Alfred Hitchcock:
Bon Voyage & Aventure Malgache,
1944. Get it from:
- Amazon.com
Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound, 1945.
With Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck.
Get it from:
- Amazon.com - Amazon.co.uk - Amazon.de
Alfred Hitchcock: Notorious, 1946.
With Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergaman.
Get it on DVD from:
- Amazon.com - Amazon.co.uk - Amazon.de
Alfred Hitchcock: Strangers on a Train,
1951. With Farley Granger. Get it from:
- Amazon.com - Amazon.co.uk
Alfred Hitchcock, 3 DVD
set: Vertigo (1958): Collector's Edition,
Psycho (1960): Collector's Edition,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (4 episodes: Lamb To The Slaughter,
Case Of Mr. Pelham,
Back For Xmas
and Banquo's Chair).
Get it from:
- Amazon.com
Alfred Hitchcock:
The Birds, 1963.
Get it from:
- Amazon.com
Alfred Hitchcock:
Marnie, 1964.
Get it from:
- Amazon.com
John Russell Taylor:
Hitch: The Life and Times of
Alfred Hitchcock. A biography, Da Capo Press, 1996. Get it from Amazon.com.
Alfred Hitchcock and Art
Fatal Coincidences - until March
18, 2001
The exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Biography, filmography and DVDs
Alfred Hitchcock
and Art: Fatal Coincidences
The exhibition at the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts explores the complex universe of Alfred Hitchcock. He was
"an artist of anxiety, a designer of dread, an architect of
uncertainty." The curators conceived the exhibition not
chronologically, but as an entertaining melding of cinema, visual arts,
music, mise-en-scène and photography. They assembled some 200 works of
art, frame enlargements and never-before-seen film clips, props, posters
and storyboards and arranged them in 14 scenes.
In gallery 1, one can find 21 inanimate
objects like a bread knife (Blackmail), a glass of milk (Suspicion)
and a key (Notorious), which, when given symbolic power or "fetishized",
constitute the curators' entry point into the film-makers universe. They are
accompanied by the music of Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the scores
for Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho.
In gallery 2, the exhibition showcases 32
images of Hitchcock himself. In gallery 3, one can find Hitchcock having
fun with his wife and daughter, playing "horsey", carrying his
little girl on his back and imitating Charlie Chaplin. It is a space
dedicated to his life and career.
Gallery 4 shows how Hitchcock's imagination
was nurtured early on by the last vestiges of the Romantic and Symbolist
movements in art and literature as well as by Victorian England. The dark and
disquieting world of Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems play a central
role, exemplified in the fantastical illustrations by Beardsley, Rackham,
Martini, Previati and Redon, one of Hitchcocks favorite painters by whom
he owned a number of works.
Gallery 5 is dedicated to moving pictures
by filmmakers like Fritz Lang, whose impact is felt in Rebecca and Psycho;
by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who Hitchcock met in Berlin and whose style
is evident in Saboteur; by Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel with
whose work Vertigo resonates and by Jean Cocteau, whose retelling
of the Orpheus myth influenced The Birds. These images unfold
simultaneously on two large screens.
A projected spiral greets visitors in
gallery 6. Scenes like the killing in The 39 Steps and the chase
through the movie theatre in Saboteur illustrate Hitchcock's
universe. Voyeurism as a key theme is summed up in Rear Window with
James Stewart as the injured photographer, hidden in his apartment, who
observes his neighbours through his camera lens and is transformed form
passive voyeur into an active party.
In gallery 7, the visitor is confronted
with the abyss of the senses and of passion, illustrated by works by
Magritte, Munch, Weiss and Rossetti as well as by four famous screen murders
and four famous screen kisses by Hitchcock. Gallery 8 is dedicated to
references to Catholicism, from confession to sacrifice and original sin,
present in the movies Topaz, I Confess and The Lodger.
Gallery 9 discovers the femme fatale, icy
and distant, so present in Hitchcock's work. Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak,
Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren and Eva Marie Saint embody unattainable and
enigmatic beauties of apparent coldness. Rossetti, Magritte, Man Ray and
other artists with similar female types are confronted with Hitchcock's
women.
Gallery 10 is devoted to the imagery of
Dark Romanticism and Symbolism, apparent in Rebecca and Psycho.
