Del Toro Dissects Hitchcock at Academy Museum
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- Guillermo del Toro launched "Guillermo del Toro Dissects Hitchcock," a screening-and-lecture series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles running through June 28, with the retrospective opening Thursday night with "Notorious" (1946)
- Del Toro selected five Hitchcock works for analysis — "Notorious," "Shadow of a Doubt," "North by Northwest," "I Confess," and "Frenzy" — drawing on behind-the-scenes stills from the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library for shot-by-shot breakdowns
- Del Toro argued that "Notorious" marked Hitchcock's pivotal Hollywood breakthrough, explaining that producer David O. Selznick's obsession with his Western epic "Duel in the Sun" freed Hitchcock from the micromanagement that had plagued collaborations on "Rebecca" and "Spellbound"
- Del Toro dissected the famous Cary Grant-Ingrid Bergman kiss in "Notorious," highlighting how Hitchcock evaded Production Code censors through sly blocking and then echoed the scene's rhythms in the film's climax to generate pure cinematic emotion
- Del Toro framed the series as a defense of "pure cinema" as a visual art form, lamenting that "the language of cinema is evaporating" because discussion defaults to dramaturgical terms like plot and character rather than formal analysis, as with a Van Gogh painting
- Del Toro, now a member of the Academy Board of Governors, teased future lecture programs — including a floated idea devoted to Luis Buñuel's Mexican work — as part of his mission to "renew the pact with cinema"
Why it matters: Del Toro is using his new seat on the Academy's Board of Governors to institutionalize a particular kind of cinematic education at the Academy Museum, curating screenings of Hitchcock, and potentially Buñuel, to teach filmmakers and audiences how to read movies as visual art rather than just story — and the five-film, multi-week format (running through June 28) gives young filmmakers repeated access to shot-level analysis they rarely get elsewhere.
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