the cursed poet Alfred H.

Program under the auspices of the Embassy of the United States of America in Prague.

_ _ _

Jean-Luc Godard

we have forgotten
why Joan Fontaine in Rebecca
leans on the edge of a cliff

and what he wanted in Foreign Correspondent
Joel McCrea to do in Holland
we've forgotten the reason why in the film
I confess
Montgomery Clift guards eternal secrecy
and why in Psycho Janet Leigh stopped
in front of the Bates Motel
and why Teresa Wright issuspicious in Not a Shadow

still in love with Uncle Charlie.
We've forgotten what Henry Fonda isn't.
in The Wrong Man completely guilty
and why, in fact, in The Doubtful Woman
the U.S. government engaged Ingrid
Bergman

But
we remember the purse in Marnie
but
We remember the bus in the desert in The
North Northwestern Line
But
we remember a glass of milk in Suspicion
of windmills in The Foreign Correspondent
the hairbrush in The Wrong Man
But
we remember the lined-up bottles
in The Doubtful Woman
the glasses in Strangers on a Train,
the musical score in The Man Who Knew Too
Much
the bunch of keys in The Doubtful Woman
because with those things
and through them
Alfred Hitchcock succeeded at what they failed at
Alexander the Great, Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon,
when he took over the universe.

Maybe ten thousand people haven't forgotten
Cézanne's apple
but a billion viewers
will remember the lighter
of the stranger on the train.
And if Alfred Hitchcock was the only one
cursed poet who had success,
it's because he was in the 20th century
...the greatest creator of form...
and because it is forms that ultimately tell us
what is at the heart of things
for: what art is,
if not that which makes form into style?

and what is style,
if not man?

Alain Resnais

"You can describe the feeling of being uncomfortable in an external way. But what about the mental life? It's not subjectivism to film what's going on in your head. No: it's a different realism. That's why I love Hitchcock's Vertigo so much. You're here, you're drinking tea, but there's a lot going on in your head at the same time. Everyone lives in their own world of ideas, that's why communication between us is so difficult."

Jacques Rivette

"To define Hitchcock's art in one word, I would choose the term exigence, demandingness. Hitchcock's films are not the domain of critics, who have always shown themselves to be utterly incapable of interpreting them. Rather, these films, along with the comedies of Hawks, the American work of Renoir, the work of Rossellini, are the first manifestations of that modern cinema which only the filmmakers themselves can understand."

François Truffaut

"If, in the time of Ingmar Bergman, we are willing to accept the view that cinema stands no lower than literature, I think it is necessary to place Hitchcock in the category of restless artists like Kafka, Dostoyevsky or Poe. Of course, these artists cannot help us to live, because living itself is difficult for them, but their mission is to share with us what grips them. In doing so, they help us, perhaps even unintentionally, to know better what the goal of any work of art is."