18" by 24"
Hand SIgned & Numbered
Giclee' Print on 200gsm Enhanced Paper
Limited Edition of 50

Kaleidoscope would have been a departure for Alfred Hitchcock. He had spear headed a new kind of cinema with Psycho years earlier but after a series of less acclaimed films he had begun to feel he had fallen behind new younger european filmmakers. He was particularly aware of Michelangelo Antonio's film Blow Up. Desperate for a change he began work on a prequel to his earlier film Shadow of a Doubt. Describing the origins of the Merry Widow Murderer. The film would be modern, the production would be small featuring a cast of unknowns, lit naturally, shot on location in New York City. Hitchcock went as far as to photograph and film silent test footage to establish his approach to the project. 

The story would be from the perspective of the murderer. A bodybuilder based in part on two separate true life cases from the turn of the century. It would have far exceeded the limits of what audiences had seen on screen up to that point. It featured enough sex violence and psychedelia that Hitchcock's friend Francois Truffaut expressed reservations about it's content. There were to be 3 main set pieces. Each centered around water: a murder at a waterfall, a murder on the docks and finally the films climax on an oil refinery full of colorful oil drums. Eventually Hitchcock gave up on the film after being dissuaded by studio chief Lew Wasserman and also because he wasn't satisfied with the ending. For a director as bold as Hitchcock who repeatedly established himself at the frontier of cinema all the way back to the silent era, any experimentation or departure had the potential to revolutionize the art form and it's a shame that we'll never see what Kaleidoscope could have been.