Alfred Hitchcock was a pioneer of modern cinema. His finely crafted movies introduced audiences to new levels of suspense, sexuality and violence. His work raised cinema to the level of great art.
This summer in London, the British Film Institute (BFI) is celebrating all things Hitchcockian by showing all 58 of his works, including newly restored prints of his early silent films, such as Blackmail.
[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]
Alfred Hitchcock is to be celebrated like never before this summer, with a retrospective of all his surviving films and the premieres of his newly restored silent films – including Blackmail, which will be shown outside the British Museum.
The BFI on Tuesday announced details of its biggest ever project: celebrating the genius of a man who, it said, was as important to modern cinema as Picasso to modern art or Le Corbusier to modern architecture. Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director, said: “The idea of popular cinema somehow being capable of being great art at the same time as being entertaining is still a problem for some people. Shakespeare is on the national curriculum, Hitchcock is not.”
One of the highlights of the season will be the culmination of a three-year project to fully restore nine of the director’s silent films. It will involve The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock’s first, being shown at Wilton’s Music Hall; The Ring at Hackney Empire, and Blackmail outside the British Museum, where the film’s climactic chase scene was filmed in 1929, both inside the building and on the roof.
Stewart said the restorations were spectacular and overdue. “We would find it very strange if we could not see Shakespeare’s early plays performed, or read Dickens’s early novels. But we’ve been quite satisfied as a nation that Hitchcock’s early films have not been seen in good quality prints on the big screen, even though – like Shakespearean and Dickensian – Hitchcockian has entered our language.”
The films, with new scores by composers including Nitin Sawhney, Daniel Patrick Cohen and Soweto Kinch, will be shown the London 2012 Festival, the finale of the Cultural Olympiad.
Between August and October the BFI will show all 58 surviving Hitchcock films including his many films made in the UK – The 39 Steps, for example, and The Lady Vanishes – and those from his Hollywood years, from Rebecca in 1940 to Vertigo in 1957, The Birds in 1963 and his penultimate film, Frenzy, in 1972.
[div class=attrib]See more stills here, and read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Image: Robert Donat in The 39 Steps (1935), often hailed as the best of four film versions of John Buchan’s novel. Courtesy of BFI / Guardian.[end-div]