The Mumpsimus

Alfred Hitchcock in conversation with Francois Truffaut: To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. What's the ultimate in representative painting? Color photography. Don't you agree? There's quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it's not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.

An exploration of echoes and variations — a few moments from  Touch of Evil  and Psycho  reimagined through each other: (The two films shared a number of personnel: actors Janet Leigh and Mort Mills, art director Robert Clatworthy, and John L. Russell, who worked as a camera operator on Touch of Evil and director of photography on Psycho .)

I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good.  I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot , wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features. In amidst it all, there was ...

My latest Strange Horizons column, "Revisiting Hitchcock", has been posted.  It's a first stab at what will, I hope, become a longer project eventually, but writing about Hitchcock is tough because he's been so thoroughly written about before that it's hard not to just reiterate what lots of other folks have written.  But his work maintains such a hold on me that I also feel at this point that I can't not write about it, so who knows...

The news of film critic Robin Wood's death  came as a real shock to me because, in preparation for teaching an intro to film class next term, I've been spending a lot of time with his writings recently.  One of my projects, only vaguely justified by the class, has been to view or re-view all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Wood was one of the most important writers on Hitchcock.  Indeed, his Hitchcock's Films Revisited has been the book I've spent the most time with during my journey with Sir Alfred because it is richly provocative and unpredictable, and helped me reassess some films, such as Marnie , that I would otherwise have felt were minor. Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book.  After the original Hitchcock's Films was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in Englan...