At the Met, after the Frick, I browsed through the catalogue for Marcel Duchamp Étant donnés, and found an image reproduced from Blue Velvet, but I searched the index for "Hitchcock" and found nothing. Beyond stupid, its just embarrassing. A camera is a wooden box with a hole in it to look through and Hitchcock is the archetypal cinematic voyeur/peeping tom.


Duchamp said early on[?] that he dreamt of forcing people to look at his work from only one place and point, I am a camera, indeed. [I'm trying to find an image from one of Hitchcock's early silents.] Lynch has a certain cachet as an experimental filmmaker, and therefore as an "artist." Again, like choosing Vertov over Eisenstein. Duchamp by 1955 especially was an artist in the age of film. He was more than anything a late 19th century artist in the age of film, which explains why he disliked it or at least distrusted it as much as he did. Hitchcock was just on the other side of the same manic/phobic relation to time.