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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART CELEBRATES CENTENNIAL OF MASTER FILMMAKER WITH COMPLETE FILM RETROSPECTIVE AND GALLERY EXHIBITION

Most Comprehensive Film Retrospective Ever Mounted in the United States, Screening More Than Fifty Features, Shorts, and Documentaries; Gallery Exhibition of Posters, Photographs, and Papers; And Launch of Interactive Computer Program and MoMA Hitchcock Web Site Included in Four-Month Program

Alfred Hitchcock April 16-June 15, 1999 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Film Schedule available

Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette April 16-August 17, 1999 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Lobby

In celebration of the centennial of Alfred Hitchcock, The Museum of Modern Art will present four months of exhibitions devoted to the master filmmaker. From April 16 through June 15, the Museum will mount Alfred Hitchcock, the most comprehensive retrospective of Hitchcock's films ever presented in the United States, from (1925) to (1976), his final feature, as well as several shorts he made for the British Government and documentary films about Hitchcock himself. Opening simultaneously with the film program and running through August 17 is Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette, a gallery exhibition of movie posters, photographs, production designs, and documents spanning Hitchcock's life and career. The retrospective and exhibition will be accompanied by Multimedia Hitchcock, a new computer program that will be installed on interactive kiosks around the Museum, as well as the launch of a special Hitchcock subsite, accessible through the Museum's Web site.

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, five miles from the center of London, on August 13, 1899. The son of greengrocers, Hitchcock was educated in Jesuit schools and trained as an engineer specializing in mechanical drawings. He became a technical clerk in a telegraph company, and was soon transferred to its advertising department. In 1920, he shifted from writing ad copy to writing intertitles for silent motion pictures at Paramount's London studios, and over the next sixty years became perhaps the world's most famous filmmaker, his name virtually synonymous with the kind of humorously macabre suspense he created.

Hitchcock was the prototypical "complete" filmmaker, not only directing his movies but also casting them; sketching out the shots before they were photographed; working with the cameramen, writers, editors, and composers; often producing; and even shaping the advertising campaigns. He directed his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925, and, the following year, married his assistant director, Alma Reville, who would continue to work with him on screenplays throughout his career. On the invitation of producer David O. Selznick, Hitchcock came to the United

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States in 1939 to make Rebecca. He stayed and became an American citizen in 1955. Four years after making his fifty-third feature, Family Plot, Hitchcock died in Los Angeles, on April 29, 1980.

The Museum of Modern Art's relationship with Hitchcock is a long one. Iris Barry, the Museum's first film curator, met Hitchcock at the newly formed London Film Society in 1925, when she was a young critic and he an aspiring filmmaker, and his were among some of the first British films acquired for the Museum's collection. In 1939, Barry invited the celebrated filmmaker, newly arrived in the United States, to give a lecture on the art of the cinema at MoMA. In 1963 the Musuem presented the first complete Hitchcock retrospective in the United States, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, which was prepared by Peter Bogdanovich, then a journalist and film historian.

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Hitchcock has come to embody the concept of director as auteur. "In interviews Alfred Hitchcock spoke of his passion for 'pure' cinema in which movement and image provide layers of meaning at once obvious and subtle," notes Laurence Kardish, Curator and Coordinator of Film Exhibitions, Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, who organized the film retrospective. "He may be best known as a master of suspense, but Hitchcock's mastery is far more comprehensive; it is of storytelling itself."

Over the course of his long and celebrated career, Hitchcock enjoyed both critical and commercial success with films that made the director himself a star. The Museum's retrospective will survey Hitchcock's entire cinematic output, from early silent movies like The Blackguard, on which Hitchcock worked as assistant director, screenwriter, and art designer, The Lodger (1926), and Easy Virtue (1927); through the British talkie successes The 39 Steps (1935) and (1938); to the Hollywood masterpieces Vertigo (1958), (1959), Psycho (1960), and others. MoMA will screen 35mm prints of all the films in the program, many in restored versions from the vaults of London's National Film and Television Archives and Universal Studios.

