The Birds (BFI Film Classics) [Paperback]

Camille Paglia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

Review

"Magnificently cantankerous." -- J.G. Ballard

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: British Film Institute; First Edition edition (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0851706517
• ISBN-13: 978-0851706511
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspired choice for the birds, July 21, 2000

By 

Kevin Brianton (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)

Camille Paglia is a controverisal choice to review the Birds which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1962. She is a writer with her own mind and this approach puts her out of step with nearly everyone in academia. Paglia is a always readable and controversial. She has put a generation of feminist's teeth on edge. And on occasion she gets distracted from the task in hand to take a jab at her opponents.

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.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arrows Of The Wise, November 3, 2003

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)

Those who would like to learn to write well could hardly do better than study Camille Paglia's The Birds (1998), the author's exhilarating monograph on Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror masterpiece. The British Film Institute (BFI), which sponsored the book in its BFI Film Classics series, has made some highly questionable choices in its "modern" selection of "the 360 key films in the history of cinema," including such mediocre productions as John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), Michael Mann's Heat (1995), and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), but their pairing of Camille Paglia with The Birds - the choice of film was probably hers - is nothing less than inspired.

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Camille Paglia's delicious treatment of The Birds thrills!, August 17, 1999

By 

D. Greven (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)

One of Hitchcock's half-dozen authentic masterpieces, The Birds still manages to titilate as it terrifies; its poetically bleak yet mordantly witty vision of the random shattering of everyday life has only gained clarity and luster. The madcap Paglia has risen to the occasion--this treatment is the most sustained critical piece ive read from her in some time, and the focus it requires of her frees her--for the most part--from her characteristic insecurities (manifested by wearying "shock" tactics) while it brings out her most appealing qualities, daring insight and psychological acuity and historical breadth. She does a first-rate job of depicting and scrutinizing the great women of the film--Hedren, Pleshette, Tandy--bringing out their decadent sultriness and mysterious sexual glamour, in ways that successfully underpin her view of the film as a Romantic treatise on the vagaries of "rapacious nature" and Woman's enigmatic sexual allure and power. The only real failing is the ending--where is it? A carefully orchestrated finale of insight would have made this fine, rousing piece a real showstopper.