Architecture plays an important role In the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Steven Jacobs devotes lengthy discussion to a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans made specially for this book.
In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender, and desire over his thirty-year American career.
Winner of the AIGA'S International Competition for Notable Graphic Design. “It’s both an architecture and movie fan’s dream.” - Los Angeles Times "Strikingly designed." - Publishers Weekly “Explores the cinematic tradition of antiheroes with architecturally significant private spaces." - Architectural Digest “A fascinating gift for that highbrow nerd in your life.” - Syfy Wire Why do bad guys live in good houses? From Atlantis in The Spy Who Loved Me to Nathan Bateman's ultra-modern abode in Ex Machina, big-screen villains often live in architectural splendor. From a design standpoint, the villain’s lair, as popularized in many of our favorite movies, is a stunning, sophisticated, envy-inducing expression of the warped drives and desires of its occupant. Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, celebrates and considers several iconic villains’ lairs from recent film history. From futuristic fantasies to deathtrap-laden hives, from dwellings in space to those under the sea, pop culture and architecture join forces in these outlandish, primarily modern homes and in Lair, which features buildings from fifteen films, including: Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Star Wars The Incredibles Blade Runner 2049 You Only Live Twice The Ghost Writer Body Double North by Northwest Edited by acclaimed architect Chad Oppenheim with Andrea Gollin, Lair includes interviews with production designers and other industry professionals such as Ralph Eggleston, Richard Donner, Roger Christian, David Scheunemann, Gregg Henry, and Mark Digby. Contributors include director Michael Mann, cultural critic Christopher Frayling, museum director Joseph Rosa, and architect Amy Murphy. Architectural illustrations and renderings by Carlos Fueyo provide multiple in-depth views of these spaces.
Out of print for more than ten years, Bloch's conclusion to his terrifying Psycho Trilogy takes readers back to the Bates Motel, which has been turned into a tourist attraction--and the site of a whole new series of murders.
Steven Jacobs' book provides a unique critical intervention into a relatively new area of scholarship - the multidisciplinary topic of film and the visual arts.
Among the abundant Alfred Hitchcock literature, Hitchcock's Motifs has found a fresh angle. Starting from recurring objects, settings, character-types and events, Michael Walker tracks some forty motifs, themes and clusters across the whole of Hitchcock's oeuvre, including not only all his 52 extant feature films but also representative episodes from his TV series. Connections and deeper inflections that Hitchcock fans may have long sensed or suspected can now be seen for what they are: an intricately spun web of cross-references which gives this unique artist's work the depth, consistency and resonance that justifies Hitchcock's place as probably the best know film director ever. The title, the first book-length study of the subject, can be used as a mini-encyclopaedia of Hitchcock's motifs, but the individual entries also give full attention to the wider social contexts, hidden sources and the sometimes unconscious meanings present in the work and solidly linking it to its time and place.
Alfred Hitchcock once famously remarked, "Actors are cattle." In The Camera Lies, Dan Callahan uncovers the sophisticated acting theory that lay beneath the director's notorious indifference towards his performers, spotlighting the great performances of deceit and duplicity he often coaxed from them.
This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism. Paula Marantz Cohen considers a sampling of Hitchcock's best films—Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho—as well as some of his more uneven ones—Rope, The Wrong Man, Topaz—and makes connections between his evolution as a filmmaker and trends in the larger society. Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian-style gentleman who evolved into one of the leading masters of the modern medium of film. Cohen posits that Hitchcock's films are, in part, a masculine response to the domestic, psychological novels that had appealed primarily to women during the Victorian era. His career, she argues, can be seen as an attempt to balance "the two faces of Victorianism": the masculine legacy of law and hierarchy and the feminine legacy of feeling and imagination. Cohen asserts that Hitchcock's films reflect his Victorian legacy and serve as a map for ideological trends. She charts his development from his British period through his classic Hollywood years into his later phase, tracing a conceptual evolution that corresponds to an evolution in cultural identity—one that builds on a Victorian inheritance and ultimately discards it.
Foster Hirsch's Dark Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.
The films of Alfred Hitchcock are appreciated for a variety of reasons, including the many memorable villains who menace the protagonists. Unlike so many of cinema’s wrongdoers, the Hitchcock villain was often a complex individual with a nuanced personality and neuroses the common person might not be able to relate to, but could at least understand. If such figures did not always elicit sympathy from the audience, they still possessed characteristics that were oddly appealing. And frequently, viewers found them more likable than the heroes and heroines whom they victimized. In Hitchcock’s Villains: Murderers, Maniacs, and Mother Issues, authors Eric San Juan and Jim McDevitt explore a number of themes that form the foundation of villainy in Hitchcock’s long and acclaimed career. The authors also provide a detailed look at some of the director’s most noteworthy villains and examine how these characters were often central to the enjoyment of Hitchcock’s best films. Whether discussing Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt or Norman Bates in Psycho, the authors consider what attracted Hitchcock to such characters in the first place and why they endure as screen icons. Intended for both casual and ardent fans of Hitchcock, this book offers insight into what makes villainous characters tick. While serious students will appreciate observations in Hitchcock’s Villains that will enhance their study of cinema technique and writing, general fans of the director will simply enjoy delving further into the minds of their favorite villains.