Word: hitchcocked
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...This life-size reconstruction, at Paris' Pompidou Center, of one of cinema's most memorable scenes is evidence that Alfred Hitchcock's art has made it into the Western canon. Part Planet Hollywood-style memorabilia collection, part film archive and very much a study of the master of suspense's influences and inspirations, "Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences" is the museum's first attempt to establish a filmmaker's oeuvre within the context of the other arts. The show is on until Sept. 24. Influential paintings, sculptures, novels, storyboards, stills, film clips and photographs play off each other to reveal...
...cigarette lighter in Strangers on a Train is more memorable than the image of Cézanne's apple, French director Jean-Luc Godard wrote, it's because Hitchcock was "the greatest creator of forms of the 20th century, and it's forms that tell us finally what lies at the bottom of things." Forms were Hitchcock's fetish, and he was a master at etching an image into his audience's memory. Movie fans will immediately recognize the show's small gold lighter with the initials A.G. engraved around a tennis racket as being from Strangers, and the smashed...
...Everyday objects took their place with the fine arts in Hitchcock's films. Evidence for the influence of well-known paintings and sculptures - many of them on display here - is overwhelming. One look at Willy Schlobach's painting of La Morte, and it's clear Hitchcock directly recreated its image in Vertigo when Kim Novak throws herself into San Francisco Bay. Walking around Rodin's The Kiss gives the same effect as the camera turning around Jimmy Stewart's embrace of Novak later in the movie. The aerial shot of Cary Grant in the cornfield in North by Northwest - with...
...intersects film most lucidly in the dream sequence in Spellbound. Wanting to avoid the clichéd soft focus approach, Hitchcock sought out Salvador Dalí to help him depict an amnesiac patient's dream in the clarity of reality. "What I was looking for was the living side of dreams," said Hitchcock. "All of Dalí's work is very large with sharp angles, long views and black shadows." The result of the collaboration was grandiose - five different sets were built involving Dalí's painted decorations and miniature sets - but most of the scene ended...
...Hitchcock wasn't all about seriousness and suspense. His trademark, a cameo in each of his films, shows the director's admiration of a good joke. His role as a casual passerby - as a man reading a newspaper or a passenger on a train - recurs 32 times in one room of the exhibition. The deliberateness of the gag is at its height in the 1944 film Lifeboat: an ad for a weight-loss program printed on the back of a survivor's newspaper features the portly director and his famous gut - in before and after poses...