Spellbound

>> The Museum of Fine Art's Hitchcock exhibit is a tour de force

by JOANNE LATIMER

Over 600 items of Hitchcock paraphernalia are on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and there's hardly a dud among them. Imagine taking a walk through Janet Leigh's room at the Bates Motel. Or scrutinizing the meticulous storyboards from The Birds.

And that's just scratching the surface. This enormous exhibition would please the Master of Suspense himself, who would undoubtedly approve of its dramatic presentation, which owes more to theatre design than traditional museology.

It's always a pleasure when a museum slums it with a pop culture show. Perhaps it's more of a guilty pleasure, watching the connoisseurs get in a snit while the pop culture mavens mock gratitude. But the collision of an uptown venue with a downtown theme only pokes fun at the fuzzy lines now dividing these camps. Let's face it: there's an Armani exhibit in New York and a display of running shoes graced San Francisco's MOMA all summer, so why shouldn't Montreal hold a gigantic retrospective for one of cinema's legendary masters? The catalogue's introductory article is a tad defensive, for no reason.

Auteur's offspring

Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia, and Janet Leigh were at the press conference last Tuesday, along with the show's co-curators Guy Corgeval, director of the MMFA, and Dominique Paini, director of the Cinémathèque franç#231;aise in Paris.

"To this day, I do not take showers," said Leigh, when questioned about her fatal bathroom scene in Psycho. She was miraculously preserved in her pink Chanel pantsuit and black turtleneck. "I'm dead serious. Why put yourself in that position?"

Patricia Hitchcock looks like her father, fleetingly, with the same deadpan timing. "My father and mother would be extremely thrilled with this show," she said. "His great love, next to my mother, was art. He loved Klee, Dali and Vlaminck. He knew of these things. Remember, he was British."

The best advice for anyone seeing Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences is to hit the ground running. There's much to take in. Themes include Desire and Double Trouble, Idols, Catholicism and Disquiet. Viewers can enjoy a recreation of Dali's sets for Spellbound, film posters, a re-creation of a scene from The Birds, extensive film clips, storyboards, the Bates Motel bathroom and a fun collection of backlit stills showing Hitchcock's cameos in the films.

"The cameos started in the early days, when everyone on set was used to fill crowd scenes," recalled Ms. Hitchcock, who is writing a book about her mother's contribution to the Hitchcock films. "So, he was in the crowd scenes too. But audiences started looking for him and screaming when they'd see him. This meant he had to appear earlier and earlier in each film, before he had established any kind of mood that could be broken by the screams."

Objects of film art

The first exhibit room is a showstopper: fetish objects from the films are encased in glass boxes, sitting on red satin pillows, spotlighted in the dark. The objects--like the camera from Rear Window and the ruby pendant from Vertigo--aren't authentic props, but the effect is real enough. A little less convincing are some of the parallels to contemporary art movements. It's a stretch from Hitchcock to Michael Snow's "Door" (1979).

Yet it's less of a stretch and more of a revelation to see the work of Man Ray, Dali, Rodin, Herb List, Magritte, Edgar Allen Poe and Ralston Crawford set in relation to Hitchcock's aesthetic of anguish. Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism are carefully placed among the relics of Hitchcock, making their mutual sensibility more than obvious.

"It's too passé to put Hitchcock's work beside [contemporary Scottish artist] Douglas Gordon," says Corgeval, who isn't afraid of going up against the barrage of Hitchcock tributes of late, including a recent retrospective at the MOMA with NYU, and exhibits of Douglas Gordon's multimedia

manipulation of Psycho at the Tate

Modern in London, England and Hamilton, Ontario.

Are we in any danger of suffering from Hitchcock overkill? "It's my belief that you can't get enough of Hitchcock," says Larry Kardish, senior curator at New York's MOMA, who recalls that Peter Bogdanovich was the young curator at the MOMA who held the first retrospective for Hitchcock. "The work bears repeated viewing."

A complete film retrospective is screening at the MMFA and Hitchcock's silent films are running concurrently at the Cinémathèque québécoise. Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences runs until March 18. Info: 285-2000 or www.mmfa.qc.ca