The Birds (BFI Film Classics) Review

Camille Paglia draws together in this text the aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), and analyzes its depiction of gender and familial relations.

BFI Film Classics are a treasure, featuring some of the most imaginative recent writing on movies and the film industry. In each little book of the series, an important essayist explores the planning, production, and meaning of a single classic film. We've already been treated to Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane, David Thomson on The Big Sleep, and Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz. Camille Paglia on The Birds seems like the next, natural step!

Paglia brings her characteristic blend of autobiography, psychoanalysis, kinky vampirism, 1960s radicalism, and contempt for scholarly jargon to her discussion of The Birds, Hitchcock's vision of Mother Nature's vengeance on the humans who have desecrated her. Paglia says she has loved the movie since it first flew into theaters in 1963: "Overwhelmed by the film when I saw it as an impressionable teenager, I view it as a perverse ode to women's sexual glamour, which Hitchcock shows in all its seductive phases, from brittle artifice to melting vulnerability.... In this film, as in so many others, Hitchcock finds woman captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature, but she is the chief artificer in civilization, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception."

As enthusiastic about the film as Mrs. Bundy (the movie's amateur ornithologist) is about birds, Paglia is somewhat birdlike herself in her observations. As you read the scene-by-scene analysis of the movie, you can feel her perched on your shoulder, watching it with you, chirping loquaciously--and sometimes ironically: "The birds ... soar up from behind the schoolhouse like a cloud of bats. Academe breeds nightmares." And, "After the first flash of real horror, I generally settle down to laughing and applauding the crows, whom I regard as Coleridgean emissaries vandalizing sentimental Wordsworthian notions of childhood." Of the heroine, the overly curious socialite Melanie Daniels, Paglia remarks, "She is living up to her name--a Daniels who enters the lion's den."

Paglia augments her observations with quotations from Hitchcock, his collaborators, and some of the most important essays written about the film. She also adds an appendix summarizing the film's gory plot under the heading "Melanie Daniels' Social Calendar." Full production credits and a helpful bibliography round out the volume. No fan of Hitchcock, Paglia, or The Birds will want to miss this unique and evocative discussion of a film classic. --Raphael Shargel

Inspired choice for the birds

By A1TPJMIG83W12L on 2000-07-22

Yet this is a superb piece of criticism taking in every apsect of the production of Hitchcock's masterwork. Paglia is very good at the sexual and oedipal politics that pervade Hitchock's work.

It shows that film criticism needs not be dense writing aimed solely at obscuring meaning.

Her discussion on the ending of the Birds certainly opened my eyes to a flaw of the film. As great as the film is, the ending does not work. The original ending would have provided a great climax to a masterwork, yet it was not chosen. Anyone interested in the Birds or hitchcock should read this book.

The book covers a lot of ground and is immensely readable. The best of the series which has shown good marketing sense, but really not a lot of good criticism.

Arrows Of The Wise

By A3VAXB8CDYY5BG on 2003-11-03

In 104 concise, robust pages, Paglia proves that depth of perception can be readily expressed without recourse to the labrinthian doublespeak that has infected American academia via the French Structuralists over the last quarter century. Paglia communicates clearly without seeming to try: the emphasis throughout is squarely on the intelligent conveyance of her ideas, and not on dreary abstractions and intellectualism. Her sentences virtually crackle with energy and verve, humor and acuity.

Readers familiar with Paglia's previous work already know her to be a walking testament to Western culture. Here, Paglia brings the same brilliant contextual ability to The Birds that she brought to the work of Spencer, Byron, Swinburne, Wilde, Hawthorne, and Dickinson in 1990's Sexual Personae. Whether discussing Hitchcock's oeuvre or psychology, Tippi Hedren's facial expressions, wardrobe or coiffure, the original Daphne du Maurier short story upon which the film was based, real episodes of bird attacks along the California coast, or the myriad technical processes involved in the making of the film, from sound and cinematography to special effects, Paglia, who seems to know everything, is in top form. If a character so much as crosses their legs, Paglia has something revealing to say about it.

Paglia carefully moves through and interprets each scene, expressing surprising and persuasive theories about the smallest of details, demonstrating in the process how absolutely nothing should be overlooked, assumed, or taken for granted in films as carefully planned and executed as Hitchcock's. Moving from episode to episode, Paglia cumulatively offers her own astute interpretation of the film's notoriously ambiguous meaning. Paglia has scrupulously researched her subject, interviewed Tippi Hedren, who she clearly reveres, and obviously enjoyed the writing of The Birds tremendously. Less hilarious than some of her other work, The Birds, film writing at its best and a cut well above most of the other titles in the BFI series, is a sheer pleasure to read. Illustrated with color and black and white photographs.

The Birds (BFI Film Classics) Reviews

Inspired choice for the birds

Arrows Of The Wise

Camille Paglia's delicious treatment of The Birds thrills!

Before Fabio got goosed, there was 'Tippi'

What fun