Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock‘s ‘The Birds‘ 1963 UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC. COPYRIGHT RENEWED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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What strikes you most about rewatching this supreme Hitchcock classic? Its proximity to “Psychosis”, the master’s previous film, including “The Birds” extends a bundle of intentions and themes. First of all: to go beyond the framework of sacrosanct suspense to reach the next stage, that of violence, disgust and horror.
Through the multiplicity of scenes of attacks by birds descending on Tippi Hedren as well as on the inhabitants of Bodega Bay, a village in Northern California worthy of an English Gothic tale, Hitch orchestrates a gory symphony, full of spurts of blood, sordid sound effects and gouged out eyes, in a sort of variation of the anthology sequence of the knife murder, in the shower, from “Psychosis”.
Toxic dominance
Not to mention the erotic dimension, pushed to the extreme during a sadomasochistic finale, in which the spectator contemplates a tortured actress, moaning in pain, defiled by the simple contact of animals on her skin. Some saw in “The Birds” a great film about rape as well as prevented desire. Because like “Psychosis”, “The Birds” remains a story of a big daddy swallowed up by a castrating mother.
All the supernatural manifestations can thus be interpreted as Lydia Brenner’s repressed anger towards a woman attracted to her son Mitch (the pale Rod Taylor). The link is all the more clear since Hitchcock openly emphasizes the physical resemblance of the mother and potential daughter-in-law (Jessica Tandy and Tippi Hedren have the same hairstyle) and ultimately brings them together in a toxic embrace sealing the domination of one over the other.
That said, “The Birds” is not content to follow in the footsteps of another film. It also anticipates a major part of the codes of zombie cinema, a genre that flourished a few years later. “Night of the Living Dead”, released in 1968, owes a lot to him. In addition to the use of gore, it will take up the principle of the besieged house that a dysfunctional family unit undertakes to preserve.
◗ Sunday February 22 at 9 p.m. on Arte. American thriller film by Alfred Hitchcock (1963). With Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor. 1h59. (Available on demand on Arte.tv).
