Hitchcock Summer Fest '11, the Love Affair Continues

Vertigo:Screening this weekend at BAM.  Vertigo opened Summer fests around the nation--with two screenings in LA last weekend.  Vertigo, along with other major Hitchcock films, will play every weekend this summer somewhere in the US.

Alfred Hitchcock's movies have become ubiquitous on the summer film fest circuit.  Summer has always been a good time to head inside to cool in the dark of Plato's movie cave, but it also means lots of city parks with free evening screenings--and Hitchcock has become the Shakespeare of the scene:  a bit of class that draws crowds and pleases the crowds it draws.  In fact, Hitchcock has not really faded enough from the culture to call the current interest a renaissance, but I am energized by the vigor that the rising generation of filmgoers are showing for the Master.

Hitchcock did well in his own time, but as cinema goes these days, a Hitchcock film generally stands head, shoulders and well above in quality and overall entertainment value than any movie showing on screens today.  There are patches of cinema brilliance scattered about, but nothing like a Rear Window or even Psycho.  The filmgoing numbers are sending a strong message to studios and filmmakers:  for the most part, the last few years of cinema have been crap.  You can see this reflected certainly in plummeting ticket sales but also more revealing in DVD sales of recent releases.  I cannot name a single film worth purchasing to own--not because of price considerations, but value of entertainment concerns.  Do I really want to see any of these films again?  No.  Most of what has been on screens the last two years can hardly support a single viewing's interest, let alone a second or third go that makes a movie something you want to buy.

Theater and film have their cycles and the films will, I know, climb back with new artists who will reinvent and do better than Hitch.  But they are not here yet.  And, my generation of filmmakers seem to have disappointed the most--the best of my class seeming to get lost in Dante's woods with no Virgil to help us collecting climb out of this cinematic hell.  I fear we have seen the best of Scorsese, Triers, Allen.

The final image from Hitch's final film, Family Plot.

So, I imagine that Hitchcock will grow as a standard bearer in all the senses of that phrase.  He is by no mean the only fine filmmaker whose work seems ageless, but, of his generation, Hitchcock is the filmmaker who fascinates like that hidden diamond that closes his final film, Family Plot.  The sparks and flashes from the sharp, finely cut and polished gems that are Hitch's films catch and hold our gaze, and, as our gaze is held, we can feel in ourselves, and even in each other if we are watching his films in a theater, the absolute joy, nay, joy and release that the gem that has drawn our gaze and held us, is, relief, worthy of our time. That with each passing frame, we find more there that pleases, amuses, intrigues, instructs, touches, scares--all the frames flickering at first, then in full light, the real wonder of art and not just any art, but that art which is still the greatest art of our time, the art of cinema.   The films that have the depth and beauty of pressed, aged, polished carbon.  True diamonds and with the real, solid value of that precious stone.

Most of what amounts to modern film serve only to fill a couple of hours.  They have become the equivalent of cinematic fast food--a consistent veneer of quality that can never hide the banality and shallow nature of how its made and of what it's made.  This kind of stuff feeds but doesn't nourish--and even the best of us, grow tired of just eating for the sake of eating.  Our hunger for Hitchcock in cinema, like Shakespeare in theater, is the hunger for art with real sustaining meat on its bones.  Dramas whose characters grow our interest organically from who they are, what they want and their desperate need to understand in a confusing, identity destroying, anxious modern time.

I began this blog as a summer round up on Hitchcock but my passion for the filmmaker and what he means to cinema has again gotten the better of me.  And, indeed, that is the real joy in Hitchcock and great cinema--they have gotten the better of me and I am so happy for it.