In Hitchcock’s Long Shadow, Inspired Art Runs Free

Alfred Hitchcock is never named in the New Media Gallery’s exhibition Master. But the late, great English film director doesn’t really need to be. Hitch, known and exhaustively studied for his canonical contributions to the thriller and noir genres, is everywhere in the exhibition.

He’s in the corner of the gallery, intoning from a vintage television set in Lee Henderson’s installation De Mortuis. He’s flickering in and out of 4 Vertigo, 2000 (AI Remake 2024), a reworking of the Jimmy Stewart/Kim Novak thriller from New York-based artist Les LeVeque. He’s hovering over two different versions of Psycho in Psychedelic Lock, Daniele Puppi’s ping-ponging revisitation of Hitchcock’s most infamous horror film.

The hand, the voice and the vision of Hitchcock, the auteur’s auteur, turns the New Media Gallery into something of a giant haunted house. And like any haunted house, the pleasure comes from juxtaposition: eerie stuff abutting hijinks, horror curled up right next to sexual obsession.

One of the strangest experiences you can have in Master comes from standing in the entranceway of the gallery and letting the sound, shadows and spectral presence from the different works of art deluge you. It’s a trip.

Where that trip takes you is determined by what you bring to the proceedings. So, yes, we’re getting Freudian, folks. Or maybe Derrida-ian. The introduction to the exhibition explains: “Cultural theorist Jacques Derrida once called the persistence of elements that evoke the past an hauntology... a play on the word ‘ontology’ or the study of existence... questioning if there is a fundamental substance, and whether or not things are real.”

To know if things are indeed real, start small and wend your way into the darker recesses of the psyche, so playfully and horrifyingly explicated in Hitchcock’s cinematic universe.

Inside the death drive

De Mortuis provides an ideal entry point, making pointed use of footage from the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s a meditation on what else: Death! The many shades of the concept are amplified through the voice of old dead Hitchcock drolly commentating on mortality.

Lee Henderson’s investigations into the ultimate end of everything have formed the basis of his creative practice. In his artist statement, he notes, “I have so far found that they all collapse back to the central problem of the terminus, that presumed point of ambiguous inevitability we spend our conscious lives avoiding, or from which we supposedly sprang.”

De Mortuis offers a gentle poke at mortality, but something else arises in seeing Hitchcock in action once more. In Master, cinema functions as a kind of reliquary of the dead. The collection of different works in the exhibition made me think about the tombs of ancient pharaohs. The afterlife, as captured and depicted through art, envisions what awaits us when we slip this mortal coil, but there’s a more disruptive quality in Master.

Few filmmakers were as singularly and creatively obsessed with death as Hitchcock was. His focus on death was driven not by its conceptualization as the ultimate destination for all living things, but as an exploration of life and all its components. Sex, love, obsession, art, beauty, style, madness: it’s downright kaleidoscopic.

Which is also an apt descriptor of the most unsettling work in Master.

To look, then look away

In 2012, Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo topped Sight and Sound’s poll of greatest films ever made, displacing Casablanca as the perpetual favourite.

Vertigo provides the basis for a few different works in Master, but the most harrowing might just be New York-based artist Les LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo, 2000 (AI Remake 2024). It is not easy, but it’s supposed to be that way.

Its creator explained the impetus behind the installation: “Building on the notion of obsessive looking, I wanted to transform the original movie into a spinning mandala to generate a sensuous viewing where the dramatic narrative becomes unstable and elusive, a viewing experience where the hypnosis of cinematic spectacle is articulated to such a physical degree that it engenders a consciousness of watching.”

If you look too closely, expect to experience a form of visual vertigo strong enough to bring on nausea. The fragmentation comes from the process of using frames from the original film, one for every two seconds. This footage is duplicated multiple times over, flipping the axis, so that horizontal and vertical orientations become impossible to track. The result is something that retains the original character of the film, even as it looks nothing like it. I had to look at it, then look away, and could only stay in its vicinity for a few moments before fleeing.

Another way into LeVeque’s work is to first watch Grégory Chatonsky’s Prediction. The installation also makes use of Vertigo. It uses footage from the film but employs software that provides analysis of the characters’ emotional states throughout the narrative. This information runs in a counter on the side of the screen as the characters do their thing. Percentages of disgust, fear, anger are calculated by a software program with each edit in the story.

