This is a guest post for Silent London by Henry K. Miller. Here, Miller introduces Hitch-22, his “alternative chronology of 1922”, the first part of which is published today.
A typical day in Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius, his engrossing chronology of 1922, much in the air in 2022, a year on from his untimely death, will have more than one entry, most often for events in London and Paris. The section on 4 March, however, begins in Berlin, with the first private screening of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, no. 1 on the IMDb’s list of the most popular films of the year, Jackson tells us, before hopping over to London for no. 6 on the same list: Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Thirteen. The latter, not the former, makes the book’s back-cover blurb: 1922 was “the year in which James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature, the Ottoman Empire collapsed…” Number Thirteen has dropped down to no. 15 in IMDb’s list in the decade since Constellation of Genius was published, perhaps reflecting a generational shift akin to Jeanne Dielman’s victory over Vertigo, but still the question remains: what is it doing there? There, specifically, on 4 March, but also, in a wider sense, in a book about modernism.
Silent London 