![]() This film’s recounting of the great moment is too comfortable with the banality of the maestro’s mundane domestic life with wife Alma Reville, a former colleague and creative partner. It was surprisingly coincidental with experimentation of European film artists as well as the investigation of unrefined genres begun by Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and continued with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom-but outclassing both and later surpassing himself with the pinnacle achievement of The Birds. Arriving on the cusp of social revolution, Hitchcock’s Psycho ushered in new perspectives on cinema and popular art. His movie is completely vacant of a sense of period-that unsuspected transition from post-WWII affluence and Western confidence to an era of fearful change, suspicion, brutality and cynical, inbred violence. Psycho altered the culture, as much a revolutionary moment as Battleship Potemkin or Citizen Kane-two movies that rivaled Hitchcock’s extraordinary use of montage and mise-en-scène.īecause no one was prepared for Hitchcock’s gear-shift at the time doesn’t excuse Gervasi’s indifference to the fact. But Psycho wasn’t just a career move following the popularity of North by Northwest. Its dramatic and aesthetic shock came as the culmination of a fantastically successful career in England and Hollywood. Gervasi’s film concerns the making of Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho. It was in the fin de siècle wrap-up Histoire(s) du Cinema that Jean-Luc Godard referred to Hitchcock as “the greatest poet of us all.” The film’s scandal-based view of Alfred Hitchcock’s personal eccentricities-his egotism, marital self-absorption and professional exploitation-overwhelm any appreciation that its subject is one of the 20th century’s undeniable artists. In Hitchcock, Gervasi seems to disbelieve the transformative, or at least extenuating conditions, of art-making. Its problem isn’t simply a lack of documentary veracity but the absence of good intention. ![]() ![]() Only a little of that beneficence is apparent in Gervasi’s dramatic debut Hitchcock, which takes a fanciful approach to biography. Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil: The Story of Anvil, the 2010 chronicle of the little-known rock band, was a rare excellent documentary a film distinguished by its good-hearted recognition of what lies beneath artistic motive. ![]() ‘HITCHCOCK’ SHOWS THE MAESTRO WITHOUT HUMOR ![]()
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