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The Observer (22/Apr/2001) - The tainted saint

(c) The Observer (22/Apr/2001)

The tainted saint

Alfred Hitchcock receives a tribute from his Francophone fans in a stunning show as exciting and surprising as a season of his films

In Montreal, where the cold cramps your body into something like rigor mortis, I came face to face with the mother of all traumas: Mrs Bates from "Psycho". With a ratty wig on her severed head, her eye sockets hollow and mouth (equipped with a full set of choppers) grinning lewdly, the mummified crone presides over this superb exhibition. The matriarch's pickled head has replaced the skull of Yorick as our emblem of mortality and its jesting triumph. I felt more moved by her wizened, discoloured face than I did when I first saw the Mona Lisa.

The countries in which Hitchcock lived and worked did little to honour him during his centenary in 1999: England's tribute consisted of a vapidly trendy show at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, and Moma in New York managed only a paltry display of posters.

Two years later, his Francophone admirers have apotheosised him. It was French critics who first acclaimed him as a tragic metaphysician in the 1950s, when the English-speaking world still considered him to be no more than a shrewd commercial operator, and it is French art historians and cinephiles who now establish him as one of the indispensable modern masters - a creator of form, as Chabrol and Rohmer called him, who altered the way we see the world; a poète maudit who infected so many of us, as Truffaut put it, with his private disquiets; a dictator of dreams who, as Godard claimed, succeeded where Caesar and Napoleon failed, and took control of the entire universe.

As if proving Godard's point, a collection of souvenirs testifies to Hitchcock's global reach, his endless capacity for metamorphosis and his intimate invasion of our privacy. The curators have rounded up Hitchcock stamps from Sierra Leone, an ad for beer in which a puddle of froth distends into his bulbous profile, and bars of soap or towels imprinted with the black motto of the Bates Motel. Whether edging nervously up staircases or shiftily handling a pair of scissors, we all live inside Hitchcock's haunted head.

The exhibition begins in a dark room where, fumbling through shadows, we discover 21 mundane but mortal objects, displayed in glass cases on folds of blood-red cloth. This is a Hitchcockian reliquary, a gathering of props sanctified by their association with death; Bernard Herrmann's funereal score for the scene at the Mission Dolores in "Vertigo" announces that we are on holy ground. Among the curios are the gleaming razor from "Spellbound", the breadknife from "Blackmail", the glass of possibly poisoned milk from "Suspicion" and the tell-tale cigarette lighter from "Strangers on a Train". Here too are some of the director's profaner fetishes: the puckered skin of the handbag with its vaginal clasp of cold brass from "Marnie", the doll with the bleeding groin from "Stage Fright", the phallic telephoto lens from "Rear Window", and the silk stockings twined round handcuffs which unite the fugitive couple in "The 39 Steps".

Finally, we are released into daylight after sidling past a jungle gym infested with broody crows. The school playground from "The Birds" reminds us of the innocence which Hitchcock's imagination so cruelly despoils.

The 'fatal coincidences' to which the show refers represent moments when Hitchcock's films intersect with the history of art. This is his official admission to the culture enshrined by museums - if you like, his canonisation. 'Hitchcock was above all an Englishman,' says a wall text (in French, ironically), and the show traces his obsessive images back to the morbid romanticism of the Victorians. A Burne-Jones print hangs on the wall of the suspected serial killer in The Lodger, and serves as a photofit image of his preferred blonde victims. Ingrid Bergman's adored profile in "Under Capricorn" exactly matches the domestic Madonnas photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Kim Novak afloat in San Francisco bay in "Vertigo" resembles the drowning Ophelia of the pre-Raphaelite Millais; duplicated by the double role she plays as both soulful angel and earthly demon, Novak also eerily corresponds to Rossetti's Rosa Triplex. Hitchcock, who attended art history courses at night school during his early years in London, saw the motion picture as a paint ing freakishly animated.

An anguished Christ painted by Rouault is juxtaposed with close-ups of an excruciated Henry Fonda in "The Wrong Man". More riskily, the exhibition proceeds to uncover a traditional religious iconography in profaner contexts: the harried pursuit of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint through a birch forest in "North By Northwest" recalls the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, as if painted by a latter-day Mantegna.

The exhibition calls teasing attention to its own comparative method in a section where sequences from Hitchcock's films are screened beside parallel passages from other directors. 'Homage? Citation? Competition? Source?' asks the title cards, as we watch the "Psycho" shower scene next to a bath-tub murder from Fritz Lang's "While the City Sleeps", or the belltower finale from "Vertigo" intercut with an equivalent episode from Buñuel's "El". The coincidences don't damage Hitchcock's originality, because they show him taking expressionistic or surrealistic fantasies and grounding them in realism. The incineration of Valhalla in Lang's Nibelungen saga becomes the torching of Manderley in "Rebecca"; a car radio which broadcasts from the nether world in Cocteau's Orphée is switched on again - more scarily because more plausibly - in "The Birds", and the same ethereal voice announces doomsday.

Continuing what the curator Guy Cogeval calls Hitchcock's 'adventure through modern art', the exhibition aligns him with a succession of audacious avant-gardes. The dream Dali designed for "Spellbound" is reconstructed, with Ingrid Bergman (in footage junked by the producer Selznick) calcifying into a columnar white goddess who sports a spiky dog collar. The crazed aviary in "The Birds" is linked with the swooping predators painted by Braque or Max Ernst.

While Grace Kelly, Novak and Tippi Hedren preen and pose on a triptych of screens, the Hitchcock blonde is perversely disassembled by other artists: Magritte's Rape depicts a flaxen-haired female who face is her pudenda, while Herbert List's Slave is a headless mannequin with a steel undercarriage, tethered by ropes. In conclusion, the show boldly abstracts Hitchcock, claiming he shared Duchamp's devious talent for unsettling our confidence in reality. It then demonstrates how he did so in North by Northwest, which sends its characters absurdly scuttling towards a non-existent compass point and looks down on landscapes whose cross-hatched lines are the vectors of dehumanised fate.

Mrs Bates gloats in the penultimate room, surveying a gruesomely faithful mock-up of the "Psycho" motel cabin. The bathroom door is open, and a naked woman vainly tries to wash away her sins behind a translucent shower curtain. An extra amenity has been added to the tacky decor: a television set, on which we can watch looped footage of Janet Leigh screaming as the knife is raised to slash her - a savage, messy killing which is at the same time the most clinically perfect example of montage in the history of film.

Interviewed by a French admirer elsewhere in the show, Hitchcock declares, with his macabre and lecherous mastery of double meaning: 'Je suis un puritain' - and then adds, after a cheeky pause, 'dans le cinéma.'

No wonder he pretended to be a mere entertainer with harmlessly mercenary motives. Asked if he considered himself an artist, he shrugged and defensively grunted: 'No, not particularly.' But Godard, in his recent history of cinema, insisted on the accolade and capitalised it, identifying Hitchcock as THE ARTIST - the man who, almost alone, defined the expressive possibilities of the seventh art, and discovered its alarming psychological potency.

His stature is irrefutably established in the Montreal exhibition. See it when it transfers to Paris: it is as exciting and surprising as a whole season of Hitchcock films, and I can think of no higher praise.

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