The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (best finance books of all time TXT) 📕

in the lineage of another, more rarified field of the visual arts indicates he wanted us to believe that his mastery of “pure cinema” put him in a category separate from even the most accomplished filmmakers of the day. One could argue that it expresses an insecurity about his own status as a commercial filmmaker, and about cinema as a whole. If so, it’s one shared by plenty of others; there is no shortage of critics who have praised Hitchcock’s talents by way of comparing him to other types of artists. Dolly Haas, who played the role of the murderer’s wife in I Confess, was so fascinated by Hitchcock’s visual flair that she concluded he “was actually an architect. I thought, ‘My God, the man should have been a visual artist or an architect,’ because he drew every close-up and every scene from the left blank page of his manuscript.”

It’s intriguing that a successful film actress apparently didn’t consider filmmaking to be a branch of the visual arts, but Haas hit on an important point. The writer Gavin Lambert once made the brilliant observation that many of Hitchcock’s most memorable scenes “could be titled like surrealistic paintings: Human Being Caged by Bird, Cigarette Extinguished in Fried Egg [To Catch a Thief], and as a presentation of the extreme not even Dali has gone further than, Young Man Dressed as His Dead Mother Knifing a Naked Girl under a Shower.” So strong was his visual motivation that Hitchcock does at times resemble a conceptual artist, one who liked to capture shocking, witty ideas in those images that were so often his initial motivation for making a film. This sensibility is perhaps why his work has appealed to and inspired so many visual artists in other fields, many of whom have responded to Hitchcock’s voyeurism in their own creations. For example, Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video installation 24 Hour Psycho slows the Hitchcock movie down, stretching it to last an entire day. So elongated is each shot that, even in the frenetic moments of the shower scene montage, the audience is no longer looking at Hitchcock the filmmaker, but Hitchcock the still-life artist.

The work of the English artist Cornelia Parker has certain parallels with Hitchcock’s—bracing images laced with a playful wit, ingeniously executed, communicating an idea or a sensation, rather than a narrative. For her best-known work, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, she persuaded the British Army to detonate a garden shed full of everyday objects, then used the remains to reconstruct the shed in mid explosion, suspended in midair, with a single light bulb at its center, creating expressionist patterns of shadows all around it. Parker says that one artwork she wishes she had made is Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, an enormous replica of Stonehenge in the form of a bouncy castle, the type of jaunty undermining of solemn reality that Hitchcock would have appreciated, and which he executed himself with his replicas of Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest) and the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur) that turned famous monuments into jungle gyms. In 2016, Parker installed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan a structure she titled Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), a replica of the Bates family home made from the reclaimed materials of a dismantled red barn. In re-creating the most terrifying house in American history in the blood-red colors of an architectural icon of American wholesomeness, Parker intended to reflect her observations of the United States, in the way that Hitchcock used his outsider’s perspective as a lens through which to look at the American west. Hitchcock’s own inspiration for the Bates house, moldering next to a highway that represents the speed and transience of modern America, is thought to have included House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper.

Parker watched Psycho repeatedly and in freeze-frame, poring over tiny details. It was only in doing this that the artifice of Hitchcock’s set became apparent to her: this was not a real house but merely a painted facade, one of the many clever tricks that Hitchcock played on our eyes, confident that, unlike him, audiences rarely look closely enough to differentiate reality from falsehood. It was Hitchcock’s contention that almost every shot will be on screen for less than five seconds, nowhere near enough time to pick apart the trickery of moviemaking.

He may have been happy to bend the truth on screen, but Hitchcock’s approach to what he called “filling the tapestry” of a film was based on an unbending attention to detail. Though he took pride in declaring his films slices of cake rather than slices of life, he also aimed for realism in his work. Realism in the sense Hitchcock meant it had nothing to do with logic and plausibility, things in which he had only the vaguest interest. Instead, he felt it vital to place the Brownian motion of his plots within a sturdy, immutable chamber. “I avoid out-and-out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal.” More succinctly, Robert Boyle described the idea as “fairytales played against a realistic environment.” If one played an outrageous event in a convincingly ordinary setting, the emotional impact on the audience would be that much greater. Thus, while one could drive a horse and cart through some of the holes in Hitchcock plots, the mise-en-scènes of those films are remarkably detailed.

Fittingly, the pedant’s gaze seemed to reach new heights on Rear Window. In creating the right set, he instructed his team to scan Greenwich Village for granular visual details. Doc Erickson, the production manager, was charged with fulfilling Hitchcock’s wish for the neighborhood to be thoroughly photographed. Research images were taken of numerous apartments, and several courtyards were captured at different times of day, in different light, from different angles, and at different points of the compass. For the moment in the