Hitchcock’s fetishes, and Pauline Kael

Fascinating, and meticulously put together, photo study of Alfred Hitchcock’s fetishes - some of the visual motifs that recurred in his films - on the Bright Lights Film Journal website. Check all the links. There are some omissions - I was surprised by the exclusion, from the "Hands" section, of the image of Anthony Perkins briefly extending his palm out ("I wish I could curse her") towards Janet Leigh during the parlour conversation in Psycho - but this is one of the more interesting collection of Hitchcock images I’ve seen on the WWW.



Incidentally, I came across the link after reading another piece by the author, Alan Vanneman, on film critic Pauline Kael. Very opinionated, very interesting. Much of what Vanneman says is debatable (why shouldn’t a film critic be inconsistent in her opinions over a reviewing career?) but he rightly points out that people picked up on Pauline Kael’s energy and not her specifics. I remember when Quentin Tarantino interviewed Brian DePalma for the journal Projections, both men agreed that "you could go on disagreeing with Kael’s opinions, but you could never argue with the passion with which she wrote about movies".