Hitchcock: Centenary Essays [Paperback]

Richard Allen (Editor), S.Ishii Gonzales (Editor), Sam Gonzalez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2008

Born in 1899, Alfred Hitchcock directed 57 films in a fifty year career that spanned the history of the moving image, from the silent era to stereo sound, black-and white to Technicolor, widescreen to television, and from Europe to Hollywood. His oeuvre has so comprehensively engaged the attentions of scholars of all critical persuasions that the study of his films is synonymous with the study of the art of cinema itself.

Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays displays the range and breadth of Hitchcock scholarship and assesses the significance of his singular body of work. The book engages with Hitchcock's characteristic formal and aesthetic preoccupations, his relationship with modernism and politics and his engagement with romance and sexuality. 

This volume of essays draws on the best of current Hitchcock criticism and opens up new directions for Hitchcock scholarship. 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you're looking for more information about the films, versatility, and lasting impact of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock: Centenary Essays should sate your hunger. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Hitchcock's birth, editors Richard Allen and S. Ishi Gonzales have assembled a collection of essays that cover not only the gamut of Hitchcock's movies, but also their continuing importance in today's culture. Acclaimed critics and theorists like Slavoj Zizek, Peter Wollen, Brigitte Peucker, William Rothman, Susan White, Raymond Bellour, and Lee Edelman contribute essays on famous films like Vertigo, Psycho, and The Thirty-Nine Steps, as well as lesser-known works like Stage Fright, Rope, Foreign Correspondent, and Marnie.

The book also covers Hitchcock's status as the "master of suspense," his forays into the genre of film noir, his interest in painting and sculpture, his humor, and his vision of the future. (It even offers a chapter somewhat mysteriously entitled "The Hitchcockian Blot.") "This centenary," the editors write, "provides us with the ideal occasion to consider the nature of Hitchcock's achievement as a filmmaker, the relationship between the artist and the authorial persona he partially (and ingeniously) manufactured, and the relationship of the director's work to the larger political and economic forces that shaped it. It also happens to coincide with the end of the twentieth century.... We would like to suggest that Hitchcock is the century's exemplary artist." --Raphael Shargel

Review

"Scholarly, wide ranging . . . an entertataining analysis of Hitchcockian attributes ... should find space on the bookshelf of any self-respecting film critic, media academic or cinematic student of the great master."--"Communication Booknotes Quarterly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: British Film Institute (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 085170736X
• ISBN-13: 978-0851707365
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)