We all have seem movies which have struck us like an epiphany. Not for the meaning of it all, but about their invisible alchemy. Here are two movies which really opened my eyes about how cinema works at his best. And i'm not speaking about expensive special effects or high-brows academic non-sense but simple and efficient ways to deliver a story visually.

THE GODFATHER part II

Remember that scene in Havana? Mike Corleone has come with his brother to Havana in order to conduct some business with fellow partner in crime Hyman Roth. 

They are chilling on the roof of a prestigious hotel, overlooking the bay, it's a glorious day. Not only because it's sun-drenched but especially because they have put aside all their differents and have made a deal with the dictator Batista in order to conduct their business without interference.

There, a waiter arrives, pushing a trolley with a cake on it. It turns out it's Hyman Roth's birthday. And as the icing on the cake, it's the entire island of Cuba which is painted on the cake! 

So, while the waiter cuts slices of the cake representing Cuba, and passes it over to the people around, Hyman Roth iterates the business slices everyone will get... And Cuba is slowly being sliced and shared between all the mafiosos. Not to mention the "Last supper" kind of allusion in all of that.

This is a genius moment from the genius of F.F.Coppola ! You don't even need to have sound to understand what is going on there: the images of the slices of Cuba being served to those greedy bastards are enough to understand that they are gobbling up the whole island in that kind of Congress of Vienna.

In an interview by Michael Haneke, the Austrian director, I remember him saying that what constitutes a master work is the adequation between the form and the substance. Here, you have the perfect definition of it.

PSYCHO by Alfred Hitchcock

For a long time, it puzzled me. Why did Hitchcock needed such a convoluted and showy sequence to show the murder of the detective Arbogast? Let's step back for a bit of context: Vera Miles fled Phoenix with a lot of money and ends up in a seedy motel run by Norman Bates. Her boss sends a detective to find her and get the money. He finds the motel and gets too nosy, and eventually meets "Madam Bates" face to face...

The thing is that as soon as Arbogast walks up the big staircase, Hitchcock slowly tracks back with the camera focusing on him ascending the stairs.

Cut to the picture of the door on the first landing, slowly and silenty opening. 

And cut to a brilliant angle adopting a god-like perspective, at the vertical of the characters, where suddenly "Madam Bates" rushes on Arbogast with a big shiny knife, stabs him literally in the face and pushes him back the stairs, at the bottom of which she finishes the job.

Why this great, but ultimately fishy shot? The answer lies in the other possibilities and the secret the director has to keep from the audience.

It is obvious that Hitchcock could not show the face of "Madam Bates". One way of doing that was to simply keep the camera in the back of her head. But the audience is not stupid. We would have immediately suspected something fishy: if the director does not show the face of the assassin it's because we must know that face. 

So, Hitchcock invented that crazy loophole by putting his camera in an impossibly crazy and expensive angle, like you had never seen before, in order to make the people forget about the real information: the identity of "Madam Bates". You still cannot see her face. But you don't realize it. The shot is so unusual that, by the time you come back to your senses, you have no idea that you have just been deceived. Moreover, Hitchcock adds the icing on the cake with that famous shot where Arbogast falls down the stairs and looks like tip-toeing the stairs backwards, like a drunk ballerina.

It may look like a preposterous and showy tour de force by Hitchcock, without real meaning to validate its presence, but on the contrary - it is intended to serve the story first and foremost. And this is the genius of Alfred Hitchcock.

What about you? Which is the scene which opened your eyes about the storytelling potential of cinema?