Late 19th century legends and tales, paintings by Redon, Vuillard, Coburn
and Hammershoi as well as by Max Ernst and De Chirico explore the same
theme.
The world of dreams as presented in Spellbound
is at the center of gallery 11. Hitchcock asked Salvador Dalí to imagine
"dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, shaper than the film
itself." Terror and fright, the horror off-screen, such as in Bates'
Motel in Psycho, are evoked in gallery 12. The highlight on view is
the original prop head of Norman Bates' mummified mother, surrounded by
paintings by Munch, Martini, Frédéric and Dix.
Gallery 13 is devoted to Hitchcock as an
architect of images who had mastered dizzying, labyrinthine perspectives
of earlier masters of the turn of the century. Klee and Duchamp are
painters who influenced the director in this regard. The final gallery
with 40 posters from various countries retrace the cinematic voyage of
Alfred Hitchcock.
Biography of Alfred Hitchcock
1899-1980
Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899
as the youngest of three children. His father was a wholesale grocer.
Alfred attended a Jesuit school which he left when his father died in
1914. He entered the School of Engineering and Navigation. At 19, he took
an office job with a manufacturer of electrical cables and telegraph wires
and began attending evening classes in, among other subjects, art history,
later complemented by drawing and painting classes, which enabled him to
transfer to the company's advertising department as a graphic designer.
Soon after, he took a part-time job as title card illustrator in the
editorial department of the American film company Famous Players-Lasky,
which had recently set up a shop in Great Britain. He wrote intertitles for
several silent films and made the acquaintance of the famous director
George Fitzmaurice, who became Hitchcock's first mentor. He, too, had
studied painting and believed that cinema had affinities with visual
arts (Nathalie Bondil-Poupard).
1920-22, Hitchcock made drawings and sets.
Then, he directed Number Thirteen, a film which remained unfinished
due to lack of funds. At this time, he met the film editor and script girl Alma
Reville, who became his wife when he was 27. Their only daughter later had
small parts in a few Hitchcock movies. The name of Alfred's wife appeared
in the credits of her husband's films for many years. She was his artistic and
economic adviser. Only death separated the apparently happily married
couple. In Hitchcock's movies, tall, cool and unattainable blondes became
an obsession of the director - but Alma Reville was small and red-haired,
far from this type of woman.
In 1924, the German producer Erich Pommer
invited Hitchcock to Berlin to work as art director on the Balcon-Pommer
co-production Die Prinzessin und der Geiger, rel. 1925). In Berlin,
Hitchcock met Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931), a master of the silent
movie. Murnau contributed to the Symbolist, metaphysical and dream
dimension of Hitchcock's work. The fantastical imagery of the
Expressionists and the visual readability of the Kammerspiel films
were absorbed by Hitchcock. The Hitchcocks were interested in art, mainly
by modern painters such as the Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Cuban
Fidelio Ponce León. In later years, they purchased works by Raoul Dufy,
Maurice de Vlaminck, Maurice Utrillo, Georges Rouault, Chaïm Soutine,
Albert Gleizes, Milton Avery, Pierre Soulages, Auguste Rodin, Georges
Braque's "birds series" and Paul Klee, who he called once his
favorite painter.
According to some specialists, Hitchcock
was a fat young boy, condemned to live in "fear" and to observe
life. His upbringing in a Catholic school and as a "Cockney"
gave him a guilt complex and, at the same time, a rebellious character.
In 1925, Hitchcock shot his first movie in the UK, The Pleasure Garden, released in 1927. But it was with The
Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, a variation on the Jack the Ripper
story, that one could first grasp the greatness of the Hitchcock to come. The
visual narrative technique and attention to lighting he inherited from
German cinema were confirmed to Blackmail (1929) and Murder!
(1930). In 1935 and 1937, Hitchcock directed his first masterpieces, The
Thirty-nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Both movies combined
humour and suspense, were box-office successes and caught the attention of
Hollywood.
Hitchcock was influenced by the German and
Soviet film schools of his time. According to Guy Cocheval, "the
scene in the London Underground in Rich and Strange (1932), with
employees robotically repeating the same gestures while the protagonist is
completely of of synch with them, can be read as a humoristic take on
Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926)". The scene in Hitchcock's Secret
Agent (1936) in which panic suddenly sweeps through a Swiss chocolate
factory shows the influence of Pudovkin.
