror film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, released by Universal Pictures and starring Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and introducing Tippi Hedren in her film debut. Loosely based on the 1952 short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, it focuses on a series of sudden and unexplained violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California, over the course of a few days. The screenplay is by Evan Hunter, who was told by Hitchcock to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot while keeping du Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks.

While it initially received mixed reviews when originally released, its reputation improved over time and it has since been considered to be one of the greatest horror films of all time. At the 36th Academy Awards, Ub Iwerks was nominated for Best Special Effects for his work on the film. The award, however, went to the only other nominee, Emil Kosa Jr., for Cleopatra. Hedren won the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress for her role in the film.

Marnie is a 1964 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.

Marnie became a milestone for several reasons. It was the last time a "Hitchcock blonde" would have a central role in one of his films. It also marked the end of Hitchcock's collaborations with cinematographer Robert Burks, who died in 1968; editor George Tomasini, who died soon after Marnie's release; and composer Bernard Herrmann, who was fired during Hitchcock's next film, Torn Curtain (1966), when Hitchcock and Universal studio executives wanted a pop-and-jazz-influenced score for the film.

Thriller film, also known as suspense film or suspense thriller, is a broad film genre that evokes excitement and suspense in the audience. The suspense element found in most films' plots is particularly exploited by the filmmaker in this genre. Tension is created by delaying what the audience sees as inevitable, and is built through situations that are menacing or where escape seems impossible.

The cover-up of important information from the viewer, and fight and chase scenes are common methods. Life is typically threatened in a thriller film, such as when the protagonist does not realize that they are entering a dangerous situation. Thriller films' characters conflict with each other or with an outside force, which can sometimes be abstract. The protagonist is usually set against a problem, such as an escape, a mission, or a mystery.

François Roland Truffaut (UK: /ˈtruːfoʊ, ˈtrʊ-/ TROO-foh, TRUU-, US: /truːˈfoʊ/ troo-FOH; French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁɔlɑ̃ tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author. The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter-ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. Truffaut supplied the story for another milestone of the movement, Breathless (1960), directed by his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.

His other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), Two English Girls (1971) and The Last Metro (1980). Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) earned him the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He played the doctor in The Wild Child (1970), the director of the film-within-the-film in Day For Night and the scientist in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He starred in The Green Room (1978), based on Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead". He wrote Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), a book-length interview with his hero Alfred Hitchcock which tied for second on Sight and Sound's list of the greatest books on film. Truffaut paid homage to Hitchcock in The Bride Wore Black (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983).

Identification refers to the automatic, subconscious psychological process in which an individual becomes like or closely associates themselves with another person by adopting one or more of the others' perceived personality traits, physical attributes, or some other aspect of their identity. The concept of identification was founded by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s, and has since been expanded on and applied in psychology, social studies, media studies, and literary and film criticism. In literature, identification most often refers to the audience identifying with a fictional character, however it can also be employed as a narrative device whereby one character identifies with another character within the text itself.

Varying interpretations of Freud's original concept of identification are found in literary and film theory traditions, such as psychoanalytic literary criticism, archetypal literary criticism, and Lacanian film analysis, and in the works of prominent theorists and critics such as Northrop Frye, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz. Acclaimed filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock used specific camera and acting techniques in his films to incite audience identification with his characters in order to create suspense.

Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for 'assembly' or 'editing'). It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and introduced formalism into filmmaking.

Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Sergei Eisenstein marked a note of accord in "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" when he noted that montage is "the nerve of cinema", and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema". Its influence is far reaching commercially, academically, and politically. Alfred Hitchcock often emphasizes the pivotal role of editing (and montage) in filmmaking. In fact, montage is demonstrated in the majority of narrative fiction films available today. Post-Soviet film theories relied extensively on montage's redirection of film analysis toward language, a literal grammar of film. A semiotic understanding of film, for example, is indebted to and in contrast with Sergei Eisenstein's wanton transposition of language "in ways that are altogether new." While several Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein's view that "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots" wherein "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other" has become most widely accepted.