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Master of imperfection
Hitchcock may have been a master of many things, but his goofy endings were like a dead cockroach found at the bottom of a near-perfect cinematic sundae.
By Steve Burgess
[08/13/99]

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"Detroit Rock City"
Shout it out loud: You'll be in sweet pain after a retro glimpse at four kids smoking through the '70s heyday of Kiss.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[08/13/99]

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Sharps & flats
House music will never die: The hyped -- but worth it -- Basement Jaxx testifies.
By Amanda Nowinski
[08/13/99]

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"Brokedown Palace"
Claire Danes stars in her first -- and hopefully last -- women's prison flick.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[08/13/99]

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All in the family
Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell recalls working with her father, Alfred, on "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho."
By Michael Sragow
[08/13/99]

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Seen in this light, his oeuvre constitutes a blast at gentility. So does the work of Camille Paglia, whose love of Hitchcock informed her controversial book "Sexual Personae" and prompted her to write a study of "The Birds" for the British Film Institute. On the occasion of Hitchcock's centennial, I asked Paglia about the daring art and astounding influence of the man once known simply as the Master of Suspense.

Also Today Master of imperfection Hitchcock may have been a master of many things, but his goofy endings were like a dead cockroach found at the bottom of a near-perfect cinematic sundae. All in the family Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell recalls working with her father Alfred on "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho."

I wonder if you agree that Hitchcock is the only director who is as great an inspiration to the avant-garde as to the mainstream?

I think it's very true. Hitchcock was viewed as merely an entertainer until the French New Wave directors of the late 1950s and '60s began to hail him as the ultimate auteur. In the last three decades, Hitchcock's critical esteem has swelled and swelled in the film studies departments of universities. The staying power of the actual films themselves has been proved by their omnipresence on American television -- which is really unique in the world. There's no country that has that kind of advantage of almost wall-to-wall movie broadcasts. By the '90s, something I would not have believed in the '60s has become pretty clear -- that Hitchcock has displaced practically all of the major European art directors that I myself thought in college and graduate school would be the ones who would be considered the equals of great masters in painting and music and the novel of the 20th century.

It's not a big surprise to me. As a teacher now for almost 30 years, I've tried to show my classes the movies that I took very seriously by Antonioni or Bergman or even Fellini, and there is little in these films that contemporary American students seem to connect with. I've begun to conclude, to my regret, that the high point of European art film was in fact rather parochial. That is, it had to do with the negative backwash from two world wars. The sensibility of catastrophe and bleak nihilism that came out of that period was, it turns out, not universal.

I certainly thought that Bergman, at least, would always have general appeal. But on the contrary, it's only Hitchcock whose films have bridged the generations. Many contemporary students are as fascinated by those films as we were. If I had been asked to rank the great directors in the late '60s, when I entered grad school, I would never have put Hitchcock in the top five; I'd have put him in the top 10, not the top five. Now, as a culture critic, I say at the end of the 20th century that because of his technical innovations and massive influence, Hitchcock for me is the equal of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust and Joyce.

In writing my study of "The Birds" for the British Film Institute, I had the opportunity to review all kinds of films from Hitchcock's past that were not available when I was young -- films from the silent era and the 1930s that are now on video. I was just stunned by what I discovered: the blatant continuity of Hitchcock's sensibility, down to tiny little details in the earliest films in matters of decor or geographical setting or the plot. It's clear that what we have in the works of Hitchcock really is, despite the ups and downs of the quality of the films, a giant oeuvre -- one huge imaginative projection. I feel also that Hitchcock's vision is so extensive, so broad, that it takes in everything, from architecture to politics to sexuality -- but sexuality in particular, with its weird mixture of beauty and desire and horror and the macabre. There's an emotional depth to Hitchcock's films that I find almost completely lacking in some of the European art films that I once so adored and now regard as rather affected and very partial statements about human life.

Are you saying that at this point he is the only movie director you would put on a level with Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust and Joyce?

With Bergman. Ingmar Bergman has produced an enormous body of very important work. But oddly enough, if I were to try to choose a Bergman film to show to my undergraduates, I would be hard-pressed to know what it would be. I end up showing "Persona" simply because it's my favorite film and it devastated me when I saw it in my senior year of college at its American release. It's a film that I continue to draw from. I just toured in England with it for the National Film Theatre and was very pleased to see the audience that came to that film -- an audience that was not simply young but of several generations and seemed very responsive to it. I feel I've lived that film and know every detail of it, but I still find new things in it -- and I laugh through it. People think it's a very grotesque and traumatic film, but actually Bergman, at his best, has that same mixture of comedy and horror that Hitchcock has.

As far as I'm concerned, Bergman is the greatest living artist in any genre in the world right now. He is drawing, of course, on his great knowledge of theater and opera and all kinds of things that flow into him. I don't think we'll ever have a Bergman again because today's filmmakers get right into film early on, and they just don't have the kind of cultivation that Bergman has. But I feel that the major artworks in world history are self-evident at a certain level and that they appeal to general and universal emotions. Therefore I think that it can be argued that Hitchcock is certainly of the rank of Bergman and that he may be the one who survives this century in terms of the canon that eventually emerges.

When I was starting out as a critic and interviewer and first began talking to directors, I was always shocked when someone you wouldn't automatically associate with Hitchcock -- like, say, Jonathan Demme -- would immediately come out with "Well, of course the director who most influenced me was Hitchcock." It was because Hitchcock, through his lucidity, was able to teach by example the grammar of film and the expressive potential of film.

I think every young filmmaker should be studying Hitchcock because of the editing alone, that is, the economy with which an enormous amount is compressed into three seconds of an image. Today I can barely stand to watch most new films that are released, even the ones that are critically praised, because they run on and on and on. The people who make them have no sense at all of subtlety and suggestion and how to think about a shot, to set it up months in advance in your head and not just fall to the lowest common denominator of the audience.

Hitchcock had such a keen sense of the popular audience -- which I think he got from his lower-middle-class background and from watching the crowds in London. He's able to go directly to the mass audience and yet never insult that audience. He plays tricks on us, but with the most incredible kind of sculptured cinema. It's pictorial insofar as he imagines the screen as if it's a painting and fills up the rectangle, but it's also sculptural in the way that he photographs the human figure. The great stars of Hitchcock look like monumental objets d'art; they are just wonderful to look at. Filmmakers today don't realize the craving of the audience simply to look and to admire and to savor the beauty of a sexy man or woman on the screen before you. They don't realize you can simply let the camera linger on the person. The director should give himself or herself over to the energy of the story or to the charisma and craft of the performers themselves -- and never mind about showing how clever and cool you are.

Next page | Was Hitchcock a woman-hater?