The story behind this video is rather involved. I was a big fan of Jill Feldman's recording of "Tra le fere," a show-stopping aria from Handel's *Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno.* I wanted to do a video using it as the music and thought would be good to choose a subject that incoroporated the aria da capo structure: Handel arias often have an A / B / A structure, where you sing something, then a contrasting middle section, then sing the first section again but this time with added flashy bits. It's called a "da capo" aria because you go back to the beginning, the head, the "capo," at the end of the B section.
I had the great idea to use the Hitchcock *Psycho* and Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake. The first section of the aria uses images from the Hitch, the B section uses images from the special features, and the da capo uses imagines from the Van Sant, ending with images from both.
I'll share a brief personal note about these two movies. I think the Hitchcock *Psycho* is the most perfect movie he made. It's lean a taut, every frame is perfectly composed, every moment drives relentlessly (but rarely feverishly) towards the end of the movie. And it has to be said that the Bernard Herrmann score is insanely good. And the Gus Van Sant *Psycho* - - I'm the only person I've ever heard of who actually liked it! In a perverse way, it was the most original movie I'd ever seen, because every moment of the movie was a déjà vu, something I had seen before but totally new and fresh. I'd never had an experience anything like that in a movie.
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