I have two favorite Hitchcock scenes.:
1.) The close-up of Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954). Just the directorial decision balls to make her beautiful face that big in the frame; and the cut to the rightfully cowering/shadowed Jimmy in the face of her awesomeness. That is an amazing correlative to love.
2.) Sassy little Tippy Hedren in The Birds (1963) going across that inlet to deliver the goods. The directorial decisions balls to have like 4 minutes of silence supporting the scene. The silence is what makes it special.
Oddly.., I’m not a big Hitchcock fan. I think Rear Window is vastly overrated. His is an anti classic Hollywood seamless style that cannibalizes great movies for the sake of great self-conscious and suspenseful/artful scenes. In this I might be alone, but I much prefer the American invisible style of directing, say of a Howard Hawks. Or if you’re going to go into self-conscious, go with a hyper-stylized Nicholas Ray and retain the technique. Hitchcock was always a quaint novelty to me. I realize more than most how stupid it sounds, but to me Hitchcock is a great study – not a great movie. Maybe they just don’t age well for me. I am an Anglophile in so many dimensions, but Hitchcock is not one of them.
I also like the highly abstracted bird attack scene when Tippy is trapped in the attic, when the birds become tessellated strobe abstractions in her horror. It’s an entirely real scene with real birds being thrown at her, but – unneeded – they step over the line into abstraction, which thoroughly works for me.