‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’ Review: What Movie Documentaries Should Be

Right here’s a movie documentary that appears like a time-travel machine. However we’re not escaping into the previous — the previous is coming to us.

In “My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock,” film-besotted documentarian Mark Cousins hopscotches by way of the Grasp of Suspense’s physique of labor based mostly on concepts and pictures, not your typical film-by-film chronological method. He’s made hyperlinked connections all through Hitchcock’s entire filmography (clips from nearly each one in all his movies seem) to point out that these works usually are not of the previous: They continue to be eternally current tense.

To do this, Cousins presents us with a powerful trick: making it appear as if Hitchcock is narrating the documentary and guiding you thru his work and thru the themes you won’t in any other case discover. Impressionist Alistair McGowan portrays Hitch within the voiceover and has him down utterly, from the sharp consumption of breath to the almost-snort that precedes him beginning a brand new conversational riff to his deep stomach snort. The Hitchcock who made such an artwork of self promotion, making the introductions on his TV present, showing on-camera for his movies’ trailers, telling depraved tales on “The Dick Cavett Present” about serving nothing however blue meals at a cocktail party. That Hitch feels delivered to life once more.

“You’ve feathered your nest within the twenty first century haven’t you?” McGowan-as-Hitchcock says, in what can solely be described as a chortle. “However don’t you need to escape it, slightly?” That introduces the primary of six themes that every obtain about quarter-hour of consideration: Escape, Need, Loneliness, Time, Achievement, and Top. It’s a private collection of concepts and linkages throughout films introduced with enjoyable and a sense that, when you actually love Hitch, you could possibly most likely make a film constructed round six classes of your individual selecting. (My very own would most likely be: Wanting, Perspective, Structure, Portray, Meals, and Humor — greater than another, his films present comedy as a type of suspense.) There’s a way of participation in “My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock” that we haven’t seen in a movie documentary since Rodney Ascher’s “Room 237.”

For the Need part, Cousins doesn’t linger on “Vertigo,” however as a substitute exhibits how Sylvia Sidney retains taking a look at a kitchen knife that she needs to make use of to stab her husband in “Sabotage.” And there’s one gloriously creepy shot in “The Paradine Case,” the male gaze made extraordinarily literal, when the digicam tracks in on a girl’s naked shoulder to point out what a lusty previous perv Charles Laughton’s character is. Hitch cuts immediately from an excessive close-up in “Torn Curtain” of one in all Paul Newman’s blue eyes, the sunshine shining and making it glitter like a jewel, to the jewels Grace Kelly wears round her neck in “To Catch a Thief.”

Alistair McGown, who voices Hitchcock.

These linkages don’t really feel almost as strained because the “three moments in movie that characteristic bubbles” that opened Cousins’ sprawling 2011 docuseries “The Story of Movie: An Odyssey” (a second Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly referred to as out). That collection was complete however might be reductive, with Cousins repeatedly referring to traditional Hollywood cinema as “a bauble.” Gone are also his bolder proclamations from that doc (“Hitchcock is crucial visible artist of the twentieth century — extra necessary even than Pablo Picasso”) or odd turns of phrase (referring to “Port of Shadows” as “a movie with its eyes lowered”).

Cousins wrote every thing that McGowan’s Hitchcock says in “My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock,” however by some means the voice of Hitchcock offers refinement to Cousins’ personal voice as a author. He’d be clever to proceed the sample of this documentary and his earlier “Girls Make Movie: A New Street Film By means of Cinema” and let others narrate for him.

Some authentic footage Cousins shot for “My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock” doesn’t work, nor does his selection of repeatedly displaying tight close-ups of Hitchcock’s eyes from previous stills. However there’s a sense of shock, invention, and spontaneity that almost all different film documentaries would do nicely to aspire to. It’s straightforward to look at any movie featured right here and see how alive it’s; it’s one other factor to try this for the complete physique of labor. Cousins most likely might have gone a step additional and made the case that Hitchcock was completely primed for the age of social media — pictures from his movies and his personal self-promotional antics are meme-ready and share-worthy. However that will have been an apparent selection, and Cousins shies away from the plain on this survey of Hitch’s work.

“Cinema is a lie 24 frames per second.” That’s been attributed to many individuals, however “Hitchcock” says a model of that at one level right here. Each film lives as much as that to some extent, however Hitchcock’s greater than most, whether or not it’s Claude Rains strolling up an out-of-sight ramp to look as tall as Ingrid Bergman in “Infamous” or the large paper-mache finger, made to look lifelike, that dials the rotary telephone in excessive close-up in “Dial ‘M’ for Homicide.” With “My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock,” Cousins powerfully makes the case that there’s nothing higher than cinema itself for elevating a lie into artwork.

Grade: A-

“My Title Is Alfred Hitchcock” premiered on the 2022 Telluride Movie Pageant. It’s presently in search of distribution.

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