Indepth Arts News:
"Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences"
2000-11-16 until 2001-03-18
Montreal Museum of Fine Art
Montreal, QC,
CA
This bold, lavish and innovative exhibition is the first ever in
which a museum has drawn parallels between film and painting, at last giving full
meaning to the phrase the seventh art. Never before has a museum placed the
output of a filmmaker on the same footing as a hundred years of artistic creation.
The result is a new reading of the cinema and painting. Visitors will draw their
own connections based on the encounters, juxtapositions and coincidences
presented throughout an exhibition that aims to be an entertaining show as well as
a occasion for thought-provoking discovery. This spectacular exhibition will
include 200 nineteenth- and twentieth-century artworks - paintings, drawings,
prints, illustrated books and sculpture - and 300 cinema documents - production
stills, posters, story boards, and set and costume designs - as well as forty film
excerpts. The exhibition is being organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
and presented by Investors Group, through its Sharing Culture with Canadians
programme.
Hitchcock: The Man and His Art
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) made more than fifty films. His name,
synonymous with suspense, is legendary in the annals of cinematic history. He is
probably the most famous director in the world, but he was the most private of
men. For audiences everywhere, Hitchcock IS cinema, though much of his work
is little known and many of his films have been forgotten. Skilled at kindling
collective fright, he was long dismissed as a shrewd craftsman who played on
viewers' anxieties. But the young French critics of the 1950s, notably the
Cahiers du Cinéma contributors who went on to form the New Wave,
anointed him an auteur, an inventor of form, an artist of coherent vision. Since
then, Hitchcock has become a multidimensional figure, bridging the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and providing inspiration for contemporary art.
The Exhibition's Approach
Alfred Hitchcock's films are enjoyed by moviegoers around the globe, but he was
not just a crowd pleaser. His genius lay in the ability to entertain while dealing
with serious themes and erudite philosophical and artistic references.
To study this aesthetic of anguish he so brilliantly developed and maintained, the
exhibition will adopt three approaches:
The first is the scholarly and documentary dimension, which will
contribute to a greater understanding of Hitchcock's œuvre by means of
source materials from an international array of cinema archives and
private collections.
The second approach focusses on Hitchcock's showmanship and
fantasy. It will be conveyed through evocatively staged settings from
films like The Birds or Psycho that enable visitors to experience the
atmosphere of the films and grasp the director's unequalled knack for
manipulating viewers' perception and imagination. Imaginations will be
spurred by costumes and objects that functioned as obsessive leitmotifs
in various thrillers: the rope (Rope), the cigarette lighter (Strangers on a
Train), the mother's mummified head (Psycho), the scissors (Dial M for
Murder), Carlotta Valdes's jewelled pendant (Vertigo) and many others.
Images from the films will also be projected on large screens that visitors
pass in front of, recalling how Hitchcock's actors often performed against
back projections.
The third approach, a more interpretational one, will highlight the
influences, inspirations and heritage from the visual arts of past centuries
that mark the œuvre of Alfred Hitchcock, who was an art lover and a
collector (Rodin, Dufy, Klee and Rouault). Salvador Dalí worked with
Hitchcock on Spellbound. Hitchcock's movies are frequently infused
with Symbolist and Surrealist imagery. The Victorian vestiges of his
early training in England are also discernible, as is German
expressionism. The works selected (Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Beardsley,
Sickert, Vallotton, Redon, Klee, Magritte, Khnoff, Hopper, De Chirico
and many others) will invite better understanding of the cryptic visual
references in the Hitchcockian world. Painting, with its illusory space,
troubling resemblances and mythological representations, nourished his
œuvre. In turn, Hitchcock has become an extraordinary purveyor of
images to late twentieth-century art, inspiring many contemporary artists
like Cindy Bernard, Alain Fleischer, Tony Oursler, Cindy Sherman,
among others, as well as those working in the performing arts.
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