 In interviews Alfred Hitchcock spoke of his passion for "pure" cinema in which movement and image provide layers of meaning at once obvious and subtle. Yet the stylistic rigor that permitted no wasted motion and no dead space within a single frame did not prevent him from making some of the world's most enjoyable films. Hitchcock may be celebrated as a master of suspense, but his mastery is far more comprehensive; it is the mastery of storytelling itself.
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, five miles from the center of London, on August 13, 1899, and it is on the occasion of the centenary of his birth that The Museum of Modern Art has prepared this complete retrospective of the director's feature films. The son of greengrocers, Hitchcock was educated in Jesuit schools and trained as an engineer specializing in mechanical drawings. He became a technical clerk in a telegraph company, and was soon transferred to its advertising department. In 1920 he shifted from writing ad copy to writing intertitles for motion pictures, and over the next sixty years became perhaps the world's most famous filmmaker. Hitchcock was the "complete" filmmaker, not only directing his movies but sketching out the shots before they were photographed; working with the cameramen, writers, editors, and composers; casting; often producing; and even shaping the advertising campaigns. He directed his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925, and married his assistant director, Alma Reville, who would continue to work with him on screenplays. On the invitation of David Selznick, Hitchcock came to the United States in 1939 to make Rebecca. He stayed and became an American citizen in 1955. Four years after making his fifty-third feature, Family Plot, Hitchcock died in Los Angeles on April 29, 1980.
MoMA's relationship with Hitchcock is a long one. In 1939 Iris Barry, the Museum's first film curator, invited the newly arrived Hitchcock to give a lecture on the art of the cinema. Barry and Hitchcock knew each other when she was a young critic and he an assistant director in 1925 where they were members of London's The Film Society. When MoMA's Film Library was established in 1935 Hitchcock's were among the earliest films acquired and the Museum continues
to collect not only his films but stills, posters, and press material relating to the master's work. In 1963 Peter Bogdanovich prepared the first complete Hitchcock retrospective in America, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, which climaxed with the American premiere of Hitchcock's recently completed The Birds.
Hitchcock engaged his audience the way an artist absorbs his viewer--through process, both instinctive and methodical. He disdained the notion that he tricked his public, but won their confidence through technique in the way--he told more than one interviewer--a painter convinces through the strokes of his brush. The manner of his storytelling virtually becomes the tale. The camera movement, the cuts of the film, the dialogue and the music, all make explicit what is not said, and it is exhilarating to be implicated in the unfolding of a Hitchcock plot. Although his films careen with surprising incident there is always intelligence, shrewd psychological insight, and considerably more than meets the eye and ear.
For this second retrospective the Museum has prepared an exhibition, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Lobby, Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette. MoMA has also collaborated with Hitchcock scholar Robert Kapsis in making his comprehensive interactive computer program on Hitchcock available at public kiosks at the Museum. Concurrently with MoMA's film exhibition, the Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52 Street, presents a complete television retrospective, including the twenty telefilms directed by Hitchcock and rarely seen interviews with the filmmaker.
The film retrospective Alfred Hitchcock, on view April 16-June 15, 1999, was organized by Laurence Kardish, Curator, the Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art.
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