In childhood we arrive at certain images of crucial significance to us. These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity ... he cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning ...
If Bruno Schulz was right,
the insight is especially true of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), whose centenary is celebrated this year.
Tirelessly, this master of the macabre worked and reworked the same dark visions, from The Pleasure Garden in 1925 to Family Plot 51 years later, even to the extent of entirely reshooting 1934's The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956.
So perhaps he would not have resented the cheek of Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho last year, although I suspect that, like everyone else, he would have hated A Perfect Murder, the lifeless Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow remake of his own Dial M For Murder (see video column page 7).
Few other directors have more Websites devoted to them than this enigmatic walrus of a man, with his cryptic, fleeting appearances in his own movies (short of an actor in an early film, he was forced to play the part himself and it became both ritual and signature).
These cameos are streamed on the Net at Hitchcock Online (www.hitchcock. nl/eng.htm). Perhaps the greatest of all was his posthumous appearance on an American stamp last August. And don't miss some of the best video clips online from classics like Rear Window, North By Northwest and Vertigo, at www.qumulus.nl/hitchcock/mov.htm. And, of course, Psycho ... its shower scene remains the most celebrated short sequence in cinema history, the most indelible movie murder since Barbara Stanwyck's in Sorry, Wrong Number years before: just two and a half minutes of explosive horror which Hitchcock painstakingly spliced together from the shots of more than 30 cameras - more than you would need for an entire rock concert.
You can check into the Bates motel anytime you want at www.nightprods.com/psycho/index.html, but one of the best complete guides to Hitch is Alfred-Hitchcock.com (http://gfm.org/projects/alfred hitchcock).
Still under construction (which Website isn't?), it originates in Germany and takes you, in charmingly idiosyncratic English, on a grand tour of the master's work, including trailers in streamed video and a museum with themed exhibitions of which Vertigo is the first - not a film that impressed at the time (Hitchcock would only say that it covered costs), but which has achieved cult status in the afterglow of his death.
Serious scholars of Hitchcock meet at The MacGuffin (www.demon.co.uk/nscl/guff.html), a subscription site (there's a free news and comment page derived from it at www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin). Here one can unpick at leisure the strands of Hitchcock's ambiguous art: its damaged heroes, with their physical or emotional handicaps, reacting to the blond human icicles he was so fond of casting opposite them.
So grip the arms of your seat and visit www.primenet.com/~mwc/biohitch.html, www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/7145, http://users.netreach.net/treyl/hitchcock.htm, http://personal.redestb.es/hailbrath/index.html - and the list goes on.
There's so much Hitchcock on the Web that I can safely leave you to find your own favourites. Try www.interlog.com/~couke/index.html to start you off.
Immortality takes many forms. Where once we mummified the past, and later captured it on celluloid, today we cheat death with electrons. On that basis, and after 100 years, Alfred Hitchcock is still very much alive and still in pictures.
Email: petersinclair@email.com