HITCHCOCK TO BE FETED DURING CULTURAL OLYMPIAD

Eighty-three years after scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail were filmed at the British Museum, the movie will be screened on an outdoor wall of the museum as part of a Hitchcock retrospective being mounted as part of the Cultural Olympiad, which coincides with this year’s London Olympics The British Film Institute (BFI) said Tuesday that the 58-film retrospective, which will also present a number of Hitchcock movies from the silent era, is as important to modern cinema as Picasso is to modern art. Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director, said that Hitchcock should occupy a space in the British school curriculum equivalent to Shakespeare’s. In an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Stewart remarked, “The idea of popular cinema somehow being capable of being great art at the same time as being entertaining is still a problem for some people. Shakespeare is on the national curriculum, Hitchcock is not.” The restorations, presumably funded in large measure, if not entirely, by the National Lottery, were long overdue, Stewart said. “We would find it very strange if we could not see Shakespeare’s early plays performed, or read Dickens’s early novels. But we’ve been quite satisfied as a nation that Hitchcock’s early films have not been seen in good quality prints on the big screen, even though — like Shakespearean and Dickensian — Hitchcockian has entered our language.”