The Birds – Camille Paglia

A study of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 legendary movie The Birds in the BFI Film Classics series.

Language: English

Paperback, 120 pages

Published by Bloomsbury/BFI, 2020

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Camille Paglia’s essay on Hitchcock’s The Birds, part of the BFI Film Classics, is a superb piece of writing about cinema, and the best and most comprehensive I have read about the film itself. It’s beautiful how Camille Paglia objectively redeems Hitchcock’s heroines and especially Tippi Hedren’s place among the Hitchcock heroines (as when driving her Aston Martin free, liberated, driving “as a vivacious expression of her combative personality”), especially in a time when so much effort has been put into criticising Hitchcock’s female depiction. It’s a compelling character analysis that extends to the other protagonists as well. The author considers every aspect of filmmaking, from aesthetic to technical elements, and her visual, cinematographic writing style makes the reading very engaging, highlighting, for example, the way costume fundamentally relates to the study of film narrative and mise-en-scène.