Alfred Hitchcock at the Georges Pompidou Center.
Paintings, etchings, photos, storyboards, film settings, videos, models, drawings, costumes and famous objects are currently showing until 24th September 2001.

Alfred Hitchcock and Art: inevitable coincidences

As an old fan of Alfred Hitchcock I couldn't miss the exhibition at the Pompidou Center. I was curious to see how his films are being promoted not just as classics of suspense but likened in artistic quality to some of the greatest artists of the last century. In fact, as soon as you enter the 6th floor gallery you are plunged in the dark; it’s as if you were in a police department's collection of "crime evidence" – a sort of horror museum with the scissors from ‘Dial M for Murder’, the razor from ‘Spellbound’, the knife from ‘Blackmail', the tie from ‘Frenzy', and the yellow bag that ‘Marnie’ held while walking away from a compulsive robbery. These objects are the artifacts of suspense from famous shocking scenes in his films, and have often been used and misused since by others, sometimes acquiring the banality of clichés (e.g. the scene of a young woman being attacked while taking a shower).

The exhibition takes you further by recreating the atmosphere on the set with some scene settings (you can see the dismal hotel room of ‘Psycho’ opening to the shower). In addition, the way scenes were thought out and created is illustrated with the help of photos, drawings, storyboards and models. And some drawings show what Hitchcock actually had in mind in terms of atmosphere before realizing his films and how closely he directed his actors (a photo of him on the bedside scene in ‘Vertigo’ with Kim Novak shows the charming complicity of the two).