The Paradigm Case: The Cinema of Hitchcock and the Contemporary Visual Arts (Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts)

Description

With the migration of cinema into the art gallery, artists have been turning, with remarkable regularity and ingenuity, to Alfred Hitchcock-related images, sequences and iconography. The world of Hitchcock’s cinema – a classical cinema of formal unities and narrative coherence – represents more than the spectre of a supposedly dead art form: it transcends its own filmic and institutional contexts, becoming an important audio-visual lexicon of desire, loss, mystery and suspense. Through a detailed study of the Hitchcock-related work of artist-filmmakers Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Johan Grimonprez, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Atom Egoyan, this book facilitates a dialogue between the creative appropriation of Hitchcock’s films and the cinematic practices that increasingly inform the wider field of the contemporary visual arts. Each chapter is structured around a consideration of how the artwork in question has reconfigured or ‘remade’ key Hitchcockian expressive elements and motifs – in particular, the relationship between mise en scène and the mechanics of suspense, time, memory, history and death. In a career that extended across silent and sound eras as well as the British, European and Hollywood industries, Hitchcock’s film œuvre can be seen as a history of the cinema itself. As the work of these contemporary artist-filmmakers shows, it was also a history of the future, a paradigm case par excellence. Cover Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘Paradigm Cases’ Chapter 1. Mapping the Field of Hitchcockian Appropriation Chapter 2. Found Footage in Flames: Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet’s "Phoenix Tapes" Chapter 3. The Essay-Film (Expanded) Johan Grimonprez’s "Double Take" Chapter 4. Horror in Real-Time: Douglas Gordon’s "24 Hour Psycho" Chapter 5. Participatory Remaking: Pierre "Huyghe’s Remake" Chapter 6. Screening Memory: Atom Egoyan’s "Evidence / Felicia’s Journey" Conclusion Appendix: Visual Art and Filmic Review of Appropriations Bibliography Filmography Exhibitions Index