Hitchcocks Films

When Hitchcock's Films was first published, it quickly became known as a new kind of book on film and as a necessary text in the growing body of Hitchcock criticism. This revised edition of Hitchcock's Films Revisited includes a substantial new preface in which Wood reveals his personal history as a critic--including his coming out as a gay man, his views on his previous critical work, and how his writings, his love of film, and his personal life and have remained deeply intertwined through the years. This revised edition also includes a new chapter on Marnie.

Meet the inventor of modern horror. This complete guide to the Hitchcock canon is a movie buff's dream: from his 1925 debut The Pleasure Garden to 1976's swan song Family Plot, we trace the filmmaker's entire life and career. With a detailed entry for each of Hitchcock's 53 movies, this clothbound book combines insightful texts, photography, ...

Originally published in 1977 and long out of print, Maurice Yacowar's Hitchcock's British Films was the first volume devoted solely to the twenty-three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his native England before he came to the United States. As such, it was the first book to challenge the assumption that Hitchcock's "mature" period in Hollywood, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, represented the director's best work. In this traditional auteurist examination of Hitchcock's early work, author Maurice Yacowar considers Hitchcock's British films in chronological order, reads the composition of individual shots and scenes in each, and pays special attention to the films' verbal effects. Yacowar's readings remain compelling more than thirty years after they were written, and some-on Downhill, Champagne, and Waltzes from Vienna-are among the few extended interpretations of these films that exist. Alongside important works such as Murder , the first The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent, The Lady Vanishes, and Blackmail, readers will appreciate Yacowar's equal attention to lesser-known films like The Pleasure Garden, The Ring, and The Manxman. Yacowar dissects Hitchcock's precise staging and technical production to draw out ethical themes and metaphysical meanings of each film, while keeping a close eye on the source material, such as novels and plays, that Hitchcock used as the inspiration for many of his screenplays. Yacowar concludes with an overview of Hitchcock as auteur and an appendix identifying the director's appearances in these films. A foreword by Barry Keith Grant and a preface to the second edition from Yacowar complete this comprehensive volume. Anyone interested in Hitchcock, classic British cinema, or the history of film will appreciate Yacowar's accessible and often witty exploration of the director's early work.

Features essays from some fifteen authors written about Hitchcock and five of his most significant films: Rear window, Vertigo, The man who knew too much, Rope, and The trouble with Harry.

Alfred Hitchcock called the silent "the purest form of cinema," and the ten silent films he directed between 1925 and 1929 reveal the young director's mature artistry. Hitchcock's silents have often been characterized as the work of a talented amateur, a young director practicing his craft during a pre-sound era of antiquated instruments and poor film techniques--the director experimented with myriad points of view, unique camera angles and movements, and special effects such as dissolves, blurriness, and violent cuts. These films, however, contain the first appearances of some of his greatest and most familiar techniques: the vertigo-inducing crowd scene, the symbolic use of inanimate objects, the manipulation of the audience's emotions, and the self-conscious, often macabre wit. This work discovers Hitchcock's early talent and skill through close readings of the films from The Pleasure Garden to the silent version of Blackmail, using shot-by-shot descriptions and interpretations. Each film's chapter includes technical information, a summary of the critical response from the film's release to the present, and detailed analysis of the camera techniques and themes Hitchcock uses.

Parting ways with the Freudian and Lacanian readings that have dominated recent scholarly understanding of Hitchcock, David Humbert examines the roots of violence in the director’s narratives and finds them not in human sexuality but in mimesis. Through an analysis of seven key films, he argues that Girard’s model of mimetic desire—desire oriented by imitation of and competition with others—best explains a variety of well-recognized themes, including the MacGuffin, the double, the innocent victim, the wrong man, the transfer of guilt, and the scapegoat. This study will appeal not only to Hitchcock fans and film scholars but also to those interested in Freud and Girard and their competing theories of desire.

This book is neither biography nor a conventional film critique. Rather, the text explores aspects of Hitchcock’s work in relation to theories drawn from the social sciences and philosophy. The various chapters focus not on specific films, but on broader ideas central to Hitchcock’s work. There is, for instance, a chapter on his idea of the MacGuffin in which I use Ernesto Laclau’s theories of equivalent substitution to explain how the MacGuffin functions in Hitchcock’s works. There is also a chapter on his notion of ‘pure cinema’ which moves from the idea of purity as an anthropological concept to consider purity in relation to current debates regarding so-called hybrid media, and Hitchcock’s relevance to these issues in respect of his dissatisfaction with the advent of sound to the cinema world. Broadly speaking, the book uses Hitchcock’s films to illustrate ideas in the social sciences and philosophy and uses those same ideas to illustrate aspects of Hitchcock’s films.