Alfred Hitchcock's imperative was to charge the screen with emotion. Subject matter and acting were, for him, subordinate to "all of the technical aspects that made the audience scream." Focusing on onscreen objects in Hitchcock's films, this study examines staircases, eyeglasses, lamps, doors, candles, cigarettes, buildings, monuments, statues and dozens of other props that the director treated as subjective protagonists, their roles nearly equal to the actors'. Examining each of the director's 52 extant films, this book provides a comprehensive exploration of Hitchcock's treatment of objects as subjects.
Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things argues that Alfred Hitchcock was as much a filmmaker of things and places as he was of people. Drawing on the thought of Bruno Latour, John Bruns traces the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents in Hitchcock’s films with the aim of mapping the Hitchcock landscape cognitively, affectively, and politically. Yet this book does not promise that such a map can or will cohere, for Hitchcock was just as adept at misdirection as he was at direction. Bearing this in mind and true to the Hitchcock spirit, Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things anticipates that people will stumble into the wrong places at the wrong time, places will be made uncanny by things, and things exchanged between people will act as (not-so) secret agents that make up the perilous landscape of Hitchcock’s work. This book offers new readings of well-known Hitchcock films, including The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, as well as insights into lesser-discussed films such as I Confess and Family Plot. Additional close readings of the original theatrical trailer for Psycho and a Hitchcock-directed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents expand the Hitchcock landscape beyond conventional critical borders. In tracing the network of relations in Hitchcock’s work, Bruns brings new Hitchcockian tropes to light. For students, scholars, and serious fans, the author promises a thrilling critical navigation of the Hitchcock landscape, with frequent “mental shake-ups” that Hitchcock promised his audience.
In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.
Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Žižek’s pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek’s own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civilization’) and Žižek’s idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek’s own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Žižek (just as Žižek in his collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek’s ideas.
The most comprehensive volume ever published on Alfred Hitchcock, covering his career and legacy as well as the broader cultural and intellectual contexts of his work. Contains thirty chapters by the leading Hitchcock scholars Covers his long career, from his earliest contributions to other directors’ silent films to his last uncompleted last film Details the enduring legacy he left to filmmakers and audiences alike
Uses close readings of Hitchcock's films to combine an articulation of Lacan's theory of ethics with a discussion of recent theories of feminine subjectivity and queer textuality.
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.
When we talk of 'seeing' a film, we do not refer to a purely visual experience. Rather, to understand what we see on screen, we rely as much on non-visual senses as we do on sight. This new book rethinks the body in the cinema seat, charting the emergence of embodied film theory and drawing on developments in philosophy, neuroscience, body politics and film theory. Through the prism of Alfred Hitchcock's films, we explore how our bodies and sensual memory enable us to quite literally 'flesh out' what we see on screen: the trope of nausea in "Frenzy", pollution and smell in "Shadow of a Doubt", physical sound reception in the "Psycho" shower scene and the importance of corporeality and closeness in "Rear Window". We see how the body's sensations have a vital place in cinematic reception and the study of film.
Alfred Hitchcock was, despite his English origins and early career, an American master. Arriving on US shores in 1939, for the next three decades he created a series of masterpieces that redefined the nature and possibilities of cinema itself: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, to name just a few. 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 American career. This Companion explores the way in which Hitchcock was transformed by the country where he made his home and did much of his greatest work. This book will be invaluable as a guide for both fans and students of Hitchcock and twentieth-century American culture, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved and hugely influential director.
