Take a walk through Janet Leigh's room at the Bates Motel. Or scrutinize the meticulous storyboards from The Birds. Over 600 items of Hitchcock paraphernalia are on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and there isn't a dud among them. This enormous exhibition would please the Master of Suspense, who would approve of it's dramatic presentation style--owing more to theatre design than traditional museology.
It's always a pleasure when a museum slums it with a pop culture show. Perhaps it's more of a guilty pleasure, watching the connoisseurs get in a snit and the pop culture mavens mock gratitude. But the collision of an up-town venue with a downtown theme only pokes fun at the fuzzy lines now dividing these camps. Let's face it, there's an Armani exhibit in New York and a display of running shoes graced San Francisco's MOMA all summer, so why shouldn't Montreal hold a gigantic retrospective for one of cinema's legendary masters?
Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia, and Janet Leigh were at the press conference on Tuesday, along with the show's co-curators Guy Corgeval, director of the MFA, and Dominique Paini, director of the Cinematheque francaise in Paris.
"To this day, I do not take showers," said Leigh, when questioned about her fatal bathroom scene in Psycho. She was miraculously preserved in her pink Channel pantsuit and black turtleneck. "I'm dead serious. Why put yourself in that position?"
Patricia Hitchcock looked like her father, fleetingly, with the same deadpan timing. "My father and mother would be extremely thrilled with this show," she said. "His great love, next to my mother, was art. He loved Klee, Dali and Vlaminck. He knew of these things. Remember, he was British."
The best advice for anyone seeing Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences is to hit the ground running. There's much to take in. Themes include Desire and Double Trouble, Idols, Catholicism and Disquiet. Viewers can enjoy a recreation of Dali's sets for Spellbound, film posters, a re-creation of The Birds, film clips, storyboards, the Bate's and a fun collection of backlit stills showing Hitchcock's cameos in the films.
"The cameos started in the early days, when everyone on set was used to fill crowd scenes," recalled Ms. Hitchcock, who is writing a book on her mother's contribution to the Hitchcock films. "So, he was in the crowd scenes too. But audiences started looking for him and screaming when they'd see him. This meant he had to appear earlier and earlier in each film, before he had established any kind of mood that could be broken by the screams."
The first exhibit room is a showstopper: fetish objects from the films are encased in glass boxes, sitting on red satin pillows, spotlighted in the dark. The objects--like the camera from Rear Window and the ruby pendant from Vertigo--aren't authentic props, but the effect is real enough. A little less convincing are some of the parallels to contemporary art movements. It's a stretch from Hitchcock to Michael Snow's "Door" (1979).
Yet, it's less of a stretch and more of a revelation to see May Ray, Dali, Rodin, Herb List, Magritte, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ralston Crawford's work set in relation to Hitchcock's aesthetic of anguish. Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism are carefully placed among the relics of Hitchcock, making their mutual sensibility more than obvious.
A complete film retrospective is screening at the MFA and Hitchcock's silent films are running concurrently at the Cinematheque Quebecois. Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences runs from November 16th - March 18th, 2001.
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