A Dream Of Hitchcock

Download or read book A Dream of Hitchcock written by Murray Pomerance and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores Hitchcock’s repeated voyages into the dreamlike. A Dream of Hitchcock examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock’s work—dreamscapes, dream processes, the dream effect—by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot. 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. Rebecca revolves around problems of memory; To Catch a Thief around uncertainty; Saboteur around pungent aspiration; Family Plot around intuition; Rear Windowaround expansive imagination; and Strangers on a Train around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past, the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain, and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance’s distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock’s work allows these films to inform theorization, not the other way around. His original, provocative, and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy, improbability, doubt disconcertion, hope, memory, intuition, and belief, through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life. “This lively, informed, insightful book is a like a jazz riff on the six films under consideration, mixing cultural, historical, filmic, and literary allusions to interpret each film. I think it would be as interesting and helpful to a person just beginning to study Hitchcock’s films seriously as to an academic who has been studying and writing about Hitchcock for years.” — Richard A. Gilmore, author of Doing Philosophy at the Movies

Download or read book A Dream of Hitchcock written by Murray Pomerance and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dream of Hitchcock examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock's work—dreamscapes, dream processes, the dream effect—by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot. 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. Rebecca revolves around problems of memory; To Catch a Thief around uncertainty; Saboteur around pungent aspiration; Family Plot around intuition; Rear Window around expansive imagination; and Strangers on a Train around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past, the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain, and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance's distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock's work allows these films to inform theorization, not the other way around. His original, provocative, and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy, improbability, doubt disconcertion, hope, memory, intuition, and belief, through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life.

Download or read book A Voyage with Hitchcock written by Murray Pomerance and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Suspicion. Murray Pomerance's sources come from a wide territory of interest, including production study, philosophy, cultural history, and more. The book is written as an homage to, and in many ways address to, not only the story content of these films but, more importantly, their overall filmic texture, which involves compositions, visual nuances, sounds, rhythms, and Hitchcock's unique treatments of human experience. The voyage theme plays a key—and moving—role in all the films discussed here.

Download or read book Hitchcock and Adaptation written by Mark Osteen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From early silent features like The Lodger and Easy Virtue to his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies were adapted from plays, novels, and short stories. Hitchcock always took care to collaborate with those who would not just execute his vision but shape it, and many of the screenwriters he enlisted—including Eliot Stannard, Charles Bennett, John Michael Hayes, and Ernest Lehman—worked with the director more than once. And of course Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, his most constant collaborator, was with him from the 1920s until his death. In Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, Mark Osteen has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore how Hitchcock and his screenwriters transformed literary and theatrical source material into masterpieces of cinema. Some of these essays look at adaptations through a specific lens, such as queer aesthetics applied to Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, while others tackle the issue of Hitchcock as author, auteur, adaptor, and, for the first time, present Hitchcock as a literary source. Film adaptations discussed in this volume include The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Rear Window, Vertigo, Marnie, and Frenzy. Additional essays analyze Hitchcock-inspired works by W. G. Sebald, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and others. These close examinations of Alfred Hitchcock and the creative process illuminate the significance of the material he turned to for inspiration, celebrate the men and women who helped bring his artistic vision from the printed word to the screen, and explore how the director has influenced contemporary writers. A fascinating look into an underexplored aspect of the director’s working methods, Hitchcock and Adaptation will be of interest to film scholars and fans of cinema’s most gifted auteur.

Download or read book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense written by Edward White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Biography An Economist Best Book of 2021 A fresh, innovative biography of the twentieth century’s most iconic filmmaker. In The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon—what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world. The book’s twelve chapters illuminate different aspects of Hitchcock’s life and work: “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up”; “The Murderer”; “The Auteur”; “The Womanizer”; “The Fat Man”; “The Dandy”; “The Family Man”; “The Voyeur”; “The Entertainer”; “The Pioneer”; “The Londoner”; “The Man of God.” Each of these angles reveals something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived but also the various versions of himself that he projected, and those projected on his behalf. From Hitchcock’s early work in England to his most celebrated films, White astutely analyzes Hitchcock’s oeuvre and provides new interpretations. He also delves into Hitchcock’s ideas about gender; his complicated relationships with “his women”—not only Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren but also his female audiences—as well as leading men such as Cary Grant, and writes movingly of Hitchcock’s devotion to his wife and lifelong companion, Alma, who made vital contributions to numerous classic Hitchcock films, and burnished his mythology. And White is trenchant in his assessment of the Hitchcock persona, so carefully created that Hitchcock became not only a figurehead for his own industry but nothing less than a cultural icon. Ultimately, White’s portrayal illuminates a vital truth: Hitchcock was more than a Hollywood titan; he was the definitive modern artist, and his significance reaches far beyond the confines of cinema.

Download or read book Alfred Hitchcock written by Paul Duncan and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, ...

Download or read book The Art of Pure Cinema written by Bruce Isaacs and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a now-famous interview with Fran�ois Truffaut in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock described his masterpiece Rear Window (1954) as "the purest expression of a cinematic idea." But what, precisely, did Hitchcock mean by pure cinema? Was pure cinema a function of mise en sc�ne, or composition within the frame? Was it a function of montage, "of pieces of film assembled"? This notion of pure cinema has intrigued and perplexed critics, theorists, and filmmakers alike in the decades following this discussion. And even across his 40-year career, Hitchcock's own ideas about pure cinema remained mired in a lack of detail, clarity, and analytical precision. The Art of Pure Cinema is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avant-garde film movement in the mid-1920s. Tracing the evolution of a philosophy of pure cinema across Hitchcock's most experimental works - Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy - Isaacs rereads these works in a new and vital context. In addition to this historical account, the book presents the first examination of pure cinema as an integrated stylistics of mise en sc�ne, montage, and sound design. The films of so-called Hitchcockian imitators like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma are also examined in light of a provocative claim: that the art of pure cinema is only fully realized after Hitchcock.