The Man Who Saw Too Much - Alfred Hitchcock

Art in America, June, 2001 by Sue Taylor

A staple of Surrealism, the theme of woman as statue recurs in a painting by Rene Magritte, Deep Waters (1941), where an uncanny marble figure in coat and gloves is accompanied by an incongruously huge bird. The resemblance between the Magritte and a publicity photo for The Birds (1962) is striking: Tippi Hedren, a big crow perched on her arm, is statuesque in a glamorous cocktail sheath. Hedren is among the many Hitchcock heroines pictured in the exhibition, which foregrounds his celebrated "type," a cool blonde, often described as "icy" and inaccessible. The statue metaphor gives added meaning to his predilection for clothing female leads in long white gowns with pleated skirts, thus casting Bergman, loan Fontaine and--in Edith Head's costume designs for To Catch a Thief (1954)--Grace Kelly as archaic Grecian kore or fluted columns.

A painting of Pygmalion and Galatea (ca. 1926) by Franz von Stuck invites us to consider the more universal trope of woman as image, fashioned by man according to his desire, as Hitchcock, for instance, literally transformed Hedren from model to movie star or as Scottie recreates Madeleine from Judy in Vertigo. Although a galleD' of beautiful blondes--including stunning Technicolor sequences of Hedren in Marnie, Kelly in Rear Window and Kim Novak in Vertigo--allows viewers to luxuriate in the visual pleasure of what Hitchcock wrought, an untitled film still (1979) by Cindy Sherman posing in a white slip subtly reminds us that such eroticized icons are masculinist constructions.

Also illuminated in the exhibition is the fetishizing of feminine hair and body parts that film theorist Laura Mulvey identified as a crucial defensive mechanism of the male unconscious in classic Hollywood cinema.(4) But the tendency is peculiar neither to Hitchcock nor to film: Vertigo's loving close-up of Madeleine's blonde chignon and the fascinated caress of the back of Eve Kendall's neck in North by Northwest (1958) find echoes in paintings on view by Edouard Vuillard, The Nape of Misia's Neck (ca. 189-99), and Domenico Gnoli, Curly Red Hair (1969). The libidinotts investment in women's accessories seems ubiquitous, as we encounter images of Psycho's Marion Crane in girdle and lacy brassiere, or Marnie's soft leather purse (stuffed with stolen money) gripped tightly under her arm or Catherine Lacy's shiny high-heel pumps in The Lady Vanishes (1938). It's the same urge to fragment, isolate and cathect found in Alfred Stieglitz's 1919 photograph of a woman's leg, stockinged and tightly shod or, earlier, in Max Klinger's suite of etchings (1881) unfoldlng a tale of a man's desperate obsession with a woman's glove. An amazing surprise in this category is a painting in the show by German Realist Wilhelm Leibl, The Corset (ca. 1880-81), which fixates on a woman's cinched waist, every pleat in her apron, every fold on her sleeve detailed with almost lascivious attention.

Eroticized vision and cultural spectacle number of works in the exhibition that parallel themes in the movies. If the menaced eyes in Spellbound's dream signify castration, the look in Psycho and Rear Window is also phallic--witness Norman Bates spying on his victim through a peephole (a picture of Susanna and the Elders on the wall nearby) and L.B. Jeffries equipped with a long telephoto lens, the better to observe Miss Torso and her neighbors across the courtyard. Clips from these films indicate how effectively Hitchcock implicates the moviegoer as voyeur: in the opening scene in Psycho, the camera pans across Phoenix until it finds a window with blinds slightly raised, then sneaks beneath them into a room where Marion lies in her underwear, her lover standing over her. Hitchcock indulges his and his viewers' voyeurism while also positioning them as guilty perverts--Peeping Toms. Across the century, a number of other works present scopophilia as a common feature of the modern city: Auguste Chabaud's painting Hotel-Hotel (1907-08) of neon nightlife populated by disembodied eyes; Andre Kertesz's photograph of a couple, backs turned to his camera, peeking through cracks in a fence in Circus, May 19, 1920; and Alain Fleischer's nocturnal projection of pornographic images on the brick wall of an apartment building in Exhibition in the North of France (1992). The witty inclusion of Magritte's 1937 photo of Edward James, seen from the rear studying one of the artist's paintings, suggests to the exhibition's visitors how they, too, participate in the kind of actMty in question.