BFI Hitchcock Season – Tippi Hedren Q&A, Camille Paglia Lecture & Vertigo (1958)

What an exhausting day, both physically and mentally. After a completely unintentional impromptu location scout of Children Of Men,  including a late breakfast in Shadwell followed by a meander over to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall to see what’s shaking (not a lot I’m afraid to say) I then took a leisurely stroll over to the West End to pick up a few Blu-Rays, before finally basking in the sun at Trafalgar Square, killing time (heh) before a couple of Hitchcock Season events at the glorious BFI. So let’s get this post going by updating you all on my recent experiences with the master of suspense, I still have another review to construct at some point next week before further activities the following weekend, the other good news is that I managed to pick up all my remaining tickets for the screenings and events in September and October with one crushing omission – alas Bruce Dern is no longer coming over for a Q&A due to filming commitments. That’s Bruce The Driver Dern, Bruce Coming Home Dern, or perhaps more importantly Bruce Silent Running Dern, also known as Bruce father of Laura Dern. It’s a real shame but here we are, I did manage to get a ticket to the other big October event so watch this space….

Earlier in the week I managed to catch the Tippi Heden Q&A at the South Bank prior to the world premiere of BBC drama The Girl, an intriguing looking take on her horrendous experiences of working with Hitch on The Birds, alas this was sold out but no matter, I can wait until it gets its terrestrial screening at Christmas. You may recall that this wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Ms. Hedren in conversation but this felt like much more of an ‘event’ given the backdrop of the full retrospective, a point reinforced by the surprise (for me) addition of Donald Spoto in the questioners chair, for the uninitiated he is one of the premier writers on the craft and legacy of the portly Picasso, and his book The Dark Side Of Genius is an essential acquisition of any Hitchcockian fanatic, up there with the writings of Robin Wood and of course the essential Truffaut series of interviews. Naturally at times this was a grimace inducing event given Hitchcock’s reprehensible behaviour which is utterly repellent, but this did coax out some fascinating illuminations of the man and his work, with Spoto expressing the opinion that Marnie was essentially his last major and concurrently emotional work, with only a few sub-par features to follow with one potential exception that I will be reviewing later in August. Hedren is quite a remarkable woman and despite having her subsequent career destroyed she did manage to work with the likes of Chaplin as well as being a champion for animal welfare over the intervening decades, she earned an audible gasp when she revealed that one of the directors who wanted to work with her during her Hitchcock contract enforced blacklist was none other than Truffaut, and despite her torture remains sanguine about her life and what may have been, and insists that in the initial stages she had a fantastic learning experience before the disgusting obsession ballooned into full stalker mode. The harassment is a real stain on Hitchcock’s legacy and rightfully so, it throws a very different and coruscating light on the vast breadth of his work with all those auterist and associated perspectives, at the close of the discussion Spoto summed up the situation brilliantly by utterly condemning the behavior but making the point that the art remains, separate yet umbilically linked, as many of histories artistic visionaries were guilty of deeply offensive and decrepit behaviour – Picasso and his treatment of women, Wagner and his anti-Semitism and criminal activities, the list goes on but the work remains, disembodied and eternal.

An obvious and exhausted choice of soundtrack perhaps but the visual theme dovetails nicely into the first session of yesterday’s activities, an utterly brilliant and captivating lecture entitled ‘Women & Magic in Hitchcock’ by the fantastic Professor Camille Paglia, one of the worlds leading feminist academics and social critics, a definitive Hitchcock champion whose conceptions and speculations were pure collegiate heroin  for the Hitchcock evangelists such as yours truly. The lecture was illustrated with revealing sequences of the films enhanced with Paglia’s scholarly commentary, it was an amazing allocution and you may remember her galactic contributions to this. Canoeing through references to Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll and even Frank Sinatra this was a frequently hilarious, always enthusiastic and perfectly delivered argument on Hitchcock’s profound genius and his ‘agonised complexity of mens relationship to women’, and rather a personal experience for me as back in my academic youth I had written a 10,000 word dissertation on Hitch which defended him against the rampant claims of misogyny as a simplistic reading of his work – the common and usual position at the time – thus it’s nice to have your opinions vindicated sometimes. Paglia dismisses these redundant attacks effortlessly with the dual claim of his erotic vision as women as ‘object d’art and woman as devouring mother’ – see how his heroines glide through his films as either spirited, unearthly, intangible wraiths or the challenging, aged females are portrayed as infertile, neutering, hectoring crones. I can’t possibly do the prelection justice here as it obviously deserves its own lengthy appreciation, fortunately this was filmed so I’ll post it once it gets on-line. As an aside cultish fans of the lesser known Bell, Book & Candle, also released in 1958 as was Vertigo with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart in the starring roles also may find a revisit to this mirroring work a fascinating exercise, as Paglia excavated some unconscious connections to this lesser known work, a miasma of the occult and haunted, when moving into Psycho territory she claims that the ‘frightful shower murder is like a ceremonial purification and slaughter, a blood sacrifice to a jealous local goddess who will brook no rivals’ – incredible stuff.

And so finally we come to the Pièce de résistance of the day, a glorious new digital restoration of the recently canonized greatest film ever made®, Hitchcock’s 1958 undisputed masterpiece Vertigo. I don’t have a great deal to add to my existing exhaustive review that you can revisit here other than to say this was one of the most ravishing screenings I’ve ever been privileged to attend, given that it’s not so much that the BFI have funded a glorious new print as they appear to have developed a time machine, travelled back fifty-four years and spirited away a master negative from the Kodak labs with the emulsion drips still spattering the floor as they legged it back to the nest of their fictional, epoch defying contraption. This new print is breathtaking  in its acute visual qualities and rich luxuriant tones, it honestly felt like seeing it again for the first time and is an absolute must see for anyone even remotely interested in cinema. I fell deeply in love with this film at the tender age of thirteen or so, following my initial contact with Hitchcock’s golden age of 1954 to 1964 through a late night ITV film season,  although my Prince Charles cinema viewing from a couple of years ago was terrific this gets perched on a higher occasional plateau, and it hypnotised me to the point where Vertigo has now been elevated up the Minty pantheon to silver medal position, naturally 2001 will always be unimpeachable but there is always room for quarreling maneuvers further down the structure of the celluloid cathedral. The elegant camera movements, the organisation of effulgent colour, the spatial geometries and structural perfections, Novak’s and Stewart’s purely cinematic, non verbal moments in their performances, it’s all in their glowing, spectral eyes, and for the first time I think I detected that Hitch actually changed Judy / Madeline’s eye colour depending on her duplicate persona, all these gambits accelerating the volcanic emotional core which separates it from Kane as a more emotionally spearing work of genius. It is a masterpiece with its numerous layers always rendering alternate affectations and obsessions, even when you take a Chris Marker static approach it howls and murmurs, as you can infatuate here;