From December Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Arts will host the exhibition Hitchcock: Art, Cinema and...Suspense. One component of the exhibition Notorious features 14 artists whose work has been inspired by Hitchcock in a variety of media (film, video, sound and photography). Artists include John Baldessari, David Reed and Cindy Sherman (USA), Victor Burgin (UK), Stan Douglas and Atom Egoyan (Canada), Matthias Muller and Christoph Giradet (Germany) and Douglas Gordon (Scotland).
Our cover photograph shows one of the featured works, Pierre Huyghe’s Re-make, a 16mm version of Rear Window as a home movie with amateur actors presented as video projection with sound. In other exhibits, Scottie’s bedroom from Vertigo is “brought to life” and a continuous projection of Psycho screens ultra-slow over 24 hours in the gallery. Commissioned especially for the exhibition, The Phoenix Tapes comprises rapid fire clips collapsed from Hitchcock’s films. From the Hollywood archives come storyboard panels, sketches, graphics, posters, stills and some photographs of Alfred Hitchcock in Sydney in the 1960s.
Organised by the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford the Hitchcock exhibition includes the complementary Moral Hallucination: Channelling Hitchcock curated by Edward Colless and featuring works by contemporary Australian artists (including Louise Hearman, Andrew Hurle, Anne Wallace, Rosemary Laing and Dale Frank) which “channel the corrupting spirit of Hitchcock.”
From March 30 to April 2, the museum will host a 4-day festival of gallery talks, papers and performances analysing and celebrating Hitchcock’s enduring legacy to contemporary culture. On January 30 there’s a recreation of Hitch’s courtroom drama, The Paradine Case.
The film program is presented in collaboration with the AFI. The following double-features will screen at The Chauvel Cinema in Paddington in December: Notorious (1946) and Spellbound (1945); Rope (1948) and Vertigo (1958); Marnie (1964) and Frenzy (1972); Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Strangers on a Train (1943); Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963); The Wrong Man (1957) and I Confess (1953); Suspicion (1941) and North by Northwest (1959); The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Foreign Correspondent (1940).
There’ll also be a series of talks on Hitchcock’s films on Thursday evenings (6-8pm) at the MCA.
Hitchcock: Art, Cinema and...Suspense, Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay West; December 17 1999 - April 24 2000, www.mca.com.au.
Salute to Hitchcock, Chauvel Cinema, Paddington Town Hall, December 11 - 20
