Hitchcock

Started by jmj, March 14, 2003, 01:28:28 PM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

children with angels

In case anyone is interested, my first academic article to appear in print (in The Hitchcock Annual), called 'What We Don't See and What We Think it Means: Ellipsis and Occlusion in Rear Window', is now available online here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/47777361/What-We-Don-t-See-and-What-We-Think-it-Means-Ellipsis-and-Occlusion-in-Rear-Window-By-James-MacDowell.

It's long and detailed, as film studies pieces tend to be, but hopefully might be of interest to those of you who read and like such things.
"Should I bring my own chains?"
"We always do..."

http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/
http://thelesserfeat.blogspot.com/

Sleepless

Congratulations. It was an enjoyable read. What is your background (studying/teaching)?
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

children with angels

Thanks, glad you liked it! I've just handed in my PhD in film studies, having previously done a Masters and an undergrad in Film & Literature - all at the University of Warwick, UK. I've been teaching throughout the postgrad period.
"Should I bring my own chains?"
"We always do..."

http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/
http://thelesserfeat.blogspot.com/

Stefen

I love when xixax does it big. Good job.  :bravo:
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

children with angels

Haha, not sure I've done it big yet exactly, but thanks very much!  8)
"Should I bring my own chains?"
"We always do..."

http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/
http://thelesserfeat.blogspot.com/

I Love a Magician

def. doin it big when it's linked to in one of my favorite blogs (http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2011/02/panopticon-links.html)

i promise to read this when i carve out the time to do so

Mr. Merrill Lehrl

From Trailers from Hell again, a of James Brown asking Hitchcock a question. Probably not an important video in any sense but I think it's a riot that's the one question he wanted to ask.
"If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America," Bolaño says, "I'd take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful."

Pubrick

I've seen that and the bungled question doesn't make any sense. Hitch makes the most of it to fulfil his promotiinal obligations but the whole interaction feels sad, with Hitch so far past his prime and this crack head asking nonsense about his golden years on a forgettable useless promotion tour type program... poor Hitch.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Early Alfred Hitchcock effort discovered
A portion of 'The White Shadow,' a 1923 silent film that's considered to be his first credit, is found in a New Zealand archive.
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

It's the kind of surprise the Master of Suspense would have loved.

The National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive are announcing Wednesday the discovery of the first 30 minutes of a 1923 British film, "The White Shadow," considered to be the earliest feature film in which Alfred Hitchcock has a credit.

Hitchcock, who was just 24 at the time, was the writer, assistant director, editor and production designer on the melodrama, starring Betty Compson as twin sisters —one good and one bad —and Clive Brook. "The White Shadow" will have its "re-premiere" Sept. 22 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The silent film will be added to the academy's Hitchcock collection, which also includes the legendary director's papers.

"What we are getting is the missing link," said David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock." "He was a creative young man who had already done some writing. We know the kind of creative personality he had when he was young and we know a few years later he started directing movies himself. What we don't know is how these things were coalescing in his imagination."

"White Shadow's" director, Graham Cutts, is described by Sterritt as a "hack" who didn't take too kindly to Hitchcock to the point that his "professional jealousy toward the gifted upstart made the job all the more challenging."

"White Shadow" was discovered in a collection of unidentified American nitrate prints that had been safeguarded at the New Zealand archive since 1989. That's when Tony Osborne, the grandson of New Zealand projectionist and collector Jack Murtagh, brought the highly unstable nitrate material to the archive. Because the archive only has the funding to restore its country's vintage films, experts couldn't spend much time with the American releases (though "White Shadow" was a British film it was released in the U.S. in 1924 by Lewis J. Selznick Enterprises). Selznick's son, producer David O. Selznick, would bring Hitchcock to America 15 years later to make "Rebecca."

"We took quite a lot of care into storing them. It was kind of an investment," said Fred Stark, head of the New Zealand archive. "We would wind through these films every 18 to 24 months, which enabled us to keep them from getting stuck, and if there were problems we were able to correct them."

Last year, the National Film Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, received a grant to send an archivist down to the New Zealand archive to check out the American films in the collection. Some 75 features, shorts, newsreels and fragments were discovered last year and divided up between the academy's archive, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Library of Congress, the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art. The biggest find in that cache was the 1927 John Ford film "Upstream," which was screened at the academy last year.

This year, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded the first trip, gave the NFPF more funds to check out what was left. Annette Melville, head of the NFPF, noted that "it was kind of a different activity than the previous work, which had more complete films. A lot of these films will be partial films and fragments."

Nitrate expert Leslie Lewis is NFPF's Sherlock Holmes. She was the lead sleuth last year and also went through the material this time around with the help of the staff at the New Zealand archive. "We pulled a bunch of reels from the nitrate vaults and I just started going through them," Lewis said. "'White Shadow' was initially labeled 'Twin Sisters.'"

Inspecting the footage on the light table, she knew that this was a quality production because the tinted images were striking. "I went home and started poking around, did a lot of research and narrowed down the possibilities," Lewis said. "I realized that this was most likely a film that Hitchcock worked on. I went to the archive the next day and used their research library to pull out some contemporary reviews and summaries and confirmed it was 'White Shadow.'"

Initially, she only had two reels of the film. "But I was inspecting another reel that was just identified as 'Unidentified American film.' I put it on the table and I recognized the actors and the sets. I took dozens of photographs of each reel and then compared them [to the other two reels] and they belonged together."