In 1940, Hitchcock's first American movie, Rebecca,
made at the instigation of David O. Selznick, was released. From then on,
his American career was unstoppable. Spy movies, crime thrillers and black
comedies followed. In the 1950s, his films came to visual and
philosophical maturity. "At the same time, his conception of the hero
became clouded for lack of guidelines in the postwar years". Vertigo,
North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds are
considered masterpieces; among the films which followed later, only Frenzy
stands out. Hitchcock rejected all naturalism, he favored the
simplification of the actor's performances as well as of their costumes
and hairstyles, his storytelling was schematized, the sets were
theatrically stylized (Robert Daudelin).
At the age of 76, Alfred Hitchcock made his
last movie, a comedy entitled Family Plot, released in 1976. Four
years later, he died in Hollywood. He had never received an Oscar as a
director. The Oscar for Rebecca in 1940 went to producer David O.
Selznick. Instead, in 1967, Hitchcock received the Irving G. Thalberg
Memorial Award.
Filmography of Alfred
Hitchcock
- Number Thirteen, UK, unfinished,
1922
- The Pleasure Garden, UK, prod.
1925/ released 1927
- The Mountain Eagle, UK, prod. 1925, released 1927
- The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, UK, prod. 1926, released
1927
- Downhill, UK, prod. and released 1927
- Easy Virtue, UK, prod. and released 1927
- The Ring, UK, prod. and released 1927
- The Farmer's Wife, UK, prod. 1927, released 1928
- Champagne, UK, prod. and released 1928
- The Manxman, UK, prod. 1928, released 1929
- Blackmail, UK, prod. and released 1929
- Juno and the Paycock, UK, prod. and released 1930
- Murder!, UK, prod. and released 1930
- The Skin Game, UK, prod. 1930-31, released 1931
- Number Seventeen, UK, prod. 1931, released 1932
- Rich and Strange, UK, prod. and released 1932
- Waltzes from Vienna, UK, prod. and released 1933
- The Man Who Knew Too Much, UK, prod. and released 1934
- The Thirty-nine Steps, UK, prod. and released 1935
- Secret Agent, UK, prod. 1935, released 1936
- Sabotage, UK, prod. and released 1936
- Young and Innocent, UK, prod. 1937, released 1938
- The Lady Vanishes, UK, prod. 1937, released 1938
- Jamaica Inn, UK, prod. 1938, released 1939
- Rebecca, USA, prod. 1939, released 1940
- Foreign Correspondent, USA, prod. and released 1940
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith, USA, prod. 1940, released 1941
- Suspicion, USA, prod. and released 1941
- Saboteur, USA, prod. and released 1942
- Shadow of a Doubt, USA, prod. 1942, released 1943
- Lifeboat, USA, prod. 1943, released 1944
- Aventure Malgache, UK, 1944
- Bon voyage, UK, 1944
- Spellbound, USA, prod. 1944, released 1945
- Notorious, USA, prod. 1945-46, released 1946
- The Paradise Case, USA, prod. 1946-47, released 1947
- Rope, USA, prod. and released 1948
- Under Capricorn, UK, prod. 1948, released 1949
- Stage Fright, UK, prod. 1949, released 1950
- Strangers on a Train, USA, prod. 1950, released 1951
- I Confess, USA, prod. 1952, released 1953
- Dial M for Murder, USA, prod. 1953, released 1954
- Rear Window, USA, prod. 1953, released 1954
- To Catch a Thief, USA, prod. 1954, released 1955
- The Trouble with Harry, USA, prod. 1954, released 1955
- The Man Who Knew Too Much, remake, USA, prod. 1955, released 1956
- The Wrong Man, USA, prod. and released 1956
- Vertigo, USA, prod. 1957, released 1958
- North by Northwest, USA, prod. 1958, released 1959
- Psycho, USA, prod. 1959-60, released 1960
- The Birds, USA, prod. 1962, released 1963
- Marnie, USA, prod. 1963-64, released 1964
- Torn Curtain, USA, prod. 1965-66, released 1966
- Topaz, USA, prod. 1968-69, released 1969
- Frenzy, UK, prod. 1971, released 1972
- Family Plot, USA, prod. 1975, released 1976
___________________________
This article is based on the information
provided by the exhibition
catalogue Alfred Hitchcock and Art (Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, Milan,
2000, 498 p.) from the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts in Canada.
For more articles on directors, actors and movies: Film.
