Archive Talks: Hitchcock and Herrmann With Steven C. Smith

In-person:

Q&A with Steven C. Smith, author of “Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema.” Book signing before the screening, beginning at 6 p.m.

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Archive Talks pairs leading historians and scholars with screenings of the moving image media that is the focus of their writing and research. Each program will begin with a special talk by the invited scholar that will introduce audiences to new insights, interpretations and contexts for the films and media being screened.

Between 1955 and 1964, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann collaborated on eight films, including Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), that reshaped American cinema. As the Cold War set in, censorship regimes loosened and television took its toll on the box office, Hitchcock responded to the times with stories and images that pushed Hollywood’s boundaries to attract new, younger audiences to the big screen. In Herrmann, Hitchcock found an erudite composer willing to take chances with him. Indeed, Hitchcock so trusted Herrmann's insights into the medium and music's role in it that he would adjust editing and even dialogue in key sequences to accommodate Herrmann’s scoring. In background and temperament they were unlikely partners but their work together produced some of the most enduring, visionary and influential cinema of the last century. Award-winning filmmaker and film historian Steven C. Smith dives deep into their creative relationship and the forces that shaped it in his latest book, Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema. As part of this program, Smith will deliver an illustrated talk about these visionary collaborators before a screening of their iconic work on Psycho (1960) and a post-screening Q&A.

Psycho

U.S., 1960

Paramount was so unnerved by the concept for Psycho — loosely based on a magazine article about serial killer Ed Gein — that Alfred Hitchcock agreed to front the cost of production himself to get it made. By the time Hitchcock brought a rough cut to Bernard Herrmann, however, even the director had lost faith in the project. “He was crazy,” Herrmann later recalled. “He didn’t know what he had.” But the composer had “some ideas.” Herrmann’s groundbreaking minimalist score of stabbing, sweeping strings elevates the stripped down dread of Hitchcock’s images in a visionary fusion like no other. Herrmann’s score made Psycho work and then Psycho changed cinema history.

DCP, b&w, 109 min. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Screenwriter: Joseph Stefano. With: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles.

Programmed and notes written by Paul Malcolm.

Part of: Archive Talks