Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 317: Fri Nov 23

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960): Royal Academy, 6.30pm



Royal Academy introduction to this special screening:
With Cornelia Parker’s PsychoBarn in our courtyard, watch a special screening of the film that inspired it – followed by a talk with the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator who originally commissioned the work, examining the psychological associations of the architecture in the film. Inspired by the installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker RA in the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard, we have joined forces with MUBI for a special screening of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest masterpieces, Psycho (1960). Psycho is a thriller illustrating the case history of the young Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, whose deep attachment to his mother gives him a murderous split personality. Filmed in black and white with long, tense shots including little dialogue, Hitchcock crafts a slow burning suspense movie that leaves you constantly on edge. Using two iconic buildings as a background for the film: the Bates’ Motel and House, the architecture became the inspiration behind Parker’s PsychoBarn. Originally commissioned in 2016 for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, PsychoBarn merges two iconic examples of American architecture: the red barn and the infamous mansion on a hill from Psycho, itself inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Parker’s large-scale sculpture is created from a deconstructed red barn and seems at first to be a genuine house, but is in fact a scaled-down structure consisting of two facades propped up from behind with scaffolding. Simultaneously authentic and illusory, the project evokes the psychological associations embedded in architectural spaces, in the same way that the Psycho house was designed and repurposed over the decades for different movies. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the original commissioner of Cornelia Parker’s installation, Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

For anyone interested in looking in more depth at the film (and this is truly in-depth) the BFI book by celebrated British film critic Raymond Durgnat called A Long Hard Look at Psycho is a must.

Chicago Reader review:
A dark night at the Bates Motel, in the horror movie that transformed the genre by locating the monster inside ourselves. Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture.

Dave Kehr

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