North by Northwest

Movement or travel or departure In the late ’50s, Frank Lloyd Wright was the most famous Modernist architect in the world. Any house he designed for the film would have been instantly recognizable to audiences. The problem: they couldn’t afford Wright’s fee. So Hitchcock decided they’d just build a house that looked like one Wright would have designed.

The exterior shooting of the UN building was not allowed wo versions of this final matte are in existence — one appears in the DVD and Bluray releases of the film whilst a different one appears in the VHS home video releases.

The interior shots are fake, and are matte sets painted to replicate the inside of the building. I want to talk about the abstracted movement as a circulation path in the scene where Thornhill leaves the UN building (38 mins into the film), and how such movement shows its directionality and linearity and echos some other moments in the film. I absolutely love this shot from the top perspective view. It also might be one of the tallest high angle shot in all of the Hitchcock’s films. Then on the top left side of the a “site plan” is abstracted from the UN plaza. It is even more interesting to learn that the entire shot is made with a matte painting of overhead view, which was layered with a tiny silver of live action with 3 people near the entrance way and Thornhill’s running. Here, Thornhill’s departure is abstracted into a circulation path that points to the southwest, diagonal across the plan. We can compare the departure scene with the entry scene of the UN plaza and building at the beginning of of this scene. When he enters UN plaza, he seems much more at ease and the architecture is portrayed more in the human scale, and the camera is following Thornhill in a more conventional perspective. After the murder, his escape and his helplessness is immediately contextualized by the huge scale change. He becomes a tiny figure moving on a vast scale of environment. In a sense, the lost of human scale illustrates Thornhill’s lost of agency. At the same time, this circulation path is emphasized to be the only path (and thus its linearity and directionality) that is illustrated on the plan by the light yellow path. One can interpret this sense of directionality as his desperate need to escape and also his own chase after Kaplan’s identity. I wonder if this directionality and linearity could be relevant to what we will soon know in the next scene that the identity chase he is onto has no return, and that he is constant being pushed and “controlled” by other forces in the film to be on the “planned” road. In addition, the directionality or the rigidity of the circulation path is emphasized by the huge modernist building’s grid-like facade, occupying the right half of the screen. Unlike the flat site plan on the left, the skyscraper is “shot” in the tall perspective angle, which presents us with an infinite matrix of glass and metal grids. This could be connected to Saul Bass’s title sequence, where the directionality and rigidity are explicitly abstracted to the lines and grids, which then materialized into the skyscrapers in Manhattan. The linearity of his path also echos with the space in the train later in the film. As the police is checking the individual one after one in a linear order, it becomes extremely hard for Thornhill to not be cornered to the end of the train, and thus breaking this linearity or break the “planned” path seems to be the key to escape, and the key to his identity. Last but not the least, the directionality is also present right before the famous crop duster sequence, where there was only one road that Thornhill could rely on. Maybe a side note to end: the color scheme of this scene is also really interesting, consisting of blue, yellow and green. I think of the color palette in Jacque Tati’s Playtime, and these three colors are representative of urbanity and modernity.

U The road The train ?