PM Review

I was willing to start Hitchcock with either Psycho [1960] or Birds [1963]. Nonetheless, like Godard’s Contempt [1963], I have begun with Hitchcock’s Spellbound [1945], again for the sake of Cannes Classics 2023.   Everyone says Hitchcock is a master of suspense. My first experience with Hitchcockian thrilling and suspense is quite disappointing as per my great expectation.   The method of therapeutic practices of mental sufferings and personality disorders through Freudian psychoanalysis are exercised in the movie with philosophical and aesthetic touches. But it disheartens me to keep the fair balance between cinematic narrative structures and literary worthiness.   Two things have just imprinted the finest impressions on my mind. First the dream sequences, designed by  Salvador Dalí , especially where Ballantyne [ Gregory Peck ] was running away down to the hill; as a tool of  curing amnesia. The composition and the motion are the iconic one to me. The other t...

  When I was reading the heart-wrenching descriptions and narrations from Charlie Chaplin’s  My Autobiography [1964], my eyes just froze at the line, “There  were patches everywhere, on the elbows, trousers, shoes and stockings.” [4] Afterward, While I was watching Chaplin’s “The Kid” (1921), I found a verisimilar costumes and moods & expressions on the faces of the Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) & the Kid (Jackie Coogan) who is the one of the most expressive child artist I have ever seen.   It is beyond doubt that no other filmmakers than Charlie Chaplin could, as far as I know, apply and make art from the autobiographical extractions so elegantly and truthfully. I could barely differentiate the deep feeling of vulnerability a single mother could have when I saw the mother ( Edna Purviance ) who abandoned his newborn baby both being deserted by her man, the artist and being burdened because of child’s identity and economic destitution with Charlie’s...