“My name is Alfred Hitchcock”: The teacher reveals our weaknesses to us in the first person | Culture

“Written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock” is the last opening title in the first minute of My name is Alfred Hitchcock new documentary by Northern Irish popularizer Mark Cousins. A little later came this voice out of She is sophisticated and intriguing, with constant twists of tone, shortness of breath and sarcasm in every sentence. She admits that she will lie throughout the entire film and challenges the viewer to decipher it. Of course, it doesn’t refer to the (obvious) fact that the teacher wasn’t able to write or narrate the documentary. And here is Cousins’ first game, in keeping with the sarcasm of the mythical director and his presentations on the show Alfred Hitchcock presents… A stunning imitation of British actor Alistair McGowan, that voice is the first great virtue of a work that, as is usual with Cousins, resembles a visual essay and film lesson more than a documentary.

And even if it is true that Cousins ​​is a character and an incomprehensible work, how difficult it is to write a work about the director today dizziness j Psycho, rear window j Rebekah, appears to be new, or at least with aspects never dealt with and formal features never used. The tone and calm, as well as a certain poetry, are present in some of Cousins’ great works (The History of Film, Women Make Film, The History of Looking…), is present again, but the fact that it is the transcript of trailer hitch Whoever is leading the charge and is saying things they did say, others they could have said, and even a few things they could have said today if they had lived, if they had lived our time, our cinema and our societies would have seen becomes seductive in the end.

In fact, the monotonous rhythm of the narration can actually work against the rhythm, but the feeling of boredom will only be felt in the body and mind of viewers who are not interested in the art of cinema. And there will be few or none of these in the rooms. The documentary is divided into six parts – some of which are clearly related to other studies on the teacher; other, unique cousins ​​contributions –: Dodge, Desire, Solitude, Time, Abundance and Altitude. And it’s fed by ongoing sequences from his films, in which Cousins ​​elaborates his theories (and those of Hitchcock himself) about the details of the staging, the color, the tone, and other formal or background plots.

“I was an artist, a daredevil, a showman,” says the fake (true) master storyteller: “There are many who have expressed their opinions about my films. They have analyzed my storytelling style, my way of expressing guilt and Catholic morality. You have explored my visual fantasies, my furtive ways of observing people and beauty. […]But they missed things.” The goal is nothing less than a kind of journey through time, where at the end the viewer’s weaknesses are identified: those of the past and those of the present. what remains.

To all this Cousins ​​adds a few photographs, few and animated with an elegant effect, and a handful of shots taken by him, the most controversial of his works, intended to show the gaze of the present, that of the current viewer, but they don’t quite fit together or don’t understand each other.

My name is Alfred Hitchcock. It is a work that is insightful and playful, funny and dark, tricky and artistic at the same time. This was the cinema of the man who made it The man who knew too much and Cousins’ joke is the last to confirm it.