Hitchcock's Films Revisited [Paperback]

Robin Wood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1989

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is really two books in one. It contains the entire text of Robin Wood's groundbreaking Hitchcock's Films and supplements it with articles and commentaries on Hitchcock that Wood wrote from the time of that book's publication until today. Tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock's career, Hitchcock's Films Revisited also allows us to follow the intellectual and emotional development of one of the cinema's major critics. Wood's close readings are always revelatory and exciting, and this volume contains probably the best single essay ever written on a Hitchcock movie, Wood's analysis of Vertigo.

From Library Journal

In 1965, Wood, now professor of film studies at York University, authored the well-regarded Hitchcock's Films . Since then he has become an avowed Marxist and feminist, and had modified his auteurist views. From these perspectives, the work has been reprinted, extensively footnoted and "corrected" by bracketed insertions, and combined with several new essays which essentially comprise another complete book. Where the first book focuses on the director's mature works, the second one critiques somewhat less-appreciated films and provides an overall thematic context. In an illuminating new introduction, Wood extensively analyzes his and other film writers' approaches to the Hitchcock canon. Highly recommended for informed laypersons and scholars.
- Roy Liebman, California State Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 395 pages
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr (April 15, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231065515
• ISBN-13: 978-0231065511
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,021,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As brilliant as it is controversial, September 8, 2005

By 

Alexander Jacoby (Yokohama, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Paperback)

Most of the comments posted about this book are embarrassing in their refusal to engage properly with what Robin Wood is actually trying to argue. Previous readers appear to resent Wood's desire to take the cinema seriously, and suggest that we should look to Hitchcock's films for no more than "craft" and "technique". If that's all one is concerned with, I'm not sure why it would be worth reading a book on Hitchcock at all. Wood has always been firm in asserting that the experience of watching a film is both emotional and intellectual. Taking the cinema seriously doesn't mean one has to stop responding to it emotionally. Nor does Hitchcock's status as a consummate entertainer invalidate Wood's arguments that his films raise profound and troubling moral and political questions.

Wood writes beautifully. Complaints about his reliance on Freudian or Marxist terminology are wrongheaded - such terminology is in fact employed far more rarely than by most academic writers. Wood's use of language is magnificently precise and careful. It is true that he conducts his critique of Hitchcock, as of other filmmakers, from a leftwing viewpoint. One does not have to share his commitment to Marxism (a kind of reconstructed, humanistic Marxism, incidentally, which has nothing to do with the atrocities perpetrated by Mao or Stalin) in order to appreciate the strength of his analysis. Anyone who is prepared, as a reader, to engage in lively debate with a writer's ideological and moral assumptions, should be able to profit by reading Wood's book.

I certainly don't agree with everything Wood has to say either on a political or an aesthetic level. But no other writer on Hitchcock, or on the cinema, has the same depth, reach or passion for his subject. Hitchcock's Films Revisited, presenting in tandem Wood's earlier and later thoughts on one of the cinema's great masters, is not only great criticism; it is also a moving account of one man's personal and political evolution.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best in-depth Hitchcock study ever to be published., September 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Paperback)

I have been reading books about Hitchcock for the last 15 years and the discovery of this one written by Robin Wood has been a revelation, far better than the praised Truffaut book or the one by Donald Spoto, both of which seem to disregard the vastness of Hitchcock's timeless movies. I very much recommend this book if you really want to go beyond cinema trivia and have a look into the work of one of the best artists of this closing Twentieth century. Enjoy it before and after watching a Hitchcock movie - or just anytime you feel like a good cinema essay.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Price of Innovation, October 8, 2005

By 

John P Bernat (Kingsport, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hitchcock's Films Revisited (Paperback)

Forty years ago Robin Wood joined a then-small number of serious critics who urged that Hitchcock be taken seriously. Since many of those critics did not receive a wide reading, Wood's effort was of extreme significance in garnering Hitch the respect he deserved.

It's wonderful to note that Wood, still writing, has continued to update his first work without repudiating or diluting any of it. He made some highly daring observations in 1966, which so many writers ridiculed or dismissed. His originality and critical integrity is so notable, though, that it has weathered these attacks and survived to the present, in actually even better form.

Consider, for example, that Wood countered a then-contemporary tend in dismissing "Marnie" as a failure. Instead, in his first book and most recent edition, he insists that "Marnie" be counted in among films like Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo and North by Northwest as a masterly pairing of visual images addressing psychological elements. And who else before Wood saw the utterly original qualities of "Vertigo," or deconstructed them more effectively?

You won't be sorry to have this book in your library. It originated a critical lanugage of film, and celebrated one of film's greatest contributors in a unique way.