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In 1925, a young British set designer, taking on an assignment in Berlin for a bounder-a little too fond of drink and women-called Graham Cutts, watches German directors at work at the Ufa Studios in Neubabelsberg. The director whom he observes most closely is F.W. Murnau, just completing the film that was to make him world-famous, The Last Laugh. The Englishman is especially impressed by a scene in which an entire train station, busy with morning commuters is suggested by painted perspectives, lighting, and a "real" train carriage in the farthest distance of the shot. The "German influence" on Alfred Hitchcock, often talked about by himself and almost as often referred to in the literature, is usually said to have been as profound as it was made up of distinct elements.1 Among them was the German studio style (i.e., filming in totally controlled environments, surrounded by highly trained professionals), an emphasis on wholly visual storytelling ("no intertitles"), and a mastery of complex camera movements (those, for instance devised by Karl Freund for Murnau's film, and generically referred to as the German's "unchained" camera).2 Complex camera movements famously recur in many of Hitchcock's films throughout his long career, whether in The Lodger, Murder!, Notorious, Psycho, or Frenzy.3
Late in 1925, only months after his initial visit to Berlin, Hitchcock returned to Germany, this time as the director of an Anglo-German production, working for the München Lichtbild Kompanie, better known by its acronym Emelka. This production, The Pleasure Garden (1925), involved location shooting mostly in northern Italy, about which Hitchcock himself has left a number of hilarious and self-deprecating accounts, mostly revolving around his sexual innocence and anatomical ignorance, that can scarcely be taken at face value. The film's other claim to anecdotal status is that its producer, Michael Balcon, is famously quoted as having appreciated just how "American" the movie felt, implicitly predicting, it is suggested, the turn Hitch's career would later take.
Lang and Hitchcock in the 1920s
There has been some speculation about the contacts between Hitchcock and the other Olympian figure of Ufa in the 1920s, Fritz Lang. If Hitchcock's testimony to François Truffaut is to be believed, he admired Lang. Especially to his French critics, the director often acknowledged that Lang...