by Dmetri Kakmi

Perhaps no other English-speaking filmmaker has been the subject of such intense scrutiny, praise and condemnation as Alfred Hitchcock, who, in a career spanning over forty years, has spawned more imitators than a frog has tadpoles. There are countless excellent monographs about this seminal British director, not the least of which is Robin Wood's "Hitchcock's Films". So, do we need another Hitchcock book, or is it a case of whenever you hear of a good new book, you rush out and buy an old one? Because Camille Paglia sources a substantial number of books, interviews and articles written on Hitchcock, her new book on "The Birds" is, in one sense, also an old book, but her idiosyncratic approach, brilliant frame-by-frame commentary and peppery wit immediately make this delightful book a must buy.

During an interview Paglia said that when the British Film Institute invited her to write about Hitchcock's 1963 film, she saw it as a great opportunity to redress some wrongs. 'He's a first rate artist,' she pointed out. 'But you have to realise how low his reputation is right now among feminists. Tippi Hedren ... has never got one good word anywhere in film criticism. The masses liked Tippi Hedren, but the critics have been snobbish about her from the very start.' With these points in mind, Paglia set about fashioning her insightful and bubbling-with-enthusiasm addition to the BFIs "Film Classics" series.

In his first venture since the ground-breaking "Psycho" (1961), Hitchcock 'addresses the theme of destructive, rapacious nature that was always implicit in his fascination with crime.' Based on a 1952 Daphne du Maurier short story, and a series of newspaper reports of bird attacks, "The Birds" was an ambitious, large-scale venture which, thanks to complicated special effects and matte processes, was also fraught with technical difficulties. Ironically, in its day, the film laid a bit of an egg with critics, but the public flocked to it. Over the years, however, its reputation has steadily grown. Seen now, thirty-five years later, one is immediately struck by Hitchcock's mature artistry, subtle layering of themes and the 'documentary naturalism' initially deployed to establish the films later eruptions of violence and slow deterioration of culture before nature's onslaught. Coming as it did in the early sixties, "The Birds" follows on from the fifties radioactive-giant-insects-on-the-rampage movies, and clearly preempted the disaster movies of the seventies and late nineties. What partly distinguishes it, however, is Hitchcock's manner of fleshing out his four main players so that when the birds descend, there's plenty of meat for them to peck!

Paglia begins by placing "The Birds" 'in the mainline of British Romanticism, descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femme fatales of Coleridge.' As someone who shares Hitchcock's view of women as 'capricious and elusive', Paglia sees the film 'as a perverse ode to woman's sexual glamour,' and was struck by its themes of 'captivity and domestication.' Not before time, she also places Hitchcock among noted Surrealist filmmakers, with themes and images from his overall oeuvre traceable to early Surrealist films, such as "Un Chien Andalou", which Hitchcock clearly favoured. Like the American Surrealist, Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone", Hitchcock made a career of introducing the uncanny, whether it be the unexpected criminality of "A Shadow of a Doubt", or the haunting presence of "Rebecca", into the mundane everyday and subtly shifting perspectives to accommodate 'a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed.'

The inner dynamic of the film, and a good reason why it still captivates, is the underpinning of three central female characters: an insecure mother, an isolated ex-girlfriend and a sophisticated new woman in the life of macho Mitch, played by Australian Rod Taylor. In a sense the women are 'the birds' as much as the film's avian marauders. Mother-dominated Hitchcock has placed three 'devouring females at the crux' of his story. Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette represent the clinging, self-sacrificing aspects, while the predatory element is conveyed in Melanie's habit of using either a pencil or cigarette to jab and stab the air when she's speaking to her 'male quarry', or, more significantly, in her practice of twisting the phone cord when she's speaking on the telephone. This binary representation of women as conversely vulnerable and predatory leads to two of the film's most vibrant exchanges between women. The first is the tense, brandy-soaked discussion between ex-girlfriend, Annie, and her rival, Melanie in the former's home. The other takes place in the besieged diner where a woman accuses Melanie of bringing on the bird attacks, thus further linking woman to complex vitalities beyond the rational mind. Paglia observes that the woman's charges are irrational, but 'they have a mythic power that cannot be shaken off. On some level Melanie is a kind of vampire attuned to nature's occult messages.'

Seen here in her first role, model-turned-actress, Tippi Hedren, couldn't have stepped into a more demanding and arduous part. But thanks to her extraordinary poise and innate sense of body language, in the space of five tortuous days, she goes from strong-willed, flirtatious and impeccable fashion plate to a dishevelled, semi-comatose mess covered in scratches, bandages and hair in disarray! But where past feminist critics have seen misogyny, Paglia sees a complex universal sex war of give and take being waged between the sexes. The message of "The Birds" is that biological imperatives and elemental powers rule mortals helplessly flung about like driftwood on the sea of life.

Hitchcock, Paglia argues, was no misogynist but a subtle observer of the ebb and flow of desire and its influence on the sexual dynamics flowing between men and women. As a chubby youngster, he lived in awe of beautiful women forever beyond his reach. As a filmmaker, his displaced eroticism turned voyeurism allowed him to create some of the most incandescent images of goddess-like women ever put to celluloid. (Who can forget Grace Kelly's entrance in "Rear Window", or Kim Novak's phantom-like beauty in "Vertigo"?) But behind Hitchcock's adulation lay fear and suspicion. For him, women were also supreme beings of artifice and deception. So he took mordant pleasure in raising them on pedestals and then eroding the foundations on which they stood. As he did with Tallulah Bankhead in "Lifeboat", Hitchcock again uses wardrobe, female accessories and household paraphernalia to define and slowly destabilise his female characters. Paglia's reading of Melanie through this method is sharp, biting and funny: Melanie's ever-present clutch bag 'is a hunt bag in which to stuff male quarry ... Hitchcock portrays the vagina as a male prison.'

Wit and an appreciation of the absurd can never go astray in a book, and there's no lack of it here as Paglia spices up her arch asides with Hitchcockian ghoulishness. She positively crows like a W. C. Fields when the birds swarm around the isolated hill-stop school crowded with children: 'As soon as the little snacks hit the road, the crows rise from the gym ... I generally settle down to laughing and applauding the crows ... whom I regard as Coleridgean emissaries vandalising sentimental ... notions of childhood,' she cackles. But it's poor young Cathy Brenner, played by a bubbly Veronica Cartwright, who is at various times slapped by Paglia for being too 'hale and hearty' and offered as a sacrifice to the birds just to buy Suzanne Pleshette more scenes.

From undefined anxiety at the start to catatonic withdrawal by the film's end, Paglia's "The Birds", is a genuine aficionados reading of a masterful film by an original talent. Mixing, as it does, myth, psychology and her own brand of 'street-wise feminism', it is a book that should please Paglia's fans, Hitchcock scholars, and newcomers alike. In its exuberance and analytic power, it's a book worthy of the great film critic, Parker Tyler.

"The Birds", Camille Paglia, British Film Institute, 104 pp, $24.95. For more on Camille Paglia and her work on "The Birds", read Dmetri Kakmi's interview.