Hitchcock on Hitchcock: selected writings and interviews (original) (raw)

Hitchcock and Contemporary Art

2014

History conference in 2010 and "The Vestiges of Vertigo: Re-Staging and Remembering Hitchcock" at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) meeting in 2011. This latter paper was then graciously invited by Douglas Cunningham to be part of his excellent collection of essays on Vertigo. Along the way, conversations with friends and colleagues played an important role in advancing this research. I must especially thank Laura Mulvey for her support over the years, our chats on this topic, and for pressing me on "why Hitchcock" during a long drive from the airport. As the pages that follow reveal, I am also deeply indebted to her very influential recent work on spectatorship as well as her essays on rear projection and the films of Mark Lewis. It is to this groundbreaking scholarship that effectively rethinks our relation to the cinema that my study here hopes to make a very modest contribution. I am also grateful to Mark Cheetham and Andy Patton for our short but lively discussions in preparation for our exhibition Conspiracies of Illusion, for thinking through the vagaries of time and space in relation to the work of David Reed. Many members of SCMS's CinemArts Special Interest group, in particular my cochair Susan Felleman, have been wonderful sounding boards and active audiences at a series of great panels over the last several years. I'm particularly indebted to Steven Jacobs for the wealth of material he sent me on exhibitions and artist practices that fall under the purview of this project. His own research has also been extremely influential for the ways in which it poses some fundamental questions about the relationship between art and film. Nicholas Haeffner has been a tremendous help in this respect too, by sharing his thoughts on Hitchcock and pedagogy and by shipping me an incredible package of materials on the exhibitions RePossessed and Shadows of a Doubt. And, finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Daniel Morgan for his many astute insights and comments on parts of this manuscript at both its most nascent and final stages. This project certainly wouldn't have been possible without the generosity of artists who allowed me to interview them or provided me with crucial information about their works:

Spellbound by Images. The Allure of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock

The article presents how the significance of the paintings in Hitchcock’s films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of mystery or mysterious identity, but also consists in raising questions about the interpretation of images in general. In contrast with a classic dramaturgy that neatly solves all the puzzles, the Hitchcockian painting, or painterly image emerges as the medium of the unknown threatening to throw the mind of the character (and implicitly of the viewer) into the abysmal depths of the uncanny and the unidentifiable. (One of the most eloquent examples of this is the startling image of the squirt of blood “painted” over the black and white images and “thrown” towards the off-screen space, implicitly “at the spectator” at the end of Spellbound.) It seems that for Hitchcock painting acts like an “intermedial demon of the cinematic image,” a medial doppelgänger that is ready at any time to take charge, threatening to disrupt the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world.

Hitchcock, Technology, and Time: The Impact of Technology on The Analysis of Film.

Technology and Film Scholarship. Experience, Study, Theory, 2018

Perceptual shifts related to the technological conditions of ilm scholarship have shaped the analysis of ilm. By observing a sampling of Hitchcock scholarship dating back to the 1960s, we can see how technology enables and shapes academic discourse on ilm. While early work on Hitchcock involved frantic note taking in darkened theatres leading to short, comprehensive reflections, the ability to control the means of projection via technologies such as the VHS allowed scholars to engage in lengthy, visually detailed readings of ilm structures, as well as close, personal readings of signs and moments. Currently, the digital life of ilm (and ilm scholarship) is thriving in its growing a inity with art and information exempli ied in works such as Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” and Douglas Gordon’s “24-Hour Psycho.”