Today, August 13 marks Alfred Hitchcock’s 113 birth­day. Ear­lier we posted an arti­cle about a cou­ple of movies due this year about the genius of cin­ema. This time we want to remem­ber Hitch­cock with a 1999 doc­u­men­tary made to cel­e­brate his centenary.

Hitch­cock directed more than fifty fea­ture films in a career span­ning six decades. Often regarded as the great­est British film­maker; he did more than any direc­tor to shape mod­ern cin­ema, which would be utterly dif­fer­ent with­out him. He pio­neered the use of a cam­era made to move in a way that mim­ics a person’s gaze, forc­ing view­ers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to max­imise anx­i­ety, fear, or empa­thy, and used inno­v­a­tive film editing.

Alfred Hitch­cock once said that all art is emo­tion, and that the task of the film­maker is to use the tools of his medium to manip­u­late the audience’s emo­tional experience.

The fol­low­ing British doc­u­men­tary cov­ers  The life and films of Alfred Hitch­cock in two parts: Alfred, the Great and Alfred, the Auteur. Sur­viv­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors and col­leagues are inter­viewed. The doc­u­men­tary also includes footage from Kalei­do­scope Frenzy, an orig­i­nal screen­play about a necrophil­iac ser­ial killer in New York City.

Hitch­cock showed his script to his friend François Truf­faut. Though Truf­faut admired the script, he felt uneasy about its relent­less sex and vio­lence. Unlike “Psy­cho”, these ele­ments would not be hid­den behind the respectable veneer of mur­der mys­tery and psy­cho­log­i­cal sus­pense; the killer would be the main char­ac­ter, the hero, the eyes of the audience.

Uni­ver­sal wasn’t keen on the film either, despite Hitchcock’s assur­ances that he would make the film for under a mil­lion dol­lars with a cast of unknowns. The film – alter­nately known as “Frenzy” or the more “sixties”-ish “Kalei­do­scope” – would not be made, but some of the ideas – and the title – would be recy­cled into his 1972 thriller “Frenzy”.