Among the program's highlights are a tinted-and-toned restored print of The Lodger; both the silent and sound versions of Blackmail (1929), Britain's first talkie; Mary (Sir John greift ein, 1930), the little- seen, German-language version of Hitchcock's Murder (1930); a rare screening of Elstree Calling (1930), an all-star musical revue from Britain's Elstree studios, for which Hitchcock directed the non-musical bridging scenes; a new print of Rebecca (1940), the first film the director made in Hollywood; the British government projects Bon Voyage (1944), (1944), and The Memory of the Camps (1945), a documentary about the liberation of the German concentration camps on which Hitchcock was technical advisor; Michael Epstein's Hitchcock, Selznick & the End of Hollywood (1999), an illuminating look at the personal lives of and the working relationship between Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick from Rebecca to The Paradine Case (1948); and From the Hitchcock Collection, a compilation of outtakes, behind-the- scenes footage, and home movies drawn from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Gallery Exhibition Documents Hitchcock's Career With Film Posters, Rare Photographs, Drawings, And Personal Papers

This retrospective of the master filmmaker's work is accompanied by Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette, a gallery exhibition of posters, film stills, and production designs, as well as a sampling of Hitchcock's

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notes and correspondence covering the entire range of the director's career. The exhibition pays tribute to the many facets of Hitchcock's persona: director, producer, showman, artist, and man of copious wit. It includes rare family photographs; telegrams and studio memos (on casting the lead role in Rebecca, for example); elaborate architectural drawings (sets for , Rope, and Strangers on a Train); storyboards (The Birds, North by Northwest, and Topaz); and letters from such favored Hitchcock actors as James Stewart, Joan Fontaine, and Grace Kelly. "By documenting all aspects of his productions, Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette fleshes out the familiar profile of one of the twentieth century's most knowing, accomplished, and entertaining artists," says Mary Corliss, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, who organized the exhibition with the assistance of Jan- Christopher Horak, Director of Archives and Collections, Universal Studios, and Pat Hitchcock O'Connell.

New Interactive Computer Application Offers Visitors A Wealth of Hitchcock Scholarship

In conjunction with the film and gallery exhibitions, MoMA will also present Multimedia Hitchcock, an interactive program installed at several computer stations around the Museum. Developed by Dr. Robert E. Kapsis, Queens College of the City University of New York, the program features a wealth of materials from and information about Hitchcock's oeuvre. Users will be able to access audio and video clips from a number of the master's films, along with Hitchcock's own comments about his work and a wide selection of critical discussions. In addition to being a storehouse of seven decades' worth of reviews, criticism, and scholarly work on the director and his films, Multimedia Hitchcock also offers newly created and newly assembled textual and audiovisual material covering all aspects of Hitchcock's career in film and television.

Special Hitchcock Subsite Featured on MoMA's Web Site

The Museum will launch a special Hitchcock subsite on its own Web site (www.moma.org) to accompany the retrospective. The subsite will include introductory texts by the curators of the exhibitions, a biographical profile of the filmmaker, a 1939 lecture by Hitchcock, Peter Bogdanovich's 1963 interview with the director, a complete filmography of feature films, selected stills and storyboards, as well as a full screening schedule for the retrospective.

Concurrently with MoMA's film exhibition, the Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52 Street, presents a complete television retrospective, including the twenty telefilms directed by Hitchcock and rarely seen interviews with the filmmaker.

[Please note: Due to current restoration work on the film, The Museum will screen Hitchcock's (1954) in late 1999.]

The retrospective and exhibition are made possible by Banana Republic.

The Museum acknowledges the kind support of the National Film and Television Archive, London (Anne Fleming, Curator; Bryony Dixon, Archival Bookings Officer/BFI Films), for arranging the loans of Hitchcock's pre- 1939 British films, and is grateful for the courtesy of the two companies who, between them, own the American rights to most of these: Canal+ Image International, Paris, and Carlton International Media Limited, London.

The Museum also appreciates the assistance of Pat Hitchcock O'Connell.

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The retrospective and exhibition are presented with the help of the National Film and Television Archives, London, Milestone Film and Video, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment Co.

No. 33

©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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