In describing the intent of his exploration of Vertigo, Chatonsky states: “It is a question of transforming the temporality of the cinematograph into a navigable space. Sign of the times: the passage from time to space, the passage from the flow of cinema to the internet network map. Let us imagine a film in which we could move. Let’s imagine a film that would be a mental space.”

Not sure if that helps, but it does bring about a perceptual shift in viewing the film that can be used to wend your way into LeVeque’s vertiginous version.

With ‘Psychedelic Lock,’ a study of the uncanny

As one ping-pongs back and forth between the different works, a similar process is taking place in Daniele Puppi’s work Psychedelic Lock. Puppi uses footage from Hitchcock’s Psycho and Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake. It too is something of a profoundly unsettling experience, unscored by metronomic clicks that almost become a heartbeat/drumbeat/boot-step march that feels relentless.

A useful primer about Psycho is Alexandre Philippe’s documentary 78/52, which takes its title from the number of edits and the shots from the infamous shower scene. Like Philippe’s documentary, Psychedelic Lock offers an introspective inspection of the mechanics of cinema: things like shot structure, editing, sound and story. Even as you understand how the film is constructed, something elusive endures, capering just outside of rational understanding.

In Puppi’s work, twinned pairs of LED monitors do a back-and-forth volley, shot for shot with both versions of the film. On one side, there’s the black and white original with Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. On the other, there’s the colour remake with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche.

Van Sant’s version has taken on an even stranger resonance with the tragic death of Heche, but even without the creepier echoes, Psychedelic Lock is a destabilizing work. It is useful to know that the word “lock” in the title has a few different meanings, as not only a security device, but something that lifts one to a higher level. Welcome to the kingdom of the uncanny.

The allure of the unsettling

Vancouver-based Scott Billings’ Übermensch takes inspiration from Hitchcock’s one-shot narrative Rope. The plot of Rope was inspired by the case of Leopold and Loeb, two young men who murdered a teenager to prove their intellectual superiority. The title Übermensch, based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ultimate human, alludes to the killers’ motivations.

Although the story proved impossible to film in a single uninterrupted take (the edits are cleverly dovetailed throughout the plot), it remains one of Hitchcock’s most compelling cinematic experiments.

Billings’ installation adds layers of additional meaning through the introduction of a robot arm that twists and turns a miniature film set, precisely recreated in 3D printed resin, right down to a tiny bar set, complete with cocktail glasses smaller than your pinky fingernail. As dialogue from the film accompanies the swivels and turns of the apparatus, murder as a kind of technical problem plays out.

In Swedish artist J Tobias Anderson’s Sliced Classics, the margins of feature films that were sacrificed to meet the aspect ratio for television are resurrected in slivers of action that throb with repressed emotion. If you look closely, you can gauge which films provide the raw material. The sunnier shades of The Trouble with Harry are clear and bright, whereas the moodier, more deeply saturated colours that make up Rear Window are also apparent.

Like any haunted house experience, you may emerge somewhat altered, plumbed to your depths. There’s a risk in messing about with the grittiest of stuff; it’s a vulnerable experience to face the murky, subterranean things that lurk at the very bottom of the human soul. It’s frightening, discombobulating, but also strangely, almost eerily satisfying. And best experienced in the hands of a Master.

This exhibition marks the 10th anniversary of the New Media Gallery. I find this even more disconcerting than the exhibition itself. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that the gallery first sprang into the local arts scene. Let’s take a moment to appreciate everything that this place has done, and hopefully will continue to do.

Two hundred artists, 35 exhibitions, countless experiences. But aside from the numbers alone, the thing that I am perpetually struck by in visiting the gallery for a decade is a sense of being just ridiculously lucky.

We’re lucky that it exists, lucky that all the long hours, hard work, patience and careful attention have created an audience that not only is interested in the work and the ideas presented, but who feel at home here.

This isn’t a miracle, although it often feels that way. It’s the result of dedication, passion and commitment to present some of the most extraordinary contemporary work on the planet.

Happy anniversary!

‘Master’ runs at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster until Dec. 1.