Among the 60 other titles arriving soon on our shores is a 1928 two-color Technicolor short, "The Love Charm"; an early film from female director Alice Guy; a 1920 dance demonstration; and a fragment of a 1914 Keystone Kops lost comedy, "In the Clutches of the Gang." These "lost" films will be preserved by the five archives over the next three years.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

squints

"The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts" – Friedrich Nietzsche

Reel

 maybe this thread should be called Alfred Hitchcock with the movie out and everything...


anyways, on Turner Classic Movies, every week this month




   SPELLBOUND
   MARNIE
   THE BIRDS
   SHADOW OF A DOUBT
   PSYCHO (1960)
   THE LODGER (1926)
   BLACKMAIL (1929) - SILENT VERSION
   FRENZY
   UNDER CAPRICORN
   STAGE FRIGHT
   I CONFESS
   THE WRONG MAN (1957)
   SABOTEUR
   FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
   NORTH BY NORTHWEST
   THE RING (1928)
   NUMBER SEVENTEEN
   THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
   FAMILY PLOT
   THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956)
   VERTIGO
   REAR WINDOW
   TO CATCH A THIEF
   THE FARMER'S WIFE
   THE SKIN GAME (1931)
   LIFEBOAT
   THE LADY VANISHES
   TOPAZ
   TORN CURTAIN
   THE 39 STEPS
   SABOTAGE
   DICK CAVETT: ALFRED HITCHCOCK
   THE MANXMAN
   RICH AND STRANGE
   MR. AND MRS. SMITH
   SUSPICION
   STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
   DIAL M FOR MURDER
   REBECCA
   NOTORIOUS

tpfkabi

TCM showed most of Truffaut's films last month.

I saw both of the "fact" based Hitch biopics from last year. I don't know that I buy most of it, especially with him being dead and having no chance to refute any of it.
I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away.

wilder

Alfred Hitchcock's Unseen Holocaust Documentary Restored, To Be Screened In Cinemas And On TV
via The Playlist

It has long been an enduring facet to Alfred Hitchcock's character that away from the director's many films of murder and heart-stopping suspense, he was greatly repulsed by violence in real life. The examples of this irony might call to mind the twisted types of crime seen in Hitchcock's usual wheelhouse, but as a new documentary partly made by him about the WWII Nazi death camps nears closer to a re-release, we get the sense that the most unlikely example was the most affecting for the director himself.

In 1945, Hitchcock was asked by his friend Sidney Bernstein to delve into British and Soviet units' footage of German wartime atrocities and turn it into a cohesive document of the time, one reportedly made to force the German people to come face-to-face with their actions. But as Hitchcock initially saw the footage at Pinewood Studios and left so disturbed that he didn't return for a week, and then delays led the Allies to reconsider the political point to the film, five of the finished project's six reels were quietly tucked away in London's Imperial War Museum.

However, an American researcher found the reels of film in the '80s, and after showings at the Berlin Film Festival and on PBS, now the documentary is set for a re-release, in the way that Hitchcock, Bernstein, and others originally intended. Digitally restored with the sixth reel back in, and featuring "Night Will Fall," a new companion documentary from producer André Singer ("The Act of Killing") and "directorial advisor" Stephen Frears, Hitchcock's as-yet-untitled film will be shown on British television in early 2015 with cinema and festival screenings to occur before then.

You can read the full history of the project (once called "Memory of the Camps") over at the Independent, but the new release will undoubtedly shine a new tragic light on Hitchcock's work and approach; even though he took only a small role on the project, its emotional effects were no doubt irreversible from that day onward. As Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Imperial War Museum described, feedback on the film largely strayed toward calling it "terrible and brilliant at the same time," and we'll soon see how accurate that assessment proves.

wilder

CANNES: Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg to Appear in Docu 'Hitchcock/Truffaut'
via Variety

CANNES — Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson and David Fincher are among the interviewees lined up to appear in feature documentary "Hitchcock/Truffaut," which is being produced by Cohen Media Group, Artline Films and Arte.

The pic is based on the recordings that led to Francois Truffaut's 1966 book "Cinema According to Hitchcock," which has been dubbed the "Bible of Cinema" by many filmmakers.

The film will also include interviews with Brian De Palma, James Gray, Richard Linklater, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin.

The directors will share how the book shaped their careers, transformed cinema and introduced the French New Wave and "New Hollywood" to the world.

The movie is directed by Kent Jones, the helmer of "A Letter to Elia" and director of the New York Film Festival, and is co-written by Jones and Serge Toubiana, director of Cinematheque Francaise.

The film will journey through the extensive series of conversations between Hitchcock and Truffaut, illustrating their love for filmmaking and demonstrating their impact on world cinema. Scenes from Hitchcock's films will be intercut with comment from the filmmakers.

Segments from the 1962 original recordings between the two filmmakers will also feature, allowing audiences to hear candid discussions between Hitchcock and Truffaut, and to witness first-hand a quintessential moment in cinematic history.

"For me, in many ways, cinema began with Francois Truffaut's book about Alfred Hitchcock," said Jones. "For me, and for many others, the book was more than formative — it was essential and direct."

The film will be released in spring 2015. Cohen Media Group is handling world-wide sales.