MEDIAPEEL 0.1

I’ve always enjoyed a good Alfred Hitchcock movie. For many film fans he remains “the guv’nor” despite the fact that all of his work predates “Star Wars” and therefore, for a lot of film studies courses, simply fails to register on the radar any more. This, to me, is like teaching history whilst discounting everything that happened before the Second World War, but I suspect that there’s a fair amount of that going on nowadays, too.

Over the course of his long career, Mr Hitchcock directed a huge number of classic movies in both Britain and America starring the kinds of iconic actors whose names can already leave people from the generation following mine feeling nonplussed, and leave the rest of the room glancing at the ceiling in disbelieving silence. Cary Grant (“Who?”), James Stewart (“Nevvo-erred-ov-im”), Grace Kelly (“You wot?”) and Doris Day (“Are-u-avvin-me-on?”) are already names fading from the general recognition of the public to be replaced with such luminaries as “Beyonce” and “Justin Bieber” or “Vin Diesel” and that bloke from the “Twilight” movies. Such, I suppose is the fleeting fickle finger of fame, and their stars too will inevitably happen to fade to nothing one day, to be replaced by the next wave, whoever they might turn out to be.

Sadly the grand master shuffled off to the great editing room in the sky before the video age really took off in the domestic market, in the days before the idea of VAM (Value Added Material) on viewing platforms was a glint in the glowing red eyes of a marketing specialist, and before even home-viewing itself was really thought of as being a likely and affordable prospect. Back in those days, you used to go to the cinema to watch a movie and, once it had finished its release run, you might very well never have seen it again until that new-fangled television nonsense started buying them up cheap to fill the massive wastelands of airtime. Even then, you had to make the choice to go to the cinema and probably miss forever that TV show you enjoyed watching because that’s the way things were.

When it comes to the dawn of things like “extras” in the video age, I do remember a friend of mine buying a set of 2 videos of “The Usual Suspects” – one that was just the film and a duplicate tape which had what we would now call the Audio Commentary instead of the soundtrack. I seem to remember that I didn’t think it would catch on, but that option was soon overtaken anyway by the coming of the shiny disc and before you know it all sorts of added fun was being attached to your feature film, wonderful “extras” like “animated menus” and “chapter selection”, but things soon sorted themselves into the sorts of stuff we now recognize as being standard today.

This does very little for poor old Mr Hitchcock, of course. He can hardly be resurrected just to share his thoughts upon flinging dead birds at “Tippi” Hedren, although, because he was a master at self-promotion long before it had the name, there is a certain amount of material around that has been salvaged and added to the various releases of his surviving films. I say “surviving” because his career was so very long that it dated back to the earliest days of cinema when such things weren’t preserved with quite the vigour there would be in later years, and some of his early works are, it seems, lost forever.

The reason this all came to mind was because of an interview with Madonna I saw on TV at the weekend. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Hitchcock used to publicise his films by doing interviews on film. The studio would ask questions and he would answer them on film  and (this is the clever bit) local news stations could splice in footage (from the days of its proper meaning of length of film strips, not what Kate Humble refers to home video clips as being…) of their own interviewer asking those questions and, as far as the viewer was concerned, it would look just as if your local “Tom, Dick, Harry or Jeremy” was interviewing the great man in person.

From the structure of the Madonna interview, and the way the reporter was intercut whilst sitting against similar looking wallpaper, but never appearing in a two shot with her, and the way he started every question with “Madonna…” in that way that you really wouldn’t if you were in the same room at the same time, I had my suspicions that this ancient art was being practiced again, and we should, as discerning consumers, remain on the alert for such things.

I remember the old story of the reported being sacked over the chess tournament piece he did because when he was congratulated on the good luck of just happening to find two old men playing chess in front of the tournament venue he admitted that he’d set it up, and given them a chess set so he could film it. He was fired because “You don’t fake the news!” and I think of that every morning when I see the various “spontaneous” tricks and gimmicks employed by the reporters on Breakfast News and which just goes to show how much times have changed.