del Toro Studies Hitchcock: The Rest of Us Were Just Watching

There is a version of cinema where you sit in the dark and feel things. Then there is the version where you sit in the dark and understand *why* you're feeling them — where the camera angle is a choice, the silence is architecture, the cut is a sentence that finishes someone else's thought. Guillermo del Toro has always lived in the second version, and this weekend at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles he explained, apparently at length, exactly how Alfred Hitchcock put him there.

The lectures and screenings del Toro is presenting aren't a retrospective. They're more interesting than that — they're an anatomisation. A filmmaker who made *Nightmare Alley* and is now deep inside *Frankenstein* standing in a room and saying: here is the mechanism. Here is the clock with the face removed. This is not the behaviour of someone who watched movies. This is the behaviour of someone who studied them the way Lisbeth Salander studied systems — obsessively, privately, looking for the load-bearing wall.

Which makes this weekend's other screen news feel, by contrast, appropriately humbling. *Couture* — the Angelina Jolie fashion drama set against Paris Fashion Week — is being reviewed as exactly the kind of film that makes you understand why filmmakers study Hitchcock in the first place. Director Alice Winocour apparently cannot quite find the pulse underneath the glamour, which is the one thing Fashion Week actually has in abundance if you know where to press. Jolie gives "sad glamour," which sounds like a compliment and isn't. Sad glamour is what you get when a film knows what it wants to look like but not what it wants to say. Hitchcock never had that problem. Every frame was an argument.

Meanwhile Annecy — the animation world's most quietly serious festival — gave its top prize to *The Violinist*, beating out *Iron Boy* and several Cannes favourites to do so. Animation is where the real formal risks live right now, because audiences come in with their guard down and the best filmmakers know it. Don Hertzfeldt won Best Short, which is the correct outcome and also the only possible outcome if you have ever seen anything Don Hertzfeldt has made.

The week in screens, then: one filmmaker teaching a masterclass in seeing, one fashion film that apparently forgot to see anything at all, and an animation festival quietly doing the work that the multiplexes won't.

Del Toro sat in the dark long enough. Now he turns the lights on. That's the difference.