The McGuffin

From my MFA thesis piece "Everything I knew about America I learned from the Movies", found footage re-worked - FRAME-BY-FRAME into short vignettes, exploring the relationships between home movies and mainstream (Hollywood) cinema. This is the Hitchcock homage.
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Home Movies
• Found Footage
• McGuffin
• Hitchcock