Alfred Hitchcock

341 Pages·2016·4.32 MB·English

by  Douglas A. Cunningham (editor)

C r i t iC Al
CRITICAL
INSIGHTS
in s i gHt s
Cunningham
A
l
Douglas A. Cunningham is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young f F i lM
University and Adjunct Professor of Literature and Film Studies at Westminster r
College in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is a retired US Air Force officer and taught e
literature and film at the US Air Force Academy for five years of his twenty-year
d
military career. He earned a PhD in film studies at the University of California, Alfred Hitchcock
Berkeley, in 2009. He is the editor of The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo:
H
Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration (Scarecrow, 2011), and the coeditor (with
John Nelson) of A Companion to the War Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). His essays
have appeared in Screen, CineAction, The Moving Image, and Critical Survey. In 2011, i
t
he directed Listen, Darkling, a short film produced as a personal tribute to Alfred
c
Hitchcock’s Vertigo. He is currently at work on a monograph titled, Celluloid Airmen:
h Edited by Douglas A. Cunningham
World War II, Hollywood, and the Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit.
c
Among the essays in this volume:
o
“The Uncanny Forests of Woman and Land in Vertigo” by Kellianne H. Matthews
“Hitch Puts a Bird on It: Paul Klee’s Influence on the Master of Suspense” c
by Joel Gunz
k
“Space in Rear Window Revisited: Questions of Spectatorship, Community, and
Surveillance” by Thomas Lubek
“Hitchcock’s ‘Female Gothic’ Experimentation in Spellbound and Notorious”
by Sheri Chinen Biesen
Salem
Two University Plaza, Suite 310
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Hackensack NJ 07601
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
CRITICAL
INSIGHTS
Alfred Hitchcock

CRITICAL
INSIGHTS
Alfred Hitchcock
Editor
Douglas A. Cunningham
Brigham Young University & Westminster College, Utah
SALEM PRESS
A Division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc.
Ipswich, Massachusetts
GREY HOUSE PUBLISHING
Copyright © 2017 by Grey House Publishing, Inc.
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Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Names: Cunningham, Douglas A., 1969- editor.
Title: Alfred Hitchcock / editor, Douglas A. Cunningham, Brigham Young
University & Westminster College, Utah.
Other Titles: Critical insights.
Description: [First edition]. | Ipswich, Massachusetts : Salem Press, a division
of EBSCO Information Services, Inc. ; Amenia, NY : Grey
House Publishing, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-68217-110-3 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899-1980--Criticism and interpretation.
| Motion picture producers and directors--United States. | Thrillers
(Motion pictures)--History and criticism. | Film criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.H58 A44 2016 | DDC 791.43/0233/092--dc23
First Printing
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
About This Volume, Douglas A. Cunningham vii
On Hitchcock, Douglas A. Cunningham xii
Hitchcock’s Biography, Cole Smith xxv

Critical Contexts
Mirroring a Century: Alfred Hitchcock and His
Historical Contexts, Douglas A. Cunningham 3
Hitchcock and His Women, Kerry Linfoot 17
Hitchcock’s “Female Gothic” Experimentation in
Spellbound and Notorious, Sheri Chinen Biesen 36
Everyone’s a Critic: Hitchcock’s
Evolving Prestige, Douglas A. Cunningham 49
Critical Readings
The Other Hitchcock: No Suspense, but (Re)marriage
Instead (Three Early Films), Julie Michot and Dominique Sipière 63
The Traumatic Cultural Dimensions of Adolescent Girlhood
in Champagne, Blackmail, and Young and Innocent,
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Mariana Zárate, and Patricia Vazquez 79
Rebecca: Auteur, Auteur, John Price 95
Space in Rear Window Revisited: Questions of
Spectatorship, Community, and Surveillance, Thomas Lubek 109
The Uncanny Forests of Woman and
Land in Vertigo, Kellianne H. Matthews 126
Norman Can’t Leave the Nest: Freudian Theory and the Uncanny Use of
Taxidermied Birds in Psycho, Erika Rothberg 141
Foucault Takes Wing: Bodega Bay as Panopticon
in The Birds, Douglas A. Cunningham 158
The Murderer in the Garden: Something Rotten in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, K. Brenna Wardell 173
v
Performance and Textual Disjuncture: Alfred
Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Justin Wyatt 192
Between Cinema and Life: Biopics on
Alfred Hitchcock, Ana Daniela Coelho 209
American Modern Architecture as Frame and Character in Hitchcock’s
Cinematic Spaces, Christine Madrid French 226
Hitch Puts a Bird on It: Paul Klee’s Influence on the Master
of Suspense, Joel Gunz 246

