The Birds After Hitchcock: Beyond the Movement of Cinema

This video aims at creating an alternative experience of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), emphasizing issues of legibility, composition, and narration. I started by selecting a small set of frames of Hitchcock’s film and then I digitally manipulated the images by erasing the figures. The digital stills were recombined with fragments of the original soundtrack, creating a dissociative relation between image and sound, movement and fixity. As a result, the apparent neutrality of each frame is transformed into a distorted and uncanny vision that depicts empty sets inhabited by ghostly presences.