Hitchcock's America

Description

Alfred Hitchcock's American films are not only among the most admired works in world cinema, they also offer some of our most acute responses to the changing shape of American society in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The authors of this anthology show how famous films such as Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Rear Window, along with more obscure ones such as Rope, The Wrong Man, and Family Plot, register the ideologies and insurgencies, the normative assumptions and the cultural alternatives, that shaped these tumultuous decades. They argue that, just as these films occupy a visual landscape defined by the grand monuments of American civic life--Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the United Nations--they are also marked by their preoccupation with the social mores and private practices of mid-century America. Not only are big-city and suburban life the explicit subjects of films like Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt, so are the forms of experience that emerge within these social spaces, whether the urban voyeurism examined by the former or the intertwining of banality and violence depicted in the latter. Indeed, just about every form of American life that was achieving social power at this time--the national security state; the science and art of psychoanalysis; the privileging of the free-wheeling, improvisatory self; the postwar codification and fissuring of gender roles; road-culture and its ancillary creation, the motel--is given detailed, critical, and mordant examination in Hitchcocks films. The Hitchcock who emerges is not merely the inspired technician and psychological excavator that critics of the past two generations have justly hailed; he is also a cultural critic of remarkable insight and undeniable prescience.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Hitchcock's America

  • 1999-02-25
  • 208 pages
  • Ebook
  • Oxford University Press

Similar books

• 

  Alfred Hitchcock's America

  By Murray Pomerance

  There is an element of love in this relation. ... began work at 9:00 AM, Monday, November 4, 1963, at the Sportsmen's Lodge Hotel, accompanied by Virginia Darcy, Universal's stylist (Robertson to Donnelly; Robertson to Barron).

• 

  The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock

  By Jonathan Freedman

  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 ...

• 

  A Dream of Hitchcock

  By Murray Pomerance

  The Hitchcockian dream, as invoked here, is not so much a dream as it is a way of understanding, in its dramatic contexts, an "unearthly," irrational quality in the filmmaker's work.

• 

  My Dear Miss Dupré (American Royalty Book #1)

  By Grace Hitchcock

  In what is a unique take, author Grace Hitchcock has combined the modern with the old fashioned by setting her book at the height of America's Gilded Age. . . .Overall, the book is amusing and entertaining, a relatively quick read.

• 

  The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder

  By David Thomson, Thomson David Thomson

  In "The Moment of Psycho," film critic David Thomson situates "Psycho" in Alfred Hitchcock's career, recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide.

• 

  Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual

  By Christopher Brookhouse, Sidney Gottlieb

  Sophisticated observations were made about Marnie's ( Tippi Hedren ) masqueraded — and hence elusive — subjectivity , which Mark Rutland ( Sean Connery ) , for all his prowess , cannot entirely master . Well , well , I thought to myself ...

• 

  A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock

  By Thomas Leitch, Leland Poague

  But Hitchcock cuts to another sequence in Parra's room that restores the suspense. Parra sits at his desk and works. While doing so, he reaches down and places a paper in a case that was next to the briefcase that Uribe took.

• 

  Hitchcock in Hollywood

  By Joel Waldo Finler

  "There have been many homages to the Master. But it has been almost a decade since the most recent spate of books, and Hitchcock in Hollywood admirably fills a new...

• 

  The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration

  By Douglas A. Cunningham

  Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ... Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick, eds., Hitchcock's Rereleased Films: Cinematic Landscape of Vertigo O 77.

• 

  A Voyage with Hitchcock

  By Murray Pomerance

  Following from An Eye for Hitchcock and A Dream for Hitchcock, this third volume of reflections upon Alfred Hitchcock's work gives extensive meditations on six films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and ...