No alarms and no surprises

Hai c-o zic în engleză că sună mai bine:

Out of all the greatest sequences in Hitchcock films, the crop-duster attack from North by Northwest is one of my favorite. It's a top-notch one in terms of suspense! And not even the attack itself, but the few minutes leading up to it. Cary Grant steps out of the bus, wind blows dust into his face, and you realize that he's in the middle of nowhere. He's arranged to meet someone at that spot, but there's nobody there. Vast prairie space all around, no civilization signs in sight, he's all alone and completely exposed. He knows, and we know, that something is not quite kosher about the situation. What a tremendously great sensation that is (obviously, not for Grant)! The bus is gone, there's nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait. And all of the sudden... bang, Hitch strikes us in style!

In his own words, „there is a clear difference between surprise and suspense. (...) We are sitting here and having an innocent conversation. Let us assume that there is a bomb under this table between us. (…) Suddenly there is a loud boom and the bomb goes off. The audience is surprised, but before this surprise they have only seen a very ordinary scene without any significance. Let us instead look at a suspense scene. The bomb is under the table and the audience is aware of this because they have seen the anarchist plant it there. They also know that the bomb will go off at one o’clock, and up on the wall is a clock showing that the time is now quarter to one (…). In the first scene we have given the audience 15 seconds of surprise (…) but in the last scene we have given them fifteen minutes of suspense.” (Truffaut 1973, p. 52-53)