by Daniel Crooke
Arriving just in time to slice and dice screens during the Halloween season comes Alexandre O. Phillipe's documentary 78/52, named after the 78 shots and 52 cuts that comprise the primal terror of Psycho’s infamous shower scene. A frame-by-frame deconstruction of the sequence, the myth, and the way it changed moviegoing culture forever, 78/52 debuted to warm reviews at Sundance earlier this year and will no doubt be a sweet seasonal treat for fans of Alfred Hitchcock, legacy horror, and the precise construction that goes into the craft of filmmaking.
Aficionados and genre experts such as Guillermo del Toro, Jamie Lee Curtis, Karyn Kusama, and Danny Elfman provide their own insights in the documentary...
78/52 attempts to decode how and why Hitchcock’s groundbreaking assemblage of sudden panic caused such a shock to the cinematic system upon its release. As Peter Bogdanovich remarks in the recently released teaser trailer below, “it was actually the first time in the history of movies where it wasn’t safe to be in the movie theater.”
When viewed alongside contemporary documentaries such as Room 237, De Palma, and, of course, Hitchcock/Truffaut - not to mention HBO's upcoming Spielberg - an undeniable trend emerges towards a resurgence of the documentary as film essay. For those who vociferously consumed Matt Zoller Seitz’s series of illuminating video essays back in 2011 on the work of Terence Malick for the Museum of the Moving Image – although obviously there is any number of other commendable examples of this medium – these feature-length excavations into culture, craft, and close-reading have become an extension of film school for a fraction of the price.
78/52 hits theaters and VOD on Friday, October 13. For all the reasons above - and perhaps as an apology for the last time a movie tried tackling the behind-the-scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho - I can say with certainty that the film jumps right up my list of most anticipated films for the fall. Where do you land? And in the spirit of its subject, what are some of your favorite movies about movies?