Resources
Chronology of Alfred Hitchcock’s Life 267
Filmography 275
Bibliography 277
About the Editor 291
Contributors 293
Index 299
vi Critical Insights
About This Volume
Douglas A. Cunningham
Why another essay collection on Hitchcock? Hasn’t the academy
“checked the box” on this type of book over and over these past
thirty years? Since the publication of Deutelbaum and Poague’s A
Hitchcock Reader (1986), Raubicheck and Srebnick’s Hitchcock’s
Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991), and Ishii-Gonzalès
and Allen’s Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (1999), the field
has been flooded with Hitchcock anthologies, essay collections, and
themed journals, not to mention all the monographs published on
the Master of Suspense during the same period.
So, again, why yet another essay collection on Hitchcock? There
are many answers to such a question. First, and most obviously,
Hitchcock is the type of genius about whom not enough can ever be
written or even said. His body of work is so extensive, his quality
so consistent, his themes so pervasive, and his style so innovative,
that energetic and insightful discourse on his oeuvre can never be
exhausted. Additionally, as times, borders, politics, technologies,
and attitudes change, so, too, do our readings and understandings
of Hitchcock and his films. In an increasingly postmodern world,
we can recognize Hitchcock’s imprint everywhere, from movies to
streaming television, from fiction to documentary, from literature to
academia, from fashion to art, and even down to the very essential
ideas about how our world and the people in this world think and
operate.
As a cursory glance through this book will show, Critical
Insights: Hitchcock is intended to contribute to the ongoing discourse
about the Master of Suspense, his body of work, and his larger
influence on world culture. Contributors have been selected from
across a generous array of experiences and disciplines, from online
bloggers to home video enthusiasts to the highest levels of academia
and Hitchcock scholarship. The resulting volume thus offers a wide
vii
range of essays, each of them intended for readers at the high school
and/or undergraduate student level.
In addition to front matter (an introductory essay and a brief
biography of Hitchcock) and back matter (a chronology of Hitchcock’s
life, a filmography, a bibliography, and an index), the book itself is
divided into two main sections. The first of these, Critical Contexts,
is a collection of four carefully selected critical readings focused on
(respectively) the historical background for Hitchcock and his work;
the changing critical reception of his films throughout his career; a
view of Hitchcock’s work through a very specific critical lens; and,
finally, a comparative analysis that looks at several Hitchcock works
in tandem with one another. The book’s second segment is the Critical
Readings section, which features twelve essays that vary in subject
matter and approach, covering the entire period of Hitchcock’s fifty-
year career, from the silent era to his final film, Family Plot (1976),
and beyond. The goal of the project has been, all along, to provide
an accessible look into contemporary Hitchcock scholarship. Critical
Insights: Alfred Hitchcock provides that exactly.
The journey proper begins in the Critical Contexts section with
my essay, “Hitchcock in Twentieth-Century Culture and Beyond,”
in which I argue that Hitchcock and his work played formative
roles in the development of twentieth-century culture, much in the
same way that figures such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Miles
Davis, and Steve Jobs shaped that century. Next, Kerry Linfoot
offers a truly unique critical approach to the question of Hitchcock’s
misogyny in her essay, “Hitchcock and His Women.” Employing
critical discourse analysis as a tool for examining male-to-female
verbal exchanges throughout three key films in the director’s career,
Linfoot’s approach offers a truly new way of understanding the
treatment of women in Hitchcock’s work.
Following this is Sheri Chinen Biesen’s comparative analysis,
titled “Hitchcock’s ‘Female Gothic’ Experimentation in Spellbound
and Notorious.” While also focusing on the roles of women in
Hitchcock’s pictures, Biesen uses a far different (although equally
fascinating) methodology from that used by Linfoot. Noting that
Hitchcock employs a very interesting “female gothic” trope in his
viii Critical Insights
first two films for David O. Selznick, Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion
(1941), Biesen examines the extent to which these early uses of the
trope change in later films Hitchcock made for Selznick, namely
Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1947). Finally, I conclude
this Critical Contexts section with an essay titled, “Everyone’s a
Critic: Hitchcock’s Evolving Prestige.” Here, I follow five decades
of Hitchcock’s career, noting how scholarly understanding of the
Master of Suspense has changed over time.
The larger Critical Readings section is organized, for the
most part, by the chronological order of films discussed in the
various essays. Thus, the section begins in the silent period of
Hitchcock’s career with Julie Michot and Dominique Sipière’s “The
Other Hitchcock: No Suspense, but (Re)marriage Instead (Three
Early Films)” examining the romance and politics of Hitchcock’s
marriage/remarriage films—specifically, The Farmer’s Wife (1928),
Rich and Strange (1932), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)—Michot
and Sipière note how themes of love and cynicism infuse these works
from the director’s early career. Next, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni
Berns, Mariana Zárate, and Patricia Vazquez explore Hitchcock’s
representations of teenaged women in “The Traumatic Cultural
Dimensions of Adolescent Girlhood in Champagne, Blackmail, and
Young and Innocent.” When paired with an in-depth look at standards
of appropriate femininity in 1920s and 1930s Britain, these analyses
of Champagne (1927), Blackmail (1929), and Young and Innocent
(1937, aka The Girl Was Young) prove even more insightful and
intriguing.
Entering into Hitchcock’s American period, John Price explores
the contentious relationship between the director and Selznick in
“Rebecca: Auteur, Auteur.” Price posits, in fact, that Rebecca (1940)
marks the end of the producer-led model of film production and
introduces the director as the primary creative force behind a film
and its associated success. Thomas Lubek follows a quite different
trajectory in his essay, “Space in Rear Window Revisited: Questions
of Spectatorship, Community, and Surveillance.” Entering into
Hitchcock’s golden age, Lubek provides a unique understanding
of how Rear Window (1954) employs concepts of space within a
About This Volume ix