FILM AND TELEVISION: "A Hitch in time"

The recent Hitchcock centenary generated several initiatives on television, while the film industry re-issued prints of many of his films. Oxford's Museum of Modern Art curated Notorious—Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, "exploring the master of suspense's profound influence on contemporary art." The work of 14 artists extends through the gallery—some specially commissioned for the show is combined with older works which express the debt to pleasure of Hitchcock's cinema. Among the latter are Cindy Sherman's Film Stills, where she endlessly transforms herself as a Hitchcock-type heroine, Douglas Gordon's 24-Hour Psycho, the slowed-down version of the film at two frames per second, and Victor Burgin's photographic installation The Bridge. With overt references to Vertigo, Burgin's image of a woman's body, wrapped in cellophane, poses plenty of questions about the ideal image of woman, explicitly recalling Millais' pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia.

Vertigo and Marnie emerge as the show's busiest points of departure: David Reed's 1994 installation, Scottie's Bedroom, re-creates the Vertigo scene physically in the gallery, and digitally inserts his own painting into a re-edited sequence, playing as a loop on an old TV set.

A video installation by Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller, The Phoenix Tapes, consists of a compilation of extracts from Hitchcock's output, deftly edited together. The exercise illuminates Hitchcock's visual sense and his recurrent tropes, patterns and gestures—from mislaid or stolen keys to railway lines, ritual hand-washing, open spaces, empty landscapes, or the prevalence of mothers in his work.

Although never explicitly mentioned, the spectre of Edward Hopper hovers over the show. Hitchcock credited Hopper's House by the Railroad as the home of Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho, but across his wide cinematic landscape, Hitchcock recalls Hopper's in shafts of light, diagonal shadows, telegraph poles to infinity or human figures diminished by landscape and architecture.

A hallmark of both their work is a voyeuristic impulse—those intimate spaces glimpsed through windows, primed for narrative extension. It is the voyeuristic aspect which links to Atom Egoyan's installation, a series of out-takes from his latest film, Felicia's Journey, in which we view the eventual female victims in conversation with an off-screen manipulator/killer/director/?. Stan Douglas's 1989 version of the robbery scene from Marnie envelops the room with a loud hissing noise—in direct contrast to Hitchcock's subtle use of silence in the film.

In this show we might expect that the visual is foregrounded—but the sound elements throughout the gallery slop into each room as a kind of acoustic soup, not always in a useful or even challenging way. And this highlights the inherent tensions between the cinema and gallery as venues for Hitchcock's art. Hitchcock's art is 24 frames per second, a movement of images and sounds that compels and controls audiences in their darkened spaces. What Notorious does achieve is to re-focus our view of Hitchcock's cinematic heritage as visual art, even though it has moved it out of the cinema space.

Stephanie McBride