Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Nicholas Haeffner provides a comprehensive introduction to Alfred Hitchcock s major British and Hollywood films, navigating the audience through a wealth of critical commentaries. One of the acknowledged giants of film, Hitchcock s prolific half-century career spanned the silent and sound eras and resulted in 52 films of which "Rear Window" (1954), "Vertigo" (1958) and "Psycho "(1960) are now seen as classics within suspense, melodrama and horror genres.
Synopsis
A comprehensive introduction to Alfred Hitchcock's major British and Hollywood films, which navigates the reader through the wealth of critical commentaries.
- Locates the director's remarkable body of work within traditions of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture, and their appeal to different types of audience
- The author explores Hitchcock's mastery of the technical means used to build and maintain suspense.
- Examines a style which always featured, murder, espionage, deception, mistaken identities, chase sequences, wry touches of humor and occasional intrusion of the macabre in various combinations
Table of Contents
1. Background
2. Hitchcock's heritage: class, culture and cosmopolitanism
3. Authorship and reputation
4. Fascinating design: image, nothingness, sound and silence
5. Realism and The Wrong Man
6. Hitchcock and women
7. Delirium of interpretation? The uses and abuses of psychoanalysis
8. Audiences and identification
9. Hitchcock's legacy: Psycho and after