Hitchcock9 November 7–17, 2013

To be screened for the first time in Turkey, Istanbul Modern Cinema, in collaboration with the British Council and the British Film Institute presents nine silent films from the early career of Alfred Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense.” These surviving films, which Hitchcock directed in the 1920s during the silent era, were cleaned and restored by the British Film Institute last year. “The silent films were the purest form of cinema” said Hitchcock. Shedding light on Hitchcock’s later work, providing clues as to his cinema – which can be considered as a school of today’s film grammar – and displaying the evolution of the director’s truly unique style, these nine films include: The Pleasure Garden, the directors first film in a black-comedy style made when he was 25; Blackmail, a crime thriller made in 1929; and The Lodger, a more expressionist thriller. The films will be screened in DCP format and accompanied with live performances by musicians such as John Sweeney from the UK and Hakan Ali Toker and Erdem Helvacıoğlu from Turkey. On Thursday, November 7, British cinema critic and journalist Ian Haydn Smith will present a talk on Alfred Hitchcock’s 50-year cinema career.