The Man Who Saw Too Much - Alfred Hitchcock

Art in America, June, 2001 by Sue Taylor

The myriad visual correspondences between Alfred Hitchcock's movies and modern art are explored in an exhibition that travels to the Centre Pompidou this month.

Works of art can possess ominous power in Alfred Hitchcock's films. In Blackmail (1929), a painting of a laughing jester seems to mock Alice White from the easel of the artist she has just killed. Guilt-ridden and fearful, she lashes out, ripping the canvas. A portrait of her predecessor torments the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock's American debut, while the ancestral image of Carlotta Valdez, enshrined in a museum in Vertigo (1957), appears to drive Madeleine Elster mad. But "Hitchcock and Art," a fascinating exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, does more than merely survey the director's oeuvre for sightings of paintings or sculptures. Cocurators Guy Cogeval and Dominique Paini, directors of the Montreal Museum and the Parisian Cinematheque Francaise respectively, situate Hitchcock's 50 years of filmmaking within the larger visual culture of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Film clips, storyboards, publicity stills and costume designs are provocatively juxtaposed with works in all mediums by diverse artists ranging from Edward Burne-Jones to Julia Margaret Cameron, Auguste Rodin, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Bridget Riley and many others.

Subtitled "Fatal Coincidences," the exhibition reveals myriad correspondences among these objects in iconography and style, formal and narrative strategies, mood and recurring themes. Literary and cinematic parallels are noted as well. According a popular filmmaker such expansive treatment is an unusual endeavor for an art museum, although in 1999, the centenary of Hitchcock's birth, the Oxford Museum of Modern Art organized another kind of homage: "Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art" surveyed video and sound works, photographs and installations by artists directly referencing or inspired by movies like Rear Window (1953), Psycho (1959-60) and Marnie (1963-64). Victor Burgin began this artistic engagement with Hitchcock in his psychoanalytic treatment of Vertigo, a text and photo-panel piece titled The Bridge (1984); the phenomenon is now widespread and international, exemplified by Judith Barry, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe and David Reed, among others. The pervasive appeal of Hitchcock in recent years is attributable to multiple and diverse factors, not the least of which must be technological (the advent of the VCR) and theoretical (the ascendancy of semiotics and psychoanalysis as interpretive models). Surely contemporary artists are equally seduced by the potent psychology of Hitchcock's oeuvre, his manipulation of Freudian concepts and, above all, his masterly production of a realist, narrative cinema injected with his own supremely self-concious artifice.

While Oxford's "Notorious" approached the films of Britain's native son as a source or, perhaps better, a resource for contemporary, visual artists, "Hitchcock and Art" instead reeks to contextualize his esthetic historically. It's notable that this ambitious, celebratory project was initiated by two Frenchmen. At the forefront of film studies and theory, French intellectuals of Cahiers du cinema long ago recognized Hitchcock's status as auteur, devoting a special issue to his work in 1954; Francois Truffaut's interviews with him appeared in 1962, followed by his Cinema selon Hitchcock in 1966.(1) Cogeval, moreover, is an expert on European Symbolist art and aims to show how Hitchcock's sensibilities, especially toward female beauty and romantic yearning, developed from this poetic attitude of the 19th century. Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites defined the remote, even unattainable woman, cloaked in mystery, later embodied in characters like the spectral Madeleine Elster or the frigid antiheroine of Marnie. Images associating love and death, desire and drowning--John Everett Millais's Study for Ophelia (1852), Willy Sohiobach's The Dead Woman (1890)--predict morbid Hitchcock obsessions and the watery tableau of Madeleine's suicidal plunge into the San Francisco Bay. A contemporary tribute to Hitchcock's dramatic mise-en-scene, sans femme, is also included--a color photograph by Cindy Bernard of the Golden Gate Bridge, Ask the Dusk Vertigo (1990).

Although this ricochet of sources, homages and "coincidences" old and new creates a tangled web, the exhibition refuses to reduce its thesis to simple causality or influence, insisting on varied possibilities. A gallery of illustrations for the stories of Edgar Mlan Poe by artists like Alfred Kubin, Odilon Redon and the Italian Symbolist Alberto Martini reminds us that Hitchcock knowingly modeled his efforts in suspense on Poe's dark "spellbinding logic."(2) In other instances, the relationships posited are tentative, as when Hitchcock clips are compared with similar scenes from Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau and Fritz Lang. Does the struggle between Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine/Judy in the mission bell tower in Vertigo derive from an episode in Bunuel's El (1952), or the shower murder in Psycho from Lang's While the City Sleebs (1956)? The viewer must decide.