Hitchcock thriller “The Birds”: timelessly modern for 60 years

It is March 28, 1963. The premiere guests are pouring into the New York cinema in Manhattan, a world premiere is coming up, that of the new Hitchcock. The master director has kept audiences waiting for three years since “Psycho”, and after the use of showers in the USA has noticeably decreased since his last film, he is now unleashing supposedly harmless, feathered friends on mankind.

“The Birds” fluttered across the wide cinema screen for the first time exactly 60 years ago, and very similar to the time with “Psycho”, when the viewers are suddenly robbed of their protagonist in the middle of the film, this time there are screams too from the horrified, shocked contemporary audience who didn’t know what to expect. Today, Alfred Hitchcock’s 48th film is one of those classics of the international film canon that have left their mark on the collective memory.

Here is “The Birds” (Newly released in 2022 as Blu-ray and DVD by Universal) not only iconic, but ultimately of timeless modernity despite its age. In view of a global climate crisis and a breathtakingly rapid extinction of species, one of the three central interpretations that have established themselves in the film-historical reception of Hitchcock (e.g. by Robin Wood or by Slavoj Žižek) again comes to the fore, namely alongside the “cosmological” and the “familial” those of the “ecological”. The reading that ascribes to the birds the function of “condensing an exploited nature” that tries to resist crude exploitation by humans. A film classic celebrating its 60th anniversary can hardly be more topical.

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