'Psycho' (15) and Q&A with curator Beatrice Galilee
Film screening
Friday 23 November 2018 6.30 - 9pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly
£15, £9
Cornelia Parker RA: PsychoBarn
In partnership with
With Cornelia Parker’s PsychoBarn in our courtyard, watch a special screening of the film that inspired it – followed by a talk with the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator who originally commissioned the work, examining the psychological associations of the architecture in the film.
Inspired by the installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker RA in the RA's Annenberg Courtyard, we have joined forces with MUBI for a special screening of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest masterpieces, Psycho (1960).
Psycho is a thriller illustrating the case history of the young Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, whose deep attachment to his mother gives him a murderous split personality. Filmed in black and white with long, tense shots including little dialogue, Hitchcock crafts a slow burning suspense movie that leaves you constantly on edge. Using two iconic buildings as a background for the film: the Bates’ Motel and House, the architecture became the inspiration behind Parker’s PsychoBarn.
Originally commissioned in 2016 for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, PsychoBarn merges two iconic examples of American architecture: the red barn and the infamous mansion on a hill from Psycho, itself inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Parker’s large-scale sculpture is created from a deconstructed red barn and seems at first to be a genuine house, but is in fact a scaled-down structure consisting of two facades propped up from behind with scaffolding. Simultaneously authentic and illusory, the project evokes the psychological associations embedded in architectural spaces, in the same way that the Psycho house was designed and repurposed over the decades for different movies.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the original commissioner of Cornelia Parker’s installation, Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum, New York and Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Architecture Programme Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Director: Dir Alfred Hitchcock
Running time: 100 minutes
Language: English
Certificate: 15+
Release: 1960
Organised in partnership with MUBI
Psycho (15) by Alfred Hitchcock
Trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 feature film Psycho.