alr

Spellbound

Screening on Film
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
With Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov.
US, 1945, 35mm, black & white, 116 min.

The tremendous popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis in postwar American cinema and popular culture informs Hitchcock's witty and sophisticated romantic thriller about a bookish analyst falling for a mysterious amnesiac analysand who is either himself a brilliant therapist or a traumatized patient with murderous tendencies. Inspired by David O. Selznick's own "cure" through psychoanalysis, Spellbound was Hitchcock's second picture under contract with the mercurial and tyrannical producer who struggled to impose ideas that Hitchcock, working closely with screenwriter Ben Hecht, was largely able to deflect and subvert. Sadly, Hitchcock was unable to prevent Selznick from damaging one of the film's centerpieces – an extended and now lost dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí which Selznick considered excessive and ordered recut by William Cameron Menzies. Miklos Rozsa's moody score is often credited as the first use of a theremin in a Hollywood film.

Part of film series

Read more

The Complete Alfred Hitchcock

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf

Read more
a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

Le Dépays + Sans soleil

Read more
Peter Sellers wearing a large hat with "ME" embroidered on it, and gripping a Pilgrim-like collar

Carol for Another Christmas