Hitch Talk: Weirding Hitchcock
MacGuffin Film Club Talks
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40m
Magic. Telepathy. Spirit possession. Angels, demons and vampires. They show up again and again in Hitchcock's films, only to be explained away. Or are they? Tonight, we'll peer into the eldritch aspects of Hitchcock's films to divine their possible meaning for him and for you. Won't you join the "séance"?
In their chapter on I Confess, Rohmer and Chabrol maintain that "though Hitchcock is a practicing Catholic, he has nothing of the mystic" about him. Really? Nothing? In the very next paragraph they state that "Providence runs through [his films] like filigree work." They go on to tick off a short list of miracles in his films, such as Hannay's lifesaving hymnal in The 39 Steps. Sounds mystical to me, or, at the very least, weird—that liminal zone between material reality and the supernatural. Comparable to queering, weirding views a picture as with a black light to reveal contours and details that would otherwise be missed. It promises nothing less than a whole new—possibly transcendent—way of looking at Hitchcock's films.
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