Learning on ScreenDo we ♥ Hitchcock?
What makes Hitchcock such an instructively ‘universal’ figure is the way that, across a 50-year directing career, he covered such exceptionally wide ground: silent and sound cinema, mainstream and experimental, popular film and popular television, montage aesthetics and – notably with Rope in 1948 – the long take. And, of course, American cinema and European, involving a wide range of shaping influences.
The impact on him of German films and his early work in German studios: the impact of early Soviet films and especially of Soviet theory: these are well known. But Britain was his base for the first four decades of his life, and for his first two decades in the industry. Impressed, understandably, by the strength of his Hollywood work, commentators have struggled to come fully to terms with this awkward truth.
The clear plus side of the 2012 Hitchcock campaign is that it aggressively foregrounds Britain, at two levels. Firstly, by restoring, showcasing and celebrating the nine surviving silent films, and giving due attention to their sound-film successors of the 1930s. Secondly, by giving a sustained voice to British writers.
The BFI’s publication 39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock is an impressive addition to the literature, a slick and rapid feat of assembly by editor James Bell, with extensive illustrations that would in themselves justify the £12 price; and the majority of the contributors are based in Britain.
If my calculations are right, the ratio is three British contributors to one American (plus a few from elsewhere). It is a striking reversal of what has become a regular imbalance the other way. The Hitchcock Annual – in effect a Journal of Hitchcock Studies – is edited from America, and most contributors come from there. The same applies to the wide-ranging Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, published in 2011 by the Anglo-American firm Wiley-Blackwell: it has two American editors, and just two contributors from Britain among a total of over 30. In contexts like that, I have come to feel something of a Token Brit in an American crowd.
It would be wrong to express chauvinistic resentment. One can only admire and be grateful for the drive and eloquence of American scholars: it is they who have given us the two major Hitchcock biographies and much else, just as it is American archives – the Margaret Herrick in Los Angeles and the Harry Ransom in Texas – that have used their enviable resources to house and catalogue the papers respectively of Hitchcock and of his first Hollywood producer David O.Selznick. Likewise, it was researchers from California who located three reels of a ‘missing Hitchcock’ film, The White Shadow from 1924, in the depths of the New Zealand Film Archive, and have since reconstructed it and made it available – a terrific act of recovery.
