Alfred Hitchcock retrospective 24 to 30 October 2019.

This year, it is 120 years since the birth of Sir Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Hitchcock’s continued high esteem among new generations is evidenced by his films still being ranked in the top lists of the world’s best films (e.g. in 2012, his ‘Vertigo’ made it to the top of the Greatest Films of All Time list of the British Film Institute). As a bow of respect to the grand master’s creative legacy, the Sõprus Cinema and the Tartu Electric Theatre are holding a Hitchcock retrospective.

The Estonian audience mainly knows this director, often named the master of suspense, through his brilliant thrillers made in 1954–1964 – and thrillers also have a place of honour in the selection presented at the retrospective. However, it is significantly less well known that before Hitchcock took to the director’s chair in the mid-1920s, he worked, among other things, as a decoration designer and an art director, being particularly fascinated with the hallucinatory spaces and deformed expression of form of the German expressionist cinema. Those early experiences and impressions left a deep mark on Hitchcock’s creative work, making him realise that images can have a far greater impact than words and that spaces speaks as much as the characters in them. The appearance and nature of the settings of his films actually played a substantial role for him as early as in the scriptwriting stage and the constructed environment is almost always strongly interwoven with the narrative in his films (for instance, quite a few of his recurring motifs that are linked to dramatic turning points are architectural – e.g. a stairway or a window). The uniquely Hitchcockian counterpoint of narrative, events, characters and settings also underlies the retrospective’s film selection which for the first time brings to the Estonian audience some of his early films that are less known here.

Schedule:

24/10 18.30 "The Lodger: A Story of the Londong Fog“, 1927 / 1.31 25/10 18.30 "Sabotage“, 1936 / 1.16 26/10 18.30 "Rebecca“, 1940 / 2.10 27/10 18.30 "Rope“, 1948 / 1.20 28/10 18.30 "Rear Window“, 1954 / 1.52 29/10 18.30 "North by Northwest“, 1959 / 2.16 30/10 18.30 "Marnie“, 1964 / 2.10

Curator Eva Näripea.

Tickets 6.50€. Buying 5 or more at the same time from cinema Sõprus, ticket price is 5€!