Cousins imagines the master: ‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’

Cinema | November 25th, 2024

By Greg Carlson

For many years, Mark Cousins has been one of the most ambitious chroniclers of movie culture. The indefatigable documentarian might be best known for his 2011 project “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” That 930-minute epic was programmed in America on Turner Classic Movies and is now available on physical media along with its 2021 sequel, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” running a “mere” 120 minutes, feels bite-size by comparison. It premiered in 2022 at the Telluride Film Festival, and is finally being released for wider consumption. Hitchcock fans won’t need to be prodded to seek it out, but even casual appreciators will discover all sorts of reasons to watch or revisit the films of the Master of Suspense.

Film critics, historians, academics and cinephiles will no doubt express a wide range of opinion on the central design feature settled upon by Cousins for the delivery of his message(s). The filmmaker, who wrote and (cheekily) attributed the movie’s script to Mr. Hitchcock, employs comic/entertainer/impressionist Alistair McGowan as the narrating voice of the famous director. The novel gimmick allows the disembodied Hitchcock to, in essence, chat with us from beyond the grave. All the time that has passed since Hitchcock’s death in 1980 melts away as Cousins imagines how the droll raconteur might respond to his own work more than four decades beyond the length of his own life.

By electing to stick with voiceover and not to visualize some kind of Hitchcock avatar (as I watched, I kept thinking of Stevan Riley’s captivating approach to Brando in 2015’s “Listen to Me Marlon”), Cousins can do one of the things he does best: assemble a cascade of film clips to illustrate his positions. With the help of editor and frequent collaborator Timo Langer, Cousins selects scenes spanning the breadth of Hitchcock’s monumental 54-year filmography. From the instantly recognizable touchstones to the cult gems to the less frequently screened early efforts, Cousins organizes “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” into six chapters: Escape, Desire, Loneliness, Time, Fulfillment, and Height.

Cousins uses these thematic groupings to explore his favored aspects of the oeuvre, much the way author Edward White dissected “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock.” White’s book, published the year before Cousins completed his movie, broke down one dozen of the filmmaker’s dimensions (the titles are worth repeating for the curious: “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up,” “The Murderer,” “The Auteur,” “The Womanizer,” “The Fat Man,” “The Dandy,” “The Family Man,” “The Voyeur,” “The Entertainer,” “The Pioneer,” “The Londoner,” and “The Man of God”). I know I am not the only one who would love to see a documentary based on White’s Edgar Award-winner.

As with any two Hitchcock scholars, there are many points of overlap between Cousins’ movie and White’s book. Of course, books can do things movies cannot and vice versa, making it fair to say that White manages to wrestle with Hitchcock’s complicated, complex, and sometimes abusive relationships with actresses more substantively than Cousins elects to do in “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock.” Both documents, however, illuminate our ongoing fascination with the man, acknowledging the awesome visual power conveyed via Hitchcock’s gift for cultivating something well beyond the dreaded “pictures of people talking” that grind dynamic movement to a dead stop.

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