VOD film review: My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
Review Overview
Fake Hitchcock?
6Fake Hitchcock!
8Film insight
9Anton Bitel | On 22, Jul 2023
Director: Mark Cousins
Cast: Alistair McGowan (voice)
Certificate: 15
“They made this monument to me 20 years after I died,” says Alfred Hitchcock (in voiceover) of Antony Donaldson’s Buddha-like statue of Hitchcock’s head in the courtyard of London’s Gainsborough Picture studios where he first directed. Of course, it is not really Hitchcock saying this. How could it be? After all, dead men tell no tales. Yet part of the object of writer/director Mark Cousins’ pseudo-autobiographical film essay My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is to serve as another monument to the great filmmaker, bringing him back to life for a post-millennial audience born decades after the real Hitchcock’s death in 1980.
Commenting on a scene from Marnie (1964), this “Hitch” says: “Her past was not past. She was reliving it, the way that movies relive, the way that I am reliving in this movie perhaps.” This is expressly meta-commentary, as cinema’s power to bring back the past is in evidence as much in this fictionalised documentary on Hitchcock as it is in Hitchcock’s own films. After all, as text tells us at the end, Hitchcock’s “voice is still alive”, not just because of Alistair McGowan’s uncanny impression of it here, but because it can be heard (and seen) in the films that he has also left behind as monuments both to his idiosyncratic views and fixations. Hitchcock’s own films are as much records of the “real” Hitchcock as Cousins’ film is (with each offering their own truths through fiction). You just have to put in the work to reconstruct – to resurrect – that voice, and that life.
The narrator openly admits to being a “trickster” and asks the viewer directly: “Do you trust me? You do know that films are lies, don’t you?” The artifice at the heart of My Name Is Hitchcock makes this something of an F Is For Fake among directors’ biopics. Perhaps, though, it is better to think of it as a dialectic between a late filmmaker and a long-time admirer, mediated through the latter’s sharp engagement with the former’s considerable body of work. For this is presented as a conversation, indeed a formal interview, between Cousins (whom we occasionally hear but never see) and Hitchcock (shown almost entirely in stills – a deliberate decision, given the wealth of surviving footage of Hitch moving and talking). So both the documentarian and his subject are present absences, while Hitchcock’s filmography is the thing – the sounding board for ideas and motifs which serve as Hitchcock’s well-preserved if scattered remains. Meanwhile Hitchcock’s oral account of his own intentions, obsessions and evasions – an account in fact written by Cousins – reveals the younger filmmaker as a keen and close observer of Hitchcock, well-placed to read the director’s entrails.
“Look closely at my pics and you see things. I see things,” Hitch says near the start. “I’d like to tell you some of the things I see. Not suspense, mystery or movie stardom, that’s all been done to death. Can we look at my movies from more unusual angles. Angles that might relate to your lives. your families.” This is very much Cousins’ programme, as he brings together close, insightful readings of recurring themes and often tiny details across the films – from silents to talkies, from the British to the bigger American productions – all designed to cast light on often hidden craft, to encourage closer examination, and to find new life and lasting relevance in these now old features.
Hitch/Cousins divide the documentary into six chapters, each with their own formal, abstractly thematic title: Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfilment and Height. Discussion shifts deftly from scene interpretation to cinematographic analysis to meta-cinematic and even political commentary, while the director is presented as an impish if avuncular creator constantly trying to trounce expectation, upend comfort and interrogate viewers’ cosy assumptions about themselves and the world.
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock certainly offers a wide array of new approaches to Hitchcock’s films, which Cousins convincingly coaxes from carefully collated visual evidence. Even those well-acquainted with the master’s oeuvre are likely to find these readings provocative and compelling. If it can also draw younger viewers – like the Zoomer to whose staring image we occasionally cut and whom Hitch at times directly addresses – back to the source materials with open eyes and mind, then Cousins’ disinterment of Hitchcock will be complete. He certainly makes a persuasive case that there is life yet, and new discoveries to be made, in the departed director’s filmography. After all, Hitchcock will only truly die when we stop watching, and thinking about, his monumental body of art.