21 - Thoughts on Hitchcock's Authorship

Summary

When I was asked to contribute an essay to an event celebrating the centennial of Alfred Hitchcock's birth, I expected, and wished, to write something in a celebratory mood. The fact that we continue to recognize Hitchcock's achievements as a filmmaker a hundred years after his birth is itself something to celebrate. The present piece has turned out to be a somber one. For this, I blame Gus Van Sant, who in any case deserves all the blame anyone might heap on him for making his dreadful version of Psycho. Van Sant's actors seem to be going through the motions, to be following a bad script, to be reading lines that do not even seem to have been written for them. An apologist for the postmodern might praise Van Sant for undermining the “realism” of the original. But aren't we all tired of listening to such nonsense? Hitchcock proudly regarded Psycho as his most powerful demonstration of “the art of pure cinema,” his gift (as he put it to Truffaut) to the filmmakers among his viewers. How could a director, especially one not devoid of talent, make a virtual shot-by-shot copy of Psycho that is interesting only for being so utterly uninteresting? In Hitchcock – The Murderous Gaze, I suggested that Psycho declared the death of the art of film as Hitchcock knew it and prophesied the emergence of different, perhaps freer, forms of cinema.