"Self-plagiarism is style"

Many thanks to Boline Skovly and Filmmagasinet Ekko for publishing an article about the site (specifically the 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project)…

• Hitchcock — stykke for stykke
  Fan har lagt 50.000 billeder fra Hitchcocks film ud på nettet. Guf for undervisere, mener ekspert.

After reading Brendan Dawes' "Analog In, Digital Out", I've revisited the colours of "North by Northwest" (see earlier blog post).

Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the "crop duster" sequence:

( full sized version on Flickr )

When I started this blog in 2005, it was primarily to support the Hitchcock site, which started up in 2003. The title of the blog ("Self-plagiarism is style") being a quote from Hitchcock.

Two years on, the most popular posts seem to be those about libraries so I've decided to fork the blog — this one will continue to be library and personal posts, and a new blog will concentrate on the Hitchcock stuff: "It's Only a Movie…"

Several sites are just starting to break the news that the actress Jane Wyman (who played the role of Eve Gill in "Stage Fright") has died at the ripe old age of 93.

Jane Wyman and Alfred Hitchcock in "Stage Fright" (1951)

I've been meaning to start regularly blogging about Hitchcock, so here goes! I'm planning to cover news from the previous week and details of upcoming DVD releases, as well as any birthdays or anniversaries in the coming week.

As reported at MacGuffin, the actor Hansjörg Felmy (who played the role of Heinrich Gerhard in "Torn Curtain") died on 24/Aug/2007. Oddly, the report of his death at Variety states he appeared in "Alfred Hitchcock's cold war thriller The Iron Curtain."

Also over at MacGuffin, Ken Mogg's latest entry in "The Editor's Week" (08/Sep/2007) covers "The Manxman" and the similarities between Kate's suicide attempt and those by Madeleine in "Vertigo".

The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University (north of Chicago) is hosting an exhibition ("Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film") and is running a season of nearly 30 Hitchcock films, starting on 26/Sep/2007. A selection of images from the exhibition is available here and there's a copy of the press release here.

On October 5th, the Old Mission San Juan Bautista is hosting a "weekend of Vertigo" to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film. As well as a dinner and gala fundraiser with Pat Hitchcock O'Connell and James Katz (who worked on the restoration if the film), there's also a bus tour of some of the filming locations.

This week…

11th September

• Several Hitchcock film actors passed away on this day, including Leonard Carey, O E Hasse, and Jessica Tandy (who was married to Hume Cronyn).

12th September

• Three Hitchcock "baddies" passed away on this day — Anthony Perkins ("Psycho"), Raymond Burr ("Rear Window"), and Tom Helmore ("Vertigo").

13th September

• Composer Maurice Jarre ("Topaz") celebrates his 83rd birthday.
• 25th anniversay of the death of Philip Ober, who played the "real" Lester Townsend in "North by Northwest".

  

14th September

• 25th anniversay of the death of Grace Kelly, who was arguably the ultimate "Hitchcock Blonde".

  

15th September

• The 100th anniversary of the birth of actress Fay Wray (star of the original "King Kong"), who appeared in two episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" ("A Dip in the Pool" and "The Morning After"). Wray died in 2004, aged 96.

16th September

• Many happy returns to Peter Falk (80) and Anne Francis (77), who both appeared in episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour".

If you have any Hitchcock related new items you'd like including in the next update, please send them to email [at] daveyp.com

Every now and then I post something to one of the Hitchcock groups on Yahoo about an interesting anniversary or birthday (e.g. yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Ingrid Bergman's death) …basically an excuse to raise a glass of something alcoholic and/or watch a Hitchcock film ;-)

I've also been trying to keep track of Hitchcock collaborators who are still alive. As you can imagine, the list dwindles year by year, but 2007 has (touch wood) been fairly quiet.

Anyway, I did threaten to do something with the data one day, and here it is…

Number of births and deaths per year

The red profile is lower partly because sites such as IMDB don't always know when someone has died (or if they are still alive). Some people might start in the movies, only to move on to another career and their death might not be widely reported in the press.

There are some interesting trends in the birth year (e.g. rises and falls over a 6 year cycle and occasional spikes).

