Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
Hitchcock: The Hidden Power
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Hitchcock et l'Art: Coïncidences Fatales (Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences)
catalog of the exhibition edited by Dominique Païniand Guy Cogeval
an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 6–September 24, 2001. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Milan: Mazzotta,498 pp., CAN$39.95 (paper)
The Hitchcock Murders
by Peter Conrad
Faber and Faber, 368 pp., $25.00
Hitchcock et l'Art, an exhibition devoted to teasing out connections between the films of Alfred Hitchcock and a wide range of art from the 1850s to the 1990s, has just closed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and it is a pity that there are apparently no plans to bring it to the United States. (It has been shown in North America, having originated in a more condensed form in Montreal.) Since Hitchcock is already everywhere in American culture—in video stores and on cable TV, in film courses and in a stream of critical studies and biographies that shows no sign of letting up, in remakes and reworkings and allusions that mine the oeuvre as a kind of folklore—it would have been fitting if more of us could have had a look at an assemblage that opens up the work in unpredictable and fascinating ways. Hitchcock et l'Art amounts to a form of film criticism relying not on verbal analysis but on the deployment of images and objects. It talks about Hitchcock by speaking in his own language, and in the process raises haunting questions about the potential of what that language might convey.
Review, 3365 words
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