Sight and Sound - Beauty and the beasts: The Birds

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Beauty and the beasts

Camille Paglia on nature and civilisation in Hitchcock's "The Birds"

I first saw The Birds when I was in high school, and it had a profound effect on me. Its view of nature fascinated me, and Tippi Hedren's performance impressed me. I was not old enough to have been influenced by Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock's films, so I didn't come to The Birds with any preconceptions that made me feel Hedren hadn't met the standards of a slightly older generation of actresses. For me, Hedren is the ultimate Hitchcock heroine.

The Birds is respected for its technical achievements, which were cutting edge at that time, but there's always a backbiting about Hedren. So in my book on The Birds I wanted to show why her performance is wonderful and why the audience loves the film, and loves her. Critics don't like her because as Melanie Daniels she comes across as too fashionable, too chic, and there's an animosity towards chic, fashionable women among academic film critics. They believe fashion is a capitalist conspiracy by heterosexist imperialists, to keep women down and give them low self-esteem!

In my film criticism I take the position of the fan. I look at film from the point of view of appreciation. I believe it's the critic's function to open the work further to the audience, not to demean the work, to attack it, to find all the racism, sexism or homophobia in it.

I love the beauty and glamour of the great Hollywood studio era. So I'm perfectly positioned to appreciate the high-fashion style that Melanie Daniels was created to embody. The main problem with so much feminist film criticism, as well as post-structuralism and postmodernism, is that they're obsessed with words. Film critics for the past 25 years have tried to impose verbal categories on film. But film works choreographically; it uses body language, for which Hitchcock had tremendous feeling. A lot is done in mime in Hitchcock. Everything was cut in his head in advance. He has a visual and choreographic way of telling stories.

Another wonderful thing about Hitchcock is his double vision. He sees the tragic dimension and the horrors of life, as in Psycho, but he also sees the comedy. And he combines these in a macabre way.

For this project, I saw many of Hitchcock's early films that had never been available before on video. I'd always felt Hitchcock was a genius, but after reviewing those films and realising how early his vision came, my reverence for him increased. I was very impressed in his silent films by his skill in photographing crowds. My theory is that because his father was a greengrocer, Hitchcock in his early years directly experienced the crowds in London moving in surging rhythms. So he learned how to show crowds moving through the streets, or going down subways, stairs - as in the title sequence of North by Northwest, with its crowds rushing across the screen.

Hitchcock has the ability of a great stage or opera director to manage groups of people. Italians can do these gigantic, Fellini-like crowd scenes, but you don't expect that from someone emerging from British culture. The sense of space is so constrained in England that people learn how to live within narrow borders. Body language is constrained too - unlike Italians, who have large, expressive gestures. Hitchcock, interestingly, considering how sober a person he was, saw the flamboyance of body language and was able to use it. The mass audience responds to the crowd scenes in movies - the gesturalism and choreography.

The Birds occupies a key position in Hitchcock's work. It's a film that has escaped the claws of film critics and truly belongs to the people. I believe the reason the mass audience loves the film is because it depicts the unknown terrors of nature. I found many remarks by Hitchcock that explicitly address nature, and I think it's indisputable that it was his major theme here. Current critics aren't prepared to deal with that. There has been a great gap in intellectual life over the last 25 years, coming from post-structuralism: the inability to perceive nature and to honour it. I see Hitchcock coming out of the main line of British Romanticism, down from Coleridge. I also see him as a Surrealist, and I was pleased to find he mentioned the influence of the Surrealists on his work. In my book, I noted the scenes I feel are directly out of Surrealist art - for instance the woman in a fur coat, with a bird cage, in a row boat. Even to say that makes you think of Dali or Magritte.

One of my favourite scenes in The Birds is the one at the jungle gym near the schoolhouse. Hedren is anxiously smoking and looking over one shoulder, while over the other we see crows beginning to land on the jungle gym. For me, the jungle gym is a symbol of civilisation - the framework, the grid - and the birds are nature. Soon the jungle gym is heaving and rippling with birds, which look very evil, very dark and almost shapeless. Then you have Hedren sitting there smoking in this amazingly sophisticated manner, fantastically elegant. That combination - the primitive horror of the rippling black birds, and the beauty of the woman staring off alone, with no male, staring off into space, very composed - is to me a symbolic depiction of human life, both nature and culture. I took from Hitchcock this view of the frame of culture, the invisible skeleton of civilised life. I regard myself as someone who is climbing and groping and trying to find the rungs of the invisible jungle gym of contemporary society and western culture. It's an enormously important image to me.

Camille Paglia was talking to Leslie Felperin. 'The Birds' is available on CIC Video; Camille Paglia's BFI Film Classic on 'The Birds' is available from all good bookshops

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