2023-05-27 18:59:51
write something original about Alfred Hitchcock (London, 1899-Los Angeles, 1980), one of the most popular and influential filmmakers of all time, is a very complicated task. Edward White he faces the vertigo of approaching the iconic figure as if he were doing a psychoanalysis through a double track: his life and his work. There is a significant peculiarity: in this case the two trajectories cannot be separated. His films are loaded with more or less hidden references to his biography and his biography is explained by his films.
White threads both high-voltage areas with extreme skill, a remarkable capacity for reflection, and penetrating lucidity when it comes to unraveling the Hitchcockian enigma from clues that unfold from 12 clues, 12 lives, 12 paths to follow. the traces of the creator, as debatable in his personal life as indisputable for his cinematographic prowess.
The one who came to have his own Hitchcock brand was, as Oscar Wilde in theater and Andy Warhol in art, “a case apart in the Hollywood canon: a director whose mythology dwarfs the sharpness of the myriad of classic movies he made.” A historian said of him that his career offers “an inexpensive way to study the entire history of cinema”. And it is that his work “covers the eras of silent, sound, black and white and 3D films; expressionism, film noir and social realism; thrillers, sitcoms and terror; Weimar Germany, the golden age of Hollywood, the rise of television, and the phenomenon of the ’60s and ’70s that gave us Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.” Almost nothing. Most.
But, also, “he was the most emblematic artist of the 20th century, […] the most influential, whose life and work in diverse media and in a plurality of genres graphically illuminate essential themes of Western culture.” His works “come compellingly to today’s public.” , paranoia, guilt and shame “are the emotional motors of his films.” And more: “Surveillance, conspiracy, distrust of authority and sexual violence these were the issues that constantly worried him”. It is enough to take a look at today’s news to realize that his cinema is not from yesterday. It will even be from tomorrow.
The book delivers 12 lives, 12 portraits with different frames so that all of them contribute an essential vision of a man from the public entity that he created and of the mythological creature “in which he has become”: the “irrepressible prankster, the lonely and terrified child, the innovative problem solver, the citizen of the world who never really left London and the transgressive artist for whom violence and disorder were a creative life force”.
Warning
A necessary warning. And fair: “You can’t deny your talent, but without the intervention of creative collaborators, journalists, publicists and us, his public, what we know as Hitchcock would not exist”. end in itself; he was not just a filmmaker, but a promoter, an artist, and a showman, with his self-created mythology at the center of it all. The more that mythology grew, the more Hitchcock used it to tease us, with in-jokes, irony, and self-parody.” Then came the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and the child prodigy “had become a cunning old cynic on the path of postmodernism. “.
Who is the real Hitchcock? “Her reading of him as the lascivious ogre clashes with the image of Hitchcock the devoted husband. Hitchcock the brooding artist is counterbalanced by Hitchcock the vodeviliano. The laborious and imperfect digestion misanthrope that some point to contrasts with the inveterate romantic that others identify when they plunge into Hitchcock’s filmography.or just dive into the tormented and stormy psychology of the creator of Birds. It also investigates in a detailed and rigorous way in its creation process in each of its elements, without neglecting a single one of them. Because, say those who knew him well, no one enjoyed making movies as much as he did.
The book begins with a child Alfred fascinated by the play Mary Rose, by JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. It is the story of a girl who wants to grow up but cannot. Like Hitchcock: the perpetual child. Run-ins with terrifying authority figures marked him throughout his life. His fear of the priests and his violent punishment left “an indelible mark”. They were, he admitted, “the root of his work.”
A visual poet of anxiety and the accidental, as they came to define him, the filmmaker collected stories from his childhood that could well be considered traumas later exported to his films, although in the case of someone like him, anyone knows where the truth began and where fantasy began. He “he was telling us that he associated childhood with fear, insecurity, confusion, and the little moments that change everything.” He eye: “My mind works more like a baby’s, it thinks in pictures.”
Complex collaborations
Confessed admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, Hitchcock “he continually addressed murder as a perverse expression of artistic creation”. It became clear to him “the pervasive power of violence in popular culture.” White addresses Hitchcock’s complex collaborations with his screenwriters, his transition from commercial filmmaker to cult creator, his wife Alma’s role in forging his legend, the ins and outs of a groundbreaking film like Psycho, and its famous scene. of murder in the shower, his relationship with women (on and off the screen) in search of answers to the questions: who are they and what do they want? And he does not avoid the controversial issue of accusations of sexual predator, especially when the actress Tipi Hedren denounced, with the filmmaker already dead, that she had sexually assaulted her. Summarizes the author: “Socially awkward, self-centered, and sexually frustrated, Hitchcock made advances on and assaulted young women because he couldn’t control his impulses, but also because in the environment in which he lived, men in his position were allowed to behave that way.” manner”.
The work shows a perfect balance between the folds of the artist’s personality and its ramifications in his work, which in some cases was received with hostility (Marnie, Psycho) and which the passage of time exalted. His bitterness over being overweight (“a shell of fat”) did not prevent him from appropriating it.sa fat to draw an unmistakable public figure. Eating was for him an art form: the palate before the torment of the diet. Few times was he happier than when he dressed his female stars. “A sensual pleasure equal to undressing them.” The dandy’s indifference, his obsession with good manners (how Paul Newman came up with the idea of drinking a can of beer at a dinner), his imaginary identification with Cary Grant, his relationship with religion… There are so many layers to Hitchcock that are well they could add 12 more lives to the book. “The further we get from the 20th century, the more important it becomes in its history.”
‘The twelve lives of Alfred Hitchcock’
Edward White
Translation by Ana Pérez Galván
alliance
432 pages
23,70 euros
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