Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock (Cancelled) (en)

In line with the themes of Tina Gillen's work and the visual language of her paintings, the Konschthal is showing a selection of three films as part of her Flying Mercury exhibition.

The screening of the film Rear Window (1954), produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, will be preceded by an introductory lecture by Steven Jacobs, an art historian specializing in the relationship between film and the visual arts.

The Painting That Knew Too Much: Tina Gillen and Alfred Hitchcock

To a large extent, Tina Gillen’s work can be described as a pictorial take on cinematic images. Apart from works that show a fascination for decors and sets, she also made some explicit references to films by Alfred Hitchcock.

This lecture deals with some of these references, discussing them in the context of the ubiquitous fascination for Hitchcock among many artists of the last decades who work in various media. Like many other artists, Gillen developed into a “possessive spectator” who attempts to hold the elusive filmic images by means of solid, painted images, thus doubling Hitchcock’s emphasis on objects and spaces subjected to the voyeuristic gaze of his characters and spectators. In addition, Gillen’s fascination for Hitchcock also resonates in her particular take on the spatial and architectural structure of images that seem to organize their own viewpoints.

Steven Jacobs is an art historian specialized in the relations between art and cinema. He is the author or co-author of The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013), Screening Statues: Cinema and Sculpture (2017), The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (2018), and Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary (2020). He teaches at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp.

The plot:

A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his Greenwich Village courtyard apartment window, and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder, despite the skepticism of his fashion-model girlfriend.

In collaboration with: Universal / Park Circus

Speaker: Steven Jacobs

Languages: EN (subtitles in french)

8€ pp. | Subject to availability | Booking required.