Number of births and deaths per month

March and August are the most popular birth months, and (perhaps not surprisingly) December and January see the highest number of deaths.

Here's the same data stretched to 100%…

Number of births per year (surviving collaborators)

The most common year of birth for surviving collaborators is 1936. The only film actor who was born in that year was Bruce Dern — all the rest were actors in the TV series.

The oldest surviving collaborator is the Art Director and Production Designer Robert F Boyle, and the youngest is actor Bill Mumy who went on to play the role of Lennier in "Babylon 5".

The oldest actress is Frances Reid and the oldest actors include Kevin McCarthy and Norman Lloyd.

Notes

The data is based on anyone who has a biographical entry on the Hitchcock Wiki (which certainly isn't everybody). This includes actors and cast/crew for films and television programs, as well as some of the people who've appeared in Hitchcock DVD documentaries.

For the "still alive" list, sometimes I've made a best guess — this is usually based on whether or not the IMDB shows them as still being active in film or television in the last couple of years, or if the site lists their current whereabouts.

Well, perhaps not quite "new", but Criterion have announced that they will be re-releasing their "The Lady Vanishes" DVD in November. Hopefully, more details will appear on their blog in due course.

The previous 1998 DVD release from Criterion was missing around 6 seconds of footage, but this has apparently been restored to the film for the new release.

As well as a new cover and transfer, the release also contains a second disc with some brand new extras:

• Crook's Tour, a 1941 feature-length Charters and Caldicott adventure, available for the first time on home video, with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne reprising their beloved The Lady Vanishes roles
• Excerpts from Francois Truffaut's legendary 1962 audio interview with Hitchcock
• Mystery Train, a new video essay about Hitchcock and The Lady Vanishes by scholar Leonard Leff.

I'm quite looking forward to seeing "Crook's Tour" (IMDB), having recently watched "Night Train to Munich" which also stars Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters & Caldicott…

Charters: If only we hadn't missed that train at Budapest.
Caldicott: Well, I don't want to rub it in, but if you hadn't insisted on standing up until they'd finished their national anthem…
Charters: Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott. If I'd known it was going to last twenty minutes…
Caldicott: It has always been my contention that the "Hungarian Rhapsody" is not their national anthem.

Back in January, I set myself the task of reducing every one of the available major Hitchcock films down to 1000 frames of film.

Today, nearly 7 months later, I've finally finished :-)

• 1000 Frames of Hitchcock

I'm guessing this is probably the largest online collection of images from Hitchcock's films, with a total of 52,000 images covering a creative period of over 50 years, and taking up 3.76GB of disk space.

However, there's still more work to be done! With the help of some fellow fans, I'm starting to catalogue the images — in particular, which actors are in each frame and what's happening or what objects appear. It's still early days, but here are some examples from the films that have been catalogued so far:

• Cary Grant and Grace Kelly together
• kissing
• food/eating
• James Stewart on the telephone
• Janet Leigh driving
• knives
• looking towards (or just past) the camera
• pointing
• female legs
• alcohol
• newspapers
• mirrors

The images are also starting to be integrated into the actor/actress pages in the site (e.g. Tippi Hedren).

Also, inspired by a comment in Charles Barr's "English Hitchcock", I've begun documenting film credits as well intertitles from the silent films (e.g. Champagne).

The final thing I've been adding in the last week or so is content from YouTube. The aim is to have videos for each of Hitchcock's cameo appearances (e.g. Vertigo), interviews (e.g. Picture Parade), and film trailers (e.g. Frenzy).

So, now you know why I've not been blogging much recently ;-)

And here's the next batch of "1000 Frames of Hitchcock"…

Family Plot (1976) (60 seconds)

Rear Window (1954) (60 seconds)

Rope (1948) (60 seconds)

Here are the last two for this week…

Frenzy (1972) (60 seconds)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (60 seconds)

I couldn't resist using the frames from Uncle Charlie's speech — as he speaks the final words, he turns and stares straight into the camera…

The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands, dead, husbands who've spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands, drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewellery but of nothing else, horrible, faded, fat, greedy women… Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmmmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?