Shh…It’s Hitchcock

Most of his films remain easily accessible through home video,whereas the work of many of his contemporaries has been allowed to sink into commercial obscurity. And yet,theres a significant portion of Hitchcocks work that has been neglected: his earliest features,made from 1925,when the 26-year-old Hitch made his debut as a director with the melodrama The Pleasure Garden,to 1929,when he partly reshot the silent thriller Blackmail to add dialogue,making it the first British talkie.

But now,Hitchcocks silent films are back as The Hitchcock 9,a travelling programme organised by the British Film Institute. Though the nine surviving Hitchcock silent films have long been accessible in variously compromised forms,they are being shown in versions as definitive as modern technology can make them. Two seem completely reborn: Thanks to 20 minutes of restored footage,The Pleasure Garden now feels like a fully realised film; and The Lodger,Hitchcocks third film (1927) and his first to join the subject of crime,has been filled out with missing shots and returned to an approximation of the form in which it was first seen.

If this unusually public initiative had a secret agenda,it was perhaps to reclaim one of Englands most famous expatriatesto re-establish the essential Britishness of a filmmaker who made his last British feature in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1955.

The opening scene of The Pleasure Garden seems almost like a clip reel of Hitchcock motifs to come. In the shot,chorus girls are seen descending a spiral staircase (both will become recurring images,as,for example,in Vertigo); a middle-aged man uses a pair of opera glasses to get a better look at a blonde dancer (immediately summoning James Stewart in Rear Window); the blonde dancer (played by Virginia Valli) turns out to be not a remote erotic object but,beneath her blonde wig,an approachable woman with dark hair (a dichotomy that goes right down to Barbara Harris and Karen Black in Hitchcocks final film,Family Plot).

But in other,no less interesting,ways,these films represent the road not taken. At this early point in his career,Hitchcock was experimenting with different genres,varying his approach film by film as he discovered what he had to say.

In between,we find a boxing picture (The Ring),a boarding-school story (Downhill),a rural comedy (The Farmers Wife),an adaptation of a Noël Coward drama (Easy Virtue),a screwball comedy (Champagne) and a stark treatment of adultery (The Manxman).

The single most consistent stylistic element in these films is Hitchcocks vigorous use of the confrontational close-up,in which an actor looks directly into the camera and addresses the audience. Beyond their immediate dramatic purpose,what you feel in these shots is Hitchcocks eagerness to shake us out of the position of the detached voyeur. Hitchcock insists that we feel the compulsion of the killer,the passion of the adulterer,the irrational shame of the unfairly accused,before we make a moral judgment.

Hitchcocks use of this confrontational close-up diminished with the coming of sound. Perhaps he felt that with the added element of dialogue,the technique became too obvious. He would find other,more subtle,ways of achieving the same effect. But the device remained in his arsenal: When Mrs Bates looks up and out at us at the end of Psycho,she does so with the same,sudden,discomfiting intimacy with which the Lodger regarded the camera in 1927. And neither one of them would hurt a fly.