Hitchcock's films can affect you like a spell of vertigo-gazing at the discomforting fixations, the suffocating moods, you totter, involuntarily, at the edge. Perhaps that is why so many artists are compelled to take on the master of suspense-it's a matter of regaining balance. Bob Paris's The Birds (1994, 3 mins) squeezes the eponymous ornithology through a psychedelic lens, adding big beat music for that Flock of Seagulls effect. Rea Tajiri's Hitchcock Trilogy (1987, 13:16 mins) does away with image, relying instead on Bernard Herrmann's evocative scores to resurrect the lure of narrative. In sections titled “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” and “Torn Curtain,” Tajiri constructs her own scenarios, twice-removed, but ominous in their ability to coax hazy suspense. Accelerating at fifteen times speed, Les LeVeque's 2 Spellbound (1999, 7:30 mins) compresses Hitchcock's thriller into a frantic tableau of blurred but symmetrical identities. By excerpting forty films, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller's monumental Phoenix Tapes (1999, 45 mins) delves into Hitchcock's obsessions. From the first section, “Rutland,” which scrutinizes interior and exterior space, seldom occupied except by a fleeting Cary Grant; through “Derailed,” in which hurtling trains threaten the wakefulness of Gregory Peck; to “Why Don't You Love Me?,” a cavalcade of Hitchcock's monstrous mothers, Phoenix Tapes tell us how much we don't know about the man who knew too much.