As Sundance Film Festival 2017 comes to a close we are happy to announce a new acquisition fresh from its world premiere at the festival: 78/52. It is an unprecedented look at the iconic shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, the 'Man behind the Curtain', and the screen murder that profoundly changed the course of world cinema. Variety calls it "an enthralling act of film criticism" and the film will be released in cinemas later this year.
The film is sure to be a favourite for those who enjoyed Hitchcock/Truffaut which we released in 2016. Hitchcock/Truffaut focuses on the 1962 week long interview between directors Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, this interview was basis of the seminal book "Hitchcock/Truffaut". In the film we hear from leading filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and many more on what this book meant to them and how both Hitchcock and Truffaut inspired their work. Hitchcock/Truffaut is now available on DVD and on demand, find out how to watch here.
In 78 setups and 52 cuts, the deliriously choreographed two-minute shower sequence in Psychoripped apart cinema’s definition of horror. With a shocking combination of exploitation and high art, Alfred Hitchcock upended his own acclaimed narrative structure by violently killing off a heroine a third of the way through his film, without explanation, justification, or higher purpose. Psycho played out like a horrific prank, forcing audiences to recognize that even the most banal domestic spaces were now fair game for unspeakable mayhem.
With black-and-white film-geek reverence, director Alexandre O. Philippe breaks down this most notorious and essential scene shot for shot, enlisting the help of film buffs and filmmakers alike—including Guillermo del Toro, Bret Easton Ellis, Karyn Kusama, Eli Roth, and Peter Bogdanovich. 78/52 examines Janet Leigh’s terrified facial expressions and the blink-and-you-miss-it camera work, not just within the context of the film but also with an eye toward America’s changing social mores—revealing how one bloody, chaotic on-screen death killed off chaste cinema and eerily predicted a decade of unprecedented violence and upheaval.