From the Cinematheque members email:

Our Saturday VERTIGO anniversary event was completely booked out, and since many members were unable to attend, we have added a screening of VERTIGO on Tuesday, July 1. And we will follow that with screenings of five more of the best works of one of the most skillful and entertaining film directors of all time, Alfred Hitchcock.

We hope you will appreciate this rare opportunity to see Hitchcock?s films as they were meant to be seen: on a big screen in a dark theatre.

Alfred Hitchcock week
Hanoi Cinematheque
01-05 July

SCHEDULE

JULY

1 Tuesday
19:00 VERTIGO

2 Wednesday
19:00 THE BIRDS
21:00 STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

3 Thursday
19:00 STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
21:00 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

4 Friday
18:30 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
21:00 REBECCA

5 Saturday
14:00 NORTH BY NORTHWEST

16:30 THE BIRDS

THE DIRECTOR

I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilization has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills firsthand. Therefore, to prevent our lives from becoming sluggish and jellified, we have to experience them artificially.
- Alfred Hitchcock (Who obviously never lived in Vietnam)

It’s only Hitchcock whose films have bridged the generations. Many contemporary students are as fascinated by his films as we were. As a culture critic, I say that because of his technical innovations and massive influence, Hitchcock is the equal of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust and Joyce. Hitchcock’s vision is so extensive, so broad, that it takes in everything, from architecture to politics to sexuality - but sexuality in particular, with its weird mixture of beauty and desire and horror and the macabre. There’s an amazing emotional depth to Hitchcock?s films.
- Camille Paglia, critic, writer and Professor of Humanities

THE FILMS

VERTIGO
(1958)
129 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

VERTIGO is one of Hitchcock’s most complex movies. On the surface there is a great story that is full of wonderful details, but if we want to go deeper we find out that the movie works on many levels and that it is both psychological and philosophical. On a literal level it is a mystery-suspense story of a man hoodwinked into acting as an accomplice in a murder, his discovery of the hoax, and the unraveling of the threads of the murder plot. On a psychological level the film traces the twisted, circuitous routes of a psyche burdened down with guilt, desperately searching for an object on which to concentrate its repressed energy.

At the time of its release, VERTIGO was a commercial failure. But today it is on most film critics’ “Ten Best Films of All Time” list. It is ranked by the American Film Institute as the 9th Greatest American Film ever made. Obsessive, perverse, haunting, bizarre countless essays and whole books have been written about VERTIGO.

VERTIGO IS STILL A DIZZYING, DAZZLING DISPLAY OF MOVIEMAKING, 50 YEARS LATER
By Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times movie critic

Watching VERTIGO, Alfred Hitchcock’s glorious, intoxicating tale of obsession, is like entering a dream; time slows down in its green-colored light as the world is reduced to a man, a woman, a weary hotel room and a sad, doomed passion. Darkly inviting, it takes over its viewer in the way few movies do. Every time I watch it - and this film is meant to be watched over and over - it sweeps me in with its thick, almost humid atmosphere of yearning. As its final scenes go by, you watch it barely breathing, becoming part of it, knowing the ending is inevitable but wishing it could somehow change.

VERTIGO celebrates is 50th anniversary this year, in a version beautifully restored in 1996. It’s a chance to revisit a film that never grows old. Set in a San Francisco whose wet streets and gray fog speak of untold stories, VERTIGO is both psychological thriller and mournful romance. Scottie (James Stewart), a retired police officer, reluctantly accepts a strange job: An old acquaintance wants his wife shadowed. The wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), seems so fragile that a gust of Bay Area wind might break her; she’s a whispery blonde obsessed with a long-dead ancestor. “Do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?” the husband asks. Scottie answers, instantly and firmly, “No.” But the character’s gee-whiz matter-of-factness quickly dissolves into the fog. The lonely Scottie falls, hard, for the doomed Madeleine, and even the protests of his sensible pal Midge can’t stop the force of his unexpected emotion. (Midge, portrayed with delicate wit and sympathy by Barbara Bel Geddes, happens to be quietly in love with Scottie herself; VERTIGO, it turns out, is a journey through a hall of mirrors.) From there, the story swirls into unexpected waters, which I’ll let VERTIGO newcomers discover, deliciously, for themselves.

Stewart’s performance, is astonishingly good; nothing the actor had done before quite prepared audiences for his work here. Scottie’s transformation is thorough and devastating; he changes from laconic everyman to hollow-eyed ghost before our eyes. In the film’s final third, he walks the streets like a gaunt shadow. What he’s starved for seems gone - until, gazing at the object of his love, he’s suddenly fed and desperate for more. And Novak’s vulnerable, heartbreaking performance matches his; at times her character almost seems choked by her words, trapped in a cage of secrets.

VERTIGO is filled with the sort of detail that rewards re-watching: the audaciously wordless 10-minute sequence early on that seems to go by in a heartbeat; the way cinematographer Robert Burks’ light catches Stewart’s blue eyes, making him look just the tiniest bit otherworldly and menacing; the long, sad hallway shot in which Bel Geddes makes her exit from the film; the way Novak’s smile, late in the film, seems entirely drained of happiness. Now 50 years young, its strange beauty deserves celebration.

THE BIRDS

(1963)
119 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

One of Hitchcock’s most famous thrillers, THE BIRDS is based on a short story by French writer Daphne DuMaurier (who also wrote the book on which REBECCA is based). Du Maurier set her story in London, but Hitchcock transfers the action to a small village on the northern coast of California. (Hitchcock, however, once compared the major bird attack in the film to his experience of the Nazi bombing in London during World War II: “The bombs are falling, and the guns are going like hell all over the place. You don?t know where to go. You’re caught! You’re trapped!”)

THE BIRDS is noted for its extraordinary special effects - in the days before there was such a thing as CGI (Computer Generated Imagery - now standard in nearly every Hollywood production). Featuring 370 trick shots, THE BIRDS required three years of preparation, and was responsible for numerous innovations in vidual layering (the final bird attack required 32 separate pieces of film), as well as sound design (note how Hitchcock substitutes music with sophisticated bird sound effects).

In addition to its technical brilliance, THE BIRDS is entertaining, suspenseful, frightening, and surprising romantic!

In THE BIRDS, what you have is a kind of an overall theme of everyone taking nature for granted. Everyone took the birds for granted until the birds one day turned on them. If you have ever eaten a turkey drumstick, caged a canary or gone duck hunting, THE BIRDS will give you something to think about. Nature can be awful rough on you if you play around with it. Look what uranium has done!
- Alfred Hitchcock

THE BIRDS is an apocalyptic poem.
- Federico Fellini

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
(1951)
101 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is another brilliant Hitchcock classic.

Rich playboy Bruno and tennis star Guy each have a troublesome relative who they would like to be rid of. Meeting (by chance?) on a train, Bruno proposes to Guy that they exchange murders, so the police would be left without a plausible motive for either murder. Guy doesn?t take the proposal seriously enough to reject it flatly, and is soon horrified to discover that Bruno has fulfilled his end of ?the bargain? and now expects Guy to carry out his murder. Bruno stalks Guy everywhere, most memorably at a tennis match, as Guy tries desparately to escape his grasp.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is pure cinematic storytelling. We are drawn deep into the story during the first five minutes, and carried along - totally absorbed - for the next hundred minutes.

The screenplay was written by famous American mystery writer, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.

A timeless treat, a marvelous display of Hitchcock?s absolute mastery of his medium, and a deliciously dark comedy as well.
-Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

REBECCA
(1940)
130 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

REBECCA was Alfred Hitchcock?s first Hollywood movie (after directing 28 films in England), and his only film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year.

A young woman (Joan Fontaine) believes her every dream will come true when her sudden romance with the dashing Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) culminates in marriage. But she soon realizes that Rebecca, the previous Mrs. de Winter, haunts both Mr. de Winter and the de Winter mansion, called Manderley. In order for Maxim and the new Mrs. de Winter to have a future, Rebecca?s spell must be broken, and the mystery of her violent death unraveled.

As in THE BIRDS, the house where the story takes place is isolated, which Hitchcock says helps to heighten the suspense. Houses away from the outside world prevent help from arriving.

REBECCA is a masterpiece of style and slow suspenseful development ? an extended meditation on how the dead haunt the living, brilliantly photographed in shadowy black & white.

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
(1956)
120 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

A remake of his excellent 1934 film of the same name, Hitchcock considered this version to be superior to the original.

James Stewart and Doris Day play an American couple vacationing in Morocco with their young son. After a French spy dies in Stewart’s arms in the Marrakech market, the couple discovers that their son has been kidnapped and taken to England. Not knowing who they can trust, the couple find themselves caught up in a nightmare of international espionage, assassinations and terror. At the end, as they draw closer to the truth, all of their lives hang in the balance at a concert in London’s famous Albert Hall.

This is Hitchcock at his best: rendering an implausible plot with such serious conviction and fast pace that we are completely carried away and find ourselves caring deeply about the outcome. Although, like many late Hitchcock movies, this may seem like a superficial Hollywood production, we should appreciate the great care with which Hitchcock constructs his story, and his use of camera tracking, editing and music to highten our engagement. Hitchcock is much more than a skillful entertainer. He is a master filmmaker.

Hitchcock, aware of every nuance - when to use sound, when to not let us hear what the actors are saying, when to use different colors to get our attention - has set up our emotions exactly as he wants them, like a ticking time bomb with a faulty alarm.
- Robert A. Harris, in ‘The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock’

NORTH BY NORTHWEST
(1959)
136 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

NORTH BY NORTHWEST is perhaps the most typical and perfect of all Alfred Hitchcock movies. It is the ultimate ?wrong man? story - with Cary Grant, mistaken for a spy and assassin, forced to flee across the country while pursued by various villians and government agents.

A fateful coincidence leads Manhattan businessman Roger Thornhill to be mistaken for a CIA agent by a ring of foreign agents. Roget is kidnapped and marked for death. He miraculously escapes, but nobody will believe his story - not even his own mother. He tries to warn a U.N. official on their hit list, but winds up being framed for the official?s murder.

The fun of NORTH BY NORTHWEST is not in the logic of the plot, but in the humor and momentum of the chase itself. The script is fast and witty, and the film contains some of the greatest action sequences in cinema history, including a crop duster attack in a deserted Iowa cornfield, and a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.

In terms of the sophistication and quality of its production, acting and script, and the universality of its appeal, NORTH BY NORTHWEST is at the very top level of works produced in any art form or genre in the 20th century. It is a great example of Hitchcock at his height.
- Camille Paglia

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.or CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.