MichaelB wrote: On Thursday 27th September, there'll be a second feature-length live stream, this time of Champagne. I'm guessing this will be UK-only, but going from a recent Rialto announcement it sounds as though the BFI restorations will be making a US appearance before too long.
The Shaping of Alfred Hitchcock - a new addition to the BFI's Screenonline site, complete with individual entries for a number of Hitchcock's earliest assignments as screenwriter and art director.
The National Film Preservation Foundation is streaming The White Shadow (1924), on which Hitchcock served as scenarist, editor, assistant director and art director. (Only three of six reels survive, thanks to New Zealand projectionist and collector Jack Murtagh.)
Extended thoughts on the Network LODGER Blu-Ray in my post naming Alfred Hitchcock White City Cinema's Filmmaker of the Year for 2012: http://whitecitycinema.com/2012/12/20/2 ... the-hitch/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
michaelgsmith wrote:Extended thoughts on the Network LODGER Blu-Ray in my post naming Alfred Hitchcock White City Cinema's Filmmaker of the Year for 2012: http://whitecitycinema.com/2012/12/20/2 ... the-hitch/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I was curious about this comment about the big Hitchcock box:
Originally scheduled for release in September, it was delayed for a month by technical problems, most of which were satisfactorily resolved by last minute fixes.
Aside from correcting the misspellings in the Frenzy opening titles, which other problems were fixed? It seems to me that virtually everything else that Nick Wrigley complained about was essentially untouched, from the weird fuzz on Marnie to the Godawful Family Plot (hands down one of the worst Blu-ray transfers I've ever seen).
Awesome! They're showing these now at the Music Box in Chicago, and they do indeed look amazing. Also a lot cheaper to see them here than in Brooklyn - same accompaniment (the musicians are apparently touring with these digital prints), but $12 vs. $20 at BAM. Damn you, NYC, with your inflated prices...
IN JUNE 1962, François Truffaut asked one of his “masters,” Alfred Hitchcock, to answer some 500 questions about his career. On Aug. 13 (Hitch’s 63rd birthday), the men, along with Truffaut’s collaborator the translator Helen G. Scott, met in Beverly Hills to commence work on the first of two epic interview sessions that resulted in more than 40 hours of tape. Their conversations covered the sweep of Hitchcock’s astonishing career — from his early stint creating title cards for silent pictures to a gruesome, lengthily staged murder in “Torn Curtain” — and led to the publication of Truffaut’s “Hitchcock,” one of the most influential books on its subject.
This year, Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programing at Film Forum, will turn that legendary Hitchcock/Truffaut encounter into a pair of complementary, back-to-back retrospectives. The Complete Hitchcock, a five-week series, begins on Feb. 21 and includes nine silent features that have been restored by the British Film Institute. (Hitchcock’s television oeuvre will be shown at the Paley Center for Media.) On March 28, the day after the Hitchcock series ends, with his 1928 feature “The Manxman,” Tout Truffaut begins. The three-week series will allow you to trace Hitchcock’s influence on Truffaut, including in “The Bride Wore Black,” a Hitchcockian tale with Jeanne Moreau, which he shot in 1967 — the year the American edition of his Hitchcock book was published.
“I especially liked the scene of Moreau watching the man who had taken poison Arak dying slowly,” Hitchcock later wrote Truffaut. “I think my particular sense of humor might have taken them a little further, so that Moreau could have picked up a cushion and put it under his head so that he could die with more comfort.”
My understanding is that the Holocaust documentary was almost entirely the work of Stewart McAllister, Humphrey Jennings's regular editor, with Hitchcock merely offering a small amount of advice.
Which is easy enough to believe: Hitchcock had no experience of fashioning documentaries out of existing footage, whereas McAllister was one of the best in the business (one of the best ever, in fact).
This is, after all, a man whose creative input into Listen to Britain was considered so massive that he ended up with a co-director credit, even though I don't believe there was ever any evidence that McAllister went near an actual camera.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but a found-footage doc 'directed' by Hitchcock would be nothing more than a curio, since I don't think his vast talents would be especially applicable to that kind of project, but McAllister would be right at home and would have a strong chance of coming up with a masterpiece.
Likewise, I'd regard an unknown documentary about life in a Liverpudlian nursing home shot in 1963 with a lot more suspicion if it were attributed to Frank Tashlin than if it were attributed to John Krish.
It doesn't sound ridiculous to me at all - but then I spent a chunk of last year watching pretty much McAllister's entire output when writing the biog of him for two of the BFI's Humphrey Jennings volumes, and there's no doubt that he's an enormous if all too frequently unsung talent (although he did at least merit a biography, by fellow editor Dai Vaughan, which is highly recommended).
While the only two people who knew for certain who did what on Humphrey Jennings's films are Jennings and McAllister, both long dead, it's worth noting that virtually all Jennings's major masterpieces were edited by McAllister (the only significant exception being Spare Time) and that, for the most part, Jennings's pre- and post-McAllister work is appreciably less inventive. (This is why, if you only fancy sampling one of the BFI's Jennings volumes, go for volume 2 - it's wall-to-wall Jennings/McAllister, and all the better for it.)
By contrast, Men of the Lightship, which was edited by McAllister but not directed by Jennings, is far more imaginatively cut than the rather plodding material deserves - apparently McAllister (whose temper was said to be ferocious) had several major creative disagreements with director David Macdonald, but seems to have won his arguments. It helped enormously that the film was produced by Alberto Cavalcanti, who was himself no stranger to innovative editing - Cavalcanti took McAllister's side, and Macdonald walked off the film.
I have always been pretty ambivalent about Hitchcock -- but recently saw and liked (a lot) "Strangers on a Train. So, I decided to finally tackle "Vertigo". Let's just say this is not a film that will ever make it onto my Top 1000 list. I found the plot progressively unbelievable, leading to a a (to me) utterly ridiculous conclusion. And, other than Barbara Bel Geddes, I was not especially enthused about the performances. Obviously I am not set up to appreciate Hitchcock